Tough Customer

The captain asked Dodge if he wanted to talk to a chaplain, a counselor, a psychologist. Dodge told him to fuck off. He didn't stay for the briefing.

For a while, he drove around the city looking for someplace in which to vent his roiling anger but soon realized that his erratic driving was a danger to innocent motorists and their passengers. Where would be the sense in his killing somebody in a car crash? No one would appreciate the irony. Least of all Jimmy Gonzales, who would rebuke him from the cold slab in the morgue on which the halves of him lay.

He wound up at a batting cage. It felt good to have something hard and potentially lethal in his hands, taking whacks at something as defenseless as Gonzales had been against the laws of physics and that goddamn telephone pole.

He didn't go home until hours later. By then the pot roast had been put away. Caroline's eyes were soft with sympathy when she greeted him at the door. 'It was on the ten o'clock news. I'm so sorry, Dodge.'

He nodded and walked past her into the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator but didn't know what he was looking for, so he just stared into it sightlessly.

'I want to do something to help you,' she said with feeling. 'But I don't know what to do.'

He slammed the refrigerator door, rattling glass containers inside. 'You can't do anything to help. I can't do anything. I can't even go to his funeral. I've been ordered not to. I can't go see his parents. Nice folks, by the way. Proud as punch of their son Jimmy, the cop.' His throat seized up, and he groaned, 'Jesus.'

Caroline took a step toward him, but he rebuffed her. 'There's nothing you or anybody can do, all right?' he shouted. 'Don't you get it? The dumb asshole should have been off duty. Instead, he's dead! And for what? He died protecting that flaming fairy with pink hair and green satin pants, whose singing, frankly, sounds to me like a cat getting fucked in the ass.

'And the person who caused the wreck fled the scene. Didn't even have the decency to own up to taking out a good cop and a great guy. Probably some cokehead. If I ever find out who...' He raised his hands, curled his fingers toward his palms. 'If I ever find out who was driving that car, I'll kill him with my bare hands.'

'Dodge, you're--'

'You don't think I mean it, do you?'

'Dodge.'

'Think again, nice girl. I beat up your fiance, didn't I? Have you forgotten that?'

'You're not yourself.'

'I'm exactly myself.' He sneered. 'This is me, Caroline.' He pounded his fist against his chest. 'Take a good look. This is the real me.'

He could feel the angry blood throbbing through the veins in his head and neck. He knew that his eyes were glowing with fury, that he was spraying spittle with each word, that he probably looked feral.

That he probably looked like his old man.

But even knowing that, he couldn't stop himself from saying what his father used to shout at him. 'Just leave me the fuck alone, will you?'

With remarkable calm, Caroline sidestepped him and left the room.

Then he had no one on whom to direct his rage, so he threw himself down into one of the kitchen chairs, put his head on the table, and sobbed till his throat was raw.

He stayed there until dawn, benumbed by grief, steeped in self-loathing.

When he realized the sun was coming up, he stirred. He toed off his shoes and tiptoed through the house to the bathroom, where he splashed his face with cold water. His shirttail was out, his hair standing on end, he had a full day's growth of beard. He looked like a derelict after a weeklong binge, but he was too weary in body and soul to make repairs.

As he left the bathroom, he looked down the hallway toward the bedroom. The door was ajar, not quite an invitation, but she hadn't barred herself against him, which, after the way he behaved, she'd had every right, practically an obligation, to do.

He went to the door and pushed it open. Its hinges creaked, but that didn't waken her because she was already awake. He sensed she was even though she was facing away from him, lying on her side, her knees pulled up nearly to her chest. She lay on top of the covers, fully dressed except for her shoes. The pads of her toes, perfect dots of flesh, were lined up against the balls of her small feet.

The sight of her caused the bitterness that he had nursed through the night to disintegrate, and all he was left with was emptiness.

He walked to the bed and lay down, close to her, but without touching. He expected her to tell him to get away from her, that she couldn't stand the sight or sound or smell of him. But she didn't. She lay perfectly still, and that silent acceptance of his presence emboldened him to speak.

'I was wrong last night,' he said in what, for him, passed as a whisper. Even so, his voice sounded abnormally loud. He tried lowering it another decibel. 'When I said there was nothing you could do to help me, I was wrong. There is something.'

'What?' Her voice was muffled by the pillow beneath her cheek.

'You're doing it.'

'I'm not doing anything.'

'Yes you are. You're ... you're being.' He moved his head closer to hers, closed his eyes, and pressed his face into her hair.

'Just being?'

'That's enough. Actually, that's a lot.'

She turned over until they were face-to-face. She didn't rebuke him for rubbing his face against her hair, which he was afraid she might. Her regard wasn't judgmental. More like tender.

'I'm sorry for flying off the handle.' Then he snuffled with disgust. 'That's an understatement. I went way beyond that.'

'You were upset.'

'I was. Am. But nothing excuses the way I acted and the things I said.'

'I didn't take them personally.'

'Good. They weren't directed at you.'

'I know. I understand.' Her sweet expression said she did.

It made his throat tight. 'Do you think you can forgive me?'

'I saw you at your worst, and I'm still here.'

He shook his head sadly. 'That wasn't my worst, Caroline. Not by a long shot.'

'I'm still here,' she repeated softly.

Gazing into her calm, sherry-colored eyes, he felt little cracks forming in his mean ol' heart. It had been toughened early by the loss of his mother, who'd loved him, hardened by his father, who hadn't, then made stony by the man's ceaseless cruelties.

But his callous heart didn't stand a chance of remaining so when Caroline looked at him as she was doing now. Little fissures in it opened, allowing trickles of her gentleness, kindness, and goodness to get inside.

He was nearly suffocated by yearning. 'Caroline.' He stopped, swallowed noisily, tried again. 'Caroline, a few weeks ago, you were engaged to another man.' Again he paused, at a loss for how to express himself. 'I'm bungling this, dammit. What I'm trying to say--'

'I know what you're trying to say.' Her voice, unlike his failed attempts at