Trials of the Monkey

by Matthew Chapman

  It’s still light as Rocky, carrying a large wad of warrants to be served, leads me to his car, talking about eating. He has to eat a lot and frequently because of the lifting.

  Rocky was born in Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1960, but his mother was a Dayton native and when she split up with her husband in 1979, she decided to move back. Rocky came through a short while later on his way to Houston, Texas, where he was planning to work on the oil rigs. He stayed with his mother a couple of weeks and was impressed how friendly everyone was and how the town was so peaceful. When he got to Houston, he worked a few days hefting barrels, but didn’t like it, missed his mother, and decided to try life in Dayton. He worked seventeen years at the La-Z-Boy factory, serving as an auxiliary cop on evenings and weekends.

  Now he’s full-time, always working the night shift, seven to seven. His wife, his second wife, works at Long Johns, one of the eateries out along the highway. Between them they have three kids, two hers, one his. He has breakfast with them when he comes home, sees them off to school, then sleeps. In the afternoon, he runs errands, lifts some weights, and when the kids come back, he plays with them or helps with their homework. Around six, he eats one of his many meals in their company, kisses them goodnight, and hits the road.

  Our first stop is to check on a runaway girl whose parents have taken out a warrant on her, to try and get the courts to control her. As we’re driving up the hill, a pickup comes down toward us and stops. There are two men in the cab. The driver leans out.

  ‘Hey, Rocky, just saw a pair of shitheads in a red Chevy Camaro, you might wanna keep an eye out for ‘em.’

  Rocky talks to them for a while (they turn out to be off-duty fellow officers) then thanks them and we continue.

  ‘Is there an exact definition for “shitheads”?’ I ask.

  ‘shitheads,’ he explains, ‘is the term we use around here for the bad guys. Shitheads. Friday night. Lot of shitheads cruising around.’

  We pull up outside a house one step up from a trailer and moments later are joined by the parents of the runaway. She has not come back. They seem defeated almost to the point of indifference. Their daughter’s got a new boyfriend. The boyfriend’s a drug user … It’s a familiar tale. Rocky explains to them who to see at the courthouse, what their options are, and they thank him deferentially.

  Soon we’re back cruising around the county. It’s not the best night for serving warrants, not yet at least, because the shitheads are out drinking or doing whatever it is shitheads do of a Friday night in Dayton; but for me it’s an opportunity, a guided tour. The warrants lead us to the flickering satellites of crime and misadventure: a preacher whose wife has taken out a restraining order to stop him beating her; a man who keeps throwing rocks at local kids; another who refuses to pay rent. None are in. After each visit, Rocky rechecks his warrants, looking for one that might either end in success or provide some entertainment. There’s been a dispute in the Little League Football team. One of the VPs of the team, a woman, needs to be served a warrant to appear in court where the matter will be settled. An ex-beauty queen from some local contest, she has long blonde curly hair and is in consequence known as ‘Little Mermaid.’ She lives in a nice middle-class home up in the hills. But she’s not in either.

  We get a call directing us to a neighbourhood across the tracks, Morgantown, a domestic dispute. We cross back over the highway, bounce over the tracks, weave along sunset streets, and soon find ourselves in what can only be described as a rural slum. Decaying one-storey wooden houses with peeling paint behind chain-link fences. Dirty children playing among cars rusting in the yards and on the street. Even the trees look dusty and worn out.

  The windshield of the car becomes like a camera or a telescope, no longer a frame through which you idly gaze, but something purposive with which you seek. I find myself watching differently, hoping to see something Rocky misses, a figure running off alongside a house, the red Camaro. It’s strange how quickly the instinct takes root.

  Many people are outside in the heat, lounging around, drinking, playing with the children, but we’re still a hundred yards away when I know the house we’re going to. A couple in the yard, two children, a tableau of aggrieved shock.

  We pull up and Rocky gets out. I follow, slightly behind, face expressionless. A woman in her late twenties, prematurely faded, once attractive, bad teeth. A man in a baseball hat and jeans, ginger hair and beard, shirt off. Both are moderately drunk. Two boys: one a five-year-old, already with dark resentful eyes, the other under two, in diapers and nothing else, no shoes, no shirt. The younger child’s filthy skin is covered in red dots, like small bites. On his shoulder is a red mark about the size of an adult hand.

  The woman shows Rocky a similar mark on her neck running up toward her ear, through which, she claims, she can no longer hear. Her ex-husband has been down here trying to pick up the smaller of the kids, his son, but he was drunk and hit them both when she disputed custody. Rocky tells her the smacking is a domestic matter and as he didn’t see it, she has to swear out a warrant if she wants to prosecute him for assault or get a restraining order. Meanwhile, he’ll go in search of Dave (although that’s not his name) to get his side of the story.

  We turn the car around and drive up a track toward Dave’s mother’s house. Dave is a regular down at the jail, Rocky tells me, that’s how it goes, the same band of petty miscreants circling through. We’ve been driving around for about an hour since we left the jail, and something’s changing in me. At first I was afraid, wary, hoping nothing bad would happen; but now there’s a different feeling. I have begun to feel the power.

  You drive down a bad street and it’s as if you’re invisible. No one looks in your direction, yet everyone is acutely aware of you. It’s respect, it’s fear, it’s fun. And now, suddenly, I’m hoping there’s going to be some trouble, some resistance, no guns, please, but something, some minor altercation which will reveal the extent of the power. I’m ready to hit someone if I have to. (Preferably after Rocky’s softened them up a little first.)

  We’re on a dirt road overhung with tall trees clattering with cicadas and now there he is up ahead in the waning light, Dave, pale-skinned, stumbling along, jeans at his hips, shirt off, scrawny as a boy. He has long dirty blond hair hanging out of a baseball hat. He looks back, sees us coming, but does not run. Rocky stops the car and gets out. Dave grins involuntarily up at him. A narrow face, more bad teeth.

  ‘Hey there, Rocky,’ he says.

  ‘Hey,’ says Rocky, keeping a little distant, unafraid but ready. ‘So what’s been happening?’

  Dave explains he’s just come out from five weeks in the slammer. It was not his turn to take the kid, but he figured as he’d missed five weekends, his ex-wife might bend the rules a little.

  ‘Yeah, well maybe she might have but you’re drunk and you shouldn’t have hit her,’ says Rocky. ‘I’m going to have to take you in.’

  ‘But I just got out, Rocky …’

  ‘I know it.’

  ‘Oh, man, do I have to go back in again?’ he pleads, but clearly without expectation of success.

  ‘’Fraid so. You know how it goes. Drunk in public. No way ’round it.’

  For a moment Dave seems to be figuring the odds. Make a run for it?

  ‘Tell you what,’ offers Rocky, ‘take the P.D. and I’ll overlook the domestic violence.’ (P.D. stands for public drunkenness.)

  ‘Thanks, man,’ says Dave.

  ‘Get in the car,’ Rocky tells him, opening the back door.

  ‘Ah well, shit happens,’ says Dave as he slides into the back seat, uncuffed, compliant, and unaware that the offer Rocky made him has no value. It’s the ex-wife who has to press charges on the domestic matter, not Rocky.

  Rocky and I get in the front of the car and Rocky turns it around.

  ‘Yeah, shit happens,’ Dave repeats from the back.

  ‘Yep,’ says Rocky.

  ‘I just got out, now I’m going back in.’ He shakes
his head. How do these things happen to him?

  ‘Ah well,’ says Rocky, giving no lecture.

  ‘How come there’s no door handles back here?’

  ‘That’s so you don’t jump out,’ Rocky tells him.

  ‘Makes sense,’ laughs Dave.

  Rocky initiates a conversation about some relatives of Dave’s. It’s amiable, the gossip of a small community, but an ever-growing database is refined in Rocky’s head, a picture of the town, connections that might prove useful at a later date.

  We arrive back at the jail and take Dave in. He sits down in the narrow, congested booking area, and lights a cigarette.

  ‘Not you again,’ says the jailer with the wooden leg.

  Dave holds to his philosophy. ‘Shit happens.’

  ‘Shit happens if you’re stupid,’ says the jailer.

  Dave laughs. ‘Guess so.’

  We return to the car.

  Crrkkk! A radio message: A grandmother has called the station to rat out her grandson who, she believes, just went into the woods to access his dope stash and is currently out delivering in a white Pinto.

  Rocky finds some rock music on his regular radio and the chase is on. The kid used to be okay, Rocky tells me, but his father got shot dead in a bar fight and now his son’s gone bad, drugs, threatened to kill someone.

  Hm, I’m thinking, maybe I don’t want to catch this particular shithead after all …

  It’s dark by now and we are back in Morgantown, looking left and right down side streets, when suddenly a massive form looms up ahead of us: a pure-bred Cherokee woman weighing in at 300 pounds, not including her front teeth, which she must have left somewhere else because they certainly aren’t in her mouth.

  Rocky tells me she’s the street mama, a half-ton vigilante who watches over the neighbourhood and often calls the police.

  Rocky asks if she’s seen a white Pinto come through.

  ‘No, ain’t seen no white cocksucker Pinto. Why?’

  Rocky tells her who he’s looking for.

  ‘Oh, that pussy-assed little bitch motherfucker. He come around here, I’ll call you.’

  ‘Okay,’ says Rocky. ‘Thank you.’

  When I ask if I can take her photograph, she tells me, ‘No, you can’t take no Indian’s picture, you be stealing our spirit.’

  We drive on. Sometimes signals from cellular and mobile phones bleed onto the police scanner. It’s the ears of the night patrol, shards of existence vacuumed out of the dark atmosphere. To me, even the dullest of conversations seem sacred and revealing when they detonate inside our travelling shell. ‘You know how I like ham, well my dawg just stole two slices,’ says a voice. Then in quick succession: ‘We’re just gonna have to pray harder.’ ‘Hell, I’m having mah baby tomorrow, I don’t have time to visit wid you.’ Now we hear two men talking. One of them is so wasted we can barely understand him. We look around but there are many houses nearby and one looks no more degenerate than the next.

  One evening, Rocky tells me, he was driving along a street when he heard a woman’s voice. ‘There’s a cop going by,’ it said. ‘He’s a good-looking young thing, I wouldn’t mind fucking him at all.’ Rocky looked around and saw an attractive woman of about forty sitting on her stoop, talking into a mobile phone. ‘Oh, he’s looking at me,’ she said. ‘Yeah, I could sure take this boy …’

  As we rise up out of Morgantown, we hear a young woman’s voice break in, sexy and inviting. ‘You come on by here, you know where I am.’

  ‘What time should I get there?’ It’s a young man’s voice, anxious and excited.

  ‘Well, I’m free now, so why don’t you get your ass up here right now?’

  We’re in a low-rent development and Rocky thinks we might be getting a signal from the town’s white hooker, a pretty woman in her late twenties who’s reputedly selling pussy to the fifteen-, sixteen-year-old boys for $30 to $35 a pop.

  We drive past a safe house for battered women and then past some young black males who say, but with neither aggression nor fear, ‘There’s Five-O!’ a reference to the old TV police show ‘Hawaii Five-O.’

  Now, looking out the front, we see three black teenage girls standing on the corner. Rocky pulls over.

  One of them is without doubt the best-looking person I’ve seen in Dayton, dark-skinned with huge eyes and an astonishing smile. I think to myself, no wonder a lot of black men oppose integration. Who in their right mind would want to deflate these lips or flatten these fine buttocks or lighten this blue-black skin or in any other way dilute this phenomenal beauty?

  Rocky talks easily to the girls about a friend of theirs who called him a while back to enforce a restraining order on her boyfriend. She swore she’d never see the man again. Now she’s pregnant by him and they’re living together. If there’s any racial tension here it’s not apparent. If there’s any tension at all, it’s that these women are so refreshingly free of the prudishness of the Lord-be-with-you white girls, it takes your breath away. It’s all laughter and flashing eyes and thrust. It’s amazing in fact, how different they are. The white girls down here who dress provocatively do so with an almost spiteful defensiveness: how dare you look at me!? There’s nothing like that here, no hypocrisy and surely no shame: for these girls the body is a source of simple joy and amusement.

  Passing by my window is the biggest of them. She has two horse-size, gravity-defying cheeks packed into (and partially out of) a pair of tiny shorts. And she is flaunting them. Furthermore, this rump has the ability to talk. As it goes by, it bumps up and down and then suddenly it stops in mid-stride—like a double-take—and I hear it say to me, ‘So, little white boy, think you could handle this fine black wazoo?’ And now, catching my look, the owner of these taunting chubbies laughs raucously, the cheeks shudder back to life, dismiss me with a shrug—‘Uh-unnn, I don’t think so, mister!’—and pump off around the front to offer the same monumental challenge to Rocky. He waves them off laughing, and we leave.

  Rocky needs food. We’re almost at the Wendy’s when we get a call. An accident out on some country road. Now this I had not thought of and it scares me. I don’t want to see a scattering of limbs, gushing blood. I don’t want to hear someone yelling at me, ‘Put your finger in the hole!’ or ‘Hold his guts in!’

  Rocky switches on the siren and two sets of lights. One of these, the regular one, is on the top of the car. The other is a recently installed set that seems to be inside the car at the base of the windscreen. They’re like strobe lights and they’re so techno-bright and harsh and silvery they more or less blind you. It’s like driving a disco at seventy miles an hour. Rocky narrows his eyes and soon we’re doing ninety.

  Rocky doesn’t like road accidents either, he tells me, and recalls one where a child got run down in front of his father. The boy was decapitated and the father picked up the head and tried to put it back on the body, talking to it all the while, saying, ‘You’re gonna be okay, you’re gonna be all right.’

  We swoop off the highway. The narrow road ahead now becomes a swallowing intestinal tube of darkness down which we plunge at speed, the flying disco, and I’m feeling sick. Soon we see more flashing lights. Rocky pulls in behind an ambulance and several other cop cars. We’re not the first on the scene and the scene is not so terrible. A massive biker sits on the grass verge at the end of a 350-foot skid mark. The bike lies another 30 feet ahead like a full stop at the end of a long winding sentence. Beyond the verge is a ditch and a hedge.

  The biker is bloodied, grazed, but not gushing. His right shoulder is completely skinned and clearly hurts as he hefts himself up onto his knees and starts muttering about a ring he’s lost. He looks like a flayed hippo down there on all fours. The medics tell him not to move so he settles back onto his haunches, dazed. People start to emerge from unseen houses along the road. The atmosphere is almost festive. One of the locals is a tall, shirtless old man, thin but for a bulging white stomach. Sheriff Sneed arrives with his wife. He gets out and comes to stand
beside me as the biker is lifted onto a gurney.

  ‘This guy,’ he nods at the old man, who’s moved up next to us, ‘he’s always out here with his shirt off and a basketball in his tummy.’

  ‘Yeah,’ grins the old man, ‘I’m always hanging around without my shirt, it’s true. Just wish I could find some young people to molest.’

  Everyone laughs uneasily, including Sneed, who soon gets back into his car and drives off. Now, out of the darkness runs a stocky young man in shorts and nothing else, no shoes, no shirt. It turns out he’s the brother of the man who crashed. Having ascertained he’s still alive, the guy picks up the bike, which is mangled and covered in gasoline, and switches it on. To everyone’s amazement, it starts. The man rams it in gear with his big toe, and rides it away. Rocky and I hunt around for the ring for a while, and then give up. We return to town to see if Little Mermaid is home yet.

  She is, and she is indeed very pretty, with glittering vivacious eyes full of flirtation and the knowledge of her beauty. Her husband hovers in the doorway behind her, possessive and protective, as Rocky talks to her about a fired coach. Except for drunks everyone is polite and helpful if you’re a cop, attentive. There Rocky stands with his nine-millimetre Ruger at his hip, and there they stand on the lip of their home, so glad he’s out there culling shitheads for them. And how happy they are when he leaves, taking the faint aura of threat with him—everyone has secrets, a little pot in the bedside table, a taste of moonshine, a memory—and how good it feels to bolt the door and return to dinner, unbusted, confirmed: good citizens deserving of protection.

  Back in the car, Rocky shuffles his warrants. ‘Ah, here’s one that might be fun,’ he says, smiling. ‘Better do it before it gets too late.’ It’s a bad cheques warrant to be served on a woman named Sue (not her real name). ‘She’s a treat, last time I arrested her—it was a P.D. thing—she says to me, “Rocky, you wanna know what I think of you?” and then she lifts up her dress and pees all over my car.’

  We drive up a hill and approach a trailer park, a desolate gently sloping field. It’s filled with tilting, dented oblongs up on breeze blocks, some in rows, a few scattered around as an afterthought among the litter of slumped cars and pickups. Sue’s a crafty one, Rocky tells me. If he drives directly up to her trailer, which is one of the first, she’ll hide inside, not answer the door, and he won’t be able to serve her; but she’s into everyone else’s business, so if he drives past her trailer, as if going somewhere else, she’ll come out to see who’s in trouble, and then he’ll turn around and nab her.