THESE LITTLE TOWN BLUES

Sgt. Crocker Newton on the Usual Suspects

New Age lizards, washashores, blow-ins,

if they’re loose they roll to Cape Cod

any time the country tilts this way,

because Florida’s too far, too big a drain

on their concentration. Not to mention

the one-to-a-crate originals

already present and accounted for--

the homegrowns dealing joints and coke

out of their rides at beach parking lots,

probationers and marginal offenders

we invite to the station for a sit-down.

I look at them and think: hapless.

That’s the word I drag the bottom of

my vocabulary for, and brother, it fits.

I’ve toured the fifty states, and this place

right here is breathtaking. But do they see it?

Too interested in bodily harm. What good’s

fresh air when you can have a spider web--

with spider--tattooed between your thumb

and index finger? That young lady with

a swallow on each ankle and a bear’s footprint,

claws and all, on her ample calf? You ever

wonder how they’ll explain those items

to the grandkids forty years from now,

after time and fat and sagging muscle,

bad habits and cellulite?

Mostly it’s in the eyes though, lack of--what?

Fire? Energy? Like they were fed as kids

on test cereals that didn’t make the grade.

Remember those colored puffs and corkscrews,

looked like pictures of germs they show

on the mouthwash commercials now?

And don’t get me started on the shoes.

Cowboy boots aren’t functional for work

or leisure in Cape Cod sand, and the women

in clunkers that look like milled chunks

of 2x4, or those over-the-knee spiked boots

like Errol Flynn wore in Captain Blood.

Less than a mile of sidewalk in this town,

so they must spend their lives in cars, their kids

raised on Sunoco fumes and Fritos.

Multiple earrings, nose and tongue studs,

eyebrow rings. Call me crazy, but I’d hide

in the cellar during lightning storms.

I’d be afraid to pass the refrigerator, for fear

I’d end up on the door with the magnets.

I blame all this self-mutilation on the death

of Communism. After fifty years, no big bad

boogie man out there anymore, to direct

our aggressions at, so it’s road rage, public

provocations over nothing, and driving

to New Bedford to pay total strangers

big bucks to shoot us full of holes so’s we can

walk around hung with hardware.

Had Cole Farjohn in the station last week,

had a beercan pop-top through his nose,

it looked like. Christ, Cole, I said, be careful

with that thing around coathangers.

You’re liable to find you hung

your schnozzola in the closet.

Sgt. Newton Recollects the Return of Thane Gould

to Endicott, Massachusetts, in the Winter of 1977

That was the winter a nameless December hurricane

laid the freighter Etruria lengthwise on the sand

at Head of the Meadow, then Thane appeared

in early January as though there was some connection,

hitch-hiking down Route 6. Before I saw who it was

I had already pulled the cruiser over to check him out:

short on luggage, jailhouse tattoos on the back

of his hands, hair to his shoulders and stiff as

peanut brittle, like you could snap it off. And his back

showing signs of defeat, still lugging the invisible piano

of a recent attitude adjustment. A cop’s inclination

is to keep a vision like that moving on down the road:

he’s probably not in town to visit his dear old mother.

Then I saw it was Cousin Thane, only thinner than

chopsticks and fresh from two years’ incarceration

down there in Santa Marijuana or whatever they call it.

Before I let him off at Aunt Shirley’s, he’d told me

what a damn fool he was. Gone and gotten in on the deal

because he wanted to go into auto parts, twenty K

they promised him and the other guys apiece on delivery

of the bales up here to Cape Cod, except by the time

they’d anchored overnight at Santa Whatchacallit

the crew was sampling the cargo, and everyone

in port got wind of it. The jailer’d slide a bowl into the cell

and watch them fight for it like chickens in a henyard.

Fish and rice the whole two years. Of course the pusbags

who’d signed him up went into thin air, and the moral

of the story is that when Thane did the math--plenty of time

for that between eye-gougings for a few mackerel parts--

he saw he could have saved the twenty grand

by doing oil changes right here in Endicott two years

for Moxie Hogan, or shingling for the Olafsen brothers.

He’s been clean ever since. Chopping up the beams

and laths in the house Aunt Shirley left him

to keep warm was dumb, but it wasn’t a crime.

All night he leaves the lights on in that little trailer,

even now. Says he gets dizzy in strange buildings.

Things couldn’t been too easy in that jailhouse after dark,

I’d say, and anyway a man’s got to watch himself.

Sgt. Newton and the Crows

I used to admire the way they’d stand two feet

from traffic, ripping away at a roadkill. It showed

some grit and independence, even performed

a civic duty, policing the highway. That afternoon

I heard them before I saw them, and thought

they’d treed an owl or hawk the way they do.

A ways further down High Barbary Road

I saw them, roosting and flapping around

on Cole Farjohn’s scalloper, that floating eyesore

the Lady Evelyn, up on blocks and peeling paint

by the road side, probably named for some

down-cape pushover Farjohn thought he was

in love with. A couple dozen crows were up

in the rigging and goose-stepping along

the gunnels, on the pilot house roof--except

I wouldn’t call the glorified phone booth

Farjohn has up there a pilot house--

and dropping down onto the deck, flying off

into the trees and coming back. I should have known

by then. Some men have their deaths written

all over them and Cole was one, the Bad Year Blimp,

as Earl Seed down at the Bunker called him. Then

I caught the smell. Farjohn dumping shells

and gurry in the bushes? OK, we’d add that

to the charges. I still wasn’t getting the picture,

and when I pulled up next the boat the crows

blasted off into the woods. When I got out

to look around, it was no question of inhaling.

My breath got as far as my molars and backed off.

Nothing under the hull, nothing in the woods but pines

and crows. Farjohn’s old tank of a Pontiac was parked

at his house up the road, widow-maker of a place,

tarpaper held down by laths, a tin stovepipe

elbowed out the wall, capped about two feet from

the roofline, and go ahead, ask me if he burned pine.

Ask me if we took a 9 mm Glock pistol out of his freezer

after the Mid-Cape Electronics break-in. But the stink?

No way without a ladder I could get on deck.

I opened my passenger door and stood up there.

Not high enough, so I climbed over

the bumper onto the hood, thinking, chief’s

going to ream me out if I put a dent in it.

When I stood full height and looked

into the deck area, all I could think of

was how Cole kept a couple of tortoiseshell

pussy cats at his place, and had such tiny feet

for a large man, then I wrapped both arms

around myself and doubled up.

Sgt. Newton’s Indie Film Debut

Endicott, Massachusetts, is turning up

on the silver screen a trifle too often, if you ask me.

Chamber of Commerce loves it, film school graduates

shooting their own scripts in town, budgets so low

they don’t get past the premiere here at the Rialto,

or maybe onto Cable 6 plus an interview

with your host Jack Cole. The story’s always

about film school graduates maxing out their plastic

making movies while their parents ride their backs

about attending law school. What’s wrong with

this picture? Mirrors within mirrors, that’s what.

So their girlfriends get to chew the local scenery

as female leads, and some of our more

photogenic citizens get to leer from the dark

into windows and such--Les Kraft and Arthur Slade

are lately talking Actors’ Equity. But cut to the action

yesterday morning: some of the fishermen

got down the wharf to go out scalloping and found it

roped off. These kids had selectmen’s OK to work

on town property, provided there wasn’t any nudity.

So Fred Bunjoe and Bobby Collery and the others

are sitting in their pickups thinking, There goes

another day of fishing. Meanwhile this couple’s

down the wharf pretending to have an argument.

Kid with a hand-held camera’s bouncing around them

getting all the angles and another’s holding a mike

on a boom over their heads, and here comes old

Bill Coehlo going about twenty, driving

right for the rope and dragging it and a saw horse

on either end down the wharf. Next thing the others

are following, offloading gear in the midst of the scene.

The kid director’s wearing one of those Australian

cowboy hats. One side of the brim pinned up

against the crown the way they do? Only now

he’s got a whistle in his mouth and running

and waving his arms like a referee, trying

to get the boys back in their trucks. Bob Chisholm

sticks a leg out and trips the kid so’s the whistle

when he hits the wharf breaks several front teeth.

About the time I got there, the kid’s mouth

looks like the entrance to the Ted Williams Tunnel.

Bob Chisholm’s being sued for damages:

cameraman kept shooting as the trucks came down--

catch the realism, I guess--so there’s Bob’s foot

as the kid ran past and I’m in it too, me and

Bill Walker trying to calm everybody down. Now

they want to work us all into the plot, serendipity

the camera guy calls it. First time in all my years

of policework I debated pulling my weapon

or not on folks I’ve known my whole life.

A Figure of Speech

You’re an oxymoron, beautiful cop,

and I must be pointedly foolish to think

I’m the only guy in town who goes twice around

the block to double the rush-hour sensation

you are at the intersection

of Commercial and Main.

Officer Coral Snow, up close your green eyes

are sensible contradictions to your blue blouse.

Around your eloquent silence, who would dare

blow his horn?

And when with elegant hands

and one flick of red-gold ponytail you wave

our line of traffic through, the jarring

harmony of things raises a wildflower meadow

inside this transfixed commuter:

sable rose, I’m humming, and havoc’s delight,

reason’s quandary, as if such paradoxes

could put down roots and send up rockets.

But how you startle the butterflies to lifting

off them: first the elfins, then skippers

and hairstreaks, swallowtails.

New Cop

He is waxed and polished, as streamlined

from crewcut to steel toes

as this new cruiser my taxes bought him.

If he’s Before, then I’m After,

creased and spindled in all the wrong places,

what he could become,

though I doubt he can imagine

letting his shirttail hang out like this

to indicate it’s one of his better days,

or growing a white beard until

it turns flyaway and his wife-cut hair

freaks whitely from an Orioles cap

as if at the first

tingle from Old Sparky.

Should I excuse myself by telling him

how I have to exercise this left hip joint,

or say I’ve been jogging

and walking this road right here for

a third of a century, so have a claim on it?

Who is this kid, anyway? Nobody

I’ve ever seen in this town of 1500.

It’s suddenly damp and foggy,

and I’m feeling muskrat shaggy

and a little bagged off, like I just crawled

out of that marsh down there.

Are you a Baltimore fan? he asks.

No, I’m an oriole fan, I say,

the wrong answer because I can see

it’s scrambling his gestalt.

Not a good day for a walk, he says,

watching the eyes behind my bifocals

for the Vacancy sign, waiting

for me to ask when Chief McHugh’s

going to get here with my tuna sandwich.