Home Town

by Tracy Kidder

  Being full of his own childhood, the winter landscape became the playground of his absent child. Less often now, but occasionally, he stopped at a favorite spot and reminisced—at the foot of Hospital Hill, for instance. He looked at it through the side window of the cruiser. The sledders had gone home. The steep white hillside lay in shadows. But he’d bet he could still find the spot where he and his friends used to build their toboggan jump, voices hooting and hollering, toboggans flying. They’d land in heaps in the snow. The only things cold were his ears.

  Tommy remembered playing out there on many winter days. Who would have been with him? he wondered. He started a list: Morker, Ethan, Bobby, Lisa, maybe Jimmy—Jimmy was probably one of their gang by then. And who else? “Oh, yeah. And Rick.” He turned away, put the cruiser in gear, and drove off.

  He and Jean had decided to try again next spring. It seemed as if he’d been waiting forever to become a father and a real adult. He wished he didn’t have to wait to be installed as detective sergeant, which would be some kind of change at least. But it didn’t seem as if he had much choice except to wait some more. He’d just have to clear his mind of everything that shouldn’t be in it, and hope some bad guys acted up.

  “Goo-ood morning. This is. Ron Hall. It’s twenty-two degrees. Russ Murley is. Here! With the forecast.” There was snow in it again.

  Tropical air full of moisture comes up from the south, while cold masses descend from Canada. They meet over New England, and in some winters produce a sequence of snowstorms. Northampton was built for this. The town in a winter without snow was like the tropics without palm trees. The place never looked cozier than when everyone was booted and bundled up and the residents looked more alike than not and all had something in common to discuss at the post office, the barbershops, the ubiquitous hair salons. It was not too far-fetched to imagine that in the town’s most private places, Northampton’s many psychologists and their patients took a moment off from therapy, that most self-regarding of pursuits, to talk about the weather. Settled under snow, Northampton looked united, simplified, full of fellow feeling.

  On a street near the college, inside his ancestral home, Judge Ryan lay in his sickbed, and stared out the window. On a day earlier this winter, he had been presiding over district trial court. A jury had just filed in, and as usual he had begun to stand, in order to greet them. The next thing he knew his head was lying on the bench, and he was listening to worried voices around him.

  He’d had the precursor of a heart attack. He was operated on in Boston, in a novel procedure, much less intrusive than the usual bypass. The news had made the local papers, and even The Boston Globe, which had described his operation in great detail. So the judge’s friends, who were legion, knew what had happened. He was spending a lot of his recuperation answering the phone. The doctors had taken out one of his ribs. For a couple of weeks now he’d been telling well-wishers over the phone that he might become a scientific—if not biblical—puzzle for the future, if some anthropologist dug up his body.

  The judge was only forty-nine. He was mending well and quickly, but, lying alone in his house, he had long thoughts. He’d imagined that he would live here in Northampton to the ripe old age of eighty-three, just as his father had. Now he wondered. He gazed out the window at the falling snow.

  Inside the police station, Tommy came up the stairs from the locker room in a leather jacket and a furry black hat. He looked like a Russian commissar. “Okay, it’s dat time, men,” he announced. He paused a moment to model his hat for the patrol officers in the Ready Room. “You know what’s good about storms like this? They make everybody friendly. It’s something everybody’s got in common,” he said, and added, for the benefit of his officers, “I don’t know why anybody would stay in the station in a storm like this.” He stopped on his way out to hold open the door to the parking lot for a man who had spent the night in jail in protective custody and was being released. Evidently, he hadn’t fully sobered up. He staggered past Tommy, out into the snow. “And good luck to you, young man,” said Tommy. He whistled a snatch of a tune as he cleaned snow off the supervisor’s cruiser. When he climbed inside, the radio dispatcher was announcing an accident on Pleasant Street. Downtown was a muddle through the openings the windshield wipers made, a white construction site, storekeepers shoveling, the city’s big road grader bumping and rumbling up and down Main Street.

  Some time ago Tommy had begun to notice a recurring pattern. He would be out on patrol, a remembered face would swim into his mind’s eye, and just moments later he would encounter that face in fact. This gave him an eerie feeling, as if he had been singled out for clairvoyance. Then again, he rarely forgot faces and there were only so many in town. Ones in his mind were bound to match up with ones on the streets now and then. Not so often downtown, though. “Downtown isn’t used by natives much. I can work Downtown and not worry about stopping an old friend,” he was saying as he pulled up to the accident.

  A little Japanese car with its front end mangled sat at the curb. It was pointed south on Pleasant Street, toward the road to Holyoke. Pieces of bumper lay in the snow. Tommy waded up, opened the driver’s door, and his eyes widened. “Jackie?” he said.

  A vast distance separates a teenage boy and a beautiful girl a year or two older. It makes the boy wonder if he’ll ever grow up. Her face was still unravaged, beneath the blood around her mouth and nose. But her tongue was thick. So was the smell of alcohol inside the car. A man sat next to her, another familiar face.

  “Get Sergeant Tommy O’Connor down here right now,” said the man. He slurred the words.

  It was one of his old rats. Tommy leaned around the woman and snarled at him. “You must be cocked, because you’re looking at him, you idiot. Shut up.”

  This kind of incident often devolved into scenes reminiscent of junior high, with pupils dressed in adult bodies. The erstwhile narcotics informant standing unsteadily in a snowdrift on the sidewalk, crying out, “I’ll take all the blame! ’Cause I’m no good!” Tommy directing traffic around the wreck, yelling over his shoulder, “Get back in the car!” The rat picking up a piece of bumper, holding it as if it were a knife, glaring at Tommy, who noticed, of course, and turned around and stared.

  The rat dropped the piece of metal, and started wailing again. “Leave her alone! Take me in, ’cause I’m no good!”

  When a patrolman arrived, Tommy extracted his high school classmate from the driver’s seat. She used to be a runner. He remembered her in gym clothes, her long and shapely legs. She was too drunk to stand on them right now. He rarely put suspects in his cruiser without cuffing their hands behind their backs. But he didn’t cuff this old friend of his youth. He took her by the arm as if she were an old woman, and put her in the cruiser, then drove back toward the station through the snow.

  “How’d you hook up with him?”

  “Jesus fucking Christ.” She was weeping. “Because my husband’s beating me.”

  “How’d you make friends with him?”

  “Through AA.”

  “Through AA.” He made a face. “That didn’t work too well, did it? Were you taking him to Holyoke?”

  “He’s like a really hard person to deal with.”

  “Oh, Jackie, a lot of changes in eleven, twelve, fourteen years, huh?”

  “I know.” She put her face in her hands. “I was married to a transvestite.”

  “What?” Silence, except for her sobbing. Any other noise was preferable. “Sounds like you could end up where you are just from the stress of it.”

  He led her toward the side door, then turned her so she faced him. “You were on your way to Holyoke for him.”

  She nodded.

  “So he could pick up a couple vials of crack, I have no doubt. He played you like a fiddle, Jackie.”

  A couple of patrol officers took over, one of them a woman. A moment later the patrolman poked his head out of the door of the Booking Room. “Tommy, good search,” he said sardonically. “We j
ust pulled a razor out of her coat.”

  Tommy sat down in the Report Room. “I couldn’t even give her a field sobriety test.” He put the drunk-driving form into the typewriter. “We could lose this case. I don’t care if we do.” Another native casualty, another from his high school years. But a good priest believes in hope. He began to type. “Maybe we could get her some help.”

  It was snowing again, a blizzard, and the wind whistled through the opening Tommy left in the cruiser’s side window, like breath across a bottle top. He parked beside Augie’s rooming house downtown. One of the patrolmen stood in the doorway waiting for Tommy. The manager had called the cops to demand that they roust a pair of legendary local drunks, trespassers in a tenant’s room. “If they’re cocked, we could PC ’em,” Tommy told the younger cop. “It’d be a nice thing to do for ’em.” He snapped his fingers. “Hey, what’s his name? Ben. I hear his Sani-Can is up for rent. Great thing everybody bought him coffee so he could live high on the hog. Why isn’t anybody worrying about Joe and Michelle? They’re still alive.”

  Joe and Michelle were sitting on the wooden floor of a room under a bare lightbulb. Michelle had a girlish face and dead-looking teeth. She said, in her liquor-thickened voice, “Hey, Tommy, I got a joke for you. It’s really terrible. What did the duck say to the waiter? ‘Just put it on my bill.’ ”

  Tommy smiled. “Okay, you’ve been trespassed,” he said and left them there.

  “Love through the bottom of a bottle,” said Tommy when he got outside. “We did our job,” he explained to the young patrolman. “We told them to leave, but we left first. What the hell’s the point of throwing them out in this shit?”

  It was getting dark. Tommy was driving through snowdrifts, chortling, when the dispatcher called. A teenage boy had been playing football with friends at the Meadowbrook apartment complex. The boy had fallen down and wasn’t breathing. Tommy grimaced. He had no good memories of incidents like this. The cruiser’s siren sounded muffled in the falling snow. The car seemed afloat, drifting sideways around corners. He managed to take a sip of his coffee. “Something to throw up when he pukes in my mouth.” It was a white-and-black scene in the twilight, a crowd looking on, silent, except for the mother. Tommy moved her away, while she screamed in Spanish over his shoulder. An off-duty cop, who’d happened to be driving by when the call came in, crouched over a small, quiet, supine figure. Tommy ran back through the drifts in loping strides and took a turn, kneeling down, rocking back and forth, compressing the boy’s chest. Then the medical technicians took over with machines. “Tom, get the suction, the board, and the stretcher.” And soon, with methodical haste, the cops and technicians were wading toward the ambulance, carrying the stretcher. They looked like pallbearers, but the boy was breathing again.

  In the cruiser, driving slowly toward the hospital, Tommy beat his hand on the steering wheel. “That’s what it’s all about! That’s all of it! I’m all for go out and catch the bad guys, but if you can save a life!”

  He stood in the hall outside the emergency room, his face flushed, chatting with the emergency technicians. Their faces were flushed, too. One said, “If it works, it’s my first time.”

  “When I worked Midnights, they called me the angel of death,” said Tommy. He turned to shake hands with the head technician.

  A nurse came out. “Nice for a change, huh?” she said.

  “Hey, now I’m one for twenty-one!” said Tommy. He stopped in the waiting room, where the parents were sitting. He hadn’t paid much attention in high school Spanish class, but he knew a few phrases. “Buena suerte.”

  “Gracias.”

  He drove toward Forbes Avenue for his forty. A lone figure waded through the snow, down the sidewalk near his father’s house, a scanner buff, one of those who liked to listen to police calls. “Wannabes,” some other cops called those people, but occasionally they were useful. “Besides,” Tommy said, “I wannabe, too.” He stopped and rolled down the window. “Did you hear that call? No? It was a good one.”

  “Hey, Dad, a fourteen-year-old kid playing football in the snow.” Tommy stamped his feet on the mat inside the kitchen door. “He dropped. He was dead and he’s up at the ER now, and he’s doing well. I’m one for twenty-one.”

  Bill was puttering in the kitchen. He smiled. “Really, Tom? That’s good, huh? That’s very good.”

  They sat down to supper, and Bill began. Perhaps tonight he took his cue from the story Tommy brought in from the storm, but it was impossible to know. Bill might have been answering a question that Tommy had asked him decades ago, a question like, “Dad, how come I’m superstitious?”

  “But you know my mother got very nervous if a bird landed on the windowsill,” Bill said. “ ‘Mom, what are you so upset about a bird for?’ ” Bill’s voice slid into an Irish lilt, like his mother’s. “ ‘What’s the matter with you? Don’t you know it’s death?’ My mother never dodged a question. ‘Mom, I saw shadows behind the windows of the Polish church.’ ” He did her voice again: “ ‘Oh, yes, yes. That’s the priest who died two years ago, that’s who that is. He’s comin’ back to say mass. Now, Billy, what that is, that priest had so many masses to say and they gave him so much money to say them he has to come back.’ ”

  There was an old-world quality about the elderly man, an elegant detachment. He seemed to stand looking back at the land of irreversible time, calm and amused. He rarely took a direct route, but he never rambled. He always seemed to know where his thoughts were heading, and he was the only one who did, until he reached familiar ground. Bill sighed. He said he’d been remembering his own mother’s passing.

  “The ice cream headache, right?” said Tommy. And he laughed softly.

  “Yes,” said Bill. “She said, ‘Oh, it’s nothing but an ice cream headache, Billy.’ It was a hot day. ‘I’ll get you a cold drink, Billy.’ She poured the soda on the table.”

  The walls around the kitchen were like a family photograph album. In them you could follow the ontogeny of Tommy. It was just as Jean said. Sitting beside his father, he did look like the fresh-faced, smiling boy of ten or so on the wall. Except for the lack of hair and the fact that the boy in the picture was still surrounded by immortality. Boys of ten don’t stare at their fathers so intently, lips moving slightly, as if silently reciting.

  “The next day I was waiting for the doctor to come,” Bill went on. “Two Irish ladies knocked at the door. ‘Billy, we heard your mother’s sick. Can we go in and see her?’ I sat in the rocking chair, thinking, thinking. They came out and the two of them t’rew their arms around me. ‘Don’t you worry, Billy. She’s gonna be all right.’ Then they went out. I went to the screen door and they were going down the stairs. I heard one of them say, ‘Where do ya think she’ll be waked? Hulbert’s or John B. Shea’s?’ Well, I went back in the bedroom. I sat down next to my mother. ‘God, I wish I could wake you up,’ I said. ‘You would enjoy this one so much.’ ”

  Tommy plowed slowly down Elm Street toward the station through the snow. “I try to remember some of the stories, in case something happens. So if, knock on wood, Jean and I ever have kids I can tell them who their grandfather was.” It had been a boy’s night on Evenings. He planned to nominate everyone involved for lifesaving citations. “I was looking forward to coming in tonight. On a night like this, there’s nobody else out. You see what nobody else does.” He jerked the wheel to the left and put the cruiser in a half spin on the empty, snowbound avenue. “Plus you get to slip and slide around in this stuff.”

  Mrs. Levi Shepherd, née Mary Pomeroy, the daughter of the town’s most famous Revolutionary War hero, wrote of her sixty-first winter, the winter of 1804: “The snows have often been repeated … and at this day, the snow is 4 feet deep, where there has been no travelling.” Northampton had seen many snowy winters. This had already become one of the snowiest.

  Frankie was in winter storage, back in jail for violating one of his many probations. The longer Frankie’s record got the harder
it was to disentangle him from the system. Tommy had tried to help this time, but only a little. He had to set a limit. Dealing with Frankie, he had to remind himself which team he played for, since Frankie played for all of them.

  Sunsets came early when they came at all. Many gray afternoons simply faded into black. The wind blew over frozen snow and propelled lone figures down Main Street. The kids wore their pointy-topped hooded sweatshirts under coats. Through the cruiser’s windshield, they looked like packs of elves. It was hard to tell one from the other. “It’s too cold for crime,” said Tommy. But he had ways of getting through a winter. They’d always worked before.

  In between calls these slow winter nights, he relived old stories as if he were being transported from one episode to another, from one handcuffing to the next. He remembered the day when he was still brand-new and found himself outnumbered and almost overpowered by two drunks in a pickup truck. An off-duty state trooper stopped and rescued him. “He got out and waffle-stomped the other guy, and I realized that if I was gonna do this job, I’d better learn some things.” How if a person with a knife comes at you from as far as twenty feet away, you don’t have time to pull your gun, so you have to learn the proper way to move and make it instinctive. How to get handcuffs on a suspect before he starts to fight …