"Ah, two inna bunch, Ev, same as always," Merrion said absently, without looking at him, flopping the sheaf of multi copy bail forms onto the desk, the top copy, white, blocked off and printed in rust-colored ink. He snapped the briefcase shut and tossed it onto the top of the desk against the wall, turning to face Whalen and resting his buttocks on the edge of the desk so that his left foot touched the floor and his right foot dangled above it. "Our happy campers ready?"
Thompson'll start bringin' 'em out to see you in a couple minutes,"
Whalen said. He stood slumped with his hands in his pockets. In his late forties he had prematurely acquired the sallow skin, the shameful little paunch and the doleful, dismayed look of a careless man nearing sixty and discovering that the penalties of failure to eat properly, get sufficient exercise and moderate his intake of alcohol plenty of cheap beer, generic six-packs, in Ev's case are just about as disagreeable as medically predicted. He looked as though he had realized some time ago what was going to happen to him, sooner than it should, and had resigned himself to it. The dismissive scuttlebutt that Merrion indifferently remembered from a casual courthouse conversation was that Ev Whalen never had any good luck at all.
Apparently well before he'd been close to old enough to have learned very much about women or know anything at all about marriage, he'd made the bad mistake of marrying a somewhat older woman who'd had her heart set on having a husband and had pretty much settled for him as the best she was going to get. She had borne him two children, but then after those experiences and some further consideration decided that on the whole she wished she hadn't married him. While she still believed he had probably been the best she could ever have done, he didn't make much money; he bored her, and she didn't like him very much.
One night with four rum-and-Cokes in her she had disconsolately given him that news, confessing her realization that she would have been better off alone. Staggered, he said he wished she were. In his bleak grief he told her since she felt that way to get out of his house and he would raise the kids himself. She said she would like to do that and appreciated his offer, but they both knew he couldn't do it alone, not the way things had become. They were stuck with each other, fused by a bad event that wouldn't've happened if she hadn't grown impatient and they hadn't gotten together.
Merrion wasn't exactly sure what it had been. One of the children had some kind of serious disability, caused either by a birth defect that she could have prevented with better prenatal care or more prudent behavior, or else by a very bad accident during infancy. The calamity had occurred while Everett and his wife were still fairly young, ruining whatever slim chance they, with little else to hope for, had ever had of at least moving up a notch or two in the world on a policeman's pay.
When no-end-in-sight expenses threatened to destroy them, some of their friends and neighbors organized a ten-kilometer fund-raising walk around the Cumberland Reservoir. Disc jockeys at WMAS in Chicopee exhorted listeners to volunteer and sell sponsorships of themselves to relatives and friends for contributions of a buck per kilometer to 'this very worthy cause." The week before the 10K walk, volunteers impeded shoppers leaving stores and markets at the local strip-malls by stepping into their paths and shaking white cardboard metal-bottomed canisters containing coins in their faces, demanding that they "Please Help the Whalen Family." Friends and neighbors staged a couple of dinner-dances at the VFW Hall in Hampton Pond, "Benefit of the Whalen Fund." They charged couples $25 per ticket for access to a cash bar and Music By The Muscle-Tones, a four-piece amateur Sixties Oldies band formed by two firemen, a high-school teacher and a lab technician who worked out together at the Canterbury Spa and Health Club, playing and singing together for the bright-eyed pleasure that it gave them.
Too indolent to change the local-access channel after the conclusion of an entertainingly contentious budget-meeting of the Canterbury selectmen, Merrion had watched the climax of one of those dances on television. The Whalens were standing awkwardly side-by-side like 4H livestock, a team of farm animals being auctioned off at the Big E Eastern States Exposition. Obviously not used to his clothing, Whalen wore a white shirt and narrow dark-red tie with a dark suit. His wife, whose name Merrion did not remember, wore a black dress with a high collar and long sleeves. They were standing on a low stage next to the "MAS morning disc jockey, a laboriously jovial, heavyset young man with a microphone, doing their best to look humble and grateful while the fat kid boastfully announced that a measly 'three or four thousand dollars have been collected, from hundreds and hundreds of people throughout the Pioneer Valley, reaching out to help the Whalen Family."
He did not say that ninety percent of it had been five and ten-dollar bills donated by people who knew the Whalens only slightly but really did feel sorry for them, or else had been asked by one of Whalen's fellow cops to make a donation and thought it might be provident to do so. The DJ did not say the rest was small change badgered out of contemptuous strangers who didn't know a thing or give one good shit about the Whalens and resented being forced to use their pocket change for once glad to have pennies to ransom themselves from the can-rattling solicitors they deemed fucking goddamned nuisances.
"Wonderful, wonderful people, every one of you," the DJ declaimed, extending his arms in symbolic embrace of people sitting at tables and standing in groups on the dance-floor under the balloons and crepe-paper festoons decorating the dimly lighted hall, staring in curiously some blearily at the Whalens. Because he knew Ev, Merrion had avidly watched the mortification, ashamed that he felt such fascination.
Then it had been time for Everett to grovel. He had taken the microphone and held it clumsily too close to his mouth so that it muffled his words, abjectly whinnying mandatory thanks to all the wonderful people who had worked on the great events and given money and helped out in any way at all; promising them that he and his wife he grasped her hand desperately, as though reasonably apprehensive she might come to her senses and bolt, try to get away while he was occupied and their healthy child, as well as the one being helped, would never forget their wonderful kindness and generosity. He did not quite promise to reciprocate on demand by donating one of his kidneys or a lung, his heart or liver, for that matter to any fundraiser who might ever need one and match his tissues, but he came pretty close.
As Merrion watched the event he'd begun to feel astonishment and wonder. He did not recall having given to the fund drive. He was reasonably sure that he had somehow inadvertently escaped every dragnet bagging all those niggardly donors. To the best of his recollection, it was the only such shakedown he had managed to elude since he'd first gotten into politics, forty years and more before. This amazed him. He calculated that in the course of his twenty-two-year career he had solicited campaign contributions for Dan Hilliard and other Democratic candidates and causes at least sixty times. The people on his trusty donor-list remembered him, with vengeance, when it came time for them to raise money for their candidates, colleges, church schools, drum-and-bugle corps, their children's teams and their favorite diseases, knowing he could not refuse. But somehow he'd escaped the posses of the Whalen Fund. He could not for the life of him explain how he'd done it, imagine what on earth he'd done or failed to do that had delivered him. Thereafter each time he saw Whalen at the station, he marveled silently once more.