older model grill, the big chromed-up steel ones they used when cars were still solid and heavy, is rushing up in the pull-over lane. The car’s headlights are off. You perceive only a winking reflection in the old grillwork, and you have just a millisecond to turn to face the onrushing steel. Since you’re an excellent athlete, your instant reaction is to try and jump.
You do not hear the impact. Your brain shuts down-all black. All silent, an automatic response by the organism, they tell you later, a response to what your animal system tells you is instant death.
– 2 -
“Jesus,” I said, and not in the cynical way I usually take the Lord’s name in vain, but with a true amount of awe and sympathy. “He was pinned?”
“When the first highway patrol troopers got there, they could see him in their headlights,” Sherry said. “His torso was still straight up, not slumped over the hood or anything. They said his head was back and his mouth wide open, like he was yelling to the sky. But he wasn’t making a sound.”
“Jesus,” I said again, putting the image in my head, and then having a hard time shaking it out. Maybe Sherry could sense my discomfort, or maybe she just went back to concentrating on the macadam roadway, because she went silent for a while. She hadn’t even gotten to the point of why she was telling me the tale.
All that came out of her now was that rhythmic breathing and the almost imperceptible grunt of effort each time she pushed the wheels of her wheelchair, spinning them forward, her wrists feathering up like a rower does when he’s finishing a stroke in a skull. Her chair would glide for a second while she exhaled, re-cocking her arms and preparing to spin again.
I was riding next to her, peddling in a middle gear on a ten-speed touring bike. When we’d first started coming out here to Shark Valley in the southern Everglades, I actually jogged next to her while she rode the chair. She wouldn’t let me push her-never had. Even the day she left the hospital, only a week after having her leg amputated, she refused to let anyone push her wheelchair.
Then after two days at home, she decided to take herself down the ramp I’d built off her back porch. She figured out a way to open the wooden gate herself, and was rolling down the street “to breathe some fresh air, for God’s sake, Max,” she’d snapped when I’d asked what the hell she thought she was doing. “That room, the house, the walls. It’s like being in a freaking cell up at Raiford.”
I’d started to say something about her not knowing what being in a Florida State Prison cell was truly like, even though she’d sent more than a few convicts up the line as a detective with the Broward Sheriff’s Office. But I’d learned to keep my mouth shut at such times. Sherry had lost her leg during a camping trip I’d taken her on in the Glades. I’d been ignorant of a churning hurricane in the lower gulf. Then I’d soaked our only cell phone in a stupid move to dunk her playfully.
After her leg was shattered in the storm, I was the one who’d led us into a spider’s nest of criminal assholes, putting both of us in jeopardy. The fishing shack we’d gone to wasn’t what it appeared to be-not to us, or to the idiots who were looting camps after the storm. When armed muscle for the real owners showed up, we got caught in the crossfire. The result was the loss of Sherry’s limb. I would never forgive myself.
So what Sherry Richards wanted to do these days, we did. If she wanted to get out of the house, I brought her here, a peaceful six-mile loop of macadam off the old Tamiami Trail on which folks could ride through a true Everglades meadow. To me, it was breathtaking: green-gold saw grass spread out to the horizon and lit by a rising sun in the morning, standing lakes of shallow water in the rainy season rippling in the wind and alive at times with hovering dragonflies and darters and the occasional bream that scooped up the insects from below. When I’d point out these marvels of nature to Sherry as we cruised along, I got mostly an uninterested nod. Such observances were not her idea of breathtaking anymore.
The first time we came out here, I’d walked alongside her, both of us breathing the humid, earth-cleaned air. I watched her carefully to make sure she didn’t overheat in the South Florida sun. I carried lots of water and kept my cell phone in my pocket, ready at all times. I’d had to jog to keep up with her and drank most of the water myself. The next trip, I ran the entire six-mile loop; she was waiting for me at the end. Finally, I rented a bike, and we’d been doing it that way ever since. Sherry was a triathlete before her amputation. Now she was a driven, disabled triathlete with a chip on her shoulder.
I’d told myself a thousand times in the last six months to let it go, let her work it out, let her master it; then she’ll return to who she was. Neither one of us is going to be twenty-five again, but neither wanted to give up a workout, either. She’d made two concessions so far: She agreed to wear a big, floppy hat to shade her blonde head, and she took her trainer’s advice not to push so hard that she couldn’t carry on a conversation while wheeling.
She chose the Marty Booker story. Booker was a fellow sheriff’s officer who’d lost both legs during a routine traffic stop on I-595. And why she was telling me the story? She’d been asked to meet with Booker, to talk with him, to counsel him. I was just happy not to have been the one giving her that assignment.
“The captain and one of the department psychs thought it would be a good idea. It’s the old ‘brothers-in- arms’ drill: You’ve been through what he’s going to have to go through. You’ll have a reference point. Maybe you can help him,” Sherry finally went on.
“I didn’t see anybody helping you,” I said, trying to be on her side, even though I knew the only reason she hadn’t had a counselor or therapist or shrink to lean on when she was rehabbing, was that she was stubbornly adamant that she’d didn’t need help.
“Yeah, well, they’re saying he’s having a hard time adjusting. Way too distracted and quiet and internal. He’s not opening up at all, even to family. So they’re thinking one crip cop to another, maybe we can connect.”
“And you agreed,” I said, maybe letting a tinge of surprise sneak into my voice: Sherry as therapist and a sounding board? Not her style.
“I heard stories about the guy before he got hit. He was too wild, too into himself, too much of that ‘cop as soldier’ stuff. Who needs that in their squad?” Sherry said. “But now, you know, he’s a wheelie like me. I’m thinking maybe it’s not a bad idea to talk to him.”
That said, she exhaled and did the silent thing again. Whoosh, glide. Whoosh, glide. Whoosh, glide. Not a word. Over the last few months, I’d thought I’d learned to deal with this.
Sherry had always been independent, and proud of it. But she wasn’t selfish. She’d once taken in a friend being abused by a cop husband. She was always first to jump into a homicide case, to do the extra work others hadn’t thought of. Before she shared her thoughts on cases with me, even though I wasn’t officially a part of the law enforcement family anymore, it was usually the ethical quandaries she wanted to talk about.
Now she would go someplace in silence, in her own thoughts, seeing images only she could watch in her head, to a place that I could only speculate about: Was it anger over the loss of her leg, or a loathing of her own body? Was it self-pity that someone of her character would naturally fight against? A submerged hatred of me, given what my decisions had brought upon her?
I took this new flicker of thought, this idea that she felt a responsibility to reach out to someone else, as a good thing.
While we took a long bend in the trail, I accepted her silence and focused instead on a dark blip in the saw grass ahead. As we got closer, I could make out the green-black body of an alligator halfway out of the lake, up on the shore with its snout up in the air as if it were smelling the breeze. Twenty yards closer, and I could see that it was huge, a fifteen-footer at least. And it had something in its jaws. Twenty more yards, and I could see that wedged in the gator’s mouth was a Florida soft-shell turtle, the size of one of those big picnic salad bowls.
“Whoa,” I said, and slowed down. The gator concentrated on its catch. Sherry whizzed by on the trail thirty feet away without once turning her head.
I stopped and watched. The gator paid me no mind and continued to work its jaws, applying pressure. I could hear the turtle’s shell crackling as the teeth split its plastron: It was still alive, kicking its feet, stretching out its neck in a futile attempt to escape.
– 3 -
