Because she has cried and feels wretched but oddly chaste, Bunny allows herself to feel, full blown, the tremble of fear that swallows her up when she thinks of what Carson has done. She feels the fear even as she imagines her own version of the chilling, unalterable moment and what Carson must have felt, and she wonders what the man he killed thought, watching the bullets turn him into a target. Bunny has never been afraid of Carson. She is not afraid of him now. But if this could happen…The shudder passes and Bunny vows never to think this way again. But she doesn’t choose all her thoughts.
If he had just gotten off the streets, taken the test for sergeant like Eric—but Carson shunned the idea of becoming part of the force’s bureaucracy. Whenever Bunny mentioned Carson’s joining the police department’s administration as a way to get off the streets, he’d tell her, “I’m no paper pusher. I’d go nuts in an office, some supervisor breathing down my neck. This way I do my shift and I’m done.”
Bunny showers and changes clothes and goes back to the kitchen, where she places the lamb in the oven. By noon it will be ready and she and Carson can have an early dinner for two, she thinks, and maybe she can coax him into taking her to a movie. As she begins to think of what she will prepare to accompany the leg of lamb, the doorbell rings.
Through the peephole at the front door Bunny sees her mother and takes a deep breath, feels the familiar agitation that Doris’s presence so often inspires.
“I didn’t know you were coming,” Bunny gently complains, ushering her mother into the house.
“Since when do I have to call my own daughter? Why can’t I just stop by?” Doris asks, her voice stilted with mock hurt.
Doris’s black velour running suit is more stylish than practical, set off by large hoop earrings and a gold chain, and nails polished a startling deep red. Doris casually and quickly removes her lightweight jacket and follows Bunny into the kitchen.
“I just wish you’d called. You know how things are now,” Bunny says as Doris fills the teapot with water and puts it on the stove.
“You don’t mind if I have a cup of tea, do you?”
“Mama, come on, not today,” Bunny says with a sigh.
“Well, you always make me feel like I’m invading your home, not visiting.”
“You know that’s not true.”
“It’s how I feel, whether you want me to feel that way or not,” Doris says, leaning against the counter as she waits for the water to boil.
Bunny reaches for several potatoes from the basket on the counter and begins peeling them.
“Where’re you coming from?”
“I had lunch with some of the members of my bridge club,” Doris says. “And where are my grandchildren?” she asks eagerly.
“The girls are spending the weekend with a friend, and Juwan is on a Boy Scout camping trip.”
“And Carson?” Doris asks pointedly.
“He’s out.”
Steam blasts from the teapot nozzle. Doris turns off the burner and pours hot water into the Orioles mug Bunny has placed on the counter with a tea bag inside.
Bunny has never forgotten Doris’s dire response when she told her that Carson had asked her to marry him. “I’ve heard all kinds of things about those police officers. A girl like you could do so much better.”
A girl like you. A girl with her father’s soft, straight hair and olive-toned skin, which had people wondering sometimes if she was Hispanic. Whose mother combed and brushed her hair as though the act was a sacrament, and told Bunny repeatedly, “Thank God you got your daddy’s hair and didn’t get mine.”
When Bunny told Doris about the shooting, Doris said, “Well, I’m sorry to hear that. Real sorry.” That was all she said, but underneath those words Bunny heard the unspoken “I told you so.”
“How is Carson?” Doris asks, stirring her tea.
“I finally convinced him to seek some help. He’s seeing a therapist,” Bunny says, placing the knife and the potatoes on the counter.
“Good.” Doris beams with what appears to be sincere approval. “Who is it?”
“Mom, it’s no one you’d know. She’s in private practice.” This revelation feels momentous to Bunny, unused to sharing details of her married life with her mother. Still, it falls far short of telling Doris that Carson had thought of taking his own life. Bunny would never tell her mother about that.
“And I don’t want you telling any of your friends he’s in therapy, either, Mom.”
“I wouldn’t. But is he ashamed of needing help?”
“It’s not that. It’s just that it could change the way his fellow officers look at him, the way they feel about him, if they knew.”
“Lord God, that makes no sense. Why did this have to happen?” Doris asks, taking a sip from the mug of steaming tea. “I feel for that family.”
“We all do, Mama,” Bunny tells her, peeling potatoes once again as a mound of skins litters the counter. She realizes that she has peeled more potatoes than she needs, but she’ll make potato pancakes with the leftover mashed potatoes.
“Umph, umph, umph,” Doris mutters. “It sure is a tragedy all around. But you can’t help but wonder. I mean, you never hear of this kind of thing happening to White people. It’s always one of us gets shot like this. Seems like our lives are so cheap.”
“Are you saying Carson did this on purpose?” Bunny asks as she scoops the potato peelings into a plastic garbage bag.
“Of course not,” Doris shoots back defensively, her face bunched in horror at the question. “But why is it always us? And it doesn’t make it any easier that Carson is Black and that young man was too. In fact, it makes it worse.”
“He’s not a killer.” Bunny announces this with a firm voice bristling with conviction as she turns from the sink to look at her mother. Doris casts her own gaze away from the withering condemnation she sees on her daughter’s face and takes another sip of tea.
Praying silently that her mother will find it impossible to forge ahead in this line of rumination, Bunny runs cold water over the potatoes, now in an aluminum bowl. She puts them in the refrigerator, washes her hands, and removes her apron before grudgingly sitting down across from Doris.
“Bunny, just hear me out,” Doris pleads, placing her warm palm on Bunny’s folded hands. “It just seems that something happens when they put on that uniform. I told you about Jacob, that boy in my choir at church. Stopped for going through a red light. Sure, he was wrong, and he admitted that to the officer, but by the time the stop was through he’d been handcuffed and slammed on the ground, and my gracious, he’s a big boy too. You met him at my church picnic two summers ago. He’s almost six feet tall and plays on the basketball team at his high school, and he ended up with a broken arm. His parents filed a complaint with the citizens’ review board. Didn’t make a bit of difference. Sure, they investigated, but what happens? After a year, a whole year, they got a letter from Internal Affairs telling them that the police officer had used reasonable force. Reasonable force—I never heard of anything so outrageous. We’re the majority in what used to be a county that was a hotbed for the Klan, and damn near every time you read about somebody getting shot by the police, it’s one of us. Now tell me, why is that? Bunny, I’m not the only one asking that question. You know you’ve asked it too. When you married Carson I prayed he’d never be mixed up in anything like this.”
“Where’s your sympathy for Carson? For us?”
“Oh, honey, I don’t mean to sound harsh. But you got to admit, it looks terrible. At the beauty parlor the other day some of the women, wives and mothers, were so concerned, saying the same things. You remember that case with Bobby Washington.”
“Oh, Mama, have you lost your mind? That was over twenty years ago.”
“But people still remember it.”
Bobby Washington was a fifteen-year-old sophomore at DuVal High who, on the night that he and two other boys were picked up for stealing a car, shot and killed two White officers ten minutes afte
r being taken into a room for interrogation. The case struck all the racial nerves of the county, pitting Blacks, who believed Bobby Washington’s account of being beaten at the hands of the two cops, against Whites, who saw a crazed, violent Black youth who had murdered two veteran officers. Bunny was a sophomore at DuVal who knew the abiding fear that many of her friends, especially the boys, had of county police officers. She also had heard stories about Bobby Washington, the skinny, waiflike boy who, according to her classmates, tortured animals, beat up his own brothers, and was hauled out of the cafeteria one lunch hour after calling the principal a peanut-head motherfucker to his face.
Community activists marched to keep Bobby from getting the death penalty. He was given a life sentence. And when he had rehabilitated himself in prison, after serving seventeen years, getting his GED and a degree from a respected correspondence school, and writing articles on the need for prison reform published in progressive journals, there was agitation for his release. A Black federal appeals court judge released Bobby from prison. He married, got a job as a paralegal, and then inexplicably robbed a bank and was killed on the scene when he aimed his gun at an officer.
Bunny had believed Bobby’s story during the trial, that he feared for his life at the hands of the police officers who were brutalizing him. But she and Carson had discussed Bobby Washington many times. “Sure, maybe they were roughing him up,” Carson would say. “But do you know how mad dog he had to be to shoot two officers? Not one, Bunny, but two?” And Bunny thought about the widows of the officers, who each time Bobby Washington came up for parole had testified about what had happened to them because of what he had done. When she read accounts in the newspaper of their tearful pleas before the parole board to keep Bobby Washington in jail, Bunny saw in them the woman that she could easily one day be.
“You’ve never been on our side. You’ve never believed in Carson.”
“Bunny, I’m just speaking the truth. You know I am.”
“The truth isn’t so simple to me anymore. No matter what you say, it’s just not black-and-white.”
The twins were seven. Carson and Bunny heard the nervous but shuttered whispers coming up from the basement when they came in from a quick run to Blockbuster to rent videos. “Let me hold it,” Roslyn peevishly insisted, words that made Carson and Bunny exchange a worried glance and head to the basement. Standing on the bottom step, clinging to Carson’s shoulder, Bunny saw the girls huddled in the center of the basement standing over his workbench, enthralled by an object neither Bunny nor Carson could see. But Bunny knew what it was. The burning in her stomach, the leaden silence of the basement, told her the twins had found Carson’s second gun. The girls were so intent, so absorbed, they had not heard Bunny and Carson’s footsteps over their labored, puzzled breathing.
“Roslyn, Roseanne!” Carson called out to them harshly, their names a verbal blow designed to scare them into moving away from the object neither parent could see but both dreadfully envisioned. When Roslyn jerked around to face her parents, Carson’s second Beretta lay in her small, trembling palms like an offering.
Bunny gripped Carson’s arm, holding him back from rushing over to the girls. “Carson, you’ll frighten them,” she whispered, straining not to scream.
But they were already frightened. Roseanne stood beside her sister with her arms enveloping her body, staring at the floor, rocking back and forth. The weight of the gun seemed to have paralyzed Roslyn as she stood, her small body teetering on the edge of crumbling. Finally her first whimper cracked the silence. “Daddy. Daddy, help…” Carson and Bunny took breathless, hushed, tiny steps toward the girls. Then in a voice lulling and firm, soft but insistent, Carson talked the gun out of Roslyn’s hands.
These are Bunny’s brooding, insistent thoughts as she watches Carson undress. She’s in bed, a hardback copy of Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings on her lap. Bunny rereads the book once a year but has found the memoir suddenly as impenetrable as the newspapers and magazines she’s abandoned since the night of the shooting. Nothing can compete with the current narrative of her life. Evenings when she would normally read, she watches television, an unaccustomed habit, reveling in the surrender of her will to laugh tracks and commercials and the inexhaustible supply of channels, faces, and situations, grateful that she can erase a tragic ending or an outcome she rejects simply by pushing a button on the remote.
But on every channel there is news of the war in Iraq, now official since the invasion and despite ten million people all over the world marching in protest. George W. Bush has his war, with body counts and death tolls making it real, despite the television rendition that presents it as a sophisticated video game. Over dinner the children had asked about the war and she and Carson struggled to explain why the war was wrong, unjustified, why the president wanted to wage a war over oil and water and vanity and belligerence and pride. “But my teacher told us Saddam Hussein is a bad man, that he wants to kill us with nuclear weapons,” Roseanne told them.
So much violence, so much crime, Bunny thinks as she grazes the channels some nights now and sees, in addition to footage of bombs falling in Baghdad, which she feels landing in her soul, an endless procession of dramas that begin always with a dead body discovered, a murder within the first thirty seconds, autopsies, investigations, serial killers, rapists, crime scene investigations, lawyers, judges, law and order and guilt and innocence and blood, always blood.
But tonight she would read. That’s what she thought, anyway, but she sat thumbing disinterestedly through the now-familiar text when the flashback to the incident with the girls and the gun sprang from her unconscious.
Carson sits on his side of the bed with his back to her. He’s bending over, and although she can’t see his hands, Bunny knows from his movements that he’s unstrapping his Beretta from his ankle.
“Why do you still wear that?” she asks in an urgent whisper.
“You know why. I’m duty bound to carry it at all times,” Carson says, turning abruptly to face her.
“Don’t you think…?”
“No, I don’t think what you think.”
“We can’t even name what you were going to do. We can’t even say the word.”
“We won’t have to if you just let it go. If you’d forget it.”
“How can I?”
“I told you, I wouldn’t have killed myself.”
Bunny crosses her arms in front of her chest, purses her lips, and looks away from Carson.
“You didn’t fire that gun, but it feels like you did,” she says, aiming the words not at him but at the ceiling. Still, they hit their mark. “I don’t know why I feel this way, but I do. It’s as if a part of me feels widowed, betrayed by what I saw sitting in the car with you that night. I’m grieving, but I don’t know what for. Maybe I’m as scared of saying what we’ve lost as I am of saying out loud what you almost did.”
“Do you think I like wearing it? But if I don’t and I’m in public and there’s an incident, Bunny, I’m still a cop. My reflexes will kick in. I’d take action and I’d be ineffective. No way I’ll go down like Madison over in the second district. Didn’t like wearing his weapon when he was off duty. Gets carjacked one night in front of an ATM, locked in the trunk of his own car, driven from District Heights over to Oxon Hill by some kids out stoned and joyriding. Officers caught the kids, saw them speeding and going through red lights. One of the kids, a fourteen-year-old, had a gun—that’s how they forced Madison into the trunk. He hasn’t lived that down yet.”
He’s lying again. The weapon weighs on his lower leg like a tumor. He can hear it ticking like a time bomb in the glove compartment of his car. The gun is part of the pretense that he’s still capable, competent, the ultimate symbol of the facade required to remain in good standing, even on administrative leave. He’s told Bunny that his reflexes would kick in. He can’t tell her there are probably thugs gunning for him. That he can’t risk not wearing his weapon. He’s arrested too man
y drug dealers, been aggressive in arresting thugs who’d relish the chance for payback if they found him parked alone somewhere, anywhere, day or night. But he’s absolutely certain he’d freeze, think twice, delay, if he had to use his gun now. The Beretta is a fig leaf that barely covers the truth nobody in the department can know.
He watches Bunny refusing to look at him, closing the book in her lap, and reaching to turn off the halogen lamp on her nightstand. “Bunny, please, don’t make me wish I’d pulled the trigger that night. I can’t lose you too.”
6
Carson worries about his children now more than he ever did before. Worries because he fears one day there must come some cosmic payback. Paul Houston was a son too. When he thinks of his son, Juwan, he thinks of the word soft. But there is another word that rumbles in his mind, noisily, too often, especially now that Juwan, at twelve, stands on the brink of adolescence. It is a word that fills Carson’s mind like a mushroom cloud when he watches Juwan walk, his hands and wrists poised slightly outward, his hips rolling gently with a reflexive tilt that imbues him with a rhythm that to Carson is not male, not female, but gay. He holds on to the hope that there is time for Juwan to learn to walk, to sit the way other boys do. To be like other boys are. Will he have to explain his son? What will he say when other officers make jokes about queers, fags, jokes he has made, easily, unthinking, not caring or wondering if any of the officers in earshot “went that way”? Will he stand up for Juwan? Neither he nor Bunny has ever said the word. Bunny rejects it as a label; he resists it as a fate. For his son. Will his son be whispered and joked about? Assumed, even by the most liberal and understanding, to not be quite one of God’s children?
And yet there is the boy’s art, for which he is already winning prizes, citations at school and in the classes he takes on Saturdays at the Y. Juwan’s room is almost clinically neat, the stacks of comic books, Japanese Anime, the video games (James Bond, Final Four, Need for Speed) and CDs in alphabetical order. One wall in his room is filled with his drawings—pencil drawings of Roslyn and Roseanne, the details so precise they resemble photographs, the head of Earl Mattheson’s golden retriever, a vase filled with yellow roses, all done by a hand so steady and mature that when Carson looks at them his pride momentarily extinguishes any remnant of concern about the boy, and swells his heart.
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