Home Town

by Tracy Kidder

  The relationship lasted about four months. At Sylvester’s, he reported its crumblings and revivals many times. They had the first argument in which they raised their voices, shouting at each other terms such as “commitment” and “exclusive relationship,” which was what he wanted, and “ambivalence,” which was what she said she felt. Several times he called her answering machine and said he thought their romance was at an end, that she had lost interest. She agreed, and then again she didn’t. Some return messages said that she couldn’t live without him. In his journal Alan wrote a poem:

  Love, dark insight opens mind

  Closes heart. Lover closes door,

  Uttering words of love and regret

  With sad sounds of tsk tsk

  They started to talk on the phone and Alan said he couldn’t talk directly to her; she should hang up, and he would say what he had to say to her answering machine. The next day he planned to finance joint projects with her. The next he told her the relationship, the romantic part, was over, and she agreed, and he made a couple of dinner dates for the weekend, and then she called and said she missed him, so he canceled his dates. Then he went into Thorne’s Marketplace, to the science store, and purchased some symbolic items: a 15-million-year-old shark’s tooth, a 175-million-year-old piece of amber with a stingerless bee trapped inside it, and a piece of a meteor, billions of years old. He left these in a gift-wrapped package at her house, with a note that read, “Put your troubles in perspective. You need time, but we have just a tiny bit of time.” It had been a short, elegant note, but then, he said ruefully, he kept adding things to it.

  A thought was blossoming in him, he said: “I’ll use her for everything I can, and when I’m done, I’ll dump her.” He had to say this to reject it. He remembered that when he’d arrived at McLean, the very first day, he’d been told he must prepare himself for the day that he would leave. It was time to do that now with her.

  His last conversation with his psychiatrist had left him feeling that he’d harmed the relationship, that all his gifts had placed “unspoken demands” on her and that she was bound to feel “overwhelmed” and bound to express a need for “autonomy.” It pained him to think that he, who was a good negotiator and businessman, was least adept at handling what mattered most to him. “I’m just so totally inept when it comes to relationships. When it comes to personal emotional stuff, what’s appropriate is so unclear to me, that as soon as I have feelings for anyone, I’m over my head. Everything gets blurred.”

  He said this to a friend, who told him, “You’re being too hard on yourself.” After all, Alan had only just emerged from ten years of solitude. He was bound to be rusty at relationships.

  “Yeah. Except that I wasn’t any good at them before.”

  He laughed, the kind of laugh that seems to hurt. A person with broken ribs would laugh like that. “How can I be so confused as not to know when I’m aspiring to too much? Did I make too much of my relationship with Suzanne? Was it just inappropriate? In some ways in retrospect, it was extremely inappropriate. At the time it just seemed okay. But it seemed okay in the context of a guy who has no idea of what ‘okay’ is. I mean ‘okay’ in the sense that if I see someone who is attractive I don’t rip their clothes off and say, ‘Let’s fuck.’ If I see someone attractive, I don’t say, ‘Gee, I find you attractive. Let’s go out to dinner tonight.’ ”

  He paused. “Actually, I have said that.”

  In the middle of the night years ago, Tommy parked his cruiser near a dirt road to the Meadows, and in a moment, to his surprise, a prominent citizen, an older man, appeared out of the dark, walking east toward the great river. Tommy called to him. Tommy knew him well enough only for hellos and weather conversation, but the man stopped and climbed into the cruiser and started talking. On and on he talked, about nothing that seemed very important to Tommy, but, his radio being silent, small talk seemed as good a way as any to pass the dead hours of the night. Tommy thought he sensed a hint of urgency in the man’s voice, but then again this guy was known to be a bit eccentric. He talked to Tommy for almost two hours. The next day he showed up at the station, handed Tommy his rosary, and said, “You saved my life last night.” Then it all seemed clear. The man had planned to drown himself in the Connecticut. Just by chance Tommy had intervened. He knew it for a certainty.

  At times like those it seemed as if there really was design in the intersecting lives of the town. For Alan, the place seemed just big enough to hold out the promise that he would find the right person in it. He still thought he had found her. The place was also small enough to keep her in his view, now that he had lost her.

  Alan took long walks through downtown and its surroundings. He knew the landscape well, all the alleys and the hidden spots, such as the dry riverbed that he occasionally traced through backyards toward the Connecticut. He often felt as though he lived, as he put it, in the third person, observing both other people and himself. He was a watcher, an especially intent one now. He’d driven to Suzanne’s house to drop off some books she’d left at his place. A car he didn’t recognize was parked outside. He knew from their last conversation that her roommates were away, so the car had to belong to someone visiting Suzanne. Alan noticed cars. “It was a distinctive car. It was a very attractive car. It was a British-racing-green Chrysler product with a tan convertible top.”

  Alan drove away. He didn’t want a scene or even a conversation. A few hours later he returned to drop off the books, and the car was gone. Later he saw Suzanne on the sidewalk on the other side of Main Street, walking with a man. No matter how crowded downtown was, she stood out for him. Seeing her, and unseen by her, he studied the other man. He looked young—younger than Alan, anyway. He was casually and conservatively dressed. Maybe he was the engineer she’d mentioned. Alan remembered, from a time that now seemed long ago, her telling him that she’d met a “mellow guy” and was going to the movies with him. His heart had sunk in expectation of her telling him, as she had a few days later, that she was going to this guy’s house, because he worked with computers and would teach her how to surf the Internet. She’d told Alan where the fellow lived, an apartment house downtown. Watching from a distance now, Alan saw the man climb into the British-racing-green Chrysler. A few days after that, he went out walking on Pleasant Street and spotted the green car again, turning down a side street. He stopped and peered after it. The car turned in to the lot of the apartment house where Suzanne had said the computer expert lived. QED.

  He felt relieved, he said. “I have to admit that as much as I would rather have a good relationship with her—although I’d rather have none than a bad relationship—that I do take some comfort in knowing that she’s with someone who, who is anchored in the real world. I do take some comfort. In that. I don’t think that this is necessarily a deep romantic relationship. I think that he’s more like her than I am, a more familiar element. And I think that’s part of it. I think when she was talking about, complaining that I wasn’t good enough turn-on material to have as a steady boyfriend—she was saying it in those terms, but I think it was a more global thing. It was like, ‘I think you’re too old for me.’ She would say things to me like, ‘You’re a pretty good dancer, but I don’t like the way you dance. You don’t dance the way I do.’ Of course, I dance in the sixties style, and she dances in an eighties and nineties style. And she’d say, ‘We dance so differently.’ And she’d say, ‘I can usually tell who’s going to be the most satisfactory lovers for me, from the way they dance. People that dance more like me.’ And so. Which expands from the notion of, whether or not I’m really a satisfactory lover to her, to whether or not I’m a satisfactory relationship for her. And a person who’s more like her age, like this guy …”

  Soon, from a stripper friend, Alan heard Suzanne was moving. A few days later, he saw her car go by, filled to the roof with stuff. That afternoon he walked through town shying away from people on the street, now and then bringing his forearms to his chest. But the fit p
assed. He called Suzanne’s old number and the recording gave him a new number. The prefix signified that she’d simply moved a few miles away, to a neighboring town.

  Snow fell yet again on March 8. Thirty-five trucks of various sizes with fifty-one men aboard plowed through the night. The revolving yellow light on the roof of the big sander truck looked like a beacon on a mobile lighthouse in the driving snow. At the controls, young Rich Parasiliti of the DPW glanced at the windows of the passing houses. In them TVs glowed. Fireplaces flickered. Rich smiled. “We’ll see how many babies are born nine months from now.” Obliged to work all night inside a roaring, lurching machine, Rich was a lot more cheerful than some citizens at home. One storm ago, a citizen had hurled his snow shovel at the windshield of the snowplow just ahead of Rich; the man had just finished clearing his driveway when the plows had arrived and buried it again. Here and there tonight, homeowners put barricades of lawn chairs across the mouths of their driveways to try to block the plows. Around midnight a figure appeared in Rich’s headlights, facing the oncoming plow, holding his shovel at port arms, defending his driveway against the public interest. Rich laughed and drove around him.

  By the time the storm ended, the season’s cumulative total had reached 109 inches, the most snow ever recorded in Northampton. The local travel agencies were swamped. All over town, residents muttered that they might just leave this place for good. But then, as if appeased at last, the weather relented.

  Coming out of an apartment building—another routine domestic sorted out—Tommy stopped in his tracks amid melting snow and turned an ear skyward. “Geese. The geese are back.” The last snow fell on April 10, but it didn’t amount to much. Out on his rounds, Tommy tuned the cruiser’s commercial radio to the Red Sox on WHMP, to hear the sound of bats on balls, the sound of new-mown grass. Here the grass was just beginning to turn green. Good citizens swept the sand off it beside the roads in Florence. He spotted lacrosse nets on the high school playing fields and paused to watch the boys practice. He sniffed the new air that came in the cruiser’s windows. He could smell the town again—the earthy smell of the brimming river; the sewage treatment plant, odorous on lower Pleasant Street. Jonquils bloomed in the gardens beside the tidy houses in the historic district of Elm Street. Down below in the Meadows, tractors inched across the fields. On the sidewalks he caught glimpses of faces he hadn’t seen in months. The town had come out of hibernation. Now at last enough was going on outdoors to override unquiet thoughts. Moreover, Tommy knew a secret. The wider world of criminality was coming for a visit.

  When Tommy’s old friend Steve had gone off to the state police some years ago, Tommy had wanted to go with him. But he hadn’t done quite well enough on the state police exam. That was an odd thing about Tommy. He welcomed danger and feared written tests. Back when he worked as a young security guard at the Hotel Northampton, he used to get bored and jumpy in the dead hours before dawn. He’d climb to the roof and walk up and down the narrow ledge of the building’s triangular pediment. Balancing precariously over King Street far below, he replaced all mundane anxieties with one that he could master. Several years ago, he’d arrived with just one other officer at the site of Northampton’s last adolescent riot, and the moment he waded into the fighting crowd, bottles flying past him, he felt completely calm. But he’d felt very nervous every time he sat down at a desk to take a professional exam. Questions that he could have answered anywhere else left him stupefied.

  A few years back he and Steve had worked a great deal together, Steve as a state drug detective and Tommy as the local one. They’d learned the devious trade as partners, with a lot of help from Frankie. They still did their Christmas shopping together—they’d buy a present, have a beer, buy another, and so on. But professionally, they’d parted ways. Steve went on to bigger things. While Tommy spent this past winter patrolling Northampton, searching for something to do, Steve worked for a state and federal task force, posing as a drug dealer who supplied cocaine to a Connecticut chapter of the Diablos, a large motorcycle gang.

  The task force planned to trap the bikers at Northampton’s little airfield in the Meadows. Steve would land in what looked like a private plane, carrying a briefcase filled with drugs. He’d hand the briefcase to the bikers, they’d hand him the cash, and then, once Steve had walked slowly away, FBI agents would come out of hiding bristling with guns. They’d emerge from bulletproof Kevlar boxes, constructed for the occasion and strategically placed around the country airfield. It was Steve who suggested Northampton as the site. The airport was remote from the populated parts of town, so the area was fairly easy to control. And, maybe most important, Tommy worked in town. The bikers would bring guns. For some moments Steve would have his back turned to them, as he walked off with their cash. The last thing he wanted was for something untoward to happen on the periphery, for a civilian or a local cop to blunder in. He wanted someone he trusted absolutely to take care of security and local logistics—to make sure an ambulance was ready, for one thing. He also knew that Tommy felt a little restive. Northampton had a shortage of serious criminals acting up just now. So Steve imported some for him.

  In the midst of the preparations for the bust, Jean was implanted with fertilized eggs again. Tommy drove her to Boston, then drove her home, and, feeling guilty and excited, left her there and went down to the airport to watch the FBI agents rehearse. On the appointed day, an hour or so before the sting, he sat in a room in a motel out near the highway. He had his pistol in his lap. He sat amid half a dozen other cops and agents, watching a video screen. The Diablos, three of them, were in the adjacent room. The FBI had wired it for sound and video. Watching the video screen, Tommy saw one of the bikers, an enormously fat man named Nino, walk to the door between the rooms. It was locked, of course. The gigantic biker rattled it. The cops looked at each other, all holding their breath. Tommy thought, “If I were him, I’d kick it down.” He was also thinking how much fun this was. The video camera in the other room was lodged in a piece of furniture. These federal guys had toys he’d never even dreamed about.

  On the screen in their room, the fat man, Nino, turned away. Then, through the hidden microphone, he offered his assessment of Northampton. “This is the wrong part of Massachusetts. They’re all fags here.”

  The bikers left for the airport. Tommy followed at a distance. The bust went off almost exactly as planned, and with no shots fired. Tommy was in charge of transporting the prisoners afterward. He reserved the gigantic Nino for himself. Nino was so big Tommy had to link together three pairs of cuffs to secure his hands. “Nino, I’ve got leg irons for ya. You gonna run?”

  “Yeah, I’m gonna run across the parking lot and have a heart attack.”

  Tommy put Nino in the backseat of the cruiser, then headed for the station. “You know, I used to be a biker myself,” he said over his shoulder.

  “Oh, yeah?” said Nino.

  “Yeah, I used to be pretty much known in my neighborhood as an outlaw. On my Raleigh three-speed. Ching, ching, ching.”

  “Man, you’re crazy.”

  “And don’t you forget it.”

  They chatted all the way to the station. “You guys shouldn’t be worried about us,” Nino said. “You should be worried about the blacks.”

  “Do you work, Nino?”

  “Nah. I’m disabled. The doctor said I’m retarded.”

  Tommy helped Nino don an orange prison jumpsuit. “You look like a pumpkin, Nino.”

  Nino laughed.

  Later on that night, he drove Nino to the Hampden county jail in Ludlow. Tommy hadn’t slept for about twenty-four hours by then. Exhaustion often worked on him the way dangerous situations did. Objects became sharply etched, like clouds on the north wind. Meanwhile, thoughts came at quickened tempo and in a higher register.

  “You Diablos have a gang sign?”

  “No. That’s just for Puerto Ricans.”

  “I’ll think one up for you.”

  Nino was processed and
locked away. Tommy went to say good-bye. He stood outside Nino’s cell. “I’ve got it.” He made his fingers into a pair of little horns on either side of his head and wiggled them. Nino’s gigantic frame shook with laughter. “Nah, that’s no good, Nino. It would look ridiculous with a helmet on. That’s another reason to repeal the helmet law.”

  “Tom, you’re all right,” Nino said. But then he looked glum.

  “Hey,” Tommy said, through the bars. He felt as if he were talking to a sad-faced child. He really meant to buck him up. “Remember when your mother said, ‘Nino, we’re sending you to camp,’ and you didn’t want to go? And it turned out you kinda liked it?”

  “Tom, this ain’t camp.”

  “Hey, Nino, it won’t be all that bad.”

  “Whaddaya mean it won’t be all that bad? I’m goin’ to prison for forty-five fuckin’ years. I’m gonna die in jail.”

  “Well, when you put it that way,” said Tommy, not unkindly.

  When he was a young patrolman working Midnights, and the bars had closed and his radio grown quiet, Tommy used to sit in his cruiser and play the harmonica. Sometimes a fellow cop who had a harmonica, too, would pull up alongside and they’d play duets in the dark. Sometimes Tommy would sit in his cruiser outside the picture window of a night owl’s house in Florence and, unbeknownst to the man inside, watch movies with him, killing the time until dawn. Then he’d get his cup of coffee and drive to a good spot, sometimes up to Turkey Hill and sometimes down along the edge of the eastern Meadows, past the airport and the last of the houses where the road turns to dirt and gnarled trees are draped with twisted vines.

  His town was lovely down there at that hour. Most big-city cops, he’d tell himself, probably drank their morning coffee beside the hulks of burned-out buildings. In the distance to the west, the steeples of downtown rose over the elevated Interstate. Standing by the river, its waters roiled brown and steaming like his coffee on those early spring mornings, Tommy gazed south across the yellow fields, all covered with the flattened stalks of last year’s corn, like gigantic mats of straw. In the distance, in the gap between Northampton’s little mountain ranges, the red lights on the smokestack of the Mount Tom power plant were blinking. He had imagined that on one of those mornings, he would see another set of blinking lights appear. A small plane would materialize against the wooded hills, swoop down over the runway, and eject a package. In his fantasy, based only on old rumors, the package would contain kilos of heroin or cocaine, and he would be waiting for the big-time dealers when they came to pick it up. The airport bust came close enough to his old fantasy to seem like its fulfillment.