Buckville

O'Grady was the main policeman, the only one, in Buckville on Tuesday night. The night before his fiftieth birthday, before he went to work, at about 9 PM, he noticed that his '65 Corvette was missing, and this disturbed him considerably, but both his wife and his son knew how to get it and take it out of the garage, so he thought he'd check with them before he reported it stolen. At work, there was only the dispatcher, Corky, and a bunch of routine work to do besides the usual patrols and response to calls.

At about 1:50 AM he found himself as usual waiting in the alley between Main and Elm for Joe's bar, at the corner of Main and 1st, to let out at 2. This was his usual activity. Joe's had a regular clientele that included members of a motorcycle gang, and a bunch of people he'd known for years, including one guy named Winslow, who was there tonight; he had actually graduated from high school with Winslow, but Winslow had been much more of a rebel; Winslow had a Harley, hung around with the motorcycle gang, drank hard, and drove that cycle around town making noise, not wearing a helmet, and smoking a cigarette, while driving, a kind of flagrant way of saying he didn't care about anybody's rules.

Winslow was a kind of hardened guy, a rebel, but he had the money to drink, and lots of evenings, he would start at about 8 or 9 and go right up until 2 AM. There was really only one place, Joe's Bar. He was well aware that O'Grady would be waiting outside that bar at 2 AM waiting for any drunk to drive away, so he could pull them over, hit them with DUI, a huge fine, loss of license, a few days in the slammer. It was well known around the bar that walking out of the bar drunk at 2 AM was a dangerous activity; one guy, Smith, once walked out to his car, but then just basically sat there waiting O'Grady out. Smith didn't have the luxury of not driving; he lived out in the country. It wasn't the eight mile walk that bothered him, it was being without a car when he got there. So he'd just waited. When O'Grady finally pounded on his window, he rolled it down and asked him if it was a crime to sit in your car for a while on a city street. Other people made a habit of parking six or seven blocks away so that O'Grady would be nowhere near them when they finally got into their car. But Winslow was dismissive of this kind of game.

Back to this Tuesday night: Winslow got out of the bar at 2 AM sharp, got on his motorcycle, and drove it out on 1st Street right in front of O'Grady, who was in the alley, in his patrol car; as he crossed the alley, he gave a disparaging look in O'Grady's direction which might just as well have been giving him the finger, and O'Grady set out in pursuit, siren on. A small group of people were standing outside of Joe's as he drove past, siren on, and he was disturbed that their reaction was slightly different from usual; he couldn't quite place his finger on it. They couldn't have been surprised to see him chasing Winslow; maybe they were wondering whether it was legal to chase after a guy, just basically for knowing he was probably drunk.

Winslow turned left quickly in the alley between Main and Washington, just a half a block on the other side of Main there just past Joe's. But when O'Grady turned left behind him, in pursuit, he was distressed to find some dumpsters had been moved out from their usual spots behind the Chinese restaurant and another one further up the block, behind the insurance place. A motorcycle could pass through, but a police car couldn't. He was enraged at Winslow, but he did what he had to; he backed up, went over to Washington, and, siren still on, sped up Washington still listening for the sound of Winslow's Harley.

About ten blocks up he cut back over to find whether Winslow was still in the alley or had gone back over to Main. There was a convenience store there on 10th and, much to his surprise, Winslow stood there, next to his Harley, smiling. That's right, he was smiling. I'll get you, O'Grady thought, evading a police officer, shooting down the alley, waking up the whole town at 2 AM, I'll wipe that smile off your face.

But Winslow, smirking and laughing a little, submitted to a sobriety test and passed it; he wasn't drunk at all. O'Grady wondered for a minute if somebody had messed with his measurement system but, in fact, Winslow even appeared sober. There was not even a trace of alcohol on his breath.

They stood there in the convenience store parking lot, under the pallid light of the overhead parking lot lights, and this was the first O'Grady began to suspect something was amiss. Winslow, sober? It didn't make sense. From 8 until 2, and he hadn't drunk even a beer? Something was wrong here. In his mind for some reason he was thinking about the '65 Corvette, but that didn't make sense either; how could they be connected? What could be going on here? At that moment, he and Winslow were suspended in time, Winslow with a smirk on his face, knowing something he wasn't telling, and O'Grady, ready to release him reluctantly, about to tell him that he would get him sometime, give him what he deserved, as soon as he could, but deciding against saying anything imprudent.

At that moment Joe Foster came out of the convenience store, and laid into Winslow for owing him money. With this development O'Grady backed off a little and just watched. He tried to remind himself that he was a policeman on duty and nobody had committed a crime here. On the other hand, they were also three high school classmates, meeting by chance in the parking lot; Joe Foster had become a lawyer locally, and also was a hunter of whom many bizarre stories were told. But, this evening, it was all about the money, and Joe and Winslow went back and forth, back and forth. The thirteen-year locusts made a shrill squeak in the background; all else was quiet; it was, after all, about 2:30. The discussion went on for about a half hour, extended by complications, until O'Grady was called away on a call from Corky that had originated with the widow Swalley.

The widow Swalley lived beyond the convenience store, but needed a ride to the hospital, which was near the convenience store, and let him know very directly that she had very little business with the police in general, but was still mad when that young guy Kowalski had been hired and had ticketed about sixty cars throughout town for violating an ordinance by parking facing the wrong way. People had done that for so many years that nobody considered it illegal, and they went down to the police station in large groups protesting loudly that they had all gotten tickets; the police eventually had to withdraw them. Mrs. Swalley had been ticketed in this particular incident and hadn't forgotten it even a little, but she thanked him for the ride as she exited at the hospital.

To make a long story short, O'Grady didn't arrive back at the station until his shift was over at 7, and when he got there, much to his surprise, there was his '65 Corvette, tucked in the lobby of the police station. Some guys had taken it entirely apart and put it back together inside the lobby where it couldn't be driven, but had to be walked around, and where its redness reflected every wanted poster on the wall. He was flabbergasted. This was some birthday present!

Winslow was there, but only for a short while; Corky, who was obviously in on the prank, was there longest and laughed hardest. He recognized a bunch of people from Joe's bar, although it was 7 in the morning and some of them would have had to work hard to be up at that hour. A group of guys had done it, all in league with each other, and with his son's cooperation; all kinds of people were in on it, even Joe Foster and the widow Swalley, whose role was basically to stall him and keep him away from the place for a while.

You would think this would be a kind of tribute to a small-town guy like O'Grady, but the fact was that the people of the town, particularly the Joe's bar crowd, were kind of mad at him, mostly for hanging around near the bar at 2 every morning, harassing the regulars, and things worked out so that having his Corvette jammed in the lobby of the police station was more of a major inconvenience than a tribute to a well-loved citizen. Winslow, who left for a Great Lakes ship the following day, was blamed for virtually everything, and was everyone's excuse for not helping O'Grady undo the problem. It was Winslow, after all, who knew who had done the work and how to undo it, and it took O'Grady a long time to figure out how to have the car removed and put back where it belonged. Some of the mechanics at Floyd's garage were key figures, but they were much more willing to do a favor for Winslow than for O'Grady, and it took O'Grady weeks of pleading and doing favors for them to get them to take it apart again and reassemble it in O'Grady's garage. Fortunately it was a Corvette, and was small, but even a Corvette is heavy and can't exactly be carried around by hand. And in the intervening time, when the police chief started getting angry, and everyone made comments about how the police station lobby looked like the local mall, and asked whether it was for sale, and some young punk ran his key along the door on his way to being arrested or whatever. By the time the experience was over, in the beginning of October sometime, O'Grady was thoroughly exasperated and ready to arrest everyone he'd considered responsible. He'd now be unable to drive that car around, without people telling that story.