Commonwealth

by Ann Patchett

  “Well, there you go,” Franny said. To the best of Franny’s memory, the only lap Caroline had ever wanted to sit in was their father’s, even after they had moved to the other side of the country.

  Fix nodded. “Kids loved Lomer, all of them. He was always letting them get in the car, turn on the siren, play with the handcuffs. Can you imagine the lawsuits people would file if someone did that now, handcuffing a little kid to the rearview mirror for fun? They had to stand up on the front seat, they loved it. Lomer gave cops a good name. I remember when he left our house that night after dinner, your mother and I talked about how sad it was the guy didn’t have any kids of his own. We thought he was so old and he was what then, twenty-eight, twenty-nine?”

  “Was he married?”

  Fix shook his head. “He didn’t have a girlfriend, at least not when he died. He got his nose broken in the Navy and his nose was a mess but he was still a good-looking guy. Everybody used to say he looked like Steve McQueen, which was an overstatement because of the nose. Your mother was always wanting to set him up with Bonnie and I said no because I thought Bonnie was an idiot. Too bad I got my way on that one. It would have saved the world a priest.”

  “Maybe he was gay,” Franny said.

  Fix turned his head, a shadow of such bewilderment crossing over him that it was clear he thought there had been a misunderstanding. “Joe Mike wasn’t gay.”

  “I meant Lomer.”

  And with that Fix closed his eyes again and kept them closed. “I don’t know why you have to do that.”

  “There wouldn’t have been anything wrong with it,” Franny said, but she was already sorry. Once upon a time in the city of Los Angeles there was a smart heterosexual cop who loved kids and looked like Steve McQueen and didn’t have a girlfriend; whether she thought such a thing was possible didn’t matter. Gay or straight, Lomer was just shy of fifty years dead. The chemo bag had just gone up and they had another hour and a half to sit in this room and either talk or not talk. “I’m sorry,” she said, and when he didn’t answer her she gave his arm a small poke. “I said I was sorry. Tell me about Lomer.”

  Fix waited for a minute, deciding whether to nurse the grudge or let it go. Truth be told, Franny irritated him, the way she looked like Beverly but without Beverly’s sense of knowing what to do with her looks—her hair in a ponytail, the drawstring pants, not so much as ChapStick on her face. He knew people here, sometimes his doctor came by during treatment. She could have made an effort.

  And she didn’t know the first thing about Lomer either. Sitting in his lap when she was a year old was as close as Franny ever got to a man of Lomer’s caliber. That old guy she’d been so crazy about when she was young, the one who’d robbed her blind, and even her husband, who may be nice enough but had clearly married her because he needed a babysitter for his children—Franny had no taste in men. Fix had hoped that someday his girls would meet a man like Lomer but no luck there. The picture in his mind—his partner at the dinner table holding Franny, Beverly in the kitchen dressed like she was going out to dinner instead of making dinner—that was enough to make the decision to keep his eyes closed, but then he felt a single, electric jolt run through his esophagus, as if the poison coursing through him had suddenly washed against the side of the tumor, and Fix remembered again what he was constantly forgetting: this was going to kill him.

  “Dad?” Franny said, and touched her hand very lightly to his sternum in exactly that place.

  Fix shook his head. “Get me another pillow.”

  When she brought the pillow and arranged it behind his back, he started. Franny had come all the way from Chicago to see him. She’d left her husband and the boys for this.

  “What you need to know about Lomer is that he was a funny son of a bitch,” Fix said. “There was nothing better than going on a stakeout with him.” He found his own voice to be small and cleared his throat to start again. “I looked forward to sitting in some piece-of-crap car until four o’clock in the morning in South Central because Lomer was there telling jokes. I’d laugh until I was sick, until finally I had to tell him to cut it out or we were going to blow the whole night’s work.”

  Franny’s father looked brittle and small. The cancer was in his liver now.

  There were spots in his pelvis and one in his spine, while Lomer was handsome and still twenty-nine.

  That’s what Lomer would have to say about it.

  “So tell me a joke,” Franny said.

  Fix smiled at the ceiling, at Lomer sitting beside him in the car. He lay like that for several minutes, the silvered droplets of chemo sliding down the plastic tubing and into the hole in his chest, then he shook his head. “I don’t know them anymore.”

  Which wasn’t true exactly. He remembered one.

  “So this woman is home when a cop knocks on the door,” Lomer said. For the first second Fix didn’t know he was starting in on a joke. That was the thing about Lomer, you never knew. “The cop has a dog with him, something like a beagle, maybe a little bigger than a beagle, and the dog looks guilty as hell. The beagle tries to look up at the woman and he can’t do it, he can’t meet her eye, so he’s looking down at the grass like maybe he’s dropped a quarter in there somewhere.”

  A joke. Fix was driving and the windows were down. The radio was squawking directives in numeric code and Fix dialed back the volume until the words and the numbers were nothing more than a slight crackling of static. Lomer and Fix weren’t headed anywhere in particular. They were on patrol. They were looking.

  “The cop,” Lomer said, “he’s trying. This is tough duty. ‘Ma’am,’ he says, ‘is this your dog?’ And she tells him it is. ‘Well, I’m sorry to inform you there’s been an accident. Your husband’s been killed.’ So you know what happens, she’s shocked, she’s crying, all of it. The dog still won’t look at her. ‘But ma’am,’ the cop says, and he does not want to say this, ‘there’s something else I have to tell you.’ He’s just going to rip off the Band-Aid. ‘Your husband’s body, when we found him at the site, he was naked.’ And the wife repeats the word, ‘Naked?’ And the cop nods, then he clears his throat. ‘There’s something else, ma’am. There was a woman in the car with him, and the woman didn’t make it either.’ The wife makes some sort of sound, a little gasp, or maybe she says, Ooh. And then the cop finishes it off. He doesn’t have any choice. ‘Your dog here was in the car with them. It looks like he was the only survivor.’ And the dog just stares at his front paws like he really wishes they’d all been killed together.”

  Fix turned the car down Alvarado. It was August 2, 1964, and even though it was nearly nine o’clock at night it still wasn’t fully dark. Los Angeles smelled like lemons and asphalt and the muted exhaust of a million cars. There were kids on the sidewalk shoving each other and running away, one big game, but the night crawlers were coming out too: the gang-bangers, the working girls, the junkies with their insatiable needs, and together they created a market of exchange. For everyone there was something to sell or buy or steal. The night was just getting warmed up. The night was still very young.

  “So do you make these things up?” Fix asked. “Have you been riding around for the last three hours making this up in your head or do you read jokes in joke magazines and save them for the right time?”

  “This isn’t a joke,” Lomer said, taking off his sunglasses now that the sun was nearly finished. “I’m telling you what happened.”

  “To you,” Fix said.

  “To someone I know. The cousin of someone I know.”

  “Fuck you. Seriously.”

  “Just be quiet and listen for a change. So the cop offers his condolences and hands the woman the leash and he’s out of there. The dog has to go inside. The whole time the dog is looking over his shoulder at the cop, who’s getting in his car. When the woman closes the door she starts in on the dog right away. ‘He was naked? He was in the car and he was naked?’” Lomer’s voice wasn’t that of a grieving widow but a furious wife. “
And the dog looks back at the door, just desperate to be anyplace else in the world, you know?” Lomer looked out the passenger window of the car for a minute, at a kid with a basketball parked under one arm walking home from the courts, at a guy standing on the corner, drunk or high, his head thrown back and his mouth open, waiting for rain. When he looked back at Fix he was the beagle, the saddest, guiltiest beagle in the history of beagles, and the beagle that was Lomer nodded his head.

  “‘And the woman?’” Lomer said in the wife’s voice. “‘She was naked too?’”

  And just that quickly he was a beagle again, just barely able to look up at Fix. He nodded.

  “‘Well, what were they doing?’”

  This question was almost too much for Lomer as the beagle, so painful was the moment to recall, but he touched his thumb to the fingers of one hand to make a circle, and then took the index finger of his other hand and jabbed it through. Fix flipped on his turn indicator and pulled the black-and-white to the curb. He was no longer watching the street.

  “‘They were having sex?’ the wife asks.”

  Lomer nodded sadly.

  “‘In the car?’”

  The beagle closed his eyes and very slowly nodded again.

  “‘Where?’”

  Lomer lifted his chin just a quarter inch to indicate the backseat. A sadder beagle was never born.

  “‘And what were you doing?’”

  Fix was laughing before the punch line came, as Lomer put his hands on an imaginary steering wheel and looked nervously, nervously but with real interest, into the rearview mirror in order to see the backseat of the car, where Lomer the beagle watched his master screw another woman.

  “Where do you get these things?” Fix asked and for a second touched his forehead to the steering wheel. Lomer never told him but he could remember the feeling of laughing so hard he couldn’t breathe. Then from underneath the laughing and the sound of the cars rushing past and the high Latin music that was coming from someplace neither of them could see, a series of numbers separated them from the steady barrage of numbers the radio spat out—their numbers. Lomer and Fix both heard them with the volume nearly off, and they were glad, though there was no need to say this. The night had been too quiet so far and the quiet had given them an itch. They never believed there was nothing going on in Los Angeles, only that it hadn’t come to them yet. Now the lights were on and the siren was screaming out its loop. Lomer gave directions and Fix raced the car down the suddenly empty middle lane of the wide street. Pedestrians held to the curb, all eyes on the black-and-white. The two officers felt that kick inside which never failed to ignite them. The call was for a domestic disturbance, which could mean a screaming match that was annoying the neighbors or a husband beating his wife with a belt or some kids standing on the roof popping off rats in the palm trees with a BB gun. It wasn’t armed robbery and it wasn’t a murder. Most of the time the people were just embarrassed and whoever called the cops got all the blame. Though sometimes not.

  They took Alvarado to Olympic and slid down into the warren of side streets. Night was full on them and Fix killed the siren but left on the lights so that house by house the curtains parted an inch or two and the occupants peered out, wondering who was in trouble and wondering who was thoughtless enough to bring the cops down on their quiet neighborhood where everyone had at least one thing to hide. The house they were going to was dark. When the residents of the house know you’re coming for them, the residents of the house trouble themselves to get up and turn off the lights. Standard operating procedure.

  “Looks like we’re too late,” Lomer said. “They’ve already gone to bed.”

  “Let’s wake them up,” Fix said.

  Were they ever afraid? Fix would wonder about this later. In the years that followed there was not a single thing Fix Keating didn’t know about fear, even though he would eventually learn to set his face in such a way so as not to show it. But in the years he spent with Lomer, he walked through every door certain he would walk back out again.

  It was a small box of a house with a small, square yard. It was like every other house on the street except for a cascading hedge of bougainvillea covered over in flowers the burning pink of antihistamine tablets. “How did this even get here?” Lomer said, running his hand across the leaves. Fix knocked on the door, first with his knuckles and then with his flashlight. In the flashing blue light from the car he could see he was making small dings in the wood. He called out, “Police!” but whoever was inside knew that already.

  “I’ll check around back,” Lomer said and walked off whistling through the narrow side yard, shining his flashlight in the windows while Fix waited. There were no stars above Los Angeles, or they were there but the city threw out too much light to see them. Fix had his eye on the slim quarter moon when he saw a bright light coming through the dark house. Lomer switched on the porch light and opened the front door. “The back was open,” he said.

  “The back door was open,” Fix said.

  “What?” Franny asked. She put down her magazine and pulled the blanket up to his shoulders. He’d been right about the blanket. Patsy had brought him one.

  “I was asleep.”

  “It’s the Benadryl. It keeps you from itching later on.”

  He was trying to put it all together—this room, this day, his daughter, Los Angeles, the house just off Olympic. “The back door was open and the front door was locked. You would’ve stopped to think about that, wouldn’t you?”

  “Dad, tell me what house we’re talking about? Your house now? The Santa Monica house?”

  Fix shook his head. “The house we went to the night Lomer was shot.”

  “I thought he got shot at a service station,” she said. That’s what her mother had told them, and if it was forty years ago, more than that, she still remembered it. Her mother had been fighting with Caroline. Whenever Caroline stayed out past curfew or said something really horrible to Bert or gave Franny enough of a slap to make her nose bleed, she took the opportunity to remind their mother that had Beverly been a decent wife and stayed with their father then none of this would have happened. If Beverly had stayed married to Fix then Caroline would have been a model citizen; her good behavior had been entirely within their mother’s grasp and she’d blown it by choosing to run off with Bert Cousins, so no one should be blaming Caroline for how her life was turning out. It was old news. By the point at which they’d come to this particular fight they’d been living in Virginia for longer than either girl had lived in Los Angeles, but the story of her alternative existence was Caroline’s trump card and she brought it out for every occasion. Franny remembered the time the three of them were in the car coming home from school, she and Caroline both in the plaid uniform skirts and white perma-press blouses of Sacred Heart. She couldn’t remember what Caroline had done that had started the fight, or why this fight seemed more serious than the others. But something that was said had made their mother tell them about Lomer.

  “That’s right,” her father said to her. “He was shot at the Gulf station on Olympic.”

  Franny leaned over in her chair and put her hand on her father’s forehead. His hair, which had been gray for as long as she could remember, had grown back a luminous white brush after the last round of chemo. Everyone talked about her father’s hair. She swept it back with her palm. “I really want to know what you’re talking about,” she said, her voice low even though no one was listening. No one in that room was thinking about them at all.

  Fix, who had never been big on sharing, suddenly wanted to explain it to her. He wanted Franny to understand. “The house was so small we knew it wasn’t going to take any time to find them. There were three doors off the hall—two bedrooms, one bathroom. These places were all put together the same way. They were in the first bedroom. It was a father, a mother, four kids. They were on the bed together in the dark. We flicked on the overhead lights and there they were, all sitting up straight, even the littlest one. It
was the father who’d been beaten. That’s not one you see a lot. Usually it’s the woman who’s taken the hit but this guy looked like someone had just scraped him up off the freeway, his lip had sliced open on his teeth, one of his eyes was already shut, his nose was everywhere. I can see his face as clear as I see you. It’s crazy how much of that house and those people I remember—their feet were bare, and all of them had their feet up on the bed. We started asking them questions and we got nothing, no response at all. The father was looking at me with his one eye and I was wondering how he was even upright. There was blood on his neck that was coming out of both of his ears. I would have thought the beating had popped his eardrums if it weren’t for the fact that no one on that bed seemed like they heard us. Lomer radioed in for an ambulance and backup. I kept talking to them and finally the oldest girl, maybe she was ten, tells me they don’t speak English. The mother and father don’t speak English but the kids do. There were three girls and a boy. The boy was maybe seven or eight. I said, ‘The person who did this, where did he go?’ And then they all turned mute again, the girl was staring straight ahead just like her parents until the little one, who was five or something like that, not so much bigger than Caroline was then, looked at the closet plain as day. She didn’t turn her head but she was very clear. The guy was in the closet. The older girl grabbed her wrist and squeezed the hell out of it but Lomer and I turned around and Lomer opened the closet door, and there he was, smashed into the clothes. It was a small closet, the kind people used to have, and everything they’ve got in the world was in there, including this guy. He understood the situation. He wasn’t going to make it past us. He had blood on his shirt and his hand was cracked up from beating the poor son of a bitch on the bed. I don’t think he spoke any more English than the one he’d come over to bust up. He’d stuck his gun in the pocket of a dress in the closet. Maybe he figured nobody would find it and he could come back and pick it up later. Right about that time the backup came in and then the ambulance. There were no Miranda rights back then, no calling in a guy who spoke Spanish. The family on the bed, they’re all shaking now and the kids were crying, like it was fine when he was in the closet and they didn’t have to look at him but now that he’s standing in the bedroom again they were all stirred up. His name was Mercado. We found that out later. He had a regular job beating Mexicans who’d borrowed money to be smuggled into the country and hadn’t made enough yet to pay off the debt. Nobody who had any money or any way to get their hands on money screwed these guys over. They beat people in front of their families, in front of their neighbors. That was the wake-up call, and if the money still didn’t come a week or two later they’d swing by and shoot you in the head. Everybody knew it.”