Home Town

by Tracy Kidder

  Meanwhile, every day she and her budget analyst snip at the deficit, and she thinks wistfully of ways she would use more money: to combat homelessness and teenage drug use; to provide all-day kindergarten and reduce class sizes at the schools. The farmer at the Smith Voke Farm can’t seem to stay within his budget—her latest crisis; some of her oldest allies blame her for the threat to Northampton’s cows. The high school simply has to be replaced, as does the fire station. At least last winter she prevailed upon the council to take out snow insurance.

  She likes to say she was elected mayor of every resident, including those who won’t vote for her no matter what she does. As she also likes to say, she usually leaves the front door to her office open. A building contractor once complained that he knew he didn’t get a good hearing from her because she didn’t close that door while they talked. Her office has another door, a back door with a chair in front of it, usually closed, rarely used. But by late afternoon on a long day, she feels as though her face is about to slide off the weary muscles underneath. The mask of a face would lie at her feet, still smiling. Corinne pokes her head in the doorway. The boy on the front steps outside, the one keeping a forty-eight-hour vigil for worldwide liberation, waits in the outer office. He wants an audience.

  A moment later, Mayor Ford opens her back door, and a moment after that, clerks looking up from their desks see Northampton’s chief executive hurrying down the hall, casting backward glances, heading for the stairs.

  The fact that machines actually work, a philosophical engineer once said, proves that God exists. But divine wisdom left it up to people to invent the machinery and keep it running. Committees that the mayor appointed now meet regularly to plan a new fire station and an improved high school. The town is revamping its water system, along with its treatment plant. Former generations of functionaries acted similarly, enacting improvements that would outlive them. When managers recite the old joke “The graveyards are full of indispensable people,” they mean that anyone can be replaced. But in a town where things function most of the time, the irony falls away. The saying is literally true. Northampton’s graveyards really are full of indispensable people. So is the town of the living.

  For example, the shy, big-hearted, thoroughly competent, imaginative, and garrulous mayor, who works an average of twelve hours a day on behalf of the town. And the civil servants like Rich Parasiliti, who spent the winter cheerfully performing what he calls snow-fighting and now looks after Northampton’s grass and playground equipment. Also the town’s many volunteers, only some of whom are rich enough to be suspected of atoning for it, who seem to feel it is a privilege to go to endless meetings and be denounced by some in town, all so they can serve Northampton without pay. The mayor’s office keeps lists of people waiting for spots on the town’s twenty-three permanent boards and eight ad hoc committees—the Skateboard Task Force and the Waterways Committee, the DPW board and the Board of Health, the Fire Station Site and Building Committee, the Arts Board, the Council on Aging, the Committee on Disabilities, the Fair Housing Committee, the Northampton Housing Partnership. Just recently the mayor got a postcard from a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa, offering his services when he returned.

  Many members of the town make smaller contributions: the renters raising flowers beside dilapidated porches on lower Pleasant Street; the person who planted pansies in the scraggly ground beside a pair of public steps; the youthful anarchists who retrieved the stolen plaque from the front steps of the First Church; even, perhaps, the man who goes out early in the morning and tears down the posters illegally attached to light poles, mailboxes, and other public property.

  Northampton has a constructive role for every willing resident to play. Not all are quite the same as service on the mayor’s ad hoc committees.

  Over at the police station, inside the Detective Bureau, Peter Fappiano, the drug detective, peered at the rap sheet of a new Northampton resident, a man named Tyrone. He lived in an apartment over Hugo’s bar on Pleasant Street. The rap sheet spilled from Peter’s hands onto the floor. It listed seventy-six arraignments, Peter said to the veteran detective Rusty Luce, who was sitting at his desk. “He has an FBI number. He has a huge out-of-state record, too. Aggravated assault and battery with great bodily harm, out of Florida.” Tyrone was driving a truck for a local food distributor, and, according to Peter’s sources, selling crack to about half the people in one of the local rooming houses.

  “Let me see that,” said Rusty. He was a round-faced, stocky man with thick-fingered hands, which fellow cops likened to paws. Rusty the Dancing Bear, they called him. Rusty read the rap sheet, and started talking to himself. “He did three years of an eight-year sentence. For?” Rusty peered at the page. “For rape. This guy has a bad record. He’s not good. He’s not good. We don’t need him around here.”

  “You know what?” said Peter. “He’s on parole. We could bring the parole officer and when we hit the place, he could be violated on the spot.”

  But before they could hit the place, they had to get a confidential informant to buy some crack from Tyrone. No question who was the best person for that job. The problem was that Frankie had to go to court this week to face his outstanding motor vehicle charges. Rusty shook his head. He’d always thought that Frankie was more useful to the town out of jail than in. Northampton cops had arrested Frankie and charged him. Now Rusty would have to undo what fellow cops had done. Rusty chuckled. “What a system”

  Rusty and Frankie stood in a corner of the hallway outside District Courtroom 2, conferring in soft voices. Frankie was dressed up. He wore a pair of wrinkled jeans, a blue windbreaker, a wrinkled white shirt with a button-down collar, and a regimental necktie. He also wore his sweet, boyish smile, his I’m-on-my-best-behavior smile.

  “Where you livin’ now, Frankie?” Rusty wore a necktie, too. His sport jacket was unrumpled.

  “I’m still at Grove Street. I’m waiting for a subsidy.”

  Rusty looked at Frankie and the tip of Rusty’s tongue came out. A merry little smile half-concealed his eyes. Rusty never used the usual epithets for criminals—“maggots,” “assholes,” “mopes,” “scumbags,” and the like. Half the people Rusty had hired to help him build his own house were ones he had arrested. He’d had to delay construction until one of his helpers got out of jail. Now Rusty’s tongue withdrew. He frowned at Frankie. “I’m trying to help you out on this case. But no more fucking up. How many times can I do this? It makes me look bad, Frankie.”

  “It was just transportation,” said Frankie. “See, those cops didn’t have probable cause to stop me.”

  Rusty didn’t bother to say so, but Frankie was a walking case of probable cause. And there was no telling what might happen if Frankie made an argument like that before the judge on duty today—an elderly man, not as easily amused as Judge Ryan. Rusty eyed him sternly. “When you get before this judge, don’t say anything. He’s a tough judge.”

  “Oh, okay,” said Frankie.

  The prosecutor walked up and said to Rusty, “What I can do is recommend that these charges be continued for six months, on a general continuance on a guilty plea.” He turned to Frankie. “That means if you get in further trouble, these charges can be brought back and you can be tried on them.”

  “Okay,” said Frankie.

  “For some reason the Northampton Police Department speaks very highly of you.”

  Frankie looked at him with great sincerity. “I mean well.”

  “I remember a few things from some years ago,” said the prosecutor. “But that was long ago.”

  “I been, like, a Boy Scout ever since,” said Frankie. He had his hands folded in front of him, like an acolyte. “Thank you, sir.”

  “Well, keep up the good work,” said the prosecutor.

  “I did that heroin case last year.”

  “Sounds like Columbo,” said the prosecutor.

  “I’m trying to represent for my bad deeds, you know?” said Frankie.

&nbs
p; He sat most of the day in the gallery, waiting his turn before the judge. The gallery was relatively unfamiliar territory. In recent years he’d often gone to court handcuffed, because he hadn’t shown up on his own. “Procrastinating,” he explained. His therapist had warned him about this tendency. “My home away from home,” Frankie said, looking around the courtroom. He knew a lot of the people in the courtrooms of the region, both lawyers and defendants. A young Latino man stood before the judge. He was charged with possession of cocaine. He asked for an interpreter. “This guy speaks English,” Frankie whispered. “When you say you can’t speak the language, you get more time to figure out a strategy. It’s perfect if you want to act dumb, too.”

  Watching cases come and go, Frankie chuckled softly. “It’s a drive-through court system. It wasn’t me. I didn’t do it. Motion to suppress. Okay, next.” The day in court wore on. At one-thirty in the afternoon, his name was finally called. He folded his hands in front of him as he stood in the well of the courtroom. Up on the bench, the judge read Frankie’s record. He scowled at it. He scowled down at Frankie. Then, with obvious reluctance, he let him go.

  “It’s boring,” Frankie said, walking out, a free man on probation. “Imagine doing that for fifty-one cases.”

  Frankie already knew Tyrone. They’d spent some time together at the county jail—Camp Hamp, most inmates called it. In fact, he had Tyrone’s beeper number. Peter didn’t bother to ask Frankie how he got it. They went to a pay phone on Strong Avenue. Peter listened in on Frankie’s side of the conversation.

  “Hey! This is Frankie. Can you hook me up? I need some rock. Yeah, yeah. I need a twenty.”

  They went through the usual procedure, which Rusty had taught Tommy and Tommy had taught Peter. Frankie could have taught it, too. Peter searched Frankie, so Peter could testify in court that his informant had no drugs on him beforehand. Peter recorded the serial number of a twenty-dollar bill—bills don’t have to be marked, because they already are. He gave the bill to Frankie, who ambled off alone and stood on the sidewalk on lower Main Street outside the Italian restaurant there.

  Peter and another detective, Bobby Dunn, sat in an unmarked car across the street. In a little while, they saw Tyrone come around the corner on a bicycle. Frankie—stocky, smiling, pants adroop—sauntered up to him. The two men shook hands. Tyrone dug in a pocket, then held out an open hand. Frankie looked around as if to make sure they weren’t being watched, then bent down and scouted around with his index finger in the palm of Tyrone’s hand, as if he were sorting through a handful of jewels, as if he wanted to make sure he picked out the best-looking rock of crack. Frankie could have been a method actor. He could have been a lot of things. He handed Tyrone the twenty-dollar bill, they shook again, Tyrone rode away on his bicycle down Pleasant Street, and Frankie sauntered across Main. As he passed the cruiser, he gave Peter and Bobby a gigantic wink. They met up in the alley behind the pizza shop. Frankie handed Peter the rock of crack. Peter searched Frankie again, then gave him another twenty-dollar bill, which was Frankie’s pay.

  To get a search warrant that was certain to stand up in court, they had to make several controlled buys. Frankie made two more, both in Tyrone’s room over Hugo’s. It was a living. Frankie was nowhere around, of course, when, a few days after the last buy, four cops burst in on Tyrone early in the morning. They found twelve rocks of crack and $1,500 in cash in the room, including the bills that Frankie had passed to him. Tyrone’s parole was revoked, and he was sent out of town and back to jail to finish up his sentence, with another year tacked on for selling crack.

  If they only knew, wouldn’t every citizen of Hamp applaud Frankie’s work on their behalf?

  The assistant director of Grove Street, a young Ph.D. candidate at the university, was writing his dissertation on homelessness in Northampton. “There’s so much of an effort to fix people,” he said. “But I don’t think the problem’s with the homeless person so much. A person will stop drinking, for instance. They’re still poor, they still have no family or community support. They leave Grove Street and go to a rooming house and start drinking again. So I think it’s a lot more than just looking at the individual. I don’t see any movement towards housing as a right. Drug testing comes up every six months or so. Does it mean if someone is using, they shouldn’t be allowed to stay in an emergency shelter?”

  The young grad student went on: “Instead of trying to provide support, we ask what’s wrong with Frankie. How can we fix them.” He said, “In Frankie’s case, whether he’s disabled or not, he’s considered disabled, and he can’t afford a place to live on his income from that. Not even a rooming house. But what kind of job is he going to get at this stage? The joke is every time he leaves the house, the police hook him up for something.”

  Actually, just now Tommy was trying to figure out how to keep Frankie from getting hooked up again and going back to jail. Frankie had some more outstanding charges pending. He’d been caught buying crack in Holyoke a while ago. Frankie had said he was “doing research.” Tommy had made a call and gotten him released until the case came up in court. Then Peter had called a prosecutor down in Hampden County, who had said, “All right, we’ll do something with him. But if he fucks up again, we just throw him away.” So concessions would be made, perhaps for the last time, when Frankie went to court again. But someone would have to make sure that Frankie went to court. Meanwhile, Frankie’s unregistered car was still impounded, locked up in a fenced-in lot at a gas station in Florence. Frankie had been pleading with Tommy to get it back. On a summer evening, Tommy sat in the Detective Bureau discussing the problem of Frankie with one of the state police drug detectives.

  Tommy was wavering. Maybe they should help Frankie retrieve his car, his latest “Chebbie,” then try to get him relicensed.

  “It’s the worst thing we could do,” said the state detective. “If he gets that car, he’ll get more charges and more charges. He’ll get in so deep we’ll never be able to use him again. And he owes the world for parking tickets in nineteen different jurisdictions. It would take an act of God to get him licensed again.”

  Tommy nodded. He picked up the phone and called Grove Street. He turned on the speaker so the state detective could listen to both sides of the conversation.

  “You know what, Frankie? I don’t think we’re gonna get your car out. It’s gonna get you in more trouble. Here’s what I think we should do. Work on getting your license back. I mean, I like ya, Frankie, you know that.”

  “Why don’t you just give me back Samson’s license?” said Frankie.

  “Frankie, it expired in 1992. But you could probably go down and renew it, you jerk. How ’bout the license plate? Where’d you get it?”

  “It came with the car.”

  “ ‘It came with the car’? Frankie, it doesn’t work like that.”

  “Come on, Oakie. It’s got all my stuff in it. It’s got my crutches.”

  “Your crutches? What were you doin’? Jumping out a window to get away from the police? So it’s best if we just leave the car.”

  “Come on, Oakie! If you leave it there, I’m gonna lose my Chebbie.”

  “We’ll get your license back and get you another car.”

  “That’s gonna take three years!” Frankie paused. “Now I’m depressed. I’m gonna go get some Prozac.”

  “When we get off the phone, I can imagine what you’re gonna say about me.”

  “I can’t. Because I can’t tell anyone I know you.”

  “That’s right.” Tommy started laughing.

  “I’ll go upstairs and bite on my pillow.”

  “And don’t do anything stupid,” said Tommy. “Like go and get the car yourself.”

  “I already checked,” said Frankie. “They got dogs.”

  Tommy shook his head. “You know, Frankie, if you weren’t older than me, I’d adopt you.”

  “Yeah! I could be, like, your older brother.”

  Tommy laughed again.

 
Frankie must have thought he’d softened him up. “Okay, Oakie, let’s go get the car.”

  “If we get your car back, you’re gonna drive it.”

  “No, you can keep the key. I can’t drive it without a key.”

  “Do you know how to start a car without a key, Frankie?” Tommy asked.

  Actually, Frankie was a skilled automobile mechanic. He was good with his hands. He’d held a lot of jobs around here. He’d worked as a mechanic and in construction. He didn’t mind working. One time Oakie got him a job at a local factory and the boss liked Frankie so much he even gave him a raise. But then Carmen got him in trouble again, and by the time those charges were dismissed, someone had taken his place at the factory. He was on the dole now. Better here than in some places, Frankie thought. The people in the social service agencies were nice to him up here. He fit into a lot of categories for getting help and it was easy to adapt himself to fit some others. He was having trouble getting into subsidized housing, where priority went to the elderly, disabled, and people with dependent children. But he didn’t usually mind Grove Street. He got fed, and the social service system supplied him with a regular doctor, for an old injury to his foot, which was a blessing, because it brought some disability money and didn’t actually bother him much. A psychiatrist and a therapist were also provided. One prescribed drugs for his depression. The other was trying to help him get off the other drug, his beloved and hated crack, which, he’d come to realize, was the main cause of his depression. This had come to him as a revelation, part of a larger one, which had arrived in stages.

  When Frankie had returned to Northampton after his last stop in jail, he’d told his therapist, “I feel miserable when I’m not high and when I’m high also. I’m fed up with life, fed up with drugs, and I haven’t shot myself in the brain because I’m waiting for an answer.”