built to keep the river out, I’d been a golden child, headed for greatness-greatness meaning only escape from that town and its mean horizons. I’d ridden the cockhorse of a scholarship down the river to New Orleans, then back up it to Chicago (following the course of jazz) where, once I had secured a fellowship, head and future pointed like twin bullets towards professordom. Then our president went surreptitiously to war and took me with him. Walking on elbows through green even greener than that I’d grown up among, I recited Chaucer, recalled Euclid, enumerated, as a means of staying awake and alert, principles of economy-and left them there behind me on the trail: spore, droppings.
No difficulty for this boy, rejoining society. I got off the plane on a Friday, in Memphis, stood outside the bus station for an hour or so without going inside, then left. Never made it home. Found a cheap hotel. Monday I walked halfway across the city to the PD and filled out an application. Why the PD? After all these years, I can’t remember any particular train of thought that led me there. I’d spent two and a half years getting shot at. Maybe I figured that was qualification enough.
Weeks later, instead of walking on elbows, I was sitting in a Ford that swayed and bucked like a son of a bitch, cylinders banging the whole time. Still making my way through the wilderness, though. If anything, the city was a stranger, more alien place to me than the jungle had been. Officer Billy Nabors was driving. He had breath that would peel paint and paper off walls and singe the pinfeathers off chickens.
“What I need you to do,” he said, “is just shut the fuck up and sit there and keep your eyes open. Till I tell you to do something else, that’s all I need you to do.”
He hauled the beast down Jefferson towards Washington Bottoms, over a spectacular collection of potholes and into what appeared to be either a long-abandoned warehouse district or the set for some postwar science fiction epic. We pulled up alongside the only visible life-forms hereabouts, all of them hovering about a Spur station advertising “Best Barbecue.” A four-floor apartment house across the street had fallen into itself and a young woman sat on the curb outside staring at her shoes, strings of saliva snailing slowly down a black T-shirt reading ATEFUL DE D. A huge rotting wooden tooth hung outside the onetime dentist’s office to the right. The empty lot to the left had grown a fine crop of treadbare auto tires, bags of garbage, bits and pieces of shopping carts, bicycles and plastic coolers, jagged chunks of brick and cinder block.
Nabors had the special on a kaiser roll, Fritos and a 20-ounce coffee. I copied the coffee, passed on the rest. Hell, I could live for a week off what he spilled down his shirtfront. But that day his shirt was destined to stay clean a while longer, because, once we’d settled back in the squad and he started unwrapping, we got a call. Disturbance of the peace, Magnolia Arms, apartment 24.
He drove us twelve blocks to a place that looked pretty much like the one we’d left.
“Gotta be your first DP, right?”
I nodded.
“Shit.” He looked down at his wrapped barbeque. Grease crept out slowly onto the dash. “You sit here. Anything looks out of whack, you hear anything, you call in Officer Needs Assistance. Don’t think about it, don’t try to figure it out, just hit the fuckin’ button. You got that?”
“Gee, I’m not sure, Cap’n. You know how I is.”
Nabors rolled his eyes. “What the fuck’d I do? Just what the fuck’d I do?”
Opening the door, he pulled himself out and struggled up plank-and-pipe stairs. I watched him make his way along the second tier. Intent, focused. I reached over and got his fucking sandwich and threw it out the window. He knocked at 24. Stood there a moment talking, then went in. The door closed.
The door closed, and nothing else happened. There were lights on inside. Nothing else happened for a long time. I got out of the squad, went around to the back. Following some revisionist ordinance, a cheap, ill-fitting fire escape had been tacked on. I pulled at the rung, saw landings go swaying above, bolts about to let go. Started up, thinking about all those movies with suspension bridges.
I’d made it to the window of 24 and was reaching to try it when a gunshot brought me around. I kicked the window in and went after it.
Through the bathroom door I saw Nabors on the floor. No idea how badly he might have been hurt. Gun dangling, a young Hispanic stood over him. He looked up at me, nose running, eyes blank as two halves of a pecan shell. Like guys too long in country that had just shut down, because that was the only way they could make it.
I shot him.
It all happened in maybe twenty seconds, and for years afterward, in memory, I’d count it out, one thousand, two thousand… At the time, it seemed to go on forever, especially that last moment, with him sitting there slumped against the wall and me standing with my S amp;W . 38 still extended. Right hand only, not the officially taught and approved grip, never sighting but firing by instinct, how I’d learned to shoot back home and the only way that ever worked for me.
I’d hit him an inch or so off the center of his chest. For a moment as I bent above him, there was a whistling sound and frothy blood bubbling up out of the amazingly small wound, before everything stopped. He had three crucifixes looped around his neck, a tattoo of barbed wire beneath.
Nabors lay there lamenting the loss of his barbeque. Man like him, that’s the note he should go out on. But he wasn’t going out, not this time. I picked up the phone and called in Officer Down and location. Only then did it occur to me that I hadn’t cleared the rest of the apartment.
Not much rest to clear, as it happened. A reeking bathroom, a hallway with indoor-outdoor carpeting frayed like buckskin at the edges. Boxes sat everywhere, most of them unpacked, others torn open and dug through, contents spilling half out. The girl was in the back bedroom, in a closet, arms lashed to the crossbar, feet looped about with clothesline threaded into stacked cinder blocks. Her breasts hung sadly, blood trickled down her thighs, and her eyes were bright. She was fourteen.
Chapter Three
“I’m in over my head,” Sheriff Bates said. “You came up around here, right?”
“Close enough.”
“Then you know how it is.”
We were in his Jeep, heading back towards town. Dirt roads pitted as a teenager’s face. Now we turned out of the trees onto worn blacktop. The radio mounted beneath his dash crackled.
“Weekends, we break up bar fights, haul in drunk drivers. Maybe kids pay someone to buy them a case of beer and party till they get to be a nuisance, or some guy down on his luck climbs in a window and comes back out with a pillowcase full of flatware, prescription drugs, a laptop or TV. Not like there’s much anywhere he can go with it. Once in a blue moon a husband slaps his wife down once too often, gets a butcher knife planted in his shoulder or a frypan laid up alongside his head.”
The radio crackled again. Didn’t sound to me any different from previous crackles, but Bates picked up the mike. “I’m on my way in.”
“Ten-four.” Guy at the other end loved those vowels, rolled them around in his mouth like marbles.
Bates hung the mike back on its stirrup.
“Don Lee. You’ll be meeting him here shortly. Eager to get home to his six-pack and his new wife, most likely in that order. What time’s it got to be, anyway?”
“Little after eight.”
“My month to cover nights. Natural order of things, Don Lee’d be gone hours ago. Lisa’d have had his meat and potatoes on the table, he’d be on the couch and his second beer while she washed up. But long as I’m out of pocket, he’s stuck there.”
Bates hauled the jeep hard right and we skidded out onto what passes for a highway around here, picking up speed. Almost immediately, though, he geared down, braked.
“You need help there, Ida?”
A saddle-oxford Buick, cream over blue, vintage circa ’48, sat steaming in the right lane. An elderly woman all in white, vintage a couple of decades prior, stood alongside. She wore a hat that made you want to hide Easter eggs in it.
