Lars stayed on in the Navy after the war, retiring with twenty years of service, and had gone on to a second career as an Alaska halibut fisherman. A lifetime drinker, he had managed to make it through the death of his only child, a son, who was shot down during the Vietnam War, only to fall apart completely during the five years it had taken for his wife, Aggie, to succumb to Alzheimer’s disease.
Sober now for six years, he lived just up the street from me, subsisting on a small naval pension and Social Security in a subsidized apartment building called Stillwater Arms. He prided himself in both his unwavering independence and his good health.
His most prized possession was a videotape copy of a television news broadcast that featured an interview with him done by the local CBS affiliate during Seattle’s famed five-day Labor Day Blackout of 1988. A misguided construction project had shut off the electricity to much of the downtown core, paralyzing businesses and stranding high-rise dwellers, many of whom were far too old and frail to negotiate the long, darkened stairways in their buildings.
The camera had caught Lars Jenssen at the bottom of a nine-story stairwell. He had affixed a flashlight to his cane and was loaded with a backpack full of sack lunches, which he was about to deliver to unfortunate and less able high-rise strandees.
“Somebody’s got to take care of all those old people,” he had grunted pointedly into the camera, and then set out determinedly to clump up the nine stories to deliver his goodies.
I hadn’t seen the interview at the time-hadn’t even known Lars Jenssen then-but he had shown it to me once after we met, venturing shyly into my condo to play it for me on the VCR.
“Offered to let that young guy come with me, but he said he didn’t want to climb all them stairs. Ha!” Lars had snorted derisively when he showed me the tape. “That’s what’s the matter with kids these days. No gumption.”
We ordered our usual postmeeting dinners-a chili-burger for me and a plate of sliced tomatoes and cottage cheese for Lars. It was to this unvarying evening repast, cholesterol doomsayers to the contrary, that Lars Jenssen attributed both his good health and his longevity.
Spooning half a pitcher of cream and several heaping spoonfuls of sugar into his coffee, he eyed me thoughtfully.
“How come you never talk about your family none, Beau?” he asked. “You had a chance tonight, and you blew it. Oh sure, you talked about your kids and all, but when it comes to the rest of your family, it’s like you fell off a turnip truck somewhere all growed up.”
“That’s not too far from the truth,” I told him with an uneasy laugh.
My family history, or lack thereof, isn’t something I’m particularly eager to talk about. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, I suppose, but it’s not something to brag about, either.
“My mother’s dead,” I said flatly after taking a forkful of my chili-burger. “I never knew my father. He died during the war. They weren’t married.”
With an oath, Lars flung his fork back onto his nearly empty plate, where it bounced on a wilted lettuce leaf.
“See there?” he demanded loudly. Encroaching deafness had disabled Lars Jenssen’s volume control years before. “No wonder you’re all screwed up, Beau. You never had no men around, did you? You know, what they call one of them role models.”
Rather than being provoked by Lars Jenssen’s probing interference, I was instead slightly amused. For a whole lot of money, the department gladly would have paid to send me to a genuine shrink. So here I sat in a dingy restaurant being psychoanalyzed by a meddlesome near-octogenarian who had probably never even heard of Sigmund Freud.
Lars leaned back in his chair and squinted nearsightedly across the table at me. “What about your grandparents?” he persisted stubbornly. “You musta spent at least some time with them.”
My amusement disappeared as I felt my hackles rising. I could talk about my father. The motorcycle accident that had killed him was just that-an accident. And so was I, for that matter. It was a cruel twist of fate that those two young lovers, my parents, had never had the chance to marry. The fact that my mother never married anyone else during the lonely years afterward testified to the enduring love she must have felt for her dead sailor/lover.
And I could talk about my mother, too. She had done it all and done it by herself, with no help from anyone. She had kept me and raised me at a time when that simply wasn’t done in polite society. She had brought me up with unstinting devotion and a selfless, gritty determination. I’ve seen a lot of action in my years on the force, but those two qualities still form the basis for my definition of heroism.
Talking about my mother and father was fine, but I could not, would not, talk about my grandfather-a man whose name I bore-about Jonas Piedmont, that stiff-necked, stubborn Presbyterian son of a bitch who had turned his pregnant sixteen-year-old daughter out of the house and who had never once, in all the difficult years that followed, lifted a single solitary finger to help her.
The sudden unexpected flood of resentment that washed through me made it difficult to remember exactly what Lars Jenssen’s question had been, to say nothing of answering it.
“No,” I said finally. “I never did.”
“How come?” Lars wasn’t one to let sleeping dogs lie.
“We just didn’t, that’s all.”
“They dead?”
“Goddamn it, Lars. What’s the point of all this third degree? No, they’re not dead, not as far as I know, but they could just as well be. For all I know, they probably still live somewhere right here in Seattle, but you couldn’t prove it by me. I’ve never met them, never laid eyes on them, never wanted to. Once they found out my mother was pregnant with me, they crossed us off their list. Permanently.”
“I see,” Lars Jenssen said, nodding sagely. “Maybe you ought to pay them a visit.”
“Like hell I will!” I snorted.
AA has strict live-and-let-live rules that decree members should not interfere in other people’s lives, rules that create psychic nonaggression pacts which allow each member, supported by the invisible group behind him, to work his way through his own nightmare of self-imposed darkness.
If anyone had ever told Lars Jenssen about those rules, he had long since forgotten them, or maybe he did remember but was simply ignoring them.
“The thing is, Beau, you gotta give ‘em credit for doing the best they could.”
“I don’t have to give them anything,” I insisted.
Lars shook his head. “Just a minute here,” he said. “Take my boy Daniel now. He didn’t get drafted, you know. He up and volunteered, for Chrissakes. He went over to Vietnam and got hisself blasted to pieces all for nothing. I cussed him for that, cussed him good, too. Not just after he was dead neither, but right then, at the time, when he was leaving.
“I cussed Danny and told him he was too goddamned stupid to be any son of mine. Course, it wasn’t true, and it like to broke poor Aggie’s heart, me carrying on that way all the while her only son was packing up his stuff to leave home and go off to war. And I cussed him later on, too, when I’d be out in the boat, just me and God and the ocean…”
Lars broke off suddenly, stopped cold, and didn’t continue.
Any mention of the Vietnam War always gets to me, because when the war came, I didn’t go. It wasn’t that I was a draft-dodger or a protester. I simply didn’t get drafted, although God knows I was prime cannon fodder material, and you can be damn sure I didn’t volunteer, either. By the time I was in college and eligible for the draft, my mother was already sick and dying. I’ve wondered sometimes if maybe one of her friends wasn’t on the local draft board. Maybe that would help explain why I’m still walking around in one piece when lots of other people aren’t, including Lars Jenssen’s son, Daniel. Lately I’ve wondered if going into law enforcement wasn’t a way to make up for what I have somehow come to regard as dereliction of duty.