by Tracy Kidder
On many evenings he makes arrests, sometimes one that he has looked forward to. Shortly after dark, hiding in the shadows at the rear of Pulaski Park, he catches a young man selling LSD—a young man with a small goatee, who dresses in black, occasionally with a cape, and who, Tommy believes, wields a malign influence over the younger teenagers always loitering in the park. Those kids, at any rate, refer to him as God. Tommy usually chats up people he’s arresting, but God is one of those old adversaries who have taunted him. “So I guess this makes me Pontius Pilate, right?” says Tommy, snapping handcuffs onto God. Tommy makes a loud, braying laugh.
He catches a boy skateboarding up King Street, in violation of local ordinance. “Crime of the century,” says Tommy, a former skateboarder himself. “But you’re outside the city limits. I just moved them up. Have a good night.”
On the sidewalk beside a quiet street in Florence, the cruiser’s headlights brush across the figure of a boy, unsteady on his feet. Tommy gets out and walks him home to his mother’s house. They stand together on the front porch, the boy protesting. “Dude. How can you say I’m drunk?”
“Because most people, when they try to crack their knuckles, don’t punch themselves in the chin,” says Tommy, pressing the doorbell.
He still likes all this—dealing with the undramatic, playing ombudsman to the lost, the needy, the unsteady in his hometown. Administering stern reprimands to the boys he catches throwing snowballs at cars, as he once did; wagging a finger at the drivers who don’t think he saw them make illegal turns; saying to a carful of gray-haired women who ask if he knows the way to Alumnae House at Smith College, “Follow me, ladies.” Many nights he stops at the emergency room in the Cooley Dickinson Hospital, to follow up on an accident, to interview a suspect, to help the staff with a dangerous patient. The charge nurse, Mary Lou Greene, used to baby-sit Tommy. “I can remember changing your diapers,” she’ll say. Sometimes, once he finishes his work there, he gets Mary Lou or one of the other nurses to take his blood pressure. Repeatedly, the measurements have told him that it rises, not dangerously but markedly, when he is in uniform. Ten years as a local cop in his small native place, and he still feels excited when he goes out patrolling his town and hears the desk officer’s voice come over the radio, calling for him.
“Eighty-three,” says the desk officer’s voice. “We have a call for a dog locked inside a car.”
The desk officer’s voice sounds weary. Tommy’s voice rises. “Why do people call the police because of a dog in a car?” he cries, as he heads toward the scene. “Why not? Who else they gonna call? This is a great job.”
As Judge Ryan says, there are many different Northamptons. Tommy doesn’t know them all. He doesn’t get invited to the cocktail and dinner parties in the fine houses of Northampton’s rich. Or to the after-hours card games or the golf tournaments of the town’s hard-drinking, high-living crowd. One time he was told to post some traffic guards for a wedding at “St. John’s.” He looked puzzled. “Where?”
“St. John’s. The Episcopal church.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Tommy. “The English church.”
“Jesus Christ, O’Connor. You’ve lived in this town your whole life and you don’t know the name St. John’s?”
Tommy smiled. He put on a brogue. “And what would be the need to know?”
But in Tommy’s own subjective view, the town is a single place and worth preserving, worth a lifetime’s effort at stamping out the bad or keeping it at bay or cleaning up the messes that it leaves behind. He always had a compulsion to be busy, and ten years of compulsively busy police work have made a great deal of the town transparent to him. He knows the insides of most of the larger buildings and of thousands of houses and apartments, and he knows where flaming youth repairs to drink and experiment with drugs. He knows the escape routes that burglars and hit-and-run drivers are likeliest to take, and, not always but often, he has gone to just the right spots for intercepting them.
He doesn’t know everyone in town, not by any means, but it seems as if he might know half and as if more than half know him. All evening long, voices call to him as he passes in his cruiser—friends, acquaintances, adversaries. All evening long, people he once arrested, young and middle-aged, white, black, and Hispanic, come up to his window. He knows their family histories, their special weaknesses. They tell him what exemplary lives they’re leading now. “Hey, O’Connor! I’m working seven days a week. Nine dollars an hour under the table.” “I’m working! Eighteen weeks!” “Oh, man, I got in trouble once, but I’m stayin’ out of trouble, workin’, man.” “I got a job now, got a wife. I’m clean, too, man. Hey, O’Connor, I got a kid now.” He pulls into a housing project and Willie, a notorious scammer and crack addict, walks over and says, “Have no fear, Willie’s here. That’s because I go to the hospitals and do all the laundry, you know what I’m sayin’, O’Connor?”
Maybe people like Willie simply hope to get him off their backs, but it usually sounds as if they want something else besides, something like approval, or absolution. By the midpoint of a shift, Tommy often begins to feel like Northampton’s father confessor. He plays the role. He half believes in it. To all of those anticonfessions, Tommy replies, “Good for you. Stay out of trouble.” As he drives away, he muses, “I wonder if they think I actually believe them. They probably do. It makes them feel better.”
Sometimes he seems neither priest nor cop, but more nearly social worker, a comparison he would resent. He stands inside a cramped living room, in a small rented Northampton house. A young woman sits before him, her face in her hands. Her wrists look thin as wishbones. The room contains what furniture dealers call a living room set, the kind that newlyweds buy. The plaid upholstery is stained.
The young woman glances up at Tommy. In his black boots and tidy uniform, he looks, as always, too large and martial for a domestic scene, like a soldier barging in. She says in a reedy voice, “I don’t want to go to jail.”
“We’re not here to arrest you,” Tommy tells her. His voice sounds very loud and brassy, the voice of social norms, feared and resented and, this time, strangely at odds with what he says. “We didn’t advise you of your rights, which means that anything you talk to us about we’re not gonna use against you. We’re gonna leave here, you’re gonna stay here, and that’s gonna be the end of it. We’re not here to charge you criminally. We don’t want to charge you criminally. That’s what we want to avoid. Okay? So if you have heroin here you want to get rid of, give it to the detective, and it’s gonna be out of here and you’ll never hear about it again.”
But she puts her head back in her hands, weeping softly.
Tommy tells her, “Look at me.” She hardly seems to dare. He counts on his fingers. “One, you’re not going to be the mother that you are and can be for your kids. And two, you’re gonna get a hot load some night, and that’s gonna be the end of it. Then you got a bunch of pretty little kids with nothin’.”
She clears her throat. “I’m so embarrassed.”
“Well, don’t be embarrassed. And we can hook you into the right things to try to get you some help. You’re the only one that can help yourself, but at least we can get you in the direction that maybe you can do something for yourself, or for your kids.”
She starts crying again. “I don’t care about myself,” she sobs.
“Well, you gotta learn to care about yourself. How bad a habit do you have now? ”
“Basically, I just need some time.” Her voice rises. “I don’t want to get in trouble.”
“Honestly! Hey lookit, you’re not going to get in trouble.”
“I just …”
“How old are you now?”
She looks up at him again. “Twenty-five?”
“You got a lot of years ahead of you.”
She puts her face back in her hands. “I’m so embarrassed.”
“Don’t be embarrassed.” Silence descends on the room, except for her sniffles. “Will you take my suggestio
n, or at least hear it?”
“Sure.” But she doesn’t look at him.
“Take the advice of the detective here. Talk to your friend, who wants to sit down with you. A person concerned about you. Have that person help you. Don’t let this guy you’re living with influence you. Have someone who cares about you, who’s really interested in you. Not him.”
She seems to stiffen. She stares at the floor. “Tell ya honestly,” says Tommy. “If you don’t listen to us and you just continue on? I’ll think it’s sad, but it’s not gonna make me not sleep at night. Because there’s a lot more people out there with the same problem. You’re getting an opportunity here to do something, and I would take it. How are your kids doing?”
“Oh, they’re fine.”
“How old are they?”
“Eight and five?”
“Well, the eight-year-old’s old enough to start to figure things out.”
She says she’ll let her friend come and talk to her, but isn’t ready to do more.
“All right. Good luck,” says Tommy.
It is dark when he comes outside. He looks back at the lighted windows of the little house. “That could be enough to bottom her out. Maybe not. Would it surprise me if a week from now we go there for an overdose? Not in the least bit.” He climbs in his cruiser and starts driving, back on his rounds, musing aloud. “I don’t get discouraged over it anymore, because if I went in there thinking that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Dudley Do-Right just walked in and now the world’s gonna be fine for her, and then I find out differently and I’m bothered by that—and I would be, she’s a nice kid!—then I’d be bothered all the time. Because the vast majority of people don’t take up on your advice. Like domestics. You go back there and the woman’s still with the freaking moron. There’s more to it than what we see.”
During the past few hours peace has settled over the emergency room at the Cooley Dickinson Hospital. But it’s about eleven now, and Mary Lou Greene, the veteran charge nurse, figures peace will end soon. She’s dealt for years with local injury and illness and hypochondria, and has discerned a pattern that seems timed to television. About 86 percent of households in Northampton, 9,577 at last count, have cable and almost a third contain two TV sets or more. (Only 137 customers haven’t paid their bills.) Prime time on television is quiet time in the ER, but shortly afterward, at a little after eleven, a small epidemic hits—a young woman who thinks she has pneumonia and only has the flu, a drunk with no other place to go, a man with a compound fracture of the ankle, a restaurant worker with a bruise on his head from a falling can, and a dozen more. If a TV special has publicized a new disease, some are sure to think they have it.
At midnight supine people dressed in johnnies fill the beds behind the curtained enclosures while worried-looking relatives stand by, and Dr. Ira Helfand goes bustling among them, talking fast. He is the current president of the American chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility, the international antinuclear group. But he works here in town. He stitches like a London tailor.
The beds empty slowly. A few people come in around three-thirty in the morning, and then the place grows quiet for a while. Dr. Helfand says, “This night for drunkenness is not bad at all.”
“Shhh,” says one of the nurses.
“It’s four-thirty A.M. We’re not going to get any now.”
“They just haven’t found them yet,” the nurse replies.
Out in Northampton and the towns around it—the doctors and the nurses know this happens many nights—a couple of people, sometimes more, lie awake in the dark in their beds. In one house a woman with pain in her chest, in another a man with an aching left arm. They lie there telling themselves it’s probably nothing, they can wait until their doctors’ offices open. Around dawn they change their minds. They troop into the ER around six-thirty. At the local hour of the suspected heart attack, civilization isn’t art and architecture. It’s a nurse’s hands and the smell of antiseptics, a short drive away.
Little indoor nighttime dramas fade. The town is waking up. Out on Main Street the lights shut down with an audible click. From several alleys comes the smell of baking bread, and in the distance beyond the rooftops, to the rising chatter of downtown’s birds, the sun clears the top of the Holyoke Range. It etches silhouettes of buildings on the façades across the street. For a moment Main Street is empty.
Then down the hill from Elm Street, rattling, come the trucks of the Honor Court. If Northampton were a town in Paraguay or Haiti, you might think a coup had begun. The men, mostly dressed in army fatigues and all in orange vests, climb out and straggle into position, carrying brooms and shovels. A reformed drunk founded the Honor Court; his son is in the state legislature now. The inductees perform civic chores in return for room and board, and often in lieu of jail. Some local homeless advocates call the program authoritarian, but not many residents complain. The service is virtually free to the city and all but unwitnessed because of the hour. The Honor Court platoon sweeps up the sidewalks, empties the municipal trash barrels, then rattles off toward Florence.
In some households, a large minority, mostly ones with natives in them, radios are tuned to Northampton’s own AM station—WHMP, 1400 on the dial. For nearly forty years, old-timers have awakened to a deep and slightly ominous voice, full of pregnant pauses, saying, “Goo-ood morning. I’m. Ron Hall.” Ron is part of the “1400 Team.” He reads the news. “Employees and patrons of the pizza shop chased the man after the robbery. And beat him with a. Shovel!” Soon the cheery voice of Ron Hall’s sidekick, Dennis Lee, takes over: “I had a strange dream last night that I forgot to play the morning polka. Here’s the ‘Tuba Polka,’ on WHMP! With Ray Jay!” Everyone listening knows what this means: that it’s right around six-forty. Some snap off their radios. Others, not all of Polish descent, leave theirs on, and climb out of bed to the cheery strains of a brassy orchestra, evoking women in babushkas, men in boots, clomping from side to side in a barn.
When the music ends, Dennis Lee returns. “Yes, the ‘Tuba Polka.’ Life’s okay.”
Tommy O’Connor pulled into the parking lot beside the police station around nine o’clock on the night of August 17, 1995. He was ending his patrol much earlier than usual to catch up on reports. He had a reputation, which he didn’t think he deserved, for forgetting administrative details. Once a week or so he hunted through the police station for his misplaced cruiser keys or patrol diary, muttering, “If you do twice as much as everyone else, you have twice as much to forget.” But even though no one in the department believed it—in a small society, as in a marriage, reputations long outlive the traits they memorialize—Tommy really had become much more diligent about paperwork.
The station that squatted before him is tucked away downtown, on Center Street off Main, in the shadow of much taller, older, grander buildings. It was a shameful-looking thing, Tommy thought, an offense to its setting and his profession. Unpruned shrubbery clawed at its few windows. It had a low, flat roof and the general appearance of an abandoned blockhouse. Tommy let himself in the side door by the parking lot, into a hallway of scuffed linoleum tile, with partitions made of plasterboard covered in paper that was supposed to look like wood. Some of the walls had fist-sized holes in them, souvenirs of difficult arrests and of stressful moments in the lives of cops. He went into the Records Room, a cluttered chamber. Tacked to a wall above some filing cabinets was a print in the Rockwell manner—a traffic cop turning from his duties to smile down at a little girl who is offering him an apple. Tommy liked the picture, though he felt it ought to have a frame. He had just sat down at one of the computers when his old friend Rick Janacek walked in, dressed in civilian clothes.
Tommy was glad to see Rick but mildly surprised to see him in the station at this hour. Rick worked the day shift, and besides, Tommy had thought he was taking some vacation time. He looked up at Rick, and then he looked again. Something was wrong.
Rick was as handsome as many movie stars. He h
ad a strong jaw and high cheekbones. He was six foot three, broad-shouldered, and athletically thin, and he carried himself with the erectness that makes a person look confident and proud, and in Rick’s case, a little superior. At this moment, though, he might have been stoop-shouldered, raggedly dressed, unshaven. He was none of those things in fact, but all of them in the image Tommy saw, like a picture of an embodied soul. The effect came from Rick’s face. His eyes looked blank, as if he was exhausted. And he was making little uncomfortable-looking movements with his mouth. Tommy knew exactly how his friend’s mouth felt—dry, like the mouths of people being interrogated. In his years as a detective, Tommy had made himself a reader of faces. He’d had a lifetime’s practice reading Rick’s.
“We gotta talk,” said Rick.
Many old friends from the neighborhood now lived far away. Another kind of distance had opened up between Tommy and Rick. Years ago, when they’d both joined the Hamp police department, Tommy had imagined himself and Rick as two old buddies, side by side, moving on in life. But in their years on the force, they had rarely worked together, and the brass had made Tommy the favored one, the one who got the special training and promotions. Just a year ago Tommy was promoted to sergeant instead of Rick. An awkward moment for Tommy, standing beside Rick in one of the captain’s offices and receiving the good news. Rick was still a patrolman, though the head of their union.
Like many old friends, they had drifted away partly because of their marriages. Jean didn’t like Rick much, and neither she nor Tommy cared for Rick’s wife. She was a Smithie. She came from money. She seemed stuck-up to them. At Rick’s wedding, a string quartet had played Polish polkas—exactly right as a symbol for that marriage, Tommy and Jean had thought. The two couples went out together a few times, but uncomfortably. Anyway, Rick and his wife soon had small children, and then their lives had become fundamentally different.
