Darkness the Color of Snow

by Thomas Cobb

  “It’s OK. It really is. I’m OK.” He hangs up and sighs. He’s trying to be understanding. He really is, but he’s finding it difficult. He remembers finals in college. It was a bad time, and he always tries to give her plenty of room to take care of her studies, even though it probably means losing her sometime after graduation to a job in some other place. What will happen then, he doesn’t know. In the meantime, he’s going to respect her plans. He isn’t the fool that Matt Laferiere was.

  But it’s the isolation that gets to him. He’s been alone most of his life, but he has never felt so alone as he does now. He’s living inside his head, and he needs to get out of it. The whole thing just keeps replaying and replaying, and he can’t stop it.

  He needs to get out of his apartment, but he has nowhere to go. He can’t go to the station, and he can’t see Nessa.

  And that bothers him. It’s as if he and Matt Laferiere are in a battle for Nessa, and he’s losing to a dead guy. He’s never been able to completely believe that Nessa is his girlfriend. Somehow, somewhere he has always sensed Matt’s presence in his relationship with her, as if one or the other of them has never quite let go of Matt, though both of them should have, and they both claim to have let go long ago.

  He wonders sometimes if Nessa is with him just to spite Matt Laferiere for the many slights he gave her. And in the past few days, he has started to wonder if he is with Nessa to get back at Matt for turning his back on him after the fire. Now Matt is dead, but he doesn’t seem to want to stay dead, mocking him, even when Ronny wins, even when Matt is dead.

  He’s always had the feeling that he has lucked into his relationship with Vanessa Woodridge. Looked at from nearly any angle, it would seem that she is out of his league. She’s attractive and self-­possessed, as if nothing in Lydell actually sticks to her. She is, by his standards, rich, though she denies it. Her mother teaches and her father is a lawyer, albeit a small-­town one, one who has served on the town council and now represents the town in legal matters. She was popular in high school, though not of cheerleader caliber, and smart, though she has chosen to go to community college in Warrentown, rather than one of the universities.

  And Ronny is neither rich nor popular, and though smart enough, he’s never been ambitious enough to push that. He has gone to the same college Vanessa attends, but in criminal justice while working as a patrolman. They seem to have little in common, except Lydell and Matt Laferiere.

  HE HAD BEEN a probationary patrolman, getting ready to go through the academy, on the first assignment of his career—­directing traffic around a construction site on Route 78. It was late June, and he wore a fluorescent-­yellow nylon safety vest over his summer white shirt and dark pants. The shirt was already soaked with sweat, and his pants were beginning to chafe.

  One hundred yards up the road was Vanessa Woodridge, who had been Matt Laferiere’s girl up until six months ago. The argument had seemed to be over Vanessa’s decision to go to college after graduation from high school. Ronny wasn’t sure about that, but Matt seemed plenty pissed off that she was set on doing it. It didn’t seem to Ronny that it was the sort of thing you broke up over, but then he had never had a real girlfriend, only hookups and fumblings in the dark. The whole thing seemed odd to him.

  Vanessa was the construction company’s official director of traffic. She carried an orange stop sign on a short stick. She wore a yellow safety vest, too, but underneath she wore a white T-­shirt and cutoff jeans rolled up, and heavy work boots on her feet. It was a pretty good look, Ronny thought. Her hair was tucked under a yellow hard hat, but it was already coming down in long, sweated strands. He had never seen her this way, sweated and wearing cutoffs. The clothes surprised him and made her seem more complicated and mysterious than she had ever seemed before.

  A giant Caterpillar excavator was tearing chunks of pavement out of Route 78. It would roll onto the highway, the bucket would come down, the huge teeth on the bucket tearing, buckling, then breaking the asphalt, and pulling up the dirt and gravel under it. Then the bucket would rise, and the excavator would back up, turn, drop the load into a pile in a dump truck, and come back into the road.

  When the excavator came onto the pavement, Vanessa would stop the traffic until the excavator had bitten again and taken its load away. Then she would let the traffic through, one lane at a time. Ronny stood by cruiser four, the worst heap of a car he had ever driven, to take the other direction if they needed to stop traffic in both lanes, and as a backup in case some impatient driver tried to do something stupid and ignore the woman with the sign.

  He checked his watch. It was two fourteen. The work crew was on until four thirty, and so was he. He heard Vanessa yell. He looked up and saw the excavator lumbering toward a blue Camry in its path. Vanessa was waving the stop sign in front of the Camry, which stopped and backed up. Crisis avoided. There was nothing interesting here.

  Then the driver of the excavator, a guy he barely knew from school a few years earlier, leaned out of his cab and yelled something at Vanessa that Ronny couldn’t hear. She shook her head and raised her hands up in bewilderment. The car was out of the way, Vanessa was back off the road, and the excavator came the rest of the way forward, took its chunk of pavement, and backed off. Vanessa reversed the sign for the Camry from Stop to Slow.

  And then it happened again. The excavator, still fully loaded, jerked forward and came toward the Camry. Vanessa yelled and the excavator stopped, inched forward again, then stopped and backed up. Vanessa watched as the excavator backed up farther, then waved the Camry through. The excavator lurched forward, stopped, then backed up again.

  Ronny walked over to Vanessa, who was turning her head rapidly from the Camry to the excavator, which had now turned in preparation for dumping his load into the truck. “What’s going on?” he asked Vanessa.

  “I don’t know. He’s being an asshole. He’s not paying attention to me, like he can’t read the signals. I don’t know what’s going on. Ask him.” She turned away in obvious disgust.

  Ronny nodded like he knew a cop should, then turned and walked back to where the excavator was dropping the rest of its load. He walked up to the side of it and knocked on the window glass. “Is there a problem?”

  “Hey, man,” the driver said. “No problem. No problem at all.”

  “You scared the hell out of the guy in the Camry. Her, too.”

  The driver smiled. “It’s all good, man.”

  “You two need to be in better sync.”

  “I’d like to sync with her. That’s a sweet little ass there. Think she’s going to pee her pants?”

  “I think you guys better get back to work and quit fucking around.”

  The driver grinned again and saluted.

  THE NEXT TRIP to the road was uneventful, but on the one after that, the excavator started to back off then lurched forward toward a white F-­150 that had just started to cross the site. Again, Vanessa yelled. Ronny moved forward and pointed back, telling the driver to get the excavator out of the way. He could see the driver grinning at him.

  Fifteen minutes later it happened again. This time the excavator went right at Vanessa, causing her to turn and run. Ronny ran back to the site. “I saw that,” he said.

  “Me, too. Love it when she turns around, though her front isn’t bad, either.”

  “Quit fucking around,” Ronny said. “Get back and do your job. Leave her alone.”

  “I’m just fucking with her. No harm. Just playing. This job is boring as shit.”

  You should try my job, Ronny thought. “Quit fucking with her. Quit fucking with me. Quit fucking with the traffic. Now. I’m telling you.”

  “Or what?”

  He hesitated. He remembered this guy from high school, though he was older than Ronny. He had something of the reputation of a badass back then. A slight tremor of fear rose from his memory. “Or you’re going to jail. Pub
lic endangerment.”

  “Oh, fuck. Get real. Stop being a hard-­ass. It’s just a little fun on a hot afternoon.”

  “I mean it. You do it again, and you’re going to jail.”

  “Yeah? What then? The job gets shut down, everyone loses money, and it’s all your fault.”

  “No, not my fault. Your fault. You’ve been warned. That’s all you get. One warning. I want this stopped right now.”

  The driver scowled and put the excavator into reverse. It lurched backward.

  Ronny didn’t think he really had the authority to arrest the guy and shut down the job. And the driver was probably right about the consequences. Still, he had made the threat.

  On the next trip, the excavator came forward and suddenly dropped the bucket down to about four feet from the ground and swung the bucket toward Vanessa. She yelled, turned, threw the stop sign at the excavator, slipped on a pile of dirt, and fell. Ronny took his radio and called for backup. Then he ran to the excavator, holding his hand up, and turned it counterclockwise—­turn off the machine.

  The driver lifted the bucket all the way up and drove the excavator into the one open lane of traffic. He shut the machine off, jumped out, and threw the keys to Ronny, who missed the catch. The keys landed somewhere behind him.

  “Fuck you,” the driver said, now enraged.

  “No. You’re fucked. You’re going to jail. You’re under arrest.”

  “Bogus. Completely fucking bogus. I am not going to jail.” The driver climbed back into the cab.

  Ronny walked over and tapped on the glass again. “Get out.”

  “I know who you are,” the driver shouted.

  “Good. Get out.”

  The driver crossed his arms and leaned back in the chair, uncrossed his arms, gave Ronny the finger, and then recrossed them.

  Less than a minute later Ronny saw the cruiser coming, lit up. It stopped next to his cruiser. Pete Mancuso got out. Thank God for Pete. No one was going to fuck with Pete. In the meantime, the foreman of the construction company came up in a hurry, asking what was going on.

  Ronny held up his hand to the foreman and walked back to where Pete was coming toward them.

  “What’s going on?” Pete asked.

  “This idiot was charging cars and the sign girl with his excavator. Really dangerous. I warned him, but he kept doing it.” He turned to where Vanessa was brushing herself off.

  “He hit her with the excavator?”

  “No. Chased her. She fell trying to get out of the way. I warned him.”

  “That all you did? Warn him?”

  “No. I arrested him.”

  “For what?”

  “Reckless endangerment. He was going to hurt someone.”

  “Why isn’t he in cuffs?”

  “He ran back to the excavator and shut himself in.”

  “What was he doing? I mean, is he drunk? High? Sunstroke?”

  “I think he was showing off for her.” He pointed to Vanessa.

  “Shit.”

  Pete walked over to the cab of the excavator. “Get out,” he told the driver.

  The driver wasn’t so sure now. It was one thing to have the kid cop threaten him with arrest, but this big cop seemed another matter. He stayed in the cab.

  “Now I told you to get out. You get out. There’s no other option for you. If you don’t get out, I’m going to snatch your skinny white ass out of that seat and haul you out. I promise, you won’t like that.”

  “What the hell is going on?” the foreman asked.

  “That’s what we’re finding out,” Pete said. “Now you go stand back over there somewhere.”

  “I’ve got deadlines.”

  “Then move over there faster. You,” Pete said to the driver. “You coming out, or am I coming in after you?”

  Slowly, the driver opened the cab and crawled out. “I didn’t do anything.”

  “Then this will work out OK for you. Do you understand that you are under arrest?”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “He was being a complete asshole,” Vanessa said.

  “Tell you what. Turn around and put your hands behind you. I’m going to cuff you for your own safety. Once you understand that you are under arrest, we’ll talk about what you did or didn’t do.”

  “What are you doing to my driver?”

  “You stay back. You and I will talk later.” Pete turned again to the driver. “You have any weapons on you? Guns? Knives? Brass knuckles? Bazookas or bombs? Anything sharp I might stick myself with?”

  “Pocketknife. Front right pocket.”

  Pete fished out the knife and cuffed the driver, then took his shoulder and turned him around. “OK. Now, what didn’t you do?”

  “Anything. I didn’t do anything.”

  “Miss? You all right?”

  Vanessa smeared some blood from her scuffed knee. “Yeah. I’m all right.”

  “That young lady is bleeding. That look like you didn’t do anything?”

  “She tripped.”

  Pete looked up and down the road. “Patrolman Forbert, get this traffic moving out of here.”

  Vanessa hopped up from the dirt pile she was sitting on. “That’s my job. I’ll do it.”

  “There’s a first-­aid kit under the dash of my car. You’ll want to clean up that knee.”

  Pete moved the driver back so he could lean against the excavator. “My officer says you were grab-­assing and fucking around with that young lady and menacing traffic doing it. He wrong about that?”

  “I was just joking.”

  “That’s what I thought. Tell me. Just how stupid are you? How you figure that charging ­people and cars with twelve tons of equipment is just joking?”

  “It was. It’s all that it was.”

  “Fool. You’re going to jail. You were warned to stop by an officer of the law, and you didn’t. How damned foolish is that? You’re going to jail for being a nitwit. Come on.” Pete walked the driver back to his cruiser and put him in the backseat. “Going to be hot in there. Another price for stupidity. Think the young lady likes you better now? Fool.” He slammed the door.

  “Where are you taking my driver?” the foreman asked.

  “Jail.”

  “Who’s going to finish this job?”

  “You know how to operate this thing?”

  “Of course I do.”

  Pete shrugged. “Problem solved.”

  “I’m the foreman here.”

  “And a damned fine job you did, letting your driver fool around and jackass himself right into jail in the middle of a job.”

  “Shit. Where are the keys?”

  Ronny pointed to where he had been standing. “I don’t know. In the dirt where he threw them.”

  “Officer. Officer,” the foreman yelled. Pete turned. “When you take him to jail, tell him he’s fired, too.”

  Pete smiled and shook his head. “It would be a pleasure. But I only do my job, no one else’s.”

  Ronny walked back to where Vanessa was standing by the road. “Are you sure you’re OK?”

  She looked down at her knee where the blood was coagulating. “Yeah.”

  “That guy was a class A jerk.”

  She nodded. “Yeah.” She walked over and picked up her sign. “Let’s get back to work.”

  THEY BROKE AT four thirty with the foreman handling the excavator and supervising the cleanup for the night. Forbert arranged traffic cones and signs around the dug-­up section of the road. It would be another two days, he figured, to get the work done and the road repaved. He headed back to the station. The holding cell was empty.

  “Where’s the prisoner?” he asked.

  “Probably in a bar somewhere. Don’t know, don’t care. We let him go half an hour ago.”

/>   “Aren’t we charging him?”

  “Gave him a summons. Let the court sort it out. But you and I, Patrolman Forbert, need to have a little talk. Get a ­couple of things straightened out. I will get your back. I always will. But I don’t want to be hauled out of an air-­conditioned office for this kind of foolishness ever again.”

  “I needed help. He wasn’t going to cooperate.”

  “But he did, didn’t he? He cooperated with me just fine. It’s part of your job to make him want to cooperate.”

  “What was I supposed to do? Draw my weapon?”

  “Did I draw mine? Hell, no. You played your biggest card first, and you left yourself with no alternatives. Understand?

  “You tell someone you’re going to arrest them, you better be prepared to arrest them. Got that? But don’t just jump right into that. Talk to the guy. Don’t put him on the defensive. Try to reason with him some. Give him a chance to back down, gracefully. Try not to arrest ­people. It saves us a lot of time and aggravation. Next time you call for backup, you better be in danger. You weren’t in any danger at all here. You just had an uncooperative jerk.” He leaned toward Ronny and lowered his voice. “When you called me, you lost points with that fine young lady out there. You think about that? Bad move, son.”

  “I wasn’t trying to impress her.”

  “What? Are you blind? She’s fine. Way fine. Hell, I was trying to impress her. She’s fine, and not all inked up. I, myself, prefer women with sensible skin.”

  “I know her.”

  “And you want to know her better, don’t you?”

  FOR THE NEXT two days, he kept his eyes on Vanessa as she moved the traffic through the construction zone. The jerk driver had returned the following day and behaved himself.

  “I thought he was fired,” Ronny said to the foreman.

  The foreman shrugged. “He’s good at what he does. He’s on notice, though. He won’t give you trouble.”

  Ronny nodded and went back to his post next to his cruiser. Everyone, it seemed, knew more about handling ­people than he did. He supposed that he would have to learn that. He held himself straight and tried not to look like the kid just out of community college that he knew he was.