Everybody's Fool

Not Happy

“PULL UP BESIDE that old man for a minute,” Raymer said when Jerome made the turn into the Morrison Arms parking lot. Seated in a folding aluminum beach chair on the sidewalk out front, Mr. Hynes was waving a small American flag at passing motorists, some of whom tooted an acknowledgment. Despite the punishing heat he was dressed in his usual threadbare long-sleeved flannel shirt and a ratty wool sweater. “How you doin’, Mr. Hynes?”

“Fine, fine, fine,” was the reply Raymer had come to expect. To hear him tell it, he was never any other way.

“How many varieties you got today?” Raymer asked, their long-running joke.

“Fifty-seven,” Mr. Hynes said proudly, “same as always.”

“That’s a lot of varieties.”

“Don’t I know it. What you go and do to yourself?”

“I fell into a grave.”

“I believe it.”

“You do?”

But he was looking past Raymer at Jerome, at the wheel of the ’Stang. “That a brother in there, driving this pretty red car?”

“Say hi to Jerome,” Raymer told him, leaning back in his seat to afford the old man a better view.

“Whoo-wee! They ain’t gon come repo that, is they?”

“Over my dead body,” Jerome assured him. Raymer half expected him to unholster his pistol to demonstrate just how seriously he’d defend his rig. Fortunately, the weapon stayed out of sight.

“Whoo-weee!” Mr. Hynes hooted again.

“Power’s out at the Arms, then?” Raymer said.

The old man nodded. “Black as night in there. Black as me. Blacker.”

So much for the idea of a long afternoon nap, Raymer thought. His apartment, claustrophobic under the best of circumstances, would be a furnace without his small window-unit AC; even this exhausted, he doubted he’d be able to sleep in such stifling conditions. Across the street, though, the tippy martini glass in the window of Gert’s Tavern was illuminated, which meant that it either had power or a backup generator. Half of the regulars — mostly deadbeat dads, disability scam artists, derelicts and assorted dickheads — fell asleep with their heads on the bar. Maybe Raymer would be allowed to do the same.

“Aren’t you hot, Mr. Hynes,” Raymer inquired, “sitting here in the sun? It’s over ninety degrees out.”

“Yeah, but I’m over ninety my own self. Me and the heat, we cancels each other out.”

“Okay, but you gotta promise me you’ll go find some shade if you start feeling light-headed. Heat like this is dangerous for an elderly person like yourself.”

“You forget I come up from down south. Heat don’t mean nothin’ to me.” He was clearly more interested in the Mustang and its driver than Raymer’s advice. “What that set you back,” he asked, “that pretty red car?”

“You don’t want to know,” Jerome told him, easing off the brake.

“See, that’s where you wrong,” Mr. Hynes insisted. “I do want to know. That’s how come I ask.”

—

GERT’S WAS DARK and cool and smelled like it always did, of stale beer and overmatched urinal cakes. Not, for some reason, like the Great Bath Stench. Half-a-dozen solitary midafternoon drinkers were there when Raymer and Jerome walked in, but the sight of the police chief in the company of a tall black man with a bulge under his arm scattered them like oil on water. When the front door swung shut behind the last of them, Gert, an enormous man in his midseventies with a shaved head and a hairy chest, strolled over. He’d spent most of his youth in the joint, though for the last thirty years or so, since buying the tavern, he’d managed to stay out of trouble. Raymer had heard that he dispensed advice, along with rotgut whiskey and cheap beer, to the town’s petty criminals, who liked to run their nitwit schemes past him so Gert could point out their more obvious flaws.

“Well, well,” he said, “look at you.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You’re killing me here,” he said, nodding almost imperceptibly in Jerome’s direction. “You know that, right?”

If Jerome registered the insult, he gave no sign. “Name’s Jerome,” he said, extending his hand across the bar; Gert looked surprised, but took it. “Are you the proprietor of this excellent establishment?”

“I own the joint, if that’s what you mean,” Gert said.

“Sir, you take my meaning perfectly.” He peered down the bar at the draft sticks. “Do you serve any microbrews?” Jerome’s usual watering hole was an upscale bar in Schuyler, whose screwball name for some reason eluded Raymer. Becka had dragged him there a couple times.

“What-oh-brews?” Gert said.

“All righty, then,” Jerome sighed, squinting at the sticks. “A Twelve Horse ale, if you would.”

Raymer said he’d have the same, and when Gert went off to draw their beers, he volunteered, much to his surprise, “I’m thinking about resigning.” He hadn’t planned to say anything of the sort. Certainly not to Jerome, who would rat him out to Charice. And certainly not in Gert’s, where such an announcement could circulate widely.

“You’re just having a bad day,” Jerome consoled him.

“They’re all bad,” he replied. “Today’s especially bad, but every last one of them sucks.”

“You’re conflating two issues — your job and your grief.”

“Conflating,” Raymer said. “Isn’t that like giving a blow job?”

Jerome thought for a moment. “That’s fellating.”

“Oh.”

“You need to let her go,” Jerome continued. “Losing that garage-door opener? Best thing that ever could’ve happened.”

Out at Hilldale, Raymer had told Jerome about the device that now lay at the bottom of Judge Flatt’s grave and how losing it meant he’d never know who Becka had been about to run off with when she came down those stairs like a Slinky.

Gert set two full glasses in front of them and then, recognizing that his participation in this conversation wasn’t required, retreated the length of the bar and disappeared behind the racing form.

Raymer drained off about a third of his beer, half expecting his head to detonate from its coldness, but it didn’t. In fact, he could feel the thrumming pain, which four extra-strength Tylenols hadn’t yet touched, begin to recede from right behind his eyes to somewhere deeper in his damaged skull, taking with it the worst of his exhaustion. Maybe sleep wasn’t what he needed after all. Maybe he just needed to get very drunk. Which could be accomplished, he knew from experience, on about three beers. “Oh, yeah,” he gasped, staring at the bubbles, thousands of them, magically appearing at the bottom of the glass and sprinting up to the surface. “This…this is wonderful.”

“This,” said Jerome, who’d also taken a drink and was making a face, “is horsepiss. I bet all twelve horses peed in this beer and they all had urinary infections.”

From down the bar and behind the racing form came a discernible grunt.

Raymer took off his dark glasses and studied Jerome. “God, you’re a snob,” he said.

Jerome winced at the sight of Raymer’s face, his eyes swollen to slits. “Please put those back on. You know I’ve got a weak stomach.”

He put the glasses back on. “Okay, but don’t tell me I need to let Becka go,” he said. “You’ve never been married. You’re always dating three girls at a time. You lose one, you’ve got two spares. Plus they’re mostly college girls. Interchangeable. Same exact girl, different major.” According to Jerome, he dated only girls from the college’s three small graduate programs, but Raymer had his doubts. Most of the female population was from the city, and their views regarding tall, handsome black men were on the liberal side. By his own admission Jerome had to beat them off with a stick, though there had to be times, Raymer suspected, when no stick was handy.

“Yeah, but summer is my slow season. The campus is practically deserted.”

“Whereas Becka was a woman.”

“I know that,” Jerome said, sounding surprisingly serious.

“And please don’t tell me fainting into that grave, breaking my face and losing that garage remote was the best thing that could’ve happened, because that’s just plain insulting.”

Jerome was fidgety. “You sure the ’Stang’s all right out back?”

Godalmighty. Despite the blistering heat, he’d carefully put the top up, then double-checked to make sure both doors were securely locked — a car nerd if there ever was one. “Well, you took up two spaces,” said Raymer, who nonetheless wasn’t at all sure it would be okay. The parking lot behind Gert’s was second only to the Morrison Arms in terms of generating calls to the police station. “Only assholes do that, by the way.”

“Spoken like a man who drives a Jetta and drinks Genesee.”

Raymer took another long drag of beer and closed his eyes, tracking the fluid down the back of his throat and into his chest. Lord, it tasted good. Becka had preferred wine, so he’d mostly just gone along. But how the hell had he forgotten beer? He needed nothing else, he decided. Not sleep, not riches, not a woman. Just beer and this cool dark room. He certainly didn’t need Jerome telling him why he should be enjoying anything else. “If you’re so worried about the car, go outside and stand guard. In fact, why don’t you go back to Schuyler and drink microswill at Adfinitum.”

“Infinity,” Jerome corrected him.

“Right,” Raymer said, now remembering the posh sign. No words, just the symbol, a drunken 8 lying on its side. “Go there. Because I intend to sit right here and drink horsepiss until the power comes back on across the street. Maybe a little longer.”

“See, this is what I’m talking about,” Jerome said. “All this shit’s related. You’ve heard of chaos theory? A butterfly flaps its wings in South America and that causes a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico?”

“Connect the dots and win a prize.”

“You’re depressed. That’s the problem. You live in a rathole like the Moribund Arms because you’re still grieving. Worse, you punish yourself by drinking cheap beer in a sleazy dive that smells like the locker room of a metropolitan YMCA.”

From behind the racing form came another grunt.

“You think your job’s the problem, but that’s got nothing to do with it.”

Raymer finished his beer and clunked the glass down on the bar loud enough to signal that he was in need of another, but when Gert didn’t budge, he slid off his stool and said, “I gotta pee.”

“Urinate,” Jerome said. “Women pee. Men urinate.”

“And defecate.”

“Correct.”

The men’s room was only fifty feet away, though it was all Raymer could do to make it there, and he arrived too tired to pee standing up. There was no door on the stall, and the toilet seat was beyond disgusting, but he sat down anyway. This release was nearly as thrilling as that first long swig of beer had been. Life’s simple pleasures, he thought, the phrase materializing, ready-made, in his brain. He needed to pay more attention to these pleasures. He wasn’t even finished peeing before he fell asleep on the commode, then jolted awake again. How much time had passed? Had he already started dreaming? About Becka? He stood, hitched up his pants, washed his hands in the filthy sink and then dried them on his pants, the towel dispenser empty, naturally. There was only one word for the face that stared back at him from the cracked, cloudy mirror: gruesome.

When Raymer emerged, Jerome was right where he’d left him, which suggested he couldn’t have napped for more than a minute or two. “The thing is,” he told Jerome, recalling their aborted conversation, “you can’t even keep your bullshit straight.” His glass was still empty, so he went behind the bar. “First you say it’s all related, then you tell me that my job’s got nothing to do with my depression. So which is it?” Before Jerome could answer, he called down the bar. “I’m drawing myself another beer, Gert.”

“Help yourself,” came the reply from behind the racing form. “You already drove out all my customers. Empty the till while you’re at it. Put me out of my misery.”

“It’s not bad enough,” Raymer continued to Jerome, “I have to hear this same shit all day long from your sister—”

“You’re a good cop, is what I’m saying,” Jerome interrupted, serious again. “Like with that old gentleman across the street. All day long he sits out there on the sidewalk waving his little flag. Every now and then somebody honks. But you stopped to talk to him. That might be the only human contact he’ll have all day.”

“That’s social work,” Raymer countered. He knew Jerome was trying to pay him a compliment, but for some reason he wasn’t in the mood to accept any. “The police solve crimes. Prevent crimes. Apprehend criminals.”

“Police work is giving a shit.”

“So what’re you saying?” Raymer asked. “Because I don’t want a lonely old man to die of heat stroke, that makes me a good cop?”

“Don’t resign, is what I’m saying. If you do, you’ll be sorry, is what I’m saying.”

From down the bar, now, a chuckle.

“Gert,” Raymer called. “What do I owe you?”

“It’s on the house.”

“Nope.”

“Two bucks, then. Call it happy hour.”

He took two dollars out of his wallet. “I’m putting it here on the register.”

There came a genial snort. “A cop paying for a beer? The end-times approach.”

Raymer ignored him. Heading back around the bar, he noticed one of the business cards he’d had printed up special for the last election, wedged into the corner of the mirror along the backbar. Yellowing, curled at the edges and covered with fingerprints, it had to have been there a good year. He tossed it onto the bar in front of Jerome. “Read this and tell me I’m not a joke cop.”

“Douglas Raymer, Chief of Police,” Jerome read. “We’re not happy until you’re happy.”

Gert rose from his stool and headed for the restroom, his shoulders shaking.

“Read it again,” Raymer suggested, sliding back onto his stool.

“We’re not happy until…” Jerome’s voice trailed off. “Huh,” he said squinting at the card. “We’re not happy—”

“Until you’re not happy,” Raymer finished.

The card had been the mayor’s idea, something to hand out to voters in the run-up to the election. Raymer’s first impulse had been to keep it simple, Douglas Raymer, Chief of Police in raised lettering, but Gus had objected, reminding him that this was a political campaign; it wasn’t enough to just announce his existence. “Tell people who you are and what you stand for,” he advised. “Your vision-for-the-police-department sort of deal.” Raymer supposed he understood what Gus was getting at, but really? Tell people who he was? (Everyone knew him.) What he stood for? (He stood for something?) His vision for the department? (What did that even mean?) And cram all this on a business card?

“Something catchy,” Gus explained, sensing his misgivings.

So. A motto, then. He’d come up with several, running each one by Charice, who wrote poetry when the switchboard was slow and had what her brother called sound literary judgment. Here to serve was his first effort, which Charice liked well enough, though under cross-examination she admitted it sounded a little, well, servile. Serve and protect also sounded good, but they both worried the phrase was already copyrighted by some larger, more important police force. On the front lines, they agreed, represented the worst of both worlds, sounding both fearful and belligerent. “Try for something more friendly,” Charice suggested.

In the end it came down to a toss-up: We’re not happy until you’re happy and If you’re not happy we’re not happy. Charice liked both and saved him some embarrassment by reminding him that “your” wasn’t the same as “you’re” and adding the necessary apostrophes. “They both say the same thing,” Charice said when he pressed for her favorite. “Just pick one.” So he’d scribbled his choice down and dropped it off at the printer.

He’d passed out about fifty cards before somebody pointed out that the motto printed beneath his name didn’t look right: We’re not happy until you’re not happy, it said. Raymer stared at it, at first unable to see anything wrong. But wait. There was an extra “not.” How had that happened? He called the printer immediately, hoping there’d be cause for righteous indignation but already fearing that it was he, not they, who’d screwed up. “I got what you gave us right here,” the girl told him over the phone. “It says We’re not happy until you’re not happy.” Somehow, he’d managed to merge the two slogans. But hadn’t it looked wrong? Raymer asked. Couldn’t they see it was the exact opposite of what he’d meant to say? This of course was the same argument he’d given Miss Beryl back in eighth grade, and she’d always reminded him that it wasn’t her job to decipher what he meant. It was his job to say what he meant. The girl at the printer’s expressed much the same opinion. No doubt she understood the rhetorical triangle as well.

Raymer had managed to repossess most of the cards, but the damage was done. The ones still in circulation either became collectors’ items or were put on public view, like kited checks, in businesses like the White Horse Tavern and Hattie’s Lunch. There was even a rumor the gaffe had been reprinted in The New Yorker, though Raymer doubted that. As far as he knew that magazine wasn’t even sold in Bath, so how would anybody have seen it? Regardless, the local humiliation had been full and sufficient. For weeks people stopped him on the street to inquire if he was happy. Charice encouraged him to just laugh along with the joke. “Say, ‘Not until you’re not,’ ” she advised, but asking him to pull off a double negative under rhetorical duress was like expecting him to perform a triple lutz under Olympic klieg lights. Better to surreptitiously confiscate the cards whenever he ran across them.

The problem was that the damn things kept turning up, reposted as soon as Raymer stole them. How many of the damn things had he handed out? Fifty or sixty at the outside, but he’d recovered at least that many, probably more. Had somebody ordered a second printing? That was just the sort of thing his old nemesis Donald Sullivan would do. Unfortunately, he lacked proof, and without it Raymer couldn’t bring himself to accuse the man, just as he’d never publicly accused him of stealing not one but three expensive wheel boots. No wonder, earlier in the day, when Charice told him he’d be pleased to learn who the mill’s wall had fallen on, he’d thought of Sully right off.

When Raymer finished relating the whole sorry saga, Jerome’s rigid expression was that of a man desperately trying to move a constipated bowel. “It’s okay,” Raymer said. “Go ahead.”

Permission granted, Jerome exploded into laughter so violent that he had all he could do to remain atop his barstool. For Raymer, it was alarming to see a man as tightly wound as Jerome, one so committed to self-control, lose himself so utterly. “We’re not happy until you’re not happy,” he croaked, tears streaming now. “Oh, sweet Jesus.”

“Great,” Raymer said. “Enjoy yourself.”

“Oh, come on,” he said, wiping his eyes on his sleeve, “You do have to admit that’s funny.”

“Laugh, I thought I’d die,” Raymer said, straight-faced. “I’m surprised Charice didn’t tell you all about it back when it happened.”

The mention of his sister seemed to be just what Jerome needed to regain his composure. “The thing you don’t realize about Charice is that the woman is completely devoted to you, man.”

The door to the men’s room opened, and Gert emerged, eyes down. Climbing back onto his stool, though, he made the mistake of looking up, and the mere sight of Raymer was enough to send him scurrying back to the men’s room.

“Jerome,” Raymer said, “not a day goes by that your sister doesn’t threaten to sue me. She’s keeping a list of all the actionable things I do and say. If I resigned, she’d do the happy dance on the station steps.”

“You could not be more incorrect,” Jerome said, with startling gravity after so much hilarity. “You underestimate her. Keeping her back at the station when she should be out on the street. She can think rings around Miller.”

“That’s damning with faint praise,” Raymer said. “Anyway, my point is she thinks I’m a fool.”

“You are a fool,” Jerome said, again surprising him. “So am I. So’s just about everybody we know, dude. I mean, look around. Who’s not a damn fool most of the time?”

“Yeah,” Raymer said, “but there’s a difference between being a fool and looking like one.” From inside the men’s room came more strangled laughter. “Look, I know you’re a fool, Jerome. You don’t have to convince me of that. You’re in love with a fucking car.”

At this Jerome’s eyes narrowed, as if Raymer had crossed a very serious line.

“But still, people don’t laugh at you.”

“That’s because I refuse to tolerate disrespectful behavior. I dress well. I speak well. I have excellent posture. I’ve got a great apartment. I drive the ’Stang. People take one look at me and decide to fuck with somebody else. And of course I’m armed. People do respect that, especially in a Negro male.”

“Yeah, but this is exactly what I’m talking about,” Raymer insisted. The second beer was kicking in, and he felt a terrible drunken urgency to make Jerome understand. “I’m armed, too. Maybe I don’t take my gun out and wave it around like some people, but it’s right here on my hip where everybody can see it. In all the years I’ve been a cop, I’ve unholstered my weapon only once, and the man I pointed it at coldcocked me. I might as well have been holding a Q-tip. Don’t tell me shit like that happens to a man whose true destiny is police work.”

“Doug,” Jerome said, “people voted for you. Okay, maybe they’ve had some fun at your expense, but they voted for you, man.”

“They were probably thinking of all the crimes they could commit,” he said miserably. “Things I’d never get to the bottom of. If I found any evidence against them, I’d lose it.”

“Only in your imagination — which I have to say is deeply weird — was that garage-door remote evidence of anything.”

Raymer took a deep breath, the way you do before saying or doing something you know better than to say or do. “Tell me something. Why do you think she married me in the first place?”

“Beats me,” Jerome said, as if he’d already given the matter a lot of thought and felt no need to hesitate at all.

“Thanks.”

“Dude. You’re seeking a rational explanation for an irrational behavior. Why do people fall in love? Nobody knows. They just do.”

Raymer had heard this opinion voiced more than once, but was it true? He knew exactly why he’d fallen in love. Becka was beautiful and sexy and clearly out of his league. He supposed, in hindsight, that last attribute should have been a red flag. It might’ve been a good idea to ask what she saw in him that other women had been so completely blind to. But who, confronted with such good fortune, asks sensible questions? If a girl like Becka wanted you, you’d be an idiot not to want her back, wouldn’t you?

“But…you were surprised, right?” Raymer said, recalling Jerome’s reaction when he first introduced him to Becka. “Admit it. You thought, Wow! This woman’s going to marry Raymer?”

Jerome shrugged. “Sure. That’s correct.”

“Thanks again.” Dejected, he rose and went back around the bar. “Gert,” he called. “I’m drawing myself another beer.”

This produced a muffled grunt of acknowledgment, so he laid another two bucks on the bar.

“Okay, I was surprised,” said Jerome when he returned, “but you’re imagining things. I didn’t think she was too good for you…not exactly.”

“No, not exactly.”

“It was more like…”

Raymer waited for him to split the hair he was squinting at in his mind’s eye.

“It’s more like you two weren’t interested in the same things. I mean, Becka liked to work out and listen to jazz and read and travel and drink good wine and dance and—”

“Stop.”

“What?”

“You’re just rephrasing my original question in a way that makes me feel even worse.”

“But she married you. She must’ve seen something she liked. Same with your job. People voted for you. They saw something, too.”

“You said the two weren’t related.”

Jerome sighed. “I was wrong about that. They’re related, okay? Satisfied now?”

From behind the racing form, Gert grumbled, “I voted for you.”

Gert voted? “Seriously?” Raymer said. “Why?”

“I don’t recall,” he said. “But I did.”

Now Raymer sighed again, unsure how to feel. He scrolled back through the conversation, troubled by something Jerome had said. “Becka liked to dance?”

Jerome made a face. If he knew this, Raymer should’ve known, too, was the point intended. Toward the end Becka’s primary grievance was his inattention, his knack for missing things that were “right in front of his face,” like that extra “not,” things he’d see plainly if he just opened his eyes. Including, apparently, her unhappiness. So yes, his failures as a husband did dovetail neatly with his failings as a policeman. Of course they were related.

“I should’ve danced with her,” he said, the very idea sending a new wave of despair coursing through him. Because she really was a good dancer, sensual and provocative in the movement of her hips, always just a little slower than the music seemed to call for. He could practically see it now, like a video playing in front of him.

“Do you even know how to dance?” Jerome wondered.

“I could’ve learned.”

Jerome looked doubtful. “Stop punishing yourself. Bottom line? You weren’t rich, so it must’ve been love. It just didn’t last.”

“Yeah, but why not? It’s not like I changed. I didn’t trick her. Right to the end, I was the same guy she married.”

“Maybe that’s it. Maybe she wanted you to change. Grow. Try new things. Expand your horizons.”

“She was my horizon. I was supposed to be her horizon.”

“That’s asking a lot.”

“No, she found a new horizon instead, and now I’ll never find out who he was.” Three beers. Every time. Just like clockwork. Drunk, maudlin, pathetic. “If I knew who this horizon was, maybe I’d know what was wrong with me, horizon-wise. Suppose I meet somebody new? How do I keep from doing the same thing and losing her, too.”

“Maybe it was something you didn’t do.”

“Like what?”

“I’m the wrong person to ask.”

“The right one’s dead.”

“Ask Charice, then.”

“How would she know?”

Jerome shrugged. “She’s a woman?”

“Chief?” said Charice at that very instant, her voice startlingly near on the radio. For a moment it felt to Raymer as if she’d been privy to their entire conversation and had finally decided to add her two cents’ worth. “Are you at the Arms? Because you need to get out of there.”

“I’m across the street.”

A moment of confused silence, and then: “The only thing across the street from the Morrison Arms is Gert’s.”

“That’s where we are.”

“We?”

“Jerome and me.”

“My brother is at Gert’s Tavern? With the lowlifes and scumbags and derelicts? That Gert’s?”

“The mouth on that chippie,” Gert grumbled from down the bar.

“Why would I have to get out of the Arms?”

“There’s a cobra loose.”

“A cobra? Like…from India?”

“Right.”

“So what’s a cobra doing in upstate New York?”

“Evidently one of your fellow residents sells exotic reptiles.”

“Who?”

“Don’t have the gentleman’s name just yet, Chief.”

“But selling poisonous snakes is—”

“Illegal, yes.”

Actually, insane was what he was going to say.

“It seems that one of the cages got knocked over in the dark, and the snake escaped. It chased him down the corridor and out into the street.”

“Good,” Raymer said.

“I need to use the gents’,” Jerome said, sliding off his stool.

Puzzled by his abrupt exit, Raymer watched him go. “Okay,” he told Charice, “here’s what you do. Get on the horn with animal control—”

“Already did. They’re on the way.”

“So am I.”

“How about I put Miller on the desk and join you.”

“No,” Raymer told her. “I need you there.”

“Chief?” she said. “I ever tell you about the tattoo on my ass?”

“No, Charice. That I would’ve remembered.”

“Butterfly. Tiny little thing. If you don’t let me out from behind this switchboard, it’s gonna be a pterodactyl by the time I’m forty.”

Then she was gone, the radio silent. I am not, Raymer thought, heading for the door, going to think about the butterfly on Charice’s ass. I will not.

“Funny gal,” said Gert, lowering his paper at last. “I just remembered why I voted for you.”

“And?”

“You seemed sort of…” He was clearly groping for the right word. “Normal.”

Raymer nodded. “Normal?”

“Yeah, sort of,” Gert repeated, shrugging. “Rare in law enforcement. In my experience.”

Stepping outside was like being bludgeoned, by the heat and stench and blinding sunlight. Raymer paused to let his eyes adjust. He wobbled, then righted himself. Across the street a crowd was milling around in front of the Morrison Arms, many of them residents Raymer recognized. These were his neighbors, he reflected, and while he didn’t like to be unkind, they were not attractive people on the whole. He’d known several of them since grade school, and they hadn’t looked too good back then either. Amazing, when you thought about it, how much of human destiny was mapped out by the third grade. A man wearing a neck brace, with his right arm crooked in a sling, caught his attention because he, too, looked familiar. When their eyes met, the man quickly turned away, and in this furtive gesture Raymer recognized Roy Purdy, who only hours ago had been pulled from his flattened car by a Jaws of Life machine. Was it possible he’d already gotten treated and been released from the hospital?

Raymer was about to cross the street when he heard the door open behind him. “I think I’m just going to head on back to Schuyler,” Jerome said. Tone-wise, he seemed to be trying for nonchalance, but it didn’t ring quite true. And though he’d had just the one beer, he didn’t look right, either.

“Jerome?” Raymer said, visited by a sudden intuition. “Are you scared of snakes?”

“Me?” he said, then waited a beat. “Nah.”

“Because you look kind of—”

“Some snakes, sure,” he grudgingly admitted. “I mean…”

“What?”

“Look,” he said, clearly annoyed he had to explain himself. “There are three things a snake shouldn’t be able to do. It shouldn’t swim. It shouldn’t climb trees. And it sure as hell shouldn’t stand up like a vertebrate.” He actually looked relieved, having gotten all this off his chest.

“I think cobras can do only one of those things,” Raymer noted.

“One’s enough,” Jerome said, refusing to look him in the face. “Go ahead and laugh,” he finally said. “I don’t care.”

“I’m not laughing,” Raymer said. “I’m just…I don’t know…surprised, I guess. I always figured you were—”

“Brave? I would follow you into a hail of gunfire, brother, but I don’t do serpents. Sorry.”

“Chief?” his sister chirped from Raymer’s hip.

“What now, Charice? I’m kind of busy here.”

“Jerome still with you?”

Jerome shook his head.

“No, he’s headed back to Schuyler. Why?”

“Just wanted you to know you can’t count on him for backup. That boy’s petrified of garter snakes.”

Not true, he mouthed. Unconvincingly, given the speed at which he was backpedaling.

“I’ve got this, Charice.”

Though in truth, he was no great fan of reptiles himself. He was glad he had a snootful of Twelve Horse ale, which, combined with the rush of seeing Jerome unexpectedly fearstruck, gave him the necessary courage to turn back to the Morrison Arms and step into the street, though the immediate result was a blaring horn and screeching tires as the Schuyler County Animal Control van came to a rocking halt only inches away, sending him up onto his tiptoes.

The driver appeared to be in his midtwenties, and when he poked his head out the window, he looked vaguely familiar. “That was close,” he said. “I’m Justin. We met last year?”

Though the danger had passed, Raymer stepped back onto the curb, his heart pounding.

“I hear this right?” Justin said, sounding skeptical. “A cobra?”

“That’s my understanding.”

The young man nodded thoughtfully. “And me without my mongoose.”

Raymer followed the van across the street as Justin parked as far away from the crowd as possible, then hopped out and pulled from the back a long pole with a wire noose at the end. For some reason its length deepened Raymer’s already serious misgivings. He wished there’d been time for one more beer. “Just how lethal are these things?”

Justin seemed disinterested. “Do me a favor,” he said, stepping into thick canvas pants that looked like waders. “Go ask those people where the snake was last seen.”

Before Raymer could do so, though, there came a shriek he’d never heard outside a movie theater, so high pitched that he couldn’t tell whether it was male or female. But what really made no sense was that it wasn’t from inside the Morrison Arms, where the snake supposedly was, but rather from the direction of Gert’s. He froze for a moment as the scream morphed into a terrible keening, then found himself chugging back across the street, once again setting horns blaring and tires screeching. In his peripheral vision he saw Mr. Hynes, flag in hand, struggling to his feet and tipping his beach chair over in the process. And what was that expression he fleetingly glimpsed on Roy Purdy’s bruised, swollen face? A smirk? But there was no time to dwell on such irrelevancies. Because it suddenly came to Raymer who the screamer had to be.

Raymer found Jerome on his knees in the parking lot, staring straight ahead, slack jawed, unresponsive, and he squatted down next to him. “Where did it bite you?” he said.

Because as he hurried back across the street a narrative had formed. The cobra, frightened by the noisy crowd, had somehow slithered across the busy two-lane blacktop, probably in search of a hiding place. Had Jerome left one of the ’Stang’s vent windows cracked, or could the serpent have crawled up under the chassis and—

“Bite me?” he said, still staring off into the middle distance before turning his focus on Raymer. “You bite me.”

Raymer wrote this bizarre response off to the snake’s venom and told him, “Don’t worry. It’s gone.” Which was true: no snake was in evidence. Nor was there any sign of snakebite on Jerome’s face or neck or hands. Dear God, had it slithered up Jerome’s pant leg? No way. Jerome wouldn’t be calmly kneeling there with a cobra sliding around in his trousers. Unless the venom had induced more or less instant paralysis. “Jerome,” he said. “Look at me. Where did it bite you?”

“The ’Stang,” he said, pointing at his car.

“The snake’s in there?” Raymer said, pleased to have his original narrative confirmed. Maybe he wasn’t such a bad cop after all. He just needed to trust his intuitions. Except Jerome was now regarding him like he was some Asperger’s patient introducing a random subject into a normal conversation. As if snakes had no bearing upon these proceedings at all.

“There,” he said, his face a rigid mask of revulsion and also, unless Raymer was mistaken, sheer rage. Sighting along Jerome’s index finger, he patiently waited for the snake to make its next move and reveal itself. Why the hell couldn’t he see it? The vehicle sat on a slant, just as they’d left it, athwart two spaces. Except now, he noticed, the bright red paint bore a deep silver furrow that ran the length of the car.

He stood up and went over for a closer look, approaching cautiously, since his mind was still fixed on the cobra. There was an identical gash along the other side, and the cloth roof was in tatters. When he bent over to peer inside, he was greeted with a powerful scent of urine. Swatches of foam stuffing had exploded out of the slashed leather seats.

Jerome was still on his knees, glaring at him now. “The ’Stang,” he muttered. “Why?” As if Raymer owed him an explanation.

“Who knows…,” he started, but when he put a hand on his shoulder, Jerome slapped it away with surprising violence and snapped, “You crazy bastard.” Was it possible that he was somehow blaming him? “I should’ve known,” he said. “You were in there too long.”

“In where?”

“The men’s room.”

Was the man insane? “Jerome,” he said, “why would I want to damage your car?”

“Why would I want to damage your car?” he mimicked, as if there was a reason and they both knew perfectly well what it was.

Raymer gave up trying to figure it all out. Maybe Jerome wasn’t snakebit, but he seemed to have surrendered his rationality completely. “Look,” he said, “I can’t stand here and reason with you. I’ve gotta go find that snake.” (It was unlikely, it occurred to him, that he’d ever again have reason to utter these two statements sequentially.)

“I hope it sinks its fangs right in your buttocks,” Jerome said.

“You mean bites me in the ass?”

“You take my meaning perfectly.”

Heading back to the Morrison Arms, Raymer again called Charice on the radio. “Come see to your brother.”

“I thought you said he’d gone back to Schuyler.”

“Somebody vandalized the ’Stang,” he explained. “Don’t ask me why, but he’s got it into his head that I did it.”

“Uh-oh,” she said. “I’ll be right there.”

For some reason this assurance occasioned in Raymer an unexpected wave of relief. Which was beyond nuts. He was drunk on duty and his headache had returned with a vengeance and he was about to confront a venomous reptile. What possible difference could it make that Charice was on her way? And why, he wondered, did he at this particular moment find himself picturing the butterfly tattooed on her backside? Hadn’t he expressly forbidden himself to do this very thing? Okay, so the brain was a strange, unruly organ. His own probably stranger than most. Though not, thankfully, as strange as Jerome’s. Something about Charice’s reaction a moment ago suggested she wasn’t entirely surprised by her brother’s irrationality. He made a mental note to ask her about that.

At the curb he paused, looked in both directions, and then, because it was, at least for the time being, still his job to serve and protect, he moved forward.