NOT MANY SHIFTS GO that way. Most of them, you hit the street already behind, dance cards filling faster than you’re able to keep track of. We spent the biggest part of that one rattling doors and doing slow drags down alleys. Had no calls for better than two hours, and when we finally got one it was a see-the-lady that turned out to be about a missing husband. We were twenty minutes into the call and halfway done taking a report when her response to a routine question stopped me in my tracks, follow-up questions eliciting the information that the man had died ten years ago.
Back in the squad, I sat shaking my head.
“What?” Randy asked.
“That one.”
Randy glanced over as I pulled away from the curb.
“You notice the open kitchen window?” he said. “Saucer of milk
on
the sill?”
I admitted I hadn’t.
“Woman’s lonely, that’s all. So lonely that everything in her life takes on the shape of her loneliness.”
The next call was to a convenience store where the owner-proprietor supposedly had a shoplifter in custody. He’d taken a jump rope off one of the shelves and tied the shoplifter to it after a baseball bat to the thigh brought him down. But while he was on the phone, the shoplifter had chewed through the rope and gone hobbling out the door.
Nothing else, then, for some time. It was one of those clear, still nights that seem to have twice as many stars as ordinary, when sounds reach you from far away. We grabbed burgers at Lucky Jim’s and ate at a picnic table outside East High, squad pulled up alongside with doors open, radio crackling. You didn’t eat Lucky Jim burgers in the car. And you didn’t need extra napkins, you needed bath towels.
Randy seemed to be doing okay. He’d moved out of the house, put it up for sale, found an apartment near downtown. He was hitting the gym at least three times a week, even talked about signing up for some classes. In what? I asked. Whatever fits with my work schedule, he said.
Three obviously stoned college-age kids were having their own meal, consisting mainly of bags of candy, potato chips, orange soda and Dr Pepper, nearby. They packed up and left not long after we arrived. Two people just as obviously on the street sat beneath a maple tree. The man wore a Confederate cap from which a bandanna depended, draping the back of his neck and bringing to mind all those movies about the Foreign Legion I watched in my youth. The woman had gone on trying gamely to look as good as possible. She’d hacked sleeves from a T-shirt whose logo and silkscreen photo had long since faded and cut it off just above the waistline. Rolled pant legs showed shapely if long- and much-abused calves. “You know that bugs me!” the man shouted towards the end of our stay. She sprang to her feet and started away. “Why you wanna be doing that?” he said, then after a moment got up and followed.
Though we were talking and continued to do so, Randy turned to watch the man go, I remember, and in that moment of inattention a compound of grease, grilled onion and mustard fell onto his uniform top, just south-southwest of his badge. We kept bottles of club soda in the squad for such situations, just as we kept half-gallons of Coke, useful for cleaning battery terminals and removing blood from accident scenes. But in this case the club soda lost, serving only to create concentric rings around the original stain.
We pulled out of the lot. Traffic was light.
’You give much thought to what we’ll be when we grow up?” Randy said. “I mean, here
we
are, top detectives, still jumping patrol calls. That sound like a life to you?”
“We like patrol calls. It’s our choice.”
“Is it?”
When the radio sounded ten minutes later, we looked at one another and laughed. Randy was asking if I’d consider accompanying him to temple that Sabbath.
“You’ve been going to temple? When did that start?”
“You know when it started.”
“And it’s okay for me to be there?”
We pulled up at 102-A Birch Street, a duplex in a recently fashionable part of town. Property values had rocketed here. Years later they’d coin a word for what was going on: gentrification. Bulldozers plowed the ground from first light to last, crunching homes, garage-size commercial shops and early strip malls underfoot, making way for new crops.
“You okay?” I remember asking Randy. He’d made no move to get out of the squad.
“Fine,” he said. “Just not sure I can do this.”
“Do what?”
“Never mind.” He swung legs out and stood, with a two-handed maneuver I’d gotten to know well, smoothed down hair and put on his hat in a single sweep. “Forget I said anything.”
Wary and watchful as always, we went up the walk to the front door. Several adjacent houses, though well cared for, seemed unoccupied, as did the other half of the duplex. Drapes behind a picture window at the house next door moved. Probably the person who’d called in, monitoring his or her tax dollars at work.
“Mind taking point on this one?” Randy said.
“Nottingham, huh?”
Police superstition. Back sometime in the 1950s, a squad answering a routine call according to procedure had eased up the walk just like us and knocked, only to be answered by a shotgun blast through the front door. The point man, Nottingham, went down, and died in the hospital six days later. His partner, a rookie, did all the right things. Checked pulse and respiration, went off to call in an Officer Down, came back to pack his partner’s wounds. Then he kicked in the door and took the perp down with his nightstick. After that, though, after that one perfect moment when he became, incarnate, what he was
supposed
to be, when the training flowed through him like a living force, the rookie was never again able to take to the streets. He tried once or twice, they said; then worked a few years more, filing, keeping track of office supplies, manning the evidence room, before he packed it in.
“I’ve got your back,” Randy said.
“Not my back I’m worried about.”
The door was answered by a half-dressed man whose eyes raked over uniform, badge, side arm and equipment belt before settling on my face. Then a secondary, dismissive glance at Randy behind me. From deep inside the house, echoing as in a cave, the sound of a TV. Something else as well?
“Sorry to bother you, sir,” I said, “but we’ve had a report of a domestic disturbance at this address.” Going on for hours, the caller said. “Mind if we come in?”
“Well . . .”
“I’m sure there’s nothing to it. Do have to ask a few routine questions, though. Won’t take more than three, four minutes of your time, I promise.”
He rubbed his face. “I was asleep.”
“Yes, sir. Most people are, this time of night. We understand that.”
He backed out of the doorway. I followed into the room. Randy stayed just inside the door. He had yet to speak.
“Someone called, you said?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Jeez, I’m sorry. Must have been the TV. My wife has trouble sleeping.”
“Yeah, that’s probably it.”
“Your wife?” Randy said.
“Could we speak to her?” I asked.
“She just got to sleep, Officer. Sure would hate to have to wake her now.”
“Please.” This time I didn’t smile.
He led us down three broad steps from the entryway, across a tiled living room the size of a skating rink, and along a narrow hallway into a small room adjoining the kitchen. Wood-paneled walls, single window set high, cotton rugs scattered about on a floor of bare concrete. Not much here but a couple of chairs and a console TV. A conical green TV lamp sat atop the console—these had just started showing up. The vacant chair was a recliner. The occupied one was an overstuffed armchair, ambiguously greenish brown, and nubbly, like period bedspreads.
The woman in that chair, wrapped in a tiger-pattern throw, makes no response when I speak to her.
“She’s not well,” the man says. “She’s . . . disturbed. Look at her now. An hour ago she was screaming and beating at me. Walking through the house slamming doors.”
“So it wasn’t the TV after all.”
He shook his head.
“Sounds like you need to get her some help, sir.”
“She has plenty of help. I’m the one who doesn’t.” His eyes go from his wife to me. “Mostly she’s up at the state hospital, has been for years now. Home on a pass.”
Randy comes around me, sinking to one knee. Presses two fingers against the woman’s carotid. “Honey, you okay?” he says, but it doesn’t register with me at the time what he’s saying.
And afterwards it takes me a long time to understand what happened here.
The half-dressed guy steps forward, out of the shadow. His hand comes up. Something in it? Randy thinks so. He draws his side arm, stands, shouts at the man to drop the weapon and get down on the floor, hands behind his head. What the man has in his hand is a syringe. The woman’s diabetic, we learn later. He walks towards her.
Glancing at Randy, shouting
No!
I see what is about to happen and I don’t think about it, I react, just as trained.
“What—” Randy says, as I draw and fire. I intend only to stop him, take out the shoulder or arm, but you’re taught to go for the trunk, the larger target, and I’m not in the driver’s seat this time out, I’m on auto.
Randy goes down.
At first he’s conscious, though rapidly heading into shock. I kick the S&W away from his hand, kneel beside him to check pulse and respiration. I’m sorry, I tell him. I go back out to the squad and call in an Officer Down, request a second response unit for the woman. When I get inside again, something’s happened, something’s gone even more wrong. Blood is pooling all around Randy and his breath comes in jagged bursts, like rags torn from a sheet. I slip out of my sportcoat, take off my shirt and fold it into a compress, hold it against the wound. Almost at once the shirt is saturated with blood. I push harder, hold on harder. My arms quiver and begin to cramp. The shirt darkens. His breathing quietens. Lots less blood now. I tell him again that I’m sorry.
Two or three minutes before the paramedics arrive, Randy dies.
As I said, it took me a long time to understand what had happened here. Turned out Randy knew the place. That’s why he reacted the way he did when we first pulled up curbside. Doreen had worked with the guy who lived here, stayed with him for a while after she left Randy, had a brief affair. She’d long since moved on, but Randy was never convinced of that. All these months when I’d been thinking he was getting past Doreen, getting his life back together, he’d been spending much of his off time parked down the street.
The woman in the chair wasn’t Doreen, of course. But she looked a lot like her. And to Randy’s overloaded mind in that moment of crisis, I guess, in those final moments of his life, somehow she became Doreen. Lying there, looking up, it wasn’t me but Doreen that he saw. He lifted a hand as though to caress her face. Then the hand fell.
I saw her, the actual Doreen, looking not much better than I felt, five days later at the funeral. She wore a blue dress. Bracelets jangled as she raised her arm to brush hair back from her face. We told each other how sorry we were, how much we missed him. We said we should keep in touch.
For her it was a promise. Twice a week in prison I’d receive chatty letters from her. They were penned in violet ink on four-by-six-inch lavender pages folded in half and filled with news of new neighbors, newborn children, new stores and malls. She persisted in this for almost a year, heroically, before giving up.
THE OFFICE WAS EMPTY, though unlocked. Remembering all those hollow, echoing buildings and streets in
On the Beach,
which I’d seen at the impressionable age of fourteen (after which I’d read everything of Nevil Shute’s the local library had), I found Lonnie and Don Lee at the diner.
“Out to lunch, huh? Maybe you should just move the sign over here. Sheriff’s Office. Hang it up by the daily specials.”
“More like breakfast for you, way it looks,” Don Lee said. “Just get up?”
“Yeah. Nightlife around here’s a killer.”
“You get used to the pace.”
Thelma materialized beside the booth. “What’ll it be?”
I asked for coffee.
“You people come in at the same time, sure would make my life easier.” She shrugged. “Lot you care.” She slapped a check down by me. “And why the hell should you, for that matter? Rest of you want anything? Or you gonna wait, so’s I have to make three trips instead of one?”
“We’re fine,” Lonnie said.
“For now.”
Thelma walked off shaking her head.
“You’re both on duty? Where’s June?”
“We are,” Don Lee said.
“And June’s on her way down to Tupelo, best we know.” Lonnie glanced out the window, voice like his gaze directed over my shoulder. “Looks like that’s where he went once he cut out of here.”
“Shit.”
“Pretty much the way we feel about it, too,” Don Lee said.
Thelma set a cup of coffee by the ticket she’d slapped down moments before. When I thanked her, she might as well have been stuck by a pin.
“I know I have to leave her alone, let her work this out on her own,” Lonnie said. “We talked about that. Best I could do is make it worse.”
Right.
“You get your message?”
I hadn’t.
“Val Bjorn. Says for you to call her.”
“Results of the forensics must be in.”
“Probably not that. We got those late yesterday.”
“And?”
“Not much there.”
“There’s a copy for you at the office.”
I drank my coffee, called Val only to learn from her assistant Jamie (male? female? impossible to say) that she was in court. She bounced my call back around six
P.M.
“Hungry?” Val said.
“I could be.”
“Think you can find your way to my house?”
“I’ll strap on bow and arrow now. Call for a mule.”
“Thank God it’s not prom night or they’d all be taken.”
“Mostly surfing the Internet,” I told her not long after, leaning against the kitchen table, nursing a glass of white wine so dry I might as well have bitten into a persimmon. She’d asked how I spent my afternoon. “You wouldn’t believe how many Web sites are devoted to movies. Horror films, noir, science fiction. Someone made a movie about garbagemen who are really aliens and live off eating what they collect, which they consider a delicacy. There’s a whole Web site about it.”
Val tossed ears of corn into boiling water.
“This isn’t cooking, mind you,” she said.
“Okay.”
“I’m not cooking for you.”
“Your intentions are pure.”
“I didn’t cook the salad either.”
“Wow. Tough crowd.”
“You think I’m a crowd?”
“Aren’t we all?”
“I guess.”
“How’d court go?”
“Like a glacier.” She bent to lower the flame under the corn and cover the pot. “I’m representing a sixteen-year-old boy who’s petitioning the court for emancipation. He’s Mormon—parents are, anyway. The defense attorney has put every single member of his family and the local Mormon community, all two dozen of them, on the stand so far. And the judge goes on allowing it, in the face of all my objections of irrelevance. Courthouse looks like a bus stand.”
“They love him.”
“Damn right they do. You know anything at all about LDS, you know how important family is to them. They don’t want to lose the boy—personally
or
spiritually.”
“He has some way to support himself?”
“An Internet mail-order business he created. All Your Spiritual Needs—everything from menorahs to Islam prayer rugs. Netted a quarter million last year.”
“Has different ideas, obviously.”
“He’s not a believer. Even in capitalism, as far as I can tell. It’s all about pragmatism, I think. He wanted a way out, independence, and that looked good for it. Much of the profit from the company goes back to the very family he’s trying to escape.”
“Interesting contradiction.’’
“Is it? Contradictions imply we’ve embraced some overarching generality. They’re the ash left over once those generalities burn down. Particular, individual lives are another thing entirely.”
She was right, of course.
“He have much chance of getting the emancipation?”
Val shrugged. “I don’t seem to have much idea how
anything’s
going to go these days. This dinner, for instance.”
“The one you’re not cooking.”
“Right.”
Later, having smeared ears of corn with butter, salt and pepper and chins unintentionally with same, having stoked away, as well, quantities of iceberg lettuce, radish, fresh tomato and red onion dribbled upon by vinegar and olive oil, we sat on Val’s porch in darkness relieved only by the wickerwork of light falling through trees from a high, pale moon.
“Back when you were on the streets, you thought you were doing good, right?”
“Sure I did.”
“And as a therapist?’’
I nodded.
“Still believe that?”
“Yes.”
“But you stopped.”
“I did. But not because of some existential crisis.”
Sitting in the pecan tree, an owl lifted head off shoulders to rotate it a hundred and eighty degrees. Country musician Gid Tanner, with whom Riley Puckett played, was supposed to have been able to do that.
“When I was sixteen, my dad took me to buy my first car. We found a ’48 Buick we both liked. Some awful purplish color, as I remember, and they’d put in plastic seats like something from a diner. Car itself was in pretty good shape. But the fenders were banged all to hell, you could see where they’d been hammered back out from underneath, more than once. I was looking for something bright and shiny, naturally, and those fenders bothered me. My father’d been a bit more thoroughgoing, actually checked out the engine and frame. ’It’s a good car, J. C.,’ he said. ’Just old—like me. Fenders are the first to go.’
“Later that’s how I came to see people. The parts that are out there, between you and the world as you move into it, those parts sustain the most damage. Fenders wear out. Doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong, intrinsically, with the car. The engine may still be perfectly good—even the body.”
“Tell me we’re not out of wine.”
I handed my glass across. Good half-inch left in there.
“We are, aren’t we?” She finished it off, set the glass beside her own. “All day long I sat there looking at Aaron. Fans thwacking overhead. Was I helping him—or only further complicating a life that was complicated enough already?”
“You still want to fix things.”
“Yes,’’ she said. “I guess I do.”
“You can’t.”
“I guess I know that, too.”
“Ever tell you I was once half a step away from being an English professor?”
“One of your earlier nine lives, I take it.”
“Exactly. I loved Chaucer, Old English, Elizabethan drama. Read them the way other people watch soap operas and sitcoms, or eat popcorn. Christopher Fry was a favorite.
“I expect they would tell us the soul can be as lost,
For loving-kindness as anything else.
Well, well, we must scramble for grace as best we can.”
“That’s what we’re doing? Scrambling for grace?”
“For footholds, anyway. Definitely scrambling.”
“And what does grace look like?”
“Hell if I know.”