The Onion Field

by Joseph Wambaugh

  For if he could not play it in fact, he could play it exquisitely, majestically in his imagination. On monotonous evenings, riding in the black-and-white, during dark and quiet early morning hours, he could play the pibroch. When sitting at a desk in college, now a part-time student in law and police science, tensely awaiting the exam, he could be soothed by playing the pibroch. While lying still in the night on those sleepless nights which followed the cruel or distressing thing he had seen during a tour of duty, in those moments he could certainly play the pibroch. Always it was the melancholy, pastoral, plaintive pibroch: “MacCrimmon Will Never Return.”

  The gardener was unhappy with the job he’d done on the old woman’s lawn. The grass croppings lay in heaps in several places where the catcher had missed. He went to his truck to get the leaf rake. The old woman deserved an absolutely perfect job today to make up for the fact that he hadn’t listened to her gossip.

  While he was raking he thought about the time he stole the hardware. As always, he could relive the act, but not the feelings he had when he stole. He wiped his hands on his blue workshirt and got a better grip on the leaf rake. For a moment he thought of the testimony he would give tomorrow in court. He never had to stop working when he thought of the trials, not even when he thought of his crimes.

  The November California sun was wonderfully warm today. He had a fine jacket of sweat under the workshirt. Soon it would be winter and the sun would not be as good to the gardens he tended. That much was certain, the gardener thought. As certain as death in an onion field.

  TWO

  The felony car partners ate Irish stew in McGoos on Hollywood Boulevard on their eighth night together. Ian was even more quiet than usual and then he said, “You don’t have kids, Karl?”

  “I’ve only been married a short time,” Karl said, “but we got one in the hopper.”

  “That’s great,” Ian said soberly. “A marriage is something that takes caring for. Like plants and trees. A marriage is a good thing for a man.”

  Karl glanced up from his stew, his glasses in his pocket now, and saw Ian with fork poised, staring at his own plate, preoccupied. Karl had heard that a few months before, Ian’s wife had gone to work in Bimbo’s nightclub in San Francisco supposedly to earn enough to buy furniture for their new house. And their children had gone to stay with her mother. When some of the other policemen, inquisitive ones, asked Ian if he were separated from his wife, he denied the estrangement. But Karl didn’t believe him, especially now, with the way he talked so wistfully about his marriage.

  “You have two girls don’t you, Ian?”

  “Two girls,” Ian answered. “Valerie’s three and a half. Lori’s just two. Getting old enough to really enjoy now. They were staying with their grandmother for a while but now I’ve got my girls home. All three of them.”

  Karl did not question his partner’s last remark. It was not his affair.

  “Valerie’s already learning to read. I’m teaching her.”

  Karl nodded, imagining that his partner was probably a bookworm.

  “I like to read,” said Karl. “Someday I’d like to have time to do a lot of it. But I don’t care for novels.”

  “I never read novels either,” Ian said, not knowing that Karl’s tastes were far different and ran to fishing and outdoor literature, and “How To” books. “My wife used to say reading was all I cared about.”

  “You like growing things,” said Karl.

  “And bagpipes.”

  “I heard about that,” said Karl. Then he added, “You having dessert?”

  “No, I’ve finally got my weight below two hundred,” said Ian patting his stomach.

  “At least you’re tall enough to carry it,” Karl said, feeling his own bulging middle. “Married life is turning me into an avocado with feet.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Ian.

  “Oh yeah?” said Karl. “I gotta hold my arms out these days to see if I’m walking or rolling.”

  Pictures of Karl Hettinger would verify that he was much heavier now than he had ever been in his life. The pictures would reveal the fullness in his lightly freckled face, the crew cut would make his face even fuller. The pictures would be on the front pages.

  When it came time to pay for meals or leave tips, neither noticed another thing they most certainly had in common—frugalness. Neither man had the slightest difficulty remembering where every dollar was, and where a wholesale price could be obtained, or a police discount.

  So the two young men in felony unit Six-Z-Four were becoming more and more acclimated to one another, heading toward what might be a significant friendship. It was truly a bonus when a partner could become a friend. Karl unconsciously relinquished leadership of the team to Ian by virtue of the other’s seniority on the car and on the department, and also because Ian was almost three years older at thirty-one. But most of all because Ian had a certain bearing and quiet self-confidence. It was natural that he lead when a leader was required.

  Yet Karl Hettinger was not without his traits of leadership, even had his preeminence predicted by his junior college yearbook. He often remembered that prediction. Who could’ve dreamed he’d end up a cop? he thought, as they resumed patrol.

  As long as he could remember, Karl Hettinger had dreamed of being a farmer, a unique ambition for a boy raised in the megalopolis of Los Angeles. But his mother had filled him with wonderful farm stories as a boy. She was a vivid story teller and used her talent with growing things to full advantage on their one-acre piece of ground. And the visions of the clean and tidy German farm where she was raised came to the small boy and lingered.

  Karl had come late to his parents, well after his sisters, Miriam and Eunice. His father, Francis Hettinger, was in his mid-forties by the time the boy was ready to learn. The father was unaccustomed to a child’s demands, never having had to surrender his working time to the girls. And he had no time to spare. He was a quintessential working man, one who worked not just for wages, but for fulfillment, and for profound personal pleasure. He was a carpenter and a fair plumber, and he knew wiring and cabinetmaking, and was an adequate backyard mechanic, a man who knew the worth of a pair of hands. His were big and rough, knuckle-heavy, hanging from big wrists, strong, fully capable hands. He was a quiet, sought-after workman, a perfectionist, deeply proud of what he produced, a trait rare in those war years when good workers were scarce. He knew how to boss a job when necessary, but he did not know how to teach a boy.

  “Dad, do you think I could help you sometime at your job? School’s out this week.”

  “I can’t, Karl. The boss wouldn’t like a boy hanging around. Maybe when you get older.”

  “Well, do you think you might be able to show me how to use the miter box? I mean at home? On Saturday? When you’re not at work or anything?”

  “I … well, it’s just that I have to get that job right, son. You’re just too young, right now. I just have to get it perfect. It’s important to get the job right. When you get older, Karl, I’ll show you. But for now, son, I wish you wouldn’t use my tools.”

  And the tow-headed boy would look with sky blue eyes at the big hands of Francis Hettinger and wonder how the hands worked so wonderfully. He longed to see his own become large and adept and even bruised and broken like those of the carpenter. Somehow he never did develop those hands.

  And as Karl got older, his father did try to teach him, but they were ineffectual attempts. He was not a good teacher. He would overexplain, repeat himself. In the end he could not hide his displeasure with the boy’s efforts. They rarely talked together, the carpenter and his son. And the carpenter and his wife rarely talked together. He expressed his family devotion the only way he knew, through work.

  Sometimes the boy wished they could sit and that words would flow. But when they sat, eyes would turn shyly away. Father and son usually fell silent. It was ancient inherited shame of fathers and sons.

  But farming, that was something he could learn. And h
e would beg his mother to retell the stories of the clean prosperous farms. When he was still a very young boy he was sure of his vocation and became interested in the things his mother grew in their garden.

  In fact, all of Karl’s hobbies had an outdoor flavor. There were team sports, like baseball. And he learned to fish at an early age.

  “Would you like to go fishing this Saturday, Dad?”

  “I’d sure like to, but you know I gotta work six days.”

  “Sunday. Then how about Sunday?”

  And his father would say, “A man’s got to rest sometime, son. I’m just gettin too old to be goin every day.”

  “But you’ll be working Sunday I bet. On the car or something.”

  “Oh, now putterin at home, that’s not work. That’s restful. But fishin? That’s work, son.” And he would laugh and timidly paw at the boy’s shoulder with a hand full of blackened split fingernails. And that was as demonstrative as he would ever get. Karl would usually go fishing alone.

  But his childhood was by no means lonely. With two sisters so much older, it was as though he had three mothers, one of them always ready to give him attention, and there were other boys to play with. His mother would always brag that Karl was so good she never had to whip the boy. And once when Miriam tried, Karl looked up at her sadly with his pale blue eyes and made a silly face and they both burst out laughing.

  Only once was he disciplined significantly. It was when he was six years old. Karl and another child named Grant would leave first grade and stop by the five-and-dime for a five-cent pickle to share, or, if they were flush, for one apiece. It was on a pickle-buying trip that they saw some penny erasers they thought they needed, and not having enough for the pickle and the erasers, each stole a few pennies’ worth. When Elsie Hettinger happened to see the erasers at home and mentioned them to her son, Karl blurted out the bad thing they had done. His mother threaded a piece of string through each eraser and hung them on the wall over his bed for many weeks. The erasers dangling over the boy’s bed like avenging daggers were enough. The youngster could not even think a dishonest thought for many years.

  Though his parents rarely socialized, Karl was gregarious enough and always popular. He grew to be self-sufficient. If he had a problem he learned to keep it within himself.

  “There was no need to burden others with your personal problems,” his sister Miriam was to say many years later. “It was not the family way.”

  His sister Eunice laughed when she returned home a bride, explaining to the Hettinger household what a shock it was to be hugged and kissed by her groom’s family. Not just at the wedding, but almost every time they saw her, and her husband’s people would talk to each other about the most personal things. It was strange to her. It occurred to Karl that he had not been kissed by his mother since he was a tot. Nor by his sisters. Then he suddenly realized that his father had never kissed him. It was not the family way.

  Karl Hettinger was certainly not going to confess to his mother when, during his twelfth year, he and another boy stole some fishing plugs from the Sears store in Glendale. The two boys were caught by a store employee who saw their terror and pitied them.

  “I ought to call the police,” the man said sternly, and now both boys were having difficulty holding back the tears. “Would you sacrifice your freedom for a quarter’s worth of fishing plugs? Your freedom is very precious.”

  And he released them, and Karl Hettinger knew for a certainty he was fated to be a more than honest man. He would not abide a dishonest thought or word from that day forth, believing he had miraculously escaped the terrible wrath of the law. Nothing could be more fearful than losing one’s freedom. To be confined. Never to see a golden cloudburst or rivers of sunlight on dark flowers. Never to walk your own cultivated furrows. And the memory dangled over his heart like the sword of Damocles.

  His total honesty would be one of his hallmarks. He would not so much as tell a lie from that day on. His conscience would not permit it.

  There was only one school in the area for Karl upon graduation from high school, Pierce Junior College, in the San Fernando Valley. It rested against a row of hills with the wide valley expanding below, and soaring mountain ranges to the north. White stucco buildings had multicolored Spanish tile roofs, and student landscapers of years past had generously planted the campus in palms, evergreens, and willows. It was where a Glendale boy would go if he wanted to learn agriculture. It was where Karl Hettinger, only sixteen but a college freshman, found everything he’d hoped.

  He flourished in college. Any shyness he retained from his adolescent years all but vanished in a burst of campus activity. At first it was working in the college fields, picking corn, shucking it there where it grew, eating it under the hot summer sky, never tasting better because he had helped its growth. And there were other truck crops: radishes, onions, carrots, tomatoes. Perhaps the tomatoes were best—fat, heavy, red and dew-wet on cool mornings. Karl would kneel among them in earth moist and spongy, richer by virtue of care and cultivation than any land in the valley, and with little imagination he would see vast sections of glossy tomatoes, himself walking lovingly among them on his own land, relying on no man for a wage, only wanting a little rain and luck, and lots of sweat, which frightened him not at all.

  It may have been his affinity to growing things, or it may have been living in the dorm, truly self-sufficient for the first time, or it may have simply been his ripening past adolescence, but whatever it was, Karl began to burgeon as surely as the crops he tended. He was a varsity baseball player, a member of the student council, and finally the student body president. Karl, though only of medium size, had strength, agility, and most of all the determination to pursue any task to the end. Often he would be found irrigating in the fields in his rubber boots long after classes, earning extra money. The dorms were thirty dollars a month and his father worked night and day for the properties and goods he possessed, and believed his children should do the same.

  With his diligence and love of basic field toil he was a natural to be chosen as a college leader at this agricultural school which still clung to the Protestant ethic of hard honest work.

  Life in dorm three was a pleasant interlude he would look back on at a later incredible time of life. He would remember the marvelous poker games. Karl would sit there in a nickel-dime game, the light shining off his crew cut, now darkened to red blond with the passing of years, puffing nickel cigars though otherwise he didn’t smoke, his blue eyes also darkened to a deeper color, expressionless as long as the game was in progress. And Iranian students, sons of sheiks, would play as fiercely as he, as though every dollar they owned was in the game. In Karl’s case it often was.

  But there were disadvantages to a school like Pierce in these years: for one, a dearth of women students. The few there were were attracted to Karl, not only by virtue of his student body leadership but by reason of his diffidence around them.

  The year and a half he spent at Fresno State College was less pleasant. Though most of the old Pierce boys stayed together, they played too much, and the grades began falling. Like Ian Campbell, Karl Hettinger dropped out of college in his senior year.

  Karl joined the marines and was stationed at Twenty-nine Palms, California, for most of his enlistment.

  His childhood friend Terry McManus talked of Karl: “We went to a beer bar one night right after he got out of boot camp. The broad behind the bar was a tough old bat and some guy was coming on pretty rank with her. And she put up with it as long as he was spending his money, but finally he was getting awful aggressive. She was the owner’s wife and had probably handled a thousand guys like him, but all of a sudden Karl gets up and goes over and tells the guy to leave the lady alone. Imagine, in this day and age, and in a joint like that, defending a lady’s honor! Well, Karl was always a wiry guy, and hard muscled, but this other guy knew all about handling his fists, and after Karl took his lumps and I helped him out of there, he just grinned and said, ‘Guess I
thought I was a marine tiger.’ But it wasn’t the marine thing at all. He would’ve always done something dumb like that. He was like so many of those farmboys I met at Pierce: stubborn, quiet, and determined about right and principle, and just about thirty years out of touch with the city life of Los Angeles all around them. In Los Angeles, only a farmer would shrug shoulders at adversity and bear up without complaint and hope for fair weather. And for sure only a hick would defend a barmaid’s honor.”

  After the marine corps, Karl Hettinger was suffering the same adjustment pangs that all vets undergo—restlessness, uncertainty—when one day a friend talked him into accompanying him to City Hall where the friend was going to take the test for policeman. On impulse Karl took the test himself. Ultimately it was Karl and not the friend who entered the police academy. It was a surprise to his family, to everyone who knew him, most of all to himself. He wasn’t at all certain this was to be his life’s career or even how he got there. But, typically, he put forth maximum effort and did well and was named class valedictorian.

  The first two years on the police department were for Karl like they are to most young policemen: incredibly boring, intensely exciting, mostly bewildering. Having a quiet but sharp sense of humor, Karl tried to salvage the funny moments for old friends who wanted to hear cops-and-robbers stories. Karl shared an apartment with Bob Burke, a policeman three years his senior, who had helped break him in at Central Division. They were compatible roommates, both meticulous housekeepers, who stayed out of each other’s way and worked different shifts. Bob was more of a ladies’ man than Karl, who was still an avid outdoorsman. Anything to get out in the mountains or deserts, or especially the lakes.