NOBLE STARTED THE book with the Christmas morning fire as the inciting incident for his life story. I read quickly, couldn’t read it fast enough. Amazing how the prose followed almost exactly how I remembered it. I turned the page and continued to read. Marie didn’t press for an answer and started to read as well.
A woman came by. Her low black heels barely registered in my subconscious, I was so intent on the book in my hand.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “you’re going to have to move. You can’t sit here.”
“Yeah, yeah, sorry, we’ll move,” Marie said. “We’ll move, sure we will. We’ll do it right now.” Her words came out distracted, mumbled and without emphasis. Low-Heels moved on.
In the passage describing the fire, I came to something I didn’t know, and I’d been there in the front yard, right alongside Noble for that entire incident.
The two firemen came out of the burning house, walked out of the billowing black smoke, right out the front door, a couple of ghastly apparitions in this horrible nightmare that wouldn’t end. They wore large yellow air tanks on their backs, their faces covered by oxygen face masks, their eyes an evil red.
I knew they weren’t red, but to this day that’s how I remembered them. The minute details forever seared into my memory. The names of the firemen, stenciled in black in two places on their turn-out coats, read, “J. Mellor” and “C. Kraig.” Their boots dripped with water. They smelled of smoke and sorrow and of death. I didn’t know what death smelled like until that day.
They gently set my little brother and sister down at the base of the tree, their bodies wrapped entirely in Flintstone bed sheets. I couldn’t see them, but knew. I knew.
I stood off to the side, out of everyone’s way, and couldn’t take my eyes off of them. My dad and his white whore had moved and now stood over by the same tree, with blankets around their naked bodies, unaware of what lay at their feet. His woman kept saying, “I have to get out of here. I have to go.” The deputy said, “Not yet, I need to get your statement first. I’ll have a patrol car give you a ride after I get a statement.”
“Are you out of your mind?” she half-screeched, then caught herself and lowered her tone. “A black-and-white patrol car taking me home to my neighborhood, with me dressed in only a blanket? Just move those fire trucks, and I’ll take my own car.”
The irony of her use, her description of the black-and-white patrol car, was not lost to me even at that young age.
“That’s not gonna happen,” the deputy said. “Not for a couple hours at least.”
Down the street, a news van pulled to the curb, the side door slid open, and out jumped an immaculately dressed female field reporter and a cameraman.
My father’s whore pulled the blanket over her head like someone from the Middle East. She turned her back to the street and moved to the other side of my father as cover. In so doing, she stumbled over the bundles wrapped in the Flintstone bed sheets.
She had unknowingly stepped on my brother and sister.
The deputy quickly grabbed hold of her and moved her to the side, moved my dad too.
I went to my knees at the sight, the way the woman so casually desecrated the dead. The way she disrespected my little brother and sister was like a kick to the stomach.
I hadn’t seen what Noble described in that passage, the children placed at the base of the tree, the woman stepping on them, and I’d been standing right there next to Noble that Christmas morning, my arm around his shoulders. The whole time, sick to death over the pain and sorrow he was going through. I must’ve seen it. I must’ve and blocked it out.
Noble didn’t block it out.
I skipped on down.
That horrible day, the way those two deputies acted, especially the black deputy as he valiantly attempted to enter the house under great threat and with disregard for his own safety, I believe that event was what inspired my brother Bruno to go into law enforcement. To become a deputy sheriff and work in the same neighborhood where we grew up. To fight tyranny in its most base form, a fight that he did so well taking it to the criminals, fighting them on their own turf. And, as a good friend of Bruno’s used to say, “Make the streets safe for women and children.”
The clerk in the bookstore returned; at least her shoes did. “If you people don’t move right now, I’m going outside to flag down one of the many police officers assigned to this shopping area and have them escort you out.”
I waved her off without thought to the consequences. How could I concentrate on anything else? She couldn’t possibly mean it anyway, not for sitting on the floor, of all things.
An iron fist had reached into my chest and squeezed my heart, and now it wouldn’t let go.
I don’t remember ever talking with Noble about why I wanted to be a deputy sheriff. I don’t remember telling him the old saying, the one Robby Wicks used to say far too often. But Noble had it wrong. Robby used to say, “Make the streets safe for white women and children.” I probably had told Noble and amended it to protect the innocent. Only Robby wasn’t innocent, and I had protected him far too long and never opened my eyes long enough to see him for what he was until it was too late.
I, too, like my brother, remembered names during that incident, but not the names of the firemen. I remembered the patrol deputies. The tall black deputy wore D.C. Smith on his nameplate; the other, J. Humphrey.
I let the book drop to my lap as I thought about what Noble had written, about my motivation as to why I entered law enforcement. Had that day truly been the catalyst for my motivation? Was it because of D.C. Smith’s heroic actions?
Sitting beside me, Marie said, “Uh oh.”
I looked up from the book. Two uniformed Santa Monica bike policemen came in the door, taking off their helmets, escorted by Low-Heels. She pointed at us.
I got up, helping Marie. I turned to the police officers who came up to us. “Sorry, officers, we’ll move on, we didn’t mean to cause a problem.”
One officer flanked us; the other stood in a bladed interrogation stance. Both were professionals with excellent tactics.
“Why don’t we take this outside?” the policeman in front of us said.
I took Marie’s hand. “Sure, sure.”
Low-Heels waved her hand. “Wait, wait, they haven’t paid for those books.”
Marie pulled her thin wallet out and handed the pesky woman a fifty and a twenty.
“I’ll get you change.”
“Keep it,” Marie said. She held the book upside down as she put her wallet back in her pocket. We hadn’t yet looked at the back cover of the book. Noble had somehow obtained a photo, probably from Dad. It was an enlarged photo that filled the entire back of the book, one that depicted me and Dad and Noble sitting on the steps leading up to the front door of our house on Nord. A photo Noble’s dad had shot not long before the day Noble’s house died.
I took the book from Marie and stacked it on top of mine as we followed the cop out, the second one behind us as a rearguard. If the cops saw the picture, even though I couldn’t have been more than ten at the time, and they happened to put it together that I was in the book, the forged passport ID I had in my pocket wouldn’t match the name in the book.
I subconsciously reached down to feel the passport to make sure it was there and felt something far worse.
The gun barrel to the chrome 9mm that I’d taken from my nephew Bruno.