American by Day

by Derek B. Miller

  On the back of the Harley, staring at the white skull painted on the back of the idiot’s helmet, Sigrid again asks herself why any woman would choose a view like this rather than just ride the damn thing herself.

  Two hundred dollars she had to pay this Neanderthal, and upfront, for the forty-minute ride through back roads to a bus stop in a place called Nicholville.

  The biker reins in his hog outside a deserted brick building beside a split-lane road with signs for Greyhound. A cigarette machine and a Coke machine buzz under a corrugated roof nearby. Behind the building is a forest, dense and black. There is no other structure in sight beyond the road itself, the telephone poles, and the drooping wires that even the birds have abandoned.

  “Who are your people?” the man asks.

  “Thanks for the ride, we’re done,” Sigrid says, removing her helmet.

  “I asked you a question.”

  “My people have patches on their vests that say ‘The Filthy Few.’ You don’t. You even speak again,” Sigrid says, “and it’s going to cost you.”

  The man snorts and looks her over. He’s obviously much stronger than she is and could overpower her easily if given the chance, but she’s certain she’s faster. Sigrid concentrates on his exposed throat. This is what she’ll strike if he makes a move. No one fights well with a broken trachea.

  Without taking his eyes off her, he starts the bike again, revs the engine a half dozen times for dramatic effect, and peels out leaving her alone in Americana.

  Across the road there is a field of black grass that moves to a breeze too far away to reach her. If she closes her eyes, and waits long enough, maybe it will.

  In time, when her pulse slows and she allows the coolness of the night to settle her mood, she opens her eyes again and looks across the street to the field. There is a forest silhouetted behind it, and above, a mountain range of clouds lit on their edge by the fiery white light cast by the unseen moon. Streaks of navy blue and cobalt trim the clouds. Sigrid sits alone on the bench, the helmet and sling bag beside her, resting her neck and shoulders. At least now she’s alone and free to find her big brother.

  “You forgot your guitar,” she’ll say to him when she finds him.

  “I know,” he’ll answer.

  “The one I bought for you.”

  The clouds create the illusion of mountains but in fact the land around her is flat. Should the weather turn, the rain will fall hard and flood the field. There is a heaviness now. Night rain always feels intimate to her; a chance to be washed by a secret. The sound against the clay tiles on the roof. The drip into the gutter. The soft stream of water outside the window, the rivulets dancing black on the ceiling surrounded by the yellow glow of the streetlamp. Night rain feels to Sigrid like a vestige from when the world was new and there were no people here and the planet had only itself; its own cycles and rhythms and changes, going on and on for a billion years without witnesses or someone to put those experiences into words.

  She sits there watching the clouds, waiting for them to break open so the moon—half full—might appear and take her back to her farm with her father and maybe farther back in time to when her family was whole and everything felt complete. But the moon does not come, nor does the rain, and instead a heavy light breaks through the darkness and a truck drives up the road the way she first came. Instead of moving on, though, the truck slows until it blocks the view of everything that was in front of her and finally rolls to a crunching halt.

  The window drops on the driver’s side and from the shadow of that space comes a talking elbow:

  “This is one depressing spot you’ve selected for yourself.”

  “You’re a shit,” Sigrid says to Sheriff Irving Wylie.

  “I know it.”

  Sigrid doesn’t move and Irv juts his elbow out the window. “The bus out here doesn’t run until five in the morning. It’s . . .”—Irv checks his watch—“. . . not even one. What were you planning to do here for four hours?”

  “I was going to read a book.”

  “It’s darker than a witch’s soul out here.”

  “Not all my plans work out.”

  “Neither do mine. But I’m on a roll tonight.”

  Sigrid does not move or reply, and Irv shakes his head. “Want to get some coffee?”

  Irv sees that Sigrid does not understand him. “There’s a diner up the road near Malone. Coffee’s on the menu.”

  “It’s one in the morning.”

  “It’s open twenty-four/seven. They keep the coffee flowing like it’s coffee. You don’t have twenty-four-hour diners in Norway?”

  Sigrid still does not move.

  “Don’t be like that,” he says.

  “I don’t see how we can work together, Sheriff.”

  “That’s funny, because I don’t see how we can avoid it, Chief.”

  Irv turns on his hazard lights and opens the door but does not step out. Instead he swings his legs around and rests his elbows on his knees. “Here’s how I figure it, Sigrid. You probably have a good sense of where your brother is. You figured that out in twenty-four hours, whereas we came up with bupkis after two weeks. So . . . well done. But now we know too. Saranac Lake. Or thereabouts. How, you wonder? I instructed Melinda to give you some space at the university to ask your own questions and then we circled back and called the professor afterward to get him to snitch on you. It was pretty sneaky of me, but I told you that I have faith in your love for your brother, and clearly it wasn’t misplaced. What happens now, Chief Sigrid, is we get you a nice Monte Cristo sandwich with local maple syrup to warm you up, and together we find a way to bring him in all nice and easy. Otherwise, the local sheriff isn’t going to have any choice but to call in SWAT or an emergency response team to surround Saranac Lake—where there are families on vacation with children—and we hope to God your brother didn’t bring a rifle with the intention of living off the fat of the land so he could stay away from ATM machines and their little cameras. Does he know how to shoot?”

  “He’s not violent and he doesn’t care for guns. The crime you accused him of doesn’t even involve a gun.”

  “But he grew up on a farm. I don’t know anyone who grew up on a farm who can’t shoot a rifle at least. Maybe it isn’t true, but it will be a perception shared by SWAT. So it comes down to this: It’s you and me working together, or it’s SWAT in full crazy mode. Because there are pressures on me you don’t understand, and I need to get to Marcus before our little world up here catches fire. It really is more flammable than it looks.”

  Godless Communists in American Diners

  The diner is called Diner if it is called anything at all. In Sigrid’s eyes, it is the kind of place where nothing good was ever intended to happen and probably won’t. It is set back from the road and buffered by an asphalt parking lot. The façade is fake stone painted white and the roof is rimmed with a white fence that almost but does not entirely fail to hide a giant air-conditioning unit mounted beside an angular sheet-metal chimney. Walking in, Sigrid sees four solitary patrons staring blankly through the large windows at the road, beyond the parking lot from which they came and will later go again—their pasts and futures looking identical from their perches on red Naugahyde.

  The patrons are male and the wait staff not. The men sit on stools all wearing beige or blue trousers. Thick belts peek out from shirttails floating above bulging waists. They hunch over food that is making them sicker and older but tastes familiar and comforting and reminds them of happier times when they were not here.

  Sigrid and Irv take seats in a booth—their own unique piece of American real estate.

  A white waitress without an expression appears with two pitchers of coffee that hug her hips like misbegotten twins—one caffeinated, the other not. Irv raises a finger to the brown one and the woman pours its soul into a cup trimmed with a single red stripe. Sigrid says nothing and the woman pours for her on the assumption that anyone here would need coffee.

  Irv re
moves two maroon vinyl tomes from their pinned position between the ketchup and napkin dispenser and hands one to Sigrid.

  “What’s this?” she asks.

  “The menu.”

  Sigrid opens it. It contains a thousand options ranging from T-bone steak to blueberry pancakes.

  “They have all this?”

  “Yes,” says Irv.

  “At one in the morning?”

  “Yes,” says Irv.

  “How?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Irv orders a toasted corn muffin and a glass of apple juice. Sigrid reads about a bagel with “lox.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Smoked salmon. I think it’s Yiddish. Now it’s American.”

  “Laks, L-A-K-S, is the Norwegian word for salmon.”

  “Aren’t Yiddish and Norwegian both basically German?”

  “No.”

  “OK.”

  Sigrid orders it and settles into her booth. Irv removes a map from his black canvas bag and spreads it out over the table. It displays the northern region of the Adirondacks.

  “How were you going to find him?” Irv asks her.

  “How were you going to find him?” Sigrid asks.

  “Manpower. Wanted posters, a hundred cops, interviews, show his face around, circle him, surround him at night. Throw in some dogs. We have sweaters from his house. No one ever washes sweaters. Those armpits are like ambrosia to the bloodhounds. But you don’t have manpower or dogs. You’re alone. How was that going to work?”

  “Differently.”

  “Why don’t you trust me?” Irv asks her. He shifts his weight into the corner by the window and lifts his right leg onto the bench.

  “Tell me about Jeffrey Simmons,” Sigrid says.

  “Melinda said you were curious about that. How’s that connected to your brother?”

  “Through Lydia Jones,” Sigrid says.

  “OK, but not directly. Jeffrey was shot. It was tragic. Months later, Lydia falls to her death and your brother was right there. And Chuck. And the phone call. I’m not seeing a connection between Jeffrey’s tragedy and Lydia’s.”

  “Are you sure?” Sigrid asks.

  “I’m sure that I have no reason to think there is.”

  “Which isn’t the same thing.”

  “True. But I have no reason to suspect that Lydia Jones’s death is connected to the missing Lindberg baby either, though I accept that the world has invisible levers and the universe is a vast and complex thing. Why are we talking about this?”

  “Whether or not Lydia’s death is connected to Jeffrey’s might be a secondary issue to whether Jeffrey’s death is connected to Marcus’s circumstances.”

  “You’ve entirely lost me.”

  “What worries me, Irving, is trigger-happy cops shooting people for no reason. That’s the . . .”—Sigrid pauses for a term—“the thing they have in common that connects them.”

  “The common denominator between Jeffrey and Marcus?”

  “Right. You can see why that might interest me in a manhunt for my brother who is suspected of murder.”

  “That isn’t a concern in this case.”

  “Is it because my brother is white?”

  “That’s unfair.”

  “To whom?”

  “Been here for two days and you have America all figured out, huh? That’s very European of you, you know that? You aren’t the first tourist who’s passed through here pissing on the trees.”

  “I’ve read about the Jeffrey Simmons case,” Sigrid says. “Roy Carman is a racist murderer with a badge. Which happens. What’s inexplicable is why the grand jury didn’t even consider the case worthy of going to court, let alone did a court find him guilty and get him off the street.”

  Irv lifts a butter knife and spins it across the thick of his palm the way Sigrid had seen schoolmates do with pens back home. As he performs the trick he stares at Sigrid.

  “Jeffrey Simmons may have been young,” Irv says quietly, “but he was five foot eight inches tall. That’s about your height. He was wearing a black hooded sweatshirt with the name of a rap gang on it, and he was wearing dark glasses. It would have been impossible for anyone to know what age he was without standing right in front of him or talking to him. He was holding a toy gun, yes. But it was not a pink water pistol. It was a realistic-looking object. Roy Carman, something of a hothead, responded to a call from a neighbor saying she saw a black man in a hood carrying—and I’m quoting here—‘what looks like a gun,’ unquote. Seeing two children running from this mystery figure when he arrived, Roy threw himself into harm’s way, burst from the car, and told the perp to drop the weapon. Jeffrey did not drop the weapon, and Roy engaged him with his service pistol. The result was tragic. No question. But it is not obvious where he made an error in action or judgment. It was just bad luck.”

  “Jeffrey was pretending to be a character from a storybook. His luck would have been different if he’d been white.”

  “Maybe,” he concedes. “But unfortunately Jeffrey was the exact profile of what we arrest around here at a disproportionately high rate: African American males between seventeen and twenty-five wearing either gang or rap-related clothing.”

  “There’s a difference between the general and the particular,” she says.

  “Yes, there is. But the space between them is a universe of problems.”

  “Let me tell you what I see when I look at this situation, Sheriff,” says Sigrid. “I see a little boy playing with his friends on his own front lawn when an armed police officer bursts out of a squad car only meters away and inside of two seconds—that is an actual measure taken from the video camera—murdered that child in front of his mother, who was watching him play from the kitchen window. What I’m telling you—as a police professional and as someone who has commanded armed assaults—is that Jeffrey was dead the moment Roy hit the accelerator in his car rather than the brake at thirty meters away. Because the only reason to drive that close to someone suspicious is to make sure you don’t miss when you shoot them. He drove up next to Jeffrey in order to kill him.”

  “Norwegian police don’t even carry guns. What do you really know about it?”

  Sigrid leans over the tabletop and speaks in a hushed voice:

  “One month ago my partner and I were taking point on an assault at a summer cabin in the woods backed up by our own emergency response team called the Beredskapstroppen. They were under my command. Unlike Roy, I stopped my car more than thirty meters from that cabin when someone came out with a knife and ran directly toward me. And in that time I called halt twice before pulling the trigger because it was my sworn obligation as well as my tactical training to defuse the situation rather than intensify it with the use of deadly force. But he didn’t halt and so I put two nine-millimeter slugs into that young man’s chest because while we do not normally carry guns, we do in fact know how to use them and sometimes we do. But not often. Norwegian police kill civilians in fatal shootings about once every decade. In America? No one even knows. You have no national database on police-involved shootings. You literally don’t count the number of people your police kill. And as a community you barely ask questions about it. You think that’s civilized?”

  “There is a war on the police out there, Sigrid. America is an armed country and we have hardened criminals. Personally, I’m in favor of gun control because I think the opposite of gun control is gun out-of-control and that seems wildly irresponsible. However, all that’s immaterial because . . . there are lots and lots of guns out there. Which means we’re sworn to serve and protect in a gun-rich environment that makes our jobs scarier. And we’re legitimately scared. Anybody would be.”

  Sigrid sits back in her booth and crosses her arms. She’s had this conversation before. And usually with people who simply do not understand numbers.

  “I’m assuming you studied criminology?” she says.

  “I studied divinity.”

  “Divinity?”
/>   “Yes. I have a master’s degree in divinity from Loyola. I wrote my thesis on something called Accommodation Theory. Every religion, when it spreads out, has to reach some kind of accommodation with whatever’s there already, otherwise it won’t really stick. The question is how that works and what makes it work or not. Interesting stuff. I focused on the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity.”

  “How do you go from studying ancient Rome to being a cop?”

  “You run for office and win. It seemed like it would be fun, and I got tired of using my knowledge of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew to help name pharmaceutical products, which was the job I had previously. And it was fun being sheriff—that is, until you showed up.”

  “You named pharmaceutical products?”

  “I got fired.”

  “Why?”

  “I was getting punchy because most of the products aren’t meant to cure you but make you dependent on the treatment, and that seemed wrong. So I ran my big mouth and gave them a name they didn’t like.”

  “Which was what?”

  “Puratoxin.”

  “There is no war on the police in America,” she says. “I recently read an article on this. While we don’t know how many citizens are killed by the police, we do know how many cops have been killed by criminals. For one thing, the overall number of murdered officers has been dropping in a nice flattening curve since the 1970s. In fact, the last time there really was a war on the police was in the 1920s during Prohibition. What’s also interesting is that since the 1970s there has been a growing number of officers. It’s almost double what it was then. That means, if you do the math, that the absolute number has dropped and the relative number has plummeted. It is barely more risky today to be a police officer in America than it is to be a citizen in most big cities. Oh, and the crime rate has been going down too. America is safer than ever. But according to the media, the country is doomed. The fact is, Irving, the war on the police is a fabricated lie supported by a misperception. That fabricated lie is complicit in the murder of Jeffrey, because it planted a false idea in the head of the cop with the gun. It’s that same idea that puts my brother at risk.”