by Tracy Barone
“I told you it was worth it,” he says.
Because you’re worth it. Was that a shampoo commercial, some bullshit statement that was all Go, woman, go, but at the same time saying, As long as you cover those grays? You’re worth it. Something Taya might say once Cheri tells her she hooked up with a random guy she met at her vet’s. A guy who belts back the booze despite being self-proclaimed sober. She may be hungover but she doesn’t miss a beat.
Skipperdee, it turns out, is exactly where she left him, curled up on a white pillow on the white couch, shedding gray fur. He meows when they call his name but doesn’t get up. They peel off their wet jackets and Sonny sets about building a fire in the living room while she putters in the kitchen, putting food out for the cat. Funny how jobs divide up in coupledom. How much was in Michael’s column that’s now in hers? One of his last sentences was “Remember to call the chimney sweep!” She has not yet followed through.
“Where are you?” Sonny says, handing her a beer.
“I’m here.” As soon as the food is opened they plate it and carry everything they need to the table by the fire in the living room. Cheri eats ravenously—this was definitely worth the trip in what’s now pouring rain.
“Okay, I can’t eat another bite,” she says, pushing her plate away, feeling relaxed.
“There it is again.”
“What?”
“Your smile. It’s crooked, but it’s there.”
“I smile. It’s not like I don’t smile.”
“You’ve got a lot of looks, but it’s hard to know what you’re thinking. I bet you’ve used that to your advantage.” She purses her lips into a bit more of a smile. Sonny eyes what’s left on her plate. “You going for that or can I?”
“All yours,” she says. He stabs a shrimp with his chopstick. Cheri looks out the window; the sky is dark and foreboding; the rain is starting to come down harder. “It’s getting apocalyptic out there. People in LA always seem to be putting sandbags out or fighting fires or dealing with earthquakes. Why do people pay all this money to live where the land is most unstable?”
“Unpredictable is more interesting,” he says with his own crooked smile.
“I thought we were talking about weather.”
“Are we? Then bring on the zombie apocalypse. If it’s going to end, might as well go out raging against the dying of the light. Unfortunately, all my end-of-the-world provisions are in storage,” he says.
“Don’t tell me you’re one of those guys with a homemade bomb shelter…”
“Let’s say I have good survival skills, thanks to my second stepdad sending me away to wilderness training for fucked-up kids. You think cooking over a fire pit is roughing it, this was hard core. We had to eat rattlesnake and bugs, whatever we could find. Or starve. You know how hard it is to skin a rattlesnake with your bare hands when you’re ten?” She wonders if that’s even possible. “After the quake in ’94 I got a bit extreme, I’ll admit it, with the freeze-dried food and emergency generators.”
“So you’re saying you have sandbags.”
“Correct. But if there was a tsunami or major disaster I’d be way unprepared. Bad news about being homeless means you can’t carry generators and stockpiles of munitions around with you.”
“You don’t need stockpiles.”
“Depends on how many zombies we’re going to be fighting. That’s why you have this?” He puts his hand on the top of her gun tattoo.
“That’s kind of personal,” she says.
“I think we veered into the realm of personal when my tongue was on your pussy,” he says. “But I don’t mean to pry.”
“I got it in a former life.”
“Former life, former boyfriend. You got fucked up and got matching tattoos. I know the drill.”
“We were cops.” She cracks open the Macallan she’s glad she remembered to bring.
“Unexpected.”
“That’s what a lot of people said at the time,” she says, pouring them each a whiskey.
“So back up. You said you taught religion. Was that before or after being a cop? Was this in Chicago or New York?”
“The eighties, New York. In the housing projects. On the Lower East Side.”
“You are definitely an interesting woman. I don’t trust anything linear. Why did you become a cop?”
She considers what to say. “Probably because I knew it would piss off my parents. I wanted to get as far away from them and their world as possible.”
“And did you?”
“Mission accomplished,” she says, taking a drink.
“I worked with guys straight out of Compton; I can imagine it must have been pretty hard core in the projects in the eighties. And as a woman? Was pissing off your parents worth it?”
“Okay, maybe that wasn’t the only reason,” Cheri says. “I did have some ideas about making a difference.”
“So tell me about the guy out there with the same tat. You were in love with him?” She’d been married for ten years and yet when she thinks of being in love, she goes back to Eddie Norris.
Whether it was the rain or the hangover or being properly fucked for the first time in ages, Cheri found herself telling him things that, in all the years of marriage to Michael, she had never revealed. She started with her first months on the job. Told him about the harassment; opening her locker to find bloody Tampax or, once, some rotting fish. Cops calling her Kike Dyke and Bagel Bitch. How she had the highest scores in her police academy class but wasn’t put in rotation; couldn’t get in a car or foot patrol because females were girls first, cops second. Until Eddie Norris. “He came from a SEU narcotics division up on One Hundred and Twelfth Street; he made twenty collars a month. A hundred hours of overtime—he barely slept he worked so much. He was a solution looking for a problem; everyone wanted to be his friend. Most guys in that position were walking egos. But not him. He got along with everyone. And he wasn’t afraid he’d look like less of a man because he was letting a rookie female actually do the job. A lot of cops wanted to be in Alphabet City then; dope deals took place on nearly every corner, out of cinder-block holes in the walls of abandoned buildings. The projects were an urban blight, drug dens built into broken-down tenements. It was a hotbed, you always felt like something was about to explode, and usually it did. I know, you think adrenaline rush, power trip…”
“I think you said you lived there. The good-cop part,” Sonny says. Cheri thinks of Yure’s grandson in the wheelchair. She and Eddie had found the gangbanger who did that and put him away.
“There was that. I wouldn’t have gotten on that beat if it wasn’t for Eddie. He was comfortable in his skin at a time when I wanted to jump out of mine. He didn’t give a shit what people thought. People were always busting his balls about his car—this piss-yellow Mazda—but he didn’t care. He loved it.”
“And he loved you. Not that I’m equating you with a piss-yellow Mazda.”
“Yeah, we had something…a real connection.”
“So what was it? I’m not going to go for the easy, cop-on-cop sex. You said fuck you to your parents and joined the police force and here was a guy who I’m assuming was the total opposite of anyone you’d grown up with…”
“No. Well, no and yes.” She might have been running away, but she was also running toward something. “I guess you could say Eddie Norris caught me. He stopped me, allowed me to let down and just be myself. He accepted me.” She looks around in search of what is just now sinking in as being the heart of what went so right and then so terribly wrong in their relationship. “I felt safe,” she admits. Sonny gives her a knowing nod.
“So why did it end?”
“The truth?”
“No,” he says, “I want a lie. Your choice, given there’s no way I’m going to know the difference.”
Should she tell about that night? What sent her running back to Eighty-first Street to barricade herself in her room in a tailspin of shock and heartbreak? She had never spoken about it to
anyone. Eddie Norris banging on her apartment door. Insistent. The last time he’d done that, he’d taken her and fucked her from behind over the bathtub. The clear plastic shower curtain pressing against her face, like Saran Wrap, like silk. That was a fantasy. They’d done some role-playing but part of their cop-on-cop sex was they’d seen enough darkness to never let it go too far. She’d thought maybe he was going for a repeat.
“He was dressed all in black like he was going to a bridge-and-tunnel club. He said, ‘Get dressed,’ and I knew it was something serious. He followed me into the bathroom. I was wearing a white tank top, stretched out to the tips of my knees, brushing my teeth. My mouth was full of toothpaste and I didn’t even have time to spit,” she says.
“It’s always the little things that stick in your memory,” Sonny says. The little things, the cards Eddie laid on the table: coiled wire, a yard of heavy chain link, a switchblade, twelve-inch hunting knife, assault rifle, nightstick, stun gun.
“He pulled them out of his boot, from underneath his coat. There were no questions asked or answered. We’d all heard that a cop was killed during a buy-and-bust; the perp shot him in the head. The cop was an old friend of Eddie’s, guy named Tobin. We’d hung out with him and his girlfriend, a nurse, a few times. It was a different world back then, before Rodney King, before Louima and the plunger. Crack was new to the city and hit the projects like a Mack truck. We were in the middle of a war zone. The mentality was good guys versus bad guys. We were the good guys and were going to win. There was always collateral damage,” she says and looks at Sonny. “Sounds like you’ve seen some of that.”
“Indeed I have,” he says.
“Someone’s kid, an innocent person in the wrong place at the wrong time. But if a cop was killed? One of us? That was personal. We handled that on our own. The sergeant let us off in shifts, fixed things so the people who needed to be out looking could do it quietly.”
Sonny listened. He smoked three, maybe four cigarettes all the way down to the filter, each time waiting until she paused before he lit up the next one.
Eddie Norris invited her to cross the threshold that night, to become part of the pack, the tribe of men. The others were waiting for them in the street below her apartment.
“It was two or three a.m. The four of them had been at it for twenty-four hours without sleep; they were hopped up on caffeine, maybe a little blow off the back of a hand. Johnson was the youngest, not too far out of high school. He was shifting from foot to foot trying not to let on that he was nervous. McTieg and Rayner were veterans; they weren’t expecting me and weren’t happy about it, but they couldn’t say anything because of Eddie. They all had a mantra: Someone’s going to pay for this, that scumbag who did it is going to pay.” Stalking Alphabet City like hungry wolves, going to crack houses, drug corners, whores and jacked-up cars and a boom box thumping. It was an indigo night, that quality of darkness that’s more blue than black lit occasionally by the street lamps in the projects blinking on and off; broken glass, bullet holes in the windows. They’d done walkabouts like this a thousand times, moving from outside refuse to inside refuse. The reek of piss in the hallways, vomit and spilled malt liquor, needles and vials crunching underfoot. “We went to a couple of places, looking for our usual informants, following a lead Eddie had. The shooter was a twenty-one-year-old Puerto Rican male, spider tattoo on his neck, wearing a red hoodie—we were going off a witness ID. Nothing was turning up.” Frustration spread through their systems; they strode through the derelict tent city of Tompkins Square Park with tight mouths and loud fists. McTieg slammed his foot into a cardboard tent, causing it to collapse and sending cockroaches that could use a leash skittling out. “What you doing, man,” and then deep moans from underneath the debris while he kept kicking. “Fuck, fuck you, motherfucker.”
“The tension ratcheted to a point where nobody said anything. Underneath the anger there was a deep sense of helplessness; if we couldn’t get a cop killer, what was the point of the job? Any one of us could have been Tobin. We got a tip that Red Hood’s girlfriend was in a crack den by the river. Crack spots weren’t hard to find—people lined up outside of them like they were handing out welfare cheese. Anyway, she turned up in the first one. Rayner grabs her by the throat, saying, ‘I’m going to choke the life out of you if you don’t tell me where he is.’ She didn’t have to because he was stupid enough to show up there. Someone spotted him as he was pushing his way through junkies. But he started running in the other direction as soon as he saw us.
“We chase after him. He ducks into the vacant lots by Tenth Street. It was this maze of junkyards with half-demolished buildings, rotting-out appliances—it looked like a bomb had gone off; streetlights had been shot or burned out. It was dark, lots of places to hide, so we split into pairs. I’m with Rayner, Eddie’s with Johnson, McTieg’s on his own. We’ve got our flashlights out and guns drawn when Eddie’s voice comes over the walkie-talkie; they’ve sighted him and are close behind.
“When Rayner and I get there, Red Hood’s climbing a chain-link fence. Eddie grabs his leg hard, pulls his shoe off. They get him down. He’s saying he didn’t do nothing, ‘I don’t know about shooting no cop, man.’” Was it then that McTieg smashed him in the face with his bully stick so hard he split him open like a Marlboro box, or had it taken a few minutes? She can’t remember time, only images: the topography of hate on Rayner’s face, his mouth as he shouted, “Fucking spic, eat shit, you PR motherfucker.” Saying it for all the times people had called him nigger, paying it forward to the next minority in line.
“The perp was bleeding from his mouth and nose, but his eyes were blank. He was spitting blood but kept saying, ‘You got it all wrong, it wasn’t me.’ They all say that. You can catch them red-handed and like children they say, ‘It wasn’t me.’ Eddie Norris was taunting him. ‘You feel like a big man, killing a cop,’ he screamed, spit flying out of his mouth, ‘you feel like a big man now?’ McTieg put his gun to Red Hood’s head and said no more bullshit. Eddie told me to cuff him, which I did, and then search him. He wasn’t armed and just as I found a joint, a dipper—meaning it was laced with PCP—Red Hood surged to his feet with the kind of crazy adrenaline you get from PCP and charged like a linebacker right at McTieg. He was cuffed. I don’t know where he thought he was going to go. He was like a bull. And that was it.” They were on him; fists and chains, grunts and curses.
“It was primal, like animals in a pack smelling blood. They fed off one another’s anger and righteousness. I felt the adrenaline, that rush of being on high alert and in fight mode. I was right there with them as they jostled and pushed to get at him, have their turn to kick the shit out of him. But then McTieg moved over and blocked me out. And in that moment I thought: What are we doing? The collective rage had everyone blind. They were in a circle. I was outside, watching, realizing just how fucked up it was.” Even now, she can smell the sweat of men in violent release, hear them wheezing and groaning in anger. She remembers McTieg putting his cigarette out on Red Hood’s arm, saying, “That’s for Tobin.”
Cheri glances at the fire in the fireplace; it’s burned down. The rain drums on the roof. Sonny hasn’t looked away from her the whole time. His elbows are on the table; he leans toward her and asks what she knew was coming.
“So what did you do?”
“Nothing,” she says heavily. “I did nothing.” She can see Red Hood’s fingers twitching. Then falling open, motionless.
“And he—” Sonny starts, but she cuts him off.
“Yes. He did.”
Sonny is still staring at her. His expression is unreadable.
“Afterward, everyone was shaking from the high. Johnson was high-fiving, but Eddie Norris took charge. We had to tell the same story and everyone had to calm down. He laid the whole thing out. The perp was high on PCP and resisted arrest, attacked officers with deadly intent. As long as you could explain it on paper, you could pretty much do anything you wanted.
“I ha
d to do the report because I had the lowest rank. And something was bothering me. Eddie was all, Just get this done, quick and easy. But I went back and checked Red Hood’s mug shot. His tattoo was on the right side of his neck. The witnesses all said the shooter had a tattoo on the left side. The closer I looked, the more I could tell we’d got the wrong guy. Red Hood was a criminal and a scumbag, but he wasn’t the guy who killed Tobin.”
“And you told Eddie.”
“I showed him. It was really clear. And he said, ‘Forget you saw this. We got the shooter, end of story.’ He took the file. I’m sure he destroyed it. And for him, that was the end of that. He went on like nothing had happened, started talking about where we’d go for a beer after work.”
“He rationalized it and you didn’t…”
“It was more than that. The thing is, I saw something in Eddie that night. I knew, deep down, that it was over then. I just didn’t want to admit it.” She hasn’t been able to admit what she saw that night, she realizes, until right now. “He was exactly like the rest of them, but in a way, he was worse. They were in the fog of rage, like what happens in war—all you care about is getting the enemy and you forget the enemy is a living, breathing person. You don’t know what someone is capable of in an extreme situation. We were trained to understand that. I couldn’t know how I’d react until I was there. But I saw something in his eyes that night. After I left the circle, Eddie looked back at me. And for a split second, I saw a glint of recognition. Like he saw what I saw. I’d like to think he was going to stop it. But when he looked at me again, his eyes were empty. The man I knew wasn’t in there. And then he turned around and hit Red Hood in the ribs with his nightstick.” Her throat constricts for a moment; she looks down. Sonny waits for her to continue. “I’d grown up convincing myself that I could be one of the guys. If I just proved myself, worked hard enough. Being a cop, I thought I’d found my people, my tribe. But that night showed me that I could never be one of them. And it made me question if I even wanted to be. I wasn’t built like that. I loved that job. But my ideas of justice—all of the right reasons I became a cop—were capsized. So I quit.”
