All That I Have (2 page)

The ambulance from Cumberland drove up, and the medical team piled out and came over to the patrol car. They took one look at Trooper Timberlake’s passenger, yelling nobody knew what at them and kicking and spitting and snapping like a snake in the back of the patrol car, and refused to go anywhere near him. But the driver was a big strong fellow, and Timberlake was another, and between the three of us we managed to get a bag on the Russian’s head and wrestle him out of the car. Even so, we almost lost him when he head-butted the ambulance driver, kicked Timberlake where you don’t want to be kicked, and took off running full tilt for the road. He had to get past me, though, and as he tried to do that I sidestepped and stuck out my foot. The Russian tripped and went down hard on his face, with Timberlake and the driver right on top of him, neither of them feeling too kindly toward him anymore. They got him onto a stretcher, got him strapped down good and tight. Then we shoved him into the ambulance. They took him to Brattleboro. Timberlake’s barracks commander thought the International School down there might have somebody who could talk to him.

The thing is, Clemmie says I don’t like her father. She’s right: I don’t. He don’t like me either, though, so that’s okay, we’re even. You don’t have to like your wife’s father. He don’t have to like you. It’s not a problem, really, but Clemmie sees it as one. And then, she says I don’t like her father
and never have.
That’s not right. I did like him. I liked him fine for five, ten minutes after the two of us were introduced by Clemmie. It took me that long to figure out that Addison Jessup didn’t approve of me, didn’t think I was anywhere near good enough for his only daughter, didn’t like the idea of her taking up with a half-assed woodchuck cop — didn’t like much of anything about Clemmie and me.

The fact that the week before we met I had busted Addison for driving under the influence probably didn’t help us get along real smooth. But there again, it didn’t have to have been a problem. It wasn’t for me. The sheriff’s department is different from other law enforcement work in some ways, as I will explain by and by, but it’s like all the rest in this: the people want you to do your job, and they want you not to do your job. They want you to do your job, but not on them.

“If you could just make a little bit of an effort with him,” Clemmie said. “If you could, just once, meet him halfway. He’s not young, you know. His health isn’t great. He won’t be around forever.”

“He won’t?” I asked her. “Are you sure?”

“I can’t be on your side and on his side, too,” Clemmie said. “I’m right in the middle here all the time.”

“You ain’t in the middle of nothing,” I said. “I’m the illiterate redneck that’s putting the blocks to your dad’s only daughter, his little girl. He don’t like that. I can’t make him like it. You can’t. Quit worrying about it.”

“He doesn’t think you’re an illiterate redneck.”

“Sure, he does. He’s right, too.”

“If he’s right, then what does that make me?”

“The wife of an illiterate redneck, it looks like.”

“Exactly. You see? You don’t think about that.”

“Don’t I?”

“No. You don’t. Never. You just go ahead the way you do, the way you always have. You’re that sure. You don’t see me.”

“I see you fine.”

“You don’t. You don’t see me. You don’t see anyone.”

“I see you. I see your dad. You want to know what I see?”

“No. Forget it.”

“You want to know?”

“Just forget it.”

“I’ll tell you if you want to know.”

“I don’t want to know. My Lord. You know what I want? What I’d like? I’d like to be like you. Don’t laugh: I really would. Calm. Sure. Mister Law. That would be great. I’d love that. I really would. How do you do it? How do you get that way?”

“I took a course.”

I slept on the couch that night, and then the next day I got the morning back from Clemmie. Naturally, I got it. If I hadn’t, I would have worried. I would have missed the back. How Addison felt about me, how I felt about Addison, what it all meant to Clemmie, what it meant to me, how it all went round and round, was the gift that keeps on giving to Clemmie and me. We had hunted those woods many a time and left behind a lot of fur and feathers and a lot of spent brass.

But joy cometh in the morning, as they used to say in church — and if it don’t, at least you can get out of the house and go to work. Thank God for the new male.

2

THE RUSSIANS AT DISNEYLAND

Do I know Russian?

I do not, no more than Trooper Timberlake does. ’Course I don’t. With my crack about how he hadn’t been trained right and I had, I was taking a little shot at Timberlake. I was sticking it to him, a little. Sure, I was. With the Timberlakes of this world, you almost have to stick it to them when you can, don’t you? Timberlake don’t mind. He’s — what are you when you’re padded all around, when they can’t get to you? He’s invulnerable. Taking a little shot at Timberlake is like shooting an elephant in the hindquarters with a BB gun: not only is he not hurt, you can’t tell for sure whether he knows he’s been hit.

So no, I didn’t know Russian was what Timberlake’s underdressed customer was talking up on Diamond Mountain. I didn’t know, but I did. Because as soon as Timberlake had asked me what the fellow was talking and I’d heard myself say Russian, I knew I was right, and I knew why. A wire had arced to another wire in a different part of the panel, and a whole new section of the board had lit up. A Russian. A naked Russian. Another naked Russian.

It was the Friday before Timberlake’s Russian turned up that we had responded to an automatic alarm from a vacation place in Grenada. The alarm was relayed from a private security company I’d never heard of. That wasn’t unusual. A good many of the newer properties contracted for surveillance and security service with outfits in all kinds of places; in fact, it seemed as though the bigger and fancier the house, the farther away its security was apt to be.

The house this alarm had come from was most of an hour’s drive from the sheriff ’s department, but one of my deputies, Deputy Keen, was patrolling in Grenada that morning, so I had Beverly, our dispatcher, get him on the radio and tell him to take the call. I went back to work. I had a stiff letter that morning from the first selectman in Ambrose. It had come to his attention that one of my deputies, in apprehending a speeder in his town, had pursued the violator for one-half mile into the neighboring town of Gilead. Why, the selectman wanted to know, was the entire pursuit charged against Ambrose’s contract with the sheriff ’s department? Why couldn’t Gilead pay its fair share of the charges incurred in this action? Did I not realize that the funds I expended came out of the pockets of overburdened property taxpayers? Did I not understand the need for the strictest accounting and oversight of the monies entrusted to me? Was I not little more than an embezzler, little better than a pirate? If you’re the sheriff, you get letters like this one, and if you want to go on being the sheriff, you answer them. But they can grind you down, no question.

Half an hour later, Beverly called me from her desk. “It’s Lyle,” she said. “Can you talk to him?”

I got on the radio. “Deputy?” I said.

“Sheriff?” said Deputy Keen. He sounded like he couldn’t hear me well. Our radios are US military surplus, from the Army of the Potomac.

“I hear you fine, Deputy,” I said.

“Can you get up here?” the deputy asked. “I’m at the auto-alarm in Grenada.”

“What have you got?”

“Break-in,” said Keen. “Can you get up here? You might want to have a look.”

“What for?” I asked him. “Was somebody in the place?”

“Nope. Place is empty. They have a caretaker. I called him. He’s on his way. Can you get up here?”

“Why?”

“Your boy’s been working,” said Lyle. “You might want to see for yourself.”

“My boy?”

“I’d guess so,” said the deputy. “I’ll show you. See what you think.”

Deputy Keen gave me directions, and I set out about eleven. I cranked the truck right up and used the blue light. “My boy,” the deputy had said. I knew who he meant.

When I turned off the falls road in Grenada and took the old stage road that goes back into the hills, I realized that the place I was going to must be Disneyland.

Driving at night on the highway that takes you under Stratton Mountain and south toward the valley, you see, as you come over a hill, a brightly lit house far off to your right, to the west, on top of the ridge. Whosever place it is, they must own stock in the power company, you think, because they’ve got not only inside lights, but yard lights, spotlights, floodlights. They’ve got the whole light store up there. Standing all alone on top of its ridge in the darkness, the place looked like a night game at Fenway Park. People around here called it Disneyland.

I found the driveway to the house five miles up the stage road. There was a gate, the kind you see at a railway crossing: a single bar swung up and down from one end by an electric control on the gatepost. The gate was up. Whoever raised it had known the code you had to punch into the panel on the post to work the gate. Some owners of vacation places give their security codes to the sheriff ’s department, to the local fire department, but we didn’t have a code on file for this place, never had. As I went through the gate and up the drive, I thought about that.