'But Lippy kicked out their cruiser window!'
'Right, and under the circumstances George and Eddie couldn't very well put in a claim for the damages.'
'So?'
'So the money to replace it probably came out of the contingency fund. The Buick 8 contingency fund, if you want me to cross the t's. We keep it the same place now we did then, a coffee can in the kitchen.'
'Yar, dat's where it come from,' Arky said. 'Poor ole coffee can's taken a fair number of hits over d'years.' He stood up and also stretched his back. 'Gotta go, boys n girls. Unlike some of you, I got friends - what dey call a personal life on d'daytime talk shows. But before I leave, you want to know sup'm else, Neddie? About dat day?'
'Anything you want to tell me.'
'Dey buried D.' He said the verb the old way, so it rhymes with scurried. 'An right nex' to im dey buried d'tools dey use on dat t'ing poisoned im. One of em was my pos'hole digger, an I din'
get no coffee-can compensation for dat!'
'You didn't fill out a TS 1, that's why,' Shirley said. 'I know the paperwork's a pain in the fanny, but . . .' She shrugged as if to say That's the way of the world.
Arky was frowning suspiciously at her. 'TS 1 ? What kind of form is dat?'
'It's your tough-shit list,' Shirley told him, perfectly straight-faced. 'The one you fill out every month and send to the chaplain. Goodness, I never saw such a Norwegian squarehead. Didn't they teach you anything in the Army?'
Arky flapped his hands at her, but he was smiling. He'd taken plenty of ribbing over the years, believe me - that accent of his attracted it. 'Geddout witcha!'
'Walked right into it, Arky,' I said. I was also smiling. Ned wasn't. Ned looked as if the joking and teasing - our way of winding things back down to normal - had gone right past him.
'Where were you, Arky?' he asked. 'Where were you when all this was going on?' Across from us, Eddie Jacubois started his pickup truck and the headlights came on.
'Vacation,' Arky said. 'On my brudder's farm in Wisconsin. So dat was one mess someone else got to clean up.' He said this last with great satisfaction.
Eddie drove past, giving us a wave. We gave him a little right-back-atcha, Ned along with the rest of us. But he continued to look troubled.
'I gotta get it in gear, too,' Phil said. He disposed of his cigarette butt, got on his feet, hitched up his belt. 'Kiddo, leave it at this: your dad was an excellent officer and a credit to Troop D, Statler Barracks.' -
'But I want to know - '
'It don't matter what you want to know,' Phil told him gently. 'He's dead, you're not. Those are the facts, as Joe Friday used to say. G'night, Sarge.'
'Night,' I said, and watched the two of them, Arky and Phil, walk away together across the parking lot. There was good moonlight by then, enough for me to see that neither man so much as turned his head in the direction of Shed B.
That left Huddie, Shirley, and me. Plus the boy, of course. Curtis Wilcox's boy who had come and mowed the grass and raked the leaves and erased the snowdrifts when it was too cold for Arky to be outside; dirt's boy who had quit off the football team and come here instead to try and keep his father alive a little longer. I remembered him holding up his college acceptance letter like a judge holding up a score at the Olympics, and I was ashamed to feel angry with him, considering all that he'd been through and how much he'd lost. But he wasn't the only boy in the history of the world to lose his dad, and at least there'd been a funeral, and his father's name was on the marble memorial out front of the barracks, along with those of Corporal Brady Paul, Trooper Albert Rizzo, and Trooper Samuel Stamson, who died in the seventies and is sometimes known in the PSP as the Shotgun Trooper. Until Stamson's death, we carried out shotguns in roof-racks - if you needed the gun, you just had to reach up over your shoulder and grab it. Trooper Stamson was rear-ended while parked in the turnpike breakdown lane, writing up a traffic stop. The guy who hit him was drunk and doing about a hundred and five at the moment of impact. The cruiser accordioned forward.
The gas tank didn't blow, but Trooper Stamson was decapitated by his own shotgun rack. Since 1974
we keep our shotguns clipped under the dash, and since 1973 Sam Stamson's name has been on the memorial. 'On the rock,' we say. Ennis Rafferty is on the books as a disappearance, so he's not on the rock. The official story on Trooper George Morgan is that he died while cleaning his gun (the same Ruger that ended Mister Dillon's misery), and since he didn't die on the job, his name isn't on the rock, either. You don't get on the rock for dying as a result of the job; it was Tony Schoondist who pointed that out to me one day when he saw me looking at the names. 'Probably just as well,' he said. 'We'd have a dozen of those things out here.'
Currently, the last name on the stone is Curtis K. Wilcox. July 2001. Line of duty. It wasn't nice to have your father's name carved in granite when what you wanted - needed - was the father, but it was something. Ennis's name should have been carved there, too, so his bitch of a sister could come and look at it if she wanted to, but it wasn't. And what did she have? A reputation as a nasty old lady, that's what, the kind of person who if she saw you on fire in the street wouldn't piss on you to put you out. She'd been a thorn in our side for years and liking her was impossible but feeling sorry for her was not. She'd ended up with even less than this boy, who at least knew for sure that his father was over, that he was never going to come back in someday with a shamefaced grin and some wild story to explain his empty pockets and how come he had that Tiajuana tan and why it hurt like hell each time he had to make a little water.
I had no good feeling about the night's work. I'd hoped the truth might make things better (it'll set you free, someone said, probably a fool), but I had an idea it had made things worse instead. Satisfaction might have brought the curious cat back, but I could make out zero satisfaction on Ned Wilcox's face. All I saw there was a kind of stubborn, tired curiosity. I'd seen the same look on Curtis's face from time to time, most often when he was standing at one of Shed B's roll-up doors in that sidewalk superintendent's stance, - legs apart, forehead to the glass, eyes squinted a little, mouth thoughtful. But what's passed down in the blood is the strongest chain of all, isn't it? What's mailed along, one generation to the next, good news here, bad news there, complete disaster over yonder.
