Night Passage

Chapter 40

Michelle Merchant was smoking dope with some friends on the low stone wall of the historic burial ground opposite the town common. They liked to sit there and freak out the adults. The adults retaliated through the selectmen who posted “No Loitering” signs and insisted that the Paradise police enforce them. Michelle was seventeen. She had dropped out of school after tenth grade and spent as much time as possible on the cemetery wall.

When Jesse Stone pulled his unmarked car up onto the grass beside them, the two boys Michelle was sitting with got up and moved sullenly away. Michelle did not. She took a last long drag on her joint, and dropped it in the street and scuffed it out with the heel of her red sneaker, looking all the time straight at Jesse as he got out of the car and walked toward her.

“You gonna bust me, Jesse?”

She put a heavy stress on the name, to remind him that she was not speaking respectfully to an officer of the law.

“Probably not,” Jesse said.

He sat down beside her on the stone wall.

“How you doing?” he said.

Michelle snorted, as if the question were too stupid to answer. Jesse nodded as if she had answered. The kids who had moved sullenly off lingered now, near the shopping center, watching. The traffic was sparse at midmorning, and the bird noise was easily audible in the burial ground behind them. It was late in September and the leaves had just begun to turn on some of the early trees, showing a touch of yellow or red against the still predominant green. Jesse was quiet. Michelle looked at him sideways, puzzled, annoyed, and stubborn. She was a small girl with a thin face that would have been pretty had it not been so empty. There was a streak of lavender in her blond hair, and her fingernails were painted black. She wore jeans and red sneakers and a blue sweater with the sleeves too long so that only the tips of her fingers were visible. She had a small gold bead in one nostril.

She struggled to he as quiet as Jesse, but she couldn’t.

“You going to run me off the wall or what?” she said.

“No,” Jesse said.

“So how come you’re sitting here?”

“I was thinking what a waste of time this deal is for both of us,” Jesse said.

“What deal?”

“You sit on the wall and smoke dope. I chase you off. You come back. I chase you off. You come back. It’s a waste of my time and yours.”

“I’m not wasting my time,” Michelle said.

“Really?”

“Really. It’s a free country. I should he able to do what I want.”

“And this is what you want?” Jesse said. “Sit on the wall and smoke dope.”

“You can’t prove I’m smoking dope.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“So why don’t you leave me alone then?”

“Why don’t you go to school?”

“School sucks,” Michelle said.

Jesse grinned.

“Babe, you got that right,” he said. “You know that Paul Simon song, ‘When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school/It’s a wonder I can think at all’?”

“Who’s Paul Simon?”

“A singer. Anyway, yeah, school sucks. It’s one of the great scams in American public life. On the other hand, most people grind through it. How come you don’t?”

“I don’t have to, I’m seventeen.”

“True,” Jesse said.

They were both quiet for a time. Michelle kept looking at Jesse as covertly as she could.

“My sister says she sees you sometimes down the Gray Gull having drinks,” she said.

“Un huh.”

“So how come that’s okay and smoking dope isn’t?”

“It’s legal and smoking dope is illegal.”

“So that makes it right?” Michelle said.

“Nope, just legal and illegal.”

Michelle opened her mouth and then closed it. She was trying to think. Finally she said, “Well, that sucks.”

Jesse nodded.

“Lot of things suck,” he said. “After a while you sort of settle for trying not to suck yourself, I guess.”

“By pushing kids around?” Michelle said.

Jesse turned his head slowly and held her gaze for a moment.

“Am I pushing you around, Michelle?”

She shrugged and looked absently at the white meeting house across the street.

“What do you think you’ll be doing in ten years?” Jesse said.

“Who cares?” Michelle said.

“Me,” Jesse said. “You ever see any thirty-year-old people sitting on the wall here, smoking dope?”

Michelle gave a big sigh.

“Oh please,” she said, drawing out the second word.

Again Jesse nodded.

“Yeah,” he said. “I know. Lectures suck too.”

She almost smiled for a moment, and then looked even more sullen to compensate. The boys by the shopping center had fired of watching them and drifted off. On the front porch of the town library, across the common, a young woman with a small child clinging to her skirt, and another on her hip, was sliding books into the library return slot. Jesse wondered briefly when she got time to read.

“You think I’m going to end up like her?” Michelle said, nodding at the woman.

“No,” Jesse said.

“Well, I’m not,” Michelle said.

Jesse was quiet.

“So what about right and wrong?” Michelle said after a time.

“Right and wrong?”

“Yeah. You said stuff was just legal or illegal. Well, what about it being right or wrong? Doesn’t that matter?”

“Well, I’m not in the right or wrong business,” Jesse said. “I’m in the legal and illegal business.”

“Oh, that’s a cop-out,” she said. “You just don’t want to answer.”

“No, I don’t mind answering,” Jesse said. “That was part of my answer. There’s something to be said for trying to do what you’re paid to do, well.”

He was aware that she was suddenly looking at him directly.

“And sometimes that’s the best you can do. The other thing is that most people don’t have much trouble seeing what’s right or wrong. Doing it is sometimes complicated, but knowing the right thing is usually not so hard.”

“You think so,” Michelle said in a tone that said she didn’t.

“Sure. You and I both know, for instance, that sitting on the wall all day smoking grass isn’t the right thing for you to do with your life.”

“Who the hell are you to say what’s right for me?” Michelle said.

“The guy you asked,” Jesse said. “And chasing you off the wall is obviously not the right way to help you do the right thing.”

“So why the hell are you sitting here blabbing at me?” Michelle said.

Jesse smiled at her.

“Trying to do the right thing,” he said.

Michelle stared at him for a long moment.

“Jesus Christ,” she said. “You’re weird.”

Jesse took a business card out of the pocket of his white uniform shirt and gave it to Michelle.

“You need help sometime,” Jesse said, “you can call me.”

Michelle took the card, as if she didn’t know what it was.

“I don’t need any help,” she said.

“You never know,” Jesse said and stood up. “It’s what else we do,” Jesse said, and turned and walked back to his car.

She stared at him as he walked and watched the car as it pulled away. She watched it up Main Street until it turned off onto Forest Hill Avenue and out of sight. Then she looked at the card for a moment and put it into the pocket of her jeans.