4

Thirty days later, New Year’s Eve, Wednesday night, the Knicks were at the Garden against the 76ers, just across the bridge in the city. Everyone in Pompan was watching cable, or listening to the radio, pissed that they still blacked out home games. The Knicks had their last shot at the title with Ewing getting older. They were playing like crazy men for Van Gundy.

I liked driving the squad car even though it didn’t have an AM dial Butras and I could catch the Knicks on. Every time I thought about the Knicks I couldn’t get over the fact that Ewing was a rookie when I was in fifth grade; that he was near retirement and still pulling in 7.5 million a year for his sixteen points, ten rebounds. The car radio had a microphone attached to a silver horseshoe that hung from the dashboard just over the lighter. I never thought I’d enjoy the big round Cavalier, a power car. I liked driving it any speed I wanted up roads marked No Trespassing, up private roads. I hadn’t worried about speed in a month. No more tickets for me. If a state trooper pulled me over when I was in my own car, I’d take out my wallet with the picture of me and the Governor at the Academy on graduation day. The Governor had his arm around me and was smiling after a lunch of rubber chicken and peas.

In the month of December, I had grown to enjoy feeling menacing-the heavy pistol, the sharp siren whine, the blue lights gyroscoping, making people dizzy. It was the same feeling that I got when I was weight training. I didn’t speak much about this pleasure of my job; I didn’t want to jinx it.

Night-riding was best, gliding through Pompan. Shark Chevrolet, a fish-car that could belly flop up a curb, that could take the sandy roads out past Thomas Jefferson Middle School, a car that never broke down, a car that still had power at 80 miles per hour. I liked that the seats were flat black and burned through my starchy white shirts on sunny days, even in the winter.

Butras always had some remark that would snap me out of my drifting. He needed to keep the night passing. December 31st had already been a busy night so he was lively, jumpy. Like me, he had grown up in the town, and not in one of the big houses in the Winthrop Hill area either. I had grown up five blocks away from him, not far from his own Johnston Road.

After dinner at D’Angelo’s, I let him drive. I could see the road clearly enough at night but everything was a little blurry when there were oncoming headlights. It had been that way since I started driving at sixteen, even with glasses. I saw the fuzzy halos sometimes around street signs, around porch lights or headlights. Night vision.

Most evenings, very few people called. We just drove and listened to the dispatcher call in fires and rescues. At times, the job seemed like one endless drive, without purpose, nothing much to see, an unthinking kind of emptiness. I kept notes in my head, things to think about when I got in from our shift at 1 AM. I’d light the candles by my bed, put some jazz on the radio, and stare into the dark thinking of my night and of Clarise.

Whenever I asked Clarise if she loved me, she said, “What’s your name again?” and pushed at my chest. Then she said, “You’re okay for a man.”

I was planning to see her after my shift, drive into the city when I got off at midnight, New Year’s.

Pompan, New Jersey was a perfect rectangle on the county map, four miles by eight miles. New housing tracts on the north side past the shopping area called The Plaza were mostly unfinished, interrupted by the bad economy, but the houses that had gone up were huge, with pillars beside the front doors, so unlike the other parts of town where the homes were small and vinyl-sided. I had grown up in one of the small, neat houses near the other small shopping area, Oak Lane. The Hudson River was three miles away and sometimes you could smell it like a greasy meal. Across the river in the city was Clarise.

Butras hated that the car was always hotter than the weather. December was his season. All year he waited for the cold. He was the kind of guy who sweated everywhere he went; if you bumped into him, you’d be surpised by how wet he was. He liked being out of the car, on foot, cold but sweating still.

“I feel like taking my shirt off, don’t you?” he would ask me on the coldest nights.

“No way.”

“You’d still have one of those priss T-shirts on underneath, wouldn’t you? It’s winter here. Love it or leave it.”

It had been a difficult month together locked in the car, a difficult New Year’s Eve so far, although just the week before it seemed almost as if we had reached some understanding (he didn’t shut me down as fast), laughing at some of our disagreements, ignoring others because I was about to become a graduate of the University of Frank Butras. Nearly all I knew about policing in Pompan came from him and he must have thought there was something important about that, about how he’d be the one I’d call for advice when I went out on my own.

On December 31st at 11:45 PM we were taking the usual circling route around town, near Bryant School, the one the white kids of Pompan got bussed to from the richer Winthrop area because of the elementary school overflow. Bryant stood on top of the hill which sloped down to the mostly black neighborhood around Trygon Park. Not many complaints that made it out from dispatch came from down the hill, but this call had come from there, an address just south of Bryant.

When the call came in at 11:45, Butras hadn’t spoken to me in over an hour.

The dispatcher said, “Group of kids in dark parkas, wearing hats. Anonymous caller believes one youngster had a gun. Not sure from a distance if it’s a toy or real.”

When we saw the kids running, Butras put up the headlights. “Some friends of yours,” he said.