Home Town

by Tracy Kidder

  A homeless man with a murder in his past needs help in getting lodging. Dave gives him $25 to tide him over and calls the manager of a local rooming house on his behalf. Afterward Dave says, “There’s a passage early in John. ‘And Jesus did not entrust himself to any man.’ The most important thing is not to get disillusioned. For every ten, one guy’s gonna make it. You can’t stop trying. Do you trust ’em? No. But you can’t stop trying. I think Jesus loved people. Maybe he didn’t trust ’em.”

  Main Street thrives, and some restaurants gross more than a million dollars a year. But success has boosted rents, and also brought in groups of kids. They pack downtown, clogging the sidewalks, impeding tourist shoppers, alarming some. The merchants have called for a meeting with the police chief. They sit together at a long table, in a city building a few blocks from the Castle.

  “Every word I hear is ‘fuck.’ It’s getting really trashy,” says one shopkeeper.

  “It’s just not friendly anymore,” says another.

  The chief is, as ever, calm and reassuring. “Believe me,” he declares. “I know how important downtown is. Police chiefs come here for dinner, because it’s safe for their kids.”

  “Can we set up something in the park to make it uncool to go there?” one of the merchants asks. “Play Vivaldi all night long?”

  “I wonder if there could be designated areas for street entertainers,” a shopkeeper says. She adds, smiling, “This is where I really get to sounding like my mother.”

  Downtown used to have a large department store. Now it has Thorne’s Marketplace, built inside the old store’s shell, full of separate trendy shops, the air scented with incense, but with the wooden floors intact. Two of the owners, Brink Thorne and Mazie Cox, a handsome couple, middle-aged, sit in their living room, discussing Northampton.

  She says, “In a community it’s like a musical score and all of these people are playing their parts. I think Northampton represents community.” She goes on, “In New York people used to say, ‘Northampton? Is that part of Long Island?’ Now they say, ‘Northampton. Oh, you’re so lucky. I have a boyfriend, a cousin who lives there.’ Maybe it’s the density of something we are craving in our society.”

  He says that in some ways Northampton resembles southern France. “Geography created dense, tight neighborhoods surrounded by natural features. How does that come to be and succeed? Through real relationships. Elasticity that can survive tragedies.”

  They remember coming upon Main Street, in 1972. “It was an incredible place,” he says. It looked moribund, but most of the old buildings had survived. “It hadn’t had any teeth knocked out.” They were both architects, and young enough to imagine their professional ideals realistic. They also came with capital. They campaigned against the plans to bring urban renewal to downtown. They bought and renovated several buildings. They played a part in the revival. Those were wonderful years. “The SoHo image,” he says. “Loft living. People like ourselves who were going to make things better. Living in spaces where no one had lived before, in lofts. You could make up, create your own life.” He laughs. “And then we end up living in white clapboarded houses.”

  Loitering kids notwithstanding, downtown still looks wonderful to many ordinary citizens. Pat Coonerty strolls down Main Street with her string bag, heading for the open-air farmer’s market. The sidewalks are crowded, all the sidewalk tables in front of the coffee shops filled. The place has what she thinks of as “a little European flavor.” Pat buys The New York Times and fills up her string bag with fresh vegetables. This takes a while, because she keeps running into friends.

  All her life she has worked for causes—for peace during the Vietnam War, for runaway children, for battered women here. She once taught a course in assertiveness at a small women’s college. She teaches school now, in a nearby city. She and her husband came to town twenty-three years ago. They were just passing through. “It looked like, just a lovely town. I wanted a neighborhood,” she remembers. They didn’t have much money. They found a little house they could afford in the leafy South Street neighborhood. “A handyman’s special,” she says. “A handyperson’s.” A little Victorian, all spruced up now, painted pink, but a pink so pale and tasteful it deserves to be called rose, with rhododendrons in the little lawn out front, and a Korean dogwood, and a saucer magnolia. “I love my house,” Pat says. “I mean, other people, other people stop and take pictures. It’s just really nice. I mean, I love my house.”

  Northampton turned out to be most of what she hoped for. “I could walk the streets with my toddler. Downtown is where she got her first undies, just like Mom’s.” She used to chat with other mothers on the way. The neighborhood was warm. She remembers block parties. “The kids learned to ride their bikes together,” she recalls. “It has a lot of history and memories. Not to mention that my house is a hundred and eight years old.” Her child is grown now, but Pat’s journey downtown still has a lot of the old gregarious flavor.

  She stops in half a dozen stores to schmooze with the shopkeepers. Then she walks into Thorne’s Marketplace. Pat plans to do some shopping, but is suddenly waylaid by a disturbing sight—a young mother carrying a screaming baby in a sling and holding a screaming toddler by the hand, a lost and helpless-looking young mother. Pat thinks the young woman bears all the telltale signs of someone stoned on drugs. Crowds pass by, ignoring this mother in trouble. Pat marches up and asks if she needs help.

  The woman says she wants Pat to leave her alone.

  “No. You need help,” Pat says. “Somebody has to help you.”

  The woman heads for the back stairs. Pat calls 911.

  “I think children, like, belong to the community,” Pat explains afterward. “One needs to sort of take action.”

  For most people, the workday is almost over when, at a few minutes after three, Sergeant O’Connor emerges from the side door of the police station, a block away from Main Street. The sun glints off his shiny head. He wears a blue polyester shirt with sergeant’s stripes on the sleeves, dark polyester pants, black boots, and a clip-on necktie (because a real one could become a noose). All uniforms make the people in them seem easily understood. When Tommy emerges in uniform onto the streets of Northampton, leather creaking and hardware softly jangling, he rolls his shoulders and holds his arms bowed out a little from his sides, as if he fancies himself a weight lifter and gunfighter all in one. The impression he makes, of confidence and force, isn’t altogether wrong, or unintended. But in fact, he rolls his shoulders to adjust the protective vest he wears beneath his shirt, and all the equipment on his belt forces his arms out from his sides.

  About ten pounds of hardware hangs from his uniform—pistol, pepper spray (the safest means all around of subduing suspects and mental patients who have begun to fight), pouches full of ammo and rubber gloves, two pairs of handcuffs, a kielbasa-sized flashlight for the dark hours of his shift, a PR-24 baton (a modern version of the old nightstick). He’s heading for the supervisor’s cruiser when he spots a man in a wheelchair rolling by on Center Street.

  An informant has told Tommy that this man is using heroin again. Tommy walks over to him. The man’s legs look like a rag doll’s. Tommy hooks his thumbs over his belt buckle. He stands with his feet wide apart. He looks immense beside the man, but he is smiling. After a little small talk, Tommy says, “By the way, you ever hear of C-smack? Comes in a yellow package, says ‘C-smack’ on it?”

  The man in the wheelchair shakes his head. He looks away, then up at Tommy. “I’m clean now, Tommy. You know that.”

  “Good man,” says Tommy. “But just a heads-up, in case you fall. Stay away from that stuff. Last week? We took a guy out of an apartment in Florence who died from it.”

  Tommy watches the man roll off toward Main Street. “I haven’t had the heart to bust him. I don’t know. If I was in a wheelchair, I might take heroin too.”

  He walks over to his cruiser, a big Ford with head-snapping acceleration. He opens the trunk and inspects the
gear inside—emergency medical equipment, extra pairs of rubber gloves for handling bloody situations, a life preserver ring for emergencies along Northampton’s riverfront, antibacterial soap for washing his hands after various potentially infectious incidents. He climbs in and tests his radios—they connect him to all the police forces in western Massachusetts and to the dispatcher at the station and his patrol officers. Beside the driver’s seat he places his binoculars, especially handy for observing drug deals from a distance. He tests the cruiser’s gaudy strobe-light show and medley of piercing siren noises. He takes the 12-gauge shotgun out of its rack on the floor and makes sure it’s loaded—not that he’s likely to need it, but, he reasons, you never know. He rolls down the windows and turns the air conditioner on full blast. Then he puts the cruiser in gear. “I’m in a ridin’ mood,” he says.

  Tommy hasn’t driven far when he hears trouble unfolding over his radio. One of his young patrolmen is right now arresting a citizen for driving an improperly registered car—not an arrestable offense. Tommy flicks on his blue lights and siren and races to the scene. He arrives just as the patrolman has finished snapping handcuffs on the driver. Tommy jumps out and strides toward them. “Officer! Officer! Take those handcuffs off that man! This man is a good man!” The young cop obeys and steps aside. Tommy stands before the citizen, and lifting his right hand high, makes the sign of the cross over him. “You are unarrested! Go in peace.” It works. The citizen sticks out his hand to shake with Tommy.

  Tommy tells the young cop to meet him back at the station. There Tommy takes him to an office, closes the door, and says, “Go and arrest someone else, but make sure you have the right to do it. Remember, this is the largest power you have.” The young cop apologizes. Tommy says, “Be thankful it was an ignorant civilian and not a lawyer. But it was an honest mistake, and it’s not goin’ past here.” Tommy pauses. He smiles. “Unless the guy complains.”

  He spends a part of every shift following his officers to accidents and to calls from citizens in distress, and in between he does his own patrolling. Each of the junior officers is confined to a sector of town, but Tommy’s jurisdiction encompasses all of Northampton, thirty-six square miles of land, crisscrossed by 170 miles of road. In the course of a week, he drives all of it, varying his rounds so as not to make himself predictable to Northampton’s criminal class. He drives past ranch houses on the suburban roads and past the supermarkets, car dealerships, fast food restaurants on King Street, Northampton’s Anywhere U.S.A. He drives through the small and usually quiet villages within the town and explores the wooded spots by the railroad tracks where homeless people sleep in cardboard shelters, under plastic construction wrap. He cruises slowly past the playgrounds and through the parks and parking lots and old residential neighborhoods, past the apartment complexes, rooming houses, and public housing projects.

  On a housing project street, he rolls up beside two brown-skinned Hispanic boys, who stand outside one of the units. Even though the air is warm, they wear hooded sweatshirts, probably for the pockets: a cop can’t look in pockets without probable cause.

  “Whussup, O’Connah?”

  “Whussup wit’ you, my man?”

  “Chillin’.”

  “Ricky, I been knowin’ you since you were a baby and I’ve never seen you look this stoned before.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, O’Connah. I ain’t smoked a blunt today.”

  Tommy shakes his head at him. “Stay out of trouble.”

  He pulls up beside a boy carrying a metal pipe, fashioned into a club. Last evening Tommy heard rumors of an impending gang fight, kid talk that will probably come to nothing. But the pipe is real enough. “Hey!” says Tommy, pointing out the window at the pipe. “Give me that!”

  The boy obeys. “These fuckin’ guys with guns and shit.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So what you gonna be? Superman? Banging bullets with your pipe? You call me. I got a gun.”

  “You won’t get here soon enough.”

  “I’m always here.”

  “All right, O’Connah, I’ll call you. I will.”

  “Good man. Stay out of trouble.”

  He drives a little farther on and stops, and a group of small boys and girls crowd up beside his window. Some shyly stroke the cruiser’s spotlight, and others ask if they can make announcements to the project on the PA system. Tommy hands them the microphone and plays the siren for them, just as he used to do for the young man with a wild-looking shock of hair, like a tassel on a cornstalk, just now walking past. “Suck my nuts, O’Connah.”

  “Hey! Come here, Rodolfo!”

  The young man turns, grabs his wild-looking hair, and says, “You want some hair, O’Connah?” Then he puckers up his lips and makes a kiss, and saunters on.

  The muscles flex in Tommy’s jaw. “Oh, man, sometimes I wish I worked thirty years ago,” he says. “So when Rodolfo blows a kiss at me, I could stop and split his head wide open.” According to the stories, in days gone by, Northampton’s cops didn’t suffer insults from teenagers, but took them to the station and beat them up with phone books. In his time, Tommy has wrestled with a number of people he’s come to arrest, but, rumors notwithstanding, he has never beaten up a prisoner.

  He sometimes looks as though he might—when, for instance, he yanks open the back door to a patrolman’s cruiser and glares at the teenage boy sitting in the backseat. The boy has repeatedly given the patrolman a false name. Tommy sticks his head in the door and gives the boy his stare.

  For years Tommy studied and practiced street tactics. Nowadays, to supplement his pay, he teaches them at the police academy in a nearby, larger town. Some tactics he invented for himself—his stare, for instance, which he uses on tough guys and people who are clearly lying. Frozen in the stare, his jaw thrust forward, his bald head glistening, he looks implacable and cruel, and staring usually works. Tough and distraught people usually grow docile. The look did not come naturally. He had to spend a long time practicing in mirrors, lifting one eyebrow, lowering the other, and fixing his eyes on the glass as if to look right through it. He stares that way at the boy in the backseat now. “What’s your name?” he growls.

  The boy gives him the same false reply.

  Tommy yells in his face. “You’re lying! You have candles in your eyes!” He adds more softly, “As my mother used to say.”

  It takes some time, but the boy comes clean, and Tommy resumes his patrol.

  Early in his career, he went to a local ophthalmologist, complaining of eyestrain. The doctor concluded he was scanning the landscape too intently, trying to look at too much all at once. Tommy’s eyes are conditioned now, though. Vision is by far the strongest of his senses, and the main path to his memory. He rarely forgets a face. Once he’s looked at a license plate, he can remember the numbers for half an hour. He has to see only the writing on one of his file folders, not what the words say but the way they look, to remember the whole case described inside, and he remembers cases as if they were movies playing in front of him.

  Ten years have filled his patrols with memories. They wait in the landscape. He drives through the old industrial neighborhood called Bay State, past what used to be the Clean Bore factory, and in his mind’s eye the summer evening turns snowy. He remembers following footprints in the snow from the factory’s front door and along the bank of the Mill River. He was an almost brand-new cop. It was getting dark when he saw the burglar up ahead. Tommy started running, his flashlight in one hand, his pistol in the other, yelling for the thief to halt. And then the figure turned, and in the beam of his flashlight Tommy saw a boy with a harried, frightened face, holding a shotgun. The double barrel, the gun’s two large empty pupils, pointed at Tommy’s chest. Tommy raised his pistol, about to shoot. But he didn’t. The police department brass had questioned Tommy rather harshly afterward. Why hadn’t he shot the kid? How could he have been so sure the shotgun wasn’t loaded? Tommy still could
n’t name his reasons. There was just something about the scene, the look on the boy’s face, the way the kid had held the weapon.

  As far as Tommy knows, no one has pointed a gun at him since. Almost a decade has passed since a cop got shot at or shot at someone here. Northampton is a peaceful town. Tommy often tells himself that thinking so is dangerous. He takes target practice and cleans his guns regularly, rehearses situations in his mind at night in bed, and, as he drives by, makes himself remember that long-ago evening in the snow.

  Dramatic incidents come rarely. He spends a large part of every evening shift making friendly greetings, beeping at old friends and the parents of old friends in passing cars, waving to an old classmate, now a reporter for the local paper (the Daily Hampshire Gazette, published continuously since 1786), calling, “Good evening, Your Honor,” to the mayor as she walks out of city hall. He spots a lawyer, one he likes, on a sidewalk and calls to him through the cruiser’s PA system, his amplified voice echoing off the buildings, “Charlie! It’s good to see you wearing men’s clothes again!” He turns down a side street and calls to a staggering drunk, “Hey, Campbell! You told me you weren’t gonna do anything stupid. Go home and go to bed!” He rolls up beside a respectable-looking middle-aged man, a former coach of his. “Did you get your kid to say where he got it?” “It” is marijuana.

  “No,” says the man. “Not yet.”

  “Okay,” says Tommy. “Let me know.”

  Over the radio the dispatcher’s voice announces an elderly woman in trouble. Tommy finds her upstairs in a bedroom of her house. She lies groaning on the floor, an overturned chair beside her. A neighbor has already called for an ambulance. Tommy strips a blanket off the bed and arranges it over the old woman. She moans on, looking up at him with frightened eyes. Tommy sits down on the floor beside her. She says that she was watering a plant and fell off the chair. She has a thick French Canadian accent. She doesn’t want to go to the hospital. That’s where people go to die, she says. Tommy puts a hand on her shoulder. “No. No. I know the people there. They’re very nice. They’ll fix you up in no time.” Then he changes the subject. They talk about her relatives, her years here in town, until the ambulance arrives. “I’ll come and see ya,” Tommy says as they carry her away.