Martin Prieboy didn’t want to go home.
He’d been dreading this day—and this evening—for weeks. At least during the day, he could lose himself in his work. That was easy enough to do. As chief constable of Fester, there was always plenty of work.
He’d put off coming home for as long as possible. If it had been any other night, Martin could easily have stayed in the office past midnight. But he had an appointment this evening and he needed to come home to change out of his uniform. If he’d thought about it, he could have brought a change of clothes to the office and put off this whole sad scene.
But he couldn’t put it off forever. Might as well suck it up and deal with it now. He unlocked the door to his modest Cape Cod-style house and dragged himself over the threshold. He fetched a large sigh as he dropped his heavily laden briefcase to the floor of the entry foyer. Turning to his left, he marched into the living room and removed a framed photograph from the mantelpiece. He carried it reverentially to the couch and collapsed into it.
The photo was nearly twenty years old. It showed a smiling Martin Prieboy looking very sharp in a white tuxedo. With him is another white-tuxedoed man, also smiling deliriously. He had a shy grin, wire-rimmed specs and a small, brown mustache that curled up at the ends. His name was Sam Bolton, and he had been Martin’s life partner for almost two decades.
Martin had come out of the closet shortly after he’d met Sam; up until then he hadn’t even known he’d been in the closet. The strict upbringing in the orphanage and the corporal punishment favored by Father McJaggar there had resulted in his stuffing his sexuality deep into the recesses of his mind. Martin knew he liked boys; he also knew liking boys was bad. The list of things that were hell-bound sinful at the Holy Jesus Christ Almighty School for Unfortunate Boys was a long one, and Martin ended up thinking about liking boys in the same way he did about swearing or eating meat on Friday—perhaps you wanted to do it but just didn’t. It brought too much grief. Martin’s pubescence had been a lonely and difficult one.
Once he got out of the orphanage, he’d buried his desires in his work. No longer under the strictures of the guilt- and punishment-heavy orphanage, Martin had been free to explore his sexuality. He hadn’t. He knew his sexual orientation was not bad or evil, yet he still didn’t care to indulge it. The monks at HJCASfUB had essentially stripped away that part of Martin Prieboy’s personality.
That had changed in 1994. It had been a strange time for him. He’d been the chief inspector of the constabulary back then. After chief constable Billy Snyder had been hospitalized following an assassination attempt, his temporary replacement had suspended Martin. Still obsessed with a case, he’d continued the investigation on his own, including an extremely short stint as a costumed crime-fighter known as the Fliedermaus. No doubt that DC Comics’ lawyers would have been all over Martin had they seen the cringe-worthy Batman knockoff costume he’d concocted.
Even more cringe-worthy was the get-up Martin had put together to go undercover in Fester’s sole gay bar, the Embers. Martin had tarted himself up to a degree that would have alarmed the most flamboyant participant in a San Francisco Pride Parade. The proprietor, a kind and patient man named Sam, had tried to help Martin understand the gay community did not generally behave like a cheap stereotype from TV.
This had been a revelation to Martin. He’d noticed most of the patrons of the Embers were regular guys in regular-guy outfits who just wanted to have a good time with each other. No big deal. He’d struck up a friendship with Sam and was thankful to have someone he could talk to outside of work.
The friendship with Sam had deepened, and Martin eventually realized they were flirting. In retrospect, he was certain Sam knew what was going on between them much sooner than Martin did. Yet Sam was a man of deep kindness and infinite patience, and hadn’t pushed, knowing Martin had a lot of baggage from his upbringing. Like a persevering gardener, Sam had slowly nurtured their relationship, let it grow at its own pace and supported it whenever it needed it.
Martin’s love for Sam allowed him a dimension of happiness and freedom he’d never thought possible. It took nearly two years for Martin to completely come out of his shell and allow the physical component of their relationship to develop. Again, Sam’s patience and “go at your own pace” approach had been worth the effort. When the dam had finally burst Martin had gone at it with enthusiasm—he was making up for decades of physical self-deprivation. It was a lot of fun, at least at first, but it soon began to wear Sam down a little. Nonetheless, he’d maintained the same patience and grace with which he’d always treated Martin.
One of the things that had initially made Martin reluctant to engage with Sam and in their relationship was the fact that Martin had been promoted to chief constable. He had been extremely wary of mixing his personal and professional lives, especially since he was involved in times of intense transition in both. He and Sam had done a lot of sneaking around—not appearing in public together and generally behaving like a “we’ve got to stop meeting like this” movie cliché.
It wasn’t just the constabulary’s disapproval that Martin had to worry about. Fester wasn’t the most enlightened place on the map. Sam had told stories about the abuse he and his patrons had had to endure at the hands of the constables, local church leaders, and the general populace. Reverend Georg Eyler of the Calvary Reformed Lutheran Church was a hell-and-fire homophobe who was still preaching jaw-droppingly intolerant sermons at the age of ninety-one. Calvary was the largest and most influential church in town, and Eyler still wielded a lot of influence.
Things had come to a head when Martin and Sam took the plunge and moved in together. Martin had not made a big deal of the situation; there was no grand coming out party or announcement. Martin didn’t want one and Sam had been through all of that when he was much younger. They simply bought a small house and lived there together. As far as Martin was concerned, this was simply who he was. If anyone had an issue with it, that was their own problem to deal with, not Martin’s or Sam’s.
People did have a problem with it, of course. This was Fester—a town that was mean and proud of it. Martin couldn’t do anything about it except demonstrate being gay was only one part of his life. If people decided to judge him based on that one part, then so be it. He continued to do his job with the same skill, intelligence, and integrity that he always had, and hoped it would be enough.
It almost wasn’t. There had been a concerted campaign—led by the scabrous Reverend Eyler—to have Martin removed as chief constable, and, ideally, run out of town on a rail. Fortunately, Mayor Augenblick, who was in charge of appointments for the position of chief constable, had a skeleton or two in his own closet, and was sympathetic to Martin’s cause. There was also a lot of general support for Martin from the town. People had long memories and did not miss the police corruption and brutality that had been the hallmark of Billy Snyder’s regime. Martin was a good cop. With the exception of Reverend Eyler and his hateful ilk, people didn’t want to get rid of him.
Martin had also had a struggle within the ranks of the constabulary. There had been enough trouble with the remnants of Snyder’s reign as chief constable—crooked, incompetent constables whom Martin had purged as soon as he’d taken over the Big Chair. He put the entire force on notice that corruption and brutality would not be tolerated and had fired the worst of the bad eggs. It hadn’t gone as smoothly as he’d hoped, but not nearly as badly as he had feared.
Most of these bad eggs were long gone before Martin’s sexual preference became common knowledge. Nonetheless, there were still resentful constables on the force. Martin had heard plenty of whispered references to “Chief Tinkerbell.” It would be a lie to say this didn’t hurt his feelings, but he was, after all, a professional.
He had dealt with the situation with a mild form of collective punishment. Whenever he’d heard whispers about “Chief Tinkerbell” or any other slur, Martin would schedule a mandatory sensitivity training seminar for the entire force. Personally, he thought most of these things were ridiculous, but he forced himself to sit through every one he scheduled. They may have been ridiculous, but they served their purpose. Eventually, the constables figured out the connection between ill-chosen remarks that reached Martin’s ears and the frequency of the sensitivity seminars. Both tailed off quite rapidly after that.
Also, America seemed to be a more tolerant place, at least a little. The proliferation of same-sex marriage laws had swept the country at the beginning of the century. Even stone-hearted Fester had inaugurated its own annual pride parade three years ago. Martin made sure he was visible to the parade participants and the spectators as he paced up and down the parade route. There would be no harassment of those wishing to march, and the Fester Pride Parade continued to flourish and grow.
Even the stodgy Commonwealth of Pennsylvania had seen fit to legalize same-sex marriage a few months ago. Martin wished Sam had been alive to see it; they had often talked about officially tying the knot themselves. They had even considered going up to Massachusetts to do the deed, but the conservative Pennsylvania legislature had opposed recognizing same-sex marriage from other jurisdictions. In the end, Martin and Sam had been content to leave well enough alone. They were together, they were happy; that’s all that really mattered. They’d talked about getting married eventually, but the opportunity never came.
What came first was Sam’s diagnosis. A year and a half ago, Sam had developed a cold that just wouldn’t go away. Martin had nagged Sam to get checked out, fearing he might have developed bronchitis. When Sam finally relented and got examined, it turned out to be much worse than bronchitis: he had been diagnosed with stage-four pancreatic cancer. True to form, the disease burned through Martin’s partner in record time.
Martin still had trouble internalizing the monstrous injustice of it all. Barely two years ago, Sam had been happy, healthy, and full of fun. After the diagnosis, he deteriorated quickly. Martin sometimes wondered if getting the diagnosis had somehow sped up the course of the disease. If Sam had remained in blissful ignorance, perhaps he would he have survived longer. Martin’s life had been filled with such “what-ifs” in the twelve months since Sam had died. It didn’t matter—the love of his life was gone.
Martin had been devastated. He responded to the soul-wrenching tragedy by doing the only thing he could think of—working. It was his only solace. Even his life-long obsession with Batman didn’t help. Sure, Bruce Wayne had lost his parents, but that was just some cheap plot twist a couple of funny-book writers had dreamt up seventy-five years before. Martin’s pain was real and it was of a previously unimaginable intensity. So he got up every morning and he went to work. When he came home at night, he ate a meager dinner and worked some more. Often, he fell asleep at his desk. It was the only way he knew to block the pain.
One of Martin’s first acts as chief constable had been to shut down the Pine Room—a bar on the edge of town that served as a prostitution front. Martin’s rigid morality had been beaten into him in the orphanage. To his mind, the notion of women (and a few men) selling their bodies for money was entirely unacceptable. Less than a week after he had been promoted to chief, he’d taken a hand-picked flying squad of constables to the Pine Room and shut it down for good.
The results of the closing of the Pine Room had been immediate and dramatic. The frequency of domestic violence and rape—already high in Fester—had increased substantially. Martin had wracked his brain trying to figure out how to counter this spike in violent crime. At first, he’d tried tactics similar to those that had been successful in blunting problems associated with youth crime and gang activity. It turned out that Midnight Basketball wasn’t going to cut it.
Realizing the problem wasn’t going to be one his iron-rod orphanage upbringing could address, he’d had to do some serious recalibration of his moral compass. He’d backed way off his involvement in the prosecutions, letting the DA in Weaverville make all the calls. Fortunately, the internet was becoming more widespread, and between the dating sites and the avalanche of online pornography the frustrated men of Fester soon found outlets other than brutalizing their wives and girlfriends.
When he heard Solheim had served his sentence and opened another bar on the east side of the river, Martin had taken a much more low-key approach. He’d first visited Solheim and informed him he’d better keep his nose clean, and that any public complaints would be dealt with immediately and forcefully. He’s also cultivated one of the “waitresses” at the new joint—called Mike’s Place—an attractive young woman named Rene. Martin paid her a modest sum each month to report on the doings at Mike’s Place. She’d initially indicated a willingness to provide more than information—“I just go gooey for a man in uniform,” she’d said—but Martin had politely rebuffed her. All he wanted was info. As long as there was no violence or coercion at Mike’s Place, he was uncomfortably willing to let things slide.
As always, there were many other things to occupy his attention. None, however, came close to filling the huge aching void in his life that had opened up exactly one year ago when Sam had left this earthly realm.
A year with the love of his life gone. It seemed like only a day; it seemed like a hundred eternities.
Martin checked his watch. He really needed to get going. He took another hard look at the photograph, and a tear rolled down his cheek. They were so young then, and so happy. How quickly it had all changed.
He pulled a handkerchief from his pants pocket and wiped away the tear. He replaced the photograph on the mantel and turned to go upstairs to get ready for his appointment.
