A change of gravity

by George V. Higgins

  '"So I never made an actual decision, I wasn't gonna get married and have kids. I just never got around to it. But I knew it. You didn't hurt my feelings, saying it."

  "I'm not sure he believed me," Merrion said to Cavanaugh. "He looked awful contrite. But anyway, that's what it is: to Sam what him and Jeff do with the Red Sox every summer is a holy thing.

  "Six times a season," Merrion told Cavanaugh. "I used to think they must go at least once every week that the Red Sox were home. Every time the two of us met for lunch during the baseball season, it seemed like they'd gone to the game the night before. Not that we started meeting to talk about baseball; it was for business, a pleas anter way to discuss things we needed to talk about anyway, in the course of doing our jobs. So you and I know what we're doing here. Larry never did that, and Richie didn't, either. But I think they should've. A certain amount of regular, ongoing coordination between the state and the federal systems: I think it's essential these days. There's so much overlap now, especially with all the drug stuff. I know:

  Probation. But the state probation guys don't do it enough, at least in my estimation. Maybe the ones in Superior do it, but on the District level, they don't.

  "Anyway, we both just figured that since we gotta do this, and since, you know, you're both gonna have lunch anyway, well then, why not meet and have something to eat the same time? Made sense."

  "And you're good at having lunch, aren't you, Amby?" Cavanaugh said.

  "Hey," Merrion said, 'you're tellin' me I'm fat, is that it? Jesus, what I have to take in this job anna pay's not all that good either."

  "But by judicious use of the expense account," Cavanaugh said, 'you're able to make the ends meet."

  "Oh, what's this we got now?" Merrion said. "Now I got you also getting' on me, claimin' I cheat onna gyp sheet?" '1 don't know," Cavanaugh said, waving his hand. "I also don't care.

  That's between you and your God. Or Theresa in the treasurer's office.

  Whoever it is, it's not me."

  "Well, okay, then," Merrion said. "Anyway, now you're gonna meet Sam and see for yourself. He's a little like his uncle, the chief: he's got enthusiasm. He's really into his work."

  "As many times as I've seen them do it, your Honor," Paradisio said over the sandwiches, 'and it must be hundreds now, it never ceases to amaze me. They try to make me think they've become attached to me. And therefore I've become attached to them.

  "It's ridiculous. It should be pretty clear, no matter how stupid you are, how much you wanna believe what you gotta know just isn't so, it isn't gonna matter if I like you; I think you caught a bad break or you're a nice guy, or if you make me laugh. I imagine you also run into this yourself, Judge, now and then, this same phenomenon: sometimes it just about drives me crazy. The law's put someone in your power, and he knows it, but he seems to have the idea that if he can ingratiate himself with you, you wont exercise it.

  "Well as we all know, it isn't that way and it can't be that way. You can't allow it. Instead what the situation is is this: "If you give me a reason, so I have no choice, what I'm gonna do, my friend, is violate your sorry ass. Callin' me your buddy, or any of that shit, just wont do the job for you. Cryin' wont help either, do you any good at all.

  Get your mind clear on this: If you violate the terms of your release, and I find out, as soon as we catch up with you you're goin' away again. And nothin's gonna change that."

  He wore, as usual, a frayed and starched long-collared broadcloth shirt that had taken on a greyish cast, frayed at the cuffs and collar, and one of what must have been a large collection of flimsy neckties, modestly patterned and shy, that made tiny knots when tied.

  Merrion found them embarrassing. To Hilliard: "I hate those neckties of his. They're offensive. It's so hard to remember what they even look like, five minutes after you've left him. Almost like he's daring you, you know? He's gonna call you up later and test you. "See? I knew it: You don't remember what color tie I've got on. That's how much attention you pay me." The only other time you see ties like his is when you're in a Filene's Basement or some charity thrift shop and they're hanging up in bunches, wooden pegs. They should stay there. He buys his pants out of catalogues and they come with Ban-roll waistbands I don't know that but I'd bet."

  In cold weather Paradisio wore tweed sport coats that lacked heft, and in warm seasons he wore shapeless hop sack blazers. "His sports coats look like there's nobody in them, when he's got them on. He looks like he gets dressed inna morning hoping no one'll notice him all day. Even see him; like his ambition's to become transparent. His haircuts make him look like that's what he wants. Boys' regular, short back and sides. He's been going to Harding's ever since his father started going there in Nineteen-fifty-one. He may've never liked the way Russ Harding cuts his hair, but that wouldn't make any difference. He wouldn't have it in him to change barbers over such a little thing as not liking how the guy cut his hair.

  "Not that I don't really like him or respect the guy at all; I do. He's the nicest guy the world. It's just that he's perfect. He looks like he is what he actually is and most likely always was, even before he officially became one a conscientious government worker. You look at him and you just know it. Everything about the guy screams Government at you."

  He had gotten his nickname in the course of his government work. His job had obliged him to start 'keeping exactly the kind of company,"

  Merrion said, 'that you'd imagine a guy named "Sammy Paradise" getting' into on his own, water seekin' lower ground: Hangin' around with the gangsters. Only I would've thought they'd be other gangsters; his colleagues.

  "I tell you, it's wonderful. Among hundreds of things that Sammy is not, Sammy isn't a gangster. He's in the world to do good, and nothing wrong with that notion. You and I, that's what we try to do. Don't always succeed, but we try. We're just not as ambitious. Sammy's faith in his fellow man's far greater'n ours: He tries to do good with the hoods.

  "This is a very big difference. Knowin' what they are, knowin' that they'll never change, most of the time he can still manage to believe that they might reform. That's Sammy's natural mission. He knows his work is hopeless, but he also knows that if he ever lets himself think that, he wont be able to do it anymore. Somehow he convinces himself he doesn't know what he knows."

  For Paradisio it was essential to persuade himself he didn't know what his clients meant when they told him that with his help they now understood where they had gone wrong. They told him they had come to see that the way that they'd been living before they had gotten caught was what had made them move so fast and make mistakes. "They hadn't taken time enough to think the whole thing out. Quickness's what's really counted in the acts that got them into trouble. It's surprising how big a part that plays in what they have to say to me, about the lives they've lived."

  From listening to them for so many years he believed he had learned to think a little bit like they did. "Which can be very helpful,"

  Paradisio told Cavanaugh. "I'm not knocking it. They often tell me if they'd only taken time enough to stop and think, about whatever got them into the shit, well, they never would've done it.

  "They've just never had the time. It's the darnedest thing. It always seems to have been they had to act, right off, before every guy named Dave and Al, and everybody else as well, found out and started trying, pull the deal off before they could. So things never turned out quite the way that they hoped, and then look what'd happened. I hear those stories all the time, day in and day out. That's how I've spent my life at work, listening to desperate men convicted and then severely punished for very serious crimes tell me the reason was timing. They've had a lot of time to compose their stories. You'd expect that they'd be good, complete, with no loose ends. But they aren't. They always lack something: any admission or recognition that if Dave and Al had in fact managed to go for the loot first, they would've been just as guilty of committing serious crimes, and if caught then convicted and put in jail. The parolees I deal
with in that one respect're a lot like the people I work for and with: they all seem to think that what matters is how good a job you do, not whether you should do the job.

  Except of course that the people I work for don't usually do felonies.

  The jobs they pull off may not always be good things to do, but most of the time they are legal."

  He paused. "I no longer point out to my felons what is missing from their stories. I used to but I gave it up, many years ago. They claimed they didn't understand why the element I mentioned was important to fully understanding what was wrong with what they did. I could not convince them that it was. The smarter ones after a while saw that I wouldn't let them off the hook until I'd made them see the matter my way, so they claimed I'd convinced them. They were lying. I saw that they were never gonna stop lying. So I gave up creating the situations they dealt with by telling me lies I didn't believe. I guess we're partners now."

  He was right. The strategy he'd devised to avoid disbelief of what they said amounted to comp licit surrender in their deceit. If he didn't raise the question of repentance, they wouldn't lie to him. "No one's on parole or probation forever. Sooner or later they either die or we have to release them. The agency can't get much bigger. Process them through, regardless of what they've become. Go along, get along, and go home."

  He was resigned to the collaboration. "With a name like Paradisio, everybody thinks that anyway, you're in the bag with these guys. "Ah, this guy's probably mobbed-up. Fuckin' ghinnies; most of'em are."

  He was not alleging prejudice. As far as he knew he had never been held back from advancement by suspicion that he might be connected, closer to the men that he was supposed to be supervising than he was letting on, concealing stronger loyalties to them than to the government and the department he was working for. He had found the job to be as it was supposed to be at the time he took it. His nickname was just an insignificant aspect of the acceptable prize that he had wanted, and gotten out of his life: a good steady job for himself and his family, Lois and the kids.

  Civil Service: that was the kind of job that he'd wanted, the definition of steady. He went into Probation because Probation had openings when he dropped out of American International College in Springfield, for the usual three reasons: no money; no great interest in finishing; and lastly, no reason at all. "I could've dug up the money, I guess, I'd've put my mind to it. Really wanted to try. And the same with the grades. I didn't have to get Cs and Ds; I'm not stupid. But what the hell, I didn't want to, I guess was the main reason. I was young. What the hell do you know when you're young?

  Nothin': that's the whole of it. Just that you're young, and you'll always be young so half of what you know is shit.

  "I see it in my clients. That's how almost all of them got off to their start. Knowing two things for dead-certain sure, and at least one of those things was pure shit. Time they get to me, they've found out which one. Most of them probably were as strong and tough and smart as they knew they were; that part was true. But now they know that the rules did apply to them; the idea that they didn't was shit.

  "The way that they found out was very hard. When it finally dawned on them they were locked up in the can, watching the years of their youth drain away. Like piss hissin' down onna white mint onna strainer, and all they can do now is just stand there holdin' their dick in their hand, watchin'. They've found out their lives've been like something they happened to be around for, like a big game and they got tickets, while the years were going by. Their whole youth and middle years; not lived, just gotten rid of, discarded by somebody else they don't even recognize, that guy standing next to them. By the time they get to me, all that most of them can do is just continue to stand there and watch, while the rest of their lives go away on them. Some day, they know, their life will finally disappear, like something that's never been here at all. All they have to hope for's that the instant when it runs out they'll feel a little better, because at least it'll be ending, whole process of watching it go.

  "They look at me like I've got answers, some of them, when they've just gotten out and it's begun to register on them that the years they spent inside're really gone. Never get them back. They come in and see me, when they first report, sit there and look at me as though they're thinking maybe hoping might be more like it that maybe I can do something important for them. If they're nice to me, I could get their years back for them, all the years they spent inside. Maybe there's a secret way, and I know where it is.

  "Those're the most painful cases. These're hard men, very hard men, dangerous and violent and cruel; they've done terrible things. I know it sounds silly to say it, but this's the way I feel. I hate having to be the one who disappoints them. It's nothing personal. They happened to draw me, so I'm the guy who has to tell them what they hope for can't be done. Simply can't be done. Randomness's all it is; I'm the guy picked to do it. That's just the way it is. But sometimes I think: "If I could do that for him, maybe he would reform now." I often think that a guy with no hope may not see much reason to start behaving himself; he may decide he's got nothing much to lose now, if he doesn't what can he possibly lose? Fear, that's all, that we'll do it to him again, as indeed we will, because that's all we've got left now, to make him obey the law. That's not a good threat; I don't know anyone who'd mind losing fear.

  "This I think is what accounts for the successes that the chaplains and lay preachers in the prisons and on the outside, too sometimes make of these thugs. No one can get their lives back for them. But the preachers can tell them that if they start playing their cards right for as long as this game continues, they'll get a great deal inna next one, in the afterlife. Not all those conversions that lots of us laugh at are the fakes we think they are, scams to con the parole board. Some of them are the real thing. Some of the born-agains may've met Jesus, or Muhammed, and some of them may just be too desperate to care if He was out when they called, but many of them really do believe. There's a terrible emptiness to knowing you've pissed your whole life away; you know it when you see how hard it hits these guys, meaner'n vipers themselves.

  "There're days when I wish I'd done something else with my life, but on the absolute worst day I ever had I've been better off than my clients."

  He had spent almost forty years on the job, ever since he'd seized the opening almost immediately offered to him after he won top grades on the Civil Service exam. "That, you see, I'm not really stupid, when I put my mind to something. College: I couldn't convince myself that what I was doing had any connection to any life I'd ever lead. The Civil Service exam was the only way I could get to live a life I wanted. So even though I was young, I could see it was important, worth preparing for."

  Merrion knew this about him: he had spent all of his workdays earnestly talking with and about guys who had a sense of crippled-up irony that he'd never gotten, and therefore he had never really understood them.

  It affected the way he thought about information that he got from Sammy, how he weighed, filtered and interpreted everything Paradise told him, complete with the irony and bitterness the people who had said it to him had come by the dishonest hard way, had had a lot of time to think about, in prison. They had refined it and worked it over in their minds, so that ever afterward it distorted everything they said through a sharpened, crooked smile. The mocking smile that never altogether went away told what they really thought when they saw men and women and their children, the conduct and possessions other people valued and took care of: they saw that they could turn those values into vulnerabilities. Weaknesses they could use to enrich themselves, and demonstrate that they could destroy anything they didn't want and would, to please themselves.

  It was the dialect of real evil, a silent language that they spoke and Sammy didn't. The words were the same in each one but the connotations were different. Not opposite; trickier than that — off-center, skewed and distorted. When they thought a guy who had some power over them was nice enough so that they could be friendly with h
im which meant take liberties with him; 'you know, like fuck with his mind a little; don't mean the guy any real harm' without really risking anything, it had to mean that he was kind of an asshole, a jerk. Weak, if he wanted to be arms-length friends with them. The kind of guy you'd always have to be putting something over on, kind of laughing at, taking advantage of, to show that you knew he was weak. He'd never been one of the boys, and he'd never be one of them either.

  They would always do it to him because they would always see it as a part of the duty to be cool. Merrion would be several miles and days away in Canterbury, when they saw Sammy down in Springfield, sat down and talked to him, just as earnestly and soberly as he talked to them, but later when Sammy talked about his clients and what they'd said to him, Merrion without ever seeing them would know exactly what had been going through their heads, like lethal gas, while they fucked with Sammy's mind real good for the Hell of it, for something to do in Hell, to pass away the time: contempt. And Sammy as he talked earnestly to Merrion would still not know what had happened to him. Reciting it to Merrion after the fact, completely unperturbed Merrion listening to him, hearing what the hard men had been thinking in the discordant music underneath the words that Sammy was repeating Sammy still didn't know, any more than he had known while the words were being uttered, what evil there was in them.