Mohawk

she’s just too busy. Officer Gaffney orders a hamburger deluxe, and tells Harry to hold the onions. “Two more weeks, Harry,” he observes. “Don’t seem possible.”
    John, the lawyer, seated two stools down, looks up from his soup. “Somebody’ll steal the traffic light for sure.”
    “You figure you’ll write your memoirs, Gaff?” somebody says. “Like the Blue Knight?”
    “The Blue Whale,” someone suggests.
    The lawyer’s smiling. “You figure you’ll get out of shape with nothing to do?”
    “I’ll have plenty to do,” the policeman says. “Don’t you worry about me.”
    “
I
won’t, Gaff,” the lawyer says.
    “Like what?” somebody calls from the end of the counter.
    “Like plenty.”
    “You could drive the getaway car for your brother,” John says.
    “Or for you,” Harry observes.
    “No tip today,” John says,
“Harold.”
    “Today, my ass,” snaps Harry, alias Harold Your Host.
    “
Har
-ry!” scolds The Bulldog from the cash register.
    “Yeah, Harold,” John says. “I’m shocked.”
    “Kiss my—”
    “
Har
-ry?”
    The door to the kitchen swings open and the Younger boy emerges. He draws two cokes and disappears with them. Officer Gaffney catches a glimpse of Wild Bill stacking glasses in a green plastic tray on the stainless steel Hobart runway. To keep from thinking, he says, “You ought to have that kid wear a hair net or something.”
    Harry ignores him, once again regretting having taken on his wife as cashier.
    Officer Gaffney is suspicious of this Younger and has been for years, ever since the day the old hospital came down and he was found there in the wreck of a lobby, looking as if God himself had set him down where no human boy could’ve possibly arrived on his own, what with all the bricks and plaster coming down. Two of the men who’d gone into the building, first for the boy and then for Wild Bill, were hurt by the falling debris, but there he had stood, all of fourteen years old, and not a scratch on him. The policeman was alone in thinking the boy’s story dubious. The town had insisted on making a hero out of him, running his picture in the paper, getting him on the Albany TV news. But there was plently that didn’t add up, and Gaffney was too good a policeman not to wonder. The boy had to have a reason for going into the hospital, just like he had to have a reason for turning up to take a kitchen job for two bucks an hour. This young man bore watching,even if Officer Gaffney could do the watching only for another two weeks.
    The door swung open and the girl came back in. She tossed a plastic tray on top of the stack and was gone again into the kitchen on the door’s backswing. Wild Bill was still standing at the Hobart, surrounded by tubs of dirty dishes. Instead of stacking them in the waiting trays, he had stooped to peer up into an inverted water glass at a single ice cube sticking to its bottom, defying gravity. To the policeman he had always seemed doglike, even as a boy. That look of expectant loyalty.
    His brother had hit the boy the way you hit a dog that day. First striking him, then growling “Get over here!” when he tried to slink away, the boy returning to take another slap in the head. “You can’t make me!” he said over and over again, while his father repeated “What did I tell you!”—as if those were the only two sentences they knew between them. This time Officer Gaffney himself had brought the boy home from Mountain Avenue. Standing there was all he’d been doing, not that he had any business doing even that. “You stay the hell out of this, Walt. So help me. You stay out.” And so he had gone outside to wait, but out there it was even worse and he went back inside again. By then the boy’s one eye was swollen shut and his brother was red-faced from hitting, but still the boy kept saying it. And still Rory Gaffney kept growling “Come here!” and instead of disobeying this order the way he did the other, he did as he was told, stupid boy, kept coming back, his eye shut and ugly, his lips swollen up thick and purple, now screaming “You can’t make me!” At this pass Rory Gaffney, who’d beaten his soninto this condition open-handed, closed his fist. The boy saw it, but was too sluggish to do more than turn his head. When the blow caught him on the temple, the boy dropped to his knees. For support he lunged forward and hugged his father’s knees. Then both father and son were quiet, and Officer