This one time Malone took the family to the White Mountains in New Hampshire on the kids’ spring break. They rented a little cabin in a canyon by a river and one morning he got up early and ran some water out of the tap so cold it almost hurt to drink, but it tasted so good and so clean he couldn’t stop.
That was a good trip, a good vacation.
Now bachata music comes from a boom box somewhere as Malone comes out of the building onto the street.
Helicopter rotors chop the air.
Malone hurts and he’s thirsty as he hefts the bags, walking—shuffling—west on 176th onto Haven. Blood follows him like a guilty secret as he crosses the street and staggers onto Riverside, then across, then into some trees and trips over a root and falls.
It would be nice to just lie there, just lie there and go to sleep warm and drowsy in the grass, but the pain stabs him anyway and he can’t stay there—he has somewhere to go—so he struggles to his feet and keeps walking.
John, he caught a trout from the river and when Malone put it on a tree stump and started to clean it, John, he started to cry when he saw the guts come out and he cried because he was sorry he killed the fish.
Malone walks onto the Henry Hudson.
A car blasts its horn and swerves around him. A yell comes out the window, “Fucking drunk!”
Malone crosses the northbound lane, then the south and then he’s in trees again and then he comes to some basketball courts, empty now in the early morning and even though he can see the river he leans against a post to rest and steady himself as he bends over and throws up again.
Then he starts again and comes to more trees and uses them to hold himself up until he makes it to some rocks by the edge of the river.
He sits down.
Unzips the duffel bags and starts taking out the bricks of heroin.
Billy O looks up and smiles at him.
“We’re rich.”
Then the dog snaps at the end of its chain.
Puppies mewl, a small knot of squirming life.
The day Malone graduated from the Academy was one of those spring days that New York occasionally produces, one of those splendid days when you know you don’t want to be anywhere else in the world and you don’t want to be anyone but you in this place, this city, this world unto itself.
And he was young, young and clean and full of hope and pride and belief, belief in God and belief in himself and belief in the Job, belief in the mission, to protect and serve.
Malone stabs the knife into the brick of heroin and slashes the plastic.
Then he tosses it into the river.
Does this again and again.
That spring day he stood in an ocean of blue, his brothers and sisters, his friends, his comrades in arms, and they were white and black and brown and yellow but what they really were was blue.
Sinatra sang “New York, New York,” as they filed in and stood at attention.
I should call in a 10-13, he thinks now, Officer down, officer needs assistance, but he don’t have his radio and he can’t remember where his phone is and it doesn’t matter anyway because they wouldn’t come if they knew it was him and even if they did they wouldn’t make it on time.
You should have called 10-13 a long time ago.
Before it was too late.
Claudette’s skin is black against the white silk right there at that softest spot in the world, a world of concrete and asphalt, steel cuffs and bars, hard words and harder thoughts, her skin is dark and soft and cool so near the warmth of her.
He empties one bag of the junk and starts in on the next one, wants to get it done before he falls asleep.
Levin smiles up at him we’re rich.
No that was Billy.
Or Liam.
So many dead.
Too many.
When John was born he took so long coming, when he finally slid out, Malone, he was so tired he climbed into the gurney and the three of them, they fell asleep together.
Caitlin, being the second, she was a lot faster.
Jesus, it hurts.
Malone in his new blue uniform, his new shield, his hat and his white gloves, his mother and his brother Liam and Sheila watching and he wished his father could have been there, could have lived to see this, he would have been proud even though he told Malone he didn’t want this life for him, this was the life that his family knew, his father, his grandfather, this was their life, what they did, what they believed, through the pain and the sorrow this is what they did and he wished his dad were there to see him take the oath.
“I do hereby pledge and declare to uphold the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of New York and faithfully discharge my duties as a police officer in the New York City Police Department to the best of my ability, so help me God.”
So help me, God.
No you won’t, why should you?
The pain bites at his guts and he screams as he twists on the rocks.
John cried for that fish.
He cried.
The air smells like ash. Like the day that Liam died.
Ashes, smoke, shattered buildings and broken hearts.
Tears cut lines through charred cheeks.
Now the city is waking up.
He hears sirens wail like newborn babies.
Malone looks back at his kingdom in flames behind him, plumes of smoke rising as if from funeral pyres.
Slashes another bag and gives it to the river.
Then he throws his white gloves in the air as blue and white confetti showers him and his brothers and his sisters and they yell their lungs out as the crowd cheers and he knows at that moment that this is what he wants, what he always wanted, that this is how he’ll spend his life, his blood, his soul, his being.
A pure fire burns in his heart.
It’s the best day of his life.
No, that’s not today, he remembers.
That’s not now, that was then.
Heroin falls from the ceiling like it’s snowing inside. Floats gently into Billy’s wounds, his blood, his veins, soothes the pain.
Billy does it hurt anymore?
Does the hurting stop?
Does it end?
Our beginnings can’t know our ends, our purity can’t imagine its corruption. All he knew back then was that he loved the Job, in those early years walking or riding the streets in his bag, seeing the people see him, the innocent feeling safe because he was there, the guilty feeling unsafe because he was there.
He remembers his first collar the way you remember the first time you made love—a holdup thug who’d mugged an old lady and Malone found him and took him off the street and it turned out he was wanted in ten other robberies and the city was safer, the people were safer, because Malone was on the Job.
He loved the way that people looked to him to help them, save them from predators or from themselves. He loved that they looked to him for assistance, answers, even accusation and then absolution. He loved the city, loved the people he protected and served, loved the Job.
He couldn’t imagine then that those streets could wear him down, that the Job could wear him out, that the sorrow and anger, the bodies, the heartbreak, the suffering, the foolishness, the cynicism would grind on his soul like a stone on steel, dulling not sharpening, leaving nicks and invisible, insidious cracks that would spread until the steel first broke and then shattered, until he understood what killed his father and left his blue coat draped across the dirty snow and Billy O lying on the floor strewn with dirty cash, his body and blood corrupted.
Malone’s soul started shiny as his new shield, darkened as it changed to gold and now is black as night.
He drops the last brick into the water.
That’s good, now none of it will hit his streets.
The job done, he lies back.
The old man died in a pile of dirty snow, Liam underneath a burned building, me on sharp rocks looking up at the sky.
The sky is gray, the sun will be up soon.
The sirens howl.
A radio crackles in his ear.
10-13, 10-13.
Officer down.
Then the sky is white and sirens stop and the radio goes dead quiet and he’s making his first collar again, the guy who robbed the old lady.
All Denny Malone ever wanted to be was a good cop.