The rain had lifted when Hanson knocked on the door, but the horizon was dark with more on the way. Lightning spider-webbed the horizon as he watched, counting off the seconds until its electricity brushed his face in its passing, and he imagined himself disassembling into the storm. The door opened the width of the rattling night chain, and two small dogs stuck their heads through, wheezing, trying to wriggle out, one on top, then the other, ignoring Hanson until, against their will, they began sliding backward, back inside, and the door slammed shut. Hanson listened to the dogs throwing themselves against the door while a woman shouted, “Stop it. Stop! Stop that. Right now.”
Half the night shift had called in sick that afternoon, the third day of rain. The sun was sinking fast behind the weather when the door opened. A stout black woman in her late fifties, all but filling the doorway, studied Hanson with disapproval. The two dogs leaned out from behind her, stiff legged, shivering with aggression.
“Yes?” she said.
Hanson looked down at his wet wool uniform shirt, silver badge, gun belt, and muddy boots, as if to verify who he was, then back up. “Police officer?”
At the sound of his voice the dogs flattened against the floor, baring their teeth.
“You called the police?”
The woman considered him, then stepped aside, herding the quick little dogs back with her feet. With a nod of her head she indicated a white brocade couch, protected by clear plastic seat covers, as was all the furniture in the room. The white carpet was covered by clear plastic runners.
Hanson sat in the middle of the sofa, the plastic chirping against the seat of his damp wool trousers. The dogs positioned themselves at his ankles, coiled like springs, their little throats quivering, watching his eyes. One was black, the other a dark striped brindle, milky blind in one eye.
The woman looked down at him, her arms folded over her breasts. “Well?”
It must have been eighty degrees inside, the air heavy with wet-dog smell. Hanson smiled at the dogs with his eyes, but they only growled.
“Yes, ma’am, what’s the problem?”
“I done told the police woman on the phone all about it.”
“They didn’t give me any details.”
She clicked her teeth. “Next door,” she said, cutting her eyes across the room. “That woman and the little boy calls her ‘auntie.’ Up at all hours, night and day, in and out, doors slamming to beat the band. Day and night.” She was tapping her foot. “Live and let live is my watchword. That’s what I was always taught. I don’t complain, you won’t find any complaints from me in all your complaint books, not from me. You hear what I’m sayin’?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I know she says that my dogs poop in her yard, but they do not, never have, never will, because I don’t let them outside. Was some other dogs that did it, not my dogs, but if that’s what she wants to think or tell people, it doesn’t bother me. It’s a free country. I’ve always bent over backwards to be a good neighbor, not to cause trouble or involve the police. And,” she said, “I know that fireworks are against the law,” looking at him for agreement.
He imagined they were. Just about everything they could think of in the State Capitol up in Sacramento was against the law in East Oakland.
“Uh-huh,” she said, “called the police a hour ago an’ you finally here. Did you see that mess out there?”
“No, ma’am.”
“You must not be much of an investigator, then.”
The dogs knew it too.
He nodded. “What happened?” he asked her.
“I’m here to tell you what happened,” she said. “That boy over there, lord have mercy, can’t stand still or be quiet, racing around on that bike of his, gets the dogs all worked up when they out there in the”—she looked down at the dogs—“in the yard,” she said. “Uh-huh. Ain’t that right?” she asked the guilty dogs. “I don’t let ’em out, ever, but sometimes they get out if I’m not watchin’ them every minute of the day is what I’m telling you. Those illegal firecrackers, I like to jump out of my skin sometimes they scare me so bad. Boom! Pow!”
The dogs leaped up in alarm and came down running in place, their claws clattering on the plastic carpet runner.
“Sounds about like one of those drive-bys that go on around here, police or no police doesn’t make a bit of difference. But today, now, this morning, an’ I don’t pay attention to other people’s business, I just happened to be looking out my window when that boy come out carrying a pumpkin—that’s right, a big pumpkin. Set it down at the end of their sidewalk and put one of those cherry bombs inside it, blew it up, pumpkin mess all over the place. Makes the neighborhood look bad. Scared the dogs to death. They come running and scratching on the back door for me to let ’em in, tore the screen up. I’ll have to get it fixed.”
The dogs were leaning against his legs. He could feel their hearts beating as she told the story.
“Have you ever heard of such a thing?”
Hanson shook his head then, to show he was concerned too.
Hanson said he’d go over and talk to the woman next door. He opened his notebook and she gave him, reluctantly, her name, but said her date of birth was her business. She hadn’t done anything, and didn’t want her name on a police report. Why would they want her name on the police report? She wasn’t a criminal.
Hanson touched both dogs as he got up, just to let them know that he thought they were good dogs. The one-eyed brindle rolled over on his back with his legs in the air.
“Git,” she snapped at the dogs, “git now,” and they ran off together.
“You gonna talk to her? Is that what you get paid for, to talk to people? That what they payin’ officers to do now?”
“No, ma’am.” Hanson put his notebook in his pocket. “They mostly pay us to arrest as many as we can, handcuff ’em and take ’em to jail,” he said, “but sometimes, well, I just talk to them, try to cut down on paperwork,” he said, letting himself out of the house.
The glistening street was deserted, littered with budded tree branches that had been torn off by three days of storms. Silent blue lightning veined the thunderheads still lifting relentlessly from the bay, shuddering and booming like the faraway end of the world. From the sidewalk he could see the pumpkin shards glowing orange in the strange storm twilight. He kept walking toward the patrol car, not planning to bother anybody about the firecrackers, and then, one foot still in the air, stopped. He put his foot down carefully, turned on his flashlight, and with the beam of light followed the trail of blood from the street—stains and smears and spatters, gobs and strings of blood on the grass, gelled little pockets of it in the cracked concrete—to the little stoop-porch and the front door of the house.
“Police officer,” he called, tapping the door with the flashlight. He didn’t mind waiting, giving people a moment to organize their story or prepare to deny everything. No need to panic them into doing something crazy that he’d have to arrest them for and do the paperwork. At the same time he was poised to jump off the porch if someone came out the door with a knife, or to break their hand with the flashlight.
The chain lock rattled and the door was opened by a black woman in her late twenties wearing white shorts and a ribbed white tank top. Almost as tall as Hanson, she was sleekly muscled and barefoot, angry the moment she saw that it was a cop who’d knocked on her door.
“I didn’t call the police.”
She was a beautiful woman, he thought, who would be a real handful if he had to arrest her. The bridge of her perfect nose was swollen, as was her cheekbone, and her black eye—well, it made him a little dizzy.
“Wrong address,” she said, moving to close the door.
“Radio sent me,” he said, slipping his boot in to wedge the door open, watching her hands—gold and silver rings on all her fingers—“to check on a problem.”
“No problems here.”
“Blood,” he said, shining the flashlight from the porch, using it as a pointer while watching her eyes follow the beam of light. “All the way out to the street.”
“Is that a problem?”
Hanson smiled at that. Hard as she’d made her eyes, she couldn’t hide how smart she was and that she hated him on sight. She was deciding how much of it to tell him and how to tell it. She smelled funky and perfumed in the rain-washed air. Thunder broke over the house, shook them both. Lightning turned her eyes silver, stopped time, and burned their shadows through the floor. It began to rain again.
“Can I come in for a minute, out of the rain?” he said, stepping inside through the door, pushing it all the way back against the wall so he knew no one was back there.
“Who got cut?” he asked, closing the door behind him.
“If he dies, come back and arrest me. Good night.”
“Looks like it was self-defense…”
“I’m not complaining. I didn’t call the police. I don’t need the police.”
“Where did it happen?”
She glared at him, thinking it over. “In the kitchen.”
“Show me.”
“Why should I do that? I shouldn’t have even let you in the door.”
“Let’s take a look.”
She limped as she led him into the kitchen, where the floor was patterned with bloody waffle boot prints and her own whorled footprints. A bloody stainless steel potato peeler was in the sink.
“Where did you stab him?”
“What do you want? I couldn’t get away from him.”
“I don’t think he lost enough blood to die or go to the hospital, but I want to be sure before I write it up. Show me where you stabbed him.”
She touched the back of her own leg, just below the hem of her shorts.
“Where else?”
“Here,” she said, her eyes on his, slipping two ringed fingers under the waistband of the white shorts. “I think I hit the bone, and he cut his fingers when he tried to take it away from me.”
“Um,” Hanson began, forgetting what it was he’d started to say.
“Are you going to arrest me?”
Hanson shook his head. “Are you okay?”
She just looked at him, her swollen black eye beautiful and erotic.
“I think he broke your nose a little bit.”
“I’m okay,” she said.
“And your foot?”
“Are you going to give me my rights?”
Hanson smiled at her. “I’d better take a look at that foot.”
She didn’t need him to help her hobble into the front room, holding onto his arm, they both knew that, but that’s what they did. He put her into a nice overstuffed chair, and when he asked, she told him that the rubbing alcohol was under the sink in the bathroom.
While he was looking for the alcohol he called back to her that he wasn’t looking for drugs, and she said that she didn’t keep drugs in the bathroom.
He used two washcloths he’d put under hot water, cleaning the foot up, sitting on the floor below her chair, holding the foot in his lap.
“I don’t think I’ll tell any of my friends about this,” she said, trying not to smile.
“Don’t tell anybody,” he said, reaching for the bottle of alcohol, “this was just a call about firecrackers.” He cradled her foot, folded and pinched the washcloth into a tiny wingtip, and dipped it in the alcohol. “This is cold,” he said, dry mouthed, “and it’ll sting,” he said, gently washing out the blood rimming her toenails. “When you paint your toenails, do you—”
The lights went off. He’d forgotten about the storm outside.
“Do you,” Hanson began again, “um…”
“Maybe we…” she said.
It was too dark for them to see each other.
The storm crackled and lit them up, two seconds, three seconds, then it was dark again.
Hanson cupped his other hand on the arch of her foot.
In his notebook, he’d written her name, DOB, address, and phone number. Her name was Libya. He underlined it. Then he drew a circle around it. He stood by the door of his patrol car and considered the dark empty street. The lights were on across the freeway and, of course, up in the hills, but District Five was still without electricity.
He got in the car, started it, turned on the lights, and the instrument dials lit up. Radio snapped and buzzed and chattered with traffic. On the assignment card he wrote Complainant concerned about firecrackers, then he clicked his pen closed, folded the card twice, and stuck it in his pocket.
He drove a few blocks and pulled over at the High Street on-ramp, turned off the lights and got out of the car. Standing in the rain there he could see the freeway, the red and silver taillights and headlights streaming against and past each other. Maybe it was too late to quit now, maybe he was just too crazy to talk to anybody when he wasn’t wearing his uniform. He got back into the patrol car and listened to the rain drumming on the roof, then pulled the mike from the dashboard, jumped into the radio traffic, and cleared from the call. He should go home, drink some tequila, and pass out.
Only a couple of cops were in the locker room when he came out of the tunnel from Transportation. He could hear them somewhere behind the banks of wall lockers, changing clothes. By the time he came out of the shower, they were gone, and he was alone in the empty locker room. As he put on his jeans, blue work shirt, blue-and-white running shoes, he felt as if he might be the last person alive on earth. He walked down the deserted hallway and out the push-bar steel door into the rain, two blocks more to where his van was parked, got in, locked the door, reached under the seat for the half pint of vodka with the red-and-white Popov label that he’d bought at the little Korean liquor store on the way to work. He drank the sweet, oily vodka down in four swallows, the warmth spreading in his stomach, then sat back and watched the rain cascade down the windshield, the side windows, watched the rear window through the rearview mirror, watched the shadows out on the street. The rain drummed on the roof of the car.
It seemed to Hanson as if it rained a lot, that May and June. He got used to the rain and even got to like it despite the damp wool uniform, wet steel-toed boots, raindrops puckering the orange crime report forms. The rain, blown in from the Pacific, from hundreds of miles out to sea, clattered softly in the rainspout outside his bedroom window at dawn when he went to sleep. It cleaned the oil and trash off the streets, mirrored streetlights and stoplights, murmured against the curbs, rushing and frothing down the clogged storm drains. The rain ran down his cheeks to his lips, where he licked it off, thinking how it had ridden the clouds in from the ocean.
He was done for the night.
Hanson is sleeping.
His books are all boxed up and stacked around the walls of his bedroom while he’s miles away, sitting across the kitchen table from Libya, where they are talking with their eyes. His eyes have done more to keep him alive than any field manual or assault rifle or air strike, and now they’re saving him again. He’s articulate with hard eyes and crazy eyes, mean eyes, command eyes and ready-to-die calm eyes, but Libya is teaching him how to talk with soft eyes tonight during the storm, which will give up and be gone by morning. It’s another language entirely, all new to him, but already he’s dancing with her to the basic nouns and verbs and when he stumbles he has her to hold on to.
The rain has seeped down through the walls and across the ceiling of his bedroom, patterning the plaster into dark, cryptic icons—threats, bad memories, and ransom demands from the depths of Lake Merritt. Outside his window bushes whip in the wind, fanning shadows across the bedroom from the streetlight on the corner. Thunder explodes above the house. The storm pounds the walls and rattles the gutters, it rips a screen off the bedroom window, flings it cartwheeling away into the dark.
Hanson rolls over easily in his sleep.