Compass Rose (14 page)

“This lawyer of my acquaintance. At this stage, I can’t.”

“What’s going on here? How does this lawyer of your acquaintance know who I am? How does he know you know me?”

“Your first question—there’s only one female officer who patrols the Great Swamp and who’s on sick leave. Second question—he doesn’t know I know you. He just knows your name.”

“So why doesn’t the lawyer come see me?”

“The client is very cautious, so the lawyer is very cautious. The client is both fearful and wanting to make amends. Up in our corner—
au coin
—there’s a feeling that really bad things happen to people who get tangled up with anything official. So the client wants to make things right directly—pay your medical bills, something for pain and suffering.”

“And get off scot-free?”

“After he pays.”

“This is like a bribe. This is like hush money.”

Johnny looked down. He didn’t say anything for a while. He looked up and said, “I can see how you see it. I can also see how he may be seeing it.”

“What are you doing this for? How do you get involved?”

“Like I said, people come to me. They know I know people—”

“You’re like a French-Canadian godfather.”

“Not in the sense—”

“You’re asking me to lay off this guy … this
gumba
of yours.”

“Look, you’ve been hurt. The guy appears to be willing to come forward—at least part of the way. I don’t know why exactly he doesn’t want a public reckoning. He may have a rational reason, I don’t know. Or he may have an irrational fear. So tell me what you would like to see happen.”

“I won’t take his money. I’m paid to do my job, and my job is to do something about guys like him. He is a dangerous idiot. I want his hunting license and his gun. I want him banned from possessing a firearm.”

Johnny said, “Let me think. I’ll go light my pipe outside. It makes a lot of smoke at the beginning. It’s not so cold today. No wind.” He went out the front door.

She was surprised to see him making his way down to the pond. He tapped on the ice with a stick, shuffled out a few steps. He looked at the trees, the bullbriars at the far side. He looked all around. When he saw her at the window he waved, then beckoned for her to come down.

When she stepped off the bank onto the ice, he held her hand. He said, “I’m sorry. I forgot it might be hard for you.”

“I can walk perfectly well. I’ll try tennis next week. You want to know how bad it is? The extent of my injuries?”

“I’m not representing this man. I’m only asking.”

“I’ll be fine. But I’m not the point.”

“Okay. You want this man punished not for wounding you but because he broke the rules. He did something wrong in your woods. I’m impressed by your strictness.” He looked at the trees again. “I honest to God had no idea it would be you. But here we are.” He shrugged. “So are you saying you want a criminal case?”

“Well, maybe not the whole mess, his lawyers dragging it on and on, probably trying to make me look like a liar.”

“That might be the only way to ban him from possessing a firearm—to convict him of a felony. Proving criminal intent … that’s a reach. His lawyer says he called a rescue squad from a pay phone. He wouldn’t say that unless there’s a record. So leaving the scene of an accident is maybe not in play. But taking away his hunting license could be an administrative matter …” He let out a long breath that turned white in the cold.

She said, “You’re not smoking your pipe.”

“I changed my mind. I like the taste of the air, the air over a frozen pond. I played a lot of hockey on ponds.”

She said, “I’ve been in an administrative hearing. It was just like a trial. Lawyers digging up every detail. They pulled up a memo that said I was overzealous. And this time … could they make the doctor testify? Make him talk about my subcutaneous adipose tissue? Make him show the X-ray? It’s mostly bones, but it probably has a milky outline of my rear end. No, wait—all those pellets would show up. It’d be a connect-the-dots picture of my bare ass.”

Johnny’s head popped up an inch or two. He squeezed his mouth shut. He said, “I don’t think …” He stopped. He said, “I’m sorry. I don’t know where we are. I guess you’re asking about the admissibility of medical records.”

“You think it’s funny.”

“No.”

“I saw you trying not to laugh.”

“Okay. Just for a second there I thought of a kid with a big orange crayon and a Howard Johnson place mat with a connect-the-dots puzzle.”

“There. I knew it.”

“But then I thought of how it must’ve hurt and I lost what we were talking about. I was getting angry at this guy for hurting you.”

Elsie said, “Oh,” and her hand flew to her collarbone.

She thought, There are people out there who can meet someone and not think of possibilities. She wasn’t one of them.

Johnny said, “You’re smart and you’ve got a lot of imagination, but I want to be sure you know what you’re doing. You’d be giving
up a lot of damages, not just medical bills and pain and suffering, there’s punitive damages …”

“I have medical insurance with my job. I’ve told you what I want.”

“Okay. Here’s what I can say to the guy’s lawyer—she doesn’t want money, and that’s a damn good deal. All she wants is for this guy to come to me and promise to give up hunting.”

“You? He’ll promise
you?
”

“Yes, me. His lawyer says the guy is one of us. It’ll turn out I know the guy, probably some of his family, his friends, his priest. If he breaks his promise he might or might not feel guilty, but he’ll be shamed. And his lawyer’ll be shamed, and I’ll be shamed. Shame is a group thing. When a group mistrusts the outside, they have to trust the inside.”

“So you
are
like a godfather.”

“Oh come on,” Johnny said. “This isn’t some Hollywood movie. I’m more like a switchboard operator. If I made a nickel out of this, it wouldn’t work. You think about it, see if you think it gets you what you want. What I’ll think about is how to tell the lawyer and the guy about you. How come you gave up the money part. I guess I’ll say nature is like a religion with you; the Great Swamp preserve is like your church. So you’re like a really strict nun.”

Elsie laughed.

He said, “The reason you laugh is you didn’t get taught by nuns. I say ‘nun,’ it’ll make him think about when he was in fourth grade and got caught doing something bad. Sister Margaret Mary with a ruler.”

“Is that right? Is that what ‘nun’ makes you think of?”

“Yeah, sometimes.” He looked at her so intently she wondered if he was going to kiss her. He said, “It’s funny. What you know and what you don’t know.”

She took a step back. “When you say ‘you,’ do you mean people in general? Or do you mean me, the ignorant girl who hasn’t had the benefit of Catholic schooling?”

“I just meant—”

“I guess I missed out on those thrilling punishments at the hands of Sister Margaret Mary Dominatrix.”

“You know, you’re right about one thing—you’re probably better off not going in front of a judge and jury. At least, not in Rhode Island.” Before she thought of anything to say to that, he said, “Okay. Let’s not … Probably my fault. Look—first time we met you gave me a few jabs, but there you were taking care of Miss Perry, and when we talked about her giving her books away, you cried. And just now I wasn’t sure—you got in a couple more jabs. But when you said, ‘I’ll be fine. I’m not the point,’ I got it. I admire how you care for Miss Perry and the way you’re a purist about your job. So think about what you want me to do, and let me know.”

“Do it.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. I’ll get you what you want.”

“Maybe one more thing. How about you bring me his trigger finger? The first two knuckles.”

Johnny squinted. “How come you got to get in a shock? Does it make you nervous when someone says they admire you?”

The last question stopped her. It was a relief to be stopped. Miss Perry stopped her. Sometimes Mary Scanlon stopped her. Dick used to stop her. She said out loud, “One of these days I’ll get around to stopping myself.”

Johnny looked abashed. He probably took what she said for an apology. They both started to say something, then held back so that all that came out were their puffs of breath that turned white and floated away.

She said, “You go first.”

“I shouldn’t have—”

“No. It’s okay.”

“You got a right to be angry.”

“I think I was trying to be funny.”

“Ah.”

She hoped he wouldn’t say anything else, and was pleased that he didn’t, pleased that he held out his hand for the big step onto the bank, held on to help her up the slope, and let go at the top.

After he left she worried that she’d made his awkward situation more awkward, worried about his getting involved with Jack. She
supposed that that’s what it took to run for office … to have to go to people like Jack with your hat in your hand. She’d ignored politics because she thought that politicians were putting on an act, and not a very interesting one. She didn’t think much of lawyers, either, but here she was worrying about someone who was both, worried at first that he might be too much of a backroom guy, now worried that he might be too decent for the likes of Jack.

It surprised her that she was worrying about Johnny Bienvenue. She was naturally pleased that an interesting man had shown up, and happy that she’d poked at him and he’d poked back and that he’d then startled her with plain, fierce sympathy. But she was also surprised that it somehow all felt slow. Because there was something to settle? Because she was still a little gimpy?

She reached into Rose’s playpen to pick up a bottle. A twinge. A while before she’d be ready for their tennis lesson. No rush. Enough that she could look forward to his attention, to his attentive curiosity about her. And she looked forward to her attentive curiosity about him. The sort of considered courtship Sally had given up wishing for her.

T
om had always been the cutup of the family. After Christmas dinner he said, “So where is everybody?”

It startled May. She hadn’t noticed they’d all been quiet. Tom said, “Okay, Dad’s looking out the window at the weather. No surprise there. Charlie’s daydreaming about his girlfriend. So where are you, Mom?”

She might have just waved Tom off, but he’d got everyone’s attention. She tried to think of something other than Rose. She said, “I was just thinking how peaceful it is for a change.”

Tom tilted his head back, about to say more, but Dick turned toward him and said, “Don’t be a smart-ass with your mother.” He said it mildly. May’d been afraid Dick was going to start up with Tom. She was relieved, then touched. She squinted and said, “Oh, Tom didn’t mean anything.”

Dick and Charlie both looked at her, Dick from far away, the table’s length like a stretch of water between them.

Charlie said, “That’s right.” May saw him trying to come up with a smart remark. “He’d like to mean something …”

Before Tom could cut back in, May said, “We should have asked Eddie to eat with us.”

“I figured he’d be doing something with Phoebe,” Dick said.

“No. She’s gone skiing with her daughter. But maybe Walt’s with him.”

“Walt,” Dick said, and shook his head. “Phoebe. Poor Eddie. A motorcycle bum for a son and a la-di-da girlfriend. He can’t tell if he’s coming or going.”

“Phoebe’s been good about his business,” May said.

“The better things go for his business, the more Phoebe and Walt have to fight over. It’s not like Walt’s decided to settle down. The only reason he shows up when he does is to keep his hand in. He knows Eddie’s soft on the idea of Wormsley and Son. And Phoebe’s chewing on the other side of him.”

“Scylla and Charybdis,” Charlie said. Dick looked at him. May was startled that the boys were paying such close attention. Charlie said, “It’s from the Bulfinch’s mythology Miss Perry read to us.”

“So that’s where that’s from. Captain Teixeira said it one day and I couldn’t place where I’d heard it.”

Tom said, “Bet you don’t know which is the rock and which is the whirlpool.”

May was afraid Tom was asking Dick, but Charlie said, “Scylla’s the rock.”

“That’s just ’cause I said ‘rock’ first. Bet you don’t know where the word
tantalize
comes from.”

Charlie said, “Sure I do,” but Dick said, “Wait. I remember that one. Hold on a second.” May couldn’t think of the last time Dick had
played with the boys like this. “It’s in there somewhere,” Dick said. “In that same book.”

“Tantalus,” Charlie said. “He did something, I can’t remember what, and the gods got mad and put him up to his neck in a pool of water, but when he bent over to get a drink, the water went down, so he was always thirsty and always an inch from drinking.”

“There you go,” Dick said. “Like Eddie with Phoebe.”

Charlie and Tom laughed. May said, “Dick—”

“They’re not kids anymore.”

“It’s not that,” May said. “Phoebe’s getting to be a friend of mine.”

“All right,” Dick said. “But leastways you can see the boys paid attention to Miss Perry’s books.” He leaned back in his chair. “I’m glad you boys had that. I’m not saying you’d have turned out like Walt Wormsley without it, but I guess part of how you turned out so good is on account of Miss Perry.”

May was stunned. She was so stunned she didn’t notice for a bit that Charlie and Tom were stunned, too. Dick had sometimes looked over a piece of work that Charlie or Tom had done and said it was good—a sheet bend or an eye splice, or how they’d gutted a mess of flounder. Nothing as big as this. May was glad for the boys. She was so glad that she snipped off a bud of suspicion that Dick was setting things right with them against the day they’d learn about Rose.

Dick didn’t seem to notice. He was staring at the corner of the table. “Wormsley and Son won’t work out. But neither will Pierce and Sons. Different reason. There’s not an Atlantic fishery has a future you can count on. Not cod, not scallops, not lobster. The government gave away half of Georges Bank to Canada just to get some oil pipeline, so there goes the cod and pollack. They’re overfished, anyway. Red crab is an oddity. Nobody knows much about them. If the red-crab plant loses the Boston market, then Captain Teixeira and I are out of luck. I won’t grouse about it, least not if I get another few years. But what about you boys?” Charlie and Tom shifted in their chairs. Dick heard either the creak of the wood or the change in their breathing. He looked at them, and May saw he was still far off, as if this was how his mind worked when he was lying in his bunk aboard
Spartina
. Dick said, “I don’t know any more than you. You’re going somewhere I don’t know much about. We know some college-educated
people. There’s Miss Perry, of course. And there’s Jack Aldrich. There’s the guy who started the packing plant. Some folks with sailboats, that whole crowd. Walt Wormsley went to URI and so far as Eddie can tell he learned to drink beer, chase girls, and ride his motorcycle. It’s not like the Coast Guard, where there’s rules about everything down to how you put your socks in your footlocker. You’ll be on your own. What’s more, you’ll be on your own with a little money in the bank. When I was your age, I felt things squeezing in. The only place I didn’t feel squeezed was on the water. I joined the Coast Guard like a dumb cluck—thought I’d put the uniform on and they’d give me a boat. Being dumb is one thing, going on being dumb is dumber.”