he stopped coming, though. In June, he moved to a neighboring town. The Chief’s exile was a source of puzzlement around Versailles. People assume he’d died a little when his wife passed, as spouses often do. It was a misperception I did nothing to correct. I do not know if it is possible for Dad to find forgiveness for what he did. But I expect he will outmuscle his troubles, eventually, and get on with his life. It’s the Truman way.
And me. I am still the chief in Versailles, though I don’t know how much longer I will stay. The town deserves better. In the meantime, I have made it a habit to walk a beat, as John Kelly would insist I do, though the only beat in this town is Central Street, all two blocks of it. I’ve taken that stroll twice a day, every day, stopping to chat at the Owl and McCarron’s and the General. For a while I carried Kelly’s nightstick on these rambles. I even spun the thing, or tried to. If you carry it right, Kelly said — if you carry yourself right — you’ll never have to use it. It was a bit of police wisdom I wanted to hang on to, but I couldn’t believe it anymore. Not with the touch-memory of Gittens’s head in my hands, not with him thrashing between my legs in one foot of water. No. I don’t carry the nightstick anymore. It sits on my desk or in a drawer. Maybe I’ll give it to Caroline. Or Charlie. I don’t want to have it around.
So those are the details, the ‘facts.’ That is how the story ends.
But the story never ends, does it? History — the rolling wave of incident after incident, propelled by currents of chance and luck and coincidence — streams right along with no regard for beginnings or endings. The only true end is the present moment, the seething forward edge of the wave.
So let me bring you right up to the present. As I write this, it is September. The summer temporaries have all returned to their winter jobs, and the department is back down to Dick and me. Disgorged of the summer people, Versailles is back to its population of several hundred. It is foliage season again, but that’s no real bother. The leaf stalkers are an older crowd than the summer tourists, and they’re generally nice people, even the flatlanders from Taxachusetts. It is a quiet time.
I am at the station, alone at my desk. It is dusk but I haven’t turned on the lights yet. It feels comfortable in the gloom.
As soon as I am finished here, I’m going down to the lake for a swim. This is the best time of year for it, my mother always claimed. In the evening the air is chilly, but the water is still warm after a summer under the sun. In fact, the air and water temperatures are close enough to create an illusion: while you are night-swimming, at certain moments you can’t tell air from water, and in the darkness there is a sense of zero gravity, of weightlessness. On my way to the lake, I will pass right by the spot where Bob Danziger’s cabin stood. (The cabin itself has been razed, not for health reasons but because it was considered unrentable. I sometimes use the spot for a parking place.) I will leave my clothes in the Bronco and walk right into that water, let it take me in and envelop me, and swim out to the center, stroke by stroke, to the deepest part.
