Family Blessings (13 page)

Chris decided on a new tack. "Well, I'll tell you what . . . I need a friend right now."

The concept of being needed stopped Judd's attitude. Kids like him knew, from the time they were old enough to think, that they'd never been wanted, much less needed.

"You weirding me out, cop."

On top of everything else, Judd was having an identity crisis.

Half the time he talked like a semi-educated white kid, the other half he broke into black rap.

"You got an hour?" Chris asked.

"Do what?"

"Ride. I'll come and pick you up."

"Not here."

"Wherever you say."

Judd thought some. "Seven-Eleven, same like always."

"Seven-Eleven. Give me five to get out of my uniform."

I , i: When Chris pulled up in the parking lot of the 7-Eleven, Judd had his : shoulder blades against the front window and the sole of one sneaker flattened to the brick wall below it. His hands were buried to the elbows in the pockets of black-and-chartreuse knee-length Zubaz.

He had on a faded, stretched-out purple body shirt that would have fit Michael Jordan. His hair was black and curly with a lightning bolt shaved into his skull above his left ear--inexpertly, as if with a home razor.

Judd watched the Explorer roll in, leaving his butt against the wall to show that it didn't mean jack-shit to him if anybody got a new red truck with fancy running boards, a visor and chrome wheels. As the vehicle approached, Judd didn't move, only rolled his eyes to keep up with the truck and its driver.

Chris pulled to a stop and looked at Judd out of the open driver's window.

"Yo," Chris said.

"What you talkin' like a black boy for?"

"What you talkin' like a black boy for?"

"I be black."

"You might be, but no sense talking like a dumb one if you ever want to get anywhere in this world. Get in."

Judd pushed himselfoffthe wall and made sure his heels dragged with every step on his way to the truck.

He got in, slammed the door and slouched into his corner, letting his knees sprawl.

"Buckle up. You know the rules."

"Bad-ass cop."

"That's right. Now buckle up."

He did. And started complaining and jabbing a finger with his face all scrunched up. "I could turn you in for dat, you know.

Teachers in school can't even make us change how we talk. It's the rules. We got our culture to preserve."

"I'm not your teacher, and if you ask me, you're preserving the wrong side of your culture, and furthermore, who you gonna turn me in to?"

"Somebody."

"Somebody." Chris rolled his eyes and shook his head sardonically.

"Yeah, somebody. Your captain, dat who."

"Dat who? Listen to you, talking like a dummy! I told you, if you want to get out someday and make something of yourself and have a truck like this and a job where you can wear decent clothes and people will respect you, you start by talking like a smart person, which you are.

I could hack that greo talk if it was real, but the first time I picked you up for doing the five-finger discount over at the SA station, you talked like every other kid in your neighborhood."

"Man, you don't know jack-shit about my neighborhood, so what you talkin'!"

"The hell I don't. How many times a month do you think I have to bust asses over there?"

"I'm twelve years old. You not supposed to talk to me like dat."

"Tell you what--I'll make you a deal. I'll talk to you nicer if you'll talk to me nicer. And the first thing you do is stop using that F word. And the second thing you do is start pronouncing words the way your first-grade teacher taught you to. The word is that, not dat."

Judd let his mouth get punk-disgusted, rolled his face toward the window and made some breathy sound like "Sheece . .."

"I know you're doing it to get even with your dad."

"He's not my dad."

"Maybe not, but he pays the rent."

"And buys the cheese and snow."

Cheese and snow meant marijuana and cocaine.

"Is that what went on this weekend?"

Judd grew animated again, his bony knees jutting, his head leading the way as he retorted, "You gonna diss on me the rest of this ride, then you can just let me off!"

"Is that what went on this weekend?" Chris demanded.

Judd crumpled into his corner and looked out the window. "So what you gonna do? Put me in foster care again?" he said disparagingly.

"That what you want?"

Judd's answer was only rebellious silence. There were some who'd been in and out of foster homes so many times they grew cynical about it.

Caught in the middle, these poor kids longed for nothing as much as security. It was not to be found, however, in being bounced into a foster home for two or three days while social services came out to their home to do a pep talk and offer a job to the parents, who'd rather live on welfare and get a free ride. The result was always the same. The parents would pledge to reform, straighten up for a day or two, then be back on drugs and alcohol before the week was out.

"All right, I'll tell you," Judd conceded. "They had a party Saturday night. Bunch of their friends come over. They got high and started doing a bone dance in the living room--" "Bone dance?"

"Yeah. You know." Judd fixed Chris with a look that blended indifference and challenge. "That word you won't let me say. Then somebody tried to change partners and this fight breaks out. The old man hits the old lady and one of her teeth goes flyin', and she starts hittin' him back."

"Anybody hit you?"

"No."

"You sure?"

Judd refused to answer.

"What did you do?"

"I went out the window. Went to the Seven Leven and called you like you said. But you weren't home. Where the hell were you, man?"

"I was burying my best friend."

If Judd had been any other twelve-year-old his head would have snapped around. But Judd was Judd, and he had little energy to spare on other people's problems. Surviving took all the energy he had. He merely turned his head Chris's way and asked, "Who?"

"Greg. He died in a motorcycle accident on Friday."

Judd contemplated the news. His face remained impassive but there were things going on behind his unblinking eyes. After some time he withdrew even his glance, turning back to the view out the windshield.

"Man, that sucks."

Chris said nothing.

They rode awhile before Judd said, "So you hummed out or what?"

"Yeah. I miss him. It's bad in our apartment without him there."

They rode some more while Chris sensed Judd pondering the idea of the death of a friend, changing subtly, losing some of his defiance. He had no frame of reference, however, for dealing with grief or doling out compassion, so he only repeated, "Man, that sucks."

In a while Chris asked, "You hungry?"

Judd shrugged and looked the other way. Chris pulled through a drive-in window and got a double order of chicken McNuggets, a side salad, four packets of sweet-and-sour sauce and two small cartons of milk. They went to the Round Lake boat landing and sat on a picnic table, watching sunset stain the water.

"Sorry I wasn't there Saturday night," Chris said.

"That's bad, about your friend."

"I've got to get over it though. Nobody said life was fair."

"Nobody I ever knew."

"Still, we've got to keep on keepin' on, you know what I mean?"

Judd ate another nugget and nodded.

"Eat the salad, too. It's good for you. And drink all that milk."

Judd tipped his head and swallowed three times, then swiped his mouth with the back of a hand. "This friend--he got people who treat him good, or he like you and me?"

"He's got a good family. The best."

Judd's head bobbed as he studied his badly worn high-top sneakers planted a foot apart on the picnic bench.

"Want to know something?" Chris said. He let a few beats of silence pass, leaning forward on his knees like a basketball player on the bench. "When I was your age I used to be jealous of the kids who had decent parents. I used to treat them like worms, not talk to them--you know? Problem was, the only one it hurt was me because I didn't have any friends. Life is a bitch without friends. Then I grew up and realized that it was nobody's fault my parents were alcoholics. I could go on carrying a chip on my shoulder or I could shrug it off. I shrugged it off and found out that there are some fine people out there in the world. I decided I was going to be a fine person, too, and not do like my old man and old lady did. And that's why I became a cop."

They sat in the twilight thinking about it while Judd finished his food.

In time they walked back to the truck with Chris's hand curled around Judd's skinny neck. Just before they reached the Explorer, Judd said, "This some bitchin' ride, man. Gonna have me one like it someday."

The following day Christopher returned to work. He was scheduled on the dogwatch, 11 P.M. till 7 A.M and reported with a full half hour to spare, as required. In the locker room the radio speaker crackled from the wall while metal doors clanged and officers exchanged small talk.

Nokes came over and hung a hand on Chris's shoulder.

"How you doin', Chris?"

"The locker room seems strange without him."

"Yup, it sure does." Nokes squeezed his neck and shuffled to his own locker to get dressed.

With twenty-nine sworn officers on the Anoka force, Chris wasn't always scheduled on the same shift as Greg, but often enough the two of them had stood back to back in the aisle between the lockers, exchanging small talk and wisecracks that were missed tonight.

Chris got into his bullet-proof vest and shirt, then knotted his tie before the tiny mirror on his locker door where most people kept family pictures. His held only one snapshot of himself and Greg by a black and-white squad car. He loaded his belt with the paraphernalia of his profession: silent key holder, radio in a leather holder, stream light, Cap-Stun, rubber gloves, handcuffs in their leather holder, a 9mm Beretta in its holster and two extra magazines. When he was completely dressed, twenty-six pounds of gear hung on his body, and tonight he felt every one of them.

Fifteen minutes before the shift change, he reported to the patrol room for roll call and sat down with the four others who were coming on duty to watch the updates on LETTN--the Law Enforcement Training Television Network. Today, however, the large-screen TV got sporadic attention.

Instead the men, their voices subdued, exchanged remarks about the funeral and Greg's absence, asked Chris questions about the Reston family and whether or not he was going to get a new roommate. Somebody passed him the roll-call book and he took his turn acquainting himself with information on missing persons, stolen vehicles and arrest warrants faxed to the department from the jail since he'd been gone.

When roll call ended, Chris wandered into the communications room, greeted the dispatcher and checked the past four days' shift reports which listed every call answered by the department. Though only twenty miles from Minneapolis, the city of Anoka, population 17,000, had far less crime than the big city, and needed a much smaller police force to fight it.

On Saturday night the department had responded to a total of twenty-three calls, Sunday night only seventeen. Same things as usual: suspicious person, disturbing the peace, simple assault, disorderly conduct. After scanning the clipboard, Chris hung it back on the wall, realizing that apart from the fact that memories of Greg lingered throughout the familiar rooms of the police station, it felt good to be back, occupied once more.

He collected his hat from the patrol room table and said, "I'm outta here, guys."

"Me too," Nokes said, and together they headed out to their squad cars.

He spent the night as he'd spent hundreds of others, guarding the sleeping city. Sometimes he prowled. Sometimes he sat, listening to channel one crackle ceaselessly with the voice of the county dispatcher. He and Nokes both responded to a domestic and found the apartment door open, the TV on and nobody home. He got bad-mouthed by two other apartment tenants when he knocked on their doors to ask questions. Back in his squad car, he cruised until a call from the dispatcher sent him to check out an alert from a motion alarm, which he discovered had been tripped by a falling ceiling panel. He sat in the parking lot of Carpenter's Hall beside a shadowy pine tree and watched cars come over the Mississippi River bridge from Champlin, tracking speeds on his radar. He watched the two red lights on his radar screen and listened to the sound of the signal change as the cars swept abreast and passed him.

He thought about how close he was to Benton Street. Nine blocks away Lee Reston probably lay in bed--asleep or awake? Resting after the past four exhausting days or wide-eyed, in the company of sad memories?

He started his engine and rolled out of the Carpenter's Hall parking lot, onto Ferry Street, then left on Benton. A dark, sleeping neighborhood with nothing more than a pair of cat's eyes gleaming at him from beneath a clump of shrubs before it shot across the street.

He slowed to a crawl as he approached her house. The lights were off, the garage door was down. Janice's old car was parked in the driveway.

Greg's Toyota was nowhere in sight, probably in the garage.

Are you sleeping? he thought. Or are you lying awake wishing you were? Are you wondering whose headlights are sliding down Benton Street so slowly at this hour of the morning? Well, don't worry. It's just me, keeping watch. Did you work today atyour shop or stay home and write thank-you cards? I seeyou closed your , garage door. That's better. Now you keep it closed every night, okay?

How are the kids doing? I suppose they're a help to you, reasons for you to make it through another day. I could use a little of that. It was sad in the locker room tonight, Greg's locker closed and locked and no Greg clanging the door open and upping off I i suppose we'll all get used to it, but it'll take time, wont it?

k At 3 A.M. he ate a full meal at Perkins Restaurant.

At five, when the sky had begun going pinkish in the east, he checked her street again.