I think what it is, in addition to the business with Asche being simpler and cleaner than the two before it, almost as clear-cut as the very first one, I think there’s the knowledge that finally I’m more than halfway through this thing. At the beginning, I had to do the six resumé, and I have to do Upton “Ralph” Fallon, but then that’s it, that’s the end of it, forever and ever.
(I’ll know how to handle the situation ahead of time, if anything like this ever looms again.)
But now I’ve done four of them, so there are only three to go, and that lifts my spirits considerably. It’s like realizing you’ve finally made it past the midway mile marker in a long and grueling race.
Also, there’s some sort of early indication that there might be a thaw between me and Marjorie. Nothing tangible, really, no words said on the subject, merely a difference in the quality of the air inside the house. A little conversation between us, casual, about minor things. Not like normal life exactly, but closer.
This change may have happened because she’d finally come out with it, told the truth, or at least partly, and doesn’t have to keep her burdensome secret any more. (If only it could be that easy for me.) And also probably because I’d agreed to the idea of counseling, and because the first session has happened, however little might have been accomplished so far, and because it looks as though the counseling can continue.
And maybe, just maybe, even more than all of that, it could be there’s been a change in me as well. Maybe, when I was determined to kill the boyfriend, when I wasn’t even turning it over in my mind but just accepting it as a fixed and certain thing to be done, maybe during that time I was clenched and tense around Marjorie, stalking her, watching her, searching for a trail to my prey. And now that I’ve caught on to myself, stopped myself, now that I’ve realized how awful that idea was and given it up completely, maybe she can sense a new ease in me, and my relaxation helps her to relax.
Long-term joblessness, it hurts everything. Not just the discarded worker, but everything. Maybe it’s wrong of me, snobbish or something, to think this hits the middle class more than other people, because I’m middle class (and trying to stay middle class), but I do think it does, it hurts us more. The people at the extremes, the poor and the very rich, are used to the idea that life has great swings, now you’re doing well, now you’re doing badly. But the middle class is used to a smooth progress through life. We give up the highs, and in return we’re supposed to be protected from the lows. We give our loyalty to a company, and in return they’re supposed to give us a smooth ride through life. And now it isn’t happening, and we feel betrayed.
We were supposed to be protected and safe, here in the middle, and something’s gone wrong. When a poor person loses some lousy little job that had no future anyway, and has to go back on welfare, that’s an expected part of life. When a millionaire shoots the works on a new venture that falls flat and all of a sudden he’s broke, he knew all along that was a possibility. But when we slip back, just a little bit, and it goes on for month after month, and it goes on for year after year, and maybe we’re never going to get back to that particular level of solvency and protection and self-esteem we used to enjoy, it throws us. It throws us.
And what’s happening is, because we’re family people, it’s throwing the families, too. Children turn bad, in a number of ways. (Thank God we don’t have that problem.) Marriages end.
Do I want my marriage to end? No. So I have to realize that what’s happening to us now is only happening because I’ve been out of work for so long. If I were still at Halcyon Mills, Marjorie wouldn’t be running around with somebody else. She wouldn’t be working two stupid jobs. I wouldn’t be killing people.
I didn’t play the radio in the Voyager when I drove Marjorie to the New Variety just after lunch, for her afternoon cashier job, and that’s because we were talking, we were in an actual conversation. It felt good. We talked about whether or not we might want to go see the movie that’s at the New Variety now, and that she’d try to get a sense of whether or not the movie’s any good while she was there this afternoon. And we talked about dinner, what to have, should I stop at a store after dropping her off or should we shop together later when I pick her up again. We didn’t talk about anything that matters—money, jobs, the kids, marriage, counseling—but just talking was enough.
And now I’ve come home, and I’m in my office, and I’m planning my next move. Only two resumés to go. What an astonishment. What a relief.
Three weeks ago, I wasn’t even sure I could do it. I was afraid I wasn’t up to it. Three weeks ago. It feels like a thousand years.
I study them, my two remaining resumés trying to decide which to go after first, which to go after second. I’ll start on it tomorrow, drive to that resumé’s address, check it out, see how it’s going to go.
One of the remaining resumés is here in Connecticut, the other over in New York State. And of course Upton “Ralph” Fallon is in New York State, too.
The easiest ones have been in Connecticut. It was in Massachusetts that Mrs. Ricks complicated the situation and made it all so much worse, and it was in New York that I’d had to hit that poor man with the car.
Maybe it’s just superstition, but I think the way for me to go is to finish Connecticut first. Do that next, then the last two are both in New York. And then it’s over.
22
The phone rarely rings when we’re asleep, maybe once or twice a year, and that’s usually some drunk with a wrong number. But there’s been a change in us, in Marjorie and me and our relationship to the late-night telephone call, and I never realized it before.
I come slowly awake, in the dark middle of the night, very beclouded by sleep. I can hear Marjorie murmuring into the telephone, and then she turns the light on, and I squint, not wanting to be awake, and the clock says 1:46. (We deliberately got a bedroom alarm-clock-radio without illuminated clock numbers, because we like to sleep in darkness. I’m always aware of those floating numbers at the level of my sleeping head whenever I spend a night in a motel.)
Slowly I focus on Marjorie and her conversation, and it’s something troubling to her that’s keeping her responses very down and quiet. “Yes, I understand,” she says, and “We’ll get there as soon as we can,” and, “I appreciate that, thank you.”
Sometime in through there, during the course of the conversation, failing to understand who she can possibly be talking to or what possible subject it could be about, I suddenly have my realization about us and late-night phone calls, and it is this: I didn’t hear the phone ring.
We have phones on both sides of the bed, but it’s only the phone on my side that rings, quietly. It used to be, whenever the phone rang at night, I would immediately wake up and deal with it—the drunk, the wrong number—and Marjorie would sleep right through the whole thing. I think in every marriage, that’s one of the unconscious items that’s worked out early on, who will wake up when the phone rings. In our marriage, it was always me, and now it isn’t me any more.
Since I lost my job, Marjorie is the one who wakes up when the phone rings. She can’t count on me any more; she has to be alert for herself.
I sit there, while Marjorie continues to talk into the phone and listen to the phone, and I turn this new understanding over and over in my head, to study it. I don’t know if it makes me mostly angry or mostly sad or mostly ashamed. All three, I guess.
Marjorie hangs up, and looks at me. She’s very solemn. “It’s Billy,” she says.
I think, an accident! At the same instant, I think, but he’s in bed in this house, in his room, asleep. Stupid, still clearing cobwebs, I say, “Billy?”
“He was arrested,” she says, astoundingly. “He and another boy.”
“Arrested? Arrested?” I sit up, almost falling over. I’m the one who’s supposed to be arrested! “Why would he—? Why would they—? For God’s sake, what for?”
“They broke into a store,” she says. “The police found them
, and they tried to run away. They’re at the state police barracks in Raskill.”
I’m already struggling out from under the covers. The sheet and blanket cling to my legs, not wanting to release me into this terrible unknown. “Poor Billy,” I say. A store? What store? “It’s all my fault,” I say, and go into the bathroom to brush my teeth.
The CID detective at the state police barracks, a sympathetic soft-voiced man in a rumpled brown suit, talks to us first, in a small square office painted pale yellow. Three walls are smooth shiny plastic, the fourth, an exterior wall, is bare rough concrete block. The floor is a different kind of smooth shiny plastic, black, and the ceiling is plastic soundproofing panels, off-white. Since the canary yellow paint on the concrete block was certainly put there as a very good sealer, it occurs to me that, if anything really horrible were to happen in this room, they could hose it clean in two or three minutes. From my position, in this green plastic chair facing the gray metal desk, I can’t see a drain in the floor, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there is one.
Did the architect plan the room this way? Do architects think in such terms, when they design police stations? Does it bother them? Or are they pleased at their professional skill?
Am I pleased, at my professional skill? My new skill, I mean. I’ve never thought about that before, and I don’t want to think about it now.
It’s very hard for me to concentrate on the detective, here in this deniable room. I can’t even retain his name. I want to see Billy, that’s all I know.
Marjorie is much better at dealing with this than I am. She asks questions. She takes notes. She’s as quiet and calm and sympathetic as the detective himself. And, through their conversation, that I tune into and tune out of, over and over, I finally understand what happened.
It took place in the same mall where Marjorie works for Dr. Carney. There’s a small computer store there, that sells business software and computer games and things like that. Apparently, Billy and this friend of his from school went there this afternoon—yesterday afternoon, I guess, by now—and found a moment to sneak unobserved into the back and rig the back door, the door that opens to the wide alley in back and that’s used for deliveries and trash removal. They rigged that door so it would seem locked but wasn’t. Then, tonight, long after we thought Billy was asleep in his bed, he snuck out of the house, was picked up by his friend—the friend has a car—and they drove to the mall, and slipped into the store from the back.
What they didn’t know was, the store had already been robbed in exactly the same way three times before, and as a result they’d added a new burglar alarm, a silent alarm that alerted the state police barracks here, so that when Billy and his friend went in, the state police knew it at once, and four police cars converged on the place, two each from the state trooper barracks and the local town police.
The boys were leaving, with canvas tote bags full of software, when the police arrived. They abandoned the bags and ran, and were immediately, as the detective kept saying, apprehended.
The police have everything, or almost everything. They have an admission from the friend. They have absolute proof the robbery was planned and the door rigged, so they can demonstrate it was a planned crime and not a spur of the moment thing. They have police eyewitnesses who saw the boys carrying the stolen goods. They have the attempted flight.
What they don’t have yet, and what they want, is proof that these two boys committed the three previous burglaries.
I hear the detective, and I hear how sympathetic he sounds, and I hear him say they’re just trying to wrap this all up, get all this paperwork out of their hair, get it all behind them, and I can see Marjorie nodding and being sympathetic in return, ready to help this honest unassuming civil servant, and finally I rouse myself to speak, and I say, “This is the first time.”
The detective gives me his slow sad smile, happy I’ve joined the group, sorry we have to meet this way. “We can’t be sure of that yet, I’m afraid, Mr. Devore,” he says.
“We can be sure,” I say. “This is the first time for Billy. I don’t know about the other boy, or what he might say about Billy, but this is Billy’s first time.”
Marjorie says, “Burke, we’re all just trying to—”
“I know what we’re trying to do,” I say. I look flat and level at the detective. I say, “If this is Billy’s first time, the judge will give him probation. If this is Billy’s fourth time, the judge will put him in jail, and my son doesn’t belong in jail. This is Billy’s first time.”
He nods his head slightly, but says, “Mr. Devore, we can’t be sure what a judge will do.”
“We can guess,” I say. “This is Billy’s first time. I’d like to speak to him now.”
“Mr. Devore,” he says, “this has been a shock to you, I know, but please believe me, I’ve been around this sort of thing a lot, and nobody wants to persecute your son, or make life tougher than it already is for anybody. We just want to clear this all up, that’s all.”
“I’d like to speak to my son,” I say.
“Very soon,” he promises, and turns back to Marjorie, more fertile ground than I am, he thinks, and says, “I hope you’ll urge Billy to come clean on this. Just get it off his chest, get it all behind him, and then the whole family can get back to normal life.”
I watch him, and I listen to him, and I know him now. He’s my enemy. Billy isn’t a human being to him, none of us are human beings to his kind, we’re all just paperwork, irritating paperwork, and they don’t care a pin what happens to the people involved, so long as their paperwork is neat and tidy. He is my enemy, and he is Billy’s enemy, and we know now what to do about enemies. We do not accommodate our enemies.
I always believed that I and my family and my home and my possessions and my neighborhood and my world were exactly what the police were here to safeguard. Everybody I know believes that, it’s another part of living this life in the middle. But now I understand, they aren’t here for us at all, they’re here for themselves. That’s their agenda. They’re the same as the rest of us, they’re here for themselves, and they are not to be trusted.
Marjorie has understood what I was saying, and she gives the detective less sympathy than before, and he quickly realizes he’s lost her, so he brings out the forms. The inevitable forms. Before he gets to fill them out, though, Marjorie says, “Can we take Billy home with us?”
“Not tonight, I’m afraid,” he says, and the son of a bitch does a wonderful imitation of sincerity. “In the morning,” he says, “Billy will appear before the judge, and your lawyer can ask for his release in your custody, and I’m sure the judge will go along with it.”
“But not tonight,” Marjorie says.
Looking at his watch, the detective tries a smile, saying, “Mrs. Devore, tonight’s almost gone, anyway.”
“He’s never been in jail before,” Marjorie says.
Oh, please; what does this creature care? He’s in jail all the time. I say, “You have some forms there? Before I get to see my son?”
“This won’t take a minute,” he says.
It’s all the same questions, all the usual crap. Of course, it has the one zinger question in it: “And, Mr. Devore, where are you employed?”
“I’m unemployed,” I say.
He lifts his eyes from the form. “For how long, Mr. Devore?”
“Approximately two years.”
“And where did you work before that?”
“I was a product line manager at Halcyon Mills, up in Reed.”
“Oh, is that the company that went bust?”
“They didn’t go bust,” I say. “They merged, two companies merged. Our operation was moved to the Canadian branch. They didn’t take any U.S. employees with them.”
“How long were you there?” Now his sympathy almost does seem real.
“With the firm, twenty years.”
“You were downsized, eh?”
“That’s right.”
“A lot
of that going around,” he suggests.
I say, “Not in your business, I think.”
He laughs, a little self-consciously. “Oh, well, crime,” he says. “A growing industry.”
“I wonder why,” I say.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen them before,” Marjorie whispers to me, as we follow the detective down a concrete block corridor toward whatever space now holds Billy.
I’m irritable, holding myself in. I give Marjorie an angry frown, not wanting confusion at this point, wanting clarity, and I say, “You never saw who before?”
“The parents,” she says, and gives me her own surprised look. “Burke, they were sitting back there in the big room, when we came through. Didn’t you see them? They have to be the other boy’s parents.”
“I didn’t notice them,” I say. I’m focused, Billy is my concern.
“They looked frightened,” she says.
“They should,” I say.
There’s a uniformed trooper at a desk in the hall. He sees us coming, and stands to unlock a yellow metal door. Everything is yellow, pale yellow. It’s supposed to be spring, I suppose.
The detective says, “If you could keep it to five, ten minutes, okay? He’ll be home in the morning, you can do most of your talking then.”
“Thank you,” Marjorie says.
The trooper holds the door open. We go in, Marjorie first, and as I go by the trooper says, “Knock when you want to come out.”
“All right,” I say, thinking, it isn’t that easy.
This is the cell; my God. I’d thought it would be a visiting room or something, but I suppose a small state trooper barracks like this couldn’t be expected to have very elaborate arrangements. Still, it’s a shock. This is a cell, and we’re in it with Billy.
He was sitting on the cot, but now he stands. There’s only the cot, attached to the wall, and a chair, attached to the floor, and a toilet without a seat. That’s all there is.
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