Loving Time

seven

All morning Bobbie Boudreau had trouble concentrating on the heavy polishing machine that could so easily spin out of control and hurt someone bad. Something about what Brian had said in the French Quarter last night pissed him off. Brian had said the old Mick had told him to kick Bobbie out before he made any more trouble. Where did the old shit get the idea that he made trouble? He didn’t make trouble.

All he wanted, all he’d ever wanted in his whole life was to be treated with simple justice. Where was that justice? It pissed Bobbie off thinking about it. So he punched someone’s lights out in a bar a few times. So he went to the bitch’s office and took a few things out of her desk. So fucking what? That wasn’t trouble.

Trouble was his asshole of a father beating the shit out of him when he was too little to fight back, then shooting every single one of Bobbie’s precious chickens—the business that was going to bring electricity and a telephone and a TV to the house and make them rich. Trouble was that crazed drunk running inside for his fucking hunting rifle, the only thing in the house worth owning. Bobbie could still see his raging bull of a father, still big even with the sickness, still powerful as God, as he stumbled out into the yard shooting at the fifty screeching hens that charged in all directions trying to get away, only to collapse in bloody heaps of feathers. The fit didn’t let up all the times the old man had to keep reloading to get them all. He could hardly stand up, but that didn’t stop him from shooting at everything in sight, shrieking at Bobbie all the time. Something like “You little shit, you shit-eating dreamer! I’ll kill you, too.”

The cancer and a few other things finally took the bastard out soon after Bobbie decided to join the Army. Bobbie could pinpoint the day his father started spitting blood to the day Bobbie made up his mind to believe the recruiter who came to his school. That soft-voiced black Major told him personally the Army was the only place in the country a black man could get a fair shake.

“Only in the service is everybody—and I mean everybody—treated the same.”

The Major personally offered Bobbie Boudreau, who had never in his life owned a new pair of pants, pay every month no matter what, a place to live, a uniform that would give him respect and make him look good.

“You want to look good, boy, don’t you? You want to develop your abilities? Get an education and have a career?”

You gonna believe this bull? Boy?

The man had to be kidding him. A new pair of pants. A jacket, boots that laced up above the ankles. A career for him? The blood in Bobbie’s family had been so mixed up for so many generations that by the time he was born, the seventh of ten calico children, no one even knew anymore what aunt, what uncle, what granpappy, or granmammy came from which racial and ethnic background. He had black, Indian, French blood. You name it. He wasn’t anything specific, and that was the problem that bothered him most growing up. Who did he get to be? Wasn’t nobody like him either inside or out.

He was a strange mixture of colors, his skin freckled, his hair a reddish frizz, his eyes the only ones in the family that were a mild-seeming washed-out blue. Big, gawky, shy to the point of paralysis, Bobbie Boudreau was called nigger by the white kids he knew, white by the black kids, and trash by the Creoles. There wasn’t a single place he fit in.

Sure he wanted to look good, be treated like a man. He wanted to look every bit as good as that black Major. A light-skinned black, but not as light as he. He wanted to sound like him, too. Be him, in fact. If that guy could get ahead, why not Bobbie?

Every time he saw that tape recorder in the bitch’s drawer, Bobbie was reminded of the hard road he’d traveled, how desperately he’d tried to get past it all, and the nowhere he’d gotten. He’d started at the top and one asshole after another had shot him down just like those chickens. He’d had perfect fitness ratings in his military training. Perfect. He knew he wanted to be a medic. He had good hands, followed orders well. He got the highest ratings in his MASH training unit.

Then before ’Nam one tiny mistake. During a surgical procedure when he was assistant to the surgical nurse, Colonel Stasch asked for a hemostat. Bobbie took one from the green tray, handed it to the nurse, who handed it to the surgeon. Colonel Stasch was from the Midwest somewhere. He was known as the Hitler of surgeons, made all the nurses cry.

“It’s the wrong size.” Colonel Stasch threw the hemostat across the operating room and glared at Bobbie— not the nurse who’d handed him the wrong thing.

He snarled at Bobbie, “What’s the matter with you? Yes, you, fuzzball. Are you a moron? Can’t you speak English? Answer the question. Can’t—— you——speak——English?”

Bobbie almost choked trying to get the words out. “Yezzuh, ah trah,” he’d murmured, head down so the bastard couldn’t see the hot blood burning behind his pale blue eyes.

“Trah, what the fuck is that? You come from some kind of swamp, boy?”

The patient lay on the operating table, all covered up with green sheets except for the slit in his gut nearly six inches long, with a drain stuck in it and the nurse swabbing away at the oozing blood with sponge after sponge while the procedure was delayed. Bobbie raised his eyes as far as the instrument tray. A small streak of blood was visible on the scalpel Colonel Stasch had used to make the incision. It lay on the green cloth alongside several others. “You’re not worth shit, boy. We should send you back to where you came from.”

Bobbie’s own blood suddenly blurred his vision. He was bigger than the skinny doctor, and he had quicker hands. He could grab the scalpel and slit the bastard’s throat before anyone knew what happened. He ached to do it, could see it all. But even as he saw himself kill the bastard, he made a decision. He would not slit the asshole’s throat. He would find other ways to cope. He’d let Justice wait awhile.

Ever since school Bobbie Boudreau had been ashamed of the way he talked. In the Army, he was teased about the way he talked. He’d already begun listening very carefully to the way the doctors he admired talked. It was after the incident with Colonel Stasch that he bought a tape recorder and started practicing simple words. Hello. Good-bye. How are you? Yes, sir. Right away, sir.

Last night he’d ached to pick up the tape recorder in the bitch’s desk and say something into it.

“Hello, bitch. I’m here.”

No, better would be, “Hello, bitch, count the days.” He could say in the tape recorder, “You’re dead.”

In the end, though, he said nothing. The bitch might recognize his voice.

eight

It was a routine call, but April’s heart beat faster as the elevator door slid open on the fifth floor. It was always that way. Her mouth parched up dry as a desert, and a strange metallic taste materialized as if she’d been chewing on a bullet. Her hands became clammy. Her heart raced. Her heart was always racing. Somewhere up there in her neck, or even higher, at the back of her throat. Or else her heart beat in her mouth, and her head throbbed as if with a migraine.

Every time it was exactly the same. The brain charged up the electrical circuits with a power surge that jolted the whole system into a state of alert. A thousand signals transmitted at the same time. Warning signals. Memory bank activation. Pictures of a dead child hidden under a pile of garbage in a backyard, shooting flames, explosions, flying debris, choking smoke, guns going off, a suspect hit, a cop shot, a huge mirror crashing to the ground crushing the woman under it. Burning clothes, skin. Blood. Suspects’ voices, and those of the dead.

As each new case began, ghosts from the old ones kept whispering in April’s brain, telling their cautionary tales over and over. Never take anything for granted. Never! Never accept only what you see in front of you. Never automatically believe the things people tell you. Never just open a door. Never! Behind it could be something. Could also be nothing, too. But you never knew …

It was a well-known fact cops keeled over and dropped dead sometimes on nice quiet days when nothing at all was coming down. Their hearts just stopped after too many power-surges to the system. Some had post- traumatic stress symptoms, too, like soldiers after a war. And a lot of cops had problems with normalcy. They took charge on the job but couldn’t stand gearing down to daily life. Breakfast and lunch, and families who didn’t understand what being hit by jolts of adrenaline—two, three times a day—was like.

April had a weird feeling about this one. She glanced at Mike and swallowed. It was very quiet in the hall. Mike’s mustache bristled with the tension. He must be feeling the same thing she was. The thing was, you never