Home Town

by Tracy Kidder

  On an afternoon at the end of April, the air turned summerlike. Down in the locker room before his shift, Tommy put on a short-sleeved uniform shirt.

  The sergeant of the day shift was sitting at the desk in the gloomy-looking Ready Room. He looked up at Tommy.

  Tommy lifted an arm, modeling his uniform shirt. “Short sleeves. It’s that time again.”

  “The witness list for Janacek’s trial just came out,” the other sergeant said. “I’m not on it. You are.”

  Tommy nodded, and looked away toward a window. The light was very bright outside.

  Driving away from the station the next afternoon, Tommy saw an unmarked cruiser in the courthouse parking lot. He pulled up beside the driver’s window. A state police detective, an old acquaintance, sat inside. He worked in the D.A.’s office.

  “Am I on the witness list for Janacek? I heard I was.”

  “I don’t know, Tommy. I can ask.”

  Tommy shrugged. “No. That’s okay.”

  He shouldn’t have bothered to ask. Of course, he would be on the witness list. Any prosecutor would jump at the chance to have a defendant’s oldest friend testify against him. That was how the game was played. Too bad. So sorry. If he were the investigator on this case, he’d expect the prosecutor to do this. He’d be angry if the prosecutor didn’t.

  The state detective talked about the case—no details, just the gist of it—saying, at length, “When a person says, ‘I might have,’ ninety-nine percent of the time he did it.” Tommy listened, gazing out at nothing, nodding now and then.

  Around five, he headed for his father’s house. Buds were sprouting on the small trees along the sidewalks and high up in the maples on Forbes Avenue. Everything living seemed to be straining for the sun. Its light has great intensity in New England springtime, especially at evening. No leaves had opened yet to shield the sidewalk. Driving down Forbes Avenue, Tommy was half-blinded by the glare. He pulled into his father’s driveway, then turned and saw a red Saab pull in behind him. It seemed to have materialized from behind a curtain of dazzling light. Rick got out, smiling. “Hey, Tom.”

  Both Tommy and Rick wore sunglasses. They shook hands. They stood together on the sidewalk. Rick looked as if he’d just come back from a hiking trip, tan and lean.

  A small, flower-scented breeze came down the street, and on it the voices of children. A few houses away, a young mother was shepherding two toddlers down the sidewalk. They were churning the pedals of plastic tricycles, moving slowly toward Tommy and Rick.

  Rick seemed fidgety in spite of his smile. “You and the chief are the only Northampton cops on the witness list.” In a moment his voice turned vehement. The D.A.’s office wasn’t giving him all the reports they should, he said. They were playing around with the trial date.

  “I think you’re making a mistake if you think they’re out to get ya,” said Tommy. “You were a cop in this town a long time. I think they’d like this to just go away.”

  They hadn’t talked in a while. Rick had a lot of news stored up. He said his wife had told him she wished he’d commit suicide.

  “Well, you know,” said Tommy. He looked squarely at Rick. “If you believed the accusation, you can see where she’d be pissed. Right?”

  Rick looked squarely back at him. “Hey, Tom, those two weeks before I saw my daughter’s interview, I had the comfort of knowing there was a loaded thirty-eight in the next room.”

  “I know,” said Tommy. “That’s why I stayed in close contact with you.”

  The mother and children on the sidewalk had finally arrived. Tommy turned to them gratefully. He bent down toward the little boy and girl. “And what are your names?” He looked especially shiny and enlarged in his uniform in this light. The two children looked at him big-eyed, and shied away.

  “I’m not that scary-looking, am I?”

  Rick laughed. “Hey, Tom, looked in the mirror lately?”

  Tommy smiled. “Yeah, I know. I looked in the mirror the other day and I thought I was looking at Spellicy.” In memory, the physiognomy of all drill instructors remains ferocious. Spellicy had been their drill instructor at the police academy. Tommy used to study Spellicy’s head while standing at attention. Spellicy, too, had been bald all over.

  The mother and children continued on down the sidewalk, and the conversation resumed, and then, apropos of nothing that had gone before, Rick asked, “You haven’t been making any new statements, have you?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “I know. I would have seen them if you had.”

  Rick started talking fast and angrily, about the D.A.’s office again, and the most recent deal that they had offered.

  “Look, you gotta decide what’s best for you,” said Tommy.

  “What about the truth, Tom?”

  “Right. Only you know the facts.”

  Rick looked angrily around. “I used to believe in justice. I used to believe in all that stuff.”

  It was time for supper. How often had they parted here, heading home for supper? Rick put a little laugh in his voice. “You’re not wearing a wire, are you?”

  “Hey,” said Tommy. His eyes looked surprised, the whites very large, their innocence offended. “I’ll just testify to what’s in my statement.”

  Rick’s voice was serious again. “You’re not gonna lie. That’s one thing you and I have always had in common.”

  The blessing of the job in springtime was that something else usually lay around the corner. Later, after supper, Tommy was driving down Main Street, trying not to think about his chat with Rick and what it signified and what was coming, when he suddenly yelled, “Oh, Jesus!” and pulled over.

  Frankie was mounted on a moped and weaving around in traffic on Main Street.

  A few weeks ago Tommy had at last met Frankie’s mother, Moms. It might have been better if he hadn’t. Moms told him some of Frankie’s history: How he’d had a nanny back in the Dominican Republic who had made it possible for him not to learn to tie his shoes until he was eight years old. How his grandmother used to take the spoiled little boy on carriage rides through Santiago. Tommy had turned to him and exclaimed, “Frankie! You were a rich kid!” And later, in the car, on the way to drop him off at the Grove Street Inn, where Frankie was staying again, Tommy had given him a look, a sidelong look, a look of fresh appraisal, which carried no amusement. “So you were a rich kid, Frankie. So pretty much you ruined your life with cocaine.”

  “Yeah,” said Frankie very softly. For a moment he’d looked chastened. Then he’d declared, “That’s how come I work with you and Pete.” He was saying something about helping to keep the poison out of other people’s lives. And Tommy, not looking at him then, had nodded—not in agreement, it seemed, but as if in answer to a thought in his own mind.

  But now he was chuckling. Frankie looked like an overgrown kid on the little moped, like a Shriner in a miniature car, like a hefty caballero on a donkey. He was decked out in a white helmet and a black tank top that stretched tight over his ample belly, and he was grinning as he created havoc in the traffic. Then he spotted Tommy. He made a breathtaking U-turn across Main Street.

  Tommy put his face in his hands, so as not to see the crash, and said, “What the fuck?”

  When he looked up, Frankie stood beside the window, straddling the moped. “How do you like my Chebbie? Ah hah hah!”

  “Whose is it?”

  “A friend’s. It’s licensed and everything. It’s legal.”

  “It’s legal. You aren’t, Frankie. You don’t have a license.”

  “No,” said Frankie. “It’s a mopad.”

  “No, you need a license, Frankie.”

  “Oh, okay,” said Frankie, his voice turning soft and sweet. Then he declared bitterly, “I can’t even ride a bicycle because of you guys.”

  “Frankie, you are one of the most difficult people I know to keep out of trouble.”

  Not long ago Frankie had been arrested by some of Tommy’s officers for dr
iving without a license. The car wasn’t registered, either. It bore an inactive plate, which Frankie said he’d borrowed. Now he said, “Oakie, you could fix up everything. Why don’t you just give me back my license?”

  “Frankie, it’s your Samson Rodriguez license.” Tommy was smiling. “Look. When you go to court, Luce is gonna see you, and this motor vehicle shit you got into here is gonna go away.”

  Frankie thanked him, and walked off, pushing the moped.

  The sky begins to brighten, and the birds of summer chatter in anticipation, but dawn is still a long way off, and in its colorless first hints the lighted sign above the door of a little building back of Main Street still stands out:

  WHMP

  1400

  Inside, a gray-haired man—slightly stoop-shouldered, dressed in shorts and sandals—moves quickly between his desk in the glassed-in studio and the adjacent room. He makes the coffee, scans the newsprint that spills out of the wire service printers, calls Russ Murley up in Maine and records the day’s prediction—“Hot and hazy with evening thunder-showers”—studies the local section of the Union-News and rewrites a few news stories from it on an old typewriter, records the feed from the network, checks the studio’s thermometer. “Seventy-eight degrees? Can that be right?” Typing, flicking switches, he listens to the police scanner. There’s a fire in progress in a town up north. In a moment he picks up the phone and calls the fire department there.

  Half a lifetime doing this and he has never overslept, not once. He grew up in a Connecticut River town to the north. “So, I guess I found my niche right here in my native area. I always liked radio and news,” he says. “I’m one of the lucky people.” And blessed not just with the instinct for punctuality but also with distinctive vocal cords. He glances at the clock on the wall and leans toward the microphone.

  Out toward the apartments and houses and the cabs of the trucks of early-rising tradesfolk, out toward the brightening ether above the Holyoke Range, goes the deep dark voice. “It’s a warm night. Or morning. Now. Seventy-eight degrees. Russ Murley calls for showers. Goo-ood morning. I’m. Ron Hall. There’s a big fire in Turner’s Falls.…”

  On Main Street, on the stone steps of city hall, a lone, seated figure emerges out of the gloom, a young man with a handlettered sign that reads, 48 HOUR VIGIL FOR WORLDWIDE LIBERATION. He comes from Hampshire College over in Amherst. He has sat here on the steps of the Castle all night long, his only occasional company one of the cops on Midnights.

  Her Honor Mary Ford, the incorruptible mayor of Northampton, often goes to meetings in the early morning. Sometimes she completes her toilette in parking garages while standing in front of the opened trunk of her car—it’s a Ford; she bought it used; it now has a crack in the windshield. Mirror in one hand, compact in the other, she adds some color to her pale, pale cheeks, then rummages around in the trunk, saying, “I have to find the notes for what I’m supposed to do today. I’ll comb my hair after I get there. Oh, I forgot my watch.” She keeps her black hair short so she can comb it quickly. She wears practical shoes, and dresses and skirts to vie with the suits of male politicos. She feels she ought to watch her weight. She eats, she says, to celebrate victories and to console herself over defeats. But she doesn’t have time for much exercise or sun. She is no longer youthful, but she still has energy. She gets up early and works all day and at night she goes to meetings, more than any mayor before her. She is rarely late and almost always on the verge, always bustling down hallways, with a pocketbook as large as a saddlebag slung over her shoulder, huffing and puffing at the tops of staircases, and smiling when she arrives.

  The mayor spends much more time taking care of the town than of herself. She seems to feel it needs her attention more. Brown water occasionally comes out of Northampton’s faucets. Building inspectors condemned the fire station decades ago. In recent years only one boys’ room functioned in the entire high school. When Mayor Ford was first elected and assumed command of Northampton’s bureaucracy, many departments didn’t talk to one another and a lot of arithmetic was still done by hand. The new computer system she had ordered might well become obsolete before all the bugs were fixed and all the clerks knew how to use it, and in the meantime, citizens would probably go on receiving, once in a while, tax bills saying that they owe nothing.

  But not far from anywhere in the country, not far from Northampton, the plumbing and heating don’t work at all. Broken sewers and rats in children’s bedrooms guarantee despair in the housing, danger on the streets. Northampton, by contrast, has decent, if flawed, public accommodations. Only a very small number of residents lack telephones and complete bathrooms and kitchens. All in all, the town’s underpinnings work well enough to soften local inequalities.

  Northampton contains 152 miles of paved streets and 15 miles of unpaved streets, 70 miles of sidewalk, and 22 bridges. It owns 4 cemeteries, 120 acres of playing grounds (and many more acres are privately endowed for public uses), 2.6 miles of bicycle path, and one public beach. The town has 3 reservoirs that connect to 140 miles of water mains; 60 miles of storm sewer for emergencies, as well as 3 flood-control dikes; 90 miles of sewer mains, all leading to the sewage treatment plant, Northampton’s Cloaca Maxima. Twenty-four hundred manholes let workers down into all that plumbing. Enough people to fill a regiment keep the equipment functioning. They fight among themselves, of course. No doubt there will be other winters when a mayor’s street won’t get plowed.

  A vast external bureaucracy and a small local one regulate the town’s biology and mobility and many of its pastimes. The printed rules would fill half the shelves in Forbes Library. In Mayor Ford’s office upstairs in the Castle, voices rise over terms such as “surplus overlay,” “enterprise funds,” “chapter 61b rollback taxes.” Statements begin in the imperative and conclude as questions: Know that the funding piece is kind of unique, Mary, so that, in terms of leadership, we need to bring stakeholders to the table to strategize, not in a sort of bootstraps way, but, based on a quantified understanding, proactively? To try to run Northampton, you would think, is to risk permanent befuddlement. But not for Mayor Ford. When people talk like that, she knows exactly what they want—to form a new committee, usually—and usually she agrees. She can toss off references to chapter this and chapter that with the best of the state and federal bureaucrats, and she has a fecund mind. It bursts with ideas. Sometimes too many flow out all at once. One time she got an audience with the Massachusetts Senate president and asked him a question about educational funding that went on for seven and a half minutes. The senator smiled and said, “Could you repeat that?” And she did, in a slightly different way, which took only five minutes. She is also capable of avid listening. At the most recent meeting of the Massachusetts Municipal Association, after half a day of speeches, she hurried into something called a financial tools seminar, and when the speaker intoned, “Municipal incentive grants can be used for visioning,” she could hardly contain her excitement. She made a little, throaty exclamation—“Oh!”—and quickly scribbled a note to herself.

  The mayor quit her education a dissertation short of a Ph.D. in sociology. She is married to a college professor. She came here more than twenty years ago and has raised three children in the town. Oddly, she isn’t very friendly to some of the city’s workers. A lot of them dislike her. She doesn’t always say hello when she passes the clerks in city hall. But that’s the way the mayor is, shy in private and full of feeling out in public, and if you watch her for a while, you know that both sides of her are genuine. She came to this office with dreams of doing socially important things. “I’m an old human services junkie,” she once said. But she’s had to spend most of her best energies looking for ways to eliminate that $3 million deficit. She still whittles away at it. For her pains, even some allies have begun to call her a “bean counter.” It isn’t fair. She has not abandoned her causes. Lacking money, she has given herself—to the DPO last fall, to public education, to the local committee on racism, to homel
essness in town. “No one should be sleeping under bridges and on grates in a place like Northampton,” she declared around the time of her first election. She remembers those words as “a vow.” And she has lobbied ardently to shake some money loose from Boston to help finance the local homelessness programs.

  Any mayor with an eye to the whole town’s best interests is fated to make enemies. Stay in office long enough and the sum of enemies inevitably grows to 51 percent. Mayor Ford was unbeatable when she ran for her third term, but maybe only because she was unopposed. There are signs her popularity is waning, but not for lack of conscientiousness on her part. She spends most of her days working upstairs in the Castle, in the office that looks as if it was furnished from the local Goodwill store. Perhaps she keeps the blinds on her window shut so she won’t be reminded of how fast life can slip away, so the travels of the sun won’t dim the happiness she feels when she sits here working, scheming, talking.

  Great mounds of paper still cover the mayor’s desk. Paper here is Sisyphus’ boulder. Her assistant Corinne pokes her head around the door and says, sotto voce, “Mary, the Bank of Boston folks are here, for their meet-and-greet.”

  “For heaven’s sake!” says Mary, after a while, to the suspendered, suited banker. “Isn’t that interesting!”

  She gives half an hour to an elderly couple from Northampton, England, who want a snapshot of themselves standing with her. “I’m delighted you stopped by. This is fascinating.”

  She gives up more time, almost an hour near the end of a busy day, to a homeless man who walks into her office. He wears dirty blue jeans and cowboy boots, a necktie with a picture of the Mona Lisa on it, a large wooden cross, a handlebar mustache, a ponytail. He tells her, “I’m an adopted Lakota Sioux who started out as a Jewish kid from Brooklyn.” He wants to give her an Indian necklace. “I have a plan for rebuilding the economy of Massachusetts,” he says, as he fits it around her neck. “My probation officer thinks I should go into politics.”