by Frank Zafiro
It was her mistake. Why should I pay for it?
He opened the car door and got out.
Oprah’s Smile
Panicked, Barbara stumbled toward her chair.
The opening music for Oprah blared out of the ancient TV set. The bass tones vibrated through the small speaker, but she refused to turn it down. There was no remote control for the TV, so once she turned it on, everything was locked in. No way was she going from couch to TV and back every sixty minutes.
Bad enough that she almost missed the introduction to the program to use the bathroom. Then the toilet paper ran out. The last roll wasn’t under the sink but in the hall closet. She ran an indoor marathon just to make it back in time to hear the clapping diminish as Oprah introduced the show.
It would be a one-on-one interview, she saw. With who? Oprah dropped a few hints, but Barbara didn’t want to waste the effort to figure it out. Just tell me.
Her hand snaked down to the cooler next to her chair. She kept her eyes glued to the set while she rummaged around. Her expert fingers identified the food item by the size, shape and the texture of the packaging. Oprah wasn’t finished dropping clues about her guest before Barbara realized there was an extra Ding-Dong.
She smiled and pulled it from the cooler. She glanced at the empty wrappers on the table in front of her. Six there already. That meant Hank brought her an extra one today. She unwrapped it and devoured it in two bites. It tasted funny. Stale, maybe.
Oprah smiled on TV, opened her arms expansively and revealed her mystery guest. Barbara looked up long enough to watch a ridiculously thin redhead walk from backstage and greet Oprah. The two sat down to chat.
Barbara frowned. She didn’t even like this actress or her movies. Not that she’d been to the theater in ages, but Hank occasionally brought her DVDs. It was too much work to deal with the player, but he’d put one in before he left. That was great if the movie was a good one, but that was rare. Usually it was terrible and she could hardly stand sitting in her chair and watching it seven or eight times until he came back.
The room seemed to wobble, so she leaned her head back and closed her eyes. She was still sweating from her earlier exertion. Hank should buy her a new TV. It was only fair. He got all the breaks in this life, so he owed her a little bit, didn’t he? Instead, she got resentment. Only three days ago, he laid into her about doing nothing with her life. She just sat around and ate and watched TV, he yelled. She was a burden. It was like she was already dead.
Easy for him to say. Her brother had all the luck. Wife, job, a life. What did she have?
She scowled. She didn’t have a goddamn remote, that’s what. And nothing to do but sit and wait for a full hour until Oprah ended.
Nobody understood. She tried, she really did, but she was just so tired all the time. And her disability check provided enough to get by, as long as Hank kept up his end and brought the food like he was supposed to.
Barbara tried to swallow and discovered she couldn’t. Her tongue was thick and covered with paste. She took a deep, croaking breath. Her pulse pounded in her temples.
She coughed and it turned into a gag.
A red darkness appeared at the corners of her vision.
Her eyes bulged.
Oprah smiled.
Strength of a Dancer
Sarah moved like a woman a hundred pounds lighter, but then, she used to be a dancer.
A beautiful dancer.
Fifteen years old. Her body nubile, lithe but blessed with a young woman’s curves. Flat belly, arms and legs corded with hard dancer’s muscles.
They say that when you develop muscles at that age, the strength stays with you all of your life. She believed that now.
Sarah slipped on her shirt, crossed the living room, opened the door and hurried down the stairs. No one passed her. She left the apartment building and headed south. Her breath came in ragged gasps, but she kept moving.
A beautiful dancer. With a beautiful man for an instructor. He taught her to move with grace and power. Called her his greatest protégé. She believed him, even after he locked the door to the studio and dimmed the lights. The romantic words he whispered set her heart afire, even if the other things scared her at first.
Sarah crossed the street, her thighs chafing together. She waddled into the Zip’s Burgers and ordered the special. Five burgers and a tub of fries. Five-ninety-nine. The cashier tightened his lips to contain a snicker, but she didn’t care. She was used to it.
A beautiful dancer. In love, until it all came crashing down. She begged him to marry her, to make things right, but he refused. He accused her of being a tramp and denied that it could be his. His sneer and flat eyes broke something inside of her. Not just her heart. Maybe her soul.
Her parents didn’t believe her. They sent her away to Oregon to live with her aunt. She wept the entire trip, first out loud, then more quietly once her father’s hand stung her cheek.
The baby grew within her. She ate to provide for her. She knew it would be a girl and decided to name it Cassie.
Seven months slipped by. Her mother called twice to check on her. Her father didn’t.
She was headed to a doctor’s appointment on the day of the collision. Without her seatbelt, she was tossed around inside the car like a pinball. The doctor told her he was sorry, but there was nothing he could do.
He said it had been a girl.
Sarah took the hamburgers and fries and found a corner booth. She began to eat, jamming in large mouthfuls and chewing with purpose.
A beautiful dancer. The weight never came off. Her eating didn’t help matters. Her mother called it comfort food, but that wasn’t true. There was hole she kept trying to fill, but didn’t gain any ground, no matter how much she ate. Eventually, it became a matter of habit, and maintenance.
Sarah finished the first burger in three bites and grabbed a handful of fries. They were hot and burned her lips and tongue. She chewed.
A beautiful dancer. He was still beautiful, too, when she found him. And his sneer was the same when she lifted her shirt over her head. But it didn’t matter.
Nothing mattered, except that she could still move like a dancer. She still had a dancer’s strength when she held his face tight against the naked skin of her belly. He struggled, but lying atop him, she had size, strength and vengeance on her side. When it was finished, she left him slack and open-mouthed on the apartment floor.
Sarah shoveled another handful of fries into her mouth and followed it with a deep suck from her milkshake. For the first time ever, the food tasted good.
My Christmas Fate
God has a wicked sense of humor. For instance, I’ve always known I’d die on the job, around the holidays, listening to Bruce Springsteen.
I’m not saying that God talks to me. I’m not psychic. I can’t see into the future or anything. And I didn’t know it in the same way that Boston fans just “know” that the Red Sox are going to win the pennant, either. It was just a quiet knowledge that had been with me for as long as I can remember, no more supernatural than knowing that you will eventually die someday. I just knew it’d happen with the Boss singing in my ear.
It’s not like it was a long shot bet that Bruce would be playing at my moment of truth. I mean, I upped those odds pretty substantially with my listening habits. Ever since about 1978, when I was ten years old and my Dad brought home Darkness on the Edge of Town, I’d experienced a pretty steady musical diet of the bard from New Jersey. I listened through all of it – the Born in the USA superstardom, the Tunnel of Love drop off, the acoustic meanderings, even the Seeger Sessions, complete with spoons and banjos. I hung in with the guy and his music became my life’s theme song.
I played his music at home and in my car. So being sure I’d die listening wasn’t exactly a stretch. Knowing when it would be was still as big a mystery for me as it is for you, except that I was positive it would be on the job. And around Christmas.
I thought the time was now quite a few times, truth
be told. You don’t work as a cop and not have some close calls. I almost became a statistic more than once.
For example, they say more cops die in traffic collisions than shootings and I just about proved that one out in ’94.
There I was, minding my own business, on patrol. The radio was on, tuned to the classic rock station – The House of Rock, I think they called themselves back then – and then “Glory Days” started playing. Now, this was at a time when Bruce wasn’t so popular anymore, pretty much at the height of the Born in the USA backlash, so catching a Springsteen song on the radio was a rarity. I was glad to hear it, even if it was one of my least favorite songs from my least favorite album. I sipped my coffee as I drove and sung along anyway.
Just about the time he was singing about the girl who used turn heads in high school, some drunk blew right through a stop sign and plowed into me. The force of the collision turned my cruiser onto the side, then his car butted into my under-carriage. His momentum pushed me thirty yards farther up the street. Sparks flew as the driver’s door skidded along the pavement. I dangled in my seat, held in place by the seatbelt—which, thank God, was a new policy that I actually obeyed—while Bruce sang about how glory days passed by in the wink of a young girl’s eye. All I could think of was how those sparks were going to ignite the gas tank and it would be me that was going to go up in flames like a wink in some girl’s eye.
Of course, those explosions are mostly movie myth. Crashes are much colder events in real life. Eventually we slid to a stop. My fellow cops showed up along with medics and got me out. I had some pretty serious whiplash and a fractured wrist, but that was about it.
The drunk, of course, had no injuries.
Another time, a few years later, I went to a domestic violence call while VH-1 was broadcasting Springsteen’s appearance on Storytellers. The husband and wife were both hammered—not an uncommon event in most DVs—and fell into arguing about who was better, Bruce Springsteen or Bob Seger. The husband was from Jersey, so I’ll let you guess which horse he backed. The wife was a local girl, but she took up the Seger torch, more for the sake of riling up her old man than out of any real Michigan loyalty.
I would’ve liked to have slapped cuffs on the wife simply for her poor musical sensibility. Unfortunately for the husband, the State of Washington takes a dim view on smacking your wife, no matter how ridiculous her opinion is. He dotted her eye, so he had to go.
He was a big guy, too, and probably could have torn me in half if it came down to it. Worse yet, when he got the word he was under arrest, he was about three feet from a baseball bat leaning in the corner. I saw him eyeball the Louisville Slugger and could hear the gears grinding inside his Keystone Light-addled head. I started talking Springsteen to him, letting him know that he had the right end of the argument. We connected, one fan to another. We stood for a few moments and watched the Boss perform “Thunder Road” on TV. I told the wife to shut up and let us listen. She surprised me and did. After the song, I coaxed the man into a pair of cuffs without incident.
So in that sense, you could almost say that being a Bruce fan might’ve saved my life.
Christmas time was never a happy time for me. With three ex-wives—I only have kids with two of them—around town, someone always gets sappy as the silly season draws nigh. One or the other of them wants to get together and reminisce, maybe even take a tumble for old time’s sake. Or they decide that I’m the root of all the bad things that have ever happened in their life, so I hear about that. Sometimes, one of them turns up depressed and muttering about “ending it all” and then I’m on cheerleader detail.
The kids are no consolation, either. The boy is twenty now and thinks I’m lower than some of the dog piles I sometimes come across in people’s living rooms—usually right next to a big screen TV—and the girl pretends I don’t exist unless she needs money.
So sometimes around the holidays I get a little bit angry. Other times, depressed. If I focus on work and drink a little bit, I can sometimes approach feeling nothing much at all, which is the best of the three scenarios. Of course, with everyone saying “Merry Christmas” all day long at work, it’s a little difficult to put the season out of mind.
Bruce doesn’t help much, either. Even when he wasn’t in vogue, the radio stations frequently played his few forays into Christmas songs. “Merry Christmas, Baby,” for example, popped up at least once a day. The old stand-by, “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” was always in steady rotation from about the first week of December until New Year’s Day. You know the one. Clarence Clemons, the big, powerful, black saxophonist belts out some happy ho-ho-hos while Springsteen tries to keep from laughing from the pure joy of it all.
I hate that song.
God has a pretty wicked sense of humor, though, because that is the song that provided a soundtrack to a call that seemed straight out of a horror show. It came in as a Check the Welfare. The neighbor heard some screaming next door and thought it was probably the teenagers screwing around, but “just wanted to be sure.” I’d been to the house on a couple of minor calls before and knew they were hellions, so the neighbor was probably right. I figured I could handle it myself, so I went Code Four, disregarding the backup unit.
I got on scene and walked up a short, un-shoveled walkway. The snow crunched under my boots. Once I went up the three steps onto the small porch, I discovered the front door cracked open. The stereo blared out Joan Jett’s version of “Little Drummer Boy.” I nudged the door open and peeked inside. Christmas lights adorned a thin, sickly tree, flashing weakly in the half-light of the living room. The coffee table lay smashed into pieces.
“Hello?” I called out. “Police! Anyone home?”
No answer.
No movement.
“Ba-rum-ba-bum-bum!” sang Joan Jett.
I noticed a single slender hand draped over the arm of the couch, but I couldn’t see the rest of her. Clearing my throat, I pushing the door open a little wider. “Ma’am?” I said. “Wake up. It’s the police.”
No response, other than a vicious drum solo from the Blackhearts’ drummer pounding through the speakers.
I stepped inside and made my way toward the couch. “Your neighbors heard screaming,” I explained, just in case anyone was listening. “Is everyone all right?”
The song on the CD ended in a flourish and silence filled the room. The tiny clicking noise from the old fashioned blinking tree lights was all I could hear.
One look at her told me she was dead, but not long ago. The light had barely gone out of her eyes. She’d been stabbed. Probably about twenty times. Wet redness covered her thin frame and had soaked into the couch. This close, the sickening, coppery odor of her blood filled my nostrils.
The music started up again. The cheering of a live crowd. Staccato piano intro. Sleigh bells.
Clarence Clemons let out a subtle little “ho-ho-ho.”
An impossibly young, exuberant Springsteen said, “It’s cold down along the beach. The wind’s whipping down the boardwalk. Hey band! You guys know what time of year it is?”
Oh, man.
That’s when I knew.
This was it.
Whoever stabbed this woman to death was still in the house. It was my job to find him, but somehow I just knew that when I did, he’d carry out my lifelong premonition. He’d punch my ticket. I was on the job. It was Christmas. And here was Bruce Springsteen, joking with the Big Man about Santa bringing him a new saxophone for Christmas.
I should have reached for my radio and called for backup. That’s what the manual says. That’s what common sense says. That’s what twenty-five years of experiences says.
But destiny seemed to say different, so to hell with it.
I pulled my gun from the holster. It seemed like a futile gesture in a way, but you never know. I thought the car was going to explode when I crashed, but it didn’t. I thought that big guy was going to rip me in half, but he didn’t. Maybe this would go the same way.
&nbs
p; “Oh, you better watch out,” Springsteen sang, “You better not cry.”
I moved from the living room to the kitchen. The music masked the creak of my leather gear and the thud of my boots. In the kitchen, there were three place-settings and an unlit candle. Three Hungry Man TV turkey dinners were stacked next to a pre-heated oven.
Nothing left but a hallway. A bathroom and a couple of bedrooms.
Call for backup, I thought, but didn’t do it. Instead, I thought of the quiet desperation in another of Bruce’s songs, “Dead Man Walking.” Something about rising in the morning with your fate already decided...
I moved on. As if in counterpoint, Bruce’s voice followed me down the hallway.
“He knows if you’ve been bad or good.”
In spite of it all, I cracked a smile. If Santa were real and he actually did know the truth about everyone, he’d have a pretty easy workload come Christmas Eve.
“You better be good for goodness sake.”
I swung open the bathroom door.
The Big Man’s deep baritone sang in counterpoint. “You better be good for goodness sake!”
Empty. The pale blue shower curtain hanging clashed with the peach floor mats and single, scraggly towel on the rack.
I moved to the first bedroom.
“Santa Claus is coming to town!”
The door opened easily, issuing a creak that was barely audible over the blare of the music in the living room.
Another still body. This one lay face down on the bed, his back riddled with stab wounds. The same, coppery smell of fresh blood hung in the air, punctuated by the cool bite of winter air. I glanced over at the window. A broken corner pane let in a stream of cold air and a few light flakes of snow. The flimsy curtain bounced and waved lazily from the small gusts that slipped through the shattered hole.
Clarence Clemons ripped into his saxophone solo. I walked over to the body and checked for a pulse. The young man’s skin had the slackness to it that I’ve only ever associated with death. He was gone. I found the closet and flipped on the light.