Tips for Living(28)

Whenever I saw the police make this gesture on crime shows, I imagined a warm palm placed protectively on the crown could feel soothing momentarily, especially for an innocent scared out of her wits, and maybe even for a serial killer like Ted Bundy. But in reality, it felt manipulative. Psyops for cops. “We are your friends. We want what’s best for you. We care.” A devious message from folks who hoped to lock you away for life or fry you in an electric chair. A hedge against a lawsuit if you hurt yourself.

“Fasten your seat belt. We wouldn’t want you banged up if we make a sudden stop. Or hit a pothole,” Roche cautioned. “We’ve already seen some big ones this year.”

“You might consider reporting them to the highway department,” I said.

I could hear my father’s voice whispering in my ear. Don’t get cheeky, kiddo. This is serious business here.

I buckled up, noting the car’s sickly sweet chemical smell, like the inside of a Port-O-San, and the stiff, uncomfortable back seat made of molded gray plastic. Probably easier to clean if anyone vomited, pissed, or bled, I thought, repulsed. What was that curious silver ring bolted to the middle of the floor?

“What’s this metal ring for?” I asked through the security screen as Roche climbed in the passenger seat up front. The blue-black edge of a tattoo snaking along his collar line finally exposed the ruse of his country-squire look. He glanced over his shoulder.

“Securing a prisoner’s leg irons,” he said.

The remains of whatever bravado I’d conjured disappeared as we sped out of my driveway, the police radio crackling with addresses and codes. My heart began hammering. My hands resumed their shaking. My stomach churned. The scratch on my cheek even throbbed for a second. How had it gotten there? Then . . .

Kathump!

My head hit the car roof.

“Damn pothole! You okay back there?” Roche asked.

No, I wasn’t okay. I felt scared and alone. I wanted to call Aunt Lada and be soothed by her voice. But I was afraid she would hear how frightened I was, and it would worry her sick.

“I’m good,” I said, and repeated it more for myself than for him. “I’m good.”





From the Pequod Courier

Letters to the Editor

Dear Editor,

Thanks to “Tips for Living” for bringing some levity to the struggles faced by average residents. You can tell Ms. Glasser is “one of us.” She probably drives a car that’s more than two years old. At least I doubt she owns a 7,500-square-foot summer home along with a Manhattan penthouse. Make no mistake about it: there’s a class war raging in Pequod, and I know who is winning. The greedy real estate developers who are profiting by polluting our wetlands and scarring our beautiful landscapes. The superrich Summer People who build giant vacation homes and then charter helicopters in their rush to get here and “relax,” inflicting deafening noise on the rest of us. Why is nothing ever enough for any of them?

Tim McNulty

Pequod, NY





Chapter Eight

Compared to Pequod, Massamat is a big city. Population over thirty-two thousand, according to the last census. But the downtown area was depressed. We were driving through a ghost town. At least on weekdays, you’d see some shoppers. Or young and old men in front of the empty display windows of vacant stores on State Street. They sit on graffiti-marked benches or overturned milk crates, smoking and shooting the bull while waiting for contractors to drive by and hire them as day laborers. Today everyone was at the discount mall.

The financial crisis or prolonged recession or end of the great capitalist experiment, depending on your point of view, has made downtown jobs scarce while creating other employment opportunities. Some of Massamat’s formerly college-bound youth have been joining gangs and dealing drugs. The quarterback for the Massamat High School Mastiffs became involved with a gang and was arrested for selling Vicodin and meth. Last year saw three homicides—two of them gang-on-gang kills. The third was a gas station attendant shot during a robbery. The police suspected gang involvement there, too. Just 10.8 miles from Pequod, there’s a growing culture of violence.

What if some of Massamat’s angry desperados rode over and shot Hugh and Helene in the course of robbing them? Or it could have been a gang initiation rite. Killing someone to become a member of the club. Maybe they’d slashed Hugh’s “artsy” self-portrait in a final gesture of contempt? It was possible, yes. Especially if Hugh had shown up on their radar because he was buying drugs. I’d known him to indulge in the past. Besides spreading through America’s suburbs like the plague in the last few years, heroin had become hip in the art world again, reprising the ’70s, when artists snorted in the toilet stalls at Max’s Kansas City and the Mudd Club. At least that’s what New York Magazine said. Maybe Hugh and Helene were using and abusing?

I let my head fall back against the car’s hard seat.

There were surely people besides myself with motives to murder Hugh and Helene. Killers with guns. In my muddled thinking, I’d failed to consider that if the unconfirmed report was accurate and Hugh and Helene were shot . . . well, I didn’t own a firearm. I wasn’t 100 percent certain how the police viewed me, but my own lurking, illogical doubts eased.

We drove by city hall and pulled up to the new police station conveniently located next to the county court complex. Unlike the rest of Massamat’s traditional brick government buildings, the station was conspicuously modern—all black steel and dark, tinted glass. Some failure of the imagination had led to the placement of a large bronze badge “sculpture” in the middle of the concrete front walk. A good portion of the county’s boom-year tax dollars went here when property values rose: not to job retraining or after-school programs, but to law enforcement and monuments. The police budget was a hot issue in Pequod, too.