JOE GREEGAN'S WORLD

Joe Greegan liked Sunday mornings best. His wife and children slept late, and he always headed out to the beach with the dog. It was early August, and he liked to pick that perfect hour when the previous evening's coolness was just beginning to fade, and the crisp salt air still tickled his nose. For a workaholic, married attorney and father of two, it was the only time of the week he really had to himself. A hundred and sixty-six hours to get two. Typical Southern Connecticut trade-off.

When they hit the beach, the black Labrador broke into a sprint, in anticipation of the stick his master was about to toss. It was all clichéd, but that's exactly how Joe liked it. He lobbed a piece of driftwood over the dog's head, and the lab ran into the surf to get it.

I have a good life, he thought. Sure, his wife had cheated on him ten years ago but she confessed, and he had forgiven her. Or at least, he forgave her after he cheated in retaliation—which he did not confess—since it was the only way he could get the bile out of his system. What of it? Adultery was a fact of life in his world. If it happened to you, you simply dealt with it.

Harder to deal with was the blow delivered by his idolized older brother Phillip, a respected pediatrician in Baltimore. Respected, that is, until images of child pornography were found on his computer. When Phillip went to jail, the only way Joe could come to grips with the matter was to tell himself that his brother wasn't the world's first pedophile, neither would he be the last. Pedophiles were everywhere. They certainly weren't welcome, but they were definitely a part of Joe Greegan's world.

Their father Michael had been a policeman for forty years, and retired with distinction. Certainly nothing unusual about being a cop. Humans were incapable of policing themselves, so others had to be hired to do it. The problem, of course, was that you could only hire humans. They beat and sometimes shot the civilians they were paid to protect. They frequently allowed themselves to be paid off by organized criminals. The unorganized ones, the cops simply shook down.

Joe's father sometimes supplemented his own meager salary this way. Was he a bad man? Nah. He paid his taxes, never cheated on his wife, and loved his kids. But being a staunch catholic there were seven of those kids, they needed to eat, and seven kids had trouble eating on a cop's salary. Was a cop on the take wrong? Yes. Unusual? No.

Joe's grandfather Jack was a soldier in the first world war. During a fierce engagement near Vaux, he was knocked unconscious by a mortar shell blast and left for dead. When he came to, he wandered about lost in the French countryside for days. Frozen and hungry, he was taken in by a young French woman whose husband was himself away at war. After three days of food and warmth, he began to feel better. On the fourth day, he raped her. He never intended to; the idea never entered his head until just before he did it. But he had been too long away from his wife. And he knew he could get away with it.

Only he couldn't. Killing he justified on account of the war, the rape he could not. The combination of the two ate him up, especially when he went home to a wife and friends who thought he was a hero. I'm a killer and a rapist. A killer and a rapist. He tried to drown out the memories with alcohol, but the alcohol was voracious. It ate his job, his marriage, his internal organs, and eventually took his life.

But there was nothing unusual about a soldier who was a rapist, because there was no such thing as war without rape. In Joe Greegan's world, nations fought wars and men raped all the time.

But Greegan's life was good. He counted his blessings. He was a well-paid attorney. He lived in the richest county in the richest state in the richest country in the world. Sure, he'd had some marital trouble. Who hadn't? He'd also played fast and loose with some of his escrow accounts, and had a close scrape with the bar association. But he had an old friend on the committee, and thank God for that.