One Foot Off the Gutter (15 page)

Three shots tore into the silence. There was another moment of quiet, then the lights went on in every nearby building. A dozen windows were opened; citizens' heads sprang out like jack-in-the-boxes.

 

I lay on my back at the bottom of the driveway, flexed my fingers and wriggled my legs. Nothing was broken, a minor triumph. French fries, sanitary napkins, and baby diapers were hanging from my uniform. I peeled a Kotex from my arm, growling in self-disgust.

Bellamy swung his pistol around in a circle. He stalked down the lip of the driveway, leap frogging forward in a combat ready position. He kept his finger on the trigger, ready for anything.

“Would you give me a hand,” I croaked.

Bellamy's ears perked up. I knew what he was thinking: the enemy was everywhere. There were only a few cops to hold back an ocean of assholes. You had to expect to get shot. You had to think quickly or you'd get smoked. Bellamy laid the cold barrel of the pistol against his chin. His gun could smell a criminal in the driveway. But regardless of what you wanted to call me, epithets included, I was not an asshole.

“Bells?”

“Coddy!”

“Would you fucking help me, you sonuvabitch?”

Bellamy ran down the driveway's apron, eager to aid me. He found me, got down on one knee, and extending
a hand, he pulled me to my feet. We stood face to face, ankle deep in the trash. Bellamy plucked a hamburger bun from my sleeve. He let the bun fall to the ground. Both of us looked at it.

Something had gone wrong again. Our work was often like that. We couldn't find enough gas for the squad car. We didn't have an adequate supply of bullets for our post-Vietnam war-era revolvers. The assholes were gaining the upper hand in the Mission. There was another wage cut due on the horizon. Cops were dying every day. The flag above the station was always at half mast. In a city where no one cared about us, where we were barely tolerated by the climate of liberalism, we had nobody but each other.

I wasn't too pleased with myself, but that was nobody's business but my own. Bellamy seemed confused. He wanted to put his arms around me and hug me. I had seen him do that with other cops, but I wasn't someone you could reach out and touch that easily. You had to disarm me first.

“What in the name of living fuck happened, Coddy? Maybe this isn't the most opportune time to ask you a question like that, I don't know.”

“Opportune? What's that mean? If you're gonna talk to me, Bellamy, speak English. Say something I can understand.”

“Look at this shit. This is ridiculous. Coddy. You are seriously blowing it. You'd better get a grip on yourself, or you're gonna end up on psychological disability leave. You know what'll go down then, don't you? You'll be humiliated. You'll be asked to leave the force. The captain will have to take your badge and gun away from you.”

Bellamy punctuated his nagging by sticking a finger into my paunch. I saw that as a green light to let off some steam. My partner had gone too far in criticizing me.

I shoved Bellamy in the chest and without thinking, he threw a roundhouse punch at my face. I parried the blow, gave him a sharp left jab in the ribs. Both of us fell over into the garbage. I rolled over on top of him and swung a fist at his jaw, missed, banging my hand off the side of Bellamy's riot helmet. It hurt like hell, getting worse when Bellamy jabbed me between the legs with a stiffened thumb.

I wasn't going insane. I had a plan. I was moving in the right direction. He elbowed me twice in the belly, sending jet lightning trilling up my spine.

“You had enough, Coddy?” Bellamy gasped.

“Nope, I haven't,” I replied.

A solitary dog began to howl in a nearby backyard. The poor animal listened to our scuffling and had decided to sing along with it. A hellacious melody that made my skin crawl. The creature trumpeted ill, as though our torment and all the afflictions in the Mission were heaped on its flea-bitten, ghetto-sagging back.

 

 

 

 

 

 

r
elax, Coddy. It's no big deal. We're tight right?” “Right.”

I could not argue with him, but I didn't know what was coming over me. A mood swing or a rapid descent into acute depression. Bellamy had punched me hard, as only friends with that privilege can. He'd knocked the wind out of me; not only out of my stomach, but out of my spirit. A gob rose in my throat and jumped past my tongue to the back of my mouth to exactly where the sinuses met the bridge of my oft-broken nose. Then it leaped into the space behind my eyes. I really didn't believe it was happening to me. Alice cried all of the time, but not me.

This was the worst thing a policeman could do.

My hands crossed over my face so Bellamy couldn't see me. But it was too late: I wasn't hidden enough. The first sob smashed through my defenses, shaking the jelly belly constricted by the garrison belt. I snapped my head
against the steering wheel. I gripped the dashboard with both hands.

The second gust of tears had me kicking the underside of the radio. The third wave burst like a plague, bringing more water from my eyes, more mucus from my nose, and spit from my mouth. The bib of my combat overalls was viscous with fluid. I squirmed in the bucket seat, half conscious of the image I was presenting to Bellamy.

I also saw two pieces of a riddle.

The first part affirmed life; sometimes savory and sometimes enigmatic. But when I felt the hummingbird of defeat in my chest under the bulletproof vest; that part of me belonged to death.

Freedom was a lonely thing. It didn't surprise me that most people refused it. Death was a voracious beast that roamed inside my ribcage, trying to get at the hummingbird. It made me speculate about which part would grow stronger.

Since the squad car was parked on Mission Street, I couldn't help but look through the windshield at the dozen conservatively dressed Salvadoreño men standing in front of Hunt's Donuts with their thumbs hooked into their belt loops. They looked back at me and saw a cop with a tear-stained face. Newspapers, cigarette butts, potato chip bags and donut crusts were tangoing with the wind on the sidewalk, eddying around the curb at the intersection.

“You okay now, Coddy?”

“Yeah, I'm all right. Thanks for askin'.”

“Any time, man, you know that.”

One thing was for certain: the world was a puzzle where I knew an answer. One day many years from now after I had collected my memories, my victories and defeats, the moments when I'd controlled and lost my own destiny, I would put them aside or hand them over to my surviving family members. Then I would pass away. This was not a problem. It was the other part that was a hassle. I did not know how to live as to insure the success and the presence of those memories. I just didn't know how I was going to live until the end, until that other, final part began.

 

 

 

 

 

 

t
he doctor parked the Volvo, and looked into the rearview mirror. Satisfied that every strand of his pony tail was tied back, he snatched his briefcase from the front seat and jumped out of the car. A sensation of almost unnatural ebullience was moving through him.

What was it about, he didn't know. His work hadn't gone any better than usual. He'd spent the morning treating three local men for gunshot wounds. Two of the men had twelve-gauge buckshot lodged in their backs. The third man's face was studded with pellets; a line of them were buried across his nose and both cheeks.

The doctor had picked at the small pods of skin that puckered over their wounds. He dug at the buckshot with a pair of needle-thin forceps. It was strange how the pellets vanished under the surface of the skin. They'd burrowed into the flesh with a vehemence that bordered on sentient.

What was stranger was how stoic the men were about
their plight. They'd been found by the police wandering around Garfield Park. They refused to talk about what had happened. The police assumed they'd gotten caught up in a spoiled drug deal; that's why they were handcuffed to their chairs in the emergency room.

They'd accepted the doctor's ministrations with fatalistic calm. One of them would say a joke in Spanish. The other two would smile. The doctor wiped away the blood from the pellet holes in their bodies. He covered their wounds with an antiseptic gel and a swathe of bandages. They represented the revenge of the empire. Their faces reminded the doctor that things were going to get worse before they'd improve.

 

He dashed up the front stairs through the door and breezed into the living room, greeting everybody with a wave of his hand.

“Hey, everybody! What's up? I got off early for a change.”

Patsy's mom was sitting in an easy chair. She was twirling a swizzle stick into the bottom of a highball glass.

“What do you know?” she said. “Here's our son.”

Daf was standing by the fireplace, nursing a water glass filled with straight gin. “Well, look at what the cat dragged in.”

“Give him a drink. He looks like he could use one.”

Having said that, Patsy sauntered into the living room carrying a tray laden with corn chips and a dish of green salsa. When it came to cuisine, the girl was from Missouri, but she was learning about California.

“Here you go, honey,” Patsy's mom said. “You can have my drink.”

The old woman made a petulant gesture with her mouth, letting everyone see that she was sober enough to know she was drunk.

“Thanks, mom,” the doctor sighed.

He set down his briefcase on the Navajo rug and sprawled back on the couch. He kicked off his tasseled loafers and grabbed the glass his mother-in-law handed him. He stuck his nose into the drink. A quarter moon of lipstick was enameled on its rim. He sniffed it and not surprisingly, he found the highball smelled like her perfume. He took a sip and discovered the drink was strong, the way he liked it.

“Tastes great,” he smiled.

“Most alcohol does,” Daf twinkled.

“I wouldn't know about that,” his wife said.

Patsy leaned over and put the tray down on the coffee table.

“What are we having for dinner?” her mother asked.

“We're having pan fried chicken,” Patsy replied.

“With mashed potatoes and gravy?” Daf grinned.

“And corn biscuits, snap greens and cream gravy,” Patsy said with modesty.

“With molasses in the corn bread?” Daf cackled.

“And chocolate ice cream for dessert,” Patsy said.

“That's just marvelous,” her mother burped.

Daf licked his lips and thanked his daughter. Patsy kneeled down on the other side of the coffee table, and dipped a few chips into the salsa. She did that several
times without tasting them, looking up at the doctor as if she was seeing him for the first time that evening.

“How did work go today?”

“The same as yesterday. Lots of craziness in the emergency room. It's becoming a way of life for me.”

Before he could say more, Patsy got to her feet. “Dinner will be ready in a half hour. Can you hold on?” she asked.

She turned around and sashayed back into the kitchen. The doctor held his drink, unaware of it. Something was going on, but he didn't know what it was. This caused a knot of tension to dance on his forehead.

On top of that, a deranged smile was ripping Daf's tanned face in half. It was the gestalt of a Frankenstein whose eyes, nose and mouth had been put back together by a scientist on a Singer sewing machine.

The doctor put his drink on the coffee table, conscious of a fluttering sensation in his thorax near his heart. Without calculating the effect of what he was saying, he blurted, “Was Patsy always like this?”

It was the wrong thing to say. Mom's posture hardened in the easy chair. Daf assumed a stony silence. Their character armor became impenetrable to the doctor. He needed to be quick witted around them, to make swift, clever repartees, and always never get too personal.

“Was she always like what?” the old lady said disingenuously.

She studied her fingernails, flinching when she came across the nubbin of a cuticle. She navigated the offending finger toward her half opened mouth and nibbled at it.

“You know. Efficient.”

Daf did not hide his contempt.

“Do you have a problem with our Patsy's behavior? If you do, you'd better put it out there on the table where we can deal with it.”

The doctor looked at Daf, and saw the seams on his father-in-law's face were filled with a desire to commit manslaughter. Whatever Daf was, he was a man who did not suffer wimps kindly.

“I didn't mean anything like that,” the doctor said. “I'm actually pleased, believe me.”

“Why don't we change the subject,” his mother-in-law said flatly.

“Good idea,” Daf enthused. He banged his glass down on the fireplace's mantelpiece. “That's the best damn thing I've heard all day.”

 

Standing there on the porch minutes before dinner, just to get away from Daf, the doctor gazed at the abandoned building next door. The dump reminded him of the patients he saw in the emergency room. Every one of them acted like the world owed them a favor. The doctor had found out from experience these clients were not easy to treat.

The abandoned building not only reminded him of the people in the emergency room, it reminded him of the homeless in the Mission, too. Their numbers were remarkable. They'd sprung up overnight like a fungus. There had to be a mistake, some kind of mathematical imbalance. There were buildings everywhere. How some
people managed to find themselves outside the orbit of shelter and in the streets, was beyond the doctor's comprehension. But there it was, a permanent culture of eviction in his own backyard.