All That I Have (6 page)

So, a year and change with the Green and Gold. I liked the work, but I can’t say I ever liked the state police. No fault of theirs; they’re a military organization, basically, they have to be, and I thought I’d had about enough of military organizations in the navy. Plus, I was going out with Clemmie by then, and she plain refused to marry anybody who might be seen wearing one of those flat-brimmed cowboy hats the troopers have.

Yes, I married above myself; everybody says so. Clemmie says so. Her old friends say so. Her cousins say so. Her father don’t say so. He don’t have to.

Not that we were ever poor in our family. We were never poor, not close. My sisters and I could have anything we wanted. We had a deal with our mother. Her end was, we could have anything we wanted. Our end was, we wouldn’t want too much.

That was the same deal everybody’s family had. Well, not Clemmie’s, maybe. Her father did alright. He did better than alright. He still does. Addison’s an attorney. He’s not a local, exactly, though he’s not far off. He grew up in Brattleboro; his father was a doctor down there. His grandfather was governor of the state, or maybe it was his great-grandfather. Addison went to law school in Philadelphia, then came back to set up as a lawyer, not in Brattleboro, but here up the valley, in Fayetteville. He has his office right around back of the courthouse.

Addison’s a funny fellow in some ways. He’s no woodchuck, he’s a graduate of Harvard, and he’s traveled. He’s lived in England, France, Italy — places like that. But he wants you to believe he’s just a country lawyer, sitting around the store playing checkers with the farmers and spitting on the stove. And, in a way, that’s what he is — and, in a way, it ain’t.

For example, when the state condemned Oscar Breedlove’s gas station over here in Dead River Settlement because his underground tanks had been leaking for years, and Oscar decided to sue the Exxon Corporation, whose gas he’d sold and whose contractor put in the tanks, who showed up in court representing Exxon? Addison does a good deal of that kind of work for out-of-state interests, I guess. Maybe you can’t get rich lawyering for people here in the county, but lawyering for Exxon might be a different thing.

Clemmie’s an only child. There’s a certain weight to that, she’ll tell you, and it looks like she’s got it double, since her mother don’t live here. She and Addison split up when Clemmie was little. In those days, in a place like this, being divorced pretty much made Clemmie’s mom a fallen woman. She would have found it hard to stay around here if she’d wanted to. As it was, though, she had other plans. Clemmie’s mom was a New Yorker, and she moved back down there. She remarried, had a couple more kids. Clemmie don’t see much of her.

Addison stayed single. He and Clemmie lived in their house here on the Devon road, though Clemmie spent a good deal of time in Brattleboro, being partly raised by her aunt and uncle, Addison’s sister and her husband down there.

So Addison has been a bachelor for years. He’s had lady friends from time to time, and that’s had to have been a little tough on Clemmie, a little confusing, when she was a girl, anyway, especially because some of Addison’s lady friends have been married to other people. Nobody makes a fuss, though. People are going to do what they’re going to do. Addison’s what you could call a pillar of the community, though he’s the kind of pillar where the side facing out gets a little more paint than the side facing in. He likes his toddy, too. And he’s getting older. Like Clemmie says, a certain weight.

Give him credit, though, Addison. He’s honest. He don’t lie, he don’t sneak. The time I stopped him for driving under the influence, I had him pulled over, and he started to get out of his car and about fell on his face.

“Have you had anything to drink, sir?” I asked him

“Don’t insult both our integillences, Trooper,” said Addison. “What did I say? Did I say ‘integillences’? I believe I did. I must be intoxicated.
Intelligences.
Don’t insult our
intelligences,
Trooper. Do your duty.” And he handed over his keys. That was pure Addison.

Addison didn’t think much of the idea of his only daughter marrying a policeman. He for sure didn’t think much of it when Clemmie and I were getting engaged and I quit the state police to be a sheriff ’s deputy. If you have to have a cop for a son-in-law, at least let him be a high-class cop and not some shitkicker. Poor Addison.

No, going from the state police to the sheriff ’s department didn’t make sense. When I told my barracks commander what I was doing, “God damn it,” he said, “you’re playing in Fenway, here, and you want to quit and go to Pawtucket?” He was a good man, though. “Well,” he went on, “you could do worse. You’ll be with Ripley Wingate, up there. You could do a lot worse. Give him my regards. Tell him he’s getting my best boy, god damn him. It ain’t true, but tell him anyway.”

A good man. But what about Wingate? Where did he come from? I knew I wasn’t cut out for the state police, but I didn’t know I wanted to go to the sheriff ’s. I didn’t know, but Wingate did.

There are no strangers in law enforcement: everybody knows everybody else, at least some. And, of course, Wingate had been sheriff it seemed like all my life. So sure, I knew him, at least by sight. But Wingate and I hadn’t spoken ten words before this time. Then one day when I’d been in the troopers for a year and a bit, I was patrolling in North Cameron on the Ulster road. It was a spring day. I had the windows open. I came around a bend, and here’s Wingate’s sheriff ’s car pulled over in a turnout, and Wingate himself standing beside it and looking my way.

I thought maybe he was having engine trouble, so I drove in beside him and stopped.

“Good morning, Sheriff,” I said.

“Trooper Wing,” said Wingate.

“Is everything okay?”

“Pretty day like this? ’Course it is.”

“What are you doing up here?” I asked him.

“Waiting for you,” said Wingate. “Get on out and stand with me a minute, why don’t you? Take in the air.”

I left my patrol car, and Wingate and I leaned on his car and looked out in front of us across the road and over a big mowing beyond it going up to the top of a hill. There was an old house up there, an old farmhouse and a barn, and the clouds moving behind them in the blue sky.

“You’re Lucian, right?” Wingate asked me.

“That’s right, Sheriff,” I said.

“What do they call you, then?”

“Lucian.”

Wingate nodded. “ ’Course they do,” he said. “Well, here’s the thing, Lucian. You’ve been at the barracks now for, what, a couple of years?”

“Not that long. Year and a half.”

“A year and a half. And yet, you know, I’ve been noticing something about you.”

“What’s that, Sheriff?”

“How’m I to put it?” said Wingate. “Let’s see: you were in the service, weren’t you?”

“Three years in the navy.”

“The navy,” said Wingate. “I was army, but it’s the same: your officers, when they dress up, they wear swords, don’t they? For ceremonial occasions? Naval officers?”

“I guess so. Some of them. Sometimes.”

“And you’ve seen them,” Wingate went on, “wearing their swords?”

“I guess I have.”

“Then you’ve seen how a man walks, you’ve seen how he carries himself when he’s wearing a sword,” Wingate went on. “Kind of stiff and ramrod, and favoring one side so the sword don’t trip him up?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, it always struck me that when young fellows like yourself go into the barracks, there, the state police, that when they’ve been there a little while, they always, all of them, start walking like they’re wearing a sword. Have you seen that?”

“I can’t say I have, Sheriff.”

“I have,” said Wingate. “I bet they do, too. I bet they do so give them swords. Don’t they? At the barracks? They do so wear swords. At night, maybe, when nobody’s around?”

“I wouldn’t know, Sheriff,” I said. “I never did.”

“You never did,” said Wingate. “That’s it. That’s what I noticed. You’re different. You’ve been there near two years, and you haven’t started, you haven’t developed that walk. That sword walk. Which makes me wonder: are you happy in your work, Trooper Wing?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do,” said Wingate. “If that’s your answer, you do know. You know you ain’t. Now, here’s the thing. I’m hiring a deputy this spring. Deputy Rackstraw’s getting done. He’s got a security job at the power plant. I need to hire another deputy. I wondered if that’s anything that might interest you.”

“That would be a pay cut, I guess,” I said.

“You guess right,” said Wingate. “It would be a pay cut. It would be a hell of a pay cut. I ain’t got the governor behind me, you know.”

“Well,” I said, “I’m getting married in the summer, though.”

“That don’t matter,” said Wingate. “You’re supposed to be poor when you’re just married, ain’t you?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Who are you marrying?” Wingate asked me.

“Clemmie Jessup.”

“Addison’s girl?”

“That’s right, Sheriff.”

“What are you worried about, then?” asked Wingate. “You’ll get by. Have Addison set you up.”

“No chance, Sheriff,” I said.

“No chance because Addison won’t do it, or no chance because you won’t let him?”

“Both, it looks like.”

“Well, but still, think it over,” said Wingate. “You ain’t got to make up your mind now.”

“I will. I will think it over.”

“Sure,” said Wingate. “You think it over. Think it over good. The sheriff ain’t the barracks, you know. It’s like, it’s like the difference between going fishing with a cane pole and taking off all your clothes and jumping into the pond and swimming around with the fish all day and maybe grabbing one from time to time.”

“Which is which, Sheriff?”

“Sheriff ’s swimming around with the fish,” said Wingate.

“I’ll get back to you,” I said.

“It’s like the difference between being the fellow who puts the doors and windows in a big house and being the fellow who builds a little house, but he builds the whole thing,” said Wingate.

“I’ll think it over.”

“Sheriff ’s the one builds the whole house,” said Wingate.

“I thought so,” I said.

“There ain’t a sword in the shop,” said Wingate.

I was on patrol that morning, supposed to be, so I left Wingate, promising to think about his deputy job. I thought about it for two minutes. No, I didn’t. I didn’t think about it that long. I didn’t think about it at all; I didn’t have to.

The next day I turned in my flat hat.

6

DARK LADY

Wednesday we had the day off. Not a Russian to be seen, not a Russian heard from. No Russians on the market anywhere. I’d about decided I’d have to get busy and scare one up. Then, Thursday, bright and early, the Russians began to come to me.

The sheriff ’s department has its headquarters in Fayetteville, across the common from the county courthouse. Wingate, in his time, had a little broom closet of an office in the courthouse basement, but since then we’ve moved on, though not real far. I could walk to work if I wanted to, but then where would I be if I had to saddle up in a hurry and ride out after evildoers? I take the truck, as a rule, and I like to get in to the department first thing, before the night dispatch goes home, so I can talk to a human being about what I don’t know happened the night before instead of reading a log or listening to a recording. That works when the night dispatch is sharp, like Beverly is during the day, or even halfway sharp, but at night the sharp kind is hard to find. I always wondered why. Night dispatch at our department is a quiet job: good job for a reader, good job for a crossword puzzle man, good job for a knitter. You don’t have to be a deputy. You’d think plenty of people would want a job like that. But no, the night dispatch turns over pretty quick.