Nothing shaking at the elementary school. No teenagers making out or smoking joints in the shadows beneath the log gym. No skateboarders out after dark, trying to land their decks on the hand railings. The playground swings hung limp and vacant in the still, muggy night air.
Michael keyed his walkie- talkie. “Peter, this is Paul and Mary. We’re all secure at Washington. Repeat, K through 6 is secure. Over.”
A crackle. A beep. Then Barry Firth’s voice: “Come on, guys. We’re supposed to keep the channel clear. Cut it out.”
“That’s a roger, Barry. Where’s Roger? Over.”
Crackle, beep. “Seriously. You promised.”
Michael laughed and clipped the radio back on his belt. “God, I love that guy. So what’s with Pete, do you think?”
“I don’t know.” Normally, Pete would have joined in with the juvenile nonsense on the radio, assuming he hadn’t started it himself. But he hadn’t seemed himself, at least to the extent that I knew him, since yesterday’s round of golf. “But I have a story.”
“Do you now?”
“A small one.”
“I’m all ears.”
I told him that we’d all walked off the eighteenth green around five the previous afternoon. We’d repaired to the clubhouse together, where we’d spent the next four hours eating steaks and drinking scotch and smoking cigars.
“As men will do,” Michael said.
“So I’m told,” I said. “Nine, nine- thirty, I head to the manly men’s room. I’m there awhile.”
At the time I’d been exhausted, sunburned, full of bloody red meat, half full of eighteen- year- old Lagavulin, and thinking that I might like to throw up. I managed to hold down my stomach, but there had been a touch- and- go moment.
“When I come out I take a wrong turn, go through the wrong set of doors, and end up outside instead of back at the table.”
The accidental gulp of fresh air had seemed to clear my head, so I’d decided to take a short walk around the lodgepole-swank clubhouse before going back in and rejoining the others. On the far side of the building, with its decks and its tall windows overlooking Deer Creek Valley, I’d heard voices above me and looked up to see two fat cigar embers flaring in the dark.
Time to end it, Pete, I’d heard Roger say, in his calm, unmistakable baritone. Stern, but not angry. Like a fatherly friend giving hard advice.
Or what, Roger? Pete’s voice had an edge. You’ll tell on me?
Just end it.
Michael said, “End what?”
“That’s what I wonder.”
Michael thought about it and sighed. “He’d better not be sleeping around on Melody.”
“That’s what I wonder.”
“What else did you hear?”
“That’s it,” I said. “I went back around the other way and pretended I hadn’t heard a thing. Pete hardly talked after he and Roger came back, but he ended up getting lousy drunk. Barry had to drive him home.”
“Pete.” Michael shook his head. “Pete Pete Pete.”
We walked along the empty sidewalks of Walnut Street, winding our way through its neighborhood in progress. With the nature preserve to the north, most of the new development occurred here, expanding Ponca Heights to the south.
We passed a row of new houses, all with the same rooflines, the same baby trees staked out front. We passed a row of nearly finished houses with the same weedy gaps between their sodless dirt yards. At the corner of Walnut and Cedar, a framed two-story faux Colonial sat wrapped in Tyvek.
The farther south we walked, the more skeletal the neighborhood became, until Ponca Heights South finally petered out into a group of bare lots, sleeping bulldozers, and a sign that said, Future Site of Spoonbill Circle.
“Do you figure these bulldozer guys ever stop and look around and think, “You know, we’re tearing out these trees”—I pointed at the grove of old- growth oaks and elms bordering the future site of Spoonbill Circle—” … . so they can plant those trees?” I pointed at a line of young Japanese maples tethered with wire, their wrist- sized trunks clad in protective plastic tubes. As soon as I said it, I wondered what Sycamore Court had looked like sixty years ago.
“Maybe it’s something with Brit,” Michael said, as though he hadn’t been listening. “You know she’s grounded again.”
I nodded. “Melody told us.” Apparently, a couple of nights ago, the parents of Brit’s best friend, Rachel, had caught the two of them sneaking out with a four- pack of wine coolers. “Bor rowing privileges at the Callaway branch library are once again temporarily suspended.”
Michael grinned. “That girl’s getting to be a handful.”
“She seems like a smart cookie.”
“Thirteen going on twenty- three,” Michael said. “Maybe he was giving Pete a pep talk? Roger.”
“A pep talk.”
“You know, spare the rod or whatever.” He wagged a finger, deepened his voice. “ ‘You’ve got to put your foot down, Pete, they need tough love at that age. Time to nip it in the bud.’ ” He checked for my opinion. “Right?”
“Maybe,” I said.
“I could see that.”
“Except for the ‘tell on me’ part.”
Michael nodded. “That part.”
“I didn’t get the feeling it was a pep talk.”
“What did Sara think?”
“Same thing you thought.”
“Pete, you fink.” Michael sighed again. “Well. I guess it’s none of my business.”
“That was my thought exactly.” In the beam of my flashlight, I caught a glint from somewhere over in the darkened construction site. I swept the light back and found what looked like half a dozen crumpled beer cans in the scoop of a front loader. “My other thought was, What makes it Roger’s business?”
“Aha.”
“Don’t get me wrong.” As long as we were there, we walked the extra hundred yards, collected the empty beer cans, and tossed them into the excavation contractor’s waste bin. The sound of the twisted aluminum cans clattering off the steel walls of the bin sounded loud in the stillness. “I like Roger. He did a hell of a lot for Sara’s peace of mind, after the break- in. And what happened to his son… Christ, I’d be curled up in a gutter somewhere. You know?”
“I wouldn’t claim to,” Michael said. “But I can imagine.”
“The truth is, I admire the guy.”
“Blah, blah. Yes, we all admire Roger. But?”
“I get the feeling Roger sees himself as the sheriff around these here parts.”
Michael smiled at that. We turned back and walked along in easy silence for a while, back up the hill, the neighborhood gradually filling in around us again as we cut north up Poppleton.
After a few blocks, Michael finally said, “You and Sara haven’t met Ben.”
“Not yet. We’re looking forward to it.”
“You’d like him. Not as much as you like me.”
“Naturally.”
“A word about Sycamore Court.” Michael twirled his flashlight on its hand strap as we walked. “Pete and Melody, they’ve always been great. Trish and Barry, we got a few looks from them at first, when Ben moved in. Nothing malicious. More like… cautious curiosity.”
“Right.”
“But Roger was the first to reach out,” he said. “The day Ben moved in, Roger and Wes came over, made Ben feel welcome. When Roger found out that Ben had played college golf, he went out and wheeled and dealed him some kind of VIP membership rate at the club.”
“No kidding.”
“Honestly, it always seemed a bit transparent to me. But not in a bad way. More like he was… I don’t know.”
Promoting a sense of solidarity amongst the troops, I thought. I said, “Leading by example?”
Michael touched his nose. Bingo.
“There was a time when I’d have found it demeaning. But that ship sailed long before I ever moved back to Clark Falls.” He shrugged as we turned up Wildwood Lane. “The fac
t is, I still love him for it. And he and Ben seemed to genuinely like each other, which frankly surprised me more knowing Ben than knowing Roger.”
“You’re right,” I said, almost wishing that I hadn’t brought it up. “I’m probably being an ass—”
“Now ask me why Ben took the job in Seattle.”
I looked over.
“You’re supposed to ask me why Ben—”
“Why did Ben take the job in Seattle?”
“It’s funny you should ask,” Michael said. “I’ll tell you why. He wouldn’t admit it if you asked him the same question, but I know it’s the truth.”
The long, gradual climb uphill back toward Sycamore Court now had my shirt sticking to the sweat on my back beneath my safety- green vest. The air around us felt like a steam bath. Even the cicadas seemed to be laboring to keep up their rhythmic buzzing in the trees. As the surrounding woods thickened, the mosquitoes turned out in clouds thick enough to make me wish I’d brought that second cigar Roger had given me for the golf course yesterday.
I stopped noticing all of that as Michael began telling me an anecdote about a same- sex marriage initiative that had come up for referendum to the state legislature the year before. One day, he said, Ben had brought home yard signs that encouraged voters to “Vote Yes to Prop 42.”
“I thought they were an eyesore, to be honest. But they seemed to make Ben happy. So we had these signs in our yard.”
I thought I saw the general direction of the story taking shape. But Michael seemed to enjoy the telling, so I walked along and listened, flashlight clipped to one hip, walkie- talkie clipped to the other.
“After a couple of days, Roger came over.” Michael nodded crisply. “I always gave him credit for being direct. No passive-aggressive mincing around, no smiley Hey Neighbor bullshit. He just came out and asked us to take the signs down.”
“Really.”
“He was polite about it. Very respectful. But he wasn’t exactly asking us if we’d consider thinking about maybe taking them down, either.”
“And this was Roger’s job because…”
“Oh, he said it was nothing personal. He told us that he thought we were class A neighbors. His words. In fact, he said that based on some of the family values he’d seen in his time on the force, as far as he was concerned, we had as much right to marry each other as anybody else. Probably more than some. His words.”
“So what was the problem?”
“Politics can be divisive,” Michael said. “That was his reasoning. He said that in his experience, public displays of politics create tension where none existed before, and that’s usually about all they accomplish.”
“Public displays of politics.”
“That’s what he said.”
“Welcome to America. What’s the point?”
“Roger’s point was that we had seven votes in our little circle. Everybody already had their own thoughts on the issue. And if knowing us personally didn’t influence their opinion, a couple of yard signs weren’t going to do the trick.”
If pressed I’d have been forced to admit that I more or less agreed with that analysis. But that didn’t mean I wanted anybody telling me what the hell I could or couldn’t do with my yard.
“Roger said that everybody in Sycamore Court had always just sort of agreed to keep their politics to themselves. And that things seemed to work out pretty well that way.”
“What did you say?”
“Me? I stayed the hell out of it. Like I said, I thought those signs were hideous anyway.”
“Right.”
“And after spending a Friday night keeping my staff from murdering one another with the kitchen utensils, more drama isn’t what I’m looking for. You know?”
“Sure.”
“Ben was livid,” Michael said. “It was Chernobyl at our place after Roger left that night.”
“Politics can be divisive.”
“I’ve heard that.”
“So what happened?”
“Ben kept the signs right where they were.”
“Good for Ben.”
“One morning, they were gone.”
“Gone?”
“Like they were never there.” He made a motion with his fingers. Poof. “Ben got some new signs. The next morning, those signs were gone. So Ben got more signs.”
I had to chuckle. I liked this story, even if it did seem to support my new theory about Roger Mallory.
“Oh, it was completely ridiculous. Those two. Stubborn as a couple bighorn sheep on crack, the both of them.” He shined his flashlight over to the curb near the corner; two silver coins glowed briefly in the dark, then disappeared as a fat raccoon squeezed itself down the storm drain. Michael clicked the light off again. “I swear, Roger must have had a basement full of those things by the time the vote came and went.”
“The signs? You mean they just kept at it?”
“For three weeks straight,” he said. “As far as I know, neither of them ever once mentioned it out loud to the other. After a while, I think they were just trying to prove who could be the most pigheaded.”
We were a seven- minute walk from home by then. Up ahead, Elmhaven ran into Sycamore Drive, which would take us out of the southern hemisphere of Ponca Heights proper, up the hill, around the tree line, and back to Sycamore Court.
Tonight’s patrol log: six beer cans, a few thousand mosquitoes, and one raccoon. A light shift. Normally, we’d have seen at least three or four raccoons. I liked watching them rise up on their hind legs when you caught them pawing through someone’s trash, wearing their funny little masks.
“Anyway, it wasn’t very long after that before Ben came home and told me he’d gotten this contract.” Michael shrugged. “I didn’t even know he’d been looking. Always wanted to live in the Pacific Northwest, he said. First I’d heard of that, too. But hey, you can’t know everything about a person, right?”
I told him that I hadn’t known that Sara wanted to be an associate dean at a Midwestern university until it came up.
“He asked me to go with him, but I wasn’t about to leave Mom alone in that manor for six months,” Michael said. “And the restaurant? I’ve worked my sweet ass off turning that kitchen into something. If I ever leave, I’m leaving. Not going away long enough for the whole thing to fall apart, just so I can come back to a pile of rubble. You know?”
“Sure.”
“Supposedly, we’re still operating on the theory that he’s moving home at the end of the contract.” Michael was quiet for half a block or so. Then he said, “But I think we both know that’s not really going to happen.”
“Oh?”
“We’re just pretending something else for now.”
“Michael,” I said. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
He smiled. “Nobody died.”
“Still.”
“Want to know what else? I think Roger was honestly sorry to see Ben go.”
I thought about the battle of wills Michael had just described. After a minute, I said, “How do you feel about that?”
“About Roger being sorry?”
“About Ben going.”
“I feel sad about it.” Michael waved his hand. “But I never needed a law to say we were married. If he did, then we weren’t.” He clicked his flashlight absently—on, then off. “And if Mr. Ben’s personal life plan only goes as far as getting his way or quitting, then we’re probably better off with seventeen hundred miles between us.”
I wasn’t sure what to say, so I let it rest for a minute as we emerged from the lower subdivision and turned up Sycamore Drive. Ahead, I saw two green vests glowing in the moonlight. Pete and Barry, returning from Ponca Heights North.
One of them signaled with their flashlight: three short blinks, three long blinks, three more short blinks. SOS.
Had to be Pete. Maybe his mood had improved. Michael keyed his walkie- talkie. “Identify yourself or prepare to be destroyed.”
The radio crackled, then
Pete’s voice came over the air. “Eat me.”
“Please don’t be screwing some bimbo,” Michael muttered to the sky. He keyed the radio and said, “Copy that. We’re heading your way.”
As we walked up the hill to rejoin Pete and Barry, I said, “So how did the vote come out?”
“What vote is that?”
“The vote on Proposition 42.”
“Ah.” Michael chuckled. “Defeated in a landslide.”
“I see.”
“Shame, isn’t it?”
“Well,” I said. “If it makes you feel any better, we didn’t win either.”
“Who?”
“Pete and me,” I said. “Yesterday. Roger and Barry ended up clipping us by a stroke on the last hole. We bought dinner.”
Michael smiled. “That sounds like Roger.”
Sara was sitting in bed reading a magazine when I finally got back to the house. I was sweaty and tired from walking, ready for a beer and a shower.
“How was it?”
“Highly dangerous,” I said. “But Michael protected me.”
“You and Michael tonight?”
“And Pete and Barry on the north side. Regular home team.”
“That’s nice.”
“It was interesting,” I said. “Listen to this.”
While I took off my toy patrol gear and stripped out of my clothes, I told her the story of Ben Holland and Roger Mallory and the yard signs of Proposition 42.
“Really,” she said.
“According to Michael. Back and forth with these signs. He’d keep putting them out, and Roger just kept taking them down.”
“Poor Michael,” she said. “I hope they can work it out.”
She didn’t appear to be listening very closely. Through all of this, she hadn’t yet looked up from her magazine, which she didn’t seem to be reading anyway, just flipping pages. Sara doesn’t normally read magazines in the first place.
“All this good gossip I bring back? I thought you’d be proud of me.”
At that point, she looked at me and smiled.
Two years ago, while soaping up in the shower, Sara found a lump the size of a walnut in her right breast. It turned out to be benign, a fibroid mass that went away six months after she gave up coffee. But it was still a scare, and we’d spent a tense few days waiting for medical opinions and test results. She’d smiled this same smile after her shower that morning.
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