After

by Marita Golden

  Courteous to the public, but among themselves obscenity was the second language—shit, fuck, damn, a macho lingua franca they used during roll call, interspersed throughout every conceivable conversation as shield so nothing and nobody could get to the places inside, where the officers might be hurt and so become ineffective. For what else could you say when you were called most often to riot and mayhem and loss, hardly ever to celebrate or rejoice or just hear good news, when you jumped out of your car? Carson learned soon that many cops felt deeply the effects of the accumulation of misery and the unfathomable—like why a father would throw his three-year-old from a twelve-story window to make her stop crying. To keep from feeling, they’d tell dirty jokes standing around a sheared and mangled car cut in half by the force of a dump trunk, bodies still inside, or complain about the questions on the test to become a sergeant while looking at an elderly gentleman slumped in a rocker in front of his TV, the channel turned to Jeopardy!, the game show he’d been watching before he blew out his brains with the gun on the floor at his feet because he’d been diagnosed with lung cancer the day before. They took all that home with them, with nowhere to unload it, hide it, make sense of it. Obscenities were the words that seemed most appropriate for the work they did that nobody, not even they, fully understood. Their jobs seemed to confirm that there was no God, and if there was He was surely in cahoots with the devil. They even used to joke about Eric because he didn’t curse, asked him if he knew how. Eric just said, “I don’t need to.” “Yeah, that’s right, you pray,” they’d jeer like schoolboys before roll call started, and Eric would answer, “That’s right, I do.” There could be no displays of affection between two male cops, ever, unless one of them had fucked up bad, been shot, or killed the wrong person. Once when Carson hadn’t seen Eric in a while and embraced him in the hall, the officers who passed by sneered, “Why don’t y’all get a room?”

  In the midst of those memories, Carson thinks, I’ve done this ass-backwards. Eat first and then take aspirin, that’s the rule. He goes into the kitchen, deciding to eat a bowl of oatmeal, hoping the cereal will absorb the aspirin and the waves of gastric juices his tension has unleashed now roiling against the walls of his stomach. After pouring a cup of water into a saucepan, Carson stands before the stove, waiting for the water to boil.

  Deek had talked about the early eighties as if it were Korea, or Vietnam. “Shit, man, sometimes we’d take fifteen, sixteen service calls a shift,” he told Carson, shaking his head and letting out a long, smooth whistle of disbelief at the memory. “We were patrolling all the hellholes. The crack dens, the open-air markets. And for all that work, till we got the minimum mandatory sentences it was just a revolving door.” Very quickly Carson realized that a partner was like another wife. On Bunny’s birthday, his and the kids’, on Christmas, on his wedding anniversary, more often than not he was with Deek. Half his shift was just talking, talking to his partner as they cruised the streets, keeping their eyes on the street and everybody on the street. When Carson in those early days and months complained of the boredom of some shifts, Deek told him, “Carson, there’s gonna be times you’d give up all you own for a slow shift. It’s just like the front lines in a war zone: ninety-five percent boredom, five percent terror. I been out here a while now, and that equation ain’t never changed, and the incidents that make you earn your pay often creep up on you, come disguised, like a domestic disturbance that’s murder when you get there, or a traffic stop where you get more than you bargained for.”

  After a while it didn’t matter to Carson that Deek was White. He was his partner, and that meant that while he wasn’t necessarily his friend, he was the person who held Carson’s life in his hands. Deek was one of two or three officers he invited to his wedding when he and Bunny married two years after he joined the force. And Carson had more than once gone to hear Deek and his bluegrass band play at a club in Alexandria. When Deek’s seventeen-year-old daughter got pregnant and decided to keep the baby, Deek told Carson, “They’re talking about gettin’ married when they graduate next year. I don’t care that the boy is Black—I just wish they could’ve kept their pants on a while longer.”

  Still, there were two different cultures on the force. One night a year after he’d joined up, Carson went to the bar at the Fraternal Order of Police Social Club and walked into a room full of White officers who stopped talking when he came through the door. Cops, some of whom he knew, who didn’t take their hostile, questioning eyes off Carson until he backed out of the door he’d come through only moments before.

  The FOP Club was where White police officers hung out. Black police officers did their own thing. This was the unspoken rule Carson learned on his own. Carson had signed on in the aftermath of a discrimination suit filed by a group of Black officers. He joined the force despite its reputation for brutality against Blacks, racism, and a scandal in which a group of rogue cops called the Death Squad had turned into vigilantes, meting out their own brand of justice.

  Nobody was more surprised than Carson when he became a MP in the army and then joined the force a couple of years after his honorable discharge. He knew the world was gray, but as a police officer Carson could try to make it neat, simple, black-and-white. Order. Discipline. Those were the tenets of his secret religion. The world was all chaos without them. His wasn’t just a job. Misunderstood, disrespected, his was a sacred calling.

  There was one incident early in his career he’d always remember as a kind of initiation. The day after Easter Monday, two dealers erupted into a shoot-out over a drug deal in a housing project on the Prince George’s County side of the county/D.C. line. A twelve-year-old girl riding her bike was killed, caught in the cross-fire. Within an hour the department knew who they were looking for. Everybody was working overtime, questioning witnesses and cruising, looking for the suspect.

  It was seven o’clock and Carson and Deek got lucky when they passed a Burger King and Carson spotted the suspect. He was leaning against the hood of a car, laughing and talking trash. Carson wondered if he was laughing about the little girl he’d killed earlier that day. Carson was behind the wheel, and as he pulled into the parking lot the suspect broke into a run. Deek radioed for backup and Carson bolted out of the car and gave chase to the kid, who was running like an Olympic champ, heading behind the stores to the back of the mall. Deek was trailing Carson but not close enough. There was the tumultuous screaming sound of several other squad cars closing in. The suspect tripped and fell in front of a dumpster. On the ground, he held his ankle in pain, squealing like a pig. Carson’s flashlight speckled the darkness with a slice of illumination that landed on the kid’s face. He was maybe sixteen at the most. His dark-skinned, childish face was twisted by belligerence and rage. Deek finally caught up and was all over the kid, searching him and cuffing him, rising from the ground with a gun and a palmful of tiny cellophane packets of crack.

  Several squad cars screeched to a halt, closing off the entrance to the alley. Carson heard more footsteps and turned to see Vince Proctor running toward them. The first time Carson saw Vince Proctor, he thought he was White. The slicked-back straight hair, the tiny pencil-thin mustache, the blue veins bulging through the skin of his neck, the gray eyes as hard as flints. A Black man with a complexion that was ghostly white. Some cops loved him. Some cops hated his guts. Back then, when Carson was a rookie, he didn’t know why. To him Vince Proctor walked like a man who had everything he needed with him, on him. All the time. He was a kick-ass who preferred the uniform to undercover and who saved the life of one officer trapped in a burning car and another who had a gun pointed at his head in a hostage situation. On the ground, the kid was yelling about the cuffs being too tight and his ankle being broken.

  “Niggah, if you don’t shut up I’ll give you a real reason to scream,” Proctor shouted.

  “Fuck you, muthafuckah,” the kid spat back at Proctor.

  “This ain’t no rap video, you stupid ass,” Proctor yelled as he began kicking th
e kid in the head, the ribs, the groin, the back, his thick muscular arms outstretched, as if he were performing a dance movement, with each kick. The kid’s moans strangled the warm April air. Deek, his eyes huge and still, held the gun and the crack and silently watched Vince Proctor.

  “Fuck you, muthafuckah,” Proctor taunted the kid. A dim halogen bulb hanging from the roof of the back of the pizza parlor above the dumpster revealed everything. The boy’s face, blood-soaked and unrecognizable. Proctor’s foot on the kid’s stomach as though to hold him in place. The grim, determined look on Proctor’s face, and his presence making Carson feel smaller and the moment bigger than anything he’d ever been a part of before. “Blake, you want a piece a this?” Proctor asked. His answer would tell Proctor and Deek and the circle of half a dozen other cops gathered a few feet away, who saw and who pretended not to see, who Carson was. What he was made of. A little girl riding her bike had been killed so this scum at their feet could sell drugs.

  The kid’s moans sickened Carson. But Proctor and Deek were watching him, sizing him up. Carson’s first kick was halfhearted. The second and the third, he just closed his eyes, blocking out the kid’s face, trying not to see the face of the girl he’d killed, a thick veil of blood staining her cheeks, dripping into her eyes as she lay at the foot of her three-speed bicycle a few feet from the elementary school playground where the bullet found her and roared through her skull. The fourth and fifth kick, Carson was a machine. Then there was Proctor’s hand on his shoulder and his voice saying, “I think he’s got the point.” Carson opened his eyes and turned to face Proctor, who winked at him, and Carson knew the lesson was through. Carson and Proctor and Deek hauled the kid off the ground and led him out of the alley. Carson never mentioned what he and Proctor had done that evening. Deek never said anything to him about it at all. Yet he knew that he’d left a part of himself on the ground that night, mixed in with the trash and dirt overflowing from the dumpster.

  Pouring the oatmeal into a bowl, Carson sprinkles sugar, pours milk, and smears a pat of butter over the lumpy mass and sinks into a chair at the kitchen table. All he wants to do is eat. He tries to think about the oatmeal, moist and soft, filling his mouth. He tries to imagine it traveling down his throat, into his stomach, but all he can do is think about everything he’s done on The Job. He profiled, all officers did. For self-protection. If he saw a car loaded with young Black males, he started wondering. If it’s a beat-up hoopty they’re driving, did they use it in a crime? If it’s an expensive ride, how can they afford it? He might radio in to see if it’s been reported stolen. What are they doing in the car? Are they moving to the beat of the rap blasting from the car stereo or stuffing drugs under the seat? Are they driving too fast? Too slow? But you weren’t supposed to stop them without backup. Not a carload. Driving while Black. Yeah. Driving while dangerous. Driving while armed. Driving while looking for trouble. There wasn’t one civilian he knew who could do his job for one shift. The vigilance, the paranoia it required. All to keep the peace. Carson sits at the table in the kitchen and stares at the oatmeal, grateful that these memories of the past have smothered the visions of last night.

  The traffic stop is the most dangerous stop of all. You never know who’s behind the wheel, an honor roll student or somebody wanted by the FBI. You never know. So every night’s a war. That’s why you take control from the start. Let them know who’s in charge. Every complaint against Carson (and there had been half a dozen) had been investigated. Every time he was cleared. A prostitute resisting arrest charged him with brutality because she hit her head when he wrestled her into his cruiser. He got a complaint because he told a woman he was ticketing for reckless driving to stop crying like a baby. Bogus, cynical, time-wasting shit that Internal Affairs had to investigate as if he were Rambo. Sure, there were times when he went overboard. The body slam. The choke hold. Cuffs extra tight. You can’t deal with some people until you get their attention. Until they’re subdued. Until they’ve calmed down. Capitol Heights, Oxon Hill—that’s not Mayberry. Some people deserve a beating. That’s all they understand.

  Lifting a spoonful of oatmeal to his lips, Carson wills himself to think of something good to blot out everything else. And he remembers that he wanted to be a hero. A hero like Eric.

  Carson decided early on to do as much as he could to draw a line in the sand between The Job and the rest of his life. He saw the wreckage The Job wrought in the lives of veteran officers—the divorces, the alcoholism, the gambling, men so hardened and broken by years on the street that they could be classified only as collateral damage. He didn’t have many friends on the force and didn’t want many. Carson was afraid that the dysfunction he saw in some of the cops he respected most would rub off on him. The crazy shift changes, every four days switching to day or evening or night shift, the generalized and specific stresses of The Job, and so much more made it easy for Carson to maintain workplace friendships that never spilled over into the rest of his life. Then Eric Bradshaw was assigned to the district.

  Often a group of officers on the same shift met in the parking lot before the shift began, to decide where to have dinner together. Eric had a different kind of conversation during those dinners. He wanted to talk about more than wives and children, who beat the Wizards, or gossip about other cops. He’d read books Carson had never heard of—They Came Before Columbus, about Africans journeying to the shores of America hundreds of years before White men, Stolen Legacy, Africa’s Gift to America, books about Marcus Garvey, Carl Jung, and a novel called Siddhartha.

  What Eric had read on their pages had endowed him with a quiet wisdom that Carson came to envy. Carson borrowed Stolen Legacy, and although the language and the allusions were arcane, unfamiliar, and challenging, referencing Greek, Roman, and African history his community college education had left uncovered, Carson persevered and spent weeks talking with Eric about the significance of George G. M. James’s conclusions about the true sources of Western civilization and the story of Africa.

  Soon Carson and Eric started talking every day, going to computer shows, and double dating with Bunny and Eric’s girlfriend, Jennifer, having dinner on the wharf at Hogates or going to hear jazz at a club over in Baltimore.

  Carson saw evidence of Eric’s deeply rooted religious faith in the mourning brown eyes that stared at the world with a prophet’s steely concern that could be neither shaken nor surprised. For Eric, The Job was his ministry, and he joked that God was his bulletproof vest. Eric kept it quiet that he was a deacon in his church, that he had a divinity degree from Howard, although he wasn’t ordained so he couldn’t preach. He wore all this lightly, perfecting a kind of spiritual masking so as not to disrupt the requirements of The Job for everyone to fit in, to wear the uniform as though dressed for battle.

  Mostly it was a quiet righteousness, a calm, an openness that informed anyone who looked at Eric that God called and he answered. Carson had seen him bow his head, whisper a prayer in the locker room before he hit the streets. Eric was known to break up gang fights with words, pull young bloods aside, eighteen-, nineteen-year-olds who had predicted the time and place and year of their own deaths, who had bragged they wouldn’t live to reach twenty-one. Aside, off to the corner of the rec center and playground, Eric held the rangy, angry, anguished body, looked into the resisting face, and defused the suicidal impulse. Everyone, other cops, the young bloods come to rumble, even Carson, stood a few feet away. Watched the young gangster’s body stance melt as Eric looked him dead in the eye and said…what? Offered what? Life? Love? God? On his beat they said Eric could part the waters.

  “I couldn’t do this without my faith,” he told Carson. “Seeing people at their most vulnerable, when they’re raging or stoned or have just committed some act that proves there’s evil in the world. I have to believe I’m in this, that we’re in this to do more than just use handcuffs,” he said with the melodious, slow, thoughtful rhythm of the preacher he could easily be.

  “You sound
like the administrators, the brass, the ones who haven’t been on the streets in years, the sociologists,” Carson said, shaking his head. “I’ve got faith too. Faith in me. In my training. My instincts. I couldn’t do the job without that.”

  “I’m not judging you, Carson. But I know that without my faith I’d be a psycho like Proctor or I’d be a drunk like Cooper—that’s all I know. There’s a group of us meeting for Bible study, before the shift, at Robinson’s place.”

  “You’re shittin’ me.”

  “Naw, naw, man. You oughta join us.”

  “You all just pray for me, okay?”

  Then Eric was gone. Three years ago. He stopped to help a woman on the side of 495 change a flat tire. It was 10:15 p.m., during a heavy rain. A drunk driver careened off the road and plowed into Eric, off duty, stooped and bent over, his back to the road as he changed the tire and the Korean woman stood near the trunk saying a prayer of thanks for the action of the Good Samaritan. The Jeep smashed Eric into a sodden mess of broken flesh and cracked bones. Eric, gone. Just like that. There was grief at Carson’s house, where his children had to come to terms with the first death of someone they knew, and at the district, where cops headed for their shifts in a daze.

  Carson was unmoored and sinking for months. Even now, he still misses Eric. Still talks to him in his thoughts every day. But since last night, that sporadic conversation with the ghost of his best friend has stalled. Carson had no idea how he would resurrect it. Eric was the only person who knew of his crimes, transgressions committed in the wanton haze of youth. When he told Eric the things he had done, Eric shrugged and said, “When you joined the army and then the police force, you made a decision to be born again. The ability to keep creating life anew, over and over, to rise from the ashes of our sins—that’s God’s true gift to us.”