Anna turned off the dirt road onto a smaller dirt road that led down along the other side of the farm and toward the pond where she had once seen a bear. She imagined shooting a bear, like her grandmother had done. It must have been wonderful to have felt the force of the bullet expelling from the gun. It must have been beautiful to watch that giant, warm animal collapse into a heap of blood and fur and weighty flesh.
Anna reached the wooden footbridge that crossed the end of the pond. She stopped for a moment and looked out at the water, where steam was rising in smoky little tendrils.
“I should be a cop,” Anna said aloud.
Anna smiled the entire run back. She knew what she had to do and she knew that she could do it. She’d lie about the drug addiction. She’d lie about rehab. There was no federal record of who had or hadn’t been in rehab. Besides, all that stuff was buried in California and Phoenix. She was in Vermont now. It was like another planet.
Anna figured out how to control her breathing, how to moderate her heartbeat, how to trick her body into believing what she was saying when she took the police academy lie detector test: no, she’d never smoked marijuana, no, she’d never tried cocaine; no, she’d never stolen anything. And then she was off to academy training for sixteen weeks.
After the first week of training, Anna happily made the two-hour drive home for the weekend to be with Brian. But by the second week the drive felt like a transcontinental crossing. The academy life was like doing drugs in that Anna was continually living in the rush of the moment, fully present. There was no way to get through it, to survive the boot camp–like experience, unless you were entirely there. And when she wasn’t there, when she was home with Brian, her head was still at the academy—Anna felt divested of herself, as if only her molded-skin form had come home.
Like being away at war, there was a nice intimacy between cadets that came from living in dorms, eating meals together, seeing each other sweat, cry, work, struggle. There were thirty-five men and five women in Anna’s class. Anna was the odd-numbered girl who got her own dorm room. At first there was the usual division of guys versus girls. Fairly quickly, this changed into the ones who would make it versus the ones who wouldn’t—and this division was gender-blind. Anna was in the top of the group who would make it. She felt almost obligated to be at the top, as her father had grumbled about Anna’s reaching way below her potential. (Buzzy’s statement, of course, infuriated Louise, who had been on the phone with Anna when she reported her new career plans. Louise had called Buzzy an asshole and classist, then insisted that being a cop was meaningful and great work and that she’d be proud of Anna if she were a cop.) Anna hated that, at twenty-seven, she still cared what her parents thought, but there it was, she couldn’t help herself. And so she did more push-ups than anyone else in the academy, got nearly perfect scores on every test, and reported all of this and more to her parents in their weekly phone calls.
Anna had three best friends at the academy and they were all men, the four of them in a constant shift for the number one spot. It was a reality unlike normal life. There was a luxury in being removed from the endless, tedious bullshit like calling a credit card company, or doing the dishes, or putting away laundry. Yet there was nothing luxurious about it at all. Anna studied hard, trained harder, ate what she could, and slept in between. Until Milos.
Milos was the only black guy in the academy, and one of the few who, like Anna, had gone to a college where they didn’t expect their graduates to come out as cops. Milos was beautiful, Anna thought, perfectly proportioned, skin as smooth and glossy as marble, a face that looked like it had been meticulously diagrammed—the nose exactly this far from the upper lip, the eyes just this far apart—before being created.
She had only been married a few months earlier, so it hadn’t yet occurred to Anna that her marriage would include affairs. But after spending so much of her time with Milos, breathing in his exhalations, running side by side up mountainous roads, aligning even her thoughts with his as they studied together, quizzed each other, looked over each other’s work, Anna came to the conclusion that 50 percent of love is simple proximity. You sniff in the molecules floating off a person’s skin for long enough, and you will feel like you love him. Maybe that was nature’s way of making sure people mated with whomever they were stuck with in the cave.
Anna stopped going home on the weekends and Brian accepted it as he always accepted her desires. From Friday to Sunday, Anna nestled in her dorm room with her academy husband (Milos called Anna his academy wife; he, too, had a spouse waiting at home a couple hundred miles away). The sex was like alien sex, like sex from another planet with another species, operating in a way that was totally new to Anna. She had had fucked-up-on-drugs sex and addicted-to-sex sex, which had always seemed wild, like she was a cat in heat rolling around with tomcats (sometimes more than one at a time), trying not lose all her fur in the process. And she had sober sex with Brian: gentle, tame, like a visit to a pediatrician who had very warm, kind hands. But with Milos, Anna had found something completely new. She was in the best physical shape of her life, her mind was as sober and sharp as a scalpel, and she was mating with a guy who, totally sober, could keep the passion amped up beyond a cocaine high, beyond a sex-addicted obliteration. They fucked early in the morning before class. They often fucked during lunch break. And they always fucked late at night, soiling the sheets of one bunk in her room, then moving over to the other bed for sleep. Anna’s life was both absolutely simple, consisting of only three things—Milos, physical training, and class work—and utterly thrilling: fucking, shooting guns, acing every test she took.
When Anna told her best woman friend at the academy, Julie, about the affair, Julie expressed such strong disapproval that Anna realized hers was a world unlike most others. Julie had been married around the same time as Anna and, like her sister Portia, she seemed to have a blindly romantic view of marriage, seeing herself as someone on the other side of dirty, or messy, or deceitful things. Julie’s disapproval didn’t bother Anna. She figured everyone would come over to her side eventually, one way or another. And in the meantime, she had to keep her private life to herself. This made for many distant and strained conversations with her old friends and her sister (she never spoke regularly with Emery, so he didn’t count), none of whom seemed to have anything in their lives interesting enough to hide.
The end of academy training was painful, the return to normal civilization almost unbearable. But slowly, over time, Anna felt reconnected with Brian (thus reinforcing her belief that proximity is 50 percent of love), disconnected with Milos (they met in hotels two weekends postacademy, and neither time could they recreate the alien spirit they had had in the dorm room), and more accepting of the routine life of a cop.
And then, as soon as the itchiness was starting to return, when Anna found herself searching for another big project like a house to renovate, or a new store for Brian to run, Anna was asked to work undercover narcotics. She was small, appeared ten years younger than she was, and, most important, didn’t look like a cop. It would mean dressing up like a girl who wanted to party, hanging out with people who loved to party, and buying drugs—all with a markedly greater possibility that she’d have to use her gun. Anna couldn’t have been more thrilled.
Anna’s first assignment was to enroll in high school and buy pot from the local dealers. She did such a great job she was sent to the junior college and then to the University of Vermont. Although most of the dealers were nonstudents dealing to the student population, occasionally a student would get sucked down with the bust, which always caused Anna tremendous roiling guilt. She knew it could have been herself a few years back, or Portia. Or even her mother buying pot before Buzzy started growing it. But Anna loved the thrill of being someone else on campus, playing the role of the eager party chick. And she especially, and surprisingly, loved being the party chick with her wits about her—the one who could see the way things were operating, as if she were floating on
the ceiling looking down, rather than coiling in the inferno of her own body as she had done in the past.
Reggie Fish, the head of the narcotics unit, said he’d never seen a cop who was such a natural at buying drugs. He said it was like she’d actually been doing drugs her whole life. Then he suggested that Anna be put to better use: more complicated deals, larger buys, the big guys.
For the first time in their relationship, Brian didn’t stand back and watch Anna move forward. He was worried she would be involved with people who had no problem shoving rocks down a narc’s throat and dropping her in a murky backwoods lake. People who were busted for thousands of dollars of pot were angry. People who were caught with millions of dollars of heroin or cocaine were murderous. But there was no way Anna wasn’t going to do it. As far as she was concerned, she was the only who had a choice in this.
John Domini, or Dom, as everyone called him, was Anna’s partner. He looked like a cop: big, mustache, light brown hair, muscles bursting through his T-shirts. Dom was everyone’s friend—cops trusted him, crooks trusted him (he had the most reliable informants), he made good arrests, and he would grind to the bone any asshole who messed with his people. When he and Anna were brought into an office together and told they’d be partners, her eyes locked into his like a button into a buttonhole. She knew he’d never let anything happen to her. She also knew they’d be fucking as soon as they could find the place and the time. Anna couldn’t imagine anything hotter than sex with a guy who had a pistol strapped to his leg.
Their first assignment started out slowly: drinking at a cramped, musty biker bar, which had a collection of gas masks and license plates on the walls. Word had come in that cocaine traffickers were hanging out there. And although they weren’t supposed to drink on the job (Anna had been instructed to order a beer, nurse it, take it to the bathroom, dump it, then order more), Dom sipped a couple of beers each night, and encouraged Anna to do the same. Their knees would touch under the polished wood bar counter, their cheeks would brush together as they whispered to each other. They’d concocted a story that they were a couple with a tumultuous but passionate relationship. Sometimes their faces would be only a breath apart as they pretended to coo at each other and Dom would crawl his massive hot hand up Anna’s thigh. (She always wore a miniskirt, a teensy top, and heels that made her legs look like licorice sticks.) But they didn’t fool around outside of playacting for the job.
And then after three weeks of showing up almost nightly with Dom, Anna came to the bar alone, as planned, her body wired with a Q-tip-sized microphone taped in her bra. She and her boyfriend had had a blowout fight, she told the regulars. They might be breaking up. Within two hours Anna was on the back of a rumbling Harley with an enormous grizzly bear of a man named Michael. They rode through the black Vermont hills on a lonely road with no streetlights. The stars in the sky were like a spill of glitter on a velvet blanket. Anna thought if she weren’t so scared, she would have loved the sensation of being on the rushing bike as they cut through the still and quiet landscape.
After twenty minutes they pulled up to a farmhouse with yellow light glowing out every window. The house was so isolated, Anna was pretty sure you could unload a machine gun and no one would hear the rat-a-tat-tat.
Anna got off the bike with shaky legs. She pulled the helmet off and pushed her black hair out of her eyes. Her hands were trembling. Anna’s gun, radio, and bulletproof vest were under the seat in her car, an old Saab with a new alarm. She had wanted to follow Michael to the farm, but he insisted that the only way there was on the back of his bike.
Breathe, Anna told herself. A lump of fear waited behind her heart; she felt it move into the shadows, like an animal that wanted her to forget it was there. A glint, like a shooting star, flashed off in the field beside the house. Anna hoped it was Dom, who was supposed to be following her. She hadn’t wanted to arouse Michael’s suspicions, and so, the entire ride out, had not once turned around to look for Dom. She had, however, quietly dictated into the microphone every shadowy landmark they passed. Now Anna feared that the wind had blunted out her voice, giving Dom only the crackly fuzz of static.
There was an army of people at the farmhouse—a rambling clapboard building that was decorated with hanging quilts and tables surrounded by Windsor chairs. It was past midnight, and yet someone was talking on the phone, the stereo was playing ZZ Top so loudly you had to lean in close to talk to anyone, and two dumpling-shaped women were cooking bacon and eggs in the kitchen. They both looked up at Anna, eyed her breasts popping out of her tiny shirt, and decided she wasn’t worth knowing. Other than these women, the place had a firehouse feel to it: a bunch of bulky, bearded white guys hanging out, waiting for something.
Anna followed Michael through the kitchen and into living room, where four blue velour couches were arranged in a square around a low, pine-knotted coffee table. There was a framed mirror on the table with a couple of straws and a few small heaps of coke. Four guys were sitting there, each on a single couch, as if they’d contaminate each other if they sat too close.
“Scoot,” Michael said, and one thick-thighed guy got up and moved to another couch so Anna and Michael could have the couch to themselves. Anna figured the body weight in the living room alone surpassed a ton. Even if she had had her gun, she couldn’t have gained an advantage with this crowd.
When the coke was offered to her, Anna claimed she was getting drug tested soon for her job as an administrative assistant at Burlington Community College. For the first time since she’d been out of rehab, Anna wasn’t even interested in coke. She was floating on being alert, on trying to figure out who was whom, how they were operating, why they were working in the middle of the night, and how she’d get to the back bedrooms where all the business seemed to be going down, as everyone who went in and out of that wing had either a telephone in his hand or a look of attentive concentration on his face.
Anna worried that getting out of sex might be difficult. Michael, who was drinking cans of Miller High Life, inched progressively closer to Anna over the night and continually cracked sex jokes that made his friends on the other couches lean over their bellies with laughter. Eventually he threw his hefty arm across Anna’s shoulders and whispered in her ear that he’d like to show her the power a Harley man had between his legs. He smelled like wet newspaper and had pointed yellow teeth. Anna thought his hair looked like something might nest in it.
Anna tried playing coy and said, “But I already saw your bike.” Michael laughed so hard he began wheezing.
“No, baby,” he said. “This.” Michael grabbed his crotch through his jeans. His stomach hung down over his forearm. Anna wished she had worn pants and had strapped a gun to her ankle.
“I’ve got massive creeping herpes sores right now,” Anna whispered. “You know, the stress of fighting with my boyfriend.” Michael pulled his arm away and told another joke. This one about a couple with matching sores on their lips.
It was after six in the morning when Michael drove Anna back to her car at the bar. She hadn’t seen much, but she did have a location where they could begin clandestine surveillance. And she did seem to have Michael’s trust. Anna would be invited back again, she was certain.
Anna sat in her car with her hand on the ignition and watched as Michael roared away down the road. Hers was the only car in the lot. And then headlights were beaming in her back window. Dom pulled up beside her, got out of his car, and stepped into Anna’s. They looked at each other, their mouths open, almost laughing.
“Were you there?” Anna asked. She felt wild and electrified.
“If he had touched you, I would have shot him cold,” Dom said.
Anna pulled the lever and scooted her seat back. She reached under her shirt and struggled with the wiretap.
“May I?” Dom rummaged his hands across Anna’s breasts until the microphone was detached from the receiver that was tucked down the back of her skirt.
“You’re free now,” Dom said
. He leaned into Anna and they fucked for the first time. It was inevitable. Everything that had happened earlier in the night had been their foreplay.
It took eight months for Anna, Dom, and their backup to bring down what was a multimillion-dollar cocaine ring. By the time they were ready to make the arrest Anna had befriended the two women, wives of the number two and three guys, and had grown to genuinely like Michael. Yes he was stinky, and he told jokes that only seventh-grade boys should love, but when you broke it all away, he was a genuinely sweet guy with whom she had enjoyed hanging out. And once it was established that they wouldn’t have sex (Michael had, however improbably, accepted the story that Anna “wasn’t ready yet” to be with another man), the friendship flourished. They loved the same TV shows (Cheers and Kate & Allie) and even shared a book (The Bonfire of the Vanities), passing it back and forth with each of them reading the same chapters each time so they could discuss them. Additionally, there was their joint love of bacon sandwiches, which Michael made for Anna and whoever was at the house that night: two pieces of white bread fried in butter with four strips of cooked bacon pressed between them. Most of the guys liked to put mayonnaise on theirs, but Anna and Michael ate them pure without a sauce. Anna felt a great pang of guilt every time she left Michael. She knew he’d be locked away for quite some time. No more bacon sandwiches.
The night of the bust, a rookie cop positioned outside the house thought he saw a gun pointed at him and let off a single bullet that whizzed past Anna’s head in a buzzing rush of air (she thought about that bullet every day for weeks; it was like an encounter with a guy who was so scary, you loved him). Michael threw himself on top of Anna, then shoved her protectively behind the couch, her face pressed into the gritty, mold-smelling wood floor. Thick boots were running by, making the ground vibrate and quake. Floodlights fired up the walls like a laser show. Doors were broken open and bodies rushed into the house like a bull stampede as furniture was kicked aside and Michael’s gang was corralled. When it all played out, Anna was arrested with the rest of them, her cover never unveiled. And as she lay splayed face-down on the ground in a lineup, handcuffs cutting into her bony, hairless wrists, Anna couldn’t remember a happier moment.
Drinking Closer to Home Page 24