The Early Crap: Selected Short Stories, 1997-2005

by Anthony Neil Smith

  Benny slowed the car and pulled against the curb, threw the stick into park, opened the door and stepped out. The radio buzzed but I quit listening. Benny wouldn’t have let his son grow up to look like that. Linda was the soft one. Benny was strict and old-fashioned and proud of it.

  I eased my door open. Toy or not, I was taught you never can tell. Benny was just naïve. He stood like a drill sergeant, fists on his hips above his belt. He kept his hair cut military close. I pulled myself out with one hand on top of the door, watched the kid limp down the sidewalk like a rag doll, all some gangster act like I’d seen everyday from the drug pushers: “Down with the gang, knowhatumsayin?”

  “He might run,” I said.

  Benny smiled. “Then we’ll chase him, Tom. Has he got a reason to run?”

  The kid walked faster, gun dangling in itchy fingers. I hoped to see a suction cup sticking out of the barrel—just a plaything, okay? Didn’t see it.

  “Hey buddy.” Benny walked over in a slow gait—clop, clop—near the boy, who turned and screamed and unloaded two rounds into Benny.

  Two cracks. Echo. Ringing ears.

  I dropped to the ground on one knee and wished I had stayed behind the car door. No noise from Benny. He died on the spot.

  “FREEZEdon’tmoveDROPITNOW! DROP IT!” I yelled over and over while the kid kept screaming and waved the gun my way.

  “DROP IT!” I said.

  He didn’t, and I was in the line of fire. I shot him in the chest once, prayed it hadn’t killed him but knew it had—no quarter given.

  He fell back, gun arm straight out, and his finger snapped over the trigger. The flash, the firecracker sound, and then it hit me. More force than pain, like a hard punch. But then it BURNED. I lost my breath, crumpled to the ground, pushed my legs the right direction over to the kid. He wasn’t breathing, muscles in him dying all over. Bloody mess of a chest. I nudged his gun away and passed out.

  Then I woke up in a hospital with a dead shoulder—massive shredding occurred, get used to it, they said—and in deep pain despite the gallons of drugs they had pumped into me for two straight days. I asked about the kid, and they told me he was DOA. I had only wanted to teach him a lesson, give him a nice gaping wound.

  *

  The nurses said Linda had visited a few times, but I was either asleep or in therapy when she came. She sent flowers, too. I had known her a long time: Benny’s wife, mother of his boy. I was the single one, the odd man out, and she treated me like the kid brother, tried to set me up with her friends. But it was her I wanted. I had wanted her since high school. It made sense that she came to see me in the hospital. But seeing her mowing my lawn on the day I came home surprised me.

  I got a ride from a cruiser. He pulled to the curb at my little place, and there was Linda out in a T-shirt and baggy shorts, pushing my lawnmower around the front yard in the dim gray as the rain started. Her red hair was tied back, and she was soaked in sweat and rain spatters, a big hipped woman with big legs, tiny ankles. The most beautiful girl.

  I eased out of the car, a big cast on my shoulder, arm in a sling, wearing borrowed jeans and a loose flannel shirt. My driver said, “Behind ya all the way, Tom!” and drove off. Linda stopped the mower and walked over as I crept up the driveway to my truck. Walking ten feet tired me out. I stopped and leaned against it. The red metal was warm, but filthy, covered with dust, leaves piled up in the bed.

  Linda reached over for a hug. My cast got in the way. Her sweat was ice cold, but I held her nearly a minute. She wasn’t crying, just wheezing. Working hard, about to sneeze, I thought. I didn’t mind if she sneezed on me. I patted her with my good hand low on her back and smelled her hair, then smelled the perfume. Perfume, to cut my yard. Of course she knew I was coming home today.

  “How’re you doing?” I said.

  “We’re making it, doing okay.”

  “How’s James?” Their son was four.

  “Good. He’s been a little sad, you know. He doesn’t understand yet. Lucky him.”

  I nodded. I tried not to look at her face, but kept glancing. “I’m sorry I missed the funeral.”

  “You had a good reason. Look, I’ll finish the yard. I kept your mail, too, stacked next to your chair. Fishing magazines, you’ll like those.” She wanted to say more, needed to talk with me, but I wasn’t up to it. Blame it on the painkillers, the pain, or her perfume that was driving me crazy even though she was my dead partner’s wife and the girl I’ve loved forever. She’s the one I tried for a year to keep, but I never asked her out—was worried she would say no. She became my friend, and I lost her to my pal.

  “Want to come inside, make some tea? Do I even have any?” I bounced my hip off the truck and eased towards the front door.

  “I need to finish before the rain.”

  “You don’t have to cut my yard, Linda. I’ll do it tomorrow.”

  She put her hand on my shoulder, rubbed it. I saw but couldn’t feel. She said, “You won’t be able to do a lot for a while. I’m going to help.”

  “You’ve got James to raise.”

  “But I’m going to help you.”

  We went inside. It was dark, cluttered. The mail was in two piles by the chair I had dreamed of sitting in again, facing the TV I would stay up late watching, anything except news. No more reality. The couch was like I left it: two blankets crumpled across the cushions, dragging the floor. My fish tank wasn’t in too good a shape, with a few angelfish floating on the surface of the milky water, twirling brightly under the fluorescent bulb. The beta was still swimming, though. The beta could take anything.

  Linda knew my kitchen, and had the water already boiling on the stove, ready to add the tea bags. The dry whistling of the kettle irritated me. My sinuses were pounding, but I didn’t want to take the stuff the doctor gave me. I didn’t know the name, but only took it when the pain got unbearable; I had learned to take a lot of pain.

  “You okay?” Linda called out.

  “Yeah, fine,” I said. I don’t know why sex was the first thing I thought of—here she was, single again, in my house, both of us lonely and hurt. She would hate to be alone now, I thought, would hate the silence at night, and her cold back when she slept where she used to prop against him.

  I had been alone all my life and had gotten used to the quiet at night except for the sliding of my sheets and neighborhood dogs and the TV turned so low I could only hear the commercials that would wake me in the recliner at three in the morning, causing me to stumble towards bed.

  When Linda came back into the living room, I pretended to be asleep. I heard ice tinkling as she eased the glasses down onto the table, and a moment later, the door eased open, then shut, and the lawn mower started again. I opened my eyes, picked up the glass of tea and took a sip. Too strong, too sweet. Nothing tasted right anymore.

  *

  Sergeant Harms came over that evening with a captain I didn’t know.

  “Captain Bedford, Officer Tom Knobb,” Sergeant said.

  The captain didn’t smile, didn’t extend either of his hands that were clasped over a manila folder in front of his jacket. He was younger than the sergeant but older than me, even though he looked like he was chasing any signs of aging away. The brown of his hair was an obvious dye job, and the tanned skin was bought from an indoors salon. Conversely, Sarge was proud of his gut and wrinkles. He once told me people mistook him for a grandfather, and he kind of liked that. They sat on the couch, the captain closest to my chair. I offered tea, but they declined with shaking heads.

  “Officer,” the captain said as he opened the folder. “We need to get a statement from you about the incident. I know this might be a bad time for you, but there are legal aspects we have to consider.” He reached into his breast pocket and brought out a micro-recorder, clicking the record button and setting it on the arm of the sofa.

  “Sure, I understand. Hey, Sarge, you want a cigar? Some
one sent me a box when I was out of action,” I said.

  Sarge sighed and looked interested in my floor.

  The captain leaned forward. “Nobody smoke around me.”

  “It’s my house. Don’t I have that right?”

  An awkward silence. Didn’t look good for me.

  “Officer, just run through your story, please. Or would you prefer to have an attorney present?”

  “I don’t need a…” I said, then stopped and laughed, coughed, figured out that something wasn’t right. This captain looked like a desk man the whole way. He probably never spent time on patrol, got his job through relatives and friends and reputations. Perfectly pressed uniform, used lawyer-language. What was his problem with me? After all, regardless of age, I had killed a cop killer.

  So I told them the story, clipped it as much as I could: Officers investigate a burglary, find possible witness. Officer Two was smoking the last cigarette of his second pack that day. Perp shot Officer One. Officer Two proceeded to shoot Perp in self-defense. That was it.

  The captain was quiet after I finished, and he moved his eyes back and forth over the page in his file. He marked a few things. Sarge never looked up.

  “Are you sure you and your partner did not make any threatening moves when approaching the victim?”

  Dumb question. Why’d he say “victim”?

  I answered, “Yes, I’m sure. No threats. We asked if we could talk to him about what he may have seen.”

  “You shot twice?”

  I thought a moment. “Once. Hit his chest.”

  The captain raised an eyebrow. The curtains were drawn, and the room grew darker as the slits of sunlight faded.

  “Two eyewitnesses heard four shots,” the captain said.

  “I shot once. The kid shot twice. Echoes, maybe? Want to check my clip?”

  “We already did,” Sarge said. I looked his way, but he was still counting carpet fibers. “Two gone, Tom.”

  I tried to blink an itch out of my eye. “So, maybe I squeezed of one by accident, it was all so quick. What, did I kill somebody’s dog or something? Did I hot a house?”

  The captain scribbled more notes in his folder. I’d only been through this once before, when I was questioned about being too rough on this drunk driver who slammed into our patrol car and then tried to hit me with a stick. I knocked him silly, eight or none times. The department stood behind me then. I know this was a kid and all, but why should it be any different? He killed my partner, my best friend. Where do kids learn this stuff, and why don’t their parents tell them it’s wrong?

  Sarge said, “Our witnesses have matching stories. We hear that you and Benny pulled up behind the kid, got out of the car laughing, joking. The Benny shouts at him and starts walking over, hand over his gun—”

  “That’s not true,” I said

  “—Very carelessly. Tell me, Tom. Could you see that the kid was armed?”

  I thought about the gun, the toy, we thought. Man, that was dumb. Benny had me convinced that kids in that neighborhood wouldn’t be carrying real guns around. Not in our town.

  I said, “We saw the gun, but concluded it was a toy, a water gun. But we assumed wrongly.”

  “Oh, obviously,” the captain said as he closed the file. “That assumption has cost Officer Schiff his life. And now we’ve got a lawsuit from the parents on top of that. You two were reckless, and if you had been just a bit more careful, none of this would’ve happened. And you didn’t shoot a dog with that accidental shot of yours. You blew the back window out of a truck.”

  The captain and Sarge stood and turned for the door. Then the pompous jerk turned back and swiped the tape recorder from the sofa arm. “There will be a formal hearing soon. We’ll let you know. Until then, try to rest. I don’t see how you can.”

  They left and eased the door shut. Alone, in darkness, I thought through the shooting from every possible angle—my POV, Benny’s POV, the kid’s, from above, from the nearest house—and I couldn’t see that we had done anything wrong, but I saw that we did everything wrong. We did the job so much, “the book” was part of us, but we forgot the book while we were doing it. That’s how the job was. We let experience take us to the next step, casual enough to keep it interesting. It was never a crime before. So now it’s my fault? I’m the worst cop ever?

  *

  I stayed up late watching a spaghetti western about The Man With No Name while thinking about the bass boat I wanted and had been saving for. The Man With No Name told the undertaker to get three coffins ready, because he’d need them.

  But I’d seen the movie many times before. My thoughts were elsewhere: If I took early retirement or disability, I could have bought the boat and moved to a little trailer over at Toledo Bend in Louisiana, where I’d spent summers with my grandparents when I was young.

  We caught large mouth bass by trawling deep-diving lures behind the boat on lines stretched out for yards. The rod would take a slow hard bend when I hooked one, and I had to brace my feet and fight for every crank of the reel until I pulled an eight pounder or so back to the boat. I would love to grow old like that, but I couldn’t afford to.

  Linda called once after she put up the mower and went home. I let the machine get it, and heard her say, “Just try to sleep good tonight,” before she hung up.

  I used to be the one making late night calls, back before she was dating Benny. We were finishing police academy and Benny was already talking about us being partners. Linda had been my friend since we were seniors at Gulfport High, too close to date each other. I wanted to, really, but then suddenly we’re friends, and suddenly friends don’t date. So we all hung out. At first, Benny and Linda couldn’t stand each other.

  “He’s too…friendly,” she told me. “Too casual with everybody.”

  “She’s moody, got no sense of humor,” he told me. “And when I asked her to dinner that time, she said she doesn’t eat in front of people. Can you believe it? She’s sure been eating a lot alone, then.”

  “He’s so skinny,” she said. “And not even funny, more silly. It’s irritating.”

  “I don’t like her sarcasm. It’s more mean than funny. Too dry.”

  And me between them, saying, “Yeah, I understand,” wanting to keep her for myself but failing. Who was she waiting for? I thought, Who could be better than me?

  So I used to call Linda after midnight. She would always answer after three rings, and I could tell I hadn’t woken her up.

  “I can’t sleep again,” I would say while staring at flashbulb bright commercials. “Tell me again why it would never work.” And I would stare straight ahead while she spoke in half-sentences, lots of “you knows,” about the value of a special friendship. The words were hopeless, pointless. I just loved her voice.

  I found out I lost her for good on one of those calls. Maybe I hadn’t noticed that the times the three of us got together—sometimes at my place, or at a bar, or at the country club where Benny tolerated me as a golf partner and Linda was designated cart driver—happened more frequently. Polite hellos between them became interesting conversation, and all I could do was watch and think, I’m glad they’re getting along now.

  But the last time, Linda answered on the first ring. One ring.

  “Hello?” she said. Expecting me, perhaps?

  “I can’t sleep.”

  “That’s too bad. Go watch some TV. It’ll numb you.”

  “But Linda—”

  “I’m waiting for a call, Tom. I’ve got to go, but call tomorrow, okay? Promise you’ll call.”

  I think I promised. I think I fell right to sleep.

  That was then. On the first night back home from the hospital, I couldn’t get tired enough. The painkillers had me hopped up and paranoid. I was dying for a smoke, but the cigarettes didn’t taste good anymore. They were dry and bitter. On TV, The Man With No Name shot four men instead of three.


  What had they ever done to him?

  *

  The kid’s parents hired an attorney, of course, and he called to say they were suing—me, the department, the state, my gun manufacturer—for ten million. I offered my truck and a subscription to Field and Stream. I told him I wished I could bring the kid back, and that if I had to do it over again, I would let the kid kill me instead. But that was a lie. I’m so glad I lived, even if my whole life became worthless.

  *

  I woke up around two the next afternoon, had made it to my bed somehow but didn’t remember anything except the dream—I was out West, facing down the kid again, and the Captain, and my teenage self. I shot them all, and then turned to find myself on a street in Gulfport carrying a water hose that dribbled. I yelled at the sky until it answered me, singing, “Jesus just left Chicago”—and the rock station set with my alarm kicked on, blasting ZZ Top.

  Six messages on the machine. I poured a glass of pulpy orange juice and listened. One from Dad. Four from Linda. One hang-up, probably Linda. I rewound the tape, played hers again:

  8:05 AM “Hey. Let me know as soon as you get up, okay? I can help around the house.”

  9:30 AM “HELL-OO, Tom? Haven’t heard from you. Mom said she’d keep James today. She said to tell you she prayed for you. Call me, don’t sleep all day.”

  11:00 AM “Now you’re worrying me. Wake up. Wake up! I’m going to the store, so I’ll bring you some things. But call first, okay?”

  1:20 PM Silence for a moment, then, “What else can I do?”

  The hang up was right before two.

  I decided to go fishing. I had to wear the cast a couple more months, but then my right arm would be useless anyway. Time to learn to be a lefty. It took twenty minutes to get dressed, sitting on the bed and working my legs into some khakis, then draping on a loose paid shirt. The rod and reel in my closet didn’t have a hook on it, so I worked up the nerve to see if I could tie it on one handed. There had to be a way. Anything to keep me from sitting around watching TV or keep me from calling Linda.