have a window, a way out. The others, who fail to notice, who go on trying to ride-it closes around them, like a wing casing. It wears them.
I sat on the edge of the porch floor. A sphinx moth had landed in a swath of moonlight on the beam beside me.
Back in country, some of the guys would keep insects in these cages they lashed together out of splinters of bamboo. Scorpions, a few of them, but mostly it was insects. Cockroaches, grasshoppers, and the like. They'd feed them, rattle them hard against the sides of their cages, jab them with thorns, talk to them. One kid had a sphinx moth he'd stuffed-with what, we never knew, but it was a raunchily amateur job, and the thing looked like one of the creatures-gone-wrong out of a bad horror movie. 'Just think,' he'd say, 'it'll never leave me, never die, never break my heart.' But the kid died, snipered while out on a routine patrol near the closest friendly village. Later that day Bailey brought the cage into the mess tent. He was sergeant, but no one called him that, and he had maybe a year or two on the kid. He set the cage on the table and stared at it as he slowly drank two cups of coffee. Then he picked up the cage, put it on the ground, and stomped it flat. His boots were rotting, like all of ours were (just as the French had tried to tell us), and like the feet inside them. A chunk of blackish leather fell off and stayed there beside the remains of the kid's cage as Bailey took his cup over to the bin.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Twodays later, a cloud-enshrouded, bitter-cold Thursday, I was sitting in a Memphis squad room being lectured, basically, on what cat could piss on what doorstep.
I looked around, at the corkboard with its neat rows of Post-it notes, the ceramic-framed photo of a family from some fifties TV show, and the diploma awarded by Southwestern, as Sergeant Van Zandt wound down from his sermon on jurisdiction and proper channels. His wasn't all that different in kind from the sermons with which I'd grown up courtesy of Brother Douglas and successors back home among First Baptist's stained-glass windows, polished hardwood pews, and book-thick red carpeting. As kids, strung out by an hour of Sunday school followed by another hour or more of church service, my brother and I staged our own versions of such sermons over Sunday dinner, Woody preaching, me by turns amen-ing, egging him on, and falling out with rapture. Pressed by our mother, Dad would eventually succumb and send us from the table.
'Nice cubicle,' I said when Van Zandt stopped to refill his lungs and drink the coffee that had gone lukewarm during his hearty polemic. 'What is it, MPD's finally got so top-heavy with management that they've run out of offices?'
Sometimes you just can't help yourself.
Tracy Caulding's glance toward me and half smile said the rest: Always more generals, never enough soldiers.
Tracy, mind you, was no longer on the force, she was now, God help her, a clinical psychologist, but she'd kept her hand in. She was one of the ones the department called on to counsel officers and evaluate suspects. And she was the one I called when I first hit Memphis.
The M.A. in social work she'd been working on when we met turned out not to be a good fit. She'd figuratively gone in the front door of her first job, she said, and right out the back one, back to school. To me she seemed one of those people who skip across the surface of their lives, never touching down for long, forever changing, a bright stone surging up into air and sunlight again and again.
We'd met for breakfast at a place called Tony Weezil's to catch up over plates of greasy eggs and watery grits before breaching the cop house to submit to further abuse. Tony Weezil's served only breakfast, opening at six and shutting down at eleven. After all, Tracy said, lifting a wedge of egg with her fork to let equal measures of uncooked egg white and brown grease find their way back to the plate, you've got one thing down perfectly, why mess with it.
She was telling me about a conference she'd attended, 'What Is Normal?' with authorities from all over delivering talks on Identity and Individuation, The Social Con Tract, Passing as Human, The Man Who Fell to Earth and Got Right Back Up. Some seriously weird people hanging around the hotel, she said-some of the weirdest of them giving the lectures.
'You miss it?' she said as the waitress, an anemic-looking thirtyish woman dressed all in pink, refilled our coffee cups.
'Why would I?'
'Not the professional stuff, the trappings. But the patients. Talking to so many different kinds of people, getting to know them on that level.'
'I'm not sure I did, in any real sense. There's this kind of call-and-response involved-'
'You hear what you listen for.'
'Right. And they figure out their side of it, what they're supposed to say. The good ones catch on right away, the others take a while. But sooner or later they all get there.'
She poured milk into her coffee, which she had not done with the first two cups, and absentmindedly watched it curdle. I signaled the waitress, who brought another of the small stainless steel pitchers, the same ones they used for pancake syrup.
'Maybe I'll reach that point,' Tracy said. 'You did try to warn me about social work, after all.'
'And like most warnings-'
'Exactly. But for now I like what I'm doing. I believe in it.
What she was doing, aside from the consultations, was working with disturbed children. 'Troubled teens,' she had said. 'Put it that way, it sounds like something out of Andy Griffith, they'd meet in the church basement, have cupcakes, and talk about how no one likes them. When what were talking about is kids who torture and kill the family pet, lock parents in basements, set fire to the house. I had one last month. Thirteen. A cutter. Couldn't get her to say a thing the whole hour-not that that's a big surprise. But then when she gets up to leave she says, What's the big deal? It's just another cunt, that's all. I'm just opening it for them.''
Tracy had a warning of her own for me, about the gauntlet I'd be running. It would start with Sergeant Christopher Van Zandt, a man so devoutly incompetent that a new position had been created expressly to keep him-
'Out of harm's way?' I ventured.
'Out of the department's way.'
He was, she said, continuing education and informations officer.
'And whose nephew?'
'We're not quite sure. But he is a man in love with the sound of his voice, and no subject has yet been broached, be it deciduous trees or Polynesian dances, about which he did not know everything there was to know.'
'I believe we've met.'
'I'm sure you have.' She smiled. 'Many times.'
As I said, sometimes you just can't help yourself. With my remark about management, Van Zandt's locution ratcheted up a notch or two, tiny I?'s exploding in the air directly before his lips, t's clipped as though by shears. Complex sentences, dependent clauses, dramatic pauses-the whole nine yards.
Finally, having survived the sally, not to mention those l?'s, we were passed along to someone who actually knew something. About the situation, that is.
'I suspect we won't be seeing one another again,' Sergeant Van Zandt said in the last moments, to make it clear we were done. He stood and extended his hand. 'It's been a pleasure.'
I looked at him closely. There were two people shut away in there, each with only a nodding acquaintance of the other.
We found George Gibbs in the break room staring into a cup of coffee as though everything might become clear once he reached the bottom. Periodically sweaty officers walked through from the workout room adjacent. Gibbs's mug was flecked with tiny paste-on flags and read WORLD'S BEST DAD. A gift from his kids, he told us-two weeks before his wife packed up and moved them all off to Gary-fucking-Indiana.
George, it seems, played bass with country bands, which had become increasingly a cornerstone for the
