“So it is with policemen. Detached from mankind—thrust back with sharp insults or, simply, blank stares by those whose activities he indifferently impedes—fawned over by fools who, in an analogous situation, cannot walk past a sleeping dog without calling to it and holding out their fingers—smiled at by children who tomorrow will frown or fawn, like their parents—the policeman little by little slides away from whatever comfortable humanity he may once have shared with his neighbors. Every stranger is a potential excuse-maker or gratuity artist, if not an outright enemy, and every friend is a potential favor-seeker. Men of some stature in the community, who might conceivably make good their threats to ‘break you for this,’ as the saying goes, are tin cans on the social watchdog’s tail. Men of no stature are merely a quiet annoyance. The policeman resists this inevitable tendency of his thought, if only because human beings are by nature social creatures, even policemen; nevertheless, the subtle pressure toward cynicism is everlastingly there. It is of course primarily for this reason that police departments hire family men, when possible. The bachelor policeman inevitably turns more and more for friendship to others of his own Jesuitical kind, that is, fellow policemen; and out of such friendships, out of membership in that proud and exclusive club, he draws precisely the confidence and security, almost bigotry, which, in a man with a gun, can be dangerous. In your truly Protestant department, where after his day of professionally indifferent justice (strained, bent, dented here and there by the age-old hammerings of low pay and temptation always too ready-at-hand, by anger, boredom, and the despair which comes with dealing out more justice than any policeman gets), the man of the force goes home to a wife who involves him, as soon as he crosses his threshold, in excuse-making and bribery and pointless anger of his own; and lest he begin to slide into a comfortable self-hatred, a schizophrenic separation of the policeman in him and the tawdry man, she kisses him on the cheek and, sooner or later, unmans him in his bed.
“But either way, bachelor or married, the policeman is lucky if he does not eventually (however subtly) go mad. It begins in disengagement. It is not the man but the uniform that makes the arrests, takes the insults or the fawning or (most common of all) the averted faces, the stares that pass through him. Like a man in a hypnotic trance, he moves not by his own power but by the force of a thing outside himself, his badge. Like the hypnotist’s subject, and like a true schizophrenic, he must regularly deny to himself—far below the level of conscious assertion—that the voice with which he speaks is his own. Standing with his foot on the bumper of a reckless driver’s car, writing down the license, he no more writes, himself, than the hypnotist’s subject raises the arm he has been told he cannot raise: it is the Law that writes. It is the Law that bangs, like God on Armageddon day, at the debtor’s barbican, or holds up one glove to impatient traffic at an intersection, or dispassionately—for all the pounding of the policeman’s heart—fires a bullet through the murderer’s head, or pulls the power switch at Sing Sing.
“All men, admittedly, play artificial roles. A doctor is not the same man when he’s wearing his stethoscope that he is when he sits at the breakfast table across from his wife, reading his paper and picking with the tip of his fork at the yolks of his eggs. But here, for the most part anyway, the professional and the common mortal can live comfortably and harmoniously together. If a doctor withdraws from his humanity—closes off his emotions, for instance, while performing an operation—he does it in the name of his humanity. Only small children hate a doctor when they require his ministries, and sometimes even the most recalcitrant children can be persuaded. For the policemen, whom only small children love with a pure heart (and the recalcitrant among them are not quickly persuaded), there is no such pride and pleasure. He can be proud that he is, as he is frequently told, ‘an efficient, modern machine’; he can be proud that he is indispensable to civilization—however little the word may in fact mean to—as Plato says—a man of silver. He may be proud, when he looks in a mirror, to see that his tie is straight and his shirt neatly pressed, as the tie and shirt of the silver imitation of a man should be. But he cannot take much pleasure—any more than his nearest analogues, the artist and the saint—in his everyday communion with good, plain men. He meets the world and gets along with it by means of a conjuring trick inside his brain.
“His situation, we are sorry to say, is worse nowadays than it used to be, and worse in large cities than in smaller towns or in the country. The cop on the beat—an old-fashioned curiosity as impractical and inefficient today as the hand-crank butter churn or the medieval gisarme—could come to know his neighborhood, protect it and be protected by it: he could be as well liked as the grocer or mailman or launderer. (His position was not merely a function of his walking unarmed except for a nightstick.) He could usually stop a riot before it was thought of—or so most authorities on crime now believe. And if trouble did start, whatever its nature, he knew at once whom to look for, whom to let pass and proceed about his business, as one uninvolved. The cop on the beat had another advantage, more subtle and yet even more important: he need not be bored. As he made his way down the streets assigned to him he could talk with people or fall away into the abstruse speculations of a soul turned inward, whichever he pleased. If the day was quiet, he could bask in the quiet, speaking casually of this and that, or he could praise the Lord by eyes rolled up and over. Not so the man in the prowlcar. There is no quiet for him, but a steady hiss from his radio, like horsemeat frying or seas rolling through bones and grits, or like snakes and steam contending with the feet of the damned. Or else voices come in with that nightlong leak of trivialities—addresses, names, every once in a while some cautious little joke—whereby the soul of man is overthrown. Alas, he has neither the peace and isolation of the Gnostic, sweating in the prison of his flesh but dreaming nevertheless grand dreams, nor the fitful joy to be had from the earthly communion of, loosely, saints. In comparison to the casual turning of the head and a pleasant Good-morning, there is a certain offensive obviousness about pulling over to a curb in a car with a silver-throated siren and a big red light like a basilisk’s eye, and calling out to the man who stands on the sidewalk waiting for his bus. The man in the prowlcar is thus cut off both from outer reality and inner, from communion with men and from communion with himself. No message comes over his radio directing him to a corner where he will find a man whose conversation would be worth gold and silver and all one’s best linen. Outer reality is represented by boys who have just knocked down old ladies, by prowlers, reckless drivers, exhibitionists, peeping-toms.
“The man in the car, for his sanity’s sake, becomes something of a diner-hopper, and since he cannot hear his radio while sitting with whomever he finds there to talk to, the radio which he of course must hear if he’s to go where he’s needed in the large patrol area one prowlcar covers, he learns to live not only with the isolation of the new man of silver but also with guilt.
“There, ironically enough, is the crux of it: guilt. The policeman cannot be perfectly sure he is doing his best for the department that has won from him his loyalty (it is interesting that in police slang, headquarters is known as ‘the house’); he cannot be sure he is doing the best he might for his family (the pay is bad, there are risks, and the work wrecks one’s nerves); and to the extent that his original selection and training have done their job, the old civilized man within him cannot always be perfectly content that the job is civilized.
“Yet for all that, we might note, the man on patrol has it better than the man who must work with prisoners. The voice at the other end of the prowlcar radio is not sullen or hostile, and though prowlcars have their distinctive smell—the same smell as school buses or taxicabs or any other vehicle regularly and without any trace of affection serviced and stored in a large garage—at least prowlcars do not, like cellblocks, stink. Patrolmen grow increasingly mechanical, with experience, withdrawing to something like a permanent state of light trance. Guards, forced by their circumstance
s to make a sharper distinction between us and them, may grow brutish. The prevalence of alcoholism, marital failure, neurosis, and psychosis among guards is notorious. This is particularly noticeable among guards in large prisons; but every city or country jail provides its instances. Indeed, taken as a general class, cellblock policemen are the graphic symbol of what has been called the power-failure of civilization, the black gap between Actual and Ideal. In the lumbering old Leviathan, they are the heartbeat that misses. The fault is not theirs, nor yet ours either. An occurrence more than a fault: a necessary waste of human spirit.”
The article was signed “A. Taggert Hodge, Phoenix, 1959.” A mistake of some kind. The Congressman had been dead by then, and Phoenix pointed to Taggert Faeley, the youngest of the Hodges.
Clumly frowned. The Judge was right; it was all very interesting, though not true. What would Will Sr say if you showed him that? Clumly smiled. But he would not show him, naturally; he was not completely heartless.
He frowned again. He folded the article and dropped it into the wastebasket, then on second thought retrieved it and put it in his drawer and locked it there. The whole thing was disgusting, unbalanced maybe, and yet it was just true enough to make a man stop and think. He closed his eyes.
Chief Clumly himself was not one of those people the article talked about; he could state it for a fact. He was changed very little, all things considered, from what he’d been as a young man, standing on the ship with the smell of the ocean in his nose and his heart beating lightly. Merely older, heavier of heart. Who could escape it? Neither was Miller or Kozlowski or even Figlow the kind of man young Hodge imagined cops to be. (Clumly knew his men. That was what he was paid for.) Every one of them had joined up, originally, by accident, with no serious intention of remaining in the work very long. Kozlowski, for one, was mildly scornful of, and mildly amused by, the uniform he wore. He scolded jaywalkers with a severity he secretly found comic, and now and then, with an unexpected, momentarily baffling smile, he let them know it. Once, when he’d found children throwing bricks at a blind horse in an East Main Street field, he’d reacted with indignation which—it was plain to see, or anyway plain to Clumly, watching and listening to the talk at the station—had nothing to do with his function as preserver of the peace. He would have done the same and would have felt the same if he had seen the thing while driving a tractor between two fields on a neighbor’s farm. It was not the crime he reacted to, but the stupidity and cruelty of the thing. As he would have chased heifers that had broken through a fence, he’d chased the three boys down in his prowlcar, penned them in at the corner of the Sylvania fence, leaped out red-faced with rage and, exactly as he’d have done if he were not a policeman, delivered them to the station. The only real tie he felt with the police department he served was his general, and not especially intense, liking for the men he worked with—a tie no different from the one he had felt with the baseball team he played on, back in high school. He watched Chief Clumly (Clumly saw) with remote fascination partly because he was different from the others—a narrow-minded, stiff-hearted old man, a mystery. He observed as a city man might observe a cow with the wuthers. He had no expectation of being in this business long, and so while he was here he would see what he could see. Ah, Kozlowski!
Miller, too, had joined up, originally, by accident. He’d grown up in Batavia, among the Northern Italians on the better side of town, not among the Sicilians that he too looked down on. (Clumly’s race on his mother’s father’s side.) He had a ruddy face like an Anglo-Saxon and brown hair, and he was taller than most of Batavia’s Sicilians grew. He’d served with the Marines in World War II, a young man at the time, broad-shouldered and grinning and innocent. Clumly had heard it all until he might as well have been there. Miller hated the Japs in the same abstract way he hated the cowmen who fenced off their waterholes in the Luke Short novels he was always reading. He was a first-rate Marine in the same way he’d been a first-rate football player before and was a first-rate volleyball player in the South Pacific: he enjoyed fighting, though before the fight started, in the time of waiting, he was afraid. Once the landing was on, or the jungle fight, the fear dropped away and he fought like a man in a War picture—and was even conscious that that was how it was. Only once did it occur to him that they really might kill him, when he was dragging his boots through a marsh between trees at dusk, and people were being hit around him, the same as in a landing except that that night, in the dimness and confusion, he couldn’t tell even vaguely where the shots were coming from. He was hit three times in the stomach, and as he sank into the snake-grass, losing consciousness, sinking, in fact, into the deepest and calmest blackness he had ever experienced in his life, he had believed at last in death. They’d sent him home and he’d married a girl he’d gone with most of his life—a Protestant, and so, with a shrug, because his parents were the kind who would bite their lips and weep a little and forgive it, he too became a Protestant, a Methodist like his wife, whatever that meant. To support her, he’d taken a temporary job, as he’d thought at the time, as a cop.
Even now, middle-aged, he looked like the man on a Marines poster, at least when he had his uniform on. When he sat at home in his undershirt, barefoot, watching TV—Clumly had visited now and then—you saw that his arms and shoulders were not as thick as they’d once been, that his chest had sunk, and that his trunk was wider all around, though not exactly fat. His normal tone of voice was friendly teasing, even when he asked his wife Jackie for a shirt or asked his sons if they’d finished their homework. He was the same with, for instance, the mailman if he saw him on a Saturday morning: “You’re late with the bills again, ain’t you?” he’d say, as if belligerently; but then when the mailman’s moment of uncertainty had passed, or had stretched out long enough, Miller would grin, abruptly and warmly, and cock his eyebrows, and he and the mailman would laugh. Clumly, watching (having stopped by for some reason), would feel proud of Miller. Yes. He told no long, involved jokes like the Mayor’s, but he was fond of short quick jokes, old as the hills, and he used them over and over, whenever they would fit. The kid wanted a watch for Christmas, so we let ’im. With his teasing and his jokes and his comically monstrous threats he ruled his wife and four boys like a tyrant. They loved and feared him. He was a father, but almost not part of the family. When the belligerent, jovially teasing voice would not work, it was hard for him to speak. He would sit by the TV, in his private circle of gray-blue light, watching wrestling or some old detective movie, and his wife and boys would play Password or Chinese Checkers or Monopoly in the yellower light of the diningroom at his back. Sometimes, on a sudden impulse his family did not dare resist and, in any case, rarely wanted to resist, he would take them all to a drive-in movie or a stock-car race or a hockey game. And sometimes, with that same mock-belligerence, he would announce to Jackie that they were going to the VFW Hall to dance.
Miller’s family was not fooled by his boyish manner. They knew him earnest and just and restless—a first-class mechanic, typist, square-dancer, home-workshop carpenter, radio repairman, you name it. Without talking about it, he lived by rule—a tight rule he’d perhaps never troubled to think out but would never, come hell or high water, slip from. He drank with the others at the VFW Hall, but no man could say he had ever seen Miller drunk, not even high. He drove his car fast, eyes glinting over the high cheekbones, nose like an axe; but he drove with the precision of a professional racer. It seemed, in fact, that he never even laughed except by choice. Looking into his eyes, you seemed to see there the lingering images of a thousand bad moments he had calmly come through: an eight-year-old boy on Chandler Place who’d been hanged by his playmates, a farmer’s wife, out on Ellicott Street Road, stabbed twice with a pitchfork, and other scenes no less terrible, though not as striking: head-on collisions, fires and the Tonawanda’s floods, children run over and crippled or killed, violence, drunkenness, sickness. Once, before the time of the Creek Road overpass, a man who had two children i
n his car had tried to outrun Miller’s siren by crashing through the crossing gates. The train hit them broadside, and the car exploded like a bomb. Miller could tell about the things he’d seen with a kind of detachment, almost light-heartedness, that would have made you think, if you did not know him, that his emotions ran no deeper than rainwater washing down a street. But it wasn’t so. He was as shocked by such things as Clumly was himself. Maybe more so. The images ate at his generous heart and at times tinged his mock-belligerent cheerfulness with alum. Once in a while, after one of his jokes, he would forget to throw in the open, boyish smile. At such times he seemed much older than he was. Since the beginning, he’d had it in the back of his mind that one of these days he’d get out of police work; but the images he carried with him had made him put it off, year by year—so Clumly guessed—until one day it had come clear to him that, for better or worse, he was going to die a cop.