A Ship Made of Paper (42 page)

For the most part, the stores on Leyden’s little Broadway are the same ones that were there when Derek was a boy—the Smoke Shop, Mountain Stream Realty, Buddy’s Card Shop, Candyland, Donna’s Uniforms, the Windsor Pharmacy, Sew and Vac, Kirk’s Variety Store, Fin and Feather, Tack and Tackle, and the Stoller and Hoffman Insurance Agency.

Derek cruises through town without expecting to see anything he will have to react to. Except for traffic violations, he has never seen a crime in progress in his twelve-year career. He has been, for the most part, after the fact—showing up after a house has been burgled, after a wall has been a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

covered with graffiti, after a wife has been smacked around by her drunken husband. Finding Marie Thorne in the Richmond woods last November had been the most dynamic moment of Derek’s career, and the satisfaction of that feat was all but cancelled by, first of all, her not wanting to be found, and, secondly, by the hideous accident that took place in those same woods a half hour later. Nevertheless, Derek remains alert as he makes his customary rounds.You make your presence known, you show the flag. It reminds people they are living under the rule of law, it makes everyone feel safer, it brings out the best in them. He stops at the town’s central traffic light, where Broadway intersects with Route 100, the county’s main road that goes south to New York City and north to Albany.The wind swings the hanging traffic light back and forth like a censer. A processional of high school kids crosses the street in front of him, fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds in cargo pants and tank tops, a mixed group of boys and girls, horsing around, shoves, laughter, their skin glistening, all of them in hormonal overdrive.

As is Derek himself. Spring always awakens his longing. He thaws like a river, his blood rushes, he can hear it as he lies in his bed and waits to fall asleep. The constellations wheeling in the spring skies seem to exert undue influence on him. It is not only that he is seasonally overcome with lust, but that the lust itself has such a melancholy weight to it. He watches the teenagers as they make their way through the white lines of the crosswalk and come percolating up onto the sidewalk. Is that Buddy Guyette’s daughter in those pale, distressed jeans? My God, the ass on her. He feels a little twist of sensual agony. Then he sees Mercy Crane, whose father is also a Leyden cop. She is alone, walking with her eyes cast down, wearing baggy clothes to hide her shape. She looks dejected, her hair hangs lank and dirty over her eyes, she slings her backpack over her shoulder and holds on to the strap with one hand.

Mercy looks up, sees Derek through the sun-struck windshield, with its reflections of rooftops and upside-down trees. She raises a practically lifeless hand in greeting, ekes out a tiny smile.

Derek drives another quarter mile and turns into the driveway leading to the Richmond Library, originally funded by Ferguson Richmond’s

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family a hundred years ago. Now it’s a public library, funded half by the state and half by the town. It’s a pleasant old brick building, with something of the Russian dacha about it, flanked by locust trees. Derek likes to come here to smoke in private, sitting on the hood of his car, savoring the taste of tobacco, letting the nicotine simultaneously jack him up and cool him down, and think about his life. A few years ago, the town built a basketball court behind the library, and though the cement has cracked and the baskets aren’t regulation height, there’s often a decent pickup game going on for Derek to watch while he smokes.

He steers his car with the heel of his left hand, using the right to pluck a cigarette out of his breast pocket. As he swings around the library and approaches the court, he can hear the excited young male voices, the pounding of the ball on the cement, and then he sees something that galvanizes him, sends a rush of adrenaline through him.

Two African-American males, fifteen to eighteen years old, one tall, the other taller, one thin, the other thinner, one black, the other blacker, and both of them fitting the description of two of the escaped Star of Bethlehem boys who are still at large. Unsnapping his holster strap as he gets out of the car, Derek walks quickly toward the basketball court. It’s a two-on-two full-court game, shirts versus skins, both the black kids have their shirts off. Derek approaches from the north and the action is under the south basket, so no one sees him right away. But then someone makes a basket, the ball is taken out of bounds, and the flow of the game reverses. Derek is still fifteen or twenty yards from the fence surrounding the court. As soon as he knows he’s been spotted he breaks into a run, shouting, “Hey, you, stay where you are. Don’t move.”

The white boys do as they’re told, but the blacks know better. They practically fly through the gate on the south end of the court and into the cornfield that’s on the Richmond Library’s eastern edge. In the past, the corn would not have been knee-high this time of year, but the farmer who normally harvests these thirty acres moved to Arizona, and last year’s crop, ten feet tall and dark brown, is still standing.The boys are invisible.

Derek doesn’t bother to chase them in. As a boy, he ran from friends, a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

rivals, and even the police through this very same field of corn, and he knows exactly where the boys will emerge—they will take the natural path that empties out onto the open land right behind the VFW post. He walks quickly back to his car, but before he gets in he shouts at the white boys: “You be here when I get back.”

It takes barely a minute to drive to the VFW. It’s a squat little asphalt-shingled lodge, with squinty little windows and white pebbles in the parking area. Two flags snap smartly in the breeze—the red, white, and blue and the black POW-MIA. Derek parks his car in front and makes his way to the rear of the building. A long sloping lawn heads right down to the cornfield. He walks a few feet into the dried brown rows of last year’s crop, just deep enough in to conceal himself, about ten feet to the right of the deer path that boys have been using for probably a hundred years. His heart is pounding with anticipation. He will listen for their footsteps, and when they are almost out of the field he will step into their path with his gun drawn. For a moment, he considers unlocking the safety, but he thinks better of it. He is not without self-knowledge and he senses within himself a desire to do some harm.

Derek waits in the field. The drone of an airplane passing overhead, the drone of traffic, the drone of a million flies who have come to feast on the corn’s rot, the drone of a motorcycle just picking up some speed.

He feels a cold trickle of sweat going down his spine. He disengages the safety on his gun.

After ten minutes, it’s obvious that those black boys must have found some other way out. Nevertheless, Derek continues to wait, while the sweat accumulates at his belt line and the humming of his mind winds tighter and tighter, higher and higher. At last, he forces himself to con-cede his plan has not worked. He walks back to his car, returns to the basketball court.

The white boys have waited for him, as instructed. He’s watched these two grow up. They used to blush, literally wring their small hands with pleasure when he spoke to them, but now they are at the age of secrets and not one of them can look directly into his eyes.They claim not

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to know the name of either of the black kids they were playing ball with not fifteen minutes ago.

“Ever see either of them before?” Derek asks, pretending to believe them, keeping up the fiction that they are all on the same side in this matter.

This isn’t even dignified with an answer, not a grunt, not even a slight shifting of weight.

“What about it,Todd?” Derek says, figuring he’ll have better luck singling one of them out. He chooses Todd because Todd’s a good kid, with a brother in the Marines and a schoolteacher mother, on the one hand, and a father who took off for Hawaii to live in a nudist commune, on the other hand, so Todd’s got to know right from wrong.

“We don’t know them, Officer Pabst,” Todd says. Christ, what a piece of work this kid’s become, the insincerity wrapping around his voice like red stripes on a candy cane. “We were just playing a little B-ball with them.”

“A little B-ball,” Derek says.

“Are you charging us with something?” asks Avery Hoffman, an aging cherub with a messy mustache. Avery’s father is a lawyer with the public defender’s office who has argued so many losing cases that he’s become one of those crackpot small-town cynics who sense a deal, a fix, or a conspiracy in every transaction. Derek thrusts his eyes upon Avery with the force of a nightstick, but the kid doesn’t fold. “Cause if you’re not,” he continues, “we’d sort of like to get back to our game.”

Derek laughs invitingly, but the boys remain silent, removed. “I’ll tell you, this was a real nice town to grow up in.” The boys exchange glances, which Derek quickly tries to evaluate. Are they treating him like an old-timer? Bad enough. Or are they acknowledging some little secret held among them? Worse. He lowers his voice, moves it to one side, like folding back the lapel of your jacket to reveal a shoulder holster. “And I want to keep this a nice town, you understand? Those individuals you were playing basketball with? They don’t belong around here, not running around.”

“Why is that, Officer Pabst?” asks Todd, laying it on pretty thick now.

“Because they escaped from a juvey home,” Derek says, letting Todd think he’s being taken at face value. “And since then they’ve been a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

breaking a whole lot of laws.They’ve been going up and down the river, breaking in, bothering people, taking shit, making their own rules. They almost raped a woman right here in our town.”

“If you know so much about them,” Avery says, “then how come you’re like ‘What’s their names’ and everything?”

“Come here,” Derek says, softly beckoning Avery forward.

“No,” Avery says.

“I said come here.” Derek grabs Avery’s shirt and pulls him forward until their noses are touching. “Be nice,” Derek whispers into the boy’s suddenly gray face.

“We really don’t know those guys,” Todd says, his voice rising. “We were just playing and they came over. We don’t know them.”

Derek listens to Todd but keeps his eyes on Avery. “Is that right?”

Derek says, barely whispering, and he holds on until Avery finally caves in, nods. Derek pushes him away.

Back in his patrol car, Derek has ample time for reconsideration and regret. He has forgotten little of his own youth, recalling not only the scrapes with the law, the lies, the reckless adventures, but also remembering with a painful clarity how it all
felt
—that sacramental sense of loy-alty toward your friends, how it swelled in your heart, that mad belief in each other, how you’d do anything for them and they’d do as much for you and with all of you pulling for one another no one could bring you down.

As far as those boys are concerned, he’s the enemy, not only old but a cop.

Without admitting to himself where he has been driving, Derek pulls into Kate’s driveway, just as a yellow-and-black van from Centurion Security Systems is backing away from the house, its wheels spinning, throwing up pebbles. Kate is still in the doorway, holding the signed copy of her maintenance agreement with Centurion, and when she sees Derek she waves the sheet of paper over her head, because he has been after her for months to get the house wired up.

As has become their custom, she invites him in for a cup of coffee.

She gets her coffee delivered by UPS from a warehouse in Louisiana, bright-yellow cans of dark roast with chicory, and Derek tells her with

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each cup that it is the best coffee he has ever tasted. “And as a cop, let me tell you, I know my coffee.” She knows he is flirting with her when he says this, but she is willing to let that happen. When she and Daniel first moved to Leyden, she dreaded somehow being involved with Daniel’s former life in the town, and Derek was emblematic of all the old friends of whom she wished to steer clear. Derek was worshipful and beseech-ing around Daniel, and his wife, the perfume-soaked and the socially am-bitious Stephanie, with her bleached hair, and coarse skin, was anathema to Kate, and provided yet another reason to avoid Derek. But now, Kate looks forward to Derek’s visits and his interest in her offers moments of relief from the loneliness of her days as a single woman. He is surely not what she would have chosen for herself, but she enjoys him the way she enjoys TV, as a slightly enervating diversion. He has a pleasant voice, deep and manly, beautiful hands, with long, tapered fingers, and the hair on his arms is like a boy’s, the color of honey.

“I don’t know why I waited so long to have a security system put in,”

Kate says, nursing a cold half inch of coffee while watching Derek enjoy his fresh cup. They are seated in the living room, on the black corduroy sofa in front of the fireplace, which is now filled with dried goldenrod and purple loose strife.

“I feel better that you got it done,” says Derek. “Especially . . .”

“What?”

“Well, I wasn’t going to tell you this, but I think I saw two Star of Bethlehem kids on the loose today, two from the gang who broke into your house.”

“Where?”

“In town. I tried to talk to them, but they saw me coming and they took off. Any doubts I had about them being the two . . .”

“It’s so strange.They just won’t go away, will they.Why don’t they go back to the city, or wherever it is they came from? They want to live in the country, near the river, and enjoy our various cultural and natural re-sources. Is that it?”

Kate laughs, but her voice is soft, far from her usual tone of sly a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

provocation.When Derek first started coming around, Kate adopted a more feminine and compliant voice in a kind of compensatory spirit, the way very tall people will stoop a little around others so as not to tower over them. She didn’t want to intimidate Derek—whom she calls “poor Derek” when she mentions him to people like Lorraine—and she slipped into a somewhat frail persona with him, seeking his advice, deferring to him on matters of worldly practicality, and keeping in check such verbal habits as sarcasm, arcane cultural references, and wordplay. Derek, for his part, has also constructed a kind of alternative self for his meetings with Kate. Rather than sitting at her table as a man who has lived his whole life within the confines of one small community, a man who has married his high school sweetheart, he has changed himself into a kind of exiled big-city cop who has ended up in Leyden because of some secret catastrophe back in the big city.That both Kate and Derek are in disguise makes their time together unreal yet relaxing; it’s like being at a masquerade ball, but one in which the disguises are not so elaborate, and you always know with whom you’re dancing.