Home Town

by Tracy Kidder

  He hadn’t told anyone in the department, and no one suspected anything. The other cops thought he was on a health kick. No one asked why he had to take a day off now and then. They seemed to think that he and Jean were going to the hospital in Boston; he hadn’t told anyone that they’d given up on that. One day he said to one of the captains, “Oh, I hate snow shoveling. I’m gonna put my papers in and move down south.”

  “What are you gonna do? Become a raconteur?” said the captain. “O’Connor, you’re never gonna leave this place.”

  “Early retirement,” said Tommy. “Because of the snow.”

  “Secret squirrel,” people in the department would say when a cop behaved like this. He’d told only a few close friends who weren’t on the force, so he wouldn’t be publicly humiliated if in the end he got turned down or changed his mind. In the meantime, he could dream of leaving and see what it felt like.

  His jogging route took him through the green residential parts of town, along the circumference of the world of his youth. “It doesn’t seem to be my town as much anymore,” he thought as he ran. “A lot of the people seem different. Most of the kids I knew well are gone. A lot of things are going on that I never thought were going on back then, which I like as a cop, but I’m not as sure of its safety as I was. It seems like a lot of other places to me now. So why not try some of those other places?”

  He ran a little faster every day, and as he ran he thought of all the reasons that he wouldn’t pass the next hurdle the FBI placed before him. It seemed to him that something unexpected was bound to end this fantasy, maybe something unknown, or invented. He wondered if they’d talk to Rick, and what Rick would tell them. He wondered if he’d flunk the physical because of his old shoulder injury, another souvenir of high school football. Or he’d fail the lie-detector test. What had he done that he didn’t remember or know about? If he went in believing there was something of that sort, he might appear to answer every question with a lie.

  Before work one day in October, Tommy drove north out of town and climbed the lookout tower at the top of Mount Sugarloaf. From the railing, to the south, the valley of the Connecticut stretched away across a mostly level plain. The river looked very blue that afternoon. He watched it running on, between cultivated fields, toward steeples in the distance. “Yeah, it’s a beautiful place. But there gotta be other beautiful places,” Tommy said. He’d be a fool not to take this opportunity, a fool to wait around to become Northampton’s detective sergeant. “And what an adventure. This hometown-boy stuff. There’s more to life than that.” Everything happened for a reason. Maybe this was why he and Jean couldn’t have children: so that they’d be free to go. This would be a way of making something good out of something bad. Jean wasn’t sure yet what work she’d do, but she was very happy. You could see it in her face. “And what an adventure. A life of travel. All my life I wanted to do nothing but police work. And this is the FBI! The number one police agency in the country. But that’d be pretty cool. Go into a place. Who are you? FBI. Talk about pride in your organization. I’m very proud of the Northampton PD, but this is a thousand times larger. The toys are unbelievable, and if you do a good job, you’re doing something really important.”

  A friend had told him he’d never find another place as nice as Northampton. He’d pondered that. He thought he had an answer now. “Even if you live in Oz, if you live in Oz all your life, you’d want to leave once in a while.” From the tower, Northampton lay just out of sight. He thought he could get used to views like that.

  The Three County Fair had come and gone. He’d worked security during fair week for a decade. This year seagulls seemed to outnumber people. There wasn’t any policing to do. He borrowed a golf cart and raced around the grounds. “One thing I’ll miss, screwing around like this. But I bet I can still do it. Have some fun.” The fair used to be different, full of runaway teenagers and prostitutes. There used to be brawls at the beer hall. The dog-food-company trucks gathered down by the stables again. But in a lot of the afternoon races, only five horses started. In one race, three turned up lame. The fair was dying, he thought. The festival of restaurants downtown, the Taste of Northampton, had all but replaced it. Northampton had become a town that preferred sushi to cotton candy. He liked the new festival, but this was another way in which Northampton wasn’t like his hometown anymore.

  He drove back and forth through Hampshire Heights as usual on Cabbage Night. “Ooooh, look at those kids over there. They’re going to the store to buy more eggs. It must be something to egg O’Connor’s cruiser. This is the shit I’ll miss. Listen to me. I probably won’t be missing this until thirty years from now.”

  In Northampton the cycles of crime and punishment were as easy to observe as the cycles of the weather. “It’s like sharks’ teeth,” Tommy said. “One criminal goes to jail and another comes out.” But it seemed as though an unusual number of people he’d arrested, people he often dealt with, were going off to jail this fall. Last winter, a judge had thrown out a small marijuana case of his, on Fourth Amendment grounds. Now that case came around again, in a sense. The boy in question had committed an armed robbery and now was headed for the county jail, Camp Hamp. “I don’t think that judge did you any favors,” Tommy said to him the night of his most recent arrest. “He didn’t!” the boy cried. “I thought I could get away with anything!” Which was probably what he thought Tommy wanted to hear. Weeping in his cell at the lockup, he’d begged Tommy to let him become an informant. There were half a dozen others now bound for Camp Hamp, among them the young man “God” whom he’d caught selling LSD in Pulaski Park last year. As Tommy saw it, the kids who loitered in the park were acting as if the place were their living room and bathroom. He’d done his best to make them uncomfortable there. A new graffito, created in chalk on the concrete pavement in front of the benches, commemorated both this attempt and God’s sentencing, the image of a tombstone, inside which was written:

  HERE LIES RIP

  THOMAS O’CONNOR

  MAY HE REST IN

  HELL

  Tommy took a snapshot. He could hang it in his shrine, or take it with him when he left, if leaving was what Fate wanted. Tommy drove away from the park and his chalk tombstone. “It’s going to be a quiet year,” he said, thinking of all the people now heading to jail. “I might as well leave. I’ve cleaned up this town. I’ve tamed this shrew.”

  Back at the station, in the Detective Bureau, a letter addressed to Tommy was pinned to the wall over Rusty Luce’s desk. Scrawled in large letters in the margins were the words “Help!” and “Please!” It came from the county jail in Ludlow.

  She got hurt, Chasing me out—the Window, I got 2 Wittness. All 3 of us. Were out side when she jumped. Please help me out. D.A. want 2 year’s and I didn’t, do it. Boss, I’m verry Graetfull if you Can help me! Can you Please, Call D.A.? Ockey, I’m sorry for being a pain in the butt. You known I meant Well. I promise, this is the last time, your going to hear—me and Carmen Court problems. Sorry to do all this—“Crying” I’d should had, leastsend to you a long time ago. I’d Learn my lesson, the hard way. I’m getting a new Wife. I have to give up, on Carmen. We Just Can’t make it together. Love is blind, and so was I.

  There was no point in answering. With Frankie, it had been the same old thing over and over again: Carmen and crack; crack and Carmen. Peter said he felt bad for Frankie. Tommy said, “I’ve gone and seen him many times in jail. I’m not doing it anymore. There’ll be other Frankies.” He got a strange feeling, though, when he walked back into his office at the station, and there sitting on his desk was the stack of other letters from Frankie in jail. He used to say, when Frankie had disappeared for a time, that in the midst of life’s uncertainties there was always one sure thing: Frankie would show up again. It had always been true. Some months from now, Frankie would shamble up to the side door and say to the cop who opened it, “Hey, tell Oakie I’m here. Tell him it’s eighty-eight.” And Tommy wouldn’t be there. He could h
ear Frankie’s sneaky voice. “Let’s get this guy, Oakie. He’s gettin’ too big for his bridges.” He could see Frankie slithering off his chair with laughter. Frankie richly deserved to go to jail. But he’d miss him. He put the letters away in his desk drawer.

  Rick had become yesterday’s news. He had made the front page of the Gazette: OFFICER PLEADS GUILTY TO ASSAULT ON CHILD. The next day he’d dropped back to the second section of the paper, and, of course, it hadn’t been long before Rick’s name had fallen out of public view, like Rick himself.

  The Hampshire County Jail stands on a promontory commanding lordly views of Mount Tom and the Holyoke Range. It seems an odd place for those fortresslike buildings surrounded by fences topped with razor wire. Tommy had often gone inside—to interview prisoners; often to visit Frankie in the sally port, out of sight of other inmates. The jail used to be just another landmark on his drive home after work around midnight. He liked that drive, the landscape darkening with trees, the night air sweet in the spring, winy in fall, sharp with whiffs of wood smoke in winter. After tours of duty that took him into squalid places, the drive home seemed like a bath. He could feel his body relaxing, a welcome relief from welcome tension. But ever since last August, whenever his headlights had brushed across the sign for the jail up ahead, he had thought about Rick, up that hill, inside that fence, behind those beige, blank walls.

  He’d heard some news about Rick inside. A local jailhouse boss of a Latino gang had supposedly threatened him, but apparently nothing had come of it. He heard Rick had been placed for a while in a room with another convicted sex offender. “Some short little guy who did his own daughter,” Tommy was told. Most recently, Rick had been put in a cell with God, and apparently he and Rick weren’t getting along very well.

  None of this seemed real. As he drove by the jail, Tommy told himself that Rick was a convicted felon now, that departmental regulations prohibited Northampton cops from socializing with convicted felons, that the FBI probably had even stricter rules. He’d gotten a letter from Rick. He’d stopped at these lines and read them again:

  I guess you’ll never know until you have kids of your own. I hope for your and Jean’s sake that happens soon. There is nothing better in this world, no truer love.

  What was Rick saying? Why would he want to bring that up? To taunt him? Was that the sort of thing Rick would talk about if he visited him? Tommy kept himself angry for weeks.

  One night as he passed by the jail, he realized that he might be gone before Rick got out. He might never see him again. Ever again. The thought struck him as odd, a chord in a strange key. When you parted ways with old friends, you didn’t usually know it was for the last time. They left town, and you simply lost touch. He didn’t feel angry at Rick anymore. But the prospect of visiting him in jail was all painful. He didn’t want to see him reduced to that state. Rick belonged to another part of his life, and he wanted to leave him there, as he used to be.

  Bill O’Connor wasn’t one to say a thing outright, but when Tommy had told him about the FBI, he’d said, “That’s great, Tom. It’ll give me another place to visit.” His father had said nothing would make him prouder, except maybe Tom’s becoming pope. “And there’s Jean, so I guess you’re disqualified.” Bill made his laugh. It sounded genuine, and it came as a great relief to Tommy. He’d fretted for days about telling his father.

  Bill went walking every day in Look Park. One thing Bill liked was that he always ran into a lot of other old-timers there, getting their exercise, too. “Old folks,” Bill called them. Usually, when he started on his walk, another of the old folks would tell him some gossip, invariably false. Didn’t he think there was something funny about Mayor Ford? As he walked on, past the tennis courts and duck ponds, Bill knew that the story was moving on ahead of him, so that by the time he got back to his car another of the old folks was bound to sidle up and say, “Can you believe it, Bill? Our mayor’s a lesbian. And I got that from the source.” The other morning Tommy had gone along on the walk, and they kept running into old folks, who would say hello to both of them. One said to Bill, “You got your bodyguard with you.” Afterward, Bill said, “It makes you feel good.” But Bill didn’t take a melancholy tone with Tommy. Around Tommy the old man seemed positively cheerful at the thought of his son’s going away.

  Tommy kept up his daily runs around Northampton, five miles, faster and faster. Every day he’d finish at his father’s house. They’d have lunch together, and in the evening, while on duty, Tommy would stop again for his forty. He kept asking his father if it really would be all right for him to leave, if by some miracle he did get into the FBI. Maybe he asked too often.

  One night, Bill wiped his mouth with his napkin and said, “Yes, when I started high school, I had to choose. I had to take the classical course or the commercial course. I came home to my mother and told her.

  “ ‘What are the Paddens doin’?’ she said.

  “ ‘They’re takin’ the commercial course.’

  “ ‘You’re takin’ the classical,’ she said. ‘You’re goin’ to college.’ ”

  Bill sighed. Those were the years of the Great Depression. There was barely enough money for the family to live on, in their apartment down in Holyoke. Never mind sending Bill to college. “So in 1934 I graduated from high school. Well, the CCCs were hirin’ and down we went to the city hall, me and Jimmy Burke. They said, ‘You have to be eighteen.’

  “I said, ‘I’m seventeen.’

  “The clerk says to another fella in the office, ‘Jubinville, you can fix that right now, can’t you?’

  “In a matter of seconds I became eighteen. I’m actually a lot younger than I look. Like Abraham in the Old Testament. I wound up at Fort Devens. They were pushin’ us through the line to get uniforms. I said to the sergeant, ‘I want to call my mother.’ And they started laughing. I was supposed to be home for supper. It was the first time in my life I was more than five minutes from home, except for the trolley ride to Springfield. I was about to cry. They were laughin’.

  “So, they let me call her. She says, ‘Oh, my God, Billy, you’re down at Fort Devens.’

  “She seemed upset. And I was upset. Then I said, ‘Thirty-five dollars a month, Mom, and twenty-five of it goes home.’

  “ ‘Oh!’ she says. ‘That’s not bad.’

  “ ‘I’m really feeling like crying,’ I said.

  “ ‘That’s good, Billy,’ she says. ‘Good-bye.’ ”

  Bill went on, “From the playground one minute to Fort Devens. And then they put us on a rattly old train to Lyndonville, Vermont. I remember this captain with shiny boots up to his knees. ‘Tomorrow morning, they’ll wake you up at six.’ But it was beautiful scenery. We passed through Willoughby Gap, and I said to Jimmy Burke, ‘This isn’t too bad.’ After gettin’ out of Catholic school, after twelve years, you were free. Choppin’ trees. There were real wildcats up there. And I’d call up my mother and say, ‘My term is up now.’ She’d say, ‘There’s nothing here for you, Bill. And God we can use that twenty-five dollars.’ ”

  Bill laughed. Then Tommy did, too.

  “I stood fifteen months up in that place,” said Bill.

  The old town seemed to look down kindly on the rituals invented for it, like a god who likes flattery: Smith’s Mountain Day and the ringing of the bell in the tower of College Hall, which for years beyond memory had declared one day every fall too pretty for classes. High school football on Friday nights, the cheers for Hamp High rising up from the fields below Elm Street. And the party clothes the inhabitants put on the old place to announce the coming holidays—the Christmas tree in the river, the lights all over town. Eighty-three children were born in December, nine months from last year’s final big snowstorm—only an average number, in spite of predictions. Now the snows came again, but in moderate amounts, just enough to turn the town white. There is something somber and exciting about the sight of fresh snow around old buildings made of brick and stone. It summons up sensations that fee
l like pathways between the old and new, time past and time reborn. A few days before Christmas, traffic offenders trooped into District Court to answer for their crimes at the last preholiday session, Judge W. Michael Ryan presiding. The proceedings that day had a seasonal flavor.

  A young university student stood at the defendant’s lectern. The youth had been caught speeding over in Amherst. He said he didn’t think he was going that fast.

  For a moment the black-robed, gray-bearded judge looked stern. Then he said, “It’s obviously a case of Amherst working their police too hard.” A trace of a smile crossed his face. He wiped it away, stroking his beard. “I find you not responsible.”

  The young man at the lectern beamed. “Thank you, sir.”

  Then up came a young woman. Judge Ryan studied the documents on her case. Then he declared, “The proper citation here would have been speeding. I find you not responsible.”

  She grinned. Leaving the courtroom, she did a little skip.

  Then another young man. “The Westhampton police did not respond. I find you not responsible,” said Judge Ryan.

  That defendant punched the air with a fist. “Yes!”

  The next charge was more serious. The man at the defendant’s lectern looked disheveled, as if he had slept in his clothes. He’d been caught driving without a license a year ago, and had failed to show up in court. Last night he’d been picked up by the police on a default warrant, and had spent the night in jail.