“Hi, Joe. You want a drink?”
I shook my head. I’d given up drinking several years ago. Frank knew that, but there’s something inside a hard-drinking man that can only see abstinence as a passing and regrettable phase. And Frank was a hard-drinking man; I’d seen him absorb five stiff scotch-and-sodas and not show a hair out of place. The only visible evidence of his daily drowning was an ever-expanding soft gut and a growing inability to move quickly-physically and mentally. I’d thought about going the same route after my wife Ellen had died many years back, but watching Frank even then had kept me straight. Unfortunately, either despite or because of Martha’s concern, Frank had kept right on going.
“You have any tonic water?”
He lugged himself out of the couch and ambled over to a freestanding bar set up near the wall. “Still on the wagon, huh? I don’t see how you can drink tonic water without something to kill the taste.”
He filled my order, handed me a glass and motioned to the couch. “Take a load off. I’m finding out who was asshole of the day-at least according to the TV. I’ve got my own opinion, of course.”
“John Woll?” Murphy grunted. “That’s not a bad place to start.”
“It was hardly his fault.”
“Oh, hell. I said ‘of the day,’ and the day’s almost up. I’ll find someone else tomorrow. Besides, what I think doesn’t matter much anyway.”
I cupped my ear. “What’s this? Violin music time?”
He glanced at me and shook his head. “Yeah. Sorry. I’m getting sick and tired of being the resident lame duck.”
“No one listening anymore?”
“Oh, they listen. They just don’t pay much attention. I know what’s going through their minds: if we just stall him long enough, he’ll be gone and we can forget about it. I can’t say I blame them. It’s just a lousy way to wrap things up. I’ve given those bastards a lot of good time.”
He leaned forward and turned up the volume a bit. The sports report was beginning-Frank’s idea of heaven.
As slow as he had become, his insight hadn’t suffered any. He was right about what people were thinking. He was retiring in four months, after thirty-five years on the force; it was the last chance a lot of folks had to subtly let him know they weren’t heartbroken.
I thought that stank. He was a good cop and a better friend. When I came out of Korea, I was twenty years old and scarred by something nobody wanted to hear about. Korea was the “action” between the Good War-World War II-and the Living Room War-Vietnam. We had racked up almost as many casualties in three years as they had during ten years in Vietnam. The Vietvets complained that people spat at them when they got back home; most of us didn’t stimulate even that much attention.
Also, warfare had revealed sides of humanity I’d never dreamed of, g Cdreem" rowing up in the hills of Thetford, Vermont. I’d witnessed extremes of boredom and action, of cowardice and foolhardy bravery, of viciousness and grace. I’d been touched by an experience so concentrated and searing that my former life, beckoning from my father’s farm, no longer seemed possible.
I floated for a while, utterly at sea. I was decommissioned in California, so I stayed there and spent a few years going to college in Berkeley. That was when the Beat movement was just beginning to stir, a phenomenon that filled my suitcase with some pretty strange books and all but finished the metamorphosis of one erstwhile farm boy, but it still hadn’t settled my mind one bit. So I quit and came back home, hoping something might switch me back on track.
But I’d become rootless, frustrated and alienated, and Vermont’s green hills did little to soothe. That’s when Murphy rounded me up. He was older by nine years, a veteran not only of Korea, but of World War II. I’d known him earlier; he’d been reared nearby in Ely, an older brother of sorts to a lot of kids my age-or if not a brother, then a cousin maybe-the only teenager in the area to have fought overseas and killed people and won medals. He listened to boys my age, and some girls too, I imagine, with a wisdom and sympathy we couldn’t find in the adult world. And he managed to track me down after California, although by that time he lived in Brattleboro, some seventy-five miles to the south. To this day, I’m not sure how or why he did that. I have the sneaky suspicion that my mother may have called him.
In any case, he got me interested in the police force he’d been on for several years already. It mimicked some of the more pleasant aspects of military life-that combination of specialness and fraternity-and it replaced the muddiness of my life with the welcomed rigidity of rank, paperwork and assigned tasks. It also meant carrying a gun-the ultimate symbol of the simple answer to a complex world-and it gave me a chance, every once in a while, to do something which by that time in my life was becoming an elusive quality. Korea and California had fouled the clear moral waters of my upbringing and had left me nostalgic for the innocent idealism of my younger years.
During my first weeks as a Brattleboro cop, I thought I’d finally found the solution. I was to walk the line between the good guys and the bad, keeping one from being done in by the other. Real Lone Ranger stuff, complete with silver bullets, or at least close enough. The fact that I started out directing traffic and ticketing cars didn’t matter. I was a Lawman-the armed instrument of Might and Right.
Not that Murphy instilled that simple-minded notion in my brain. That was my own doing, and I was quickly disabused. The younger, probably wiser Murphy showed me that most bad guys were usually regular joes with a screw loose-barring a few exceptions. But even while I was reluctantly conceding that the world was more gray than black and white, its complexities and contradictions stopped bothering me as much. The gun lost its appeal as I began to rely more on my instincts than on its authority. I came to see it finally as the unreal thing it is: the admission of your brain’s collapse under panic and impotent rage. For that personal growth-even rebirth-I had Frank Murphy to thank.
The wide-eyed awe I had for him during those early years died the same peaceful death as my polarized view of human nature. But it, like the latter, was replaced by something more realistic and worthy. I came to love Frank as a fellow flawed human bein Ced, lg, with whom I could disagree and argue and yet always respect. It rankled me to see him being kicked around by those who only saw his crusty armor.
“There’s no reason not to leave now, you know. The benefits aren’t going to change any.”
He pushed his lips out in a pout. “I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. I said I’d leave May first, I’ll leave May first.”
I wasn’t going to argue with that. It was damned near the only thing he had left.
“When are you going to call it quits?” he asked, his eyes still on the screen.
“I still have almost ten years to go before full benefits.”
“You don’t really need them, do you?”
I wasn’t sure where he was headed. “It wouldn’t hurt. Seems a small price to pay after all this time. I might as well do it right and get what’s coming, even if it is a mouse fart.”
He didn’t say anything for a couple of minutes. His total concentration seemed focused on whether Pepsi or Coke would win the taste test. “You want to make captain.”
It wasn’t an accusation, nor was it a question. It just floated there, and given my druthers, I might have let it drift away. Instead, I gave it some serious thought for the first time. Another ad passed and the weather girl appeared. She’d changed her hair-made her look like a poodle. “I don’t know. Maybe. You don’t get out much; I’d miss that. I don’t want to end up playing footsie with the selectmen and the chief, and figuring out everyone’s schedule. I hate that stuff.”
“It has its compensations… I can’t think of them, but they’re there. They told me so.” He got up and fixed himself another drink. “There’s something to be said for going as high as you can go. It feels pretty good. And you can get out if you don’t like it.”