Sergeant Crocker Newton Recollects the Return of Thane Gould to Endicott, Massachusetts, in the Winter of 1977

Abstract

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, hitchhiking 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 backs 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, stiU 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 caU 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 WhatchacaUit the crew was sampling the cargo, and everyone in port got wind of it. The jaUer'd sUde a bowl into the ceU and watch them fight for it Uke chickens in a hen yard. Fish and rice the whole two years. Of course the pus-bags 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 oU 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