The 37th Hour (19 page)

After spending most of his adult life in New Mexico, my father had tired of the cold winters and isolation of the high country and moved to Nevada, where his money would stretch even further than it had in the Southwest. In the desert sun of Nevada, his life savings bought him a condominium and some good times with a new girlfriend. The girlfriend (Shelly?) was a full ten years younger than him. That didn’t surprise me. My father had always been a very handsome man, and he had remained that way until the heart attack claimed him. Or so people in Nevada told me.

Sandy or Shelly had arranged for him to be buried in Nevada. There was no reason to take the body back to New Mexico. My mother wasn’t there; she was buried in Minnesota with her people. My brother, killed while serving in the army, had merited burial in a military cemetery with honors.

So my father was buried in a modern memorial garden on the outskirts of town, one of those where flowers too uniformly bright to be real decorate acres of sameness, and the grave markers, also alike, lie flush in the ground, hidden by green grass until you are nearly on top of them. As the nonsectarian chaplain said his few words under the canopy that shaded the coffin and mourners, I let my mind wander until one of my high heels pierced the overwatered turf and began to sink in, bringing me back to reality with a jolt.

One paper plate of food, forty-five minutes of small talk with my father’s friends and neighbors, and one long rental car drive later, and I was on my way back to Minneapolis again.

There wasn’t a spare seat in the coach section of the flight back. My fellow travelers seemed mostly to be retirees who’d been on gambling vacations, taking a break from Minnesota in January in the warmth of the West. As soon as we were in the air, the pilot got on the overhead and cautioned us, smooth-voiced, that the flights ahead of us were experiencing some “chop” from storms over the plains. The other pilots weren’t kidding. Fifteen minutes after his initial announcement, the pilot got back on the mike and told the two flight attendants to take their seats.

The plane bounced like a sled being pulled too fast over old snowpack that had turned to hard, uneven ice. The whole airframe made crunching, shuddering noises, bouncing hard enough to shake the wattle of the blue-haired old woman sleeping next to me.

I’m not afraid of flying, but that night I had a very odd feeling, one I’ve never had since. I felt completely adrift and out of control. I was surrounded by human beings, but they were strangers. I felt lost, as if up in this black stratum between clouds and stars not even God could know where I was. I looked hard out the window, hoping for city lights, anything that could give me a point of reference. There was none.

I hadn’t bought a real drink while I had the chance, and now I wanted one. For me it was always a physical craving that had two locations: I felt it under my tongue, and deep in my chest. I chewed the last cubes of ice from my Coke and felt a pang of regret when they ran out.

Had my mother lived, I was sure, we would have been close. She died when I was nine. My brother Buddy had been a bully, full of a sense of entitlement to whatever he wanted. Physical strength was the only thing he’d respected; at five years younger, I’d never had enough. My father, a long-distance truck driver, had slept in the main room of our trailer when he’d been at home, just so Buddy and I could have separate rooms. He never knew it, but he really needn’t have bothered.

It had been a great relief to me when Buddy, at 18, had joined the army and left home. My father saw it differently. He spent long stretches on the road, and felt that no 13-year-old girl could be ready to spend those days and nights alone, without the supervision of at least an older brother. He’d put me on a Greyhound for Minnesota, where my mother’s aunt still lived.

It was in Minnesota that I discovered basketball, or rather the coach discovered me, because at 14 I was head and shoulders above most of the girls in my class. I nearly lived at the gym after that, both in regularly scheduled team workouts and afterward, working to perfect free throws, striving for an absurd three-quarter-court shot. Just as a song can get stuck in your head, I sometimes heard a repeating loop of gym noise as I tried to fall asleep at night: the kinetic slamming of the ball against the hardwood floor, the shudder of the backboard, the squeaks of athletic shoes.

Everyone needs a place, and that was mine. Our team won a state championship in my senior year. There was a photo in our high-school yearbook from that night, one reprinted from one of the newspapers. It was taken just after the final buzzer, when in the midst of the celebration my co-captain, Garnet Pike, had literally picked me up in her arms, both of us laughing. Garnet was a little taller than me, and we’d all been hitting the gym hard that year. Even so, a second after the picture was snapped, we both fell, and I hit the court so hard the coach was afraid I might have fractured my tailbone. At the time I hadn’t felt a thing. Immortality ran in my veins that night; we were all untouchable.

UNLV came calling, and I went to play for them, but it was never the same. College didn’t suit me, and while I saw some action in games, it wasn’t much, not nearly enough to make me feel needed. I’d said nothing—to do otherwise would have looked like whining—but what ate at me was the feeling that I was at UNLV under false pretenses, that I wasn’t earning my place. Certainly my grades didn’t justify my presence on campus.

In the media guide for that season, I look unhappy, and you can see the ridiculous sheen I put in my hair as if to underscore the distance I felt from my clean-cut, ponytailed, or cornrowed teammates. The next year I let registration slide by without signing up for any classes, then wrote a letter to the coach, packed up, and went to find a series of dead-end jobs, my last, restless detour on the road to being a cop.

Buddy had died in a helicopter accident over Tennessee, the one that took the lives of thirteen servicemen. My father hadn’t believed me when I’d said I wasn’t leaving my police academy training to come home for the funeral. In his world, Buddy had been a noble hero; in his world, I’d loved and admired my brother as much as he did. He had continued to expect me until the very day of the service.

The night of Buddy’s funeral, I’d gotten home to find an eight-minute message on my answering machine. Outrage was my father’s main theme, some disappointment, some melancholy, but always returning to anger.

He had raised me single-handedly after my mother died, he said. He had never been drunk in front of me. And later, he’d never begrudged the checks he’d sent east for my support, while I’d never written him and rarely called. Finally, he’d segued into a paean to Buddy, the fallen hero, and that was when the tape ran out and cut him off.

It was too bad that the conversation was one-sided, because it was the last substantive one we’d ever had. I thought of picking up the phone and calling him. But I knew that he wouldn’t and couldn’t hear what I had to tell him about Buddy, the noble warrior. So in the end I hadn’t responded, and a long twilight had fallen on our relationship. Ultimately, if his girlfriend hadn’t gotten my address off an old Christmas card, I wouldn’t even have known about his death, nor been on a crowded bargain-carrier flight back from his funeral.

Landing at MSP, I felt relief at being on solid ground again, weariness from adrenaline letdown, and a desire for Seagram’s that had suddenly doubled. I had to take a cab home anyway, so there was no reason not to stop at the airport bar.

I was almost the only person in there. A bartender sliced up lemon wedges, her face faraway. A tall, lanky man with auburn hair nearly to his shoulders and two days’ growth of beard was drinking at the bar.

Instead of sitting at the bar as well, I’d taken a table against the wall, giving that man his privacy. Despite that, we kept looking at each other. Accidentally, it seemed. The TV turned a blank green face down at the bar, and there was no one else around, and it seemed like we didn’t really know where to put our eyes except on each other. Maybe we sensed in each other an equality of misery.

The man leaned forward and spoke to the bartender. She mixed up another whiskey and water like mine, more vodka for him. He paid and carried both drinks over to my table.

He was kind of good-looking; maybe a little too lean. I would have described his face as Eurasian, or maybe Siberian. His eyes had just a bit of slant to them, like the eyes of a lynx.

“I don’t want to intrude, but that dress looks like a funeral to me,” he’d said.

We introduced ourselves without last names. I was Sarah, just back from a family funeral; he was Mike, recently out of a “very brief, very wrong” affair. We didn’t expand on those circumstances. We didn’t talk about what we did for a living. Within twenty minutes he’d asked me how I was getting home.

He drove me to my place, a cheap studio in Seven Corners. Inside, I left my sober black funeral dress and stockings on the floor with his weather-beaten clothes and work boots.

These were my careless days, and I hadn’t been a stranger to the one-night stand. I always awoke just enough to hear the men get up to leave, but never opened my eyes, always feeling a sneaking, sorry sense of gratitude that they wouldn’t be there in the morning.

This one seemed to dematerialize from my bed; I never heard a thing. I would have felt my usual relief, but for one memory.

At the airport, we’d walked in silence to the short-term parking and he’d led me to his car, an old green Catalina.

“This is nice,” I’d said. “It’s got character.”

He didn’t say anything, and I turned around to look. He’d stopped and leaned up against a concrete pillar. His eyes were closed, his face lifted into the wind that came off the airfield, frigid January air scented with aviation fuel.

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

“Nope,” he’d said, his eyes still closed. “Just sobering up, so I don’t cash in our chips on the 494.”

I’d crossed to where he was, looking out at a Northwest plane climbing an invisible ramp of air into the night sky. And then I’d said something I didn’t even remember thinking first.

“I’ve outlived my whole family,” I said.

“God, I wish I had,” he said, and I was just drunk enough that it made me laugh, a surprised, giddy sound. He opened his eyes to look at me, and then he pulled me into his arms and held me, hard, his beard scratching my cheek.

It should have been all wrong in the etiquette of a one-night stand, way too intimate for the rules of hooking up without intimacy. But it didn’t bother me. It didn’t even surprise me. It eased a tight feeling in my chest that even Seagram’s hadn’t touched.

Genevieve and I worked out together, as was our custom, later that week. On this occasion our trip to the weight room was interrupted. We were walking near the basketball courts when a voice rang out.

“Hey, Brown!”

Genevieve stopped and turned, and I followed her example.

The man who’d yelled stood on the free-throw line, flanked by three other men, all younger than him. “Why don’t you introduce us to your friend!” he called.

“Those are all narcotics guys for the city-county task force,” Genevieve said, “except the really tall guy. That’s Kilander, a county prosecutor.”

She raised her voice. “You mean my
very tall
friend?” she yelled back. Then, to me again, “You want to meet them? They’re probably recruiting for some kind of team.”

Clearly, I saw, she was friendly with their ringleader, Radich, who up close resolved into a Mediterranean-looking man of Gen’s age with a rough-edged face and tired-looking dark eyes. Kilander was about six-five, with blond hair and blue eyes, polished and sincere-looking like an ex–farm boy turned news anchor. The other two were a lithe mid-height black man of my age, Hadley, and an ex-military–looking Scandinavian with a painfully short buzz cut and flat blue eyes, Nelson.

“This is Sarah Pribek. She’s a patrolwoman,” Genevieve said. “And more important, a state champion point guard in her high school days.”

The men exchanged smiles.

“So,” Genevieve continued, “why don’t you consider me her agent in negotiations for whatever crappy interagency team you’re putting together?”

“Putting together?” Radich said innocently. “We need some-one right now, to sub in. Nelson’s leaving. And you can play, too, naturally, Detective Brown.”

“Naturally my ass,” Gen said.

“Wait,” I interjected. “One guy’s leaving and two of us sub in?”

“I count as half a person or something,” Genevieve explained.

“No,” Radich said. “We were already playing three-on-two. Where the hell is Shiloh?”

“I’m here,” a new voice said.

Watching Genevieve joust with Radich, I didn’t even see him approach, returning from somewhere on the sidelines. I turned to look at the newcomer, and my throat worked involuntarily.

There wasn’t even a ripple of surprise in those lynx eyes, but I knew he recognized me. He was clean-shaven this day. I wanted to take my eyes away from his face and couldn’t.

Radich carried on with introductions. “Mike Shiloh, Narcotics, this is Genevieve Brown from the Investigations Division—”

“I know Genevieve.”

“—and Sarah Pribek, Patrol.”

“Hey,” he said.

“They’re going to play with us for a little while. Kilander got first pick last time, so you call it this time. Brown or Pribek.”

Genevieve looked at me and rolled her eyes at the foregone conclusion.

Shiloh’s gaze passed over both of us, then he looked at Genevieve and jerked his head in the direction of his teammate, Hadley. “Come here, Brown,” he said.

“Mike!” Hadley sounded disgusted. Radich flashed a mildly surprised look at Genevieve, who lifted both shoulders in a
search-me
fashion.

In all the confusion, I hoped nobody saw the shock of the insult register on my face. Kilander, the prosecutor, was the only unperturbed one; he flashed me a smile as though we had a great and sexy secret.

So that was how it stacked up. Genevieve darted gamely among us, with slow-footed Radich guarding her. Hadley did a pretty good job of covering Kilander, his speed counterbalancing Kilander’s height and skill. But really the game was all Shiloh and me.