71

Most nights, if things were quiet, I would drop Butras off at his father’s house for an hour and he would have dinner there while I’d get a burger at The Floss. Then I drove back and picked him up. He never invited me in to meet his father. I wondered if the FBI had interviewed him after the lynching.

New Year’s Eve at around six Butras asked, “You hungry?”

For the last hour he’d seemed lost in himself and he didn’t hear me the few times I tried to talk. The wind blowing through the partition of the cruiser, the open window, and the normal rattles had been the only noises.

Pizza at D’Angelos. He had peppers and I had mushrooms on top; we each had small pies with red sauce. He was in his short sleeves and I kept my coat on. Eating, Butras was always making plans. Meals were for looking ahead. Even if it meant just making a route for the evening tour. Two men, covering 100 square blocks, protecting the lives of maybe four thousand people. For five years he had been working out how to get it done efficiently, appearing to be everywhere at once. I remember that when he was talking I was looking down at my badge, #6391.

“Here’s the way to go about it,” Butras was saying to me. He had some system of half left turns and half right turns that allowed us to take into account all the one-way streets and dead-ends.

“There’s no other reasonable way,” he said to me.

And if I disagreed with him, on any subject, he held a grudge. He had a perfect memory for even minor disagreements.

Thinking back, with all our meals together and plans, we never really discussed the risks of our job, or how, if there was danger, we would react as a team. He told me how he had handled threats or fights in the past, but I guess we both assumed that a month wasn’t very long and the chance of us having to face something together was pretty small.

Butras and I never really sat at a meal and talked about ourselves. Could I imagine telling him about all the things I hate, about happiness? Is it possible that we could have discussed complex feelings? Could I have talked to him about Clarise? Could I have said to him she had a boom-pow ass—she took a step and her ass took three steps? About Cedric? Could I have told him that America is filled with black men like me who are tired of other people psychologizing us, looking for who we are in our handshakes, our postures, our tones of voice? Would telling him this have made any difference in how we got along?

Who was he? A man in a spotless shirt, with blue eyes, thin lips and sharp teeth.