The Policeman's Daughter

by Trudy Nan Boyce

  The trees grew closer to the road as Salt came to her home. Light from a full moon that had just begun to wane struck the glitter of gravel and turned her drive into a sparkle of gray white. The moon seemed to perch on one of the chimneys of the three-story Victorian house that had been in her family for almost a century. To the right of the house there were only woods and fields. Her one neighbor was across a field to the left. The car window still down, appreciating the silent view, she turned off the headlights and air conditioner. She parked behind the house and sat listening as the engine cooled and as the quiet night unfolded with a chorus of tree frogs and night birds.

  Still half on alert, she eyed a plump grocery bag by the doorsteps that hadn’t been there in the afternoon. As she got out of her car and approached, she recognized the recycled bag that Mr. Gooden, her old neighbor, often left for her. This one held three large sweet onions. She picked up the bag and unlocked the door. A midsize all-black dog bounded out and repeatedly, purposely, bumped into her. He kept up the bumping until she had put the onions on the kitchen table. She dropped her gear bag at the bedroom door and went down the long hall to sit on the living room couch, where the dog buried his head in her lap, blowing his breath onto her until she had run her hands all over him, scratched his ears, rubbed his eyes, and vigorously patted his flanks. Some of his soft fur floated onto the hooked rug. Salt lowered her face to his muzzle and Wonder, with a light flick of his tongue, washed dried sweat from her cheeks.

  He followed her back down the hall to the bedroom and jumped on the old iron bed, eagerly watching her moves. He knew the sequence of the nightly rituals. With each divestiture—thirty-pound utility belt unloaded and hung on the closet hook, uniform stripped of brass (department insignia, nameplate, expert pistol pin, and badge) and dropped into a pile for the wash—some of the night’s exhaustion abated. Wonder knew his time had come as she slipped on torn jeans and laced up old work boots.

  Salt carried the clothes, smelling faintly of urine, to the kitchen, where she dumped them into the washer. Then she and Wonder stood at the screen door and looked out to the pecan grove that spread from the backyard for three and a half fenced acres. As soon as they stepped out she gave the dog a “lie down” in a quiet, almost inaudible voice, then walked to the edge of the yard and clucked softly. The dog, low to the ground, snuck to her feet. Using old Gaelic commands she gave an “away to me” and the dog ran quickly and quietly off to the right, and, even with the moonlight, seemed to disappear. Then they came, like apparitions from the far end of the orchard, five fat mostly white sheep, stepping firmly through the trees with the dog back and forth at their heels. Lamb . . . Through the darkness. She thought of Shannell coming out of the dark into that streetlight. When the tiny flock was about ten yards away she gave the dog a “down” and he dropped to his belly.

  Salt went over to a small paddock and opened the gate. The sheep jostled each other at the edge of the yard. A soft “walk up” to the dog and he raised slowly, staying exactly where he had lain but forcing the sheep to turn toward her. The lead sheep stepped forward and the rest followed through the paddock gate, which she closed. Wonder settled in to watch his “Sheep TV.”

  The little flock grazed under the trees during the day. She fed and watered them at night. Closing the gate, Salt walked to the porch, calling, “That’ll do, Wonder,” and the dog pulled himself from watching through the slats and came with her into the house.

  * * *

  • • •

  The oak doors of the library were darker where over the decades her family had placed their hands to push them apart, the spots smoother, slicker than the rest of the blond wood panels. As the doors glided easily back into their pockets, Salt was enveloped by the fragrance of cedar. Family lore had it that it was her great-grandmother who insisted that the library shelves, which were built six high on each of the four walls, be made of the aromatic red lumber. For more than two centuries the family had had their roots in this property. Salt was the last to live in the old house, built after the Civil War to replace the original homestead cabin.

  The library was bereft of all furniture, bare except for a worn Asian carpet and books from each generation. A few of her great-grandmother’s had survived, some in Latin; pocket editions of Tennyson, Browning, and Shakespeare, pages brittle and crumbling, leather bindings cracked and flaking, were on the same shelf next to the plastic cases that held her father’s blues and gospel cassette collection. There were also books of her grandfather’s. But most of the shelves were taken by her father’s books. He had had a unique and personal method of organizing and shelving his books: on a waist-high shelf near the door he kept a ledger that listed which books he’d read each year, and the books were shelved accordingly, by year, on the east-front wall; the books he’d read as a child were on the low shelf of the north wall. On the middle shelves of the east wall were Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, Flannery O’Connor, lots of William Faulkner. “Find out where people come from,” he’d say. Walking around their property he’d remind her, “We’ve got a lot more than some folks ever had.” Other than on the streets, this was the place where Salt felt closest to him.

  She took a worn copy of Tarzan and the Lost Empire, sat down cross-legged with the book open on her lap, and leaned back against the shelves, remembering the smell of her father’s flannel shirt as they sat together in a big leather chair, light from a pole lamp holding them in its warm halo. She was still tired and sad from the post-shooting dreams, her vision not really up to focusing on the words of the book. On the heels of the incident on the expressway, images of her father’s death had been asserting themselves. Her hand flattened on the open page and she lifted her eyes to the rest of the room, the closed brocade drapes, the deep burgundy rug blurring.

  There had never been doubt in the family about how the children paired with their parents. After her brother, John, was born her mother became absorbed with the baby and left Salt to her father to raise. But it seemed now to Salt that she’d been her father’s child anyway, even from her birth. He’d talk to her about Howlin’ Wolf, about the blues. “Honey,” he’d say, “if you know how people feel you can understand why they do what they do.” He would tell her stories of what happened at work. “Honey, you can predict what someone will do if you understand how they feel. She just needed someone to talk to. It wasn’t me she wanted to cut.” He’d explain about the pecan trees out back. “Hundred years old or more. Their flowers are called catkins.” He’d talk and she’d ask for more.

  She looked over at the last books he’d been reading, some of the titles on their spines in large enough print that she could see them from where she sat: Depression, Abnormal Psychology, Living with Someone with a Mental Illness. Her mother believed Satan had taken hold, kept after him to let the preacher lay his hands on him. “You care more about those people than you do your own family,” her mother said once. “It’s making you sick.”

  “How did I not know, Pops?”

  Wonder lay in the hall at the entrance to the library. It was the only room he never wanted to enter. Salt thought it was the cedar, that maybe he didn’t like the smell. It had always made her think of old things: old people, winter clothes, jewelry chests, cedar chests, and coffins.

  Wonder, his head on his paws, kept his eyes open, glancing at her, then back down the hall toward the door.

  Salt’s memory turned to one sharply held incident. It must have been an off-duty day because she was with him. They were going back into the city, going to a movie. She couldn’t remember why her mother and brother hadn’t come but it felt special. She couldn’t remember what the movie was about or much else about the day, except that on the way he told her they needed to stop somewhere, and he said something like “where he worked,” not the precinct house but where he patrolled. She remembered that the façade of the building where they stopped was like that of buildings in The Homes, brick with a small porch. She vowed
that one day she would go to the police records office and find out if she could retrieve old assignment sheets, find out what beat he’d worked.

  He’d held her hand as they walked up to a door. “This is my daughter,” he’d said to a woman on the other side of the screen. In a deep, soft voice, “I see that,” had been the woman’s exact reply. Salt was sure of that. It was what she remembered most clearly from that day. There had been a little more talk between her father and the woman, something had happened the day before, something about money and milk for the baby. There was a very dark baby on her hip and more children at her skirt, their hands against the wire mesh at Salt’s level, their skin so dark almost all she could see of them through the screen were their shiny cheeks and eyes. The woman stood behind the screen until he pulled a green envelope, like the ones that had gone with their Christmas cards the year before, out of his shirt pocket and handed it through the slightly opened door.

  It was all she remembered about that day, except that back in the car he took a blue bandanna from his pants pocket and wiped his eyes.

  Salt closed Tarzan and leaned back against a set of Harvard Classics. She tightly clutched the book to her chest. “The streets, depression, this house, all of it you let go. And along with all the rest, Pops, you let go of me.”

  6.

  KNIGHT

  The following day, at the outset of their shift, she and Pepper were standing at the intersection of Moury and Thirkeld, in the dense project, buildings close and distant, as far as the eye could see. Water gushed from a couple of open hydrants into the gutters, evaporating in the heat before it reached the bottom of the block.

  The project, constructed in the early 1950s, was crammed onto one hundred hilly acres. Sturdy old live oaks reached their limbs high above the buildings they shaded, lining the ten avenues and two through streets along which The Homes were built. From the packed red dirt of the small yards the big trees thrust up the knobby knees of their roots. The buildings were all brown brick, each unit with a small five-by-seven concrete porch hemmed with iron-pipe railings. There were seven hundred families, give or take an eviction or two, in one-, two-, and three-bedroom apartments. Only a few miles south of Atlanta’s downtown business district, the two hundred buildings housed more citizens than any other development in the city. At the highest point, on Shaw Street, the city skyline and tall buildings appeared like a distant smoky mountain ridge.

  Salt was the first female cop to be assigned to The Homes and the first white officer since two white officers had shot and killed an unarmed black man there five years before. She had asked for the beat, knowing no one would ever be able to say she had had a cushy rookiehood if she worked The Homes. Since she was the only one to request it, they had to give it to her or explain the discrimination. The defined community and even the name, “The Homes,” appealed to her, and it was a bonus when Pepper had been assigned the adjoining beat of warehouses and failing businesses.

  In the years just prior to Salt’s assignment there had been several instances of children killed by stray gunfire in The Homes. Now she and Pepper watched while the kids played in the spray from the illegally opened hydrants, enjoying the luxury of being there together and with the kids, before the calls took them alone and apart. Soundtrack of the shift, their shoulder mics, crackling every now and then with calls for other cars on other beats. Later it would get constant. They were supposed to report open hydrants; instead Pepper’s eyes were on the street above, watching. There was a ten-mile-per-hour speed limit, but the crests of the hills were only half a block away.

  You could hear the beater before it came into view. Thump, blum, thump, blum. Bumper, grille, hood, tires. The driver slowed as the blue strobes of the patrol cars reflected off the windshield. Daylight was no guarantee of sufficient visibility. Things could be missed in the sun’s glare just as in the night’s darkness.

  Sun-shot streams of water ran down the bodies of the twenty or so children darting from sidewalk to sidewalk and filling the street with jumping, dancing, squeals, screams, and happy shouts. They were oblivious to any danger and to the detritus—medical waste, Big D’s scissored shirt, and all that was left from the drama that had occurred in the lot across the corner the night before. Shannell never explained what the fight had been about, only that Big D “had a problem with it,” but she never said what “it” was.

  Some older boys came roll-walking down toward them. This year’s Homes identifier, limited to the east side of Pryor, was wearing a tennis visor turned upside down, with the bill sticking up, graffiti-marked in multicolor. Along with baggy pants this was the uniform of local gang life, worn with arrogance, defiance, and anger, and more often than not predicting its wearer’s future.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Pepper said, taking a glance at the approaching boys. A trickle of sweat ran through the slick valley of a scar along the left side of his dark, dark brown face. “Some things change and stay the same.”

  When Salt had started at the police academy, Pepper’s face had been seamless, all of them fresh-faced rookies. They discovered their birthdays were only a day apart and that they were the same age, both having just graduated from college. He had drawn her in, though they were an unlikely pair. He was gregarious, lighthearted, and handsome, she reserved and determined. Classmates’ curious eyes would hold a second longer, noting a shared laugh between them or their pairing off at meals when Pepper’s wife, Ann, had packed extras for Salt in his lunch.

  There was only one other woman in their class of thirty rookies and Tonya had been the flirty type. Salt was not. Some of the guys hit on her, a few were hostile, some indifferent. But Pepper teased, setting her up so she could have the good lines, getting her in on the rowdy back-and-forth. He was tall and athletic and the other rookies liked him, wanted him to like them.

  One day at the firing range, second month into their training, Salt had asked him why he included her. “I like the way you think is all,” he had said, and laughed it off. “Everybody needs good backup. Me too.” It was Pepper, whose real name was Greer, who had given her the name that stuck, the only name any cop remembered to call her: “Salt,” from the shiny nameplate she wore opposite the badge on her brand-new uniforms. The night of their graduation ceremony they’d inspected each other. “‘S. Alt’ it says. Salt,” pronounced Pepper.

  Today Pepper’s smile was directed at the squealing children, the same hundred-watt grin that made people want to tell jokes just to keep that light on. She thought of that one rainy night in their first year, after they’d both received their assignment together in what was known as the War Zone. The call was to a possible burglary. They had run from the rain to an overhang outside the building. Pepper leaned over and sniffed. “You don’t smell like a wet dog.” Salt asked what the hell he was talking about. “You, you don’t smell like a wet dog. Black folks say white people smell like wet dogs.” With Pepper’s smile reflecting the bare bulb of the overhang light, she felt like she had been given a perfect gift.

  She smiled at the memory and caught the eye of a little girl with wheat-colored hair and honey-brown skin, who smiled back from the middle of the wet, jumping kids.

  She and Pepper rescued each other regularly. Not much they learned in the academy had prepared them for these streets. Even Pepper, at first, wondered what they had gotten themselves into. He, at least, understood the language, the accents, the culture of poverty. Though he himself had come from a middle-class home, his parents had come up hard. In the beginning, except for memories of her father’s stories and admonitions, Salt felt not much of her own background prepared her for the job and these streets. They both stumbled through their rookie days, comparing experiences, commiserating and consoling. She thought he had taught her more, but he claimed she helped him to sort things out.

  Two of the littlest boys from the hydrants ran over to Pepper and slung the water from their arms on him, daring each other t
o stay while the big cop made mock monster lunges at them. He grabbed them up, one in each arm, their slippery giggling giving way to looks of amazement at being so far off the ground and so near his face. The boy on the opposite side from the scar leaned around Pepper’s face to watch as the smaller boy traced his fingers down the long-healed wound.

  Six years ago his face had been slashed. Pepper had made his official statement at the hospital where the skin and muscle of his face had been reattached with three hundred uneven stitches. He told the rest to Salt.

  A late-in-the-shift call, radio had given it out as a domestic disturbance. No weapon had been described to the 911 call taker and so no weapon was indicated to the dispatcher, who therefore sent only one car. In this city one car meant one cop, had almost always, except when a trainee was along. Though they paid lip service to supporting the men and women in blue, the politicians chose: one-person cars meant more cars available for calls. Even though Hot Pepper was aggressive, he was careful. And it was no different that night. He told Salt that he had scanned the area as usual when he got out of the patrol car in front of the project apartment building. He saw nothing except the dark breezeway, the busted bulbs under the stairs, a tunnel of danger on each of the three floors. But while climbing, entering those breezeways with his flashlight in his left hand, right on his holster strap as he ascended to the second level, a warning voice slightly prickled his brain. That was all it was most of the time, just a tiny pinch, not thought, not complete or conscious. He told Salt that this other voice had said, “Blood.” It was hard to know whether it was a smell, or some motion barely seen or heard. He brought up the flashlight and caught the gleam of a blade coming at him from under the stairwell. Pepper cleared his holster and the man with the knife was blown backward just after the blade left Pepper’s chin.