Men sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
—attributed to George Orwell
I’m just a few days out of Mobile’s Police Academy, my third night in the Third Precinct riding with my FTO, Porter. Sarge had just dismissed us from roll call, and we were in the precinct parking lot loading and fueling up Porter’s squad car. It was 1815 hours on a sweltering mid-September evening.
Porter had told me the first night, “Get this straight, up front: I don’t know you and don’t wanna know you. Don’t give a damn about you, your life’s story, your wife and kids, what you did before this, and why you wanted to work in this fucked-up department, especially at your age, Grampa. You’re not my buddy, and you won’t be after this month is up.” He had punctuated this declaration by slamming the squad car trunk, where I’d just stowed my shotgun.
“I never volunteered to be a field training officer and don’t get paid any extra for all the goddamn paperwork. I hate rookies. Even though you’re old enough to be my pawpaw and you look like Clint fucking Eastwood—in Blood Work, not Dirty Harry, have you seen that yet? Then you know what I’m talkin’ about: he’s so old, he has a heart attack in the first scene—you’re just another goddamn rookie to me. All I ask is that you don’t bug me, don’t try to talk to me, or ask a million stupid-ass rookie questions. Just stay the fuck outta my way and don’t do anything to embarrass me.”
“Yes sir,” I’d said that first night, an academy reflex. I’d been told before of my resemblance to Clint but without Porter’s specificity. This time it kinda stung. I had just seen Blood Work. After the opening-scene foot chase ends with Clint’s heart attack, for the rest of the movie everybody tells him how bad, how sick he looks. Wasn’t Eastwood like seventy-five? I had just turned fifty.
“Jeee-zus,” Porter had said, blowing smoke and shaking his head in disgust. He’d then thrust his plump round face into mine, his sneer exposing teeth crying out for orthodonture. He barely has whiskers, I’d noticed, and a sparse, utterly pathetic mustache darkened his upper lip. I’d gotten a pungent whiff of coffee and nicotine from his breath but resisted pulling my head back.
“You see any fucking stripes on my sleeve, Pawpaw?” He’d raised a thick bicep, pulling at the sleeve. “First rule: Don’t call me ‘sir’!”
I’d felt my mouth forming the y of yessir but aborted it, leaving my chin slightly jutting, in what I’d hoped might be taken as defiance, or determination. It was taken as neither. Porter wasn’t even looking at me as we’d pulled out of the precinct and into the night. He was on a roll.
“Second rule,” he had announced. “Forget all that crap they taught you in the academy. It’s useless. Horseshit. Has nothing to do with how it really is out here on the streets. Just watch what I do, and the other guys on the squad. Except that worthless piece of shit Whatley. Do exactly the opposite of anything he does.” I had wondered, what makes Whatley a piece of shit? So much for the “brothers-in-blue” thing.
But Portly Porter droned on, his self-importance reminiscent of Deputy Barney Fife condescending to deputize Gomer Pyle in Mayberry. “Keep your mouth shut, your eyes and ears open, then maybe, just mayyybe, we’ll get along and you’ll survive this month.” He grabbed the radio mike and put us 10-8 (in service), as a one-man training unit. I didn’t count—even as a man, much less a cop—and wouldn’t for another ninety days.
I remember thinking, you fat fool, you’re a walking cliché, giving me that tired, world-weary-veteran-to-recruit spiel. You’re maybe half my age. Former Marine? Big whup. Do you really think I haven’t watched that scene you’re playacting, in maybe a million movies, most of ’em made before you could even talk?
But I was used to rookie disdain as the default setting of department veterans by now, having been razzed and lorded over and called crazy for the past six months by old cops, young cops, female cops, fellow recruits, academy instructors, my wife, and most of our family and friends ever since I’d abruptly quit my old job heading up Mobile’s United Way for a 75 percent pay cut and hired on with the department. I just sucked it up and held my tongue. I’m not one for much conversation, anyway. And if I ever do come up with a snappy comeback, it’s several days late.
Porter liked to write tickets. Traffic enforcement is my least favorite part of policing. But for Porter, it justifies parking the squad car on the roadside behind some bushes and just sitting there until the radar whines. I’d sat in obedient silence for two twelve-hour shifts, trying to focus on the radio, listening for our unit number to be called. Porter had mostly chain-smoked Marlboro Lights and talked for hours on his cell to some female in Arkansas he’d met online: “What’s your favorite thing at Taco Bell? Dontcha love those new Gorditas, with extra sour cream!” I was beginning to believe that old saying about police work: 90 percent boredom and 10 percent terror. I was craving the terror. And thinking maybe this was a really dumb career move, after all.
But third night out, as the day’s thick heat slowly rose up out of the asphalt while the blazing Alabama sun eased beyond the horizon, we finally get dispatched to a hot call, a domestic: white female caller, assaulted by known white male subject armed with a knife. Both parties still on scene. At last! I think. We get to rescue a damsel in distress!
Dubovitch will back us. (A reminder to me that even to the dispatcher, I don’t exist, at least not as sufficient backing for Porter.) I try to picture Dubovitch. From what little I’ve gathered, if he’s the guy I’m thinking of, he seems pretty squared away, based on his bearing at roll call and how the others regard him. A little cocky, maybe, but (I’m beginning to think) who of these guys isn’t? Dubovitch has been on about as long as Porter, seven or eight years, and is about the same age, late twenties, maybe thirty. At least he’s not fat and loud like Portly.
We pull into the rundown motor court, a place that charges by the week and month (and probably by the hour). That old jukebox chorus pops unbidden into my head: “I’ll even tell you that I love you if you want me to. Third rate romance, low rent rendezvous.” The Amazing Rhythm Aces.
The dozen-room Bama Pride motel’s neon sign has a nearly burnt-out, flickering P and so alternately reads “Bama ride.” It’s a long, sad-looking, one-story cinder-block building with peeling lime-green paint, sagging eaves, missing shingles, and broken windows held together with duct-taped cardboard. Room numbers are nailed all cattywampus to the splintered, scarred doors. Its weedy, cracked, and heaving parking lot is littered with cigarette butts, flattened malt liquor cans, broken glass. There’s a lone, battered, and rusty eighties-model Ford pickup, mostly faded blue but with a primer-gray door, parked at the far end of the lot. Evidently, most of this motel’s guests don’t own vehicles.
Dubovitch is already there, leaning against his squad car smoking a cigarette next to an agitated, anorexic, bedraggled, hard-looking woman talking fast and loud. Our damsel could be the “Bama ride” herself. She had likely been attractive, in a lascivious sort of way, in a previous incarnation. A large near-empty wine bottle is on the ground next to her.
She’s carrying on about how “the thum-bitch came at me with a knife! A goddamn knife!” She seems more pissed off than scared or hurt. She’s maybe mid-forties, her lisp the result of gaps in her frightfully discolored teeth. Strands of greasy, sweat-soaked hair stick randomly to her forehead, cheeks, and neck; she’s wearing a soiled, stretched wifebeater (barely containing her drooping, braless breasts), neon-pink short-shorts with white piping, no shoes, filthy bare feet. Tattoos, mosquito bites, scratches, scabs, and welts adorn her arms and legs. Dubo’s not even looking at her while she rants on with punching and parrying motions and points to the door of room number five. As Porter and I approach, I can smell her. It’s not a pleasant scent: a yeasty, sour odor similar to dirty sweat socks but sharper.
Dubovitch smiles and says, “Hey Porter, check out her tattoo. Show him your tat, darlin’.” The woman stops mid-sentence and proudly displays her upper right arm.
Porter reads aloud the faded greenish lettering, “FUCK MEN,” then grins.
“Is that your attitude, ma’am, or your job description?” Good one, Porter, I concede, grudgingly. He’s still a pompous ass, but I’ll grant him points for wit.
“I don’t need no thit from you, ath-hole!” our complainant spits through her gaping teeth. “I want him arrethted! Prothecuted to the fulleth exthtent of the law! I know my rightth!” A devotee of TV court dramas.
“No injuries,” Dubo says, ignoring her, “but those two over there witnessed the whole thing.” He nods toward a couple of gray-haired black men sitting on lawn chairs at the end of the parking lot, under the generous cool shade of a massive, moss-dripping live oak, whose roots are responsible for the crumbling, upheaved asphalt. “Guy did have a knife, they say, and he started it. It’s her old man. They both been drinking and fighting all day, according to the witnesses, and she confirms it.” He gestures to the wine bottle at her feet. When I look their way, the witnesses nod in affirmation. I swell up slightly and nod back with my most serious countenance: a man on a mission. At least they think I’m a cop. “He retreated to the room when she smacked him upside the head with the bottle.”
“You got her information, Dubo?” Porter asks.
Dubovitch nods. “I just gotta get her signature on the DV* form, and the witness statements. Why don’t you and your rookie go fetch him. He’s still in the room. No backdoor. Still has the blade on him.”
“C’mon, Pawpaw,” Porter says. “Let’s go get Mr. Slingblade.” He strides toward the door, which is partially open, to room number five. I notice he unsnaps the holster of his Glock and do likewise. My heart is pounding and my hand is trembling and I’m relieved nobody seems to notice. We stand on each side of the door. Porter gingerly pushes on it, calling out “MPD” as it swings open. We peer inside.
Naked except for darkly stained shorts, a man sits on a bed, propped against the wall. Blood covers him from a gash on his swollen forehead. He’s bald, except for long wisps of gray hair around the ears, bound into a ponytail behind his ruined face. The tangled sheets around him are soaked with gore.
Spying us, he snarls, “Arrest that bitch! She damn-near killed me! Looka me! I want that bitch chained down in Metro!”
“Settle down, Pops,” Porter says, waving off his demands as we enter. My eyes are popping at the sight of him. Porter’s eyes sweep the room, and mine follow. It’s all torn up. A nightstand next to the bed has been knocked over, its lamp shattered on the floor. A chrome-and-plastic chair lies on its side among broken dishes, scattered French fries, half-eaten hamburgers, and Sonic Drive-In wrappers swept off an overturned kitchenette table. Beer cans, wine bottles, and dirty clothes cover the floor.
“Where’s the blade?” Porter demands.
“What blade?!” Mr. Bloodyface snaps. “Wha’d that bitch tell you? She fuckin’ conked me with a bottle! I want her arrested!”
The poor bastard clearly got the worst of it. Who’s the real victim here, I’m wondering. Porter approaches him. “Get up and put your hands behind your back,” he orders, unsnapping his cuffs from his duty belt. The bloody man is outraged and bellows, “I’m barely fucking conscious! You put that bitch in cuffs, not me! Why are you idiots taking me? What’s the charge? I have a right to know the charge! I demand you arrest her! Get me a motherfucking ambulance!”
Unfazed, Porter jerks him upright from the bed and quickly cuffs him despite his twisting and shouting.
“You started it, Pops. Got witnesses. You’re the primary aggressor, so shut the fuck up and quit buckin’ on me or I’ll bloody you some more.” Then with equal contempt for me, mute and immobilized at the tableau, “Don’t just stand there with your mouth open, rookie. Search his pockets!”
The man is still attempting to jerk free, despite Porter’s firm grasp of his cuffed wrists. “Careful of the blood, rookie. He might have AIDS. You got the Bug, Numbnuts?”
I pull a small folding knife from a pocket of the blood-sticky shorts. “Hang on to that, Pawpaw. Evidence.” Porter marches our arrested subject out the door to the squad car. He’s dog-cussing us, calling us pigs, calling her a nasty dogfucking whore. His victim returns the barrage, taunting, “Yeah, motherfucker! Who’th the tough guy now?” Dubo has to restrain her from lunging at him as Porter stuffs the bloody man into the cage. He’s demanding our badge numbers, demanding justice. I drop the knife into my breast pocket and follow like a heeling pup.
At the hospital, bloody Lester Puckett shouts and struggles all the way into the ER intake bay, where Porter plops him down in front of a desk occupied by a soft-spoken matronly administrator. (Metro won’t accept anybody in Lester’s condition without a medical release. A doctor has to deem him fit for incarceration, so Metro doesn’t get sued if he croaks in its custody.) Regular people, seated in the room awaiting loved ones, feign averting their eyes from the spectacle. One woman actually covers her kid’s ears and turns his head away.
The intake specialist asks Puckett for his information, calling him Mr. and Sir. After a thoughtful pause, Lester grunts, “I ain’t gotta talk to no nigger bitch.” She seems remarkably unperturbed, but Porter apologizes for him anyway and provides her Lester’s info, gathered by Dubo from the FUCK MEN tat lady, and from his squad car’s mobile display terminal when he’d pulled up Lester’s rap sheet. Dubo had cleared from backing us and returned to his own beat.
Once she enters all Lester’s data into her computer, the lady explains to Lester that she will need him to sign the treatment authorization form. Porter unlocks the cuff on Lester’s right wrist so he can sign the form, warning him not to try anything stupid. He keeps a firm hold of the freed cuff, still attached to Lester’s left wrist. Lester calmly, tenderly rubs his freed right wrist.
Then he explodes, rising up and pounding the desk. Paper clips bounce, knickknacks dancing. “I ain’t signin’ nothin’!” he screams. The startled administrator pushes back away from him in her chair. Porter jerks Lester backward with the loose handcuff, knocking Lester’s chair into me. With his other arm, he hooks Lester around the throat from behind, sweeps him up off his feet, and slams him down hard on the floor. You can hear the thud as the back of Lester’s skull and shoulders hit the tile. The wind’s knocked out of Lester, he’s gasping for air, eyes bugging out. Porter pins Lester to the floor by the throat. Lester’s feet are kicking, arms flailing away like he’s drowning. The normal citizens clear the room.
“Yer gonna sign the fucking form, shitbag!” Porter growls.
Lester’s sucking air, sputtering, and grunts, “No . . . I . . . ain’t!” He keeps kicking.
Porter tightens his choke hold. Lester’s turning purple. Making gurgling noises. Porter puts his full (considerable) weight on Lester with a knee to the chest. Still Lester fights.
Porter shouts over his shoulder to me. “Grab an arm! We’re gonna cuff him to a gurney and sedate the motherfucker!” We each lift him by an armpit as he kicks and wheels his feet like those cartoon characters in midair when they’ve run off a cliff. Lester’s shorts fall to the floor. He writhes and curses, buck-naked, as we carry him down the hall to the trauma bays, nurses and orderlies scattering in our wake. We slam him on the first empty bed and cuff a wrist to each rail. Lester keeps kicking and fighting as Porter orders a nurse to give him a shot. With the sedative pumping into him, he quits resisting. Porter tells the nurse to go fetch the intake lady’s paperwork. Lester’s fading fast. Nurse comes back with a form on a clipboard, and Porter puts a pen in Lester’s limp fist, passes it over the treatment authorization form, inking an illegible scrawl on the appropriate line. Then he barks, “Keep an eye on this piece of shit, Pawpaw. I’m gonna grab a smoke.”
When I see Porter exit the building, I slink down the hall and retrieve Lester’s blood-caked shorts. Delicately (for my own sake) I slip the crusty, stinking drawers up his bruised, bony legs, under his skeletal trunk, and over his shriveled genitalia. He nods at me. Moments later, Lester’s out cold, but at least he possesses a shred of modesty, if utterly lacking in dignity. Later a nurse’s aide wipes the dried blood off his face and head as he snoozes fitfully. Then a doctor examines the gash in his head. A few butterfly bandages close the wound. Lester snores and shivers, covered with goose bumps. I find a blanket on a closet shelf and put it over him. His shivering stops but not his snoring. I sit at his bedside, awaiting Porter’s return. Nearly an hour passes. I figure he’s yammering on his cell to his Arkansas taco belle.
I remember the knife I’d taken from Lester and fish it out of my shirt pocket. I can’t believe what I see. Just then, Lester stirs, snorts, and opens his eyes a slit. His cuffs clank against the bed rails, startling him. He blinks hard and groggily studies his shackled wrists, then the blanket, then me, with no apparent comprehension. “Thanks,” he murmurs, falls silent again, and closes his eyes.
Still no Porter. I study the knife’s familiar fleur-de-lis emblem and work the blades. They’ve got a good edge to them, well honed. The knife is clean, oiled, maintained. I wonder . . .
Finally, I clear my throat loudly. “You awake, Lester?” He rouses and grunts. “Mind if I ask you a question?” Another grunt I take to mean “okay.”
“Your knife, here, the one I took off you? For evidence?” Lester nods, eyes still shut, silent.
“Did you know it’s a Boy Scout knife?”
“’Course I do,” he says hoarsely. “’Smy knife, ain’t it?”
“Just wondered if it was actually yours, or you just found it somewhere.” Silence.
“You ever a Boy Scout, Lester? ’Cause I was, long time ago.”
“Yeah,” Lester croaks. “Long, long time ago an’ a long ways from here.”
“Really! How far’d you get up the ranks?”
“Eagle. I’m a Eagle fuckin’ Scout.”
I’m speechless. After a long silence, I declare, utterly amazed: “Me, too! And my son—he’s grown now—made Eagle, too.”
“Yeah? My daddy was the goddamn scoutmaster.” Lester’s eyelids flutter to a squint, as if he’s straining to pull up a distant memory. Or maybe he’s just wincing in pain. But there seems to be a faint trace of interest stirring him. “He was also a deputy sheriff in Manatee County, Florida, ’fyou can belee’ dat,” he says, punctuating it with a sneer and a faint head shake.
I’m struck mute for another long moment. My jaw drops, brows arch. “What? No,” I snort, shaking my head. “No, a deputy?” I trail off. Lester offers nothing further. Minutes pass in silence.
Finally, in the most amicable tone I can muster, I say, “So tell me, Lester, if ya don’t mind my asking, how the hell did you go from Boy Scout, Eagle Scout, son of a deputy, to—” I turn my palms up, gesturing toward him: beaten, battered, shackled.
“To this sorry fucked-up mess?” Lester’s eyes are open and he’s looking right into mine. “Zat whatcha wanna know?”
I don’t reply. Just hold his gaze.
“I ask myself that.” Lester pauses, sighs. He takes a long, deep breath. “This is how it went: I graduate from high school, right? Daddy helps me get a small fishin’ boat. Work hard, eventually put something down on a little trawler, makin’ pretty decent coin. ’Nuff ta hire me a couple crew. They even called me Skipper.” A hint of pride.
“Then one day somebody says to me, ‘Lester,’ he says. ‘This is chump change. You could be pullin’ down serious bank if you was to dee-versify,’ he says. All I gotta do is pick up a little cargo fer ’im from time ta time. So I start tran-sportin instead a trawlin’.” He pauses, frowning. “Hell, it was smugglin’ is what it was, straight up. Sometime it’s weed, usually it’s flake, sometime guns and wetbacks. Coupla times, all a that in one load. I’m makin’ more fuckin’ money in a run than my ole Daddy makes in a whole month. But then, a course, I start samplin’ the goods.” He shakes his head. “Stupid as shit, I know. Like a bad fuckin’ movie. But here I am: a lowlife cokehead. A fuckin’ loser, who gets his ass kicked by a dirtyass coke whore and then gets locked up for it.”
Long silence. We both look elsewhere. Then:
“Hey, Lester. Y’ever try to kick? Listen, I know a guy, personal friend, runs a rehab. Twelve-step program, you know? Live-in, set you up in outside day jobs, stay there as long’s it takes.”
Lester’s silent. Shaking his head.
“Seriously, man, the guy’s a buddy of mine. A real professional. Lots of support, just pay what you can, when you can. He’s recovered himself, and I know he’d open up a spot for you if I asked.”
Porter steps in the door. He takes in the scene, his eyes passing from Lester to me and back to Lester. He must have been eavesdropping outside the room. He fixes his accusing gaze on me at Lester’s bedside. Porter’s lip curls into a look of horrified revulsion, eyes narrowed, shaking his head in disbelief. “Wha . . . what are you, some kinda fucking social worker?”
I shrink back in my chair, eyes dropping to the floor. I have no retort. I can’t deny it. But I can’t really own up to it, either. I force my eyes to meet Porter’s and thrust my jaw out in defiance. Still unable to speak, I just hurl mean thoughts at him: Yeah, I was a kind of social worker, Porter, but you didn’t want to hear about any of that, I recall. So fuck you, Portly, you fat ignorant oaf. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on. Porter turns and marches down the hallway. I mobilize and fall quickly in step behind him.
A month later I rotate to the Second Precinct and a new FTO. I never saw Lester Puckett or his FUCK MEN gal again, not even in court. Both failed to appear; the tatted coke-whore “victim” no doubt ignored her subpoena because she had subsequent active warrants for sordid assaults on human dignity and public decency. A fresh bench warrant was issued for Lester for bail skipping.
Skip on, Skipper, like the wind across the Gulf.
*Domestic violence.