Lucy by the Sea (42)

—

What we found was appalling.



—

The town was like a ghost town, but when William drove up to where the houses had been built for the millworkers, we saw a few people out in front of them. The houses were in terrible shape; they seemed to spew forth their guts onto their front lawns. Broken bicycles and large black bags of garbage and a broken windowframe, these things were in front of the houses; some of the porches were piled with what looked to be junk.

Some of the houses had huge American flags draped over their front windows or on their porches. The few people who were outside stood and watched us as we drove by.

“Oh God,” William said.



—

We went back into the center of town, and William got out to go into a gas station store to buy two bottles of water. I stayed in the car, and I saw that there was a policeman in his cruiser right beside me; he wore no mask, and he kept looking at his phone, and every so often he would pick up a big paper cup and drink through the straw in it.



—

I watched him so carefully.

So carefully I watched him.

I wondered, What is it like to be a policeman, especially now, these days? What is it like to be you?

I need to say: This is the question that has made me a writer; always that deep desire to know what it feels like to be a different person. And I could not stop feeling a fascination for this man, who seemed to be in his fifties, with a decent face and strong-looking arms. In a way that is not uncommon for me as a writer, I sort of began to feel what it was like to be inside his skin. It sounds very strange, but it is almost as though I could feel my molecules go into him and his come into me.



—

And then three young guys came out of the gas station store, and they stood in the parking lot opening bags of potato chips and laughing, but they scared me in a way; they all had very pasty skin and their eyes said that they had nothing left in this world to lose. The youngest one was probably thirteen and he looked especially sad; his teeth were skinny and sort of bucked, and you could tell that he was trying to impress the two older ones, and they were not impressed.



—

William got back into the car and we drove around more; we saw the mill that, according to William, had sent its paper all over the world back in the day, to Europe, even to South Africa. As we drove along the river, I saw down on the embankment—through the trees—a few broken-down old cottages.

As we headed back to Crosby, I said, “I was watching a policeman who was sitting in his cruiser while you were in the store. I’m going to write a story about him.”

William glanced over at me.

“His name is going to be Arms Emory. And he has a brother named Legs in the next town who sells insurance. They’re called Arms and Legs because they used to play football when they were kids, they were the stars. Arms could throw that football like the wind, and Legs could run down the field like a crazy man.”

“Okay,” William said.



—

Back in my studio I started the story. I loved Arms. He would be a supporter of our current president; this seemed true to me. Then I realized that his brother, Legs, would have fallen off a ladder six years earlier when he was cleaning the gutters, and as a result he got hooked on painkillers.



—

I called Margaret, who put me in touch with a social worker who counseled drug users, and I spoke with this drug counselor for a long time so that I would understand Legs’s situation. Then Margaret had me call a man who had once been on the police force, and he was enormously helpful as well. He said, “Cops take care of each other.”



—

I thought about the story. Then I began to write.

Arms Emory’s father had worked in the mill back when it was fully operative; he had worked in the pulping room. They had lived in one of the beautiful houses in Bradford Place that William and I had seen. Back then, the houses were still beautiful. When the boys were young, their father died, and their mother—whom Arms thought of as practically a saint—moved them to a new house, and she got a job at the hospital, and she told her sons that what they did reflected on their father, so even now Arms did not drink. His happiest days had been on the football field in high school when he and his brother were the football stars. Arms loved his brother deeply.



—

I sat in the overstuffed chair in my studio and thought about these two men. Once in a while I would write a scene, but mostly I just sat, staring at nothing. Just thinking about them.



—

I realized that the youngest kid I had seen in the gas station store parking lot, his name would be Sperm Peasley. He would be called Sperm as a joke—because he was so pale and small that it looked like his parents had conceived him with two sheets between them. But he never thought of his name anymore. The older of the two fellows with him would be called Jimmie Wagg. He would be the drug dealer of the town. And the middle kid was Sperm’s cousin. They had just stolen the potato chips from the store, I decided. And Sperm was still young enough to get a real kick out of that.



—

I wrote these sentences: “But there was an exhaustion Arms felt these days; it left him too tired to fight with his wife—he had not liked her for a number of years—and it left him too tired to think of the election. And yet there was an anxiety he felt as well. He did not see the connection between his anxiety and his fatigue; he was not a reflective man.”