The Wooden Sea

I decided to follow this guy. See what happened when other townspeople caught sight of him. See if—

“Hey, Fra

“Hello there, Fra

If I had been a cartoon character at that moment you would have heard all around me the sound of car brakes screeching and seen smoke billow up from the bottoms of my shoes.

I stopped so abruptly that I really needed a moment to regain my balance. “You know me?”

They looked at each other. Lipson snickered. “Why wouldn’t we, Fra

“Yeah but—”

Down the block I watched Helmet Head disappear around a corner. But I had to let him go because this was ground zero for the moment.

“You know me like this?”

Monica gave her head a cute little twist to the side like a dog hearing a harmonica for the first time. “Like what?”

“Like I am now, like this!” I pointed to my chest, my face, to McCabe almost fifty years old.

“Well sure, why wouldn’t we?”

“I gotta go.”

“Don’t forget tomorrow night, Fra

They were sitting in the den. Mr. Richardson had a pipe in his mouth and held a newspaper in his free hand. Mrs. Richardson was knitting a yellow sweater. Both of them were stark naked. I was so stu

Looking at her now and remembering that moment at her house, I didn’t hear the car come up behind me and stop. Both of the kids looked over my shoulder and their mouths tightened.

“McCabe!”

The car was black with a single red light on top. That’s all– no deck of high-speed blues that strobed and flitted nervously back and forth across your eyeballs as it approached. No metal grate between the front and back seats to keep the human animals at bay when you were bringing them in. No shotgun rack bolted to the dashboard because in the 1960s guns were either on the cop’s hip or stashed safely in the trunk of the car. The trunk of a Chevrolet Biscayne because the Crane’s View police department only used Chevrolets. The chief of police was brother-in-law to the only Chevy dealer in town.

“Pee-Pee!” I was so happy to see him that for a moment I forgot who I was/where I was/when I was, etcetera. I simply walked across the sidewalk and made to shake hands with patrolman Peter Bucci. This guy and I went back a long, long way. When I was young, Crane’s View had three full-time cops and two part-time. Pee-Pee joined the force right after high school and for the first few years he was a bullying, lazy bum. But somehow he managed to meet and marry Camille, a great woman who turned him completely around and gave him a happy life. When I returned to town after Vietnam and became a cop, we got to be good friends. It was a hard blow to both the town and our police force when he died so unexpectedly three years ago of a stroke. But like my father a few minutes before, here was Pee-Pee again, looking young and strong and, best of all, alive.

He grabbed my face in an iron hand and squeezed my cheeks so hard I had to open my mouth. “Always the wiseguy aren’t you, McCabe? You criminal piece of shit! Always got the mouth going. Well guess what, smartass? You’re going to jail. Say bye-bye to your playmates and get in the goddamned car.”

“Pee-Pee—”

He still held my mouth and squeezed harder. In a minute my teeth were going to see stars. “Don’t call me that. Only my friends call me by my name and you’re not even an acquaintance. You’re shit on the bottom of my shoe, McCabe. You’re green snot I hawk up on the street. Get in the car.”

What must that have looked like: a squat twenty-five-year-old butterball in a badly fitting uniform squeezing the face of a tall middle-age man who could have knocked Patrolman Bucci into next week if he had chosen to.

But I didn’t. Like the good law-abiding kid I’d never been, I just got into the patrol car and stared straight ahead. He came around to the driver’s side and got in with a grunt and a slide around on the seat in search off a comfy spot for his fat ass.

“I’ll call your dad for you, Fra

“But what about Dio

“Tell your father to get dressed and take you.”

“What?”

We drove away before I could elucidate.

“You’re fucked now, McCabe. You’re going to reform school for sure this time. It’s the gray-bar hotel for you.” Pee-Pee looked at me with a piranha grin.

I said nothing. The drive to the police station took five minutes. We could have walked there but I think he liked the whole routine of taking me in the proper way. When he pulled up in front of the building he turned off the engine but made no move to get out. When I reached for the door handle he barked, “I’ll tell you when to move, McCabe.”

I put my hand back in my lap. “What’d I do?” “What did you do?” He was enjoying this little time before he had to bring me in. I belonged to him for a while. He was going to milk it for all he could. This was Pee-Pee Bucci pre-Camille; Pee-Pee at his worst.

I turned slowly and looked at my friend. Who would have liked nothing more at that moment than to punch me in the mouth. “Yes. Why are you bringing me in?”

To my surprise, his voice went furious. “Am I stupid? Do I look stupid to you, McCabe?”

Young me or Gee-Gee would have said something rude and gotten smacked. Not me—I bit my lower lip and shook my head. “No, sir.”

“Sir is right, you little fuck-joint. I’ll tell you what you did wrong. I’ll tell you in one word—Dalemwood. Does that name sound familiar to your diseased brain? Painting the Dalemwood house?”

My junior year in high school a new family named Dalemwood moved to Crane’s View. They had two children, both odd. George was a sophomore and his sister was a senior. Odd kids stick out whether they want to or not. But what really got my attention was hearing these people were Jehovah’s Witnesses. That was all I needed. I knew absolutely nothing about the religion other than having heard somewhere that they didn’t believe in doctors. They let their children die when they got sick rather than getting them medical treatment. Suddenly I had something new to hate. Decisive action was needed. I took a can of silver spray paint from our garage and wrote JEHOVAH’S WITNESSES FUCKER CHILD KILLERS in three-foot-high letters on the side of the Dalemwoods’ freshly painted white house. George saw me, told his parents and I was brought in by the police. My father came to get me but was so fed up with me by then that he worked a deal with the chief of police. They left me in the jail cell overnight to think about my wicked behavior. It had no effect. When I got out the next day I went on my fateful date with Monica Richardson. The only thing that shook me up was seeing her parents naked.