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I had never heard of Union City until that day in 1983 when I quit my job and told my wife I was moving there. Dropping that on our two kids proved harder because, being fourteen and twelve, they knew the difference between a rationalization and a reason. Johnny, the oldest, mumbled; Debbie cried and went to her room. It went easier with Connie – she knew it was coming. She had heard all the threats I made over the years, and she called them pity parties until she gave in enough to call them arguments. Then the arguments became walk-outs, but I never stayed away more than a night.

How do you tell your children that you love them and their mother, but you can’t stand your job another day, so you’re going to get another job doing whatever pays your rent until you can qualify to do something you know nothing about?

High school teachers have no authority, no control, and that was what the pity parties were all about. Connie listened in those days, but what could she know about drug dealers and prostitutes in the classroom, crime organized better than tomorrow’s lesson plans, and dead kids with symbols carved on their chests, and throats slashed wide enough to get your fist into? Two of those kids had been my students – in Modern Civilization. I had to get out of a crazy system, but I wasn’t going to quit. I would make a difference somewhere or die trying.

“Union City,” the police officer said in answer to my question. He snapped the steel-backed notebook shut and punctuated the sentence like a judge banging down a gavel. Ginny Wilkersen’s body lay there under the sheet beside the road in the weeds. One of her shoes lay nearby, and I stared at it for a few heartbeats while blue lights flashed, and faces gawked from cars inching by. “I hear they need a man,” he added as a state trooper tried to move the traffic with the blast of a whistle. Ginny never knew that she had written the best term paper in the class or how proud I was of her. She would have grinned and quipped, You recognize talent, Mr. Proctor!

The officer held his two-way radio near his mouth and said, “Have the coroner stand by.” He put the radio back in the case on his belt. “It’s a good place to start,” he said. We looked at each other until I nodded excessively and turned away.

That morning I didn’t go to school; I made a call to Union City’s police department, then drove to Connie’s office on base at Fort Bragg and told her. I told her about Ginny and about Union City, north up Interstate 95 near the Virginia line, and how it’s only about one hundred fifteen miles from Fayetteville. I said I loved her and Johnny and Debbie, but that I had to do this. She shouted that I was insane and went crying back into the building.

That night I talked with the kids. I would come home at every opportunity and send all the money I could earn and spare. We would cut corners, I said, until I Frank Proctor, former high school English and Government teacher – who in all of his thirty-six years had never wanted to own a handgun – had been re-hammered into a police officer.

Two days later when I drove out of Fayetteville after Ginny’s funeral, Connie was at work and the kids were finishing their last days of school before summer break. My principal was not happy that I was walking out during finals, but he had gone to bat for me before he said that I would get what I deserved. That day, with tears in his eyes, he hit me on the shoulder and said, “Go for it, Frank!”

Driving up I-95, my family might as well have been with me in the little blue Nissan. Fourteen years all crammed in instead of my suitcases and boxes: Connie pregnant and laughing, running a hand through blonde hair every few minutes as another name would catch our fancy. Johnny and Debbie sleeping on her lap, sitting on her lap, sitting in their car seats, and arguing in the back seat all at the same time. Frank, stop here, Debbie’s sick. Bathroom, daddy.

“Connie, I’m sorry, but …” I said a dozen times that day. Her face would not leave me, a face given for so long to laughter betrayed by a restlessness she could not know nor understand. I took an exit off the interstate to turn around, but I didn’t go back. If I had, I’m sure Connie and I would be divorced today.

The feeling went with me that my family was gone, blown away like an empty paper cup tumbling crazily into the ditch by the dirty wind of my going, into a ditch filled with weeds and things thrown away because someone had made them empty … into a little piece of ditch covered by a sheet during early-morning rush.

Tommy Throckmorton, naked, mutilated – I hadn’t seen that. I saw his mother dragged away from his casket. I saw her hand pulled from its handle. I heard her scream. The police said drugs were involved, but they had no leads.

It’s been a year since I drove up to Union City, and I still don’t know all the reasons why. Connie was right when she said Ginny’s death was not the only reason, that Union City was just one rationalization for leaving, that all I ever talked about was chunking my job and getting into something that would make a difference. Well, I was in a marriage, she told me a hundred times, and apparently that fact made no difference. She was right, but only to a point, and that point became a time and a place called Union City, and a person named Robbie. Robbie and I traveled the same highway from what some would call opposite directions. We met nearly in the middle and found out together that the beginning of every highway and road is where you are. This is my account of our story, the things that drove us to Union City and why we returned on our highway and how we were different after we got home. My marriage did make a difference after all, and that difference might never have been except for Robbie.

A year ago I attended my first funeral since Ginny’s. The minister read from Ecclesiastes about another man’s homecoming:

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the
swift, now the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise,
nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of
skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

– Ecclesiastes 9: 11

Time happened to all of us. But I believe now that some of us owe nothing to chance.

Union City straddles U.S. 158 a few miles off I-95 west of Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina. The settlement of twenty-four hundred people calls itself, “The city too progressive for divisions.” Griswold Town, as it was named before the Civil War, boasted a population of seventy-two, most of whom were kin, one way or another, to Todd Griswold, who said he was a direct descendant of Martha Bertram who fought as a man in the Revolutionary War. Actually she saw action in one battle, the one at Yorktown, and claimed to have witnessed the surrender of Cornwallis on October 17, 1781.

At the approach of the War Between the States, the town faced the dilemma of favoring slavery to support its tobacco production while also wanting to keep the Union preserved. The sentiment against secession had been nurtured from the beginning by the Griswolds whose motto echoed everywhere they went: “United we stand, divided we fall.” Residents knew that the sloganizing had more to do with preserving the cooperative status quo and power of the Griswold family than with saving the Union, but to them the Union meant a comfortable status quo, so during the war years, both the Stars and Stripes and the Stars and Bars flew over the town square; the people sang “Dixie” and “The Battle Hymn of The Republic,” and the Griswolds changed their brand of slavery into a hybrid type in which the slaves were “freed” but immediately retained “for their own benefit” on the plantation and farms. From time to time they were given speeches on why they should continue to remain slaves.

Twenty-eight men of the newly constituted Union City fought for the Confederacy – solely, they repeated in an oath, to preserve the right of secession. Jeremy McElhaney’s two sons marched away in blue, survived the war, and never returned to North Carolina. To this day at the entrance of the cemetery at the west end of town is a small granite marker commemorating “The McElhaney’s Loyalty to the Union shown by bravely sending two sons to defend our beloved Union.” When the folks heard that Sherman was coming north after torching much of Georgia, they hung banners over the main entrances of town proclaiming, “We support the Union.”

As I learned the history of the city, my first reaction was to classify all twenty-four hundred residents as ignorant redneck hypocrites in a stagnant, backwoods swamp of stupidity. The place was as different from Shawnee, Oklahoma as night and day; Shawnee was my home, where I met Connie Faye Benson, the cute little blonde whose folks moved in from Tulsa when we were sixth graders. Where dad still runs an auto parts store and mom is secretary/receptionist for old Doc Donaldson. Shawnee: the name rang free and proud like the scream of an eagle riding the wind. Union City was a mud hole, the first step in a major career change for a man who would make a difference in law enforcement, who would make a difference as a police chief, or maybe in the State Bureau of Investigation. As soon as I could get out of the mud I would make a difference.

But – It was a hot June night sometime after midnight, and I was a brand new auxiliary officer checking doors on Main Street. Nothing moved anywhere, and the two-way radio on my belt had been silent for the last half hour. The White Daisy Café was secure. As I moved on to Stedman’s Barber and Style Shop, I saw a stooped figure emerge from an alley half a block away and shuffle toward where the train tracks crossed Main. The street light shone on the man’s straight, long white hair over the collar of a faded denim shirt, and a chill shot up my neck. I’d know that shuffle anywhere! Eerily, I felt like I was back in Shawnee as a kid; my hand went to the revolver at my side just to touch it with the crazy thought that if I were dreaming I would have no weapon. “CHIEF!” I shouted. “Chief Joe One-shoe!” The man continued slowly toward the darkness, and I trotted after him. “Chief! Chief, wait up!” The darkened buildings on the other side of the tracks threw back my voice, Wait up.

The man stopped as I caught up with him. “Chief Joe – what are …” A wrinkled, toothless face whirled and thrust itself toward me in the shadows.

“Not chief,” he said gravely. “Not Joe. Not drunk either. Just – great sadness.”

I looked at the Indian, one of the few I’d seen since we moved east eleven years before. I blurted, “What can I do?”

Again the wrinkle-slashed face: “Shaw-nee!” He stepped into the darkness and was gone.

I stared for what might have been a long time at two needles of light on the tracks reflected from a street light. Thinking about the Shawnees I stood there: a proud people attempting to regain their lands, they fought at Tippecanoe River against forces under President William Henry Harrison in 1811. Their village was destroyed and those left were moved to what would become Oklahoma to exist on reservations.

And the Cherokees: half the nation died in 1750 from the white man’s small pox. In 1838 many were forced to reservations in the future state of Oklahoma, and thousands more died along the way on “the trail of tears.” I had grown up knowing these things but until then I’d never felt them. The old man’s words echoed down the glimmering steel to me in the dark. Great sadness. All done.

Standing there on a deserted American Main street that ran from my feet to downtown Shawnee – to Pope Air Force Base – to Da Nang, Vietnam – to everywhere I’d ever been and all the places I hadn’t … for the first time since Connie gave birth to Debbie, I cried. I cried for the Shawnees and the Cherokees and for all slaves everywhere. I cried again for Ginny, and Tommy, and for some ridiculous reason I thought of all the parades that might have gone right by where I was standing … of high school bands and military units, of flags, and people lining the sidewalks and shading their eyes against the July sun – dads with kids perched on their shoulders. I thought of trains clanking over where I stood … going north or south, depending –

And I never thought of Union City or her people in a derogatory way after that. Of course, I cried for Connie and Johnny and Debbie. I missed them. But I had to make a difference. Something was awfully wrong with our society, and well … some of us had to get to where the action is and make a difference.

The formalities were not as numerous as I had imagined when I kept my appointment with Police Chief Billy Ransom, although trying to be formal, I had worn my grey suit and blue tie. The red brick city hall was typical of those in small towns. This one housed fire trucks in the left end of the building and the entrance to the police department was in the rear near the base of one the town’s two water towers. I parked back there beside a white police car with a single blue light on top. The entrance to the building was recessed about ten feet with the jail on the right, as I could see through a barred window, and a solid brick wall on the left. A heavy glass door came open with a firm pull and the realization that this was not a place one would come by accident. A small decal on the door read, “We never close.”

The blue-uniformed dispatcher looked up from a disassembled, long, black flashlight to answer my question with “Through that door.” He jerked a thumb to a doorway immediately ahead. “Around the corner.”

There a small sign extended over an open door stopped me cold. It said, “Chief of Police.” I had rehearsed this moment hundreds of times – actually for several years, but now I stood awed before the white letters embedded in the little slab of black plastic.

I turned toward a sound behind me. The dispatcher stood there with a toothy grin and the assembled long flashlight. He flipped it on in my face below the eyes. It was the brightest flashlight I had ever seen. “Go on in,” he said. I faced the door, looked up at the sign, swallowed hard, and went in.

A trim, uniformed woman of about sixty with short white hair paused in her search through the top drawer of a file cabinet to consider me from over narrow glasses. “May I help you?”

“Uh, I’m Frank Proctor. I called Wednesday for an appointment with Chief Ranson.”

Nodding toward another open door, she replied, “He’s expecting you. Go on in.”

I pushed clammy hands into my pockets and tried to wipe them, but I had come under the scrutiny of the man behind the desk, so I walked into his office with my hands in my pockets. Chief Ranson arose out of a squeaking chair and extended his hand over the desk to give me a reserved bone-crusher handshake. “Frank, how are you doing?” he inquired as if we were old friends. He stood approximately my height, just under six feet, and weighed about two hundred thirty pounds compared to my one-seventy. Tanned, square jawed and with a no-nonsense face, the chief looked like the consummate forty-five-year-old lawman. His short hair was the same color as mine – brown, and sported a flawless part.

“Fine,” I answered with less enthusiasm than intended. The office was surprisingly small; certificates, plaques, and possibly a degree hung on a paneled wall along with a couple of pictures of policemen and police cars. Two small, crossed American flags stood on his desk in a little stand.

“Sit down,” said the chief, motioning to a green vinyl chair that matched the carpet. I did, raising my eyes from the floor to the remaining furnishings: two file cabinets, another chair, and the desk between us. The chief sat down, leaned back, and I recalled that his hand was larger than the little revolver on his side. I looked back at the wall; it was a degree, a B.A. from State. “Do you have military service?” he asked, rubbing a spot between his eyes with a forefinger as though that action were an integral part of the question.

He leaned far back in the chair, locked his hands behind his head and said to the ceiling, “In two minutes …” I was ready to look to see what was going to happen up there when he continued, “…tell me about yourself.”

Aha! Ready for that one, I delivered my spiel: “I was born in Shawnee, Oklahoma. I went to high school there and worked in a florist the last two years before graduation. Then it was on to the University of Oklahoma where I graduated in 1969 with a double major in English and Education. In January of 1969 I married my high school sweetheart. A son, John, was born in September of that year. I thought I would be drafted, so I joined the Air Force a month later. My wife had one daughter, Debbie in 1971 while I was in Vietnam. When I received my discharge in 1972, we moved back to Fayetteville where I had been stationed at Pope Air Force Base. I started teaching school in the area and continued until three days ago.” Probably another minute remained, but I had said it all.

“Well – Connie’s a good wife. A great mother. Pretty. She’s a secretary at Fort Bragg. She has nine years with the government. Would have more, but she took time out for the kids.”

Chief Ranson leaned forward like he was going to tell me something confidential, but he asked, “And how does Connie feel about moving to Union City? There are no government jobs near here, and nobody in this area pays what the government pays.”

I wished he hadn’t asked that question. “My family won’t be moving to Union City. They are going to remain in Fayetteville. I’ll go down every chance I get. I want to start here and go to Salemburg to the police academy. When I’m certified, I plan to continue here and eventually try for the SBI or a chief’s job in a small town near a government installation. Then we’ll be together.” I knew this sounded ill-conceived, and I suddenly felt desperate to convince this man.

“Look,” I said, “I’ve got to do this! I’ve got to … even if it does cost me my family! I’m GOING to do it – here, or somewhere else. I’M GOING TO DO IT!” An unexplainable anger shot me to my feet, and I knew I was too loud, but this man – no man – was going to stop me! “Listen, Chief! Two of my students were murdered and THROWN INTO A DITCH! A GIRL …” I was shouting and the woman at the file cabinet came and closed the door. “A girl,” I started over, “was beaten and raped, and her throat was cut out! I teach … I’ve tried to put up with the insanity of the system! I … I …” I stopped and sat down. “Don’t stop me, Chief,” I said quietly. Please … don’t stop me –”

A long time passed and we sat with locked eyes. I would not be stared down. Finally he said, “Think before you answer this. Tell me in one sentence why you want to go into law enforcement.”

“All I want is the authority to do what’s right. That authority doesn’t exist in the public school system, and it’s being taken out of every system! I don’t want to be a vigilante! I don’t want to punish anyone, I just want the authority to do what’s right, to make a difference!” I stopped and took a deep breath. “Were you in the service, Chief?”

I shot back, “Public sentiment took away our authority over there. Public sentiment is taking away the will and authority to do right here in this country. Public sentiment has gone insane, and I REFUSE to go insane along with our society, Chief! Here’s your one sentence: All I want is the authority to do right and make a difference! If I do right, I don’t believe I’ll lose my family. If I don’t do right, my family is lost along with me. It’s that simple!”

He glanced at the flags on his desk before looking at me with momentarily widened eyes. “You didn’t tell me how Connie feels about all this.”

“She prefers the security of staying with the known – of bowing to insanity.”

“You said your family moved back to Fayetteville. Were they with you when you were stationed at Pope Air Force Base?”

“No, there were regulations against that. Our parents paid their way out and back and the rent on a furnished apartment.”

“People shirking responsibility is killing our society. Responsibility is not taught in schools because there’s no authority to hold students accountable. Even our laws often don’t hold the criminal responsible. Prisoners sit in prisons watching TV when they could be saving tax payers money and reimbursing their victims. When personal, individual responsibility is shirked, society goes insane.”

“Well – ” Chief Ranson’s mouth turned into a hard line before he continued, “You understand that you would start as an auxiliary officer, with no pay?”

“Look. I’ve got a man who has seven hundred fifty hours of auxiliary time. That’s fifteen hours a week for a year he’s given for free, and he’s pulled his weight. He’s almost ready to be certified. He got a purple heart in Nam. And – he wants the job.”

“Then,” I replied, taking a deep breath, “I’d better find a job. Do you have any suggestions?”

The chief drummed his fingers on the desk, stopped and said, “See Miles – Miles Giles. He runs the place. He said he needed a desk clerk. He’s cranky but okay. Try him.”

I promised that I would, and the chief stood and opened a packed file cabinet drawer. Deftly, he inserted a thumb and forefinger and drew out several forms. “Take these,” he instructed, sounding like a doctor handing his patient a bottle of pills, “fill them out and bring them in tomorrow. Leave them with Bonnie, the lady you met outside, and we’ll go from there. I’ll contact you Tuesday morning.”

I stood and took the forms. After thanking him and shaking hands again, I turned to go, but he stopped me. “Now, one thing I will not tolerate. Anybody – for any reason who lies to me is gone. There are no exceptions. Do you understand?”

“There will be no lying, Chief.” I left, speaking again to Bonnie, and the dispatcher who was on the telephone when I went out. Walking to the car, I closed my eyes momentarily and drank in a deep breath of steamy air. An eighteen wheeler, hidden by a row of buildings, was going through the gears from a red light on the four lane. The noise covered me like the blanket I used to hide under from mom and dad in our yard. I remember the smell of moth balls and grass and how big the yard seemed then and how small it really was. I got in the car and drove away to see if Inn Freedom needed a man with my talents and abilities.

I met Miles Giles on the parking lot between the motel and the restaurant. His brown tie had wilted in the ninety degree heat, and he was humming one of those tuneless dirges born on the treadmill. He turned out to be as the chief had said – cranky, but okay. “What? You? Be a desk clerk? Here?” He inquired while moving closer to my face and squinting through the bottom of his bifocals as if he were examining a bug. “You a guest here. You got a room. Number seventeen.”

The mouth of Miles Giles was one of those that revealed only the bottom teeth when he spoke, and his next word displayed them in full array: orderly, clean, and white, “Wait – ” I did. He lifted a finger, waggled it and allowed his pursed lips to play with the thought before blowing it over to me, “Why did you come to Union City?”

My greatly abridged response first brightened his eyes, then moved him back to where I was elevated to the upper level of his glasses as he dropped his chin and permitted a smile to take charge of his lined face. He did indeed have upper teeth. Passing a cupped hand over his thin graying hair, he swept it straight back in what I took to be the only kind of combing he ever administered to it. “Well, I see,” he offered, hiding the excitement I think he felt. “So you would work here and the police department. And you could work any shift here at Freedom and still get in your time with the police department?”

Well, well – well! That’s splendid! A policeman on the desk – I mean you wouldn’t need to wear your uniform and all – but word would get around! Kids – I mean, they don’t do real harm, but they park and stand around on week-end nights over to the other end, and you could sort of – scoot them along, I mean, once in a while they park and a boy or two turns up a beer, and that’s not good for business, and not that we have rowdy kids here, Mr. Proctor, but …”

“Ah, would you, ah, make a bed now and again, and ah-hem, maybe clean a room?”

“Splendid! Splendid, splendid!” The man actually shook with excitement, and his eyes danced with a faraway twinkle. “I – ah, now, I can’t pay much, you understand …”

“Well – now – that’s – uhm. Yes! Yes, you can have the room, but …”

“Well, I don’t think – well, that wouldn’t be – ” Giles stopped and made a couple of passes over his head with a palm while looking around like a man surveying the ashes of his burned out house. “Two. Two meals a day – including breakfast! But no desert until after the rush – if any should be left.”

“If any should be left,” I repeated, glad that I had so quickly found an outlet for my talents and abilities.

“Do you cook?” Giles inquired, placing a finger on his chin for an uncertain moment.

“Now, you see, Mr. Proctor – I can’t say just yet! I’ve got to figure in the room – and the meals –” He winked. “And the deserts!”

I knew the wink meant nothing; he was not joking about the deserts, so I decided to sweeten the pot. “I won’t be needing a TV. You can take the one out of seventeen for a spare. I’ll give you the TV for deserts – before the rush.”

“No TV!” he exclaimed incredulously, recoiling a step then quickly advancing two. “You – you would give up your TV?! Mr. Proctor!”

I offered a nonchalant shrug and looked around with what I hoped was the air of a genuine martyr. “I won’t have time, Sir, and desert – well, desert is one of the few pleasures I allow myself.” Pressing my lips seriously together, I dropped my head and kicked at an imaginary pebble. When I looked up at Giles, the man’s face was radiant and lined with enjoyment. Stifling a laugh of my own, I twisted my mouth and sniffed.

“Splendid! My boy – ” Lunging forward, he put my face in the bottom part of his glasses. I could see through those glasses that I was no longer a bug. You – recognize talent, Mr. – Giles. “My boy! You – ” Giles the cranky put an arm over my shoulder. I had forgotten about the TV and the deserts, and I think Giles had too. There was always a desert left, and he never took the TV out of my room.

I don’t mean to imply that the man Giles took me in as the son he never had. He did not. Giles once had a son, and there is yet a man in the western part of the country with the name and look of the motel/restaurant manager, but the only other connection between them is a long, circuitous road that gets longer and more twisted every day. But Giles did not live in nor talk much about the past. Each of his days began shining new, regardless of the weather, at precisely six in the morning in this tiny apartment just off the linen storage room behind the desk. And the end would come with the day’s final tally somewhere around one o’clock the next morning. In between, if his involuted path could have been traced, would be miles of walking and checking as he went about managing Inn Freedom. The New York owner was happy, as evidenced by his infrequent visits and broad smiles filling the few hours of his presence. And so Giles, too, learned to assume the manner of a content if somewhat cranky old man.