by Ninie Hammon
What could he say to her? No convenient evasion leapt instantly to mind so he had to settle for the truth.
“I had to shoot a man yesterday and they’re saying he was unarmed. Some people are…upset about it. ”
“You wouldn’t have shot anybody who didn’t need shooting,” she said in a stern voice. “But why would someone do this…?”
“It was a white man.” She still looked confused. “Black police officer shoots unarmed white man…”
Her hand flew to her mouth and she took a step back.
“No! They are not going to do that here! Not in Harrelton. I won’t have it! All that hate…no!”
“Mrs. Peabody, I’m with you on that, but it’s not something you and I get to decide. You need to go back home now.” She didn’t move. “Go on. This could get ugly and one little white lady standing guard won’t stop the crazies.” She stood firm, her jaw jutting out.
Jack hated to do it, but he had to get the old lady to leave. As soon as the crisis-mongering press got a whiff of a situation they could exploit, anywhere near Jack Carpenter had become a dangerous place to be.
“Don’t make me call Richard,” he said. Richard was her son and she’d confided in Jack when she’d brought him a piece of hot cherry pie last week that she was afraid Richard was making plans to put her in a nursing home.
She looked undecided.
“As soon as I clean up this mess, I’m leaving, too, for awhile, going where the Looney Tunes can’t find me.”
As a matter of fact, that sounded like a good idea,
It took more cajoling but Mrs. Peabody finally left. The neighbors on the other side were snowbirds and had already left for Florida. Apparently, the people across the street were out of town, too. So it appeared no one on the street other than Mrs. Peabody had witnessed what’d happened and he wanted to keep it that way. Next time, somebody might get hurt.
Still, he couldn’t just walk out the door and leave an alcohol-soaked couch and rug in the living room and a broken front window. He tackled the couch first. Most of the alcohol had soaked into the seat cushions. Only a little had splashed on the arms and back of the couch. He removed the cushions and carried them out to the trash can at the back of the yard, returned and did the same thing with the rug. Then he filled a dishpan with soapy water and poured it over the couch, saturating the fabric. That would have to do until he could get somebody to help him get the couch out of the room…which, he noted, wouldn’t be as hard as it had been to get it into the room. They could just shove it out through the broken window.
As he worked, he figured out what to do about the window. His tools in the garage were mounted on a big piece of plywood. He took the tools down and pulled out the nails holding the plywood to the wall. Then he carried the plywood around to the front of the house and nailed it over the window opening.
When he was finished, he stepped back inside and surveyed the carnage. The room looked like a bomb had gone off…which it had. The outside looked like he was bracing for a hurricane…which he was.
He went into the bedroom for his cellphone, punched favorites and then “Daniel,” but tapped the red button before it had time to ring. If he went to Daniel’s—or Theresa’s for that matter—he’d have to tell them what’d happened at his house and he just wasn’t up to that. Instead, he threw some clothes, a shaving kit and a change of underwear into a carry-on bag. He could pick up a fresh uniform for tomorrow at the cleaners on his way to work.
Then he got in his cruiser and headed for the Motel 6 on the interstate. They promised they’d leave the light on for him.
He ended up staying at the motel much longer than he’d planned. Though Daniel had offered his spare bedroom, Jack refused. He wanted to keep Daniel out of the white-hot glare of his spotlight. Daniel had a spotlight of his own to deal with. And Jack certainly didn’t want Andi anywhere near the protests, the threats and the press crawling out from under every rock demanding to know why he’d carried a can of gasoline into the Twin Oaks Nursing Home twenty-six years ago and why he’d shot a man last week who wasn’t even carrying a weapon.
And as soon as he and Daniel talked with Senator LaHayne, Jack threw himself into the effort to find a man whose friends called him Bosko and he left the station so seldom he didn’t even need a candle burning in the window of the Motel 6.
After pulling his second all-nighter in a row, Jack was fortifying himself with coffee that tasted like the runoff from a nuclear waste dump when he looked up to see an Ohio State Police Trooper approaching the table in the break room where he was working. It was Purvis, the man who’d kept his head that day at Carlisle Elementary School three months ago.
For a moment, the magnitude of that kicked him hard in the belly. Just three months ago he’d been a normal police officer, busting the bad guys, protecting the good guys, drinking too much beer on weekends and living a normal, boring life—putting one foot in front of the other as he had done every day since he watched a red dress fall down out of the sky beside a burning tower.
But he had shot Andi that day and there was no road back from where that event had taken him—had taken them all.
The last time Jack had seen Purvis, the trooper was taking down information from the people in the crowd the day Jack shot the man with the magical vanishing gun.
Jack held out his hand. “Good to see you, John,” he said “What can I do for you?”
“That’s the wrong question,” Purvis said. “The right question is what can I do for you? And the answer is this.” He held out an iPad. “It’s just a copy, of course. Original’s evidence.”
Purvis touched something on the IPad and a video filled the screen. Jack’s gut yanked into a knot. The last video he’d watched had featured him as the star, and it had devastated his life. But this wasn’t a surveillance camera video. It was probably filmed by a phone, but Jack couldn’t tell what the video was supposed to be showing because whoever had shot it was holding the camera sideways. And the person was short. Very short.
A random collage of images blow by on the screen. What appears to be some historic document in a glass case. Then gray carpet that badly needed cleaning. Then a sideways, disorienting sweep of a room—might have been a courtroom because there is something like a judge’s bench in the back.
“Be careful, don’t drop my phone,” says a woman’s voice from the iPad and Jack realized the person shooting the video was a child.
The video continues, a stream-of-consciousness narrative, and Jack couldn’t figure out where it’d been filmed. Still holding the camera sideways, the child sweeps it back and forth in broad strokes like he’s using the phone to paint a fence, and the scene that flies by is unrecognizable. It is somewhere hollow and echoing, though, and it looks like the floor is…marble!
Jack recognized the location of the video a heartbeat before he heard his own voice—far away, but unmistakable.
“Don’t do it,” Jack’s voice said from somewhere down in a well. “Nobody has to get hurt here today. Just lift your hands and clasp your fingers behind your head.”
Purvis reached over and tapped slow motion and the dizzying sweep of the scene slowed to a crawl.
The child and the camera turn toward the sound of Jack’s voice and the sideways angle straightens upright momentarily.
“…out…of…here,” the woman’s voice cries in slow-motion terror. Then the camera pans upward. The woman has obviously grabbed the child and is dragging him away. Then the arc of the video stream jerks back down to the marble of the floor and Purvis hits pause.
“Watch close,” he said. “Another couple of frames.” He advanced the video one frame at a time in a series of still photographs. The floor...a small tennis shoe...another tennis shoe...a woman’s ankle...the floor...the floor.
The view sweeps suddenly upward again. The fleeing woman has lifted the child into her arms. The camera captures one final landscape shot of the rotunda. Daniel lying on the floor. Jack crouched, his gun held o
ut. And from over Jack’s head, because he is hunkered down, the man standing in front of him is clearly visible. He’s holding his black coat open. A gun is stuck down in the front of the man’s jeans.
All the air whizzed out of Jack.
“Where did you…?”
“That’s what I’ve been doing since the shooting, checking out all the people whose names and addresses I took down that day. The seven-year-old child who shot this video, name’s Enrique Salazar, was in the federal building to get a passport picture taken so he could go to his grandmother’s in Nicaragua for Christmas.”
“The guy did have a gun,” Jack said with something like awe in his voice.
The big trooper grinned and nodded.
“Then what happened to it?” Jack asked.
The trooper shrugged. “Above my pay grade,” he said.
*****
Andi giggled when Sponge Bob Square Pants slammed the lid of a treasure chest down on Plankton’s antenna. She was probably getting too old to watch Sponge Bob. She didn’t hear any of the other kids in her grade at school talking about it so they must think it was a "little-kid" show. All they talked about were video games and Mommy never let Andi play video games.
Mommy.
She felt sadness sink down through her, head to feet, the way cold water settles to the bottom because it is heavier. She wished Princess Buttercup would come. The presence of the lady made out of light didn’t make her stop missing Mommy. It was more like … when you couldn’t pick up that medicine ball in gym class the day school started. And you tried and tried, grunted and groaned and finally you could lift it a little. Then a little more. It’d been like that for Andi and by the end of the year she could not only pick it up but throw it. Not far, but she could throw it. And it wasn’t because the medicine ball had gotten lighter, either! It was because Andi had gotten stronger, a little bit, day by day. It was like that with Princess Buttercup. In some way she didn’t understand, the presence of the angel made Andi stronger so when she missed Mommy, it didn’t hurt quite so bad.
Princess Buttercup didn’t come, but a vision did, the one of Andi in the room with the boards covering the window. The Lady of Light had shown it to her before, told her to look at it carefully and every time Andi saw it, she noticed something new. The man with dreadlocks had his nose pierced and wore a shiny green stone in it—in his left nostril. The man with the tattoo had a gold tooth, too. The mud on the car in the driveway—it wasn’t brown mud. It was red, well, kind of rust-colored. And the beer they took into the house had little beads of condensation on it—so it was still cold.
When the vision began to fade so Andi could see through it, she thought it was over. But this time something else appeared after the room with boarded-up windows disappeared. It made no sense, but Andi figured this was like the shapes she’d seen before, the bell and the triangle and the line that didn’t make sense to her but eventually made sense to Daddy and Uncle Jack. So she concentrated, looked at it hard.
What she saw was a gun. It looked like a real gun and Andi had seen a real gun before, not just on television. Uncle Jack had a real gun and this one looked like his so it must not be a toy.
But it wasn’t in a holster like Uncle Jack wore. It was lying in a box—no, a basket. Not a wicker basket, though. The basket was made out of the same metal as the bell at church, bronze. And it wasn’t sitting on a table or the floor or anything like that. Somebody was holding the basket, not a real somebody, a statue, a big one, way taller than a grownup, than Daddy or Uncle Jack or any man she knew.
The gun was just lying there in the dust in the bronze basket. Lots of dust, like nobody’d ever cleaned it—like not ever. But why would you bother to clean it? You couldn’t see into the basket from the floor below. The top of the refrigerator was like that. Andi had seen how dusty it was when she’d gotten on a stool to get out the plastic glasses they used for guests when they had a party at Christmas. Mommy had laughed when she told her about the dust, said it probably looked the same under the stove and behind the washer and dryer, too.
“Out of sight, out of mind,” Mommy’d said.
But the gun wasn’t dusty like the inside of the basket and the top of the refrigerator. It was shiny and clean so it hadn’t always been there or it would have been dusty like everything around it. Andi wondered who would put a shiny clean gun way up in that basket. And why?
Tomorrow, she’d tell Uncle Jack what she’d seen. Maybe he’d know why.
SCENE #3
WHAT HAPPENED TO BISHOP IN VIETNAM?
Bishop Washington carefully carved a notch into his short-timer’s stick. Only forty-three marks left and his thirteen-month tour of duty in Vietnam would be over. The very best birthday present in all the world would be a ride on a freedom bird back to a world so grayed out in his mind most days he could barely make it out at all. Images of Theresa and his precious baby boy, Isaac—they were all hard to see here, like God had wrapped them in pure white tissue paper and put them away, safe in a room in your mind where they wouldn’t get all dirtied up by … this. By what he’d seen here. What he’d done here.
Bishop had turned twenty a month to the day before he’d gone boots down out of a chopper at Bien Hoa Air Base in Vietnam. That and his size made him something of a father figure to the squad of eighteen-year-olds drafted out of their lives to come to a jungle on the other side of the planet and fight a war none of them understood or believed was worth fighting.
“Yo, Preach,” said Watson, the gangly boy from Pittsburgh who’d joined the Army right out of a steel mill and bragged in the beginning that he’d already been in hell so how bad could Vietnam be? He’d found out his first day on patrol. The guy in front of him stepped on a land mine that blew off both his legs and ripped open the bottom portion of his body, and before he died he was begging Watson to help him put his guts back in his belly.
“You got any smokes, Preach?” Watson asked. “I’ll trade you my chocolate.”
The other soldiers called Bishop Preach because he carried a Bible and bowed his head and said grace before meals, and when things got bad they’d seek him out to talk to. The unit no longer had a chaplain. Hadn’t been in-country a month when the minister had suffered a “million-dollar wound”—non-crippling but severe enough to get him shipped to a stateside hospital. Only his was self-inflicted, shot off his own big toe and tried to make it look like a ricochet in a fire fight. The brass had bought it; the guys in the squad knew better.
A giant of a man, six feet, seven inches, with a James Earl Jones voice he could dial down to gentle and kind, Bishop had quickly become the missing chaplain’s unofficial replacement. Of course, fear hung in Bishop’s belly just like it did in theirs, a humming in his guts, like the gathering of storm clouds full of lightning bolts ready to strike. He felt the tension of it with every intake of the thick air that smelled of jungle and smoke, dirty bodies, blood, rot, decay—and sweat. Fear sweat had a rancid stink Bishop was certain he’d never forget.
But Bishop wasn’t afraid of the same things the other men in the unit feared. Dying wasn’t what scared him, and because it didn’t his fearlessness in a firefight drew the others to him like iron shavings to a magnet. No, what Bishop feared were the monstrosities he could see that the other soldiers couldn’t, demons crawling around the death and destruction, feeding on it like dung beetles. Sometimes the sight of them so froze him with terror he couldn’t move, couldn’t draw a breath.
“I done give my last to Deadbolt,” Bishop told Watson, indicating a black soldier with a wide, flat face and pendulous lip.
Bishop had quickly doled out the four-smoke mini packs of Winstons, Marlboros and Lucky Strikes from his three-meals-in-one box of K-Rations. But Pall Malls weren’t as popular and he’d held onto that pack for almost a whole day. “He got a sweet tooth, though. Bet you could trade him out of one. I give Carter the Winstons.” He looked around and spotted a gangly soldier whose acne-covered face looked like it’d been sculpted ou
t of ground meat. “He’s over there. Maybe he ain’t smoked all of ’em yet.”
Carter stood with a group of soldiers gathered around a fire, hard to pick out among them because they all were cookie-cutter images of each other. Black or white, officer or enlisted man, they all wore the same dirty camouflage uniform with no insignias to designate rank—insignias made you a target. They were all dirty, skinny and exhausted and they all talked about the same things—the lousy food, the lousy weather and the girlfriends back home in Fill-In-The-Blank, who might or might not remain faithful to them. They all inserted the F-bomb in every sentence—between the syllables of words when they could manage it—and all wore the haunted look of hunted men who knew the Reaper always lingered nearby, their introduction to him only a heartbeat away.
At least, they appeared the same to each other. To Bishop they were fundamentally different. Many of them sparkled and blinked with the presence of invisible creatures even Bishop couldn’t see, demons that did not control them but whispered in their ears, told them lies, distorted reality and shoved them toward ugliness, perversion and cruelty.
And one member of the company, a narrow faced, squinty-eyed soldier named Pearson, was actually possessed. A slimy, yellow crab-like demon with a face that resembled a mutant fly was riding his shoulder.
“Naaa, Carter lights one off the end of another—them four’s gone,” Watson said. “But I got dibs on tomorrow’s tin.”
Every soldier received an accessory pack along with his K-Rations that contained instant coffee, sugar and nondairy creamer, two Chiclets, a small roll of toilet paper, moisture-resistant paper matches, salt and pepper and cigarettes. Those who didn’t smoke instantly became the purveyors of contraband to their addicted brothers. Smokes became currency, treasure sold to the highest bidder. Only Bishop among them never asked for anything in return for his.
