Mission Flats

2

At the Rufus King Elementary School the next morning, I watched the kids cross Route 2. I greeted them all by name, a point of pride with me. One by one they squeaked, ‘Hi, Chief Truman.’ One boy asked, ‘What happened to your hair?’ He dragged out the word, hey-yer. What happened to my hair, of course, was that I’d slept at the station with my head against the wall. I gave the kid a look and threatened to arrest him, at which he snorted and giggled.

On to the Acadia County District Court to check on arrests in the neighboring towns. The courthouse is in Millers Falls, a twenty-minute drive. I had no arrests of my own to report but I went anyway. There was the usual chatter among the clerks and the police prosecutors. A rumor had gotten around about some kid at the regional high school who was selling marijuana out of his locker. The chief in Mattaquisett, Gary Finbow, had even prepared a search warrant for the locker. Gary wanted to know, Would I read over the warrant application, make sure it looked alright? I skimmed it, circled a few misspellings, told him he ought to just talk with the kid’s parents and forget about it. ‘Why would you screw up a kid’s college application over a couple of joints?’ He gave me a look, and I let it drop. There’s no sense explaining with guys like Gary. It would be like trying to explain Hamlet to a Great Dane.

So, back to the station. The sense of ennui and fatigue — of unraveling — was a palpable thing by now. Dick Ginoux, my senior officer, was at the front desk reading a day-old copy of USA Today. He held the paper at arm’s length and peered at it over his eyeglasses. His eyes flickered away from the paper for only a moment when I came in. ‘Morning, Chief.’

‘What’s going on, Dick?’

‘Hmm? Demi Moore shaved her head. Must be for a picture.’

‘No, I mean here.’

‘Ah.’ Dick lowered the paper and looked around the empty office. ‘Nothing.’

Dick Ginoux was fifty-something, with a long, horsey face. His sole contribution to local law enforcement was to occupy the dispatcher’s desk with his newspaper. This made him about as useful as a potted plant.

He took off his glasses and stared at me in a creepy, paternal way. ‘Are you alright, Ben?’

‘A little tired, that’s all.’

‘You sure?’

‘Yeah.’ I scanned the office. Same three desks. Same file cabinet. Same dirty six-over-six windows. Suddenly but quite desperately I dreaded the prospect of spending the rest of the morning here. ‘You know what, Dick, I’m going out for a while.’

‘Out where?’

‘I’m not sure.’

Dick pouted his lower lip in a concerned expression but he said nothing.

‘Hey, Dick, can I ask you something? You ever thought about maybe being chief someday?’

‘Now why would I do that?’

‘Because you’d be a good chief.’

‘Well we’ve already got a chief, Ben. You’re the chief.’

‘Right, but if I wasn’t around.’

‘I don’t follow you. Why wouldn’t you be around? Where you going off to?’

‘Nowhere. I’m just saying. If.’

‘If what?’

‘If — Never mind.’

‘Alrighty, Chief.’ Dick slipped his glasses back on and returned to the paper. ‘ Awwwl righty.’

I’d made up my mind to check the cabins by the lake, a job I’d been putting off for weeks, but I decided to stop at home first and clean up. I knew my father would be there. Maybe that was the true point of the visit, to let my father know what I was up to. Looking back, it’s hard to remember what I was thinking. Dad and I had been uneasy roommates lately. My mother had died eight weeks before, and in the chaos that followed her death we’d spoken very little. Mum had always been the link between us, the interpreter, explainer and clarifier. The broker of grudges. Now we needed her more than ever.

I found him in the kitchen, at the stove. Claude Truman had always been a husky, shouldery guy, and even at his age — he was sixty-seven — there was a sense of physicality about him. He stood with his feet spread, as if the stove might rush at him and he would be called upon to muscle the thing back into its place against the wall. He turned to see me come into the room but he did not say anything.

‘What are you making?’

No response.

I looked over his shoulder. ‘Eggs. Those are called eggs.’

Dad was a mess. He wore a filthy flannel work shirt, untucked. He hadn’t shaved for days.

He said, ‘What happened to you last night?’

‘Stayed at the station. I had to PC Maurice or he would have froze in that house of his.’

‘Station’s not a hotel,’ he grumbled. He pawed through the clutter in the sink for a relatively clean plate and slid his eggs onto it. ‘You should’ve called.’

Dad cleared a space for himself at the table, moving, among other things, a forty-ounce bottle of Miller.

I picked up the empty bottle. ‘What the hell is this?’

He shot me a baleful look.

‘Maybe I should’ve PC’ed you,’ I said.

‘Try it sometime.’

‘Where’d you get it?’

‘What’s the difference? Free country. No law against me having a beer.’

I shook my head at him, just as my mother used to, and tossed the bottle in the trash. ‘No. No law against it.’

He gave me a dark look to seal his little victory, then turned his attention to the eggs, splitting and smearing the yolks.

‘Dad, I’m going out to the lake to check the cabins.’

‘So go.’

‘“So go”? That’s it? You don’t want to talk about anything before I leave?’

‘Like what?’

‘Like that bottle, maybe. Maybe today’s not a good day.’

‘Just go do what you have to do, Ben. I can take care of myself.’

He sat fiddling with the eggs, his complexion nearly as gray as his hair. He was, finally, just another old man trying to figure out what to do with himself, how to fill the rest of his days. The thought occurred to me, as it does to all sons contemplating their fathers: Was he me? Was this the man I was becoming? I had always considered myself a descendant of my mother’s line, not my father’s; a Wilmot, not a Truman. But I was his son too. I had his big hands if not his bullying temperament. What exactly did I owe this old man?

I went upstairs to wash up. The house — the same one I grew up in — was small, with just two little bedrooms and a bathroom on the second floor. The air was a little funky; Dad had not been washing his clothes regularly. I splashed icy water on my face and slipped on a fresh uniform shirt. The fabric puckered around the VERSAILLES POLICE shoulder patch, which was impossible to flatten under an iron even after paralyzing the thing with spray starch. I stood in my parents’ bedroom, where there was a mirror, smoothing this imperfection.

Tucked in the lower right-hand corner of the mirror frame was an old photo of my father wearing this same uniform and a grim expression. This was the real Claude Truman. The Chief. Fists balled on his hips, barrel torso, flattop haircut, smile like a grimace. ‘A man and a half,’ that was how he used to describe himself. The snapshot must have been taken in the early eighties, around the time my mother banned alcohol from the house once and for all. I was nine the night it happened, and at the time I thought it was my fault, at least in part. I was the one who cost Dad his drinking privileges.

That night, he came home in one of his glowering moods and fell into his chair by the TV. For my father, drunkenness was a bad attitude. He got very quiet, radiating menace like the hum emitted by electric power lines. I knew enough to keep my distance. But I could not resist the gun he dropped on the table with his wallet and keys. A big. 38 usually glimpsed on top of his dresser or hidden under his coat. Here it was, in plain view. I inched toward it, mesmerized — my intention was just to touch it, to satisfy a craving for its oily steel surface, its textured grip — and I reached out one finger. My ear exploded. Excruciating pain burst inward from my eardrum: He’d smacked the earhole with the flat of his palm because he knew it would cause the most agony yet leave no visible mark. I heard myself screaming in the distance. Over the roar in my ear, there was his voice: ‘Quit the boohooing!’ and ‘You want to kill yourself?’ and ‘Let that be a lesson to you!’ — for there was always an exalted purpose to Dad’s violence.

Mum was livid. She poured out every bottle, warned him never to bring alcohol into ‘her house’ again, and never to come home with it on his breath. There was shouting, but he did not resist her. Instead, he vented his rage on the kitchen walls, punching holes right through the plaster and Sheetrock to the rough planks behind. Lying in bed upstairs, I could feel the tremors.

But Dad must have sensed it was time to quit too. His drinking and temper were no secret around here. To some extent, I’m sure, the exaggerated respect people paid him — the displays of esteem and friendship for the law-and-order police chief — were the false tributes paid to bullies.

For the next eighteen years — until my mother died — he stayed sober. His reputation for violence persisted, but gradually Versellians came to view his rages as Dad himself did: Most of the people he pounded on or bellowed at or otherwise abused probably had it coming to them.

I tucked the old snapshot of Dad back in the mirror frame. It was all ancient history now.

On my way out, I brought down a clean shirt for him and hung it in the kitchen. I left him there pushing scraps of egg around his plate.

Lake Mattaquisett is roughly the shape of an hourglass. It stretches about a mile from end to end along a north-south axis. The southern side is the smaller of the two, though it is what most people are referring to when they mention the lake by name. At the southern tip is the former ‘fishing lodge’ of the Whitney family of New York. It is a camp lodge in the rustic style preferred by nature-minded Manhattanites of a certain class before the Depression. Now owned by a family trust, the big house dominates this end of the lake. There is a sloping trail that leads from the house through the verdant gloom of the pine woods and emerges, a quarter mile later, into the bright reflecting light at the water’s edge. The place is generally occupied only in August, when the plague of mosquitoes has eased somewhat. Other, more modest homes dot the banks of the lake, but they do not compare to the Whitney lodge and so, as if conscious of their inferiority, they hide from the road and can only really be seen from the water. The northern side of the lake is far less developed and less fashionable. Here there are only box-frame cabins built on short concrete piles. They rent by the week from Memorial Day to Labor Day, to working folks from Portland or Boston. To people from away. Sports, we call them, flatlanders — tourists, the lifeblood of this place.

I made an effort to pay equal attention to the dwellings at both ends of the lake, not so much out of sympathy for the working stiffs, but because the little cabins were more likely to be broken into than the grander homes. The cabins attracted local kids looking for a place to party. A kid could get in with no more effort than it took to pop the hasp that held a padlock. A tire iron usually did the trick. So I checked them every few weeks, called the owner when there was a break-in, saw to it that broken hinges and window frames were repaired. I even picked up the beer bottles and marijuana roaches and condoms from cabin floors.

The cabin where I found the body was the fourth I checked that morning.

I might have driven right past it without getting out of the Bronco since it was plain from a distance that there was no damage to the exterior. The windows were covered with padlocked wooden shutters, the door was undamaged. But there was a smell, faint at first but overpowering as I got nearer — an acrid, ammoniac stench, the distinctive smell of decay. I’d smelled it before, usually on deer hit by cars on Route 2 or the Post Road. This might have been a large animal too, a deer or even a moose lying dead in the woods nearby. But this smell was unmistakably coming from the cabin, and I’d never known a moose to die in bed.

I got a pry bar from the truck and popped open the door.

Flies buzzed.

The smell was overwhelming. The muscles in the wall of my throat clenched at the odor. I didn’t have a handkerchief to cover my nose as detectives do in movies, so I settled for burying my face in the crook of my elbow. Wheezing, I shined my flashlight about in the darkness.

A pile of clothing on the floor resolved itself into a body. A man curled on his side. He wore only khaki shorts and a T-shirt. The bare legs were eggshell white with rose-marble highlights where the skin met the floor. Above the swollen legs, the T-shirt was rucked up to reveal a bloated white belly. A frizz of red hair ran up to the navel. The left eye looked toward me; the right was obliterated, in its place a cake of dried blood. Above that, tissue blossomed out of a trench in his scalp. The wood floor was stained with dried blood in a wide crescent radiating out from the shattered head. The stain appeared black in the flashlight beam. Near the head lay the left half of a pair of eyeglasses.

The room began to turn. I breathed hard in the folds of my coat sleeve. The cabin was empty. Dresser drawers were ajar, the mattresses rolled up and tied with twine.

I stepped forward. Near the body, a wallet. A crumpled wad of bills, maybe fifty dollars total, lay on the floor. I knelt and, using a ballpoint pen, teased open the wallet. It contained a five-point gold star impressed with the

words ROBERT M. DANZIGER ASSISTANT DISTRICT ATTORNEY • SUSSEX COUNTY.