Summer of '69(79)

She had thought, Ha! That’s ironic. It was Richard Nixon who was disturbing the peace—and Johnson before him, and McNamara. Kirby stood quietly while Officer Turbo wrote out a ticket then uncuffed her and handed her the citation as though nothing had happened, as though he hadn’t just given her the best kiss of her young life.

“My name’s Scottie,” he said. “Stay out of trouble.”



Kirby had turned her misadventure into an empowering anecdote. Yes, she had been arrested, put in handcuffs and everything, but in her greatly modified rendition of the story, she talked sense into the arresting officer and he let her go with just a fine. Seventy-five dollars. It was too much money for Kirby to come up with on her student budget and so she had to tell her parents. They should be grateful, she’d told them. He’d let her off easy.

Kate and David were not grateful; they were appalled. But Kirby pointed out that all she had done was protest the government’s foreign policy, a right guaranteed her by the U.S. Constitution. It was the policeman who should be judged, not Kirby.

“What was the officer’s name?” David asked.

“I forget,” Kirby lied. David was an influential lawyer and could probably find a way to have Officer Scottie Turbo disciplined or even suspended, which wasn’t what Kirby wanted. What Kirby wanted was to see Scottie Turbo again—but how? All she knew about him was that he was an officer with the BPD who had been assigned to the protests in Cambridge that day. She had no way to determine what his regular beat was. Did he write parking tickets around Fenway or investigate break-ins in Back Bay or set speed traps on Route 93? Kirby realized her best hope of seeing Scottie Turbo again was to do what she had been doing the first time, and so a few weeks later, when another protest was scheduled at Harvard, Kirby attended.

She tried to remember where she had been when he grabbed her; she thought it was on Russell Street, across from the Coop. And sure enough, there he was, standing in exactly the same spot.

“Pig!” she shouted. She considered pretending to spit but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Instead, she winked at him, and he immediately grabbed her by the arm—harder this time—pinned her wrists behind her, and threw on the cuffs.

“Hey, dollface,” he said in her ear.

He led Kirby to his squad car, read her her Miranda rights, then opened the back door.

“Get in,” he said.

Fear rumbled through Kirby’s gut. Was he taking her in for real this time? She ducked her head and folded into the back seat of the car, which was separated from the front by a metal grate. She felt like an animal. He drove south through Boston, past UMass, past Quincy, and into Braintree, where he pulled behind an abandoned warehouse. It started to rain, which only made the circumstances bleaker. What were they doing here? Officer Turbo parked and got out to survey the area. Kirby couldn’t help craning her neck too. There was no one else around. He could shoot her and dump her and he would never be caught.

He opened the back door. “Move over,” he said. He slid in beside her and unlocked her cuffs.



They started seeing each other every few days. They went to first base, second base, third base—and then Scottie would stop. It was excruciating. Kirby wanted to sneak him into her dorm, but she had a roommate who was always around.

“What about your place? Can’t we go there?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “I live with my mother. She’s older but still sharp. And she has a German shepherd who is very territorial.”

“Motel?” she said. It seemed sleazy and low class, but what choice did they have?

“I’ve got a better idea,” he said. “I own a little fishing shack up on Lake Winnipesaukee. First nice day, we’ll go.”

The first nice stretch of days came the second week of April, right after Easter. Officer Scottie Turbo pulled up to the Simmons campus in a royal-blue Dodge convertible, picked her up, and drove north on I-95 to a town called Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, on the lake.

“I went to school in this town,” he said.

“You did?” Kirby said. She realized then that she knew almost nothing about Scottie’s background except that he lived with his mother and her German shepherd, that he graduated in the middle of the pack from the police academy, and that he’d made a name for himself in crowd control. His regular beats include Fenway Park and Alumni Stadium.

“Brewster Academy,” he said. “My parents sent me there after I got expelled from Weymouth High School for fighting.” He pointed out the campus—a cluster of white clapboard buildings on a green with a darling chapel—and Kirby tried to picture a teenage Scottie Turbo walking to class. It was nearly impossible; he was so sturdy, serious, surly. It seemed like he had been born a full-grown man.

The fishing shack was exactly that—a wooden structure that featured four walls, a floor, and a roof. It was furnished for survival; there was a metal sink, a small icebox, a cot with a bare mattress. Scottie threw open two doors, and voilà—the gloom became illuminated with the day’s sunlight. Outside was a small deck with a table and two chairs, and beyond the deck lay a steep muddy bank that descended to the expanse of Lake Winnipesaukee.

The lake was beautiful in an austere way. The trees were only starting to bud but the unseasonably warm day hinted at how appealing this place must be in summer and early fall. Unsure of what to do, Kirby lingered at the railing of the deck, gazing out. Scottie came up behind her, moved her hair, and kissed the back of her neck.