There’s a slight rumble of laughter from the spectator galley above the set, where the twenty or thirty other recruits are watching us. I start to roll my eyes in embarrassment as the door swings open and a middle-aged cop, playing a citizen, sticks his head out. “Oh thank God, you’re here,” he says with convincing urgency. These guys really throw themselves into the roles, I notice.
“What seems to be the problem?” I say, stepping into the apartment and slipping into the old reliable social worker’s tone.
Meanwhile, my partner, Greg, is standing in the middle of the living room, screaming at three other people: “Get against the wall! I wanna see you all spread-eagle!”
“Easy, man,” I say. “Let’s just and out what’s going on from these people.”
Greg ignores me and looks toward the doorway to the back bedroom. A mean-looking Hispanic dude in shades comes out and snarls at him.
“Don’t gimme that!” Greg screeches hysterically. “Get up against the wall.”
“Calm down,” I say, turning to address the Hispanic guy, who’s already pointing and cursing me out in street Spanish. Another guy is shaking his fists at us and raving about how we’ve violated his constitutional rights. The testosterone level in the room has been rising steadily for the last minute. All the guys are shouting at us and acting fired up. It’s like standing in the middle of a bullring with everybody waving a red cape at you. Even though I know this is just playacting, my heart is beating faster.
“Sir, we had a report of a problem here,” I say to the Hispanic guy, trying not to lose my head. “We just wanted to find out what it was.”
The Hispanic guy looks me up and down, as if he’s beginning to find all of this a little tiresome. Then he lifts up his shirt, revealing a gun in his waistband. He pulls it out and fires a blank at my partner, Greg. Before I even have time to look down at my own gun, the guy turns and shoots me.
The scene is over and the spectator galley explodes with laughter.
“You’re both dead,” Sergeant Hammerslough grumbles as he wanders onto the set. I notice the twenty or thirty other recruits who’ve been watching us are clapping their hands and are almost all doubled over from giggling at our incompetence.
“Hell,” Greg, the Rockland County cowboy, says.
“Now what did these yo-yos do wrong?” Sergeant Hammerslough asks the assembled recruits.
“The one with the red hair shouldn’t watch so many Hunter re-runs,” someone calls out once the laughter starts to die down.
“Good point,” says Hammerslough, his arms folded across his chest. “What about this guy?” He points to me.
“Too laid-back,” says one fat-faced recruit.
“He acted like a social worker,” Greg whines.
“Exactly,” Sergeant Hammerslough says, putting his face right up to mine so I can smell how much garlic he had at lunch. “You gotta leave that namby-pamby shit at the office. This is the real world. You make a mistake and a split second later you’re dead. You got that? And for Chrissake, keep your eyes on where everybody’s got their hands.”
I step off to the side, feeling thoroughly humiliated. As other recruits and probation officers go through their skits, I promise myself that I’ll be more alert if I get another chance.
The last phase of our training is on the outdoor target range. The targets are cartoons of fifty-year-old guys with square jaws and crew cuts, who look like they ought to be called Sluggo. Remnants of another era. I’ve never had a client who looked anything like that.
I step up to a line twenty-five yards away from the targets. An instructor hands me a pair of earphones and goggles. It’s a good thing I started wearing contact lenses recently; they wouldn’t have fit over my old glasses. Then he gives me the .38-caliber Smith & Wesson service revolver. I’m not so much surprised by its weight, but the shape feels pleasing in my hand. I somehow thought it would have rougher edges or less balance. Instead, it has a certain solidness, a rightness; it reminds me of the first stone I ever cast into a lake. The instructor shows me how to grip it and look down its sights.
I know I should reflect on what I’m about to do. I’ve spent so much time trying to steer other people away from violence that I can’t believe I’m going to fire this thing. But I’m anxious to get it over with, the way a boy wants to lose his virginity, just so he can say he’s done it. I raise the gun and stare down the barrel. Out of the corner of my eye, I see my instructor step away. My hands shake a little. A plane flies by. The sun is white. I pull the trigger.
It’s hard to describe what it feels like the first time. The gun bucks. It rears back. It revolts against you and tries to throw you off. And once it’s gone, you see dirt getting kicked up behind the target.
“Try holding it steadier,” says the instructor. “You almost missed the target completely.”
The second time I put my whole body into it. I stoop and bend a little at the knees, like they told me to. I have a feeling it makes me look like I’m taking a dump, but it helps my aim. I squeeze the trigger once more. The power surges up and down my arm and then out of my hand again. Even with the headphones on, the sound is piercing. But I haven’t heard enough gunshots in my life to automatically think of people getting hurt.
“Straighten it out a bit,” says the instructor, squinting at my target. “And next time you’ll put it right through his heart.”
19
DARRYL KING WAS SITTING in the seventh row of the Apollo Theatre, next to his sister, Joanna. On the stage a handsome woman in a frilly black dress was singing a snappy Ella Fitzgerald song. Darryl ignored her and grabbed his sister’s arm.
“What I wanna know,” he said, “is when do I get to run the show?”
“Why don’t you shut up and watch her sing?” his sister hissed at him.
Darryl sank back in his seat and twisted up his mouth as the woman finished her song to warm applause. It was Amateur Night at the Apollo and Darryl felt uncomfortable sitting there. Almost everybody else in the audience looked legitimate. Black middle-class families in suits and skirts. Scandinavian tourists in denims. Older poor people who must’ve been saving their money for weeks to afford the fifteen-dollar tickets. Darryl didn’t see another crimey in the place, which had a beautifully maintained interior with red velvet curtains and gold designs on the walls and ceilings. Squirming around in his seat, he ignored the older guy in the gray suit onstage, who was saying something about how Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan got started here.
“Joanna, why’d you ask me to come if you didn’t wanna say nothing about the business?” Darryl asked.
“We’ll talk,” she murmured.
“I don’t wanna talk,” Darryl said a little louder. “I wanna better job.”
Without taking her eyes off the stage, Joanna reached over with one large hand and grabbed her brother by the throat. “You behave now,” she said.
The next act was a thin man with a ponytail. The booing started before he even touched the microphone. By the time he sang the opening notes of “God Bless the Child,” people in the audience were on their feet, shaking their fists at him and telling him to get off. He stayed for two verses out of sheer defiance, his bum notes resounding like a foghorn through the great old theater. Finally, a man dressed like a clown came on the stage and chased him off with a broom.
“That sucked,” Darryl said.
“’S right,” his sister told him, turning one of her Gemini earrings. “You’re not so dumb for a Taurus.”
She said that as if it might be worth her while to take him to more nice places like this, so he’d know how to act in public. He smiled a little to himself. In the meantime, a Japanese girl and boy had walked onstage, dressed completely in black. A rumble went through the crowd like they were about to start booing again. But then the band started the old rhythm-and-blues hit “Me and Mrs. Jones” and the Japanese couple began singing with so much soul and such tenderness that the audience forgave the way some of the lyrics were get
ting mangled and began cheering. A lanky young guy in a brown-and-black warm-up suit walked up one of the aisles, stopped in front of the stage, and threw a handful of money at the singers.
“Who the fuck is that?” Darryl wanted to know.
“I dunno.” Joanna shrugged. “Maybe the brother’s selling drugs in the Bronx or something. I ain’t seen him around here.”
“Shit,” said Darryl, following the guy with his eyes back down the aisle again. “’S what I wanna do.”
“Then save yourself some money.”
“But how am I gonna save the money when you won’t let me do the shit I gotta do?”
“It’s not time,” his sister told him firmly. “I looked at the book. You got a unfavorable lunar aspect right now.”
Whenever he heard his sister talk like this, Darryl didn’t know what to say. She didn’t seem to understand what he was capable of. Otherwise she and Winston would let him do more. All this ambition was giving him a headache.
The next act made him feel better though. Nine girls in white T-shirts and striped pants gyrating wildly to a Big Daddy Kane song. “I could do that,” said Joanna, watching one really sexy girl at the front of the stage who was thrusting her pelvis at the men in the first row.
“I hate to see it,” her brother said.
Before she could turn to hit him again, there was another shower of money coming at the performers. This time, the bills were fluttering down like autumn leaves. They were being thrown from the red-trimmed opera box less than ten feet above the left side of the stage.
Darryl looked up and saw Pops Osborn standing there, in a navy blue warm-up suit with a gold Mercedes-Benz symbol hanging around his neck. He was grinning down at the crowd like an aristocrat, while the big West Indian bodyguard glowered at his side. When the sexiest dancer glanced up at him, Pops threw down another fistful of dollars and put the sunglasses with the rhinestone frames back on top of his head.
“Fuckin’ faggot,” said Darryl.
“He just be showin’ off,” his sister told him. “He ain’t nothin’.”
Darryl started going through his pants pockets, looking for stray dollars. When the next act came on, a buxom woman in a tight spandex outfit, singing almost as well as Aretha Franklin, Pops started throwing even more money. And as stagehands rushed on to clear it off, some of the people in front started saying they weren’t twenty-dollar bills, but hundreds.
By the last verse, Darryl had had enough. He found thirteen one-dollar bills in his pocket and carefully crumpled each one into a ball. Then he stood up and began to throw them, one by one, at the stage. But somehow his trajectory was off and none of the bills reached the singer. They seemed to lose momentum around the first row and fade into the pit just before the stage, like snowflakes dying before they hit a damp street.
20
AT NOON ON ONE of those summer days when it feels like a dome of fur has descended on the city, word reaches me at Rodman’s Neck that they need a gun downtown. The problem is they’re short of weapons at the Probation Department’s Field Service Unit, so they need to borrow one from the police. And since I’m due downtown anyway, they figure I might as well drop it off.
I’m only too happy to oblige. I’m tired of being up in the Bronx and I have paperwork to catch up on back at the office. But most important, I haven’t had a chance recently to check up on this girl I’m interested in.
Her name’s Andrea Clinton. She works in the legal department, which is in the same building as the Field Service Unit. She’s a law student from NYU doing a summer internship with Probation. A beautiful light-skinned black woman with delicate features and luminous gray eyes. Nearly every man in the department has noticed her, but she’s spoken about much more often than she’s spoken to.
When I get to Probation, I don’t even bother stopping by the Field Service office on the first floor. I go right upstairs, looking for her. I find her by the water cooler just outside her office.
“I haven’t seen you around here in a while,” she says brightly. “What brings you our way?”
“A case,” I lie.
I have to justify my presence on this floor, since I normally only come up here to hand in the paperwork for violations. “Nothing too heavy, I hope,” she says, glancing over her shoulder at me as she heads back into the office.
I follow her in. I’d be intimidated as everybody else by the way she looks, except for one thing: Just below her mouth to the right, she has a mole. That changes the situation. It’s like some cheap Hollywood makeup man thought he’d jazz up her somber beauty with a sleazy Marilyn Monroe touch. In fact, that mole is the one thing about her face that makes you feel like you could ask her to a ball game or buy her a domestic beer.
The other secretaries in her office smile when I come in after her because they know what I’m really here for.
“So what’s your case?” Andrea asks, sitting down at a nearby word processor. “Are you violating somebody?” She straightens her back and her fingers fly across the keyboard, inputting furiously.
I realize I have to come up with a reasonable-sounding excuse. “Yeah,” I tell her. “I’m thinking about getting rid of one particularly bad guy I’ve got on my caseload.”
“What’s his name?”
“Darryl King.”
On the other side of the room, Miriam, a stocky secretary with a Clark Gable mustache, does her nails and talks on the phone in Spanish. “Whaddeedo?” Andrea says.
“Excuse me?”
She swallows hard and laughs. “I’m sorry, I was just eating a peanut … I meant to say, ‘What did he do?’”
I hadn’t been counting on her asking this. What did he do? I try to make up the case against Darryl on the spot. “Well,” I say, “he showed up late for his appointment… And then he wouldn’t cooperate and directly answer the questions I was asking…”
She can tell I’m stumbling around to gather my facts. Taking another peanut from the paper cup on her desk, she leans back and places it between her soft lips. She looks very sexy, holding her hair back with her hand. “What else?” she says.
“He, uh, kind of threatened me.”
“How?”
“He asked how much time someone would get for killing a probation officer,” I tell her. “And then he went into this whole sick fantasy riff about being a cop and pouring gasoline down people’s throats…”
Somehow when I say this, it doesn’t convey how scary it was sitting there listening to him. Andrea doesn’t seem impressed. “Is that it?” she asks. “Why don’t you just recommend him for a psychiatric exam?”
She may be new here, but she’s clearly smart enough to know that nothing I’ve said constitutes more than a slight technical violation. Certainly not enough to stand up in front of a judge. I have to say something to avoid looking like a complete fool here.
I hitch my pants and try the honest approach. “I guess what it comes down to,” I say, “is that I just have a bad feeling about the guy.”
“A bad feeling?”
“Yeah.”
“A bad feeling.” She repeats the phrase disdainfully, as though it were the name of her least favorite song.
Across the room, Miriam the secretary is winking at me and pulling on her right cheek. I’m not sure what the gesture means exactly, but I suspect it’s derisive.
“Darryl may not have done anything that bad yet, but I know he’s going to,” I add a little lamely.
“Hmm.” Andrea glances over at the clock. Half past noon. She draws her chair back, slips off her high heels, and puts her black stockinged feet on the linoleum floor.
As she stands up and smooths her plaid skirt, she stops to stare at the left side of my windbreaker. “Are you wearing a gun or something under that?” she asks.
I get embarrassed, realizing I still have the gun from the target range in my shoulder holster, without any bullets in it. I should’ve stopped downstairs and dropped it off before I came up here. Maybe I was doing some du
mb-ass John Wayne daydreaming. “How could you tell?”
“The way it was bulging,” she says, reaching into her black leather shoulder bag and pulling out a pair of white running shoes. “Walk me to the elevator,” she says, putting them on. Out of her high heels, she moves with limber, athletic grace.
As she tells Miriam she’s going to lunch, I take a deep breath. I figure I’m finally about to get my shot at asking her out. Miriam waves and keeps talking on the phone. I think I hear her say the words “marital aid” amidst all the Spanish. When Andrea turns her back, Miriam puts her thumb under her front teeth and flicks it at me.
We walk to the elevator bank and Andrea pushes the down button. I get ready to ask her what she’s doing on Saturday night, but she starts talking first.
“I wanted to ask you something,” she says.
“What?”
She tosses her hair back and gives me a cool appraising stare. She turns me on the same way Maria Sanchez does. They both have this thing that tells me I have no business trying to make it with them.
“How can you try to violate somebody just because you have ‘a bad feeling’?” she says.
“I don’t know. I’ve been doing this awhile. You can tell sometimes.”
“Is that right?” She narrows her eyes. “Now this boy Darryl wouldn’t be black, would he?”
“It happens that he is.”
“And is that why you have ‘a bad feeling’ about him?”
“No,” I say calmly. “I get bad feelings about white people all the time too.”
“You know,” she says, closing her bag, “I always thought guys like you became P.O.s because you wanted to help people.”
“Yeah,” I say. “That’s right. I really like most of the people I work with.”
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