The Hauntings of Hood Canal

The Cop Makes a Decision

Consider traffic officers and their awkward social position, because some operate beyond copness and try to blend with ordinary mortals. Consider, especially, the traffic officer who runs roads, not city streets.

It’s a solitary life and lonely. It’s a life of coffee, wet roads, lost motorists, occasional wrecks, judgment calls on who’s too drunk or stoned to drive, or too reckless because of love and its ensuing insanity.

The level of b.s. is high. Bull comes from drivers, concerned citizens, newspaper editorials, your own administrators; and it arrives in the form of fibs, lies, baloney, krapola, criticism, threats, lawsuits, new rules and regulations, sudden enforcement of old rules and regulations; all to be mulled, digested, worried over along sodden roads where each car you pull over may be that tainted one on which your name is written widely.

When you stop a guy on a lonely road there are few options. If you’re a state cop, a sheriff’s car may be nearby, or vice versa. Light bars flash red and blue through fog and mist, guys backing guys up, but only as a luxury. Human contact is limited. Cop contact is what you hope for. Mostly you go it alone.

And alone is what you get when you walk into a store, a bar, a church. Store clerks blush with memories of petty theft, bar folk bristle with indignation, and preachers invoke the father-confessor­fifth even before you mention the name of a parishioner.

Plus, other cops are not much fun. Small town cops suck up. Sheriffs’ guys brag of criminal investigation, and you, a traffic officer get social conversation with no one. What you get is one more speeder, one more drunk; silently hostile, and convinced you are about to perforate his useless hide with ordnance.

Thus, if you get stuck with a junk job that won’t quit, like cars dunking, life is gonna change. You’ll really learn about being alone, because the job is so tainted it causes paper-shufflers and project-proposers and dispatchers to duck and cover. Because, whoever touches the unknowable is for sure going to get burned.

Still, the job is stuffed with mystery that would take the starch out of a sheriff’s brags. Suppose you are not yet old, and are handsome, and idealistic, and lonely (thus mildly neurotic); it’s easy to imagine you can solve mysteries that baffle experts. It’s easy to imagine you’ll drop the traffic job and become an investigative officer, this, despite the fact you’ve got as much chance as a hamburger in a nest of chow chows. It’s even easier to hunger after the first fine-looking woman who comes along.

And further suppose, that in a string of murders, you suspect there’s been an extra murder, but you have no remnant of deceased; no scrap of cloth, no tooth, shinbone, hank of hair. It’s easy to think one person is behind everything. If you can find the why and who of cars dunking, it’s a good guess that you can solve the whole business.

And even further suppose that among the partying populace are numbers of sell-outs and comedians. Most likely you will, on pulling them over, come up with names of murderers: Chantrell George (a likely suspect), Sugar Bear Smith (a solid citizen?) and a pool hustler name of Petey; this latter acting strange.

Given that, plus a dunked Plymouth, it pays to shake the back teeth of the community, to hear of certain whereabouts, because Petey has become prime suspect; a dunked car not evidence of a dunked guy, not when the guy is a hustler and the car is unscratched. And, you’ll naturally tell the other guys to keep lookout for a junkie, and to keep extra close watch for Petey. Judging from his past Petey will be driving something that looks rubbed out and ain’t.

And maybe, most likely, just probably, you’re gonna have to loosen up; gonna spend fewer nights sitting with TV and a beer. Maybe check out a little of that night road. Because what happens in these parts always seems to come down about the time the populace heads home, and the joints turn out their lights.