were first call; we were backup. Brass didn’t trust Randy.
We turned onto Maple. Outside a Piggly Wiggly there, a girl of sixteen or so sat slumped against a Press- Scimitar coin box, knees up, head down. She’d tucked the garbage bag that was her luggage and held everything she owned under her legs. As I got out of the squad, six yards off, the smell of her hit me. I walked towards the notch of wasted pale thighs.
“You okay, miss?”
Her eyes swam up, found me. “What?”
“Are you okay?”
“I don’t know. I look okay?”
I helped her to her feet. Reflexively one hand shot out to grab hold of the bag, which came up with her. She tottered, then straightened, found the fulcrum. Near as tall as myself.
“Not many gentlemen left.”
“You have some place to go, miss?”
She thought a moment, shook her head.
“Then-”
“A sister,” she told me. “West Memphis. Just across the bridge.”
“Best get moving that way. Stick around here, sooner or later you’re gonna get hauled in, or worse.”
She levered the bag over one shoulder. “Thank you, Officer.”
“No need to thank me. Just take care of yourself, miss.”
“You too.”
“Five blocks from here she’ll forget where she was heading,” Randy said when I got back in the squad. “You know that.”
“So-what? We take her in, she’s back on the street tomorrow, nothing gained but a meal or two, some abuse if she’s lucky, rape and a beating or two if she’s not. We drop her off in ER, she gets a psych consult, who knows where that’s going. Hard to imagine it’d be anyplace good.”
We slowed to cruise a line of shopfronts, independent insurance companies, a travel agent, a used-clothing store, that sort of thing, then pulled around to the alley, an occasional favorite of local teenagers on the prowl, and ran that.
“It’s the medication,” Randy said as we pulled back into traffic. Cross streets ticked by. Walnut Street, left onto Vance across Orleans. “Dries you out something fierce.”
Able north past Beale and Union.
All told, an uneventful shift. We pulled in at the station house with half an hour to spare, only routine paperwork outstanding, no mandatories to clear. Randy and I sat in the break room. He was filling out the shift report, I was drinking coffee. Sixth cup of the day? He pushed the form across the table for me to countersign. The rest of the shift’s warriors had begun streaming in by then, clapping backs and telling new war stories, stowing uniforms in lockers (some of them, the uniforms, a little smelly, sure, but dry cleaning’s expensive), splashing water on armpits, chest, neck and face at the bank of four narrow sinks in the communal washroom, smearing deodorant underarm, spritzing on cologne or nipping from flasks before heading out to rejoin the world as citizens.
As though they could.
I’d changed into jeans and a sweatshirt, my gray windbreaker. Pockets were long gone, the zipper was trying hard to follow, collar frayed half through. I went down the two steps the station house thought it needed to set itself apart from its surround, around the corner to the parking lot. I was just climbing into my truck, which looked a lot like the windbreaker, when Randy’s head bobbed up alongside.
“Anywhere you need to be?”
“Not really.”
“So maybe we could get a beer or two.”
So we did, four in fact, in the lounge of a Holiday Inn nearby. Waitresses kept straying through from the restaurant to see if we wanted to order food. Out in the lobby a guy played piano, great rolling flourishes shaped with both hands like snowballs around rocks of five-, six-note melodies: tonic, dominant, subdominant, home. Barest kiss of the relative minor. In one back booth a man sat speaking intently with a woman half his age. His eyes never left hers. Hers never met his.
“Look, you know how the projectionist doesn’t get the film focused just right, it’s a blur?” Randy told me over the second beer. “You keep looking away and looking back, thinking it’s gonna come clear. Like there’s two pictures, two worlds, half an eyeblink apart. Then you take the meds and it all comes together, the blur goes away.”
Maybe (I remember thinking even then) the blur is what it’s all about.
We sat there quietly, glancing vaguely at clips from football games and wrestling on the TV above the bar as the doors from the lobby opened to admit a wheelchair. It came in backwards. Having no foot panels, it was propelled and directed by the occupant’s swollen, bandaged feet. Watching in the rearview mirror mounted on one armrest, that occupant made his way into the lounge. Around his neck was what looked to be a twisted coat hanger. It held a kind of panpipe into which the occupant blew as he advanced, to warn of his passage. Possibly his arms, his upper body, were paralyzed?
But no, as he reached the bar and turned his chair about, the bartender handed across a glass of draft beer.
“How’s it going, Sammy?”
The man took a long pull off the beer before answering. “Not bad. Could be worse. Has been, lots.”
“Check came in on time, I see.”
“Day late.”
“Not a dollar short too, I hope.’’
Sammy’s features drew together in what was obviously a laugh. His shoulders heaved. There was little sound to the laugh, and tears came out his eyes. After a moment he leaned forward to put the empty glass on the bar. The bartender had a replacement waiting. Sammy drank it almost at a gulp and put it on the bar beside the first. Shifting weight onto his right haunch, he tugged free a wallet.
The bartender waved away his effort. “This one’s on me.”
“You sure?”
“Sure I’m sure.”
“Thanks, bud. ’Preciate it.”
“Take care, friend.”
Sailor Sammy tacked the wheelchair around and, puffing on his panpipe, started backwards towards the door.
“Wet his whistle,” Randy said to the bartender as he came back from opening the door.
“He did that all right. Get you another?”
“Why the hell not.”
I nodded.
He brought them.
“Boy comes in every week, sometimes Monday, sometimes Tuesday. Has two beers like you just seen. Flat downs them, then he’s gone. Don’t have any idea what this check is he’s always talking about-welfare, some kinda government thing-but he flat won’t come in till it gets there. Not that I’ve ever taken his money.”
“You know him?” Randy asked.
“Not really. Lives in a garage out behind someone’s house, I think. Maybe up Fannin Street way, just off Pioneer? Somewhere in there.”
“What happened to him?” Randy asked.
The bartender shrugged, shoulders rising momentarily from a tier of low-end vodkas and gins to one of call Scotches and subsiding.
“You’ve done a mitzvah,” I said.
The bartender looked at me as Randy grinned. ’Round those parts, those days, Judaism was as exotic as artichokes. I may as well have brought up Masonic rites, alchemy, the pleasures of goat cheese.
Doors from the lobby again swung open, this time to admit a party of office workers, six of them, in ill-fitting dresses and suitcoats with something of the oxbow about them, stiff plastic ties, costume jewelry, run-over shoes thick with bottled polish. From the back table where they settled, quickly their presence spilled out into the room,
