A change of gravity

by George V. Higgins

  It seemed to Merrion that that kind of money ought to be hard for a young parent to turn down, but surprisingly more often than he would have thought, both of the two young fathers and the young wife on his staff as well regularly passed it up, saying they wanted time with their families. And during the summer the absences of vacationing assistants usually put him on duty at least one night every week.

  This night he was glad of it. On the way home from visiting his mother he had perceived himself to be in a familiar, dangerously barren mood.

  Polly had not recognized him, gazing into space and glancing at him only when it registered on her that there was something else alive and breathing in her room, the evidence being bright and cheerful sounds he made when he tried to talk to her. At least she hadn't mistaken him for Chris, which still occasionally happened 'and never fails to piss me off," as he told Hilliard. "Puts me right into a fuckin' rage, even though of course I know she's got no idea what she's saying. I dunno what I want from her, expect her to do, where that no-good bastard's concerned. Fifty, sixty miles away, maybe an hour's drive? If it's even that, and he hasn't been to see her since I can't remember when.

  Before she got really sick, I know, the bastard, been at least that long.

  "I can't figure the little shit out. It's almost as though he holds me and her responsible for Dad dying like he did when he was still so young. Like he got gypped out of something or something, and we helped whoever did it. When he had much more of Dad's tim en I ever did because by the time he came along Dad'd made sales manager and didn't have to work so many hours had more time to take Chris to ballgames and places by then I was too old to go with them. And who the hell does he think helped Ma pay his tuition, he went to Cathedral? Helped out with his living expenses or he couldn't've gone to BU like he did, even if with his scholarship. That all seems to've slipped his mind now. She still remembers his name, though. It's my name she always forgets.

  "Jesus, though, doesn't he know? You got to take care of your own. All you and I've been trynah do, all these years, the things we ever done, it's always come down to steppin' in and takin' care of other people when their own people either didn't care about them enough so they would do it, or were so totally messed-up themselves they couldn't do it, but the need was still there. Somebody had top take care of it.

  And that was the way that we always saw it; that was the way we looked at it. Our job was to make sure the government picked up the slack.

  That's why the damned jobs exist; that's what they're for. You always take care of your own. Like I always looked out for your best interest, and you always looked out for mine. And we're not even related. We always took care of our own.

  "Chris's never done that at all. It's like he's oblivious to the fact that he should; like the shit doesn't see his obligation. He doesn't take care of his own. But it's his name she still remembers."

  She seldom understood anything he said to her any more, but on good days she seemed to be pleasantly diverted by the noise he made, and liked it, the way she seemed to like the radio that the nuns had set to play soft-rock music at low volume on the table beside her bed, smiling absently and briefly from the distant world nearby where she had gone to live, if living was still what she did. He thought perhaps she had found his father, Pat, and perhaps her mother, Rose, there for company, and that maybe Rose was being nice, happier with them in that new world than she had ever been with them in the one where the three of them had lived before. He surmised that when she was off in that place she liked the sounds he made, not for their content, or the effort the producer of them made, but for what they were themselves, as a kitten likes and is amused by squeaking sounds emitted by a rubber mouse.

  On not-so-good days, perhaps when she and Pat had quarreled, as they sometimes had when he had still been present where she used to live, and physically remained, or Rose was being cranky, the sounds that Ambrose made seemed to vex her, and when she verged on lucidity as she generally did, once or twice an hour, regardless of her inner state she would irritably make small, tidy brushing motions. He was fairly certain that she meant them to dismiss the noise-maker. On those days he subsided, and sat silently with her for as long as he could stand it, half an hour more or so, departing with the excuse in his head that the length of his stay no longer mattered, and the fact of it might not, either, except to the good nuns who observed in passing with approval his filial devotions.

  This Saturday had been an in-between day. She hadn't really taken any notice of him or what he said. Her entertainment offering to him had been to look over vacantly and then pick tremulously at her third meal of the day sections of pink grapefruit and a small dish of canned beef soup, accompanied by a half-pint container of skimmed milk and a slice of whole wheat bread with a pat of margarine, a dixie cup of peppermint-stick ice cream, served to her on the narrow telescoping bed-table, usable when she was in the wheelchair, as she had been that afternoon. Then she had placidly looked on while it was taken away, mostly undisturbed, and a short while after that he had gone away himself.

  He thought that on Monday he might call her doctor again, for no good reason except his own need to feel that he had at least tried to do something, even though he knew before he made the effort that there was nothing to be done and it would do no good to try.

  The doctor he prefaced his answer to every question with "As your mother's primary-care physician' was a large slow-moving red-haired man named Carlson, in his early forties. He seemed always to be working out a complicated mathematical problem in his head. Most likely it was always the same one, Merrion believed, relating to the possibility of obtaining additional money for his services from the family estates or the insurers of the patients, without any additional or more effective effort on his part; endless, useless calculations of no possible use to anyone except him, conducted visibly so that it would always be clear to everyone that he did not and would not ever wish to be interrupted, and would regard any attempt to do so as an imposition, punishable by neglect of the patient.

  That evident desire of his cut no ice with Merrion. He received regular quarterly statements from the Hightower Mutual Life Assurance Society in Fort Recovery, Ohio, reporting benefits it had paid to James N. Carlson, M.D. under Pauline Merrion's Medicare Supplement Extended Benefits Policy. If each of the forty-one other patients occupying all but three of the extended-care beds available at St. Mary's on the Hilltop had a policy or other resource remitting to Dr. Carlson, attending house physician, the same amount that he was getting from Hightower for Polly, that stolid man was pulling down $2,730 every week, $141,960 every year, for what appeared to Merrion to consist chiefly of saying over and over again that just as Merrion had thought 'there's been no change in the past um week, um um, no change that I see, at least. But her heart still seems to be very strong. Doesn't seem to be much more we can do that we're not doing already. She's, yes, she's still holding her own."

  On the television screen the beautifully silky, streaming tawny and white long-haired regal dogs trotted beautifully in turn around the ring on the leashes that their nondescriptly dressed diligently trotting handlers pretended that they did not need, and Ambrose Merrion on Saturday night sat depleted by his caring, watching them compete without ever knowing why, except that they existed, and that was what they had been bred to do.

  FIFTEEN

  Sergeant Everett Whalen emerged from the lockup into the ivory-painted cinderblock-walled corridor outside the lieutenant's office before Merrion finished removing his supply of bail forms from his beaten-up tan leather briefcase and getting himself settled at the bare old wooden desk against the wall. "Amby, how they hangin'," he said. It was not an inquiry; Whalen walked soundlessly in his crepe-soled black uniform shoes and spoke as a courtesy, so that Merrion would not be startled to turn and find him standing there.

  "Ah, two inna bunch, Ev, same as always," Merrion said absently, without looking at him, flopping the sheaf of multi copy bail forms onto the desk, the t
op copy, white, blocked off and printed in rust-colored ink. He snapped the briefcase shut and tossed it onto the top of the desk against the wall, turning to face Whalen and resting his buttocks on the edge of the desk so that his left foot touched the floor and his right foot dangled above it. "Our happy campers ready?"

  Thompson'll start bringin' 'em out to see you in a couple minutes,"

  Whalen said. He stood slumped with his hands in his pockets. In his late forties he had prematurely acquired the sallow skin, the shameful little paunch and the doleful, dismayed look of a careless man nearing sixty and discovering that the penalties of failure to eat properly, get sufficient exercise and moderate his intake of alcohol plenty of cheap beer, generic six-packs, in Ev's case are just about as disagreeable as medically predicted. He looked as though he had realized some time ago what was going to happen to him, sooner than it should, and had resigned himself to it. The dismissive scuttlebutt that Merrion indifferently remembered from a casual courthouse conversation was that Ev Whalen never had any good luck at all.

  Apparently well before he'd been close to old enough to have learned very much about women or know anything at all about marriage, he'd made the bad mistake of marrying a somewhat older woman who'd had her heart set on having a husband and had pretty much settled for him as the best she was going to get. She had borne him two children, but then after those experiences and some further consideration decided that on the whole she wished she hadn't married him. While she still believed he had probably been the best she could ever have done, he didn't make much money; he bored her, and she didn't like him very much.

  One night with four rum-and-Cokes in her she had disconsolately given him that news, confessing her realization that she would have been better off alone. Staggered, he said he wished she were. In his bleak grief he told her since she felt that way to get out of his house and he would raise the kids himself. She said she would like to do that and appreciated his offer, but they both knew he couldn't do it alone, not the way things had become. They were stuck with each other, fused by a bad event that wouldn't've happened if she hadn't grown impatient and they hadn't gotten together.

  Merrion wasn't exactly sure what it had been. One of the children had some kind of serious disability, caused either by a birth defect that she could have prevented with better prenatal care or more prudent behavior, or else by a very bad accident during infancy. The calamity had occurred while Everett and his wife were still fairly young, ruining whatever slim chance they, with little else to hope for, had ever had of at least moving up a notch or two in the world on a policeman's pay.

  When no-end-in-sight expenses threatened to destroy them, some of their friends and neighbors organized a ten-kilometer fund-raising walk around the Cumberland Reservoir. Disc jockeys at WMAS in Chicopee exhorted listeners to volunteer and sell sponsorships of themselves to relatives and friends for contributions of a buck per kilometer to 'this very worthy cause." The week before the 10K walk, volunteers impeded shoppers leaving stores and markets at the local strip-malls by stepping into their paths and shaking white cardboard metal-bottomed canisters containing coins in their faces, demanding that they "Please Help the Whalen Family." Friends and neighbors staged a couple of dinner-dances at the VFW Hall in Hampton Pond, "Benefit of the Whalen Fund." They charged couples $25 per ticket for access to a cash bar and Music By The Muscle-Tones, a four-piece amateur Sixties Oldies band formed by two firemen, a high-school teacher and a lab technician who worked out together at the Canterbury Spa and Health Club, playing and singing together for the bright-eyed pleasure that it gave them.

  Too indolent to change the local-access channel after the conclusion of an entertainingly contentious budget-meeting of the Canterbury selectmen, Merrion had watched the climax of one of those dances on television. The Whalens were standing awkwardly side-by-side like 4H livestock, a team of farm animals being auctioned off at the Big E Eastern States Exposition. Obviously not used to his clothing, Whalen wore a white shirt and narrow dark-red tie with a dark suit. His wife, whose name Merrion did not remember, wore a black dress with a high collar and long sleeves. They were standing on a low stage next to the "MAS morning disc jockey, a laboriously jovial, heavyset young man with a microphone, doing their best to look humble and grateful while the fat kid boastfully announced that a measly 'three or four thousand dollars have been collected, from hundreds and hundreds of people throughout the Pioneer Valley, reaching out to help the Whalen Family."

  He did not say that ninety percent of it had been five and ten-dollar bills donated by people who knew the Whalens only slightly but really did feel sorry for them, or else had been asked by one of Whalen's fellow cops to make a donation and thought it might be provident to do so. The DJ did not say the rest was small change badgered out of contemptuous strangers who didn't know a thing or give one good shit about the Whalens and resented being forced to use their pocket change for once glad to have pennies to ransom themselves from the can-rattling solicitors they deemed fucking goddamned nuisances.

  "Wonderful, wonderful people, every one of you," the DJ declaimed, extending his arms in symbolic embrace of people sitting at tables and standing in groups on the dance-floor under the balloons and crepe-paper festoons decorating the dimly lighted hall, staring in curiously some blearily at the Whalens. Because he knew Ev, Merrion had avidly watched the mortification, ashamed that he felt such fascination.

  Then it had been time for Everett to grovel. He had taken the microphone and held it clumsily too close to his mouth so that it muffled his words, abjectly whinnying mandatory thanks to all the wonderful people who had worked on the great events and given money and helped out in any way at all; promising them that he and his wife he grasped her hand desperately, as though reasonably apprehensive she might come to her senses and bolt, try to get away while he was occupied and their healthy child, as well as the one being helped, would never forget their wonderful kindness and generosity. He did not quite promise to reciprocate on demand by donating one of his kidneys or a lung, his heart or liver, for that matter to any fundraiser who might ever need one and match his tissues, but he came pretty close.

  As Merrion watched the event he'd begun to feel astonishment and wonder. He did not recall having given to the fund drive. He was reasonably sure that he had somehow inadvertently escaped every dragnet bagging all those niggardly donors. To the best of his recollection, it was the only such shakedown he had managed to elude since he'd first gotten into politics, forty years and more before. This amazed him. He calculated that in the course of his twenty-two-year career he had solicited campaign contributions for Dan Hilliard and other Democratic candidates and causes at least sixty times. The people on his trusty donor-list remembered him, with vengeance, when it came time for them to raise money for their candidates, colleges, church schools, drum-and-bugle corps, their children's teams and their favorite diseases, knowing he could not refuse. But somehow he'd escaped the posses of the Whalen Fund. He could not for the life of him explain how he'd done it, imagine what on earth he'd done or failed to do that had delivered him. Thereafter each time he saw Whalen at the station, he marveled silently once more.

  "We got a couple more guests in since I called you," Whalen said. He leaned his right shoulder against the corridor wall and folded his arms. "Lady barkeep, good-lookin' head, from up Cannonball's, and we assume it's her gentleman friend that was with her. Routine coke buy.

  He was scoutin' up the customers; she was keepin' the stash under the service bar.

  "Statics got a new choirboy for undercover narc. He's the one who popped 'em. Looks like he's about sixteen. I guess he's actually twenny-three or four. They're workin' him out around here day and night this weekend without stoppin', seems like. Showin' him around like a new movie; anywhere you go you got a chance to see him. Hittin' every place they can. Settin' guys up left and right. Marijuana, cocaine, you-name-it; sellin' booze without asking' ID; solicitin' him for blow jobs; firearms; anything they can.<
br />
  "Corporal Baker told me you can never tell what the hell is gonna happen, you drop a new young pretty boy into a hard guys' bar. Baker told me they got one guy down in Blackstone last week, had their Little Boy Blue workin' down the Worcester area, guy sold him a fuckin' recurve-crossbow. Looked like the antlers of a goddamned Texas Longhorn, mounted onna fuckin'-gorgeous, inlaid, checkered, big-game rifle stock. Fuckin' thing had to've been custom-made, some guy, most likely, use it to kill silent with. "Magine havin' that around, fuckin' thing like that? Someone must've stolen it somewhere from someone else down in Texas, prolly. Some rich oil man killer weapon, kind ah guy he must've been, and still some guy has got the balls go in and steal it from him.