After the Fog Clears

by Lee Thompson

  7

  The back of Hazzard’s neck burned with embarrassment. The captain rarely came out to an incident unless it was a special case. He’d reassured Nathan that this clusterfuck he’d created was the worst he’d ever had to try and plug all the leaks. The department didn’t need such publicity. Hazzard knew they were going to crucify him, the people would demand it, and Captain Philips would make sure he delivered. Kill the pawn. Soothe the outrage.

  He sat in his car, thinking about the last couple hours. Biggest embarrassment of his life, he saw how the other patrolmen had looked at him, the same way Philips did, like he was guilty.

  But look at the kid’s parents. Who lets their toddler play near the road at any time of any day, but especially early morning, in fog like they’d had? The parents were to blame. Hazzard had only been doing his job. And where had the old maroon Impala gone? It had vanished in the mist like a specter. He’d love to find the driver. He was to blame too. If he hadn’t been speeding down Webber, Hazzard wouldn’t have given the car more than a second glance.

  He had to go to the station, keep his head low—although everyone would already know. But it wouldn’t take him long to turn in his vehicle, his gun, his badge. Philips didn’t want to see him, not with a media shit storm on his hands, so there was that. He didn’t want to see that cocksucker again anyway. For now, his suspension would last a month. Yet he knew the suspension was only the beginning, especially if the child didn’t survive. He’d be fired. It’d look good for the department. For a little while reporters would torment him like a cloud of black flies. If he swatted them away, more would come, drawn by the smell of madness, the scent of blood.

  It was 10:30 a.m. when the life he’d known ended and something twisted—which had been growing like a tumor inside him since he’d been a teenager—became malignant.

  He’d talk to the parents.

  He’d find the driver of the piece-of-shit Impala. If he had to suffer, so did they. He didn’t concern himself with suffering too much. There were worse things in the world, and in some ways he liked it.

  Inside the station, he listened to the familiar sounds of keyboards clacking at various speeds, idle conversation, excited early morning flirting, loud yawns, bones creaking, chairs rolling, shoes whisking on the highly polished floors.

  He avoided everyone’s stares, the gathering hush, the whispers breaking it momentarily and then the silence nearly overwhelming again. No one said anything to him. And somehow he’d bulletproofed himself.

  And then twenty minutes later he was home, not so bulletproof anymore as he drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, sitting in the driveway next to his wife, Barb’s, new Pathfinder. She was in the open front door, her slight, beautiful form, her dark eyes and hair, her posture filled with a strange impatient dread. He couldn’t figure out why she looked so worried, not at first, his mind clouded by her sensuality; it’d never been love between them, only lust, was still lust almost ten years later. But he looked at his watch. Wasn’t even noon yet. He never came home during his shift, which both of them were fine with. Barb was as independent as he was, and as simple to please. She had a closet full of shoes and purses in every color known to man. She hit the outlet malls to buy brand names cheaply. When he’d first arrested Barbra, when she’d been sixteen, she’d been shoplifting. He’d called her The Kid back then, and she didn’t take offense like some of the young ones, she just said, flat out, “Pretty soon I’ll be a woman.”

  And pretty soon she was. Fucked-up thing was that right away he could sense she was placing him in some kind of father-figure role, and he’d used it to seduce her and brainwash her. She had grown more headstrong lately since going for coffee and to a book club (or so she said, he’d never seen her read anything) with four other women, none of them fellow cops’ wives.

  She opened the door and the sky seemed to darken. It’d started out such a promising day. She hollered, “What are you doing out there?”

  He caught sight of his reflection in the rearview mirror—blind rage twisted his face and the sight startled him. He wiped his palm from brow to chin and looked again. He exhaled noisily, satisfied his mask was back in place.

  Barb was on the porch now with her arms crossed, confusion or panic set deep in her and around her eyes. She said, softer, “Are you okay?”

  She could feign concern so well. He hadn’t minded when she’d used it on other people.

  She held the storm door open. He got out of his car—an old Buick Regal. Her Pathfinder was only a year old and he’d joked about buying it a cake, but Barb had said: It’s almost time for a new one. She, for all her bargain shopping, had no concept of money. It was partly his fault. He’d given her everything she wanted, at a great sacrifice to his job and his safety.

  Her feet were bare, tiny, delicate. She said, following him into the house, “What’s wrong, Nate?”

  He led her to the kitchen, mostly because he wanted a drink, partly because his father had always had his sit-downs in the kitchen. He could never be as blunt as his father though, who had sat a very young Nathan and his mother down and told them, “We’re moving across the country,” and later, “I’m moving back alone…” He’d said he’d prepared them the best he could. Nate’s mother had always known her man was a rolling stone, restless, rootless, half the time jobless. He’d live off the kindness of family and strangers. It had been an embarrassing way to live, and his mother seemed relieved that he was going, but young Nate hadn’t. And maybe that was why, when he’d busted Barb and learned bits of her history, and found out how much their lives achingly mirrored each other’s that he found he couldn’t fathom a night without her.

  He pointed at the table and she sat, leaned forward with her arms crossed, elbows pressed hard against the surface. There was dirty dishwater in the sink, cups and plates and silverware dripping dry in the rack. He’d bought her a new dishwasher but she never used it.

  She pouted and said, “I wish you’d talk to me.”

  “Hell of a morning.”

  “I can see that,” she said. “What happened?”

  So he told her. He hadn’t wanted to, but she’d find out every little detail at some point, wouldn’t she? Barb leaned farther and farther away from him. When she couldn’t lean any more, she scooted the chair back and stood. “Is he going to be okay?”

  “I hit him with my car, doing somewhere around sixty miles an hour.”

  She hung her head. Her hair fell over her face like dark clouds. She said without looking up, “What does this mean?”

  “I don’t know yet.” He never worried what other people thought of his choices, yet with her there was a strange pang in his heart, a weary flutter. She drug her feet, moved to the sink and said, “Are you going to prison?”

  “Why would I go to prison? It was an accident!”

  His cell rang. He didn’t want to deal with anything, just Barb. The way she looked at him, it was like he’d molested her. She told him to answer his phone, she had to go outside and get some fresh air. Then she was gone, out the back door, trembling like a leaf, shoulders hunched, only the smell of her remaining. He thought she might be crying. The day kept getting more screwed up. He looked at his phone and then answered it. Captain Philips said, “I need you in my office immediately.”

  “For?”

  “Move your ass. If you’re not here in twenty minutes, I’ll send a car to pick you up.”

  Nathan laughed, looking around the kitchen, about to say Really? Pick me up? But then he realized Philips had already hung up. He hesitated after he stood. The captain only wanted his statement, he knew that, he’d been kind in his way by giving Nathan a couple hours to get himself together. He hadn’t needed it, not really. He wondered where the Impala was, if the child’s parents were tearing themselves and each other apart. He hoped they were. People like that deserved whatever came their way.

  8

  When it rains, it pours… Raul had always hated that cliché, mostly because it s
truck him as true. He’d tried to call Geneva back, his mind racing, his knees knocking together, his face bloodless. He called his father at the funeral home but no one answered. His dad would be working. Mr. Spencer started a task and saw it through to completion with the delicacy and concentration of a brain surgeon.

  Raul didn’t want to call Regina, but what was he to do? He didn’t know what hospital they’d taken his son to. He couldn’t even fathom viewing Dominic, broken open like a young cask some angel had dropped from great heights, its wine the color of blood, staining the boards, the ground. He’d had to perform improvements on such victims at work. Sometimes, those struck by a vehicle, hit a certain way, or landing at the wrong angle, or worst of all, dragged a few blocks, their carcass lodged into the chassis of a car driven by someone texting or drinking or high, haunted his dreams.

  I can’t see him like that. I can’t do it.

  Traffic sometimes roared like the wind preceding a storm of colossal proportions, but there was little traffic now. Most people were locked in their cubicles, or prancing from table to table in a restaurant, or dirtying their fingers while the electric hum of a machine press cycled out automotive parts with rhythmic regularity. All the world seemed too quiet, the day lazy, time insignificant.

  Raul had unconsciously dialed Regina’s cell. It took him a moment, hearing her voice, him looking around, believing by chance they’d run into each other on the street, before he realized her voice was coming from his phone. He looked at it, thought about all the times Dominic had wanted to play with the device and Raul had refused him.

  Regina said, “Raul?”

  His phone had never felt so heavy as when he lifted it to his right ear and said, “I need you to pick me up.”

  He could never read her. She had two different people living inside her—one that governed her warm, womanly body, so full of heat, and passion, and promise; and the other side that ruled her mind, the cautious one, afraid of getting caught, shamed by her disloyalty.

  She said coldly, “Now is not a good time.”

  Even as he replied, he found it unbelievable. “Dominic was hit by a car.”

  “God, no! Is he, is he…”

  “I don’t know.” All of the air went out of him. He sat on the curb with his heels propped on the road. “My Jeep’s battery died. I can’t reach Geneva, she was with him, and my father’s working.”

  “Where are you?”

  He told her. She promised she’d be there in twenty minutes, but he said, “I’ll be home in ten minutes. Pick me up there.”

  She said she would. He hung up and watched a box truck roar past him, the wind of it rustling his hair and tugging at his shirt, its giant wheels passing only ten or twelve inches from his dress shoes, the ground humming from the truck’s weight and momentum and proximity. As far as he could tell the driver hadn’t even seen him.

  There were still three policemen parked in front of his house. A man in a suit—tall, dark hair plastered to his scalp, carefully combed and gleaming—who was bitching at a heavyset officer leaning against the trunk of a cruiser. The other two cops were standing near another car, their thumbs gripping their utility belts, pretending not to listen, their faces as unreadable as stone. Raul walked up to them. One of them, a thick, youngish officer with cruel blue eyes, held his hand up, signaling for Raul to stop. All Raul could say was, “It was my son.”

  Then he glanced at the black asphalt, noticed the black marks, trailed to where they ended at the cruiser parked up the road another thirty feet, the car where the suit and the patrolmen stood, one hostile, the other appearing almost bored, or at least not listening.

  Then Raul’s gaze followed the marks back to where his son had been hit. There was a small pool of blood, already drying, a bit of flesh smeared, lighter than the road.

  One of the cops touched his shoulder and Raul spun on him, his teeth bared, the grief and fear and anger shooting through his limbs so hotly that he swung awkwardly as if to expend it. He caught the cop in the jaw and knocked him back a step. The policeman reached for his gun—mere instinct, or training—until the other cop jumped between them, hands raised, palms out, and said to Raul, “I can give you a ride to the hospital. You’re Mr. Spencer, correct?”

  Black dots, shaped like the blood pool, danced in his vision. He blinked and wiped his tears away. The policeman said, “Your wife and son should be there by now.”

  “I have someone coming over.”

  The one cop rubbed his jaw, opened and closed his mouth. The other said, “Do you want to wait for them?”

  The suit had stopped screaming at the policeman Raul assumed had left the black marks. They stared at each other. The bureaucrat frowned, and his eyes had gone from heated to empathetic. Raul said to the officer who offered him a ride, “Was it a cop who ran over my boy?”

  “It was foggy. He was in pursuit.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Would you like to sit down?”

  “No. What’s his name?”

  “When will your friend arrive, sir?”

  “In a few minutes,” Raul said. “I should tell her to forget it.”

  “She can ride with us.”

  “No. I don’t want her to see…any of it.”

  “Sir?”

  Raul was staring at his son’s blood on the road. There were no black marks but from one side. His skin felt clammy. The red pool, no larger than Dominic’s head, started spinning, and he tried to take a step, heard the cop say more excitedly, “Grab him!” But he fell into the tire streaks, all that aggressive black, and it was not a relief. Shock and unconsciousness were bad bedfellows. Later, he’d only tell one soul what he imagined, or dreamed, after he’d fainted.

  When he regained consciousness, the first thing he noticed was the warm arms embracing him. Then there was a gentle hand attached to that arm, it stroked his hair, softly, accompanied by a flicker of breath. It misled him to believe he was a child again, in the close comfort of his mother; she had soothed him early on from his nightmares. As a child, he had seen too many coffins, too many graves, too many grieving men, women and children.

  But the scent of the woman holding him was too sweet to be his mother’s, and his body was much too large and heavy to be eight years old. The remnant of a dream clung to the dark void behind his eyelids. When he forced his eyes open, he could not remember where he was, or why Regina was cradling his head in her lap, or why there were policemen milling around, or why the black marks in the street appeared so fresh.

  But the memory surfaced and he buried his head against the side of Regina’s breast and he wished he could get lost there again, against the familiar softness and heat. He said, “Dominic. Geneva.”

  “I know,” she said, too softly, too sweetly. “They told me.”

  He was confused, believing she meant Geneva and Dominic had told her. One of the cops, the one who’d offered him a ride to the hospital, said, “Mr. Spencer?”

  “Yes?”

  “Your phone is ringing, sir.”

  The cop and car that had left the black marks were gone. So was the man in the suit who had been tearing into the policeman. Raul took his phone from his pocket and answered it. Regina held him, but it was his wife, Geneva, sobbing in his ear. He said, “Honey…” He sat up. “It’s going to be okay,” he said, “our boy is going to pull through this.”

  Her cry, so unrestrained, rattled the speaker. She said something. He dropped the phone between his legs and heard Regina saying something, rubbing his back. The blood on the road had dried and it made him want to cry. Raul couldn’t move, barely had the strength to look at his phone again. He smeared his tears on his cheeks and lay on the warming asphalt and he stared at the gray sky, trying to read meaning in the mass of clouds.

  9

  Geneva couldn’t hear the prayers she was muttering in the ambulance as she leaned sharply over her son, wanting to unstrap him from the gurney and hold him tightly. The siren was loud even in the back of the v
ehicle. The driver was chattering. A CB radio was getting on her nerves. The paramedic next to her, a young, dark-haired guy with thick eyebrows and what looked to be a perpetual and serious frown, was writing things down. About her son. About his condition, she figured. She wanted to ask him so many questions but she didn’t want to interrupt him. He had his job to do, and she thought he was the kind of man who would do it well if no one got in his way. The driver kept asking, “A cop ran the kid over? A cop? Which one?”

  The paramedic kept ignoring him. To Geneva, it felt like he was ignoring her too, but she was fine with that. Work on my son. You’re a skilled man. Ignore us. Save him…

  The driver slowed for a stop light and then blasted through it once everyone was aware of his presence. It took all the strength she had to sit there and not do anything. But the paramedic’s hands were deft. She tried to focus on them. It worked for a mile, maybe two, but the machines began beeping and Dominic started thrashing as if he were having a seizure, and she prayed: Please, God, let him live, even if he comes out of it with brain damage, if it’s the best you can do, for us, let him live!

  The paramedic cursed. The driver asked if everything was all right.

  Geneva stood and leaned over Dominic and tried to hold him still because the more he thrashed the more she felt things ripping free deep inside her. The paramedic told her to sit down, but she couldn’t, although she knew she might be getting in his way. The driver, too, said, “Sit, ma’am!”

  The paramedic worked ever more frantically.

  Dominic looked bloodless, his lips looked bluish. She cried his name and then, surrendering to her own helplessness, sobbed. She hadn’t realized she had her cell in her hand. She sobbed again. Raul was saying something to her and she could tell by the tone of his voice it was something tender, sweet, but then Dominic was still and the paramedic said something to the driver, and the driver killed the siren and slowed down to a less dangerous speed.