Everybody's Fool

Triangle

HILLDALE CEMETERY IN North Bath was cleaved right down the middle, its Hill and Dale sections divided by a two-lane macadam road, originally a colonial cart path. Death was not a thing unknown to the town’s first hearty residents, but they seemed to have badly misjudged how much of it there’d be, how much ground would be needed to accommodate those lost to harsh winters, violent encounters with savages and all manner of illness. Or was it life, their own fecundity, they’d miscalculated? Ironically, it amounted to the same thing. The plot of land set aside on the outskirts of town became crowded, then overcrowded, then chock-full, until finally the dead broke containment, spilling across the now-paved road onto the barren flats and reaching as far as the new highway spur that led to the interstate. Where they’d head next was anybody’s guess.

Though blighted by Dutch elm disease in the ’70s and more recently by a mold that attacked tree roots, causing them to weaken and constrict and allowing the ground, without warning, to collapse in pits, the original Hill section was still lovely, its mature plantings offering visitors shade and cool breezes. The gentle, rolling terrain and meandering gravel pathways felt natural and comfortable, even giving the impression that those resting beneath its picturesque hummocks — some interred before the Revolutionary War — had come there by choice rather than necessity. They seemed not so much deceased as peacefully drowsing beneath tilting headstones that resembled weathered comfy hats worn at rakish angles. Given the choice of waking into a world even more full of travail than the version they left, who could blame them for punching the snooze button and returning to their slumbers for another quarter century or so?

By contrast, the newer Dale was as flat as a Formica tabletop and every bit as aesthetically pleasing. Its paved pathways were laid out on a grid, the more contemporary grave sites baked and raw looking, its lawn, especially the stretch nearest the highway, a quilt of sickly yellows and fecal browns. The adjacent acreage, where the Ultimate Escape Fun Park had once been pictured, was boggy and foul. Lately, during periods of prolonged rain, its pestilential groundwater tunneled under the road, loosening the soil and tugging downhill the caskets of those most recently interred. After a good nor’easter there was no guarantee that the grave site you visited featured the same casket as the week before. To many the whole thing defied logic. With all that seeping water, the Dale should have been richly verdant, whereas everything planted there shriveled and died, as if in sympathy with its permanent, if shifty, inhabitants. There had to be contamination involved, people said. All those putrid acres had been used as an unofficial dump for as long as anybody could remember, which was why they’d been purchased so cheaply by the fun park’s planners. Recently, during a prolonged drought, dozens of leaking metal drums decorated with skulls and crossbones had surfaced. Some were old and rusty, leaking God-only-knew-what; other newcomers were labeled “chrome,” which cast a pall of suspicion on neighboring Mohawk, a town once rich in tanneries, but these accusations were emphatically and for the most part convincingly denied. Anybody wanting to know what those tanneries did with their dyes and carcinogenic chemicals only had to visit the local landfill, the stream that ran through town or the hospital’s oncology ward. Still, didn’t the drums of toxic slurry have to come from somewhere? Downstate most likely. On this point the history of New York was unambiguous. Shit — both liquid and solid, literal and metaphorical — ran uphill in defiance of physics, often into the Catskills, at times all the way to the Adirondacks.

No jaunty, charming grave markers in Dale. Here the stones were laid purposefully flat so they couldn’t be tipped over by teenage hooligans. Bath’s legendary eighth-grade English teacher, Beryl Peoples, whose dim view of human nature she occasionally shared in acerbic letters to the North Bath Weekly Journal, had warned what would happen. With all the stones lying flat, she cautioned, and without any trees or hedgerows to provide an obstacle, visitors would treat the cemetery like a supermarket parking lot and drive directly to whatever grave they had in mind. This warning had been dismissed as perverse and outrageous, a slander on the citizenry, but the old woman had been vindicated. Not a week went by without someone calling the police station to report tire tracks across Grandma’s headstone, right where her survivors imagined her upturned, beatific face to be. “How’d you like it if somebody drove a pickup over your skull?” the angry caller would want to know.

Chief of Police Douglas Raymer, arriving at Hilldale late to witness the interment of Judge Barton Flatt, was always at a loss how to respond to such queries, which seemed to him so fundamentally flawed that you couldn’t even tell if they were real questions. Were people inviting him to draw the obvious distinction between driving an automobile over an ancestor’s grave — an insensitive, inconsiderate act, sure — and driving it over a living person’s head, obviously a homicidal and criminal one? How was it helpful for him to imagine what either felt like? It was as if people expected him to make sense of both the physical world and its miscreants, the latter too numerous to count, too various to explicate, the former too deeply mysterious to fathom. When had either become part of the police chief’s job description? Wasn’t explaining the world’s riddles and humans’ behaviors what philosophers and psychiatrists and priests were paid to do? Most of the time Raymer had no idea why he himself did what he did, never mind other people.

Whatever his job was, most days — and today was certainly no exception — it sucked. As a patrolman he’d imagined that, as chief, his hours would be filled with genuine police work, or at least real public service, but after two terms he now knew better. Of course in North Bath most crimes didn’t demand much detective work. A woman would turn up at the hospital looking like somebody’d beaten the shit out of her, claiming she tripped over her child’s toy. When you visited her husband and offered to shake, the hand he reluctantly extended looked more like a monstrous fruit, purple and swollen, the skin splitting and oozing interior juices. But even such dispiritingly mundane investigations were fascinating compared with Raymer’s current duties as chief of police. When he wasn’t attending the funerals of people he didn’t even like or addressing groups of “concerned citizens” who seemed less interested in any solutions he might propose than how much churlish invective he could be forced to swallow, he was a glorified clerk, a mere functionary who spent his time filling out forms, reporting to selectmen, going over budgets. Some days he never got out from behind his desk. He was getting fat. Also, the pay really sucked. Okay, sure, he made more than he had as a patrolman, but not enough more to cover the endless aggravation. He supposed he could live with the fact that the job sucked if he was any good at it, but the truth was that he sucked. He had no idea what he’d have done without Charice — speaking of aggravation — and her incessant badgering. Because she was right, he was increasingly forgetful and unfocused and preoccupied. Since Becka…

But no, he wasn’t going to think about her. He would not. He would concentrate on the here and now.

Which was hot as Uganda. By the time Raymer crossed the cemetery parking lot and walked the hundred or so yards to where a couple dozen mourners were clustered around Judge Flatt’s open grave, he was drenched in sweat. Such punishing heat was unheard of in May. Here in the foothills of the Adirondacks, Memorial Day weekend, the unofficial beginning of summer, was almost always profoundly disappointing to the region’s winter-ravaged populace, who seemed to believe they could will summer into being. They would have their backyard barbecues even when temperatures dipped into the high forties and they had to dig out their parkas. They would play softball, even after a week’s worth of frigid rains made a soupy mess of the diamond. If a pale, weak sun came out they would go out to the reservoir to water-ski. But this year the town’s fervent prayers had been answered, as they so often were, at least in Raymer’s experience, with ironic vengeance. Midnineties for the past three days, no end in sight.

Raymer would’ve been more than content to suffer on the periphery of today’s proceedings, but he mistakenly made eye contact with the mayor, who, before he could look away, motioned for him to join the other dignitaries, which he reluctantly did. Yesterday, he’d tried his best to weasel out of this funeral, even going so far as to volunteer Charice, who was growing increasingly desperate to get away from the station house, to attend in his place. He’d explained to Gus that he not only had no particular affection for Barton Flatt but also counted him among the many banes of his existence. But the mayor was having none of it. The judge had been an important man, and Gus expected Raymer not just to attend but to be decked out in his dress blues, heat or no heat.

So here he was under the punishing, unseasonable sun, honoring a man who’d disdained him for the better part of two decades. Not that Raymer was alone in this. Disdain was His Honor’s default mode, and he made no secret that he considered all human beings venal (a term Raymer had to look up) and feckless (another). If he disliked criminals, he was even less fond of lawyers and policemen, who in his opinion were supposed to know better. The very first time Raymer had been summoned to the judge’s chambers, after accidentally discharging his weapon, the judge had fixed him with his trademark baleful stare for what had felt like an eternity before turning his attention to Ollie North, the chief back then. “You know my thoughts on arming morons,” he told Ollie. “You arm one, you have to arm them all. Otherwise it’s not even good sport.” Over the years Raymer had had numerous opportunities to improve the man’s low estimation of him but had managed only to worsen it.

But of course there was another reason Raymer had tried to weasel out of this. He hadn’t been back to Hilldale since Becka’s funeral, and he wasn’t at all sure how he’d react to her proximity. He was pretty sure she was out of his system, but what if the shock and pain of her loss came flooding back and he broke down and started sobbing over the memory of a woman who’d made a complete fool of him? What if legitimate mourners witnessed his blubbering? Wouldn’t his unmanly sorrow make a mockery of their more heartfelt grief?

“You’re late,” Gus said out of the corner of his mouth, when Raymer joined him.

“Sorry,” Raymer replied, out of the opposite corner of his own, though he wasn’t and in this heat he hadn’t the energy to pretend otherwise. “A call came in as I was leaving.”

“And you couldn’t let somebody else handle it?”

Raymer had a ready answer. “I thought you’d want me to handle it myself.”

At this the mayor twitched visibly. “Alice?”

“She’s fine. I brought her back home.”

This was Gus’s batshit wife, who, unless Raymer was mistaken, was off her meds again. Charice had radioed him apologetically, explaining the situation. “Really?” Raymer said, his heart sinking. “Not the phone again?”

“Yes indeedy,” Charice confirmed.

The new cellular telephones, rampant in New York and Albany for more than a year (and gaining traction up the road in Schuyler Springs), still hadn’t really caught on in Bath. Gus had one and was threatening to get one for Raymer, with whom he wanted to be in more or less constant touch. Alice had apparently observed people talking on these and immediately understood their application to her own circumstance. Seeing no reason that the pink phone in her bedroom wouldn’t serve her purposes nicely, she unhooked the receiver from its cord and put the neutered device in her bag. Then, out in public, when she felt the conversational urge, she took it out and began speaking in the manner of someone talking on an actual cell phone and, in the process, totally freaking people out.

“Why don’t you let me take care of this?” Charice had said. “You’ll be late for the funeral.”

But Raymer was reluctant to allow anyone else to confront the poor woman. She was often frightened by uniforms, but she’d been a friend of Becka’s and always recognized him, though his uniform did seem to confuse her.

“No, I’m glad to do it,” Raymer said. He was actually fond of the woman. Most of Bath’s crazies were belligerent, whereas Alice was docile as a lamb. More than anything, she seemed lonely. Becka’s death had hit her hard.

“Maybe another woman—” Charice continued, not unreasonably.

“Thanks, but I need a cool head at HQ,” he told her, his usual line. It happened to be true, though. Charice did have the best head in the station house, including his own.

“What. You think I’m gonna scare the mayor’s wife? Me being black and all?”

“No, Charice,” he assured her. “That thought never crossed my mind.” Though it had, just for an instant, before decency could send it packing. “Where is she?”

“The park,” she said. “I just hope you don’t think you’re fooling anybody.”

“Charice, it really has nothing to do with—”

“You just don’t want to go to that funeral,” she said, wrong-footing him with this new tack.

“It won’t take long,” he said, though in truth he hoped it would.

“Because I could send Miller.”

“Miller,” he repeated. Could she be serious? Miller? “He’s liable to shoot her.”

“He’s standing right here, Chief.”

Raymer sighed, massaging his forehead. “Tell him I’m sorry. That was unkind.”

“I’m kidding. He’s not really standing here.”

“Then I’m not sorry.”

“He could’ve been, is my point. This is how you’re always getting into trouble.”

“I’m always in trouble?”

“I’m not happy until you’re not happy?”

“I asked you not to bring that up, Charice.”

“I’m just saying.”

“I know, Charice. You’re always just saying. I’m asking you to please stop just saying, okay?”

He found Alice sitting on a bench in front of the war memorial. Even in the shade it was blistering hot, though she appeared not to have noticed. She held the pink receiver to her ear. “I could never be so cruel to a friend,” she said to whomever she imagined she was talking to.

“Hello, Mrs. Moynihan,” Raymer said, sitting down next to her. At some point in her life Alice had apparently been a hippie, and now, in her late fifties, had become one again. She’d stuck a dandelion in her long, graying hair and wasn’t, he noticed, wearing a bra. Charice had been right. Again. He should’ve let her handle this, just as she’d suggested. She’d nailed his motive, too. He hadn’t wanted to go to the funeral. “How are you today?”

Alice regarded him strangely, as if stumped by the question, then smiled, having evidently decided that, despite his policeman disguise, he was someone she actually knew. Pressing the spot on the phone where the answer/hang-up button would’ve been if it really was a cellular phone, she slipped it in her bag. “Becka says hello,” she told him, causing a chill to run up Raymer’s spine even as a bead of sweat trickled down. This wasn’t the first time she’d mentioned being in touch with his dead wife.

“Tell her I said hi back.”

Alice sighed and looked away, as if embarrassed. “So many men.”

It took Raymer a moment to realize they weren’t talking about Becka anymore. She was looking at the columns of names on the memorial.

“Boys, most of them,” he said.

“Yes, boys. My son is there.”

Which was untrue. She and Gus were childless. She’d been married before, but his understanding was there’d been no offspring from that marriage either.

“War is a terrible thing.”

“Yes,” he agreed. Three names in the Vietnam grouping belonged to classmates of his.

“Becka wanted children.”

“No,” he said, remembering the only time they’d discussed it. Becka had been adamantly opposed, so he’d pretended he didn’t want any, either. “I don’t think she did, actually.”

“I’ll ask her next time.”

“Can I give you a lift home, Alice?”

“Should I go home?”

“Gus said you should,” Raymer told her. A lie, though it’s what he would have said had he been aware she’d slipped her leash again.

“Gus loves me,” she said, as if reporting a curious, little-known fact.

They rose and Raymer walked her over to his Jetta and helped her inside. They didn’t speak again until he pulled in to the driveway of the old Victorian where she and Gus lived, the last house on Upper Main, across from the entrance to Sans Souci Park. Before getting out, she turned to face him. “I keep trying to remember who you are,” she said.

—

“WHERE IN THE WORLD did they find this guy?” Raymer whispered to Gus.

The clergyman delivering the eulogy actually looked a bit like Alice. He had shoulder-length hair, and the intricate, multicolored stitching on his gauzy, flowing tunic suggested…what? That he had a girlfriend? That he embroidered in his spare time instead of watching sports on TV? There was something viscerally repellent about him, Raymer decided, though it took him a minute to figure out what. With no shirt collar visible above the neckline of the tunic, neither cuffs at the wrist nor socks at the ankle, he gave the impression of being naked underneath his glorified shift, and Raymer was visited by an unwanted vision of the man’s dark, swinging genitalia.

“For more than four decades,” Reverend Tunic intoned, “Judge Barton Flatt was the voice of justice and reason in our fair city. That was the phrase he used to describe this place we all hold dear. Our fair city.”

Raymer stifled a groan. He was reasonably confident that His Honor had never once uttered any such words. In fact Flatt had exhibited little affection of any kind, except for an abstract concept he called “small-town justice,” which he claimed to dispense. How that differed from other kinds of justice Raymer never had the temerity to ask, but he suspected it meant “likely to be reversed in a higher court.” Proud of his maverick reputation, the judge had rendered his verdicts with the resigned air of a man who knew all too well that other legal minds would in the fullness of time see things differently. Our fair city? Raymer didn’t think so.

Dear God was it hot. He could feel distinct rivulets of perspiration tracking down his chest, between his shoulder blades and from beneath his armpits, all this moisture puddling in his bunched-up jockeys. At the bottom of the open grave, which was a good six feet deep, was a patch of shade that Raymer found himself genuinely longing for. That far down it would be cool and fresh smelling. How pleasant it would be to just crawl in and curl up, to rest in such coolness. Okay, there were probably finer things for a man to desire, but in all honesty he couldn’t bring any of them to mind. His encounter with poor Alice, and her referencing Becka out of the blue, had caused his spirits — already near low ebb — to plummet further. Since his wife’s death a year ago — okay, fine, so he would think about her — he simply hadn’t been himself. Most mornings, even after a good night’s sleep, he woke up feeling so dull and lethargic that he had to talk himself into getting out of bed. Also, his appetites were on the fritz. His sex drive had disappeared completely, and down at the station Charice often had to remind him to eat. Grief, was how she explained it, but Raymer had his doubts. Sure, he’d loved Becka once, loved her with his whole heart, and the way she’d died was indescribably horrible, but now he was mostly just curious to know who she’d been about to run off with.

Gus nudged him, his voice barely audible. “How’s your speech coming?”

“Almost done,” Raymer assured him, though he hadn’t written a word. Monday’s big event, the capstone of the holiday weekend, the renaming of the middle school in honor of Beryl Peoples, was something else he’d tried unsuccessfully to weasel out of. Somehow Gus had found out he’d been Miss Beryl’s student and had immediately dragooned him into the proceedings. Raymer explained he was a C-plus student at best and could hardly exemplify her teaching prowess. Why not ask somebody who’d at least gotten a good grade? Because the smart kids, Gus informed him, had all moved away, as you’d expect. No, Raymer would have to do it. Earlier in the week he’d sat down with a yellow legal pad and made a couple feeble attempts before giving up. This afternoon he’d try again. If he came up empty, he’d ask Charice to write something.

“Our…fair…city,” Reverend Tunic repeated in mock wonder. Through rhetoric alone, the man had worked himself into a state approaching rapture, and he opened his arms wide, as if to embrace all of Bath, though at the moment his only constituency, apart from the handful of wilting mourners, were those in graves that extended in all directions as far as the eye could see. “As we lay this giant of a man to rest, perhaps we should pause to reflect on what he meant by those words.”

Giant of a man? Five foot six, a hundred and forty pounds, tops. Raymer could’ve clean and jerked this particular giant and given him a good, long toss. In fact, on more than one occasion, he’d imagined doing that very thing.

“Did he mean that here in Schuyler County we’re blessed with an abundance of natural beauty and an embarrassment of resources? Of mountains and lakes and streams and springs?”

Springs? Why bring them up? In Bath they’d all run dry.

“Of cool, dense forests where once trod swift, silent Iroquois in their soft, supple moccasins?”

Iroquois? Raymer’s heart sank. If fucking Indians were creeping into the judge’s eulogy, on what possible grounds might anything else be deemed irrelevant?

“I believe he did,” declared Reverend Tunic. “But was this all he meant?”

Raymer was willing to stipulate that this was the sum total of the deceased’s intention if that meant they could all go home, but no such luck.

“I for one believe that this was not all.”

Was it conceivable that this doofus represented an actual church somewhere? He seemed more the start-your-own-religion sort of guy. Or was he some kind of interfaith minister on loan from the college in Schuyler Springs, where he was charged with soothing all the students’ sensibilities in the unlikely event they sobered up long enough to have any. An academic affiliation might explain both his windy nonsense and the confidence with which he delivered it. Still, you had to wonder what sort of instructions he’d been given. Hadn’t anyone informed him that Judge Flatt had been Bath’s foremost atheist? That this was why there’d been no church service? Did he not understand that his appearance here today was a reluctant concession to the man’s status as a public figure and the community’s desire to pay its final respects? (Okay, Raymer himself felt no such need but conceded that others might.) Reverend Tunic, far from comprehending he’d been given an ass-backward task, seemed convinced it was his duty to deliver the same sermon he’d have preached from his own pulpit to honor the passing of his own beloved deacon. Or, at the very least, to ensure that these proceedings would require the same amount of time under the broiling sun as they’d have taken indoors with the AC blasting.

What would Miss Beryl have made of this dimwit? “When you write,” she’d advised Raymer and his classmates, “imagine a rhetorical triangle.” At the top of their essays she always drew two triangles, the first representing the essay the student had written and the second, a differently shaped one that would supposedly help improve it. As if bringing in geometry — another subject that had given Raymer fits — would clarify things. The sides of the old lady’s triangle were Subject, Audience and Speaker, and most of the questions she scribbled in the margins of their papers had to do with the relationship between them. What are you writing ABOUT? she often wanted to know, drawing a squiggly line up the page to the S that marked the subject side. Even when they were writing on a topic she herself had assigned, she’d insist that the essay’s subject was unclear. Other times she’d query: Just who do you imagine your AUDIENCE to be? (Well, you, Raymer always wanted to remind her, though she steadfastly denied this was the case.) What are your readers doing right now? What leads you to believe they’ll be interested in any of this? (Well, if they weren’t, why had she assigned this subject to begin with? Did she imagine he was interested?)

But her most mysterious and baffling questions always had to do with the speaker. That side of Raymer’s triangle was always so tiny, and the other two so elongated, that the resulting geometric shape resembled a boat ramp. On each of his essays she wrote Who are you? as if Douglas Raymer weren’t printed clearly at the top of the first page. When questioned about this, her explanation was equally baffling. There was always, she claimed, an “implied writer” lurking behind the writing itself. Not you, the actual author — not the person you saw when you looked in the mirror — but rather the “you” that you became when you picked up a pen with the intention to communicate. Who is this Douglas Raymer? she liked to ask provocatively. (Nobody, he wanted to tell her, perfectly willing to be a nonperson if it meant she’d leave him alone.)

Because it seemed so important to her, Raymer had tried his best to comprehend the old lady’s triangle, though it remained as deeply mysterious to him as the Holy Trinity’s Father, Son and Holy Ghost. At least that was billed as a profound mystery that you were meant to contemplate, even while knowing that it was beyond human comprehension — a great comfort to Raymer, since it was certainly beyond his. Whereas Miss Beryl’s rhetorical triangle was something he was supposed to understand.

Today, ironically, more than three decades later, Raymer finally grasped what she had been going on about: Reverend Tunic’s triangle was missing two whole sides. He’d clearly given no thought whatsoever to his audience or its suffering in the punishing heat. Nor did his subject really matter. Judge Flatt himself, of whom the man clearly knew nothing, amounted to little more than a rhetorical opportunity. Worse, to fill the resulting void, the speaker side of the triangle, the one that truly flummoxed Raymer as a kid, was the part Reverend Tunic had down cold. If asked, Who are you? the clergyman would have replied that he was somebody and, to boot, somebody really special. Raymer doubted Miss Beryl would have shared his conviction, but so what? The Reverend Tunics of this world didn’t care. Where did such breathtaking self-assurance come from? Though he loathed the man viscerally, Raymer couldn’t help envying his dead certainty. Untroubled by a single misgiving, this Reverend Tunic obviously considered himself the right man for this job, probably for any job, even before the job was explained to him. He had everything figured out, couldn’t wait to share and seemed to feel there was enough of him to go around.

By contrast, Raymer had always been tortured by self-doubt, allowing other people’s opinions about him to trump his own so thoroughly that he was never sure he actually had any. As a kid he’d been particularly susceptible to name-calling, which not only wounded him deeply but turned him imbecilic. Call him stupid, and he suddenly was stupid. Call him a scaredy-cat, and he became a coward. More depressing, adulthood hadn’t changed him much. Judge Flatt’s remark about arming morons had hurt his feelings precisely because he’d been sized up correctly. Because, face it, his judgment had failed that day. He’d allowed Donald Sullivan — another bane of his existence — to get under his skin. That was who’d been driving his pickup on the sidewalk in a residential neighborhood, and Raymer had had every right to arrest him. But he shouldn’t have unholstered his weapon, certainly shouldn’t have aimed it, even in warning, at an unarmed civilian, and he certainly had no business flicking the pistol’s safety off and thus compounding his first two errors. He couldn’t remember pulling the trigger but must’ve — a warning shot was how he’d immediately rationalized it, the thought traveling faster than the bullet. Not much faster, though. A split second later came the distant sound of tinkling glass from — miraculously, Raymer still thought — a tiny octagonal bathroom window a block and a half away, beneath which an elderly woman had been seated on her commode. Had she been quicker about her business or more spry in rising when it was finished, she would’ve caught the bullet in the back of her head.

The incident had made a pacifist of him. For a good month, until Ollie North noticed something untoward about his bearing and asked to see his weapon, Raymer never even loaded it. Nor would he have thought to wear it if the handbook hadn’t stated specifically that the uniform was incomplete without it. Ollie, even more mortified by Raymer’s unloaded gun than he’d been by the accidental discharge of his loaded one, had explained that if anything was more dangerous than a civilian with a loaded gun it was a cop with an unloaded one. “Do you have a death wish?” he wanted to know. Even as a young patrolman Raymer knew that the correct answer to that was no, but instead of saying that he’d just shrugged, leaving the question hanging.

What made him so vulnerable to the judgments of others, he’d always wondered, when others got off scot-free? Okay, maybe the dead judge would’ve had little use for this Reverend Tunic. Were he alive to hear his preposterous eulogy, he’d likely have remanded him into custody for character defamation. But to Raymer the two men were more alike than different: neither seemed to worry about being wrong, nor were they inclined to revise their thinking. (Revise, revise, revise, Miss Beryl always recommended. Writing is thinking, and good, honest thinking involves revision.)

Not judging, though, apparently. Raymer had been summoned to Flatt’s courtroom on numerous occasions, and to his knowledge the man never, ever amended his original verdict. Most recently Raymer had given testimony against a man named George Spanos, who lived on the outskirts of our fair city with his wife and children and a dozen mangy dogs, all of which he beat savagely until they, too, became savages. When Raymer’d gone to arrest him, he’d been bitten three times, twice by dogs and once by a feral child. (The woman, blessedly, had been toothless.) The little boy’s bite wound had become infected, requiring antibiotics, and the dog’s had necessitated a tetanus shot, yet when Raymer limped to the witness stand, Flatt evinced not the slightest sympathy, even though, unlike the earlier incident, Raymer’d been clearly and unambiguously in the right. There, under the magistrate’s studied, theatrical gaze, Raymer couldn’t help feeling that somehow he and the accused had swapped stations. It was he, the chief of police, who was being asked to explain himself. It was understandable, the judge allowed, that he’d been bitten by the dogs. But how in the world, he begged Raymer to explain, had he contrived to get nipped by a child as well? During the entire proceeding Spanos sat next to his lawyer wearing an expression of aggrieved innocence so convincing that Raymer almost believed it. Whereas he himself — and he didn’t require any mirror to see the face he presented to the world — looked like he always looked: guilty as charged. Clearly, Judge Flatt considered him a fool, which left him no choice but to become one. It was appearances that mattered, and as usual they ran against him. Justice? How could there be any such thing when innocence looked like guilt and vice versa?

Even more galling than his repeated humiliations in that courtroom was the fact that the old goat had taken a shine to Becka. Not long after they married, she’d by chance been seated next to Flatt at a retirement dinner. The judge always had a keen eye for attractive young women, and after his own wife’s death he’d evidently seen no reason that, as a geezer, he shouldn’t indulge himself in the occasional flirtation with someone else’s. That evening Becka had been provocatively attired, at least by North Bath standards, in a black dress with a plunging neckline. Throughout the dinner she and the judge, who were seated at the far end of the banquet table, conspired like old cronies with a vast store of shared memories. At one point their heads came together, and Becka’s eyes briefly met Raymer’s before she burst out laughing. Naturally, he’d concluded that His Honor was recounting for her amusement the day her damn fool of a husband nearly shot an old lady off her toilet.

“What a sweetie,” Becka enthused later, strapping herself into the RAV, the seat belt causing her dress to gap and one lovely breast to be fully exposed. Had Flatt been treated to this heartwarming spectacle over the ginger-carrot soup, Raymer wondered. “He couldn’t have been nicer. Why’d you warn me about him?”

“Well, he did call me a moron,” he reminded her. He’d told Becka about the gun incident early in their relationship, feeling it was probably best that she hear about it from him rather than the Bath grapevine where the story — like so many others where he was the butt of the joke — still had considerable currency. “In front of my boss. In front of the man I’d arrested.”

“Well,” his wife began, pausing long enough for him to wonder where this was going. (That was ages ago?…I’m sure he didn’t mean anything by it?…Can you blame him?) What he hoped she’d say was Actually, he spoke very highly of you, but of course she didn’t. Instead: “I know how much you were dreading the evening, but I had a good time.”

In her considered opinion Raymer was far too self-conscious. “Not everything’s about you,” she liked to say, making him sound narcissistic. She was right, though. He did have a bad habit of internalizing things. Take, for instance, the judge’s two dramatic resignations. Could it be coincidence that he’d tendered the first of these the very day Raymer was elected police chief? And that his second came exactly four years later when he was reelected? Yes, Becka assured him; it not only could be a coincidence, it most assuredly was. Over the last two decades, the poor man had battled three separate cancers, first a tumor on his lung, then some particularly aggressive cells in the prostate and finally a small but malevolent nodule attached to his brain stem, a malignancy that for a time seemed merely to focus his ferocious intellect, to sharpen his wit and tongue, neither of which in Raymer’s view had required further honing. In fact, he had just about concluded that cancer wasn’t the lethal killer it was cracked up to be when word came that the old man had lapsed into a coma and then, a few days later, that he was finally gone.

About which Raymer was surprised to have mixed feelings. On one hand, he’d never again be fixed by that scrotum-shrinking judicial gaze of disapproval. Nor, except in memory, would he be called names by this figure whose opinion carried such weight. But if the spirit lived on, as many people believed, didn’t that mean Judge Flatt would consider Raymer an idiot for all eternity? How fair was that? Was he really so ungifted? True, he’d never made stellar grades in school. Though he’d been orderly and never caused trouble, his teachers all seemed relieved at the end of the school year when he moved up a grade with his peers and became someone else’s burden. Only Miss Beryl, who kept drawing her triangles and asking him who he was in the margins of his compositions, had seemed to feel something like affection for him, though even here Raymer couldn’t be sure. The old woman was forever shoving books at him, and while another boy might have considered these gifts encouragement, he had wondered if they might instead be punishment for some misdeed he hadn’t noticed.

The cover of one book, he recalled, pictured a bunch of people hanging out of a hot-air balloon. To him the illustration had looked all wrong. The colors of the balloon were too bright, and the humans in its tiny dangling basket looked happy to be trapped there when common sense suggested they’d be scared shitless. Another book seemed to be about a group of explorers who’d entered the bowels of the earth through a volcano. What the hell was she trying to tell him? That he should consider going someplace far away? That up or down really didn’t matter so long as he just went?

He’d thanked her for each book, of course, but at home he’d hidden them all on the top shelf of his closet where his tiny mother, unless she stood on a chair, couldn’t spot them and brood about where they’d come from. Throughout his childhood she’d harbored a deep-seated fear that he’d end up a thief, like her own father, and whenever he came into possession of anything she herself hadn’t given him, she immediately demanded to know where he got it. If his explanation struck her as suspicious or implausible there would be trouble — the same screaming and crying and crazy hair tearing that had finally driven his father away. The whole hair-pulling thing particularly frightened Raymer, because hers was already so thin you could see her pale scalp, and he didn’t want to be the only kid in town with a bald mother.

“They’re going to come and take you away,” she warned him over and over, her eyes swollen and red rimmed and wild. “That’s what they do with thieves, you know.”

Then she’d fix him with that look of hers, waiting for him to absorb the truth she was telling him, after which she’d sigh mightily and stare into the distance, into memory, at the central event of her own childhood. “They took my father. Came right up on the porch and knocked on our door. I begged Mama not to open it, but she did and they came inside and just took him.” She’d relive the awful moment for a long beat, then return to her son and the present for the inevitable postscript. “How he cried! How he begged them not to take him!” The clear implication was that, when the time came, Raymer would likewise blubber and beg the policemen not to cart him off to jail. Though he’d never stolen anything and had no desire to, he hadn’t been able to entirely discount the possibility of what she foresaw so clearly. His plan, if you could call it that, was to keep from wanting anything bad enough for stealing it to become a serious temptation.

Many of the books Miss Beryl had given him were old and musty smelling, their pages dog-eared, the sort of books you wanted to give away, but others were in better condition, a few brand-new. Often the name Clive Peoples Jr. was inscribed on the flyleaf. When he asked Miss Beryl about these inscriptions, she told him this was her son, but he was all grown up now, a banker. Something about how she said this suggested that either Clive the boy or Clive the man had disappointed her. Had he, too, failed to master the rhetorical triangle? Raymer’s heart went out to the kid. Imagine having her for a mother, your whole life a giant margin for her to ask her impossible questions in.

Still, he felt bad about only pretending to read the books she’d given him, and he wished he could’ve figured out how to get her to stop. He also wished she’d quit asking him about the ones he claimed to have read. Why couldn’t she be more like his other teachers, who looked at him blankly the following fall when he said hello to them outside Woolworths, having in a matter of months forgotten his existence entirely? Old Lady Peoples, he feared, forgot exactly nothing, and she had no intention of forgetting him.

Like so many of his anxieties, this one proved well founded. Throughout high school, Miss Beryl persisted in tormenting him. “What are you reading, Douglas?” she asked whenever their paths crossed, and when he couldn’t come up with a single title, she’d tell him to stop by her house because “I have several books I think will interest you.” Each time he promised he would, though of course he never did. She’d retired from teaching by then, and it was possible she was just lonely, her husband, the high school’s driver’s ed teacher, having been killed in the line of duty a decade earlier, launched through the windshield by a nervous beginner. He was sorry if she was lonely, but that was no fault of his, and he sensed her firm intention to keep posting her queries in the margins of his psyche forever.

After graduating, he tried a year of community college downstate, but then his mother fell ill and there’d been no money, so he’d returned to Bath. Having lost touch with Miss Beryl, he discovered he was no longer so afraid of her and maybe even missed her a little. More than once he thought about paying her a visit, maybe asking her what she’d meant by giving him all those books. He might even confess that he had no more idea who Douglas Raymer was now than he did in eighth grade. But by this time she’d become Donald Sullivan’s landlady, and he doubted it was possible for the same person to feel affection for two such different men. Fine, he told himself. Let the old woman write in Sully’s margins. See how he likes it.

It was during this same period that he got a custodial job at the college in Schuyler Springs, and it was there he met an old campus cop who suggested he go to the Academy, which he’d eventually done. A uniform, he then discovered, was the next best thing to an identity, and even Miss Beryl seemed genuinely pleased, if a little surprised, when she saw him in it for the first time. “That outfit seems to have done wonders for your self-confidence,” she told him. “Your mother must be proud.” Actually, unless Raymer was mistaken, his mother was more relieved than proud. His becoming a policeman seemed to have eroded her conviction that he would end up in the clink. He didn’t have the heart to tell her that the two career paths weren’t mutually exclusive.

Then Becka had come along. Raymer pulled her over for doing fifty in a thirty-five. She had a Pennsylvania license and plates, having moved to Bath just a week earlier. She was an actress, she explained (she was certainly beautiful enough), and she was speeding because she was late for rehearsal in Schuyler Springs and the play’s director was going to be furious. In fact, she might even lose her part. Was there any chance he could let her off with a warning? God, her smile.

He wanted to, but no. She’d been traveling at an unsafe speed, and it wasn’t right to let her off just because she was beautiful and had smiled at him and because she managed in handing over her license to touch his wrist. His decision to write her a ticket seemed to genuinely astonish her, and she later admitted that she’d been stopped for speeding any number of times without ever having been given a citation. It had made her wonder what kind of man he was. Three months later when she said, “You know what? You should ask me to marry you,” he couldn’t believe his good fortune.

How swiftly that sense of good fortune had been undermined. He’d noticed when they left on their honeymoon that Becka’s suitcase was suspiciously heavy, but he was pretty sure that asking her about why would be getting off on the wrong marital foot. When they arrived, though, and he hauled her bag up onto the king-size bed and she released the clasps, several plays and three or four thick novels tumbled out, causing the blood to drain from his face. There’d been lots of books in her apartment, of course, as well as groaning bookcases full of books about acting, as well as novels and plays. It was okay with him that she liked to read. She was a girl, after all, and many of them, like the scrawny ones at the college in Schuyler, were similarly afflicted. But their honeymoon was only for a week. What did she need with so many books? His first horrified thought was that they’d somehow gotten their signals crossed and she meant for the marriage to be platonic. That turned out not to be the case, though after they finished making love, Becka would often sigh contentedly and pick up a book and immediately become engrossed, which made Raymer feel like a short, possibly insignificant chapter. She also read by the pool and on the plane ride back, closing the last of her books just as the wheels touched down.

At the baggage claim, as they watched other people’s luggage circle and waited for their own to emerge, he decided to ask straight out, “Why do you read so much?”

At first she didn’t seem to understand the question, or maybe that its source was genuine, profound bewilderment. Shrugging, she replied, “Who knows? Same reason as anybody, I guess. To escape. There’s mine!” she pointed, momentarily confusing Raymer, who thought maybe she’d spied an escape from their marriage, not just her suitcase. Still, she read to escape? Why? Not once during their glorious week of warm sun and fancy food and drink and knee-buckling sex had Raymer wanted to be anywhere other than right where he was.

“I suppose you know all about the rhetorical triangle,” he said, feeling his eyes fill with unexpected tears. Because naturally she would. Worse, she probably understood it, that and the Holy Trinity and every other abstract concept that had stumped him during his long, tortured childhood and adolescence. Somehow he’d managed to marry someone who’d actually enjoyed school. He could picture his new wife as a kid, sitting there in the front row with her hand raised, practically waving in hopes of being called on, always confident she knew the answer. He could even imagine the expression on her young face — a combination of pity and exultation — when the teacher called not on her but some dullard trying his best to remain invisible in the back row, a boy who almost never knew the right answer and, on those rare occasions that he did, lacked the courage to risk volunteering it.

“What’s a rhetorical triangle?” Becka asked him, hoisting her suitcase off the conveyor and studying him closely. “Are you…crying?”

In fact, he was. “I love you,” he explained, which was true but hardly the reason for these tears. What had become powerfully obvious to him was how profoundly, impossibly different they were. He would be wise to enjoy her while he had her, though that wouldn’t last long.

“Where’s yours, I wonder?” she said, scanning the trundling bags, or pretending to, perhaps annoyed by his unmanly public show of emotion. “They went on the plane at the same time. Wouldn’t you think they’d come off together?”

“It’s probably lost,” he said, suddenly sure of it.

“Lord, you’re a pessimistic man,” she said, standing on her toes for a better view. Strange that she should be just as certain that his suitcase would materialize any moment as he was that it was gone for good.

He’d been right, though. His suitcase was lost, and so was he.

—

BECKA, he thought, his eyes filling at the memory of that all-too-brief period when they were still in love. Since none of the other mourners were paying him any attention, he decided to risk glancing toward her grave. He knew roughly where it was, but with the stones lying flat here in Dale, he couldn’t tell precisely. Someone had placed a bouquet of long-stemmed red roses on one of the graves in her section, causing Raymer, who’d let the first anniversary of her death go unmarked, to feel a deep pang of belated guilt. Becka was an only child, her parents having died in a car wreck when she was in high school, and her theater friends were mostly too self-absorbed to miss or even remember her. Which left only Raymer to do so, unless you counted Alice Moynihan.

Or unless you counted the man Becka’d been about to leave him for.

When Gus nudged him again, a perplexed expression on his face, Raymer realized he’d pulled the garage-door remote out of his trouser pocket and was unconsciously fondling it. Not long after her death, he’d sold Becka’s RAV back to the Toyota dealership where they’d bought it two years earlier. He thought he’d cleaned the vehicle out pretty carefully, but the service department, preparing it for resale, discovered the remote when they pushed the driver’s seat all the way back on its runners. “Bet you went crazy looking for this,” the guy said when he returned it to him at the station. “How it got wedged up under the seat like that’s beyond me.”

At the time Raymer had naturally assumed the remote was for their own garage. He’d put the town house on the market the day after her funeral, making a mental note to give the remote to the new owners. Then he’d put it in his desk drawer for safekeeping and promptly forgot all about it until a couple weeks ago. The house had sold pretty quickly, and he distinctly remembered handing over two garage-door remotes, along with the door keys, at the closing. So what was this remote?

“You okay?” Gus whispered.

“I’m fine,” Raymer whispered back, returning the device to his pocket, though in truth he was feeling light-headed.

“Quit weaving.”

Having not realized he was weaving, he quit.

It was possible, of course, that this weird little mystery had nothing to do with Becka. The RAV had been a demo model with several hundred miles on it when they bought it, so the remote might’ve belonged to a salesman at the dealership. Probably not, though. It hadn’t been dropped. No, it had been hidden deliberately. One of the more serious obstacles to small-town adultery was the problem of what to do with your car. If you left it out at the curb, it would be noticed and maybe recognized. You could leave it a couple blocks away, but people would still conclude you were having an affair; they’d just be wrong about who you were having it with. Better to arrive under the cover of darkness, drive directly into your lover’s garage and lower the door before either you or your car could be identified.

“What’s that?” Charice had wanted to know when she entered the office unexpectedly and caught him examining the thing as if it were a fossil.

“A garage-door remote.”

“I can see that,” she told him, irritation her default mode, at least with him. “I mean, like, what’s the story with this one?”

He explained where it had been found, in Becka’s RAV, up under the driver’s seat.

“Throw it away,” she said, without the slightest hesitation.

“Why?” he asked. Because you could tell at a glance that she’d leaped to the same conclusion he had.

“I’ll tell you why. Because it doesn’t necessarily mean what you think it does.”

What we think it does, she meant.

“Could be she let somebody borrow her car,” Charice continued, “and this other person dropped that remote in there.”

“But if somebody borrowed her car, why would that person have his garage-door opener on him? Wouldn’t that be in his car? Do you carry your remote around in your purse?”

“I don’t have one. I don’t even have a garage. Also, it’s none of your business what’s in my purse.”

“Okay,” Raymer said, ignoring her. With Charice you did well to ignore a good portion of what she said. “Then how’d it get wedged up under the driver’s seat?”

She shrugged. “Could be an innocent explanation, is all I’m saying.”

He raised an eyebrow at this.

“Admit it. You been thinkin’ sideways since Becka passed.” Selling the condo, she meant. Moving into the Morrison Arms. Selling the RAV instead of his piece-of-shit Jetta. All three decisions motivated by spite and self-loathing.

“And anyhow,” Charice went on, standing over him now with her hands on her hips, “suppose you’re right, which you aren’t. You plan to do what, exactly? Go around to every house in Bath and point that thing at all the garages and see which door it opens?”

That was, in a nutshell, the very plan taking shape in Raymer’s brain, though he was reluctant to admit it to someone so clearly determined to deride it. But was it such a bad idea? After all, Bath was a small place, and he could cover it neighborhood by neighborhood in his spare time. Wouldn’t that just be good, methodical police work, eliminating the innocent from your inquiries?

“Thing about garage-door openers, Chief? They send out, like, a radio signal, except that one there — the one you’re holding? — that’s not the only remote with the same signal. It’s like the key to your car. Say you own a Volkswagen Jetta.”

“I do own a Volkswagen Jetta.”

“There you go. And you got a key that starts your car.”

“Charice—”

“Here’s what you don’t know ’cause you’re not a criminal. Your key? The one to your car? Probably starts half-a-dozen other VWs, maybe even an Audi or two. Anything German. And that’s just here in Schuyler County. Never mind Albany. Or the rest of New York State.”

As was often the case, Raymer was puzzled by Charice’s logic. “So you are a criminal, since you do know this?”

“I know because I know lots of criminals. ’Cept for me and Jerome”—this was her brother—“our family’s mostly crooks. I got a cousin in Georgia did time for auto theft? He broke into this car and set off the alarm and got himself collared. Tragic part? Turned out he had a key that fit the ignition. Wasn’t any need to break in, even.”

“He was a car thief. He got caught and went to jail. This is tragic how?”

“Plus,” Charice added, undeterred, “how’s it gonna look, the chief of police standing outside citizens’ houses, trying to open their garages? God’s own fool is what you’re gonna look like.”

In this she’d been proven correct. Early the following morning Raymer had begun his investigation in his and Becka’s old neighborhood, sort of as a control. After all, it was unlikely that she’d been having an affair with someone on their block, in which case she’d have walked, not driven. But he was curious to see if Charice was right and the device might open some innocent doors. He’d gone up one side of the street and back down the other without setting a single door aflutter. He’d even tried his and Becka’s old condo on the off chance the remote was a spare he’d forgotten about. Returning to the Jetta, he found a man in a bathrobe waiting for him. “So what’s this about, then?” he said, pointing at the remote, his brow knit with dark suspicion.

“Police business,” Raymer told him, a feeble explanation people sometimes accepted.

“How’s trying to open my garage door police business?”

Raymer repeated what Charice had told him about how these remotes work, implying that his interest was official, that he himself was concerned because “your remote could open my garage door and let you into my house.”

“Except I wasn’t pointing mine at your house. You were pointing yours at mine.”

“I was speaking hypothetically,” Raymer told him.

“I wasn’t,” the man said.

The following day he’d made the mistake of telling Charice about this encounter. “What’d I tell you?” She seemed unnaturally adamant on the subject, though with her it was hard to tell. Charice was pretty adamant about most subjects. “Throw the damn thing away. You want that garage-door remote to mean adultery. Which it doesn’t. Plus you’re ignoring the real problem.”

His mental health, she meant. In Charice’s oft-stated opinion, Raymer was clinically depressed. “I mean…look at where you live,” she said, as if the apartment house he’d moved into after fire-saleing their condo settled the matter. Okay, sure, the Morrison Arms was crappy subsidized Section Eight housing in the equally crappy south end of town. The Moribund Arms, people called it. And yes, half the serious calls that came into the station involved the Arms via drug dealing, loud music playing in the middle of the afternoon, urgent reports of domestic violence, somebody off his meds shouting obscenities in the courtyard at no external referent, even the occasional gunshot. For all Raymer knew, actual arms were sold there. The way he figured it, though, living at the Morrison Arms saved time going to and fro. Wasn’t it also possible that his very presence would reduce the number and seriousness of incidents there? He had to admit there’d been no quantifiable evidence of this so far. Neither the residents nor their guests seemed frightened of him or, for that matter, even inconvenienced by him. Worse, his own apartment had been burgled twice, both crimes still unsolved, though his tape player had turned up at a pawnshop in Schenectady so reasonably priced, Raymer thought, that he’d bought it back.

“Jerome’s right,” Charice insisted, still on the subject of Raymer’s yearlong funk. Her brother had nearly as many opinions about what was wrong with Raymer as she herself did. “Ever since Becka died, you been punishing yourself. Like it was your fault, like it was you steppin’ out on her. That’s what all this is about — you punishing your own self.”

“When I find out who the guy was,” Raymer assured her, holding up the remote, “it’s not me that’s going to get punished.”

“Right. You find out who it was — who you think it was, because his garage door goes up — and you shoot him and go to prison. You tell me who’s the big loser in that scenario.”

Well, Raymer thought, she did have a point, though it was hard to see how a man shot dead could be construed as the winner. Anyway, that wasn’t how this thing would go down. Before there could be any thought of punishment, there’d be an extensive investigation, the painstaking gathering of evidence. The remote would be just one link in a sturdy chain of it, the last link being, he hoped, a confession. Then and only then would he decide on whose ashes would get hauled. He’d tried to explain all this to Charice, but of course she was having none of it. In the three years they’d worked together, he’d never won an argument with the woman and was unlikely to win this one, either.

On the other hand, maybe she was right. Feeling unsteady in the withering heat, with Becka’s grave no more than fifty yards away, he could feel his purpose waver. It was true. Since losing Becka, he had come unmoored. Somewhere along the line he’d lost not only his wife but his faith in justice, in both this world and the next. Nor was it really about punishment. All he wanted was to know who the guy was. Who Becka had preferred to himself. And even he had to admit that this part was crazy, because the list of men Becka preferred over her husband was probably comprehensive. Charice was probably right about the Moribund Arms, where everything from the puke-green shag carpet to the rust-stained ceiling smelled of stale cooking oil and mold and backed-up plumbing. Poor Charice. She was afraid that if he wasn’t careful he was going to become totally lost and completely befucked. Apparently she couldn’t see that he already was.