“He’s just doing his job, Amy, same as anyone,” Mr. Stockton said wearily. “Only he’s gotta jazz it up a bit.”
He held a chair out for Sheila and she sat down at a wooden table whose finish had been worn by repeated washings. There was a plate of cupcakes in the center, freshly iced. There were eight of them, one for each member of the family. Now they had a guest. Sheila looked around at the faces of the children, roundeyed, semicircled by shadows. They were thin and looked tired, just as their mother and father looked tired.
With a pang Sheila realized she was looking close into the face of poverty and there was nothing she could do about it, except drink the coffee that was being poured for her and hope they would believe her when she said she’d just had lunch and was too full to eat one of the cupcakes they invited her to have.
“Old man Purdy is getting on,” Mrs. Stockton said. “He’s starting to have some foolish notions. Seems worse since they took away the subsidies.” She turned to the tallest of her sons who appeared to Sheila to be about twelve. “I want you kids to stay away from there. Don’t pester that old man none.”
“We don’t pester him, Ma,” the boy answered. “We just watch him from the old barn.”
“Watch him? Watch him doing what?”
“He sits out on that back porch of his all day long watchin’ the road along by the old railroad tracks. Sometimes a car stops and some big kids get out and cut down the loco weed that’s growin’ there. They fill up the car and take off. Ol’ man Purdy has his spyglass on them and then he calls the police. The kids get picked up and Purdy gets a reward.”
Stockton leaned forward and looked at his son. “Are you sure about this, Willie?”
“I’m sure. And there’s something else. You know that cornfield behind his house, the one he didn’t plant this year? It’s full of locoweed growin’ real thick. He’s just waitin’ for somebody to come and get that. He stays out on that porch even after dark, waitin’.”
“How do you know that, Willie?” His father’s voice was stern.
Willie’s thin face whitened. “Sorry, Pa. We won’t do it again, but Jim and I snuck up to the house the other night and saw him sittin’ there.”
The boy next to Willie nodded his head. “He had his pipe goin’ and ever’ once in a while we could see it glow up. Say, Pa, how much money do you get for bein’ an informer?”
Mr. Stockton raised his hand, then remembering their guest, he lowered it.
Sheila had her collar turned up against the wind and was glad when she saw the bus come round the comer. It was colder than she had thought. She should have worn a sweater. She found a seat by the window and stared out at the darkening evening trying to get her thoughts under control. The bus was warm, but she was still cold and she knew it was a different kind of chill that she felt — not from the outside, but from within.
The Purdy place was the last on her list. All the others, marked carefully on the map made from scoutings done early in the summer, had been hit and harvested. The stalks were hanging in garages and apartments and dormitories, upside down, so the sap could flow into the leaves, drying, waiting to be processed. There was none in the apartment she shared with Jack. He’d given in to her on that. Only the Mexican papers they’d bought last year were under the bed they shared, dusty and beginning to yellow. They would be used soon, if everything went as planned.
She got out at the bus stop she’d intended, but now that she was there she didn’t feel like ringing doorbells. It was too late anyhow. People would be having supper. She went into a diner, found an empty booth, and ordered a hamburger and coffee. She could see the street from where she sat and the comer where the bus had stopped. She could have stayed on the bus, gone to the end of the line, and come back, but she hadn’t thought of it. The coffee came and the hamburger. She ate it, thinking of the Stocktons and their thin faces and hungry stomachs. Her own churned with a new and wild fear.
It was two o’clock in the morning and the place in the bed beside her was empty. The apartment was lonely and still. She got up and went to the window. Against the street lamp she could see a light swirl of snow. Jack had been right about the frost. She looked down the street hoping to see the lights of his jalopy come round the corner. She stayed there a long time, watching, waiting.
When dawn came and she was still there and Jack hadn’t come, she knew for certain that something had gone wrong. But she didn’t know what and she didn’t know how to go about finding out. She couldn’t call the police to ask if they’d picked someone up named Jack Finley. What if they hadn’t? Maybe Jack had managed to get away.
At ten o’clock she took the bus to school and got off at the south end of the campus. She wanted to walk. The sun was out and the air was crisp. The yellow roses that bloomed along the path leading to the library were brown and withered, their heavy heads drooping, hit by last night’s frost.
A group of students she didn’t know came down the library steps. One of them was carrying a transistor radio and she listened for a moment to a snatch of a song that Jack sometimes whistled while he shaved. The melody lingered in her head after she could no longer hear it.
And then suddenly it hit her and she began running back along the walk to where she had got off the bus, where she could get another that would take her back to the apartment. If she were lucky she’d be there by eleven, in time for the news.
She burst into the apartment and snapped on the radio. It was two minutes past eleven.
A voice came on, oddly familiar, a child’s voice, frail, earnest. “I’m gonna get myself a bicycle. That’s what I’m going to do with part of it. The rest I’m gonna give to my Pa.”
Her breath caught as she listened and in her mind she saw the small, thin, white face of the little boy, remembering him as he had asked, “Say, Pa, how much money do you get for bein’ an informer?”
Once a Cop
by John Pierce{© 1971 by John Pierce.}
If you read a story in which a shoemaker is the murderer, you know of course that not every shoemaker is a murderer. Or if you read about a corrupt politician, you don’t have to be reminded that most politicians are not corrupt. Or if you read about a fraudulent Old Master, you know that not every Old Master is bogus, that not every art dealer is dishonest…
“I’ve been locked up for less than that,” commented Fingers Hinschelman, who had also been locked up for more.
“They do seem incautiously loud,” agreed Seal, Chief Inspector (retired).
Reference was to a set of sounds gusting from a front window of the Peter Pan Nursery and Pleading School. An unmatched set of sounds — raucous, overloud, unnerving. A recorded band thundered Anchors Aweigh in accompaniment to the brisk military commands of Miss Springer as amplified through a granular loudspeaker. It threatened the tree leaves as it laced its way halfway across the park to the stone bench that the two men occupied.
“…HERE WE GO NOW, ROUND THE WORLD, ROUND AND MARCHING, THREE AND FOUR; FASTER, WILLIAM, THREE AND FOUR; NO, NO, SUSAN, YOU MISSED FRANCE; TURN RIGHT, REUBEN, GREECE IS NEXT AND HUP AND TWO AND THREE AND FOUR…”
“Should I ask what that is?” puzzled Hinschelman.