Home Town

by Tracy Kidder

  A cost-conscious bureaucrat might have yelped when he saw the bill. Northampton had been well protected. Forty FBI agents and a host of other people had been deployed. A helicopter and fixed-wing plane had circled the operation. All to round up three armed bikers. Of course, Tommy didn’t look at it that way. At one point he asked Nino if he thought of using his gun when the FBI agents came out of hiding. Nino said, “Yeah, I thought of usin’ it. To shoot myself.” Nino added, speaking of the agents, “Those guys were slick.”

  Tommy had watched carefully as the federal agents had rehearsed. Their techniques were sound, a few seemed novel, but none differed fundamentally from the ones he taught at the police academy. Watching them, he thought, “I could do this stuff.” After it was over and the prisoners all put away, one of the agents said, “Hey, Tom, come on down with us to Springfield for a drink.” He couldn’t. It was long since past the time when he should have been getting home to Jean. But earlier, during one of the rehearsals, an agent told him that the FBI was hiring cops these days. Tommy should apply, he said.

  Everyone lives somewhere, and sooner or later the suspicion that somewhere else is better disturbs the peace of home. Over the years Tommy had felt tugs from the wider world. Thirty-three was old to be feeling them grow stronger. But for a while he wasn’t sure his own job would ever feel the same once the FBI packed up their amazing gear and left and he went back to routine patrol in little old routine Northampton.

  He wondered if he’d have a chance of getting into the FBI. It was the highest law-enforcement agency in the country. From here it looked like the pinnacle of his profession. He could picture himself an aging local cop, staring out the door to the parking lot and wondering if he could have been a federal agent. In a few years he’d be too old to try.

  He sent away for an application. The information packet said that over fifty thousand people applied each year, and this year the FBI would accept only about nine hundred for training. He thought he’d have a better chance of getting into Harvard. He read on. “Prior to employment, all candidates must complete a rigorous application process. Successful completion of written tests and …” Tommy thought he might as well stop there. He left the application in his desk at home, among other souvenirs.

  One night around this time, the chief invited Tommy into his car for a talk. In the car, Russ said that he wished he could clone Tommy and have one O’Connor supervisor of evening patrol and the other the detective sergeant. He said he was doing all he could to get Tommy back into the detective bureau, and it wouldn’t be long now. It was almost as if the chief had read his mind. Anyway, that news was good.

  In retrospect, it seemed as if most people who got a chance to leave had taken it. Recently, for the first time in several years, Jean had talked about moving. She said, “We’re going to be old and alone and in the same place.” But where in the world would being childless feel better? “We’d have to find an island where they don’t allow kids.” He knew that if one night he told Jean he was ready to leave, the next morning he’d wake up surrounded by suitcases. But just having entertained the idea of applying for another job, another life, made his own seem much more complicated than it already was. He could imagine selling their house and packing up their possessions, and it gave him a sick feeling on top of a sick feeling. “Christ, I’d still be in my parents’ house if Jean and my mother hadn’t moved me.”

  Bill was getting hard of hearing, and a disturbance of the inner ear made him dizzy sometimes. Tommy and Jack, back on a visit last winter, had grilled the doctor. He’d said it wasn’t serious. Bill certainly didn’t look sick. He was making supper.

  “Hey, Pop, how ya doin’?”

  Bill turned and sadly shook his head. “This morning I was feeling very blue. I was fightin’ it. Coming down the stairs, I was talking out loud. I said, ‘There’s an old man lives in this house. And he’s old and he lost his wife, many years ago.’ Of course, that put me way up.” Bill made his great laugh, then went on, sadly, “But he comes down the stairs very slowly now, not with a jump the way I used to.”

  Tommy smiled. “Well, think of something else to say to yourself. Something a little more lively.”

  So Bill told a Tunker Hogan story. A complicated tale in which Tunker falsely accused Big Jim’s Republican opponent of endangering the nuns at St. Michael’s parochial school.

  Over dinner, Bill said he was going to visit Tommy’s mother’s grave. The next morning Tommy drove to the cemetery down in Holyoke, to make sure things were ready. It was the start of a very bad day. He sank almost to his knees in the dirt surrounding the grave. He searched out the cemetery’s caretaker. “My mother was buried two years ago, and last year my father practically sank into the grave and today I did, too.” The maintenance man said he’d take care of it soon. “No, no, no,” said Tommy. “My father’s coming over. You’ll come and look at it with me now.”

  Then he went off to give Jean a shot, and just a few minutes afterward, the call came saying she wasn’t pregnant. The doctor hadn’t bothered to look at the results of her last blood test until then. The shot had been unnecessary.

  Once in a while Tommy seemed like a dangerous person. You knew that anyone who hurt Jean would probably pay a dreadful price. He came to work fuming. “Here she’s had two surgeries for the fifth time and because some bonehead doctor who’s making a million doesn’t read the results right away, she has to get a shot. That’s because they don’t give a shit about the little people.” He said to the doctor far away in Boston, “Do your job.”

  Judge Ryan had returned to the bench. He wiped a hand downward over his gray beard, as if wiping the defense attorney’s argument off it. “Your client’s testimony was incredible to me,” he growled at the lawyer.

  Tommy sat in the gallery, waiting to testify in another case. He spent most of that day in Judge Ryan’s court, then went back to the police station, looking bemused. In the hallway he ran into a fellow officer. “I was in court today? And Mike Ryan sent two guys to jail,” said Tommy. “In that case of mine, he gave the guy ninety days direct, and he said if he wasn’t there tomorrow to start serving it, he’d do a year.”

  “Ryan?” said the other cop, in a voice of utter disbelief.

  “I know,” said Tommy.

  But the judge hadn’t changed. He still described himself as “a liberal libertarian.” He still handed down lenient rulings and made special allowances for unemployed musicians and especially for immigrants—“If the Irish can become law-abiding, anybody can.” He felt, as always, that if society must have jails, then it ought to reserve them for people who had truly injured others, for defendants such as the two men he’d sent to county jail today. One had terrorized a woman for the second time and the other had robbed a paraplegic.

  And the judge still liked working in what he called the vulgar court. For one thing it connected him, on a long, meandering line, with the frontier town of the 1600s, where, records suggest, the issues judges dealt with weren’t all that different from today’s. Except for spelling: “Obadiah Miller complaynes against Joane his wife for abusing him with reproachful tearmes or names as calling him foole toad and vermine and threatening him,” reads the transcript of one case from the western Massachusetts frontier court. Like his distant predecessors, Judge Ryan spent a large part of his day sorting out the problems that surround human sexuality. One time a husband and wife stood before Judge Ryan and the husband said that his wife had plugged up his penis with Krazy Glue while he was sleeping on the sofa, and the wife cried out to Judge Ryan, “He ain’t usin’ it anyway!” On any given day, a visitor to the judge’s court was apt to enter in the midst of proceedings that were vulgar in two senses, Judge Ryan sitting behind the bench with his gray-bearded chin on his hand, eyebrows just slightly lifted, as a red-haired female prosecutor cross-examined the defendant: “And she asked for intercourse, she specifically asked for intercourse, and you indicated that in the middle of having intercourse you stopped, and after t
hat incident she was quite hostile to you?”

  Life had returned to normal now, since his heart attack. At lunchtime on a fine spring day, Judge Ryan, looking dapper, dressed in suit and tie, headed with a jaunty step down Main Street toward the railroad bridge and TJ’s Sports Bar just beyond it. The establishment belonged to John Smith, one of Northampton’s bad boys, a good-looking, dark-haired fellow in his forties, one of the judge’s best friends. They’d met years ago, when the judge was a probation officer. Out of curiosity John had come to Ryan’s office with a high school friend who was on probation. John was the son of a tough, hard-drinking bricklayer who had eight children and threw the boy out of the house. John spent one summer of his high school years sleeping on the roof of the Hotel Northampton. He told Ryan that life on the roof wasn’t so bad, and that his girlfriend joined him there.

  That John had managed to graduate from high school seemed remarkable to the judge. Even more remarkable, he had managed to become a modestly successful businessman. The judge liked to say that Northampton was the wrong-sized town for a person like John, small enough that everyone heard the bad stories about him but too large for most to know of his good qualities. His generosity, for instance—he employed some people down on their luck, and fed some others for free. It was true, though, that he had a terrible temper. One time the judge said, “John has been in seventy fights in his life. He never backed down, and he never won either.” And John earnestly corrected him, saying that there was one fight he did sort of win.

  A few years ago the judge went to Key West with John and some other local sports, and the judge took second place there in the Hemingway storytelling contest. He told a story about John in Northampton. In the version Ryan told for the contest, John has a tumultuous relationship with his girlfriend. She picks fights with him when he comes home late. He complains about his girlfriend to his bookie, who advises him to put his foot down and not come home until two in the morning. Then, says his bookie, his girlfriend will be happy to see him when he comes home. That night, a winter night, Ryan is driving home and sees John walking back and forth on Main Street, slapping his hands together, trying to keep warm. He explains that he’s teaching his girlfriend a lesson. Ryan tells him this is absurd, he’s going to freeze to death. Ryan gives him a ride home.

  An hour later John calls, from the police station. When he came home, he found his girlfriend in bed with his bookie, and there was a terrible row. He had thrown a chair through a window and had just picked up a bag of flour when a cop who lived in the building appeared in the doorway, wanting to know what was going on. Moments later the cop was covered with flour, and soon after that three policemen were, with difficulty, subduing him. They put him in a cell down at the police station and he proceeded to destroy it. He ripped the bunk off the wall and the toilet out of the floor and had begun to tear down the ceiling when officers entered and prevented him. So Ryan goes to the station and bails John out, and because he can’t think of anywhere else to take him, he puts him in the St. Vincent de Paul clothes box outside St. Michael’s parochial school.

  The story continued. John’s girlfriend goes to live with his bookie. Thus, said Ryan in Key West, he has lost both his bookie and the love of his life.

  The truth wasn’t all that different from the judge’s prize-winning confection. The bookie hadn’t been so clever as to talk John into coming home late; John merely caught him sleeping with his girlfriend. Ryan didn’t put John in the St. Vincent de Paul box; he spent the night in jail. And on the morning after he had ripped apart his cell—“If they gave me another hour on that ceiling I’d have gotten out,” he would say, telling the story himself—Ryan came down to the police station and had a chat with the old chief. They agreed that John would leave town for a while. He had no shoes, so Ryan, who was a defense attorney then, had to carry him piggy-back from the door of the station across the snowy parking lot to his car. He went on a tropical vacation with his unfaithful girlfriend, and about three weeks later called Ryan to see if it was safe to come back to Northampton. Ryan told him over the phone, “You owe me big time.”

  John’s most recent trouble had been splashed all over the Northampton section of the Springfield Union-News. He owed the city a considerable amount in property taxes. Now, as the judge approached TJ’s, fresh from a morning at court, the door swung open to receive him, an old friend holding it. The judge handed the man a dollar bill in payment for this service; the man handed it back to the judge, who walked to the end of the bar, slapped the bill down in front of John Smith, and said, “Here, John. Pay your taxes.”

  John turned around on his stool. “Did you see the article in the paper? There are a hundred and sixty other offenders.” Some establishments—a nursing home; an apartment complex—owed far more back taxes than he did. “I went from being a draft dodger to a tax dodger.”

  “Just remember, John,” said Judge Ryan, “this country was founded by people who didn’t want to pay their taxes.”

  The lunchtime clientele at TJ’s was polymorphous as usual, as at District Court, though there was a higher percentage of respectable clients here—local business folk having lunch at one of the last downtown bars that served decent food but wasn’t fancy. Besides, at TJ’s, the smoking ban was ignored, which recommended it to a lot of local entrepreneurs, including some who didn’t smoke, and also to the judge. He was feeling very well again, and a cigarette or two at lunch was a delicious guilty pleasure.

  A garrulous former mental patient also sat at the bar, wearing what looked like a woman’s wig. And seated at the far corner of the bar, drinking beer after beer and smoking unfiltered cigarettes, was the blind poet Woody.

  The judge sat down at the bar, amid this mixed company, and ordered a diet soda and a sandwich. He was thinking about a woman he’d spotted in the gallery in court today, a defendant’s daughter, a truly beautiful young woman. “I want her for a daughter-in-law. I’ll find her father innocent if we can have an arranged marriage.”

  A local businessman sitting nearby started fulminating about the smoking ban. “You know what we’ve lost? The concept of free enterprise.”

  “Never mind free enterprise,” said Judge Ryan. “We’ve lost the concept of freedom.” He said that his sister forgot to pay a parking ticket and ended up having her registration revoked and her car towed. “Outrageous!” said the judge.

  Then, down at the end of the bar, Woody began to recite a poem he’d written. John Smith called out for silence, and turned off the radio behind the bar. Woody had a deep and very raspy voice. He held a hand on his thin chest as if to steady himself. The poem was called “The Hour of the Wolf.” “Money talks and animal manure stands silently in the gutter.…” It went on for a few minutes, and afterward everyone applauded.

  The judge said softly, “That wasn’t too bad. Whitmanesque.” Then, back on his earlier theme, the judge began quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., on the subject of unenforceable laws, and Woody, hearing Holmes’s name, said, “He wrote good poetry.”

  “I thought it was lousy,” said Judge Ryan. “There was more poetry in his decisions than in his verses.”

  “Are you a lawyer?” asked the blind man.

  “I used to be,” said Judge Ryan. “Then I took a state job. You get older, you want to do different things.”

  “All I want to do is make money,” said the poet.

  The judge said, “I was never that interested in that. Sometimes I wish I was. I’d have more of it now.”

  In fact, Ryan had once gone into private lawyering in order to make money, for his four children’s college tuitions. But, as one member of the local bar explained, Ryan never did make much because he kept on representing indigent clients for free. He’d managed to put his kids through college, though, and he made a good salary now—nearly $100,000, about twice what the mayor got paid. He didn’t really wish for more than he had, not in any department.

  Judge Ryan headed back to court. The air was softening, the trees along
the sidewalks in bud. Passersby kept greeting him—friends of his parents; former teachers and coaches; former schoolmates and political allies and rivals; old girlfriends; kids he’d coached in soccer, now grown up. Outside the courthouse, he ran into a small group of men and women—members of the local bar, in suits and dresses—just as one of them was delivering sad news. A native Northamptonite, an old ne’er-do-well, had died yesterday. “He gave us a dog one time,” the speaker said to the judge. “Turned out it was stolen.”

  Judge Ryan smiled. His smile enveloped his face. He would have been glad to be alive anywhere. He was very glad that it happened to be here.

  Northampton was calling on Tommy again. The kids in Gothic dress, like cartoon caricatures of evil—spiked collars, torn black clothes, mascaraed eyes—were spreading trash and graffiti around Pulaski Park, intimidating citizens, and they needed hassling. Tommy trolled what he called his favorite fishing holes, talking to skateboarders and homeboys, old friends and enemies, reformed and recidivist drunks and drug dealers, new acquaintances like the man who used to be a cop in Bosnia and was now bagging groceries in Northampton. Driving through town, Tommy said, “This is life! People are out. People you can talk to. It’s like a reunion. I love reunions.”