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stimulate even that much attention.
    Also, warfare had revealed sides of humanity I’d never dreamed of, growing up in the hills of Thetford, Vermont. I’d witnessed extremes of boredom and action, of cowardice and foolhardy bravery, of viciousness and grace. I’d been touched by an experience so concentrated and searing that my former life, beckoning from my father’s farm, no longer seemed possible.
    I floated for a while, utterly at sea. I was decommissioned in California, so I stayed there and spent a few years going to college in Berkeley. That was when the Beat movement was just beginning to stir, a phenomenon that filled my suitcase with some pretty strange books and all but finished the metamorphosis of one erstwhile farm boy, but it still hadn’t settled my mind one bit. So I quit and came back home, hoping something might switch me back on track.
    But I’d become rootless, frustrated and alienated, and Vermont’s green hills did little to soothe. That’s when Murphy rounded me up. He was older by nine years, a veteran not only of Korea, but of World War II. I’d known him earlier; he’d been reared nearby in Ely, an older brother of sorts to a lot of kids my age—or if not a brother, then a cousin maybe—the only teenager in the area to have fought overseas and killed people and won medals. He listened to boys my age, and some girls too, I imagine, with a wisdom and sympathy we couldn’t find in the adult world. And he managed to track me down after California, although by that time he lived in Brattleboro, some seventy-five miles to the south. To this day, I’m not sure how or why he did that. I have the sneaky suspicion that my mother may have called him.
    In any case, he got me interested in the police force he’d been on for several years already. It mimicked some of the more pleasant aspects of military life—that combination of specialness and fraternity—and it replaced the muddiness of my life with the welcomed rigidity of rank, paperwork and assigned tasks. It also meant carrying a gun—the ultimate symbol of the simple answer to a complex world—and it gave me a chance, every once in a while, to do something which by that time in my life was becoming an elusive quality. Korea and California had fouled the clear moral waters of my upbringing and had left me nostalgic for the innocent idealism of my younger years.
    During my first weeks as a Brattleboro cop, I thought I’d finally found the solution. I was to walk the line between the good guys and the bad, keeping one from being done in by the other. Real Lone Ranger stuff, complete with silver bullets, or at least close enough. The fact that I started out directing traffic and ticketing cars didn’t matter. I was a Lawman—the armed instrument of Might and Right.
    Not that Murphy instilled that simple-minded notion in my brain. That was my own doing, and I was quickly disabused. The younger, probably wiser Murphy showed me that most bad guys were usually regular joes with a screw loose—barring a few exceptions. But even while I was reluctantly conceding that the world was more gray than black and white, its complexities and contradictions stopped bothering me as much. The gun lost its appeal as I began to rely more on my instincts than on its authority. I came to see it finally as the unreal thing it is: the admission of your brain’s collapse under panic and impotent rage. For that personal growth—even rebirth—I had Frank Murphy to thank.
    The wide-eyed awe I had for him during those early years died the same peaceful death as my polarized view of human nature. But it, like the latter, was replaced by something more realistic and worthy. I came to love Frank as a fellow flawed human being, with whom I could disagree and argue and yet always respect. It rankled me to see him being kicked around by those who only saw his crusty armor.
    “There’s no reason not to leave now, you know. The benefits aren’t going to change