Re-enactment

Paul was walking through Greenwich Village, in New York City, with a friend from his advertising agency, Jeannette. At one point they walked past the Stonewall Inn, on Christopher Street, and she began to talk about it. Paul was vaguely aware that this was the site of the Stonewall Riots, which were famous in the city and important to the gay community. The name “Stonewall” reminded him of “Stonewall” Jackson, a famous Confederate general, whom he knew something about, being from Virginia. But the two Stonewalls, as far as he could tell, were unrelated, except that he couldn’t help thinking of the one, whenever she mentioned the other.

Jeannette was actually quite pretty, though he’d never thought of her as a girlfriend or even a possibility; they were simply work colleagues, out looking for a place to eat dinner. Yet walking by the Stonewall had stirred something in her, and she began to recite some details of the 1969 riots; how the place was owned by the Mafia; how it had been a seedy kind of bar, with the pretense of being a club; how the riots had lasted several days and culminated in various social and political changes in the gay community worldwide. She actually knew quite a bit about these riots, and that was impressive; it was a cold November night, and he watched with interest as he could see her breath as she talked. The Village was crowded; a lot of people looked familiar, but that was common; whenever Paul walked around New York, people looked familiar. Bright leaves from the fall’s changing colors dangled from trees, ready to fall. At one point they passed a policeman, staring blankly at them as they walked, and he said hello to the policeman, as he would virtually anyone, but she reprimanded him. Here in the Village, she said, we don’t say hello to these guys; they aren’t our friends.

With every mention of “Stonewall” his mind went back to the hilly fields of northern Virginia, where friends and family members would gather for one Civil War re-enactment or another; it was their life, and they lived to dress up like rebel soldiers, get out in the fall woods, fire muskets and eat old-time kinds of food like biscuits and stew. They too knew the details; they knew who killed whom, who marched where, which battles the rebels had won, and how many children the original “Stonewall” had fathered. It seemed, back in Virginia, as if almost everyone lived and relived the Civil War almost every minute, although that was partly because of Paul’s own family’s interest, and the way they surrounded themselves with similar-minded people. When he moved to New York, for example, he was shocked that there was a Civil War statue outside his workplace, yet not a single person there had any clue what it represented, who it was, what his significance was, what side he’d been on, etc. This could never have happened in his community in Virginia; the Civil War statues he knew were adored, reviled, spit upon, or cherished, but never ignored.

In her recall of minute details of historical events, Jeannette was really somewhat similar to some friends of Paul’s in Virginia, and he began to appreciate that in her; it made him more comfortable with her. The difference, of course, was that now they were talking about the events of 1969, instead of those of 1863. They were eating, finally, in a small French restaurant somewhere in lower Manhattan. Strands of her hair had come loose from the long walk and he watched. When he asked her why she knew all these things, she explained that she’d grown up in a gay family who tended to relive the details of the Stonewall riots at virtually every meal. She asked him, finally, about his life, and he explained a little about the re-enactments.

One of the most popular was the re-enactment of the Battle of Chancellorsville; they liked that one because the Rebels had won by outsmarting the Union, and they had done that by dividing their troops into two separate groups. There were always enough re-enactors to get two groups of Rebel soldiers, he said, and they took turns playing the Union soldiers, just to keep it going, though there were a few who didn’t mind being Union soldiers and some who wanted to. He himself had played Stonewall Jackson at the last re-enactment he had gone to, maybe three years ago, before moving to Manhattan.

The French waiter looked at them impassively, very observant yet apparently understanding very little English. There were times, Paul thought, that virtually everything reminded him of the Civil War era, no matter what he did. Within seconds, though, he’d decided to omit the story of Rebecca. Rebecca was a cook at a re-enactment, quite beautiful, and more so since every time he saw her she was in 1860’s dress and surrounded by the smell of home-made food; and he’d quite innocently fallen in love with her, over the course of several re-enactments. But he found out quite suddenly, on that last re-encampment, that she was married; not only that, but her husband vowed to kill Paul if he ever should appear at another re-enactment. He was moving to New York that March, so it never was an issue, but it had left a sour taste on the whole re-enactment memory, at least as he was in the process of recalling it.

He skipped forward to the story of Stonewall Jackson himself. Stonewall, he told her, was a famous general of the Confederacy, much loved and admired throughout the South. But at that very battle, the Battle of Chancellorsville, he’d been shot three times in the arm by his own men, by accident; they had to amputate the arm, and he died eight days later. Paul knew most of the details of Stonewall Jackson’s life, as did most of his friends; Jeannette, however found it somewhat odd. At one point, when she questioned him, he recalled an aunt in the family who was visiting their house after one of the re-enactments. She had asked if it wouldn’t be better if people just forgot the Civil War and moved on to other things. He laughed a little; knowing his family, that would have been impossible, if not completely ridiculous.

Back on the street, he walked Jeannette to the subway, where she would catch her train home; it was still early. Steam rose from the grates beneath their feet and dissipated in front of them as they walked. Retelling the story of the re-enactments reminded him to some degree how much he missed the area he was from, as well as how much he was glad to be rid of it. Nevertheless he wasn’t completely comfortable with New York and all it entailed. In the subway station they parted, and Jeannette kissed him suddenly, upon leaving. He felt shy, like a visitor, still unaware of the culture even after all these years. People hurried past him in all directions, as he stood there, for a moment, dazed.

But then, as he began to walk toward his own subway stop, he spotted a woman who looked exactly like Rebecca. He was shocked, yet he was almost certain it was her. She was walking in the other direction; she gave him a surprised look and then looked away, not to look at him again. She was mostly covered by a sweater, but still, he was sure enough it was her, and surprised enough, to stop dead in his tracks, and stare at her as she disappeared into the crowd. Like a ghost, he thought; you can never be sure whether they are real or not, but they look so familiar, so real, that they might as well be. But New York was different from Virginia this way: he was pretty sure he’d never see her again.

The Other Cheek

When Abel Beck's pickup went over a small cliff within the city limits of Cincinnati, killing him, authorities assumed that he'd been run off the road by someone from the Martin clan and immediately checked the pickup for signs that another vehicle was involved. Sure enough, his blue pickup had signs of being scraped and bumped by something red, but they would have to wait for the labs to find out for sure; that scraping could have been done well before the accident.

Nevertheless, the Martins and the Becks were like the Hatfields and McCoys in many ways, and one of those ways was that everyone assumed that one family was responsible for any calamity that happened to the other. It was assumed to be murder, and it was assumed to be done by a Martin, and therefore it was only a matter of time before suspicion centered on one Arlen Martin, a junkyard operator who lived alone and was about 26. He was perhaps one of the more visible of the Martin cousins, who were spread out around town, including the countryside and Kentucky and southern Ohio, and included lots of other people who weren't specifically named Martin. Arlen, however, denied it strongly, and even said that he had renounced the killing involved in the Martin-Beck feud. There was no question that the Becks were responsible for the death of Cassie Martin six months ago, he said, and that one of them deserved to die for it, but he, Arlen, would not be the one to do the killing, because he didn't do such things, and, he said, you can check every red car or truck in his junkyard, if you wanted to, for the evidence. His brazen challenge sounded authentic to Dale Green, the first investigator, who eyed all the red cars in the lot and noticed that most of them had rusted into a condition that could no longer be considered "red" as the term was known anyway. Arlen Martin did not have an alibi for the Friday night in question, but that also wasn't unusual, who did? Pick any time, any day of the week, and he probably didn't have a good alibi for that either. He was the kind of guy who filled one cheek with tobacco, and left it there for hours, and practically growled out of the other cheek (I'd interviewed him before) – but, as it turned out, he didn't seem to be lying.

Cassie Martin had been brutally killed and dumped in the river, but she was part of a shady drug deal that involved a lot of people, outsiders, people from the coast, and they couldn't find a Beck directly involved in that either; in addition, at the point of her murder there hadn't been a Beck-Martin murder for many months or even years before that. Authorities were frustrated that such a prominent murder could go unsolved, but in drug cases there were a lot of possible enemies and when the body was in the river there was less for clues, and, some of the key players in the investigation had such a bad attitude about the whole Martin-Beck feud that it seemed they'd begun to turn their backs on serious investigation just as a matter of course. This only showed how time and patterns of perception came to be more important than the facts of what actually happened, in many cases like these; I'm sure it was true of Hatfields and McCoys also.

Back to Abel's truck: since drugs were found both in the truck and in Abel's house, Abel was assumed to be part of the drug trade, which meant that he associated with a wider and worse group of people, and that there were lots more suspects than just your worst or nearest Martin. But he was a quiet kind of guy, mostly cut timber on Beck land out by the ancient serpent mound, and had no ring of enemies like you'd suspect of a more serious druggie. Authorities were about to drop this investigation also; one said, what are we going to do, check every red car or truck in Cincinnati? But, one day, a deputy was going past Arlen's junkyard early in the morning, around 5 am, and saw a red truck driving through it, and coming out of it, in the bed of the truck were personal belongings, like clothes, a dresser, a table. A woman was driving it, a woman who was a little disturbed at being seen. On checking what he had seen of the license plate, they learned that this could have been Marcie Beck Johnson, a cousin of Abel Beck who had married and divorced several times but was only 23. They considered hauling her in for questioning, but had nothing to go on, no reason to haul her in, aside from driving a red truck.

This was where I entered the case, as an investigator, when Dale Green bowed out of the case for reasons that weren't clear to me at first. The first thing that surprised me was how easily and quickly everyone around me seemed to have given up; as I said, the worst thing about these family feuds is that everyone begins to assume that they are inevitable and that nothing we can do can stop them from perpetual killing. I, on the contrary, believed that if we could quickly and decisively convince both sides that it was a vicious cycle, that in killing everyone loses, then we would have more people like Arlen Martin, who renounced the killing and went on with their lives. I was determined to catch the killer if there was one. To that end I sought out Marcie Beck Johnson and popped in for a visit. I was mystified that a Beck of any kind would be in a Martin junkyard, and wondered what she was doing with clothes and personal effects at 5 am. But most of all I wanted a look at that truck.

She lived in a tumble-down ranch in the middle of the city, no red truck in sight, kind of a dump, no evidence of children around, but lots of beer, ashtrays, etc. She was kind of pretty, but what you would call a hostile witness, not pleased to be interviewed, not happy about entertaining an investigator. When I identified the red truck and its license plate, that she had been seen in on a certain Tuesday morning, she said that the truck belonged to her ex-husband, Vern Johnson, who lent it to her occasionally, but she dodged the question of where she was moving clothes and personal effects on that morning, and why exactly she, a Beck, might have been in a Martin junkyard. She denied ever even being there, red truck or not. She didn't know anything about a Martin junkyard.

Being a Beck, she was pretty sure that a Martin was responsible for the death of Abel Beck, a distant cousin of hers, but had nothing to say about the death of Cassie Martin, who, she said, probably deserved whatever she got. She said these things mechanically though, almost confused, as if it were the party line but she didn't quite believe it. She did mention that her ex-husband Vern had apparently dumped her, a Beck, and taken up with a Martin, specifically Arlen's older sister Arianna, who could have been the one in the truck.on that Tuesday morning, she said. By taking up with a Martin now, Vern was officially a traitor and universally hated in the Beck camp, but, she said, she still got along with him ok. This was about all the information she was going to give out, so I left.

So now I had at least three people who could have been driving the truck on the night of the murder, and I thought I'd make sure the paint of the truck matched the paint that was found on Abel Beck's truck; this required a trip to yet another junkyard, and now to a driveway outside Vern Johnson's place, which was in the city, yet backed up against some woods that looked very dark and foreboding. By now it was early evening, and I got out my flashlight and started poking around. Vern Johnson came out and confronted me immediately, shotgun in hand. I showed him my badge and asked him if I could ask a few questions. He insisted on a lawyer; the hair stood up on the back of his head, and he was taking short quick breaths that had a kind of whiskey-soaked odor about them.

I made a split-second decision to go after him, and told him that I could tie his truck exactly to the murder of Abel Beck, but that I also suspected him in the murder of Cassie Martin, since he was on the Beck side at the time of the Martin murder but on the Martin side at the time of the Beck murder. I wasn't sure of this, and wasn't sure of the truck either, any old red truck could have done it, but it just seemed that pushing around a whiskey-drunk old guy with hostile questions was going to get me more than standing around being polite and letting him become more hostile first. To tell you the truth, I was ready for all kinds of trouble, but I had very little to lose; if he was guilty, my gun was easier to handle than his, but if he was innocent, he would surely just show me the truck.

Being a northerner, I already felt like I was deep in the twisted ravines of Appalachia, down south here where it's hilly and the trees reach in and choke you when you're trying to think. It was hard not to superimpose my feelings and all my experience with these family feuds on this kind of situation. I occasionally thought of an argument I'd heard in the police station a couple of weeks earlier, where one cop mentioned a study they did where they took subjects, asked them to walk to the back of a room, and had somebody trip them, and saw if they would exact revenge or not; how many would get the guy back? In Appalachia, most would, one cop said; it was an old rural Scot thing, there's no such thing as turning the other cheek, or you'd lose all your sheep. Revenge was normal, expected, necessary, under this thinking, he said, but at this point another cop, a guy named Floyd, also Appalachian, I believe, got offended and and thought it was a slur against all the mountain people, of whom Cincinnati had plenty. You ran into that conflict occasionally as mountain folks often figured the rest of us were looking down on them; that wasn't it. We were just trying to get to the bottom of the Cassie Martin murder, and were wondering what were the odds that it was a Beck, who did it just because he or she was a Beck, or some drug-soaked low-life who killed her for cocaine, or this Vern guy, who apparently dumped a Beck for a Martin and probably could have killed either one, just to impress one or the other of his loves.

So I'm yelling at him, telling him I'm tired of his lame excuses already and I'll get a warrant on his truck because I believe it ran Abel Beck down into the ravine, and furthermore I believe he'd hang for the murder of both Cassie Martin and Abel Beck, and sure enough, he backed off a little and let me look at the truck. When I matched it to my memory of Beck's blue truck, I found myself convinced that this was the guilty vehicle, but lab tests would have to confirm it. Johnson, however, now looked a little scared, and was not behaving as I'd expect a true murderer to behave. And finally, with a little pushing, he told me everything he knew: that Marcie had run off with Arlen Martin, presumably to get back at him for his slipping out with Arlen's sister Arianna, but had fallen for Arlen, quite unexpectedly, and this was a surprise development, since she was a Beck and he was a Martin. Now in danger of their relationship becoming public, Marcie had moved out from his shack also (that explained the clothes and the odd time); he wasn't sure where she'd gone; he no longer kept track of her, but, and he confirmed what she'd said here, they got along well enough so that he could lend her his truck in the process. On the night of Abel Beck's murder he was right here, drinking whiskey, and didn't know who had his truck; sure it could have been involved, but all kinds of people borrow it, not only Martins.

So I'm hot on the trail of whoever was driving this red truck; it seemed like somebody had bashed Abel Beck's truck on the front left with the front right of a red truck, probably this one, and it only seemed natural that it would be a Martin here, or someone who had it in for the Beck clan in some way or the other. Back at the police station, in the ancient coffee room with its run down filing cabinets and sawed-off pencils, I got into it again with old Floyd and a couple of the other guys. We're all cops; we know killing is wrong; we're against killing. Sure, they said, Christianity says you're supposed to turn the other cheek. But if someone killed your mother or your brother, you'd kill them back, wouldn't you? Or kill one of theirs? Revenge is a natural thing. And so, Floyd says, you can't blame these guys if their definition of family is a bit wider than ours.

In fact the investigation got murkier as it went on. A visit to Arianna turned up an alarming development: she'd sworn she was in the red truck, and had bashed a blue truck just like Abel Beck's, about a week before Abel's death. Abel's truck had been in the McDonald's drive-through and there were three people in it at the time, one of them Marcie, and she didn't recognize the other two; it seemed neither was Abel, given a picture, but both were likely Becks. So these people were harassing her, she said, and she finally let them have it, and smacked their truck right in the front. The odd thing was, her story was corroborated, not only by Marcie, who had forgotten most of the details and particularly the truck, but admitted to the harassment, and by a McDonald's employee also, and I ended up believing it. Arianna also admitted to dating Dale Green, at one point, long ago, which explained why I'd gotten the case. And she also renounced the killings, but, being a Martin, was sure that the Beck's were guilty, particularly in the murder of Cassie.

I'd gotten no closer to solving any murder though, and if anything was more convinced that at least Abel's death was suicide, or perhaps just blind coincidence. Sometimes these feuds are invented by the rest of us, someone had said, and you have to watch that you don't miss some little clues, just in the process of assuming the other clan was responsible for someone who might just as well have died, entirely on their own. In any case, the clan war between the Martins and the Becks had cost people their loves, if not their lives, and that was bad enough, There was no reason to dwell on it; there were too many other cases. I left Cincinnati soon after, glad to be rid of this one; I couldn't seem to solve it, or even resolve the questions it brought up.

Souvenir

The percentage of Canadian dimes in the New York State tollway machines in the Buffalo area was higher than the percentage of Canadian dimes in people's pockets, so the tollway people knew that people were using Canadian dimes deliberately, trying to rob the tollway of the .8 cents difference in their value. So they figured out how to make the machines know the difference between American dimes and Canadian dimes, and they upgraded the machines.

Bob Armbuster, a successful businessman who traveled to Canada a lot, was one of those people who had been using Canadian dimes in the machines. But Bob also traveled to Brazil a lot, and discovered that the new machines still couldn't tell a Brazilian dime from an American dime. Actually the Brazilian coin wasn't really a dime, but it looked like a dime and was the exact same size; when he used one, he saved 6.7 cents, a more sizable reward.

He smuggled dimes into the country in a hollowed-out statue of the Christ the Redeemer of Rio de Janiero; on one of his trips, he asked around about where he could find a hollow statue, and kept asking until he got just the right one. The coins fit in there easily without weighing too much. Once in customs, however, they actually opened it up, and he simply explained that he liked the coins and brought a whole bunch of them back for the little children in the classes he visited; they bought the story and let him bring them in. Once in the country, he'd use Brazilian coins in place of dimes at every toll machine and actually enjoyed going through the toll machine, knowing that he had something over on the toll association.

At the Buffalo Sabres hockey game it was common practice for irate fans to throw dimes on the rink when they were mad about a referee's call or they wanted to heckle an opponent's goalie. The dimes would melt the ice and become a hazard until the zamboni operator dealt with them; at that time they still didn't use cameras to figure out who was actually throwing them, but obviously the dime-throwers weren't the favorite fans of the team, the stadium, or the zamboni operators. Bob started throwing the Brazilian dimes, figuring that he was not only wreaking havoc on the team and its rink, but he was saving 3.7 cents with every throw. He was aware that he was probably giving Brazil and Brazilians a bad name in the Sabres' stadium, but he didn't care. He kept the dimes in a different pocket from the rest of his money and only used them when he needed them.

One time, though, he was getting a sausage and a coke and was short forty cents on a $5.40 bill; he accidentally pulled out the dimes from the wrong pocket and counted them out. Maybe the cashier saw the look on his face when he realized that he had the Brazilian dimes, because it drew her attention to the dimes and she looked at them, and sure enough noticed that they weren't American dimes; they weren't even Canadian ones, which were fairly common and usually accepted in such circumstances. She called her boss over and said, "Do we accept these?" innocently, and he, after observing them for a minute, said, "Hey, these are Brazilian coins!" in horror, as if they had been looking for the perpetrator of the Brazilian-coin crimes for months. In a panic Bob turned and fled, left his sausage and his coke, and left without even his five dollars; he missed the rest of that hockey game and a few others also, and that turned out to be a pity because the Sabres were at that moment doing a little better and actually winning a few games.

After that he rethought his strategy a little, and used them less often. He was aware that they had installed cameras at places like the sausage vendor's window and the toll machines, and assumed these cameras were there to catch scofflaws like him; after all, how many Buffalonians went to Brazil regularly? So he waited to use his remaining Brazilian coins, until he was at the machines on the other side of town, or he was buying cigarettes downtown; he made a point to be a little less predictable. But eventually the problem solved itself; he ran out of them, and his company stopped sending him to Brazil altogether, making him unable to get more. He was left with only the statuette, as a kind of souvenir.

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.

Asylum

Katya looked around at the office of the Immigration and Naturalization Service; she liked the officer who was assigned to interview her. Behind him was an official seal of the United States. She wanted asylum from her native country, Russia. She had been in Los Angeles for about two and a half years, but her interview had finally arrived; this was her chance to become a citizen.

Her friends had convinced her to pretend she was gay, and put, on her application, the fact that she had been persecuted back in Russia. This strategy had been working for Russians, they said. They had found people who knew how to fill out the application, knew what kinds of stories worked, knew what to say. They had helped her with the application. She tried to concentrate on the stories that they had put in there together, involving being persecuted for her sexual orientation. She couldn't go back to Moscow, she would say, because it was known there that she was gay, and they would persecute her.

The problem was, she wasn’t gay. She had come to LA originally to be with Ivan, a guy she had met back in Moscow. She liked the place, liked the lifestyle, and the beach, and the nightlife; however, the relationship with Ivan hadn't worked out. Some of her friends had advised her to simply fall in love with an American guy, get married, go that route. She had her eye on a few American men, and a few Russian guys too, but nothing serious had materialized. Actually, she hadn't thought much about being straight vs. being gay; LA was surely different from Moscow in that regard, but until today it hadn't been her concern. Now, ironically, her ability to stay here depended on it.

Her interviewer was a friendly young guy named Anders, but he set about asking questions in a businesslike way, and asked her to tell about her life in LA, her job, her apartment, her friends, her future. She remembered the story that she had put on the application and tried to stick to it. He asked questions quickly, trying to trip her up or find signs of a memorized story or scripted answer. He wanted to make sure that she genuinely needed asylum for reasons of persecution in her home country; if she was merely here because she liked it, that wasn't a good enough reason to let her in.

The afternoon sun set through the window behind him and she could see the haze of the city, and hear city noises out the window. Why did she want to stay? She had work, and friends, and it was light and warm all the time, unlike Moscow, which was dark and bitterly cold.

Moscow wasn't completely dark, of course; she thought about the warm glow in the butcher's shop and the colors of her aunt's kitchen. There were parts of it she missed, like the food, the seasons, the television; she even missed the snow, sometimes. But when she got to LA she'd noticed how the beach and the sun made it lively all the time, and she didn't miss Moscow's long winters that turned into long springs and just kept everyone inside and miserable for months on end. In LA everyone was out there, out there all the time, running to the beach, shopping, texting, going outside, and it went on 24 hours a day. No time to get depressed. Perfect for Katya.

And then there was the dream. Lots of people, herself included, had come to LA with the dream of "making it" in television, or movies, or whatever. Looking at Anders, she was sure he was familiar with the dream, but she wouldn't mention it to him, didn't want him to think it was part of her reason. To her, it was a small thing, maybe; she was pretty sure, by now, she wouldn't be discovered, and might not know what to do if she were. But the dream, she thought, put everyone on their best behavior. A friend of hers had made a disparaging comment about the dream, a broken dream, a nightmare, but she tried not to think about it. She tried to focus on the situation at hand.

Anders started asking questions about her sex life, romance, that kind of thing, and now she became more uncomfortable and had to work harder to hide her discomfort. She didn't like talking about this stuff anyway, and it got worse when she was pretending to be gay. She tried blushing and just apologizing for not wanting to give away details. But he kept on. He wanted proof that she really was gay.

As the pressure in the room rose quickly, images flashed through her mind, of friends here in LA, of the butcher in Moscow, of romantic encounters in both places. She tried to concentrate on her story of being gay, but couldn't. Finally she exploded. "I'm not gay," she said, "I don't even like gay people." Anders was shocked, but he had his answer here; the interview was over. He reminded her gently that she should, in a general way, begin packing her bags to go back to Moscow.

She stood up, looked around, and again saw the sun, and haze, out the window. A wave of emotion came over her. She'd told the truth, and, as a result, lost LA, lost the dream, lost everything. It no longer mattered, though. She was on her way home, finally.

Q-demon

Carmella Quinn's life was turned upside down one day when her husband, a Methodist minister in a small town in Minnesota, was killed at his church by a crazed gunman who then killed himself. Who was this boy, who had come up from the Cities one Sunday? What was going on? Carmella herself was in Fargo that weekend taking care of her elderly mother, but rushed back to town, of course, as soon as she heard the news.

The kid had yelled "Q-Demon!" as he shot and just by chance, an investigator googled it; he found that "Q-Demon" had a huge online reputation and was discussed in various forums throughout the internet. Apparently the Reverend Quinn had gotten online as "Q-Demon," found his way to a place where virtual people killed each other, and was the most ruthless of all killers; he was a master of the game. He was hated and despised by everyone who played the game; he was virtually unbeatable.

Carmella knew that her husband had had this passion for online gaming. In fact it was a part of Second Life, an online universe, that he would go to, and, as he explained it, everyone who found their way to this place knew the rules of the game. You went in there, and you tried to survive, and people tried to kill you, and it was all a game; if you died, you merely had to start over, make a new "avatar," which was an online persona, and jump back into the place. It was humiliating, of course, for the losers, when somebody would kill them, because their avatars were now dead and they would have to go through a process to build a new one which often included getting decent virtual clothes.

Carmella thought back to a time when she had been at a party with her husband, and, in a small group that included a teenager and a couple of ministers who were discussing online games, he vainly mentioned his involvement in this game; the teenager, rather than being impressed, recoiled in horror when he found out that her husband was actually who he was. It struck her as odd, even then, because one would imagine that success in these games would be something that would be mutually admirable; anyone who played it would admire someone else who had achieved some measure of success in it, and maybe even ask him for some insider tricks. Not so in this case; the guy had actually backed off and disappeared, and she didn't see him again in the party. The party had been some function of Methodist ministers and movers and shakers, in the Cities, and she had forgotten about it until this moment, when she was trying to recall what she knew of her husband's involvement in this game.

As she told the investigators, he'd play maybe an hour or two a night, mostly after she herself had gone to bed, she didn't really know. She was aware of it and asked him, at least once, about the inherent contradiction of being a Christian minister and at the same time, killing people, albeit virtually, at night. He had shrugged it off, basically, by saying that it was just a game. Everyone knew it was a game. You went in there knowing someone could kill you.

It was not just that he was good at it, the investigator said. He was great at it. He was unbeatable. And, he said, it's not just that you kill people. Apparently you taunt them when you do it. You say, "Got you, Newb," or some variant, with "Newb" referring to a newbie or someone who is not as good at it as others. And people can get pretty good at this taunting, or rather, they can taunt in such ways that it really stings.

"This is not to say that your husband was in any way responsible for what happened", the investigator pointed out. He wanted Carmella to rest assured that the young man who had killed him had simply gone over the edge, mentally, and that it literally could have happened to anyone, people like this lash out almost randomly, it seems, or at least there's no accounting for it really. The investigator, satisfied with what he'd figured out already, was ready to drop the case; it really wasn't all that complicated.

This didn't help Carmella, though, who had two problems. The first was what to tell folks in the small town, who all knew the Reverend Quinn as a kind and gentle minister, but who had no inkling of his dark side, or his apparently unresolved issues with anger. The second had to do with forgiveness. It was one thing to forgive a mentally unbalanced kid, who got online, confused the game and reality, and somehow found a gun; it would be another to forgive her husband.

It was during that conversation with the investigator, though, that she saw a picture of the shooter, and he looked familiar. In fact, as time went by, she became more and more convinced that he was the teenager at the party. She could find out for sure, simply by asking questions in the Methodist community; was this the same boy that was at that particular party? Rather than finding out for sure, though, she avoided the situation; the less she knew, she figured, the better. It was a small town, and she was well aware that people were talking behind her back, and often bold enough to just approach her and ask her. It seemed as if people would bait her, asking what on earth would make a kid from the Cities come up here and do such a thing, but she would just shrug her shoulders, and avoid the question. "It was just one of those things," someone once said to her, and it kind of stuck in her mind, but most of the time she couldn't even say that.

Trial and error

Barbara bought a ticket and boarded a plane for central Florida before she could have doubts or undo it. She heard about the case because she was watching a lot of television; here was this woman, who had allegedly killed her own daughter, looking impassively into the camera as if nothing had happened. It made Barbara's blood boil. She herself had no daughter, only an eleven-year-old son and a husband who may or may not be able to handle things with her gone, but they were understanding; they hardly objected when she left. Be sure to bring in the mail, she told her husband; I'm expecting a small check. Don't forget to feed the cats.

Central Florida was steamy and she made her way to the center of town where the courthouse was, and checked into the nearest motel she could find that had a vacancy. She had to try two or three, but one was acceptable, not full, not too pricey, and as soon as she'd freshened up a bit she made her way back to the courthouse where a line had formed to gain entrance into the trial the following morning. She had a spot in line that was between an older gentleman and a young foul-mouthed tattoo-covered young lady; the line wasn't moving at all, but there was plenty to watch as it seemed fights might break out over the earlier places in line. A policeman watched warily and tried not to intervene. The sultry sun put everyone on edge. To live here, Barbara decided, one must have air conditioning, a television and lots to drink.

In this time, which was actually about three hours, she made friends with a woman named Joan, who apparently was from this very city, but a little out of town, and invited her over to lunch. You may have to buy some of the supplies, she said, but you'd be welcome to come over to our house and sit with us for a while you're here in town. Seems pretty lonely to be in a city like this all by yourself, she said. Barbara hadn't thought of it.

Her sense of outrage against the mother who had killed her young child was still with her that night when she turned on the local news. The local news had the story on in much more detail, and was fully aware that the nation was watching this particular trial because of its sordidness, and a grim fascination with someone who would apparently kill her own daughter so she could go out and party a little more.

Barbara took ice from the machine outside her room, and turned on her own room airconditioning unit on full blast as she watched the news. She thought about her husband and son briefly but was soon brought into the news story again, and fixated on the young woman. The motel was full and there was a lot of noise, both in the hallway and in the courtyard outside the room, but the airconditioner and the television drowned it out and she focused. Finally she fell asleep. She had gotten sunburned standing in line, and it hurt when she rolled over.

In the morning she was let into the trial with her little entrance ticket stub, and picked a seat near the back. The trial was actually somewhat boring from back there, but she soon developed a fascination for the prosecutor, who was her main ally in delivering justice to this woman. It was as if she, Barbara, had come all the way to central Florida to ensure that justice be done to this woman, who seemed, as she sat in her seat, the epitome of evil. The prosecutor hammered away, trying to prove she did it. The defense attorney was equally aggressive; he of course was the enemy. And where did all the spectators come from? She could only guess. The trial had drawn her, all the way from south Texas; she had dropped everything; she had flown here, rented a motel, and stood in line just to be here. What were their stories? She could only guess.

She found it interesting to compare the evening news, back at the hotel, with what she had seen. What she considered important was not exactly the same for them; however, most of what they said was true. Their camera also had a different angle; however, it was all the same people.

So it went for several days; it settled into a routine. She stood in line to get tickets, sometimes for several hours; she attended as much of the trial as she could; she left only for lunch or to call home. She never missed the evening news or the recap of the trial. She didn't venture out much to see the city, or go out at night in search of anything, even a movie. When she called home everyone was ok; they were living on pizza and stale cookies, and her husband had wrecked his truck, but aside from that, it was life as usual. They missed her. They'd fed the cat at least once. They wondered when she'd come back.

Back in the courthouse her fascination for the prosecutor grew; she studied his ring trying to convince herself that he wasn't married. He was everything her husband wasn't; he was educated, well-dressed, methodical, articulate, polite; of course, part of this was his job. Sometimes she'd realize that she was deluding himself; what would he do, fall for her? She doubted it. Nevertheless the details of the trial itself were less and less interesting to her; she was already convinced that the woman was guilty. Only the prosecutor held her attention, and even he was beginning to not look as good.

Standing in line was, in some ways, more interesting than the trial itself. The police's attempts to keep order were sometimes futile. Joan came back, however, and had a long talk with her. Apparently Joan was not interested in this particular trial, but was at the courthouse because her husband had been thrown in jail about a month ago; she was having trouble supporting her daughter and elderly mother; in desperation she came to the courthouse hoping to resolve the husband's case, but unsuccessfully. Again she invited Barbara over for lunch. Maybe Saturday? Barbara agreed to the possibility; she was taking it one day at a time.

By Friday, though, she was pretty sure she would stay through the weekend, and agreed that Joan would pick her up Saturday morning for the long bus ride out to Joan's house. In order to stay through to the next week, she had to make some calls back in Texas; one was to her workplace, where they readily agreed to give her a few more days, and another was to her husband, to make sure it was ok with him also. He was beginning to get a little edgy, but so far no big disasters.

On Saturday Joan arrived at her motel, though not until ten thirty, and they got on a bus and rode all the way through the city to a god-forsaken part of it where Joan lived. Somewhere in the middle of the bus ride, looking out at the empty corners of the city, Barbara did some soul-searching. As the trial had increased its national exposure, she had become less interested in that and more just curious why she herself had been drawn all the way here, so far from where she belonged. Whereas at first it seemed necessary that she be here as witness, to make sure justice was done, now that seemed like a totally futile objective. Joan listened patiently to her story of her frustrations with her husband but Joan was clearly jealous that she even had a husband, free and clear of the prison system and all the baggage that hers seemed to have.

When they got off there was a small convenience store and they went shopping for lunch supplies; Barbara paid, and they walked the last seven or eight blocks to Joan's house. Joan's house was a tiny two-room bungalow on a crowded street. The single living room was dominated by a large television; on the show it was tuned to, talking heads, involved parties, were discussing the trial, of course, and the people in it. A shy, hungry-looking little girl appeared in the doorway of a bedroom; she appeared to be about six, and was introduced as Joan's daughter. Joan's mother, unable to move easily, watched the television impassively. They spread out the groceries on the table; it was Barbara's contribution. It might keep this hungry young girl from starving one more day, she figured, as she watched the girl eyeing the food carefully.

There was a pot of macaroni and cheese from boxes, bread and lunchmeat, milk, chips, soda, and some fruit; it seemed like a feast to the young girl, who wolfed it down. They kept the television on as they ate. Outside it was steamy and uncomfortable; they didn't even try to take anything outside, even the sodas. In the cool airconditioned living room they watched them discuss the trial, over and over, back and forth.

And somewhere in there, Barbara had her fill; she decided that she didn't want to hear another word of the trial, and didn't even care how it turned out. As she watched the young girl eat, she realized, maybe this is why I'm here, so this poor girl gets one good meal; it doesn't seem she's had another for quite some time. After they'd finished and cleaned up, she said goodbye to Joan, took the long bus back to town and checked out of the motel; she took the next flight back to Texas, and, when asked what she'd been doing in Florida, she said she was just visiting friends.

plains speaking

I was staying in southeast Kansas for a while, helping clean out a great aunt's possessions for the family, and thought I'd drive down to Texas for a weekend to visit an old friend. While I was down there tornadoes passed through the area, up around Tulsa specifically, allegedly moving a semitrailer from the westbound rest area to the eastbound; this kind of caught everyone's fancy, and it was all over the news at my friend's house.

The main question, though, I thought, was whether that trucker had some business to get turned around, like he'd left a wife back east or something, or had some personal drama where somehow God would be telling him, you're going the wrong way, turn that truck around. We'd kind of had that discussion a lot; my extended family was all from Kansas, and they'd often talk about how a tornado would hit one church and leave the other intact, or would only hit one street of a town, or something like that. There was a general agreement that it wasn't random and yet if you tried to pin anyone down they'd get offended, as they all knew someone who'd been affected, and you didn't want to imply that that person was somehow deserving of God's wrath or more likely somehow to get it than someone else.

My great aunt, for example, had been driving through the middle of this tiny town in Kansas, when the street caved in, and the car ended up about fifteen feet down a deep hole that had at one time been made by mines; the whole area had been mined heavily. Now she was all right, and so was her passenger, another old lady friend of hers, but the city spent a few hours trying to extract them and her car from that hole safely, and everyone was a bit traumatized by the event. The other old lady in particular rarely went out driving after that; she got her younger relatives to do it for her, and my great aunt always felt a little responsible, although we'd tell her, there's nothing you could have done; how could you know when that street was going to cave in? It could have happened to anyone.

Could have, but didn't; it happened to her. And that hung over the whole situation, unexplained, as if, like the tornado, maybe someday you'll find the reason it would do something the way it did. So, I was reflecting on this as I was driving back from Texas, and as you might know it's a long way through central Oklahoma with not much to think about, and generally the signs that tell you not to drive through smoke make it worse, not better. But I decided to stop for gas and coffee and ask around a bit about that trucker. I couldn't find out anything, though; the only person who'd even talk to me admitted that, yes, it had happened right near here, a truck moved from the westbound to the eastbound rest area, but they didn't know anything about that trucker, whether he had any good reason to be turned back around and headed back the way he came. "Sure ain't random, is all I can say," this guy said, but even that didn't explain much, though it sure was in agreement with what all my relatives would say.

A surprise was waiting for me, though, when I got back to my great aunt's house, and was looking through some old papers that she'd had stored away. It seems a distant ancestor, might have been mutual ancestor, hers and mine both, had sold quite a bit of land throughout that area to the mining companies. And his wife didn't agree with it, and told him so in a brittle letter I held in my own hands. She said, in so many words, that wasn't a good idea; they'd dig up the coal, or bauxite or whatever, and leave those huge gaping holes under everything and ruin it forever, which was pretty much true, I suppose. But the money was too good, and he did it anyway, sold off lots of land, and his descendants, people like me, lived all the better for it.

I could have stayed another month or two reading those papers, but life called, and I had to get back to work, which was up in the cities up north. What struck me was that those mines had pretty much been shut down for years, and the area would have died altogether if it weren't for this ammunition factory that had been put near there a few years back. We knew there were big holes under lots of the houses in the area, big old mines that had never really got filled in, My great aunt accepted it, like it was just part of living there; you felt like anything might cave in at any time, and that incident out on the main street of that little town just goes to show. It's part of life, and you can't avoid it.

Her friend, the one who was in the car at the time, died while I was in town. But I didn't know the family well, and never got to hear her version of the story. She also was probably related to those old coal barons, almost everyone was, in some way or another, but I'd never know; I had to head back up home and I was kind of glad to do it. the storms were still raking up the area, coming up through Oklahoma, and causing serious damage to these small towns, which always seemed random, but in some wierd way, surely wasn't.

luncheon

The Ozark sun was high in the sky when Meredith decided to sit on a park bench in the center of town, and nurse her baby. The baby settled in quickly and she sat back to enjoy the peaceful spring weather. But a young woman, clearly agitated, walked over to her and almost immediately told her she should not do this in a public place like this. Couldn’t she go home or go to some restroom somewhere?
Meredith immediately began to tense up and this, of course, was noticed by the baby, who began fussing and inexplicably being unable to find the target. It was like the baby immediately tasted nervousness and didn’t even want to eat until it had passed. Meredith, herself, was somewhat tongue-tied. She knew all the arguments: why should she go use a bathroom, which was unsanitary and isolated? Breastfeeding was legal, healthy, wholesome, and proper, so what was the problem? The woman, however, was adamant; her veins seemed to show in her neck as she got wide-eyed and confrontational. She took the stand of someone who was protecting the public sense of decency and modesty, and was not going to let this young girl undress even partway, in public.

Suddenly Meredith got an idea, though, and took a deep breath. In her mind she decided to focus entirely on the baby, and tell the baby that everything was going to be ok, and she started her plan immediately. She simply repeated to the baby, silently, “everything will be ok, you just eat and relax, you’ll be fine.” In her mind she focused on the baby and soon, quite easily, the baby was back on track.

But to the woman, what she said was more like this: “You sound like that man from the Tally-ban. That man wanted me to cover up completely, head, neck, cheek, mouth, everything.” She drawled it out, and slowed way down; she knew how to pronounce “Taliban,” having served in Afghanistan; but, using a more Ozarky twang helped her slow down, concentrate, and keep talking silently to the baby. The woman’s jaw dropped in shock. Nearby Meredith could see another woman, also young, also dressed up, approaching them, as if to help her friend in this confrontation.

“That man seemed to feel that all women should be covered up in all ways, at all times, and that it was a man’s job to make sure everyone followed that way...”

“I am not the Taliban,” the woman said, “and there’s a difference between your cheek and your...your...” By now, the friend had joined her, but she was unable to finish the sentence, since it involved a word she was clearly uncomfortable with.

“I told that man he could do as he wanted with his country,” continued Meredith, “since I was going back to mine anyway.” By now the baby was asleep, and making a huge light-hearted sigh of pure contentment. The morning sun shone through the trees. She thought of other things to say, but stopped; she’d said enough. She gazed peacefully at the women, unflinching, and, eventually, they left.