To be detained, the party must be, in the opinion of the officer, a danger to himself, a danger to others, or gravely disabled.
—California Welfare and Institutions Code 5150
He looked familiar to Hanson the moment Hanson saw him, out there in the water, the 5150 Radio had sent him to check on. Someone Hanson might have known years before, when they were both a lot younger. He’d been walking around Lake Merritt all day, since before dawn, a wino told Hanson, following the contours of the lake, “like he was looking for something he lost.” A white guy who wouldn’t respond to anyone who spoke to him. The people Hanson talked to all remembered or told it a little differently.
“Man, he just ignore people ’cause they black. Nothin’ new about that in this town. Say hello to him, he just walk on away like you not there, like you beneath his consideration. Can’t be bothered. Even if he’s crazy he’s still a racist motherfucker.”
“That individual? Something real wrong with him, you know what I’m sayin’? Some kind of sick motherfucker, way he look at you. Hu-uh, never seen him before.”
“Pretty soon people goin’ up to him, just to see, you know, say, ‘How you doin?’ ‘What’s up, man?’ He just walk away. Then a couple of the brothers ast him did he think he was bad, ’cause he didn’t look it. Say maybe he needed a ass kicking to straighten him out. No, didn’t touch him, Officer. Just said it to the man, putting it out there for him to consider, you understand.”
“Only reason he’s out there in the water, his own damn fault.”
He’d started angling into the muddy water, up to his knees, to get away from people, far enough out so they wouldn’t want to ruin their shoes or get their pants wet.
Then they’d started throwing things at him, forcing him into deeper water, up to his chest, then his neck so that he’d had to paddle with his hands to keep his balance, tip-toe on the muddy bottom, then deeper, having to tread water to stay upright, broken tree limbs, beer and pop cans, balled-up milkshake cups bobbing in the water around him. It was a good thing there weren’t many stones along the shore, Hanson thought, or the kid would have been stoned to death by the time Hanson had got there and pushed through the crowd.
“He was already out there in the water by the time I come by, so I don’t know, Officer. But he’s a lucky motherfucker you here an’ takin’ care of business, bringin’ some order to the situation.”
Even the birds were upset—seagulls, pelicans, the ducks, black cormorants, and geese were wheeling above the lake, screeching and keening—swooping down at him. Maybe it was just the strange weather they’d been having—the simplest explanation. The wind was gone, and it had been unseasonably warm all week. It was a beautiful day, and the forecast was for the good weather to continue through the rest of the week.
Hanson stood at the water’s edge and waved the kid in. “Come on, man. Time for us to leave,” he said, watching him paddle closer till he could touch bottom, then walk through the mud to shore and onto the grass. He was wearing a shapeless gray sweatshirt and jeans, no shoes or socks. Probably sucked off his feet by the mud. He looked surprised, just for a moment, when he seemed to recognize Hanson, then he put on that arrogant victim’s look again.
“Lemme handcuff you,” Hanson told him. “Just let me handcuff you because I’ve gotta do that. Okay?” he said.
He turned his back to Hanson and watched the lake while Hanson cuffed him.
“Got any ID?” He just looked at the lake or across the lake, and Hanson knew that he wasn’t going to show up in any database. “You got any weapons,” Hanson asked, “pocket knife, anything like that?
“You better look at me, man, so we can get this thing done.” Then, in a softer voice, “Save us both a lot of trouble neither one of us needs…What’s your name?” Hanson asked after he’d turned to face him. “What do you go by now?”
He just looked at Hanson.
“Fine,” Hanson said. “Here’s the deal. I’m gonna take you to the county hospital, and they can decide how crazy you are and what to do with you. Alameda County Hospital. I’m just your transportation. Now. Turn around real slow for me,” Hanson said, moving his finger in a circle to indicate what he wanted, looking for any bulges in his wet Salvation Army clothes that might be a weapon. He wasn’t going to pat him down. “You can stop now.”
He didn’t look like a kid, not anymore. Hanson’s age, and had the same Scots-Irish Appalachian features, but they were softer, slacker, showed the years of drinking more. Hanson knew who he was.
“Come on, then,” Hanson told him, and they walked up the slope to where the patrol car was parked on the grass. Hanson opened the back door. “Yeah,” he said, gesturing for him to get in the car, pushing his head down to clear the top of the door. “They’ll have some dry clothes at ACH. You doin’ okay?” When he ignored him, Hanson slammed the door, got in the car, and drove out of the park, thinking about it.
It had been during the second week of basic training, really hot at Fort Bragg that day. One guy had let himself pass out, and immediately three or four others did the same thing. The DI was pissed about it and chose Hanson to fuck with, yelling in his ear that he wasn’t standing at attention correctly, “in a military manner.” The DI walking around him in a circle, adjusting the cant of Hanson’s head, pulling his arm down.
He was feeling a little dizzy from the heat and decided that if the DI touched him one more time he was going to quit. Fuck them. He’d walk over to a pine tree he’d already picked out, sit down, and just go away in his head. Adios. They’d know he was pretending to be catatonic, but he could keep it up until they discharged him out of their fucking army and out of their fucking war. That’s how he remembered thinking about it. But he hadn’t done it.
Maybe the kid was just deaf and crazy, Hanson thought, and not another version of himself, split off from him that day in basic training and taken another road. Hanson was mostly deaf himself, his ears blown up in that war he went to, but he heard well enough, people mostly yelling at him on the streets, and as for crazy, he’d learned how to act like he wasn’t most of the time.
He looked at the kid in the side-view mirrors, then in the rearview mirror, through the Plexiglas cage, the kid meeting his eyes, unimpressed, arrogant the way Hanson used to be. Finally, tiring of it, bored, he leaned back and looked out the window. “The weather’s changing,” he said.
Hanson pulled the car over, into an out-of-business Shell station. He got out and opened the back door.
“Get out,” he told the kid, happy at the little bit of fear the kid’s eyes betrayed. “Turn around.”
He took off the cuffs.
“That’s it. Don’t even look back at me. If I see your eyes, I’ll kick your ass.”
When he didn’t move, Hanson put his boot in the seat of his wet jeans and gave him a push. “Take off.”
The kid adjusted the wet seat of his jeans and took a couple of steps, barefoot, his jeans still dripping water.
“Wait,” Hanson said. He took out his wallet and pulled a twenty from it, paused and took the rest of the bills out, walked up behind the kid, jamming the bills in the pocket of the wet jeans. “Adios.”
From the patrol car, he watched the kid walk down the street until he vanished around a corner, then he filled out an assignment card. No complainant. Problem solved upon departure. Hanson / 7374P.
He cleared from the call and was on the way to an Unknown Problem up on MacArthur Boulevard when the sunlight changed, faded or darkened, turning a dirty yellow. Sudden raindrops pocked the dusty windshield, and he looked out the passenger window. The storm was boiling up out of the bay, the sky black as Armageddon, trailing steely curtains of rain. Out at sea thunder drummed and boomed, an enormous armada of flaring thunderheads coiling over the horizon, pushing and pulling themselves inland.
He stopped the car and watched the storm sweep through the oil tanks and refineries, past the harbor cranes crouched like robot dogs, slapping down billboards and peeling the roofs off warehouses. It surged across the freeway, slowing then stopping traffic and flooding the streets of East Oakland. Power grids went black and transformers on phone poles exploded in sparks and the storm shook the patrol car on its suspension, hail battered the roof and sleet froze the windows opaque. Radio went silent.
Hours later, after dark, Hanson was on his way back out to District Four after transporting a prisoner, driving slowly through the flooded streets and fierce rain. Thinking over the day, he took some kind of wrong turn into a warehouse district. Mechanical bells began clanging. The red-and-white striped barrier arm of a railroad grade crossing dropped out of the dark through his headlight beams, and he skidded to a stop a foot from the barrier arm, where a red bull’s-eye warning light tossed itself back and forth over the hood of the patrol car.
The train slammed down out of nowhere, out of the dark, thundering past and down the tracks, two stories high, like some Main Street in a tornado—boxcars, tank cars, flatcars, hopper cars, gondolas, rocking side to side through the rain out of Oakland—Erie Lackawanna, Santa Fe, Oregon Pacific, Pee Dee River, Kansas City, Illinois Central, Union Pacific—to somewhere else, rain exploding into steam and colored smoke over the patrol car, the headlights of cars across the tracks like muzzle flashes between rail cars crashing and clattering past, rocking the patrol car. Hanson sat back in his rain-damp uniform and closed his eyes for a moment, exhausted.
He was wading the muddy Song Mai Loc, crossing that river again in monsoon season, the hottest part of the day, back in a war on the other side of the earth. According to the map he was using, they were half a click from a village that had been called Mai Than before it was destroyed. Every village on the map was destroyed, (DESTROYED) printed beneath each village name, in parentheses. What had once been Mai Than, before it was destroyed, according to the map, lay on the other side of a rise, just beyond a blue line on the map that was the river they were crossing, the brown Song Mai Loc, the muddy Mai Loc River.
Warm as blood and barely moving, up to their waists halfway across—Hanson and five of the CRP, the Combat Recon Platoon, Vietnamese mercenaries, who were their best killers. They were into the third day of a five-day recon that Hanson had planned, to update information on the map.
They took a break on the other side of the river, in a dying stand of bamboo—to drink the hot, iodine-tasting water from their canteens, to have a handful of the dried little fish you could eat like popcorn, and to pull or burn the leeches off their ankles and groins where they’d attached themselves in the river.
Rau, the CRP platoon sergeant, hissed at Hanson and pointed. Four or five women driving water buffalo around the base of the rise toward them, already getting close, their high-pitched musical laughter floating through the rain. They hadn’t seen them yet, and the buffalo hadn’t smelled them because they were upwind, following a trail or road that wasn’t on the map.
Mai Than must not be destroyed anymore—or not yet—and when the women saw them they’d send the village cadre, who would be main force VC, after them. Hanson knew that no friendlies had been in the area for over two years, and that’s why he’d wanted to check it out on this operation. Good idea, he thought, smiling. They were way out of range of any firebase artillery fan, and no gunships or tac air from the 101st base in Quang Tri would be able to make it over the mountains in that weather. They were on their own. When the women walked up on them, what would he do then, say “Hi, only taking a break, gotta go”?
They could start running now, but the local VC would be right behind them, and they’d know the terrain a lot better than Hanson could read it off the map. Fine, Hanson thought, relaxing, they’d just stand and fight here, killing as many Viet Cong as they could before they were killed. Good.
“We must crokadow,” Rau whispered to him, mimicking shooting a pistol, killing the women, shaking his head in a parody of regret: Too bad. He’d been killing other Vietnamese, of one political persuasion or another, since he was twelve years old. The only job he’d ever had. Back in camp, Rau sometimes shot up a mixture of opium and rice wine, but he knew his job.
Fuckin’ monsters, Hanson thought, unbuckling a flap on his pack. All of us, he thought, pulling the plastic-wrapped High Standard .22 from his pack, then the suppressor.
He’d gotten too good at his job. After a while, if you survive long enough, the only thing that can kill you is bad luck, you’re so good, and even if you step into bad luck, if you stay cool and do the next indicated thing, you’ll walk out of it.
He carried the silenced .22 pistol on operations just in case they saw a lone VC or NVA to take prisoner, he’d shoot him so he wouldn’t die right away, and take him. The pistol wasn’t completely silent, but it was quiet. He had an extra ten-round magazine too. It was an accurate pistol, and he’d practiced back at camp until he was very good with it. He’d have no trouble putting a bullet in all five of them—there were five—in as many seconds. Head shots. What he liked about the war—what everybody liked about it if they liked it at all—was the simplicity. His job was to stay alive and keep the CRP with him alive.
After they killed the women, they’d run, pull the quick-release straps on their packs, drop everything but ammo and water, and they’d have a head start, back across the blue line where they knew the way now, back to hills and valleys where they could hide, where there weren’t so many VC and, if they were lucky and ran hard enough, where he could call in artillery, where maybe they’d still be alive tomorrow. They could make it with a head start if they killed the women.
He wiped the pistol down with an oily rag he kept in the same bag, checked to see that he had a round chambered—a Boy Scout–size little .22 round—screwed the suppressor on, and thumbed the safety off. He exchanged looks with Rau and the other four CRP, and that’s when the women began slapping the lumbering buffalo with their bamboo sticks and angled away around the hill, never suspecting they had been about to be slaughtered. Hanson stayed crouched, managing his breathing, while the CRP looked both relieved and disappointed.
The delicate laughter, the slap of bamboo against the horned buffalos’ hides, the clank of bells on the buffalos’ necks, growing fainter, then gone.
Everybody had been saved, and he was still sitting in the idling, stinking OPD patrol car in the rain, but the train had passed, down the track, silent, gone. The clang of the mechanical bell was only the ringing that was always in his ears, when he let himself listen to it. The striped crossing gate rose like an arm gesturing for him to continue his life. Cars were crossing now from the other direction, their headlights flashing in his eyes as they shuddered over the tracks. More cars were lined up and waiting, behind him, afraid to honk at a police car. He put the car in gear and drove on through the rain.