by Adam Johnson
To try to cheer me up, the guys on Narco invite me out for a Buzz after work, and the bail blondes bake some awesome cupcakes—the girls are sweet, and they laugh at all my jokes, but I wish I could say they made me feel any better. The funny thing is my shooting just gets sharper and sharper. It’s like I’ve got my heart working on remote control, my accuracy is that good. I go where Lt. Kim tells me, fire at a dot on the horizon, and a kilometer away, a neck goes pop.
Then our new ROMS arrives. I’m chitchatting in the gift shop when the maintenance guys drag a big crate into the station. They tear it open right there in the lobby, cardboard going everywhere, and I figure I could use a new sidekick—I know it would be dissing the memory of ROMS to chill with a new robot, but I’ve been feeling pretty low, and then there’s this dream that won’t let up. Cruising over for a closer look, I decide that I won’t teach this ROMS to talk cool, that I’ll just accept him for who he is.
When the shrink-wrapping comes off, this robot’s the spitting image of ROMS, though it looks pretty pathetic all covered in foam peanuts. The bar code says it’s a Virgo, which means it’s finicky and needs to be needed. The guys boot up the operating system and wet the sniffer reservoir. Suddenly everything comes online. Arms lift and hover.
“Hi, I’m ROMS,” it says to a maintenance guy. “Let’s eat and make friends.”
It turns to me. “I’m ROMS. Let’s make some small talk.”
I kind of back up, and the robot advances. “Food is the first step in peaceful resolutions,” it says. “Pizza, burger, baba ghanoush?”
But I keep moving, across the marble floor, and out the glass doors of the station. In the parking lot, it’s raining lightly. There is a chill in the air, the magnolias looking a darker green against a sky that’s roof-sealant gray. Hearing that robot say the exact things as ROMS makes me feel duped, like I’ve been best homies with a parrot.
I shoulder my rifle and wander the wet streets of Palo Alto. I’m like, who cares if my gun gets wet? The Kruger saw a dozen hard years in Angola before it ever met me, so I suppose it can take a little rain. I follow the CalTrans tracks, tromping through gray shale. Rows of eucalyptus trees hem the rails, which alternate between silence and the shock of commuter cars. The smile-faced engines have taken a beating. The yellow paint’s chipped and dingy, and the insistent smile on these bruised faces makes me philosophical, gets me thinking about the big sniper in the sky and what he has in mind for us.
I stand among trees whose leaves shiver green for the northbound trains and silver for the south. Did ROMS know the real me? Was he my friend, or just a machine programmed to say whatever I wanted to hear? To find out, I decide I will believe in him and try his advice.
I detach my scope from the old Kruger. I notice how scuffed the stock is, touch the spots where my fingers have worn away the varnish. Then I hang my rifle in a tree, where it slowly turns with the wind, and start the long walk toward the foothills of Stanford to Seema’s house.
When I knock on her door, my hair is wet on my face.
Seema answers in baggy sweats. She’s holding a can of Sass.
“Hey, it’s freak boy” she says, but she doesn’t slam the door.
I hold up my hand. “Please.”
“You’re a freak. You know that?” She puts a fist on her hip, and leaning against the door, considers me.
“Please, I only wanna say three things.”
“Number one?”
That fizzy scent of Sass is on her breath, but I don’t let it intimidate me.
“I would like, when it’s cool with your dad, to take you out for some pizza.”
“How about, I’m sorry I went freako whack-out on you.”
“Here’s the second,” I say and hand her the scope.
She looks at me like I’m an idiot.
“It’s a Raytheon,” I tell her. “Top of the line, unavailable to civilians.”
“A rifle scope. Just what I’ve been needing.”
“Well, it’s also a telephone and a radio, so you can reach me anytime, at work or home. If you ever want to talk. Or maybe if you just need someone to listen.”
Seema looks at me skeptically, then walks out in the driveway with me.
“Hold my Sass,” she says and lifts the scope. Suddenly, her iris is amplified in the lens, a ring of iridescent chocolate with green rifts and pits of oily gold. When she blinks, it stuns me. She roams the neighborhood with a slow scan.
“Here’s the rangefinder,” I say. “And this switches it to thermal. Thermal’s so sensitive you can see the heat signature of a pumping heart. If someone looks normal, but you can’t see the strobe of their heart, then you know they’re concealing body armor.”
“Cool,” she says. “Thermal.” A smile, greedy with amazement, crosses her face.
Real quick, she lowers the scope to look at me, like this is some kind of trick.
“What’s the third thing?” she asks.
“If you ever need a friend, I offer myself.”
She squints one eye, staring at me, like she’s trying to figure me out.
“So you just came over here to give me this, as a friend?”
“Look, I think you’re cool, and if you wanna hang out sometime, call me.”
She keeps looking at me like that, and it makes me nervous.
“Dad says that robot on the news was your little friend, the one from the band.”
“His name was ROMS,” I tell her. “We lost one of the good guys.”
Seema doesn’t say anything to this, which is one of Lt. Kim’s tricks to get me to talk more. I take a step backward, toward the street. “ROMS was a friend, and I’m not sure I’m ready to debrief yet. But I’m ready to listen, if you want to talk. Cool?”
Seema sort of shrugs and smiles. There’s possibility in the gesture, which means I haven’t been totally shot down, and I don’t want to push my luck.
That’s when I turn and start walking. I make my way down the middle of the street so Seema has a perfect line of sight—if she decides to lift the scope and watch me go. Maybe I look like a dork to people driving by, a kid walking all slow down the yellow line, but if you’re looking at someone through a scope, they become large, filling the whole field of view, and there’s nothing in the world but them.
I don’t puff up my shoulders or anything. I want her to see the real me. If she trains her lens on me, she’ll know me, and she’ll call. If she calls, that means the LAPD is wrong, that empathy is real. Even if Seema uses thermal, she’ll see a kid who looks pretty skinny, but is glowing red as he walks into the blue-green of a relatively cold world.
YOUR OWN BACKYARD
It is the oily tang of tiger fur that startles me awake, and the first thing I do is look for my son, whom I dreamed of at top speed. The scent is gone before I even open my eyes, but a quick pulse still pants in my wrists as I sit up to see my boy watching CHiPs reruns with the sound off. Ponch and John ride their motorcycles on the beach while wearing mirrored sunglasses.
I have taken to sleeping on the couch because it is summer, and Mac is a boy with too much time on his hands and a day sleeper for a father. Last week I woke to find his hands on my belt, lightly twisting off the key to handcuffs I hadn’t even noticed were missing. We looked at each other. “I have the right to remain silent,” he volunteered, for the record, and I watched him roll out into our south Phoenix neighborhood, headed toward wherever my handcuffs might be. But today, he seems satisfied with CHiPs. I pull off my khaki security guard shirt from the zoo last night and rub my eyes against the midday sun through the windows. Today he’s just a normal boy again, a little Indian on shag carpeting, legs crossed, shoulders hunched, reading Ponch’s lips.
Sue says he’s been telling kids in the neighborhood his father’s a police officer again, that they better look out, which only adds to her theory that my quitting the force made things even worse for him. It’s hard to know what to do about this. She is at the end of her rope with the board exams and a
boy like Mac. She is reduced these days to studying with a stopwatch and speaking in two-word sentences: Room, now. Toys, away.
I see Sam moving under the carpet and watch him slowly cross our living room. He’s a Mexican boa, five foot, that I inherited from the zoo one night. There’s a hole in the carpet behind the couch where he gets in, and in the summer heat, he roams the whole house, a prowling shape between the cool padding and shag. The other pets are unsure of him, including my Dalmatian, Toby, so things work out. Sam runs into the side of Mac, who doesn’t move, who’s gotten used to this dark-roaming shape. Sam is also indifferent to what might be out there; he turns and swims off toward the television set, where Ponch and John now appear in a five-lane freeway. With their white bikes and round helmets, they are like bowling pins, a seven-ten split. “You think that’s really them riding those bikes?” I ask.
Mac knows how I feel about this show. He doesn’t even take his eyes off the screen. “I want my shoes back.”
“Those bikes have never even taken a real turn. There aren’t even scratches on the footpegs, and those sidecovers are spotless. They’ve never been down.”
“They catch a lot of bad guys,” he says.
“They catch old movie stars, has-beens.”
“At least they’re out there riding,” he says, “and not code nine at home.”
I try not to escalate this, especially over a show Mac usually says is for “dildoes,” a term whose meaning, at nine years old, he seems sure of. “What makes you an expert on code nine?” I ask him.
He turns back to me for the first time, a little too proud that I can now see he has picked up yet another black eye from somewhere. “You,” he says with enough drama to make me think he’s heard the term somewhere and assumes it means more than merely off duty.
I try not to be coplike about all this. I watch Ponch and John pull over a limo with a Jacuzzi full of bikini-clad women. The girls bounce and throw handfuls of bubbles on Eric Estrada, who feigns a mock defense, and I tell you I’m really trying.
“Come on,” I say. “Let’s cut that hair.”
“For the shoes.”
It’s dangerous to give him too much leverage here. “One day. No more, okay?”
“Affirmative,” Mac says. “Roger that.”
Aff-erm-tive, I hear from the kitchen. It took me a year to teach that bird to say that. But you can’t unteach them once they’ve learned.
In the kitchen I grab Sue’s veterinary shears and open a pack of hot dogs she’s left on the counter to thaw. Taped to all the cabinets are her anatomy lists and dosage scales. On the fridge hangs a chart of the parasitic cycle. I snap off a half-frozen hot dog and crunch on it while I wonder how much animal science Mac has picked up the last four years I was on night patrol. Only now, as a rent-a-cop, do I think about how many times he’s reached for the cereal, the bowl, the milk, and read the secrets of animal husbandry. Slowly, unknowingly, he must have picked it up.
When he comes in the kitchen I get my first good look at the shiner, a deep purple-brown that swoops and fans out to his cheekbone. He doesn’t say anything about it and neither do I, which is our version of life after the bomb. The first black eye was last year, and he learned the worst possible lesson in the world for an eight-year-old: it didn’t hurt nearly as bad as he’d expected. Next time, I knew, he would punch first. The boy’s been punished, rewarded, tested, and medicated, and here we are, postbomb, as Sue says, stealing our son’s shoes.
We had long ago made a deal, and it was supposed to go like this: she’d do most of the child-raising work while I made it through the academy and the first three years on Traffic, then I’d watch Mac while she made it through vet school. Well, Mac is nine now, Sue’s exams are here, and I am no longer a cop. I am no longer the same kind of father that once thought Mac was a good name for a boy, who used to describe motor-throwing car crashes to his son over dinner each night, who referred to hurt people as occupants and ejections and incidentals.
He snaps one of the cold hot dogs off the pack and sticks it in his mouth like a cigar. Though chewing frozen hot dogs on hot days is a habit he inherited from me, I am confronted with a portrait of him in what seems to be his natural state: bored, bruised, and sullenly indifferent to anything an afternoon with me might bring. I take a breath, open the door, and step out into the summer heat.
Out back, I set him on a stool so he can watch his haircut through the dog slobber and paw prints on the sliding glass door. I hook up Sue’s grooming shears and then stand behind him, a sweating father and his black-eyed son reflected in a patio door. He is too large for his age, with bully sized shoulders and thick hands that already have a hunch about how to get their way.
“I hear there’s been some trouble in the neighborhood,” I say and flip on the shears.
He simply shrugs and bends his head forward, chin to chest, waiting for me to start. I palm the curve of his head and roll it side to side as I run the buzzer up the back of his neck. Toby trots up with the desert tortoise in his mouth, an object he carries everywhere, and he shows it to Mac and me as he eyes first the buzzer and then the half a hot dog in Mac’s hand. The tortoise has long since resigned itself to this fate and even lets his legs hang out, which serve to funnel the slobber.
“Mom says you’ve been telling the kids I’m back on the force.” I say this and I’m suddenly unsure if I’m going about this the right way, but his head feels loose and pliant in my hand, the hair soft and short like when he was young.
“So.”
“So, is this true?”
“Mom told me you didn’t turn in your badge. She says you can go back anytime you want.” As easily as he spoke, he waves the hot dog back and forth before Toby, who sways and drools but can’t figure a way to eat without letting go of the tortoise.
“You know that’s not true.”
He shrugs.
I spin his head halfway round, so he can see me out the sides of his eyes. “I’m not going back there, so it doesn’t matter. You listening to me? Believe me on this. That’s over.” But even as I say this I see he’s messing with the dog. He’s shaking Toby by the nose, pinching the nostrils so its cheeks puff out around the tortoise. “Let go of the dog.”
He does this and then I let go of Mac’s head, which rolls back down to his chest.
“Brad’s dog. You can hit it with a brick and it won’t even blink.”
“I’m serious. I’m not going back on the force. You hit a dog with a brick?”
“I’m just sayin’,” he says and scratches the dusting of stubble on his arm.
“Did you?”
“What?”
“Throw a brick.”
“Mom says you’re lazy, says you want to be code nine.”
Code nine, he says and I can feel his lip curl, sense the slouching indifference of his shoulders, and suddenly I don’t want to keep shaving him. Suddenly, I can see him in a not-too-distant future, a tattoo on his arm, an earring maybe, wearing a black concert shirt with a wallet on a chain, and I don’t even want to touch him, because for a moment I know this kid. I have arrested him a hundred times.
I flip off the buzzer and tell him to go hose off.
“What about my hair?” he asks, but it is not a question. “This sucks.”
“Hose, now,” is all I can say as I point him away, toward the hose and the algae-green dog pool beyond.
* * *
You’d be surprised how many animals get killed at a zoo. We cull old ones, young ones, sick ones, extra ones. I cull them. Yesterday I spent most of the night scooping baby scorpions out of Desert Dwellers. They’d gotten out of their glass enclosure through the vent tube and were all over the atrium. I used a fishnet to scoop them up and drop them into a bucket of water, where they sank like dull pennies. The night before that, I fished all the newly hatched alligators out of Reptile Land with a long-handled pool skimmer. I dumped them in a feed tub and then placed it in the big cat meat locker till they were hard as tent sta
kes. I cull the overbred carp and the pigeons that swoop in from the capitol. I’m the one who harvests the ostrich eggs, and unless you’ve entered a dark pen of nine-foot birds, armed only with a pole and a flashlight, to try to take their eggs, you don’t know what I’m talking about. An ostrich can put a man’s ribs out his back, which is something I’ve seen, though not from a bird. Last week I shot a tiger.
But tonight is the kind you find only in Phoenix, only in July. The moon is rising over the Papago foothills like some distant drive-in movie, and I will forget about black eyes and roughed knuckles, will swing wide of the empty tiger pen as I roam the zoo’s dark paths in my zebra-striped golf cart. I have tonight’s list of the animals I’m to cull stuck to the cart’s visor, and beside me on the seat are my son’s dirty Converse sneakers, a temporary measure I know, a faint hope that tonight at least, he won’t get too far from the house while I’m gone. It would be dangerously simple to get in the habit of daydreaming on a job like this, to let myself ponder life amid a sleeping zoo, to speculate on the animals on that list, to keep looking at those shoes. I know that trap already, and tonight, I have decided, there will be nothing in the world beyond the cart, nothing but the luft of stale, warm air up my shirtsleeves and four more hours of dark. I will hum through the exhibits, roll through my list, and later, I hope, remember nothing.
In the distance I can hear a big cat scratching against chain link. From somewhere come the soft thumps of a great owl hovering in its small aviary, and I sink into the kind of feeling I used to get back when I was a police officer and would cruise through residential neighborhoods. I could meander through dark cul-de-sacs for hours, head back, one thumb on the wheel, only using cruising lights, as I passed homeowners’ neat lawns, their sprinklers snapping on to hiss in the dark, their security lights occasionally sensing my patrol car and shocking an upturned Big Wheel in the drive or an empty swing set. There would be nothing at all but the green glow of my dash gauges; beyond my windshield, the world became a series of dark houses that blended, and my mind would go blank.