CHANGE OF LIFE - Chapter 8

     Willard got up early on Saturday morning. He had one more day off. He fixed a breakfast of instant oatmeal and instant coffee and orange juice. Then he went outside to look around the property. The grass definitely needed mowing. He went into the garage and found the mower. He also found the gasoline can. He filled the gasoline tank and started pulling on the rope. When he was completely out of breath, he sat down on the step and rested a few minutes. Then he pushed the mower out to the car and put it into the trunk.

“I’ll take it to Grady Olson and let him fix it. I wonder how Dolores has been managing to cut the grass with this mower?”

He walked around the house looking at the gutters and the clapboard siding. The gutters were sagging in several places. The clapboard needed to be painted, but first he would have to scrub off the black mold and the dirt from the boards before painting them. He could see that he was going to be busy for the next month scrubbing and painting. For now he would get the ladder and put those sagging gutters back in place. They were probably filled with leaves. He’d go all around the house flushing the dirt and leaves out of the gutters.

First he needed to take the mower to Grady OIson so that it would be ready the next time that he was on break. When he drove up to Grady’s business establishment, an old garage building behind his house, Willard took the mower out of the trunk. He wheeled it into the garage and waited for Grady to look up from the rototiller that he was working on.

“Would you fix this up for me, Grady?”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“It won’t start. It probably needs the blades sharpened and a new plug and air filter.”

“When you go to the doctor, do you tell him what to do?”

“No.”

“Then don’t tell me. When are you coming back for it?”

“Next Friday morning.”

 “It’ll be ready.”

Next ,he went to the hardware store to get some brackets for the gutters. Then he remembered that he needed fruit, soda, and bottles of tea from the grocery.

Sandy Briscoe was at the check-out counter.

“Is your wife sick, Sergeant O’Reilly?”

“No, why?”

“She is the one who usually buys the groceries.”

“Is that so?”

He took the groceries and drove home. He put the groceries in the refrigerator. Then he took the brackets from the car, went to the garage for some tools and climbed up the ladder to repair the gutter.

As he suspected, the gutters were filled with a sludge of dirt and sand from the shingles topped with a layer of leaves. He went back down the ladder and connected the hose. He turned on the water and climbed back up the ladder with the hose. He cleaned the gutter the whole length of the one side of the house. Then he installed the new brackets. He repeated this process on the other sides of the house. The gutters now hung properly.

By this time it was early afternoon. He was really hungry. He opened a can of ravioli and put it on the stove to heat. He took the carton of cole slaw, an apple, and a bottle of tea from the refrigerator. By then the ravioli was simmering in the pan. He let it simmer while he put a plate and a fork and spoon on the table. He poured all of the ravioli out on the plate and put the pot in the sink to soak. He sat down to enjoy a welcome repast.

That afternoon he started washing down the clapboards. He began by working on the ladder, washing the clapboards beginning at the eaves of the roof. One advantage to starting high is that the soapy water ran down onto the boards that he would be doing next.

He worked hard and was finished by the time it was dark. He put the ladder, tools, hose, and scrub bucket away. He was really hungry but he was so dirty that he couldn’t do anything until he had a shower. Never mind a shower. The way his back and legs were hurting from climbing up and down the ladder, he needed a hot bath to soak away his pain.

While he was in the bath tub the phone rang several times.

“Whoever it is can call back later.”.

He was so hungry he could eat a cardboard box. He thought of going to the Acropolis Café but he was too tired to drive. He thought of ordering a pizza delivered but he was too hungry to wait. In the end he made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on two slices of bread. He ate a banana and drank a glass of milk to go along with it. He ate while sitting in his recliner watching television.

He woke up in the middle of the night. The empty milk glass was on the table, the banana peel had dropped on the floor. He got up, carried the saucer and the empty glass to the sink, and threw the banana peel in the trash. He went upstairs, set the alarm and crawled into bed. He was soon sound asleep.

The Chief of Police in Prattsville, Arkansas was Captain Hollis Castor. Ginger Sackman was their first female patrolman. She had good scores on all her tests at the State Law Enforcement Academy. He assigned her to Sergeant Willard O’Reilly as her partner. After several days working with him, she came back to Captain Castor madder than a wet hen, a wet red hen that is.

“He is rude and crude. He doesn’t do anything the way they taught us at the Academy. He isn’t friendly to me at all. Please put me on with someone else.”

“Ginger, he was a military policeman for three years, and he has been on this force for twenty-five years. He has handled some very sticky situations. He is tough and smart and has good instincts. Forget about liking him. Just watch him, copy him, learn from him. You’ll be glad that I partnered you with him.”

Ginger swore to herself that some way, somehow, she would get another partner.

Willard came to roll call aching all over. He had taken two aspirins but they hadn’t helped at all.

Lieutenant Hageman, the shift commander, said,

“We received a “heads up” from the Memphis Police Department. They have been catching a few drug smugglers carrying drugs in pickup trucks. Evidently these trucks pick up drugs in Texas and Arizona that have already been brought across the border. They are taking them to Nashville, Louisville, and points beyond. The drugs are usually found in the big tool box in the front of the pickup bed.

“They had been catching them on I-40. Now they believe that the smugglers are sticking to dirt roads and state highways to avoid the inspection stops on the Interstates. They believe the smugglers are coming through our county on their way to the Mississippi River bridge at Helena. Keep your eyes open. If you stop a suspicious truck, call in and I’ll try to get a warrant to search it.”

After roll call, Willard and Ginger went out to their patrol car.

“Did you find out any more about your wife?”

“I decided not to pursue it. Since I know that she wasn’t kidnapped and didn’t leave by coercion, I didn’t see the point in trying to find out where she went. Since there is no crime involved, it would probably be illegal for me to use any of the police department’s resources. I filed a missing person report. That is as far as I am going to go.”

“If I walked out on my husband, I would want him to try to find me.”

It was Sunday, so they checked the front and back of the businesses on their patrol beat. They made sure the doors were locked and none of the windows were open. They took turns. He would do one business, she would do the next one. They had a call that an alarm was ringing outside a small warehouse where the driver stored Frito-Lay^TM products that he delivered to stores. They waited at the warehouse until the driver arrived, opened the door, turned off the alarm, and checked all around inside while Sergeant O’Reilly walked along with him.

Willard remembered about the mower being at Grady Olson’s. He couldn’t get it today, it is Sunday.

It was nearly noon and Willard wanted to get to the bakery for his Sunday treat. On Sundays he would get a jelly filled doughnut, a piece of cherry cheesecake, or maybe a sweet roll. He always picked something different. He always got a big coffee to go. Then he would sit in the patrol car, eat his thousand-calory Sunday indulgence, and drink his coffee. That was lunch for him on Sundays. Ginger would take out her bag lunch, thank him for the coffee he brought to her, and eat sensibly. Today Willard had a large size doughnut which was overstuffed with blueberry filling.

“Ginger, there are whole blueberries in this filling!  Are you sure that I can’t get one for you?”

His doughnut was only half eaten when there was a call for them on the computer screen. It was a domestic disturbance which had been called in by neighbors. Reluctantly Willard dropped his half-eaten doughnut into the bag.

“Ginger, be extra careful when we get there. You stay behind me unless I tell you otherwise. There is nothing more dangerous, more volatile, than a domestic disturbance call. I’ve had wives come to the door screaming, ‘Help me, he’s going to kill me. He beat me. He pulled a knife on me.’  Then when you arrest, and start to put handcuffs on him, the wife will turn on you, maybe with the same knife, or say, ‘Don’t take him. He has to go to work tomorrow. We can’t afford for him to lose any more days from work.’”

When Willard drove up to the house, he recognized it. It belonged to one of the guys in his bowling league. He had bowled against him.

As they approached the house, the sound of a man’s angry voice could be heard.

“You fat, lazy sow. You lay around the house watching television while I go out to work. It looks like you could do some house cleaning and cook a decent meal once in a while.”

Willard’s heart was racing, his gut was churning. He recognized those words as being the same as he had used on Dolores many times.

He banged loudly on the door. “POLICE DEPARTMENT. OPEN THE DOOR!  OPEN THE DOOR NOW!”

“YOU DIRTY B****. YOU CALLED THE POLICE.”

“OPEN THE DOOR OR I’LL BUST IT DOWN!”

The door was opened by a very angry man dressed only in boxer shorts and a T-shirt. Across the room a woman was lying up against the wall. Willard couldn’t tell if she was conscious or not. She was bleeding; her lip was swelling; there was an angry red patch on her cheek. Willard pushed him out of the doorway. “Ginger, see about the woman. Call an ambulance. I’ll take care of this scum bag.”

He whirled the man around, put handcuffs on him, told him that he was under arrest for aggravated assault, and read him his Miranda rights. Then he escorted him out to the patrol car and put him into the back seat.

“Willard, what are you doing?  We are bowling buddies. We men have to stick together or these women will take us to the cleaners and suck the blood right out of us. It used to be a man’s world. Not any more.”

Willard felt something come over him. It had started when he heard the man using the same language about his wife as he had used about Dolores. He detested the man for what he had done to his wife. That was transferred to himself. When he saw the woman, what the man had done to her, how he justified it, was still justifying it, it all kept building up in Willard. To these were added all the grief and shame attached to Dolores leaving him. It all built up to a critical mass and then exploded from within him. Willard hurled his insides out onto the curb and the side of the police car. He went back to the steps of the house and began crying and wailing.

Just then the ambulance arrived and Ginger had to run out and tell the EMTs that the victim was inside.

After the woman was loaded into the ambulance they made a quick check of the house. They drove to the station where they booked the abusive husband. Willard told Ginger to write it up. The watch commander gave him permission to go home, get cleaned up, and change his uniform. Ginger wrote an additional memo detailing his emotional display in the course of the arrest.

When Willard returned, he was called into the office by Lieutenant Hageman.

“Sergeant O’Reilly, Patrolman Sackman has reported your emotional outburst during an investigation of domestic disturbance today. I know that you found out that your wife left you last week. If you were my partner, I would have kept that between us. Since Patrolman Sackman has included it in her report, I have no choice but to forward it on to Captain Castor. He will probably send you to counseling sessions. I’m sorry.”