“Of course,” Cal told the horse, “everyone said it’s no good for a cop to get close. But I had to know. I had to see progress. I had to believe that just one mom and one kid were better off. Can you believe that? Well, it’s the truth.” Cal knew the story sounded so predictable, so typical, it embarrassed him to imagine other cops telling it in locker rooms. So this young cop arrests this dirtbag father, checks in on the family, befriends the kid—stupid move—and then the husband starts coming back around and one thing leads to another. But it wasn’t a stupid move to befriend that kid. If it was, there was something wrong with the cosmos, not with Cal. Of that he was certain. The night Cal first arrested the kid’s dad, the kid came out of the bedroom all sleepy-eyed, carrying a stained blanket and sucking on a pacifier. The kid looked to be too old for a pacifier, but what struck Cal most, what hurt him enough that he had to come back, was that the kid didn’t seem startled by the commotion of it all. It seemed like just another night, Mom crying on the kitchen floor, cops around, Dad in cuffs. The kid smiled at Cal, and made a gun with his fingers, and shot it at him. Cal didn’t know what to do with that, so he smiled and shot his fingers back, and walked the dad outside and started his cruiser with shaking hands.
“And do you see what happens, Mr. Horse, when someone tries to have a heart?” Cal held his arms wide. “Banishment, Mr. Horse, to the pine forest. That’s what the good guy gets when he punches out the bad guy.” Cal stopped walking, thought of the whiskey in his pocket, the moon overhead. He shook his head and walked.
“But talk is cheap, Mr. Horse. It’s cheap.”
The end of that story sounded typical too. The men telling it in locker rooms would never believe Cal only ate dinner with that mother, that he sat on the couch and ate chicken nuggets and watched TV while the kid played with blocks. But that’s what he did. Cal tried to make the kid smile once or twice, but the kid seemed to smile as if to humor him, like he was the one who was older and wiser. No matter, the kid’s eyes seemed to say. And then the night came when that proved true.
It was an hour after the bars closed on his night off, and Cal stumbled into his apartment to a ringing phone. It was the mother, frantic. The dad was out of jail. He was outside on the lawn, throwing rocks at the house, kicking the railing off the porch, all the typical stuff. Cal recalled only a handful of details about that night. He remembered spilling a bottle of whiskey in his lap as he fumbled to start his car. He remembered headlights lighting up the side of a white house. He remembered bending back the fingers of a man until the knuckles popped and the man squealed on the lawn. The rest of the story was recounted to him the next morning in the chief’s office, with the oppressive aroma of cheap coffee filling the room while Cal learned his fate. There’s an interim position in Wisconsin, a snowy place of pine and forest, the kind of place a bleeding heart can relax and be forgotten.
Cal often wondered if he would have done the same thing sober. It’s not something he’d been able to fully answer yet. He was also still learning to navigate his new, northern life, this new solitude. But if he was being perfectly honest, Wisconsin wasn’t entirely miserable. He did have a dog, and he did have a truck, and though he spent the first winter sitting on top of the heat register in his drafty cabin, there was hope here where there was none back home. The closest he’d come to an answer regarding his true motives that night on the lawn was that he didn’t see any other way out. Cal could face down a grown man at three in the morning, but he was too afraid to leave a career he knew was killing him. Why? For the same reason those women stayed with bad men, he supposed. He lost his ability to believe. He befriended that kid and his mom to believe again. He beat that father into the grassy lawn to believe again. But Cal didn’t know how true that sounded either.
Cal pulled his collar up more tightly around his neck. The river to his left shone like a polished stone, and the stars above were brilliant in a way they could never be in the city. There were times he stopped hating his drafty cabin here in the Land of the Beaver, even when he was cussing it all, up on a ladder, prying off rotten trim from
