The weekend totals varied with the seasons. There were almost always at least four or five unlucky drivers whose dead headlights, faulty brake-lights or imperfect recognition of passing zones or stop signs justified a roving cop's decision to pull them over and require them to show their licenses and registrations, leading to arrests for suspended or missing documents, or operating under the influence of alcohol or narcotics. Documentation of their releases on personal recognizance in the amount of $100, promises of payment that would come due if they failed to appear the next day court was open to be processed and enter pleas, would yield a total of at least a hundred bucks a night. More often than not a Friday evening would produce an angrily baffled male whose frustrating week at work or out of it had convinced him that the only cure for his malaise was more beer than his ordinarily peaceful disposition could tolerate without becoming profane and noisy, frightening his wife into believing that violence would be next and causing her to call the cops. That would add another twenty-five dollars to the magistrate's net pay. Sometimes around graduation time or during the football season the State cops would break up an off-campus keg-party at a summer cottage on one of the lakes or a skinny-dipping outing at the reservoir, bagging a small herd of underage drinkers and public urinators whose releases from the lock-up in Hampton Pond would bring two or three hundred dollars. In the late Eighties the increasing traffic in crack cocaine had spawned an increase as well in the number of magistrate's fees, arrests for dealing it adding fifty to a hundred dollars a night.
It seemed to Merrion that that kind of money ought to be hard for a young parent to turn down, but surprisingly more often than he would have thought, both of the two young fathers and the young wife on his staff as well regularly passed it up, saying they wanted time with their families. And during the summer the absences of vacationing assistants usually put him on duty at least one night every week.
This night he was glad of it. On the way home from visiting his mother he had perceived himself to be in a familiar, dangerously barren mood.
Polly had not recognized him, gazing into space and glancing at him only when it registered on her that there was something else alive and breathing in her room, the evidence being bright and cheerful sounds he made when he tried to talk to her. At least she hadn't mistaken him for Chris, which still occasionally happened 'and never fails to piss me off," as he told Hilliard. "Puts me right into a fuckin' rage, even though of course I know she's got no idea what she's saying. I dunno what I want from her, expect her to do, where that no-good bastard's concerned. Fifty, sixty miles away, maybe an hour's drive? If it's even that, and he hasn't been to see her since I can't remember when.
Before she got really sick, I know, the bastard, been at least that long.
"I can't figure the little shit out. It's almost as though he holds me and her responsible for Dad dying like he did when he was still so young. Like he got gypped out of something or something, and we helped whoever did it. When he had much more of Dad's tim en I ever did because by the time he came along Dad'd made sales manager and didn't have to work so many hours had more time to take Chris to ballgames and places by then I was too old to go with them. And who the hell does he think helped Ma pay his tuition, he went to Cathedral? Helped out with his living expenses or he couldn't've gone to BU like he did, even if with his scholarship. That all seems to've slipped his mind now. She still remembers his name, though. It's my name she always forgets.
"Jesus, though, doesn't he know? You got to take care of your own. All you and I've been trynah do, all these years, the things we ever done, it's always come down to steppin' in and takin' care of other people when their own people either didn't care about them enough so they would do it, or were so totally messed-up themselves they couldn't do it, but the need was still there. Somebody had top take care of it.
And that was the way that we always saw it; that was the way we looked at it. Our job was to make sure the government picked up the slack.
That's why the damned jobs exist; that's what they're for. You always take care of your own. Like I always looked out for your best interest, and you always looked out for mine. And we're not even related. We always took care of our own.
"Chris's never done that at all. It's like he's oblivious to the fact that he should; like the shit doesn't see his obligation. He doesn't take care of his own. But it's his name she still remembers."
