Mission Flats

8

My father was at the stationhouse when I got back that afternoon. He was massaging the back of his neck as his head tilted left and right like a slow metronome. He didn’t greet me when I came in, just said, ‘What did you do with my chair?’

The chair in question was a leatherette, brass-riveted swivel chair of monumental proportions. The Chief had ordered it from someplace in New York and over the next twenty years or so had literally left his impression on it.

‘I sent it back to the Lincoln Monument. Mr Lincoln said he was tired, he wanted to sit down again.’

‘I’m being serious.’ His tone was don’t-fuck-with-me belligerent. ‘Where’s my chair?’

‘I gave it to Bobby Burke. He’ll find a taker for it.’

‘That was my chair.’

‘No, that was the department’s chair.’

He shook his head, disappointed. His son just didn’t get it.

I had not seen much of Dad since the body had been discovered. He hardly left the house, as far as I could tell. He busied himself with chopping cords of wood — enough to heat Manhattan through several winters — and staring at the TV. I had not found any more bottles, nor had I ever gotten the impression he was truly drunk. That said, these days The Chief never seemed quite sober either. Of course I can’t rule out the possibility he was sneaking more 40s of Miller (or worse), but I suspect that Mum’s death had more to do with it. I think he was just shocked. Shocked not by her dying — we’d both known all too well her death was coming — but by the continuing reality of her absence. It is a recognition that strikes the bravest mourners sooner or later: The dead are truly vanished. I’d been feeling it too, and I can attest the mood was a little like drunkenness.

I sat down at the desk. For years this had been my father’s desk and, other than the chair, I’d made few changes since taking his place as chief of police. I’d removed the plaque he’d posted, which read

PLEASE INSERT COMPLAINTS IN SLOT AT REAR — Dad’s idea of humor — otherwise the desk was essentially as he’d left it.

‘So,’ I said, ‘did you come down here to visit your chair? Or was there something else you wanted to talk about?’

‘You know what I came to talk about.’

But the next moment he seemed to forget what that urgent errand was. He wandered around the perimeter of the station’s one dismal room. ‘A lot of years I busted my ass in this place.’

I rolled my eyes. Self-pity did not suit Claude Truman, even in his ravaged state. Besides, in all those years it was generally other people’s asses he’d busted, not his own.

He shuffled around some more before coming to the point. ‘What’s going on with that case?’

‘The AGs have it. They think it’s some gang kid.’

He grunted.

I said, ‘This guy Danziger was getting ready to prosecute him.’

‘What about you? They give you anything to do yet?’

‘No. They have jurisdiction.’

‘Well, you’ve got to stay involved, Ben, you have no choice. You can’t just do nothing.’

‘I know.’

‘You’re the goddamn chief of police. Some flatlander comes up here and gets his head blown off-’

‘Alright, Dad, I got it.’

‘What else do they know?’

‘Dad, this has got nothing to do with you. Stay away from it.’

‘I’m just asking. Can’t I take an interest in my son’s work?’

‘I’m not sure what they know. They don’t report to me; they tell me what to do.’

He smirked.

‘Don’t start with me, Dad.’

‘Who’s the suspect?’

‘His name is Harold Braxton. Here, they gave me a mug shot.’

He glanced at the photo. ‘Who is he?’

‘All I know is he’s a gangster down in Boston. Deals drugs, I guess. One of the detectives from away said this looks like his’ — I was about to say ‘M.O.’ but the term would have sounded cop-show phony coming out of my mouth — ’it looks like his style.’

‘What else?’

‘Why?’

‘Because I want to know.’

‘Dad, why don’t you just let me do my job.’

‘Because you don’t know how.’

His arms stiffened as a little flume of adrenaline released somewhere. There was no Anne Truman anymore to soothe him, to coo ‘Claude’ in a way that both reassured and warned.

‘Alright, Dad, look: There’s another cop I just met; he thinks the crime scene has been set up somehow, that the body was moved, like maybe the killer was looking for something. That’s really all I know.’

‘You’ve got to stay on top of this.’

I gave a little salute.

‘Don’t let ’em walk on you, Ben.’

‘I know, Dad. “Nobody’s getting through us”’

‘That’s right,’ he said, ‘nobody’s getting through us.’

‘Okay, Dad, don’t worry, I’m on it.’

I watched him move toward the door. From behind, his clothes looked too big. The seams of his work shirt sagged over his triceps, the seat of his pants drooped. He was shrinking, contracting in the airless atmosphere of his wife’s absence.

‘Hey, how you holding up, Claude?’

It was the first time I’d ever addressed him by his first name. I don’t know why I did it. Maybe there was a thought that I’d detected some movement, a low seismic groan in that Yankee limestone. It was a thought he quickly quashed.

‘Don’t you worry about me, Ben. Just do your job.’

I waited till he was gone before shaking my head at the old man. Unnerved as he was — and who wouldn’t be, in his shoes? — deep down he was Claude Truman right to the end.

Nobody gets to you without going through me — and nobody’s getting through me. It was one of my dad’s favorite expressions. And mine too, because I understood it was Yankee code, I understood it was his big-fisted way of saying I love you. After I returned to Versailles, as my mother’s illness worsened, it became the family ethic. We would circle the wagons. Dad and I would protect her together. Nobody gets to her without going through us. And nobody’s getting through us.

Why did we have this sense of siege? Most people in town were eager to help take care of Mrs Truman. They called the station to update us. ‘Annie’s out sitting in the gazebo,’ they’d say, or ‘I just seen your mother out walking toward the lake.’ We could track her movements without leaving the stationhouse. To be frank, until she got sick, Mum had never been especially beloved in Versailles. She’d lived there some twenty-odd years, yet most Versellians were still skeptical of her Massachusetts roots and her Massachusetts attitude. With her illness, though, all suspicions and grudges were swept away, and the town showed its quiet, prickly brand of kindness — true kindness. If we found a supper in tinfoil left at our front door, there wouldn’t be a card to identify who’d put it there, as if claiming credit would be showoffy and uncharitable.

Of course, there is a limit to what others can do. Illness imposes on a family in ways no outsider, however well-intentioned, can truly understand. The family is isolated until it is over, one way or the other. In the solitude of our little house, Dad and I were forced to work together for the first time. This meant, predictably, that The Chief assigned me 90 percent of the household chores. With Mum, I folded the laundry and cooked the dinners and lugged the groceries, all activities she seemed to enjoy because they prolonged the illusion of ordinary life. But as her condition deteriorated — as her thinking became more chaotic, a devolution that occurred much faster than I thought possible — Dad showed a side of himself I’d never seen. I don’t want to make too much of this. People are what they are, after all. But here was Claude Truman holding his wife’s hand in public. And carrying her upstairs if she fell asleep on the couch. And driving her all the way to Portland to get those damn designer eyeglasses.

One afternoon — this was a couple of years after I came home — I found Mum in the TV room. ‘What’s going on?’ I asked.

‘He was just here.’

‘Who?’

‘Kennedy’

‘Kennedy was just here?’

She shook her head in little circles that seemed to mean yes.

‘Which one?’

‘Bobby.’ (Bobby was always her favorite Kennedy.)

‘Bobby Kennedy was just here?’

More nodding.

‘Meaning he was on the TV, right? You saw him on TV.’

‘Here.’

‘No, Mum, you mean on the TV

‘No!’

I should have let it go. Who knows what was really in her head? It was just as likely she’d meant to say something else, or not meant to say anything at all. But I didn’t. I laughed at her and made an obvious smartass joke about seeing him drive off with Marilyn Monroe.

Her face fell. With an exasperated flounce, she twisted away from me.

‘Oh, come on, Mum, it’s a little funny, isn’t it?’

‘Shush!’

‘Come on, I didn’t mean anything.’

‘Shush!’ She stared at the TV. (It was tuned to CNN, the twenty-four-hour newsathon. Some talking head bloviating about some crisis or other. Had he mentioned Kennedy? I don’t know.)

Dad must have heard her shushing me. He stormed in and demanded to know what I’d done. When he got no answer, he knelt beside her and whispered into the swirl of her ear. She made a coy little smile and hunched her ear down against his face, as if his breath was tickling her. They looked like teenagers.

That he was capable of such tenderness was a revelation to me, though I think Mum knew it all along. Once, during one of our daily walks around the circumference of the lake, I asked her what she’d first seen in Claude Truman — his strength? his looks? his aggressiveness? ‘No, Ben, his heart. I saw it right off. That man didn’t fool me for a second.’ I snorted. You might as well say you liked the Venus de Milo for her lovely arms. ‘Don’t talk like that,’ she said. ‘He’d die for you, Ben. You should know that. Your father would absolutely lay down in traffic for you.’