Fathermucker (25 page)

Still
he doesn't acknowledge Maude's crying, which has subsided to mucousy grunts and sniffles. Instead, he says, “The best way to help your daughter is to stay in your seat during a traffic stop, especially on a busy road such as this. You could get hit by a car, and then she'd
have
no father.”

There's a better chance of me being struck by lightning—that actually happened last year, to a man in Highland, the next town over; a father of two, my age, outside in a sudden storm, struck dead by lighting—but I don't press the point.

“Maybe your daughter was crying because you were so clearly irritated when you were detained,” Officer Stalin continues, returning my license and registration with a little white print-out that is, in popular parlance, the ticket. “Maybe she was picking up on your cues. You're her role model, remember. You have to be a good one.”

My cell phone, on the passenger seat, picks this moment to ring. The ringtone is called Old School; it sounds like a rotary-dial phone from the fifties, something from a film noir. I ignore it.

What I should do now is end this conversation. Apologize one more time, and be done with him. But I can't seem to let it go.

“She spilled water on her pants,” I tell him. I've managed to conceal the boiling rage in my voice, but I still sound shaky. “That's why she was crying. They were fine until then. They're
little
kids, and they've been sitting back there for a long time.”

He doesn't like this. Again, he takes this as an attack on his competence. “You've been here for the eight minutes necessary to process the paperwork,” he tells me, “and not a minute longer.”

I know that further engagement will only get me in deeper trouble. He clearly hates my guts; I should just accept my ticket and the stinging humiliation that comes with it. Anal rape is worse when you resist, right? But I can't stop myself. “Do you
have
kids? My son is four; my daughter is three. Eight minutes on the side of a road is an eternity, when you're that little.” As I talk, my cell phone makes a bleeping noise, indicating a new message. I ignore it. “Can you please at least
acknowledge
them? I don't want them to be afraid of police officers.”

He stands there for a moment, perhaps searching his mind for some statute I've violated with this modest request, some arcane blue law he can book me with. Then, finding none, he leans in a bit, gives a two-fingered wave, and says, with all the warmth of one of those animatronic animals at Chuck E. Cheese, “Hi, children. You be good, now.”

“Thank you, officer.”

He knocks three times on the hood of the minivan, marches back to his Vic, and is gone, off to harass some other innocent driver, leaving me on the side of the road, exposed and upset and thoroughly ashamed.

And I'm struck by a sudden thought:
Is this how Roland felt when I pulled him away from his game at the pumpkin patch?
Did he flip out because he felt I abused my power, punished and humiliated him when he'd done nothing wrong?

My tears come quick and loud, in big wet sobs; the raw emotion built up during the course of the day, a liquid cancer that won't come out of my body any other way. My reaction to Officer Stalin here is not all that dissimilar to Roland's to me at the pumpkin patch.

In the backseat, the kids have gone silent. They know something's wrong. I can see the terror in their eyes. Maude has stopped sobbing, her sippy-cup mishap forgotten. Even Roland has picked up on the discomfiture. No one likes to see Daddy cry.

“Sorry, guys,” I say, trying to stifle the sobs. “It's okay. I'm okay. It's going to be okay.”

“Daddy,” Maude says, “was he
bad
?”

“Yes, honey. He was bad.” I meet her concerned glance in the rearview, the caregiver look she generally reserves for her dollies and Steve the cat. “Not
all
policemen are bad, but he sure was.”

“It's okay, Daddy.”

“Thanks, honey.”

“I want to break him,” Roland says. “Stupid idiot cop.”

“So do I.” I fire up the engine. “But you can't break a police officer. You'll go to jail.”

Glancing at my phone on the passenger seat, I remember that someone left a message while I was talking to Officer Stalin. I check the call log: Stacy. Three out of five bars here, good enough reception to check the message:

Again the Fish in the Pot in my head reminds me that Sharon may have bad information, that of course Stacy loves me, that of course she's been true, that all the anxiety of this suck-ass two-star day has been much ado about nothing, a product of
caught in a trap
suspicious minds. No smoke, no fire.

One thing for sure: we can safely cross Chad Donovan off the list of suspects.

And yet the Headless Whoresman is only wounded, and will not die.

INT. SQUAD CAR – NIGHT

The car is parked on the side of Route 299 in New Paltz, hidden behind a billboard. A COP sits in the driver's seat, presiding over a radar gun. A car zooms by doing sixty.

C
RYING AND DRIVING PROVED DIFFICULT, SO
I
SWUNG BY
P
HILLIES
Bridge Farm, our CSA, not far from where I was pulled over, to gather my composure. (
CSA
stands for Community Supported Agriculture, but people up here use the abbreviation as a synonym for
farm
. When you join a CSA—and everybody in New Paltz does, just as every student wizard joins one of the Houses at Hogwarts—you come to the farm once a week to collect your share of fresh organic produce, a sizeable percentage of which you wind up throwing away six days later because you don't know how to cook it and it goes brown and limp in your refrigerator.)

Harvest Days, when the unpaved parking lot fills up with the Subarus of CSAers picking up the week's take, are Thursday and Saturday; on Friday afternoon, then, the farm is empty, just a handful of crunchy college-kids-on-leave watering the rows of sunflowers. Roland and Maude are playing in a sandbox, not as elaborate as the one at Hasbrouck, but elaborate enough for my purposes. They're playing happily, interacting well, enjoying each other's company, as they often do in the late afternoon.

It really turned out to be a gorgeous day. The sky is big and blue, the sun low over the farmhouse, bathing with light the red and orange and yellow of the autumnal trees. To the west, the mighty Shawangunk Ridge—a layer-cake of glacier-hewn bedrock, ugly and beautiful all at once, on which is perched, improbably, a manmade hard-on of stone: Skytop Tower, part of the famed Mohonk Mountain House resort complex—presides over the valley.
SAVE THE RIDGE
. Bucolic splendor, the lure of upstate New York. A lovely tableau, a picture postcard (literally, as Skytop Tower is our Liberty Bell, our Mount Rushmore, adorning our
GREETINGS FROM NEW PALTZ, N.Y.
postcards). So much beauty to behold,
don't know why there's no clouds up in the sky
and it could not be more antithetical to my
stormy weather
state of mind
keeps rainin' all the time
.

The hint of red under the new
Us Weekly
reminds me that I forgot to open the Netflix. Carefully tearing the reusable envelope—how many did I destroy before figuring out the clever trick?—I withdraw the smooth white sleeve. It is not
I Love You, Man
, but Stacy's uninspired selection,
He's Just Not That Into You
. This means I will be channel surfing later; if I watch
He's Just Not That Into You
tonight, by myself, I might as well donate my balls to someone who can actually use them.

Shaky reception here, but I'm able to get through. The plan is to catch Stacy before her meeting, but the call goes straight to voicemail. I leave a perfunctory message,
kids are fine, miss you, love you, can't wait to see you
. Then I check the home voicemail, an oh-so-convenient process that entails dialing (but not really
dialing
; no one
dials
anymore) a mere twenty numbers, plus the obligatory pound key, and then waiting for the automatronic woman
the auto-matron?
, whose changelessly cheerful tone of voice is the telephonic equivalent of the old biddy doing forty-five on the Thruway, delivering her news with all the urgency of a corpulent carrier pigeon. Get to the point!

You have . . . one . . . new message.

A message, a message! Knots in my stomach, bad ham doing its dread work. Sharon, the dreaded follow-up call, a nuptial oncologist phoning with the biopsy results of the invisible cancer in my marriage? Stacy, with benign news about her scones, her chopped salads, with what she ate for lunch
with who ate her for lunch
?

New voice messages. Playing . . . new voice messages. Call answering message from . . .

I click the number key, bypassing the chipper auto-matron, and skip right to the message:

“Jawsh,” comes the familiar voice, as lugubrious as the auto-matron is sunny. “Haven't heard from you all week. Just wanted to see how you were holding up. Call me when you get a chance, okay? Um . . . okay, bye.”

I've always been close to my mother, but lately, I find her difficult to talk to. She doesn't understand, and therefore doesn't approve of, my lifestyle. She can't wrap her brain around the fact that not everyone of consequence has a job in the legal or medical professions. I should have a law degree by now, I should be a partner. I should be married to a nice Jewish girl who stays at home and cares for the children, who balances the checkbook and manages the dry cleaning. I should be a
success
, not in the bullshit screenwriterly way, but using the traditional yardstick of such things, net worth.