One Monday We Killed Them All (4 page)

“So get hold of a reporter from the state capitol and fill him in on what it’s like back there. Show him your scars.”

McAran laughed with a good imitation of delight. “Lord God, I don’t want to reform anything, Hillyer. I don’t give a damn if they slice up the lifers and serve them for lunch meat. I’m just helping you be proud of the line of work you’re in. I want Meg to be proud of you too, pal. And your kids should worship their clean, decent, dedicated old man, don’t you think?”

“Say anything to Meg you want to say. Leave the kids alone.”

“Or else? Settle down, Lieutenant. Ride it out.”

The rain had stopped by the time I drove around the shoulder of West Hill where Dwight saw, for the first time in five years, the murky jumble of Brook City filling the valley flats six miles away. We came down the long slant and joined the heavy truck traffic on U.S. 60 and rode with it into town, past the junk yards, block plants and taverns.

“Take a swing through town,” he said. “Go over Center Street and come back on Franklin Avenue.”

I followed orders. Fifteen blocks over and fifteen blocks back. With his first show of alertness he sat forward on the seat, his big head turning from side to side. After the tour he leaned back and said, “A garden spot, isn’t it? I didn’t think it could happen, but it’s gotten worse.”

“Close to twenty per cent unemployed now. Most of them have run through the compensation. The furniture factory closed last year. Forty stores empty in the downtown area. Hasn’t been a new house built in four years. Most of the big trucks don’t even hesitate on the way through. Those who could afford to leave have left.”

I drove to my house on Cedar Street. It’s a small frame house about forty years old, but it’s on a double lot and there are some good trees. A third of the houses on Cedar Street are empty, the weeds growing tall, windows boarded, paint peeling. It was almost one o’clock as I turned into the driveway. Though the street was empty, I was aware of the neighbor’s eyes looking out at us. I guess it was enough of a drama to take them away from daytime television. The cop and the killer.

I parked short of the detached garage. Lulu came prancing, whining and grinning to offer greetings. She is a portly white dog, slightly speckled, and full of such emotional insecurity she convinces herself six times a day that everybody hates her, and goes around demanding affection with a sort of quiet hysteria. I dodged the frantic muddy front paws. She circled, frenzied with the responsibility of welcome, and lunged up at McAran. He punched her in the chest with a quick lift of his knee, so quickly and solidly she landed a-sprawl six feet away. She rolled onto her feet and stood for a moment, belly close to the ground, ears flat, tail tucked under, then give a shrill keen of spinster despair and scuttled across the lawn and around the corner of the garage.

It is perhaps somewhat sappy to read too much into such a small thing. I could have understood anger, or even a considered brutality. But McAran wasn’t irritated, or even interested. It is difficult to describe the way it was done. If a fly buzzes around your face you flick your hand at it, and it is a matter of total indifference to you whether you cripple it, kill it or merely drive it away. The end result is the same—the fly stops bothering you. Were you to kill it and be chided by a Hindu, you would stare at him as if
he had lost his mind. In order to have any understanding of his point of view you would have to go deeply into Hindu philosophy so as to understand why every life form is considered sacred.

The back of my neck felt cold. I was the Hindu facing the alien who could never comprehend my philosophy. He looked like a man and talked like a man, but we could not have been born on the same planet. I felt helplessly weakened by my own sentimentalities, by all the emotional baggage I had to tote around with me in a world where Dwight McAran was unencumbered. Up until that moment I had been apprehensive. With one casual jolt of his knee he had turned apprehension to a primitive unreasoning fear.

Meg came hurrying out onto the small back porch and down the steps and across the yard toward Dwight, making small sounds of gladness, and for one nightmarish moment I had a vision of the knee lifting again with a force suited to this larger object, to send her, too, tumbling onto the sodden ground.

I watched them embrace. And then they went toward the house together, with Meg asking questions he had no chance to answer. I followed along behind them into those kitchen aromas of the lunch which Meg hoped would erase the memories of five years of prison starch.

iii

As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a policeman. Most small boys get over this. I didn’t. I don’t know why it should have been this way with me. Most men who become cops do so when other dreams become unattainable. They go onto the force as a compromise with reality.

Perhaps there is some order about it all which we do not yet understand. In every community of men there must be some who build, some who lead, some who heal, some who serve God. And every community must have laws, and men to enforce them. Just as every war has increased the percentage of male births in some pattern we do not yet understand, maybe there is some assignment of direction so that the communities of man will remain workable.

Without us, without the directed ones, you would not be safe in your homes at night, because it is too desperate a business to be handled entirely by the men who have drifted into it.

I am a good cop. It is a complex profession, laborious, drab and unromantic. I have a high school education. My army time, after basic, was spent in Military Police. I’ve had two tours at the FBI school. I study every issue of such technical publications as the
Journal of Criminal Law
,
Criminology
and
Police Science.
I do outside reading in these fields, as well as in sociology, psychology and public administration. I have learned the tricks and devices of command. I have a distinguished marksman rating. I have shot and killed two men, one in an alley and one in a bus station. I have wounded two others, and wish I had been able to just wound instead of kill the ones who died, and still dream about them sometimes, just as I dream about the time I picked up a woman’s slender red high-heeled shoe at the scene of a violent collision just inside the city limits and found it heavy with the fragment of foot still in it. I have been shot in the meat of the thigh with a zip gun, and I have been slugged from behind with a tire iron. I have three citations
on my record. I moved up from probation through two patrolman grades and three detective grades to gold badge rank in eleven years. I work an average seventy-hour week and receive no overtime for any hours worked beyond forty-four. Every two weeks I get a check which, after deductions, amounts to one hundred and eighty-six sixty. It is the most money I ever made in my life. If I stay in this same rank I can elect to retire after thirty years at one hundred and sixty-five dollars a month.

If I was not compelled to be a cop by some force I do not comprehend, I could not endure all the rest of it.

And the worst part, worse than the money, the hours, the idiotic inequities of the laws you have to enforce, is the constant need to rationalize. You can never do the job the way it should be done. So you strain to get the maximum out of tired men, obsolete equipment, an apathetic public. You wheedle and connive and bicker, knowing the best you can expect is a better degree of sub-standard performance. The roof leaks in five places and you have three wash tubs—

The way I met Margaret McAran, I was on regular patrol, but with an assignment to special traffic when the load got heavy, and on one afternoon of a light rain that froze as it came down, the body and fender shops were racking up a score that would keep them going for weeks. I was teamed with an older man named Lou Briss and we got a school zone injury case at quarter to three that afternoon at Hall Palmer Elementary School. It turned out to be a case of stupid rather than reckless driving. The crossing cop had made a blast with the whistle which startled an old guy into banging on the brakes, locking them so that even at fifteen miles he went into a long slow skid that swung the back end around so that it thumped a little girl, cracked her wrist and gave her a head laceration when she landed on the icy sidewalk.

The only adult witnesses were the crossing cop, the old driver and Miss Margaret McAran, first-grade teacher. She was there above and beyond the call of duty because it was such a crummy, dangerous, glassy day she wanted to help get the kids herded across the street before going back into the school and finishing up for the day.

The ambulance was loading the kid when we got there, and we found out from the crossing cop that the teacher
who had seen it was inside calling the little girl’s mother; so Briss and I split up what had to be done, but if he had seen the actual teacher instead of his mental image of the teacher, it would have been split a different way. I went into the school bracing myself to try to get some coherent information out of some semi-hysterical old spinster. She was in the administration office talking to some other teachers. They pointed her out to me. There was a dull gray pearly light in that room and some weak desk lights, but she seemed to have her own light—as if she had some trick of collecting and focusing all the light around her and reflecting it back. Maybe it was mostly that mane of dark copper hair, which looked metallic yet made you want to touch the softness of it. You would get the idea it was tousled, uncombed, but when you looked close you’d see it was as orderly as she could make it. Her skin was pale, but it had that glowing texture of superb health. Her eyes were a green that startles you because it seems too bright and clear to be possible. She was a big girl, moving with that protective dignity of big girls, but looking capable of explosive grace. I guess her features were a little heavy, denying her any classic beauty, but I can say that when she looked toward me in inquiry, there was an impact which dried my mouth and made me feel, in uniform, like a silly kid dressed up for a costume party. I learned later she was one day beyond her twenty-second birthday.

We went into a small room where I sat at a desk with my note book in front of me, and she sat in a straight chair beside the desk. Her voice was low and slightly harsh, and it had the intonations and elisions of the hill country hidden behind the grammar of her education.

Yes, she had seen all of it. She felt the traffic officer on duty had made a mistake in judgment. Under those icy conditions he should have let that car go by and stopped the ones coming which were further away. She saw the skid beginning, and so she had started herding and hauling the children back, and perhaps could have gotten little Shirley out of the way, too, had she not slipped and skinned her knee. Had she not been there, it was possible the rear of the car would have hit a half dozen of them. The driver had handled his car badly, had frozen on the wheel, the brakes locked, after the skid started.

Finally I had nothing left to write. I had her name and
her address and her telephone number, and my notes on all the information she could give me. So I had to look at her. She was so close. I had the hesitancy you get when you are tempted to look directly at the flame of a welding torch. If I thanked her, it was over.

I looked at her. There was a great calmness about this woman.

“This address, Miss McAran. Do you—live with your folks?”

“What has that got to do with the accident, Officer?”

I considered inventing some nonsense about how the phone was listed and so on. I discarded it. I looked into those bottle-green eyes.

“Absolutely nothing.”

It was a challenge, and I saw it weighed and accepted. There was an aspect to this that you will not understand unless you grew up in an area where there are hills and flats, and people have lived there for a long, long time. Nowadays the differences are not as great, but they still exist and will probably always exist. Hill people think themselves tougher, shrewder, more realistic and more rebellious than the soft, conformist flatlanders. They compare their hard core of verbal honesty against the tricky legalistic antics of the flatlanders. They have a rooted distaste for all the symbols of authority. I am told it is this way all over the world, wherever there are mountains and old cultures.

We stared at each other across the fence our upbringing had erected between us. “Twenty-six Crown Street,” she said, “is a private home. Mrs. Duke rents rooms to schoolteachers. There are three of us there. She operates it as a small boardinghouse. I’ve lived there since school started in September. This is my first year of teaching. What else do you have to know?”

She wore a dark gray skirt, a matching jacket over a green sweater, galoshes with buckles. She carried a gray cloth coat now placed across her lap. It looked cheap, threadbare and not nearly warm enough. She wore no rings, no watch, no jewelry at all. Her quiet hands rested on the cloth coat. The knuckles were chapped. Much later I learned she was self-conscious about the size of her hands and feet.

It must be just this way when the officer of an army of occupation must question a civilian girl. There is challenge,
awareness, and the kind of contempt you cannot put your finger on.

I said, “A boy named Dwight McAran from this area plays for—”

“He’s my half-brother.”

“Do you have a car?”

“No.”

“My partner went off with the traffic officer and left me the patrol car. I’m going down to the hospital to check on the child. Do you want to come along?”

“No thank you. She isn’t badly hurt.”

“Can I give you a lift home?”

“No thank you. I have work to do here.”

“Maybe some evening we could—”

She stood up. “I seldom go out, thank you.”

I could not get her out of my mind. The image of her grew stronger rather than fading. I began calling her up. She was coldly gracious, politely declining every invitation. I tracked down people who could tell me something about her. It was not easy. I put a lot of pieces together. She had been born forty miles back in the hills in the tiny settlement of Keepsafe, the only daughter of Red McAran, a vast, wild raging man who had not lived long enough to have other daughters. Meg’s mother had died of meningitis when Meg was three months old. The tragedy had made her father more violent and unpredictable than ever. He had remarried, had come down to Brook City for his drunken week-end courtship of a Division Street slut, married the young dull-minded girl and taken her back into the hard hill country life. When Meg was two years old, the second wife gave birth to Dwight. Six months later Red McAran caught his new wife in a corn crib with a tough middle-aged neighbor, and took exception so carelessly he was knifed to death. Three days after the man who had used the knife—he was the father of nine—was sentenced to twenty years, the second Mrs. McAran left the two small children at the farm home of Red’s uncle and disappeared forever, in the company of the eldest son of the man who had killed her husband. The uncle was a morose, arthritic, impoverished, childless man with a deaf-mute wife.