Everybody's Fool

Slinky

“I BELIEVE,” Reverend Tunic warbled, a hint of Martin Luther King Jr. in his cadence now, “that by our fair city Judge Barton Flatt meant for us to understand that this place we call home is not just comely but fair as in ‘just,’ that our community is a model of rectitude, an exemplar of…”

Here he looked heavenward, as if for an elusive word or abstract concept, apparently finding it in a jet’s vapor trail at thirty thousand feet.

“Of righteousness,” he concluded.

Raymer, looking up as well, felt both dizzy and nauseated, his knees suddenly liquid in the heat. How nice being on that plane would be. In his mind’s eye he could see himself disembarking at its unknown destination, magically dressed for some other line of work. Something he’d be good at. Some new life undreamed of by Becka and Judge Flatt, even by Miss Beryl. Or, for that matter, by himself.

“How, then, we may ask,” Reverend Tunic continued, his gaze still fixed on the heavens, “do we make the great man’s dream a reality? How do we ensure that our fair city is the celestial one of his profound conviction?”

What in the world had possessed him to become a policeman in the first place? Had the attraction been law enforcement’s emphasis on rules? As a boy he’d always found rules comforting. They implied that life was governed by basic principles of fair play, guaranteeing him his turn at bat. And that was important, because he’d already witnessed among his peers too many kids who refused to play fair unless compelled to do so by adults. The rules he’d appreciated most were simple and unambiguous. Do this. Don’t do that. People appreciate clarity, don’t they? Being a policeman, then, would be about order, about implementing the will of the people, about the common good. Right. In actuality, the job had taught him that, far from being comforted by rules, most people were irritated by them. They insisted that even the most sensible, self-explanatory regulations be justified. They demanded exceptions in their own unexceptional cases. They were forever trying to convince him that the rules they’d run afoul of were either stupid or arbitrary, and Raymer had to admit that some of them truly were. Worse, all manner of citizens suspected that laws were enacted expressly to disadvantage them. Poor people concluded that the deck was stacked against them, rich ones that a reshuffle would ruin both them and civilization. Becka, when in the right mood, would argue that marriage was an institution designed to enslave an entire gender, and at times her rhetoric got so personal that you’d have thought Raymer himself had been a member of the original matrimonial planning committee. Back at the Academy the rule of law had made a kind of sense, at least in its broad strokes. Anymore, Raymer wasn’t so sure. So go, he thought. Just get on a plane and leave. Because after Becka’s death something had happened to him. His faith in his profession had eroded, and in light of this, what was keeping him here?

On the other side of the judge’s open grave stood a girl of about twelve — one of His Honor’s nieces or grandchildren? — who was staring intently, brow knit, at Raymer’s midsection. She couldn’t know about the garage-door opener in his pocket, of course, but she seemed to have drawn an erroneous inference about what his hand was up to in there. When he removed it, their eyes met, and a sly, knowing smile spread across her otherwise innocent features. Raymer, feeling himself flush, clasped his hands in front of his crotch and looked past her into the distance, his eye once again drawn to that vapor trail. If he went somewhere new, who would he know? Who would know him? What would he do for a living?

A hundred yards away, off to the side of the unpaved road that separated Hill from Dale, sat the bright yellow backhoe that had no doubt dug the judge’s grave earlier that morning. Raymer recognized Rub Squeers, Sully’s sidekick, sitting in the small patch of shade beside it. Something about his posture suggested that he was weeping. Could he be? Was he, too, remembering a loved one buried nearby? Was he, too, yearning for a new life, a new line of work? Maybe he’d like to swap jobs, Raymer thought, because digging graves, compared with law enforcement, would be both peaceful and rewarding. The dead were past being troubled by the world’s injustice. Nor did they resist order. You could lay them out on a grid by the thousands without a single complaint. Try that on the living and see where it got you. People professed to love straight lines, which provided them, after all, with the shortest distance between two points, but Raymer had come to believe that, deep down, humans preferred to meander. Possibly, he considered, absentmindedly, that’s all Becka had succumbed to — a perfectly natural urge to meander. Perhaps she hadn’t fallen out of love with him so much as she’d become disillusioned by the rigidity of matrimony’s rules: Love, honor, obey. Do this. Don’t do that. Maybe to her, as a policeman, he’d come to represent the straight line she could no longer abide. Was the impulse to meander so terrible? When you did, wasn’t there always the possibility that in the end you’d loop back to where you originally were? Given time, mightn’t Becka have found her way back to him? Maybe it was time, not love, they’d run out of. It was pretty to think so.

He’d been the one to find her. He’d come home early, something he almost never did, at least not lately, not since things had started to sour between them, gradually at first, then suddenly. They’d argued bitterly that morning before he left for work, what about he couldn’t even remember. Nothing. Everything. Lately, even his most benign observations summoned torrents of sarcasm, tears, anger and disdain. Almost overnight, it seemed, the range of his wife’s negative emotions had multiplied exponentially. To Raymer, though, something about her litany of grievance felt out of whack. That she no longer loved him was beyond question, yet something still didn’t ring true. It was almost as if she was doing scenes from all the plays she knew that featured marital discord. He kept looking for continuity, for what she was angry or bitter about on Monday to reappear on Thursday. But no. It was as if she meant to stampede him with a multitude of unrelated complaints that ranged from the fairly benign and specific — his forgetting to lower the toilet seat — to the more vague and global — his disrespect for her feelings — with every offense, large and small, equally weighted.

So when he pulled in to their driveway and saw those three suitcases sitting on the porch, he recognized what they meant or were supposed to — she was leaving him — but more than anything the sight struck him as theatrical, almost comic. The front door was half open. Had she forgotten something and gone back inside for it? He remembered crossing the lawn and thinking they’d probably run right into each other there. She’d be surprised for a moment, then determined. And what would he do? Let her go? Keep her by force, at least until he could get to the bottom of whatever was troubling her?

She was just inside the open door. She’d been hurrying, that much was clear. The rug at the top of the stairs — now in a heap, halfway down — was probably the culprit. Raymer himself had slipped on it more than once. Becka had tasked him with finding a mat to put beneath it, but he kept forgetting, and this, right here, was somehow the consequence. Her forehead was planted on the bottom step, her hair having fallen forward to cover her face, her knees two stairs up, arms behind her, rump in the air. She looked like she’d been swimming the breaststroke from the top of the stairs to the bottom and died before she could get there.

How long did he stand there, paralyzed? He hadn’t even checked to make sure she was dead, just stood there staring at her, unable to process what he was seeing. Even now, thirteen months later, he cringed to recall his breathtaking incompetence at the scene. What he couldn’t get out of his head was how staged the whole thing looked — Becka’s body impossibly balanced like that, no blood to speak of. To Raymer it resembled a museum diorama whose bizarre purpose was beyond his grasp. She was, after all, an actress, which made what he was witnessing a performance. She couldn’t hold that ridiculous pose forever. If he was just patient, she’d eventually get to her feet and say, Is this what you want to happen to me? Fix that fucking rug!

But no. It was no performance. Becka was dead. He found the tented note she’d left on the dining room table while he waited for the ambulance. I’m sorry, it said. I didn’t mean for this to happen. Try to be happy for us. It was signed with Becka’s usual capital B.

She didn’t mean for this to happen? It took him a moment to realize that by “this” she didn’t mean falling down the stairs, or dying, because of course she couldn’t have. No, what she hadn’t meant to do was fall in love. Falling out of love with him was something he could, in time, come to terms with. In point of fact, hadn’t he understood from the beginning that his luck in marrying Becka was too good to last? But falling in love with somebody new? Try to be happy for us? How could that happen when he didn’t know who us was?

—

DURING THE LAST THIRTEEN MONTHS the images from that terrible afternoon — Becka dead, the EMTs and investigators trying to work around her on the stairs, her rigored body being maneuvered onto a gurney and then out the front door, the neighbors having gathered outside to watch — had mercifully begun to fade, like photographs left in the sun. Tom Bridger’s words, by contrast, had lost none of their force. Over a forty-year career, Tom had developed a medical examiner’s mordant humor. Arriving on the scene, he’d taken one look at Becka, her forehead seemingly stapled to the bottom step, her rear end in the air, and said, “What the hell did this woman do? Come down those stairs like a Slinky?” He hadn’t intended the remark to be cruel, not realizing the dead woman’s husband was in the next room to overhear it. What made it so awful was its truth. Because Becka had looked for all the world as if she’d done exactly that — Slinkied down the stairs. Which again put Raymer in mind of old Miss Beryl, who, back in eighth grade, famously maintained that the precise word, the carefully chosen phrase, the exact analogy, was worth a thousand pictures. Back then he and his classmates had been convinced she had it backward, but no more. When he remembered the horror of that afternoon’s events, the phrase “like a Slinky” still played on a loop in his brain, still made his stomach roil. The words actually had a taste: stomach acid on the back of his tongue. Their meaning had gradually evolved, morphing from horror into anger, then into despair and finally into…what? Lately, when the phrase “like a Slinky” scrolled uninvited across his consciousness, he found himself involuntarily grinning. Why? He certainly didn’t think there was anything funny about what had happened. Even if Becka had been planning to run off with another man, he wasn’t glad she was dead. At least he didn’t think he was. What had happened to her wasn’t justice, poetic or otherwise. Where, then, did the shameful impulse to grin come from? From some dark place in himself? Who, he wondered, as Miss Beryl had so often done, is this Douglas Raymer?

“My dear friends,” intoned Reverend Tunic, who unless Raymer was much mistaken hadn’t a single friend, dear or otherwise, within earshot, “I submit that it is not the duty of one man, no matter how great and wise, to bring justice and rectitude to the world. No, that responsibility belongs to us all, to each and every one of us…”

Except me, thought Chief of Police Douglas Raymer. Blinking back perspiration or tears — he couldn’t be sure which — he was beyond weary of all obligation. No, the thing to do was abdicate. Surrender the field. Admit defeat. Become a gravedigger.

As he’d become lost in the memory of Becka’s tragic end, his hand, he now realized, had unconsciously migrated back into his trouser pocket, where it was again depressing the metal plate of the garage remote. What was the range on these things? he wondered. Was a door — or several doors, if Charice was right — sliding up somewhere in Bath? In Schuyler Springs? In Albany? Raymer found himself smiling at this patently absurd notion, picturing his wife’s lover, the asshole, watching his garage door go up, then down, then up again, and knowing that the man who was making this happen was nearby and armed.

Was this the compromise he was searching for? Quit the job he wasn’t cut out for, but first find out who the opener belonged to and let the rotten bastard know he was busted? If Raymer could solve just this one mystery, he could let go of everything else — responsibility and rectitude, obligation and the fucking Iroquois with their supple moccasins and whatever other happy horseshit Reverend Tunic was running up his spiritual flagpole. Okay, maybe it wasn’t possible to reinvent yourself, but you could move on, right? People did it every day. He didn’t hate Becka for her faithlessness. She was simply, like his career in law enforcement, a mistake. Everyone but he himself seemed to have recognized this from the start. When introduced to the bride-to-be at the rehearsal dinner, Jerome, who’d reluctantly agreed to be his best man when Raymer confessed he had no other close friends, immediately sussed out the situation. “Damn, Dougie,” he said. “You’re marrying up, boy.” Raymer had been pleased by the other man’s enthusiasm and proud that Becka was such a fine-looking woman. And of course it felt good to have his own assessment — that he was a lucky man — confirmed. But trailing in the wake of his friend’s enthusiasm was his unspoken assumption that luck this good was bound to run out.

“There’s a word,” intoned the reverend, “for those among us who do not each day take up the burden of making the world a better, more just place.”

That same twelve-year-old girl was nudging her mother now. Look, Mama. Look at that man with his hand in his pocket. What’s he doing, Mama?

“Do you know what it is? The word is…‘shirker.’ ”

He’d stopped sweating, Raymer realized, and his soaked, heavy shirt now felt cold and clammy. His knees felt jellied.

“And those who do so shirk not just responsibility and human fellowship but God himself. Yes, friends, the shirker shirks the divine.”

And the birker birks the bovine, Raymer thought. The perker perks the povine.

The girl’s mother was regarding him with disgust, but for once he felt his own much-abused innocence and smiled back at the woman beatifically. Over and over he depressed the metal plate, indulging again the pleasant notion that somewhere a door was rising and falling on the truly guilty.

“And what of God?” Reverend Tunic wanted to know.

Good question, Raymer thought.

“Does God love the shirker?”

Yes. He loves us all.

“No!” Tunic emphatically disagreed. “God does not.”

Well, fuck him, then, Raymer thought, giddy with heat and blasphemy. Shame on God.

“Because a shirker is a coward.”

No, God is.

“A shirker always assumes that the difficult duty of daily living is someone else’s, that the thunderclouds which darken the sun and obscure the light of reason are someone else’s problem.”

But why should clouds be anybody’s responsibility?

“No, friends, Barton Flatt was no shirker. Shirking is not his legacy. And as he journeys to his final reward…”

Dirt? Decomposition? Worms?

“…we honor him one last time by reaffirming in his presence…”

His absence, surely.

“…our faith. In God. In America. And in our fair city. Because only then…”

Raymer started, suddenly alert, his reverie instantly dispelled. Had he momentarily lost his balance in the heat, or had the ground beneath his feet actually trembled? Apparently the latter, because all those gathered around the open grave had now assumed that classic surfer’s stance, arms akimbo for balance. Even Reverend Tunic, who to this point had seemed untethered to any earthly reality, danced nimbly back from the hole in the ground, as if he’d just been informed that the bell he’d supposed was tolling for another was actually beckoning him.

Raymer’s first guilty thought was that if the earth shuddered, he himself must be the cause. He’d been silently blaspheming, and God, eavesdropping, had shown his displeasure. Anxious not to incur further disapproval, he was about to offer a silent but heartfelt apology when he heard someone say, “Earthquake.” In general, Raymer much preferred natural explanations to divine ones, but he doubted the ground had shaken long enough — a second at most — to qualify as a quake. It had felt less like a tectonic shift than a concussion, as if somewhere nearby the earth had been impacted. Had the plane he’d been watching earlier fallen from the sky? Had he somehow made this happen by playing with the garage-door opener? He took the remote out of his pocket and studied it, bewildered. Everyone, he realized, was staring at him.

And just that quickly, Douglas Raymer, chief of police, was furious, because wasn’t this the very problem he’d been trying to articulate earlier, the trouble with police work in a nutshell? Responsibility, justice, love, rectitude, legacy. Words with about as much substance as a vapor trail. A pompous windbag in an embroidered silk tunic could make a tidy living pretending by means of florid rhetoric to know all about such things. But let the ground shake beneath your feet, and it was cops people turned to for answers. Like it was their job to explain the fundamental instability of the world. Like they knew how to shore it up.

Gus Moynihan, the mayor, had grabbed him by the elbow. “Raymer?” he said, apparently puzzled by the device in his hand, a good mile from the nearest garage. “The damn ground just vibrated like a cheap dildo. You gonna just stand there?”

That didn’t seem like such a bad idea, actually. If it was an earthquake, he couldn’t imagine a better place to be than in the middle of vast, flat Dale, where there was nothing within a hundred yards tall enough to fall on them. Still, for the time being at least, he was the police chief, and action of some sort was probably in order. The thing to do, he decided, was to call Charice. She usually had answers or plenty of suggestions and, when these ultimately failed, sympathy, though even this was often laced with sarcasm. Slipping his radio off the metal hook on his belt, Raymer pressed TALK, pausing only half a beat to wonder what sort of experience Gus Moynihan had with cheap dildos, or expensive ones for that matter, before saying, “Charice? You there?”

No response.

The mourners were all talking at once, and now Raymer thought he heard somebody say, “Meteor.” Had a meteor struck the station? Killed Charice right there at the switchboard?

The mayor started tapping Raymer’s radio with his index finger. “That would probably work better if you turned it on.”

Which was true. He’d turned the radio off when the service began, not wanting the damn thing to bark at him during the homily. He turned it back on, and Charice immediately said, “Chief?”

“I’m here,” he said, though this didn’t actually feel true. His extremities were tingling, as if whatever made the ground shudder had entered through his toes and was trying to get out through his fingertips and ears. He turned away from the cacophony of voices so he could hear better.

“You better come on back to town,” she was saying. “You aren’t going to believe what just happened.”

“Was it a meteor?” he ventured, in motion now, though his legs felt as heavy and rooted as tree trunks.

“What?” Charice said.

“Doug?” the mayor called to him, but Raymer held up his hand. Couldn’t the man see he was busy?

“Was it a meteor?” he repeated.

“Doug!” Despite its urgency, the mayor’s voice seemed miles away now, though Raymer had moved only a few feet.

“You okay, Chief?” Charice wanted to know.

In fact, Raymer’s field of vision seemed inexplicably to be shrinking. In the foreground was the radio he was speaking into, and in the blurry distance the gleaming backhoe. Everything else was shrouded in gauze.

Then, with his next step, the ground simply wasn’t there, and even before he could account for its absence it was back again with a bang, the noise, impossibly loud, somehow inside his head. Had he managed to discharge his weapon again, as he had that day with Sully? Where, he wondered, might this bullet land?

You know my thoughts on arming morons, Judge Flatt chuckled from inside his nearby casket.

Then, nothing.