That’s what they had. What Ned had was us.
One day in April he came into the barracks with a great big sunny smile on his face. It made him look younger and sweeter. But, I remember thinking, we all of us look younger and sweeter when we smile our real smiles — the ones that come when we are genuinely happy and not just trying to play some dumb social game. It struck me fresh that day because Ned didn’t smile much. Certainly not big. I don’t think I realized it until that day because he was polite and responsive and quick-witted. A pleasure to have around, in other words. You didn’t notice how grave he was until that rare day when you saw him brighten up and shine.
He came to the center of the room, and all the little conversations stopped. He had a paper in his hand. There was a complicated-looking gold seal at the top. ‘Pitt!’ he said, holding the
paper up in both hands like an Olympic judge’s scorecard. ‘I got into Pitt, you guys! And they gave me a scholarship! Almost a full boat!’
Everyone applauded. Shirley kissed him smack on the mouth, and the kid blushed all the way down to his collar. Huddie Royer, who was off-duty that day and just hanging around, stewing about some case in which he had to testify, went out and came back with a bag of L’il Debbie cakes. Arky used his key to open the soda machine, and we had a party. Half an hour or so, no more, but it was good while it lasted. Everyone shook Ned’s hand, the acceptance letter from Pitt made its way around the room (twice, I think), and a couple of cops who’d been at home dropped by just to talk to him and pass along their congrats.
Then, of course, the real world got back into the act. It’s quiet over here in western Pennsylvania, but not dead. There was a farmhouse fire in Pogus City (which is a city about as much as I’m the Archduke Ferdinand), and an overturned Amish buggy on Highway 20.
The Amish keep to themselves, but they’ll gladly take a little outside help in a case like that.
The horse was okay, which was the big thing. The worst buggy fuckups happen on Friday and Saturday nights, when the younger bucks in black have a tendency to get drunk out behind the barn. Sometimes they get a ‘worldly person’ to buy them a bottle or a case of Iron City beer, and sometimes they drink their own stuff, a really murderous corn shine you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. It’s just part of the scene; it’s our world, and mostly we like it, including the Amish with their big neat farms and the orange triangles on the back of their small neat buggies.
And there’s always paperwork, the usual stacks of duplicate and triplicate in my office. It gets worse every year. Why I ever wanted to be the guy in charge is beyond me now. I took the test that qualified me for Sergeant Commanding when Tony Schoondist suggested it, so I must have had a reason back then, but these days it seems to elude me.
Around six o’clock I went out back to have a smoke. We have a bench there facing the parking lot. Beyond it is a very pretty western view. Ned Wilcox was sitting on the bench with his acceptance letter from Pitt in one hand and tears rolling down his face. He glanced at me, then looked away, scrubbing his eyes with the palm of his hand.
I sat down beside him, thought about putting my arm around his shoulder, didn’t do it. If you have to think about a thing like that, doing it usually feels phony. I have never married, and what I know about fathering you could write on the head of a pin with room left over for the Lord’s Prayer. I lit a cigarette and smoked it awhile. ‘It’s all right, Ned,’ I said eventually.
It was the only thing I could think of, and I had no idea what it meant.
‘I know,’ he replied at once in a muffled, trying-not-to-cry voice, and then, almost as if it was part of the same sentence, a continuation of the same thought: ‘No it ain’t.’
Hearing him use that word, that ain’t, made me realize how bad he was hurt. Something had gored him in the stomach. It was the sort of word he would have trained himself out of long ago, just so he wouldn’t be lumped with the rest of the Statler County hicks, the pickup-
truck-n-snowmobile gomers from towns like Patchin and Pogus City. Even his sisters, eight years younger than he was, had probably given up ain’t by then, and for much the same reasons. Don’t say ain’t or your mother will faint and your father will fall in a bucket of paint.
Yeah, what father?
I smoked and said nothing. On the far side of the parking lot by one of the county roadsalt piles was a cluster of wooden buildings that needed either sprucing up or tearing down. They were the old Motor Pool buildings. Statler County had moved its plows, graders, ‘dozers, and asphalt rollers a mile or so down the road ten years before, into a new brick facility that looked like a prison lockdown unit. All that remained here was the one big pile of salt (which we were using ourselves, little by little — once upon a time, that pile had been a mountain) and a few ramshackle wooden buildings. One of them was Shed B. The black paint letters over the door — one of those wide garage doors that run up on rails — were faded but still legible. Was I thinking about the Buick Roadmaster inside as I sat there next to the crying boy, wanting to put my arm around him and not knowing how? I don’t know. I guess I might have been, but I don’t think we know all the things we’re thinking. Freud might have been full of shit about a lot of things, but not that one. I don’t know about a subconscious, but there’s a pulse in our heads, all right, same as there’s one in our chests, and it carries unformed, no-language thoughts that most times we can’t even read, and they are usually the important ones.
Ned rattled the letter. ‘He’s the one I really want to show this to. He’s the one who wanted to go to Pitt when he was a kid but couldn’t afford it. He’s the reason I applied, for God’s sake.’ A pause; then, almost too low to hear: ‘This is fucked up, Sandy.’
‘What did your mother say when you showed her?’
That got a laugh, watery but genuine. ‘She didn’t say. She screamed like a lady who just won a trip to Bermuda on a gameshow. Then she cried.’ Ned turned to me. His own tears had stopped, but his eyes were red and swollen. He looked a hell of a lot younger than eighteen just then. The sweet smile resurfaced for a moment. ‘Basically, she was great about it. Even the Little J’s were great about it. Like you guys. Shirley kissing me . . . man, I got goosebumps.’
I laughed, thinking that Shirley might have raised a few goosebumps of her own. She liked him, he was a handsome kid, arid the idea of playing Mrs Robinson might have crossed her mind. Probably not, but it wasn’t impossible. Her husband had been out of the picture almost five years by then.
Ned’s smile faded. He rattled the acceptance letter again. ‘I knew this was yes as soon as I took it out of the mailbox. I could just tell, somehow. And I started missing him all over again. I mean fierce.’
‘I know,’ I said, but of course I didn’t. My own father was still alive, a hale and genially profane man of seventy-four. At seventy, my mother was all that and a bag of chips.
Ned sighed, looking off at the hills. ‘How he went out is just so dumb,’ he said. ‘1 can’t even tell my kids, if I ever have any, that Grampy went down in a hail of bullets while foiling the bank robbers or the militia guys who were trying to put a bomb in the county courthouse.
Nothing like that.’
‘No,’ I agreed, ‘nothing like that.’
‘I can’t even say it was because he was careless. He was just . . . a drunk just came along and just . . .’
He bent over, wheezing like an old man with a cramp in his belly, and this time I at least put my hand on his back. He was trying so hard not to cry, that’s what got to me. Trying so hard to be a man, whatever that means to an eighteen-year-old boy.