Wellf leet Blues

By Paul Gray

MIDNIGHTS by Alec Wilkinson

Random House; 200 pages; $11.95

In 1975 a college graduate named Alec Wilkinson applied for a job with the police department of Wellfleet, Mass., a popular vacation retreat on Cape Cod. His main qualification for the post was a familiarity with the area; he had summered there regularly as a child, and his parents had since joined the 2,000 or so people who weathered Wellfleet all year long. On the other hand, he possessed a slight physique and no knowledge at all about law enforcement. He had majored in music at Bennington. "Music, Huh?" the chief said during the job interview. "That'll be a big help. You ought to fit right in on the department." Still, given low pay and long hours, applicants were not lining up outside headquarters. After telling the chief that he planned to work only a year, Wilkinson was hired, issued a badge, a uniform and a .38, and sent out to preserve the peace.

In a meaner locale, such on-the-job training might have led to disaster. Happily, Wilkinson's experiences yielded up a good book instead. Midnights is both a comedy of errors and an affectionate portrait of small-town police, those beleaguered souls charged with the task of keeping their neighbors in line. During Wilkinson's inaugural night on the beat, his partner says: "The first six months were murder for me. After that, when I found out the people I thought were my friends weren't really my friends, I felt better off."

Aside from suspicious or unruly natives, Wilkinson finds himself coping primarily with boredom. "By anyone's definition," he writes, Wellfleet is "a safe place to live." When one patrolman finds the town hall locked at night, he reports this fact as a "suspicious incident." The chief borrows the shotgun from a police cruiser when he goes hunting in Maine. During the only local bank heist in anyone's memory, the teller convinces the robber that his take ($300) is a lot of money to carry around in cash. The robber is obediently investing some of it in a Christmas club account when the police arrive. "Down in Provincetown they got murders," a colleague tells the author, with a trace of envy. "By Jesus, the guys that did it drove through this town . . . They could have done it right here and taken them to P-town for all we know."

Occasionally, a joyrider provides some excitement: "I was a passenger in two high-speed chases, both of them in my first month. While they were on, I had no expectation of surviving them." Wilkinson discovers that people who have been arrested do not always behave politely. One of his perpetrators sticks a match through the grille in the police car and tries to set Wilkinson's hair on fire. He learns to distinguish the different varieties of drunken drivers: "Some drove at moderate speeds, carefully and with concentration, except on the wrong side of the road. Some drove at a crawl, although I believe they thought they were actually going fast. Others drove hell for leather, and all over the place. One man I saw was stopped, but believed himself to be speeding down the road; he was making engine noises through his lips."

Mortal danger remains a remote but real possibility. Wilkinson collars a drunk driver of awesome size and manages to coax him to jail. Later that night, the prisoner wakes up in his cell and rips the toilet out of the wall with his bare hands. At his trial, the man explains what happened: "A little energized particle broke off a star in a galaxy somewhere far away and shot down and came through the open window, and when it hit the toilet, BOOM, the whole thing blew up. I could have been killed."

The year passes in a succession of lonely midnight shifts. Wilkinson checks to see that houses are secure and gets called to a few domestic squabbles. He witnesses an autopsy and spends months trying to shake the memory of what he has seen. Most of all, he listens to the eight other men on the force and comes to respect them. They have drifted into thankless jobs. One tells him: "Right now I work on the police force, my wife stamps cans in the supermarket, and she makes more money than I do." Says another:

"Nobody ever calls you when they're be having themselves. As a rule, you always get called when people are at their worst. It's sad. It depresses me." Yet they go on doing the best that they can. The tedious side of policework rarely figures in TV serials or bestselling novels. Midnights offers a healthy antidote to all those shoot-'em-ups, a reminder that those assigned to protect are often vulnerable and quietly heroic . --By Paul Gray

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