The Year We Disappeared (17 page)

“I know you’re angry, but you have to get it under control. You think the kids can’t tell that you’re mad all the time? Look at them, look at what is happening to our family.” I wished I could make her feel better, but the truth was that I was angry and planned to stay angry until I got back at the bastards who did this to me. I just didn’t see any way around it. But it killed me to know that my boys were feeding on my hatred and taking it out on kids at school and vice versa.

After a couple of weeks at home, I got more relaxed about my physical state and didn’t run off to the bedroom to put food in my GI tube. When the kids were at school I’d sometimes do it right at the kitchen table, like a regular meal, with the guys sitting there.

“What the hell is in this stuff?” Rick asked at one point, picking up a can of my meal replacement formula and checking its ingredients. He smelled it. “Man, how do you eat that?” he joked.

“Easy,” I wrote on my pad. “I just open the can and pour it in my tube like this.” This was a reference to an incident involving Don Price, a gruesome vehicle fatality, and a doughnut—it was a story we still liked to tease Don about. I knew Rick would get
the joke, and he did. “Very funny, Buzz.” He grinned as he passed the note over to Don.

The incident in question happened one night when Rick Smith was still a RAC, summer special, and he had asked to ride with me on the night duty after his shift ended. Most of the summer specials either wanted to be full-time cops or at least wanted to see some of the action that we full-timers got. So I said yes, and that night we rode in Oscar 8 in East Falmouth, working backup. We were over in Hatchville on a report of a prowler when a call came in about a motor vehicle accident. I was the EMT officer on duty that night, so the accident took precedence over the prowler. We headed over to the scene, a narrow two-lane road called Wild Harbor Road that ran straight for over a quarter mile, then took a quick, hard curve to the left. Right at the corner of the curve was a utility pole, and that’s where we found a Corvette. The car was completely demolished—the passenger side crushed into the pole like an accordion.

I stopped thirty feet away because I could see power lines on the road. I put on both spots and headlights, flashing and blues too. I told Rick to start spreading flares along the road near the lines. I radioed in what I’d observed and grabbed my EMT case. I approached the vehicle, shined my flashlight in, and saw nobody. Then I saw two stumps of legs in the crumpled passenger compartment. They’d been torn off just below the knees. So whoever they belonged to should’ve been down the road a bit—ejected through the windshield and in need of major medical attention.

As Rick set the flares out, I proceeded slowly through the light brush alongside the road, looking for our accident victim. I found a young male facedown, forty or fifty feet from the wreck. I felt at his neck for a pulse and noticed there was a huge puddle of blood where his face should have been. No pulse. I reached down his chest to feel for a heartbeat and my hand went right inside him. No heartbeat. This guy was dead three ways from Tuesday—legs torn off, face smashed, chest wide open.

I returned to the cruiser to radio for sergeant’s response to a 10-34 fatality. As I’m walking back to the victim, I noticed something sparking about a foot off the ground and just to the side of him. It was a high voltage power line and I’d somehow crossed it twice without touching it. I got some flares to mark its location and noticed it was moving in an arching dance, winding slowly down and back. Maybe I didn’t cross it, maybe I did. Turns out that it has four thousand volts running through it, a near miss on my part.

About this time another cruiser showed up, driven by one of our auxiliary cops, a guy named Bobby. I left Rick at the scene and went with Bobby to find the rest of the car scattered down Wild Harbor Road. We found the gas tank and a seat and another young man over two hundred feet from the pole. He had lots of cuts and scrapes but no major damage visible, not even a broken bone. He was stunned and incoherent, probably from head trauma. I had Bobby call for the ambulance and power company and managed to keep the driver calm until the ambulance could get through to take him to the ER.

We found the engine of the Corvette about three hundred and eighty feet from the pole—an accident scene over a football field in length. Meanwhile this four-thousand-volt line had settled on the dead young man. It’s snapping and crackling and we’re waiting for the power company to turn it off. The sergeant sent for coffee and doughnuts, which arrived long before the power company. We radioed in again and were told they had had to rouse their emergency guy to come out, and they said he was on his way. So Rick, Bobby, Sarge, and I passed the time just standing across the road, making sure the flares were up and keeping any passing cars from coming too close to the scene. We were having our coffee, trying not to notice as the air filled with the smell of a body that’s on fire, because by now the kid’s clothes were in flames and there was nothing we could do about it until the power company got there. A car coming from the other direction slowed down to look at the scene, then pulled over to us. A woman got out, and we could tell she was mad as hell. “How can you do that?” she asked Don.

“How can I do what?” Don asked her.

“How can you stand there and eat doughnuts while that person is on fire over there!” she yelled at him.

“Well, I just open my mouth and take a bite like this, ma’am,” he said, and took a big bite of doughnut followed by a long swallow of coffee. She marched back to her car, no doubt full of contempt for these coldhearted, disrespectful, bastard policemen. There really wasn’t anything we could do until the power was
cut. By the time it was, the guy’s backside had been turned into charred ashes, his pants were burned, and a large portion of his rump was cooked. Talk about overkill—it was definitely this young man’s time to die.

We got information from the driver about who the victim was and where he’d been staying, not too much farther up Wild Harbor Road. The victim was Catholic, so we got a priest from St. Patrick’s up, gave him some coffee and doughnuts, and had him accompany us to the victim’s residence. The families of both boys, from New York, were staying on the Cape for vacation. The sergeant handled the ceremonies of introducing the good father, who broke the news. One family so crushed, one so elated, over the outcome of the same accident.

After I investigated the scene thoroughly, I charged the driver with speeding and reckless driving. Don’t know exactly how fast he was going, but from the looks of things, and how far he was thrown from the wreck, it was way too fast. In court on the stand, the kid testified that he’d since purchased another Corvette because he “liked” them. The judge found him guilty, took his license, and fined him. I don’t know if the two families are still on friendly terms, but for a couple of feet the story could have been reversed, with the driver torn to pieces and the passenger sliding to a stop down the road with just bumps and bruises.

Ever since then, we’d hassle Don when we got the chance about the irate citizen and his matter-of- fact doughnut-eating answer. I guess the joking was probably our way of dealing—of
processing what we had seen and had to clean up that night. But jokes aside, this was one fatality that haunted me for a long time. One of the firemen who came to clear the scene that night asked me if I was going to early Mass the next morning to thank God. “You walked over that wire,” he pointed out. “That’s four thousand volts. You should be dead right now.” I told him if the sarge would let me off early, I’d be there when the doors opened. I tried not to think too much about i t—fate, karma, whatever was at work that night. It was his time to die, my time to live. I put it out of my mind, stopped by the church on my way home, and called it a night. Amen.

AS that fall slowly became winter, it was clear that school this year would be very different for all of us. Eric got a black eye from fighting some guys in gym class. “I’ll kill that dick if he ever comes near me again,” he told Shawn after school. And Shawn said he would help. “I’ll hold him down and we’ll beat the shit out of him.”

Shawn had a concussion two weeks earlier from a fight he had been in at school and had to go to the emergency room. I’d started to hear rumors in the elementary school about my brothers: They got into fights all the time. They were bad. Shawn was crazy. Eric was about to be moved into the “special” class. I didn’t understand how they could have gone from being really good students and good kids to being bad practically overnight, but it had happened. Now they liked to swear all the time and go shooting with Dad’s cop friends. They had been to the firing
range with Dad and Don Price and had learned how to use guns. Shawn told me that it was really loud, but Eric didn’t say anything about it. “Eric’s a pretty good shot,” Shawn told me after one of their practice sessions. “But I flinch too much.” He must have heard that from one of the cops, because the way he said it, it didn’t even sound like him talking.

One Monday morning at school, everyone in my class was talking about Cathy’s slumber party. I knew Cathy pretty well, and I would have said we were friends, so I was surprised that she had a slumber party over the weekend and hadn’t invited me, especially when it sounded like every other girl in our class had been there.

At recess, I sat by her on the swings. I could tell she was as uncomfortable as I was about things. “Was it your birthday over the weekend?” I finally asked.

“Yes,” she said, and looked down at her sneakers. She dragged her heels back and forth through the sandy dirt. “Look, I wanted to invite you, but my mom said that you couldn’t come anyhow, so I didn’t.”

“That’s okay,” I told her. “But I could have come, just so you know.”

“You could have?” Cathy looked over at me, surprised. “My mom said she didn’t want a police car sitting in our driveway all night. And then Dad said the other girls’ parents wouldn’t let them come if we had you over, so . . .”

“Oh, right,” I said. “Yeah, don’t worry about it.”

“It wasn’t anything special anyway,” Cathy said, then added in a whisper, “and don’t worry, I didn’t let anyone talk about you.”

After recess, I sat at my desk and took out my hairbrush to pull my hair back into a ponytail. The brush was grabbed out of my hands by someone standing behind me, and when I spun around, I saw that it was my teacher, Ms. Williams.

“No hair brushing in my class,” she snapped at me, then she marched up to her desk and slammed the brush into a drawer. “I just want to remind all of you that you are not allowed to have any personal objects in this classroom. I told you the rules of my class when school started.”

Cathy raised her hand, then said, “But Cylin wasn’t here when school started, so she didn’t know.”

“The fact that she wasn’t here is her fault. No one gets any special treatment in my class.”

After school was over for the day, I went up to Ms. Williams’s desk. “Can I have my brush back now?”

“No, you cannot.” She didn’t even look up from the papers she was grading.

“When can I get it back?” I asked her.

“You don’t get it back,” Ms. Williams mocked me, talking in a high, singsong voice.

The brush was a special one that Mom had given me. It was a travel brush that folded up on itself. I really wanted it back. I
sat on the bus trying hard not to cry, but when I finally got home, I ran into my room and burst into tears. Kelly asked me what was wrong. When I told her, she said it wasn’t a big deal. “Isn’t she that teacher Shawn had a few years ago? Didn’t he say she was really mean?” She handed me a tissue. “You just can’t let her get to you. In fact, if you act like you don’t care, that will really bother her.”

I didn’t mention being left out of the slumber party. Kelly wouldn’t have understood, and I didn’t want to make Mom mad at another one of my friends.

By the time Mom got home, I was feeling better. But I heard Kelly tell her the story about Ms. Williams as they were fixing dinner for everyone. “What?” Mom yelled. “That bitch, she’s not getting away with it this time. She made Shawn’s life hell when he was in her class.”