right out of here! He’s gonna kick their asses all over the goddamn parking lot if he has to. And do you know why?”
“Gordon,” said Bill Hamm.
“Do you know why? Because his father told him to, that’s why.”
With that, Gord slapped his palms down onto the table between us and sat there panting with righteousness. Constable Adams, I noticed, was scribbling furiously into his book.
“Gordon,” said Bill Hamm again, once he could be certain he wouldn’t be interrupted. “I only want to say this to you once. You call us. You don’t sic the boy on them. I know what you’re doing — you think you’ve got a secret weapon here. He’s under eighteen and a minor so the rules don’t apply. You think you’ve got a one-man vigilante force.”
I glanced over at Gord, surprised that the cop would give him so much credit. It was far too calculated. Gord had no master plan: he just wanted punks’ skulls busted and was thrilled to have someone around who could capably get the job done. It never occurred to me that he might be taking the legality of the situation into account when he sent me out into the parking lot. And by the way, had the cops entirely missed the fact that it was Gord who had nearly throttled Croft this evening, and me who held him back? I felt myself getting angry at approximately everyone present.
“Excuse me,” I interrupted. “I was trying to stop it. I didn’t want anyone to get hurt. I was trying to calm Gord, um, Dad, down.”
“That’s right!” exclaimed Gord. “Like I said, I was ready to castrate the little bastard. If this boy hadn’t held me back . . .”
“I don’t particularly believe that,” remarked Constable Hamm, stunning us both into silence. He sniffed, then, causing his rectangular moustache to bounce around a little. “What I believe, Gordon, is that you let these kids provoke you. You enjoy it. If you didn’t enjoy it, you wouldn’t be sending the tank here after them every weekend — and believe me, we hear about it when you do. The boys over at the Legion think it’s better than TV. If you didn’t enjoy it, you’d be calling us, and we’d take care of it.”
A thoughtful stillness, entirely uncharacteristic, came over my father.
“And what would you do?” he sneered after a moment — the famous Rankin Sr. sneer. “You said yourself, these are kids. You people can’t do a goddamn thing but shoo them off home.”
“We come over, we tell them to leave, they leave,” replied Hamm. “It’s boring, for us and for them. After a while, they find something else to do, and you don’t have to worry about them anymore. But you don’t want that. You want your showdown in the parking lot. You want your dogfight.”
Dogfight. I thought about the handful of standoffs in the parking lot, Gord’s face on the other side of the restaurant window. Safe behind glass, miming punches, cheering me on.
At that moment, my father seemed to lose interest in the conversation. “Ah — bullshit,” he muttered.
“Anyway,” said Hamm, standing up. Adams followed him out of the booth as if they were conjoined. A second later Gord and I stood too. “That’s all we wanted to say tonight, Gordon. We wanted to let you know that we’re keeping an eye, and we’re happy to drop in anytime you need us. You just give us a call next time.”
“Wonderful,” said Gord, shaking Hamm’s extended hand so fast it was like he was wiping his hand on a dishtowel. “My Christ — haven’t we all just accomplished so much.” And with that, he turned away and disappeared into the kitchen, leaving me to show the policemen out.
That’s when Constable Bill Hamm turned to me and said something I never forgot. It was only the second time he’d looked at me, and for the second time in our conversation, the fake-friendly light he’d held in his eye while talking to Gord flickered into nothing.
“I know you,” he said then. “Understand that, Mr. Rankin. I see exactly where you’re headed, son.”
I stared back at him for a moment, making no sound because inside my head I was sputtering at the injustice of these words. “What?” I managed to sputter out loud, at last, to the cop. I wasn’t asking him to repeat himself, I didn’t say it like “Pardon?” I spread my hands as if to gesture to everything — the entire world surrounding