American by Day

by Derek B. Miller

  “I’m sorry about the kid too. I know the family. I’ve been to their house. They are so destroyed that their pastor, Fred Green, doesn’t even want . . . Never mind. Look, this is not your fight. Why are you so angry about it?”

  Irv’s left hand rests on the table. It is a strong hand, like her father’s. He has long fingers with no obvious bruises or scars. The veins run prominently across the back of his hand, and his forearms are muscular and yet they seem gentle; hands that are not inclined to violence. Hands that once raised a daughter and patted her bottom and carried her to sleep.

  Why is she so angry about it?

  “I’ve stood in that moment between Jeffrey and Roy,” says Sigrid. “It wasn’t the same, but it was close enough that I can see it vividly. Despite being cleared by my department, I am not convinced that I needed to kill Burim because I’m not sure he was really planning to hurt me. I’m not even sure he was conscious at all. The men inside were hardened criminals, and that went as it had to. But outside, on the grass, in front of my car, I could have done more. I could have looked with different eyes. I could have seen more. I could have understood it differently. And if I had, I could have saved his life rather than ended it. I’m no Roy Carman. I’m not guilty of the racially motivated murder of a child. But I’m responsible. I just can’t figure out for what. I don’t think I ever learned a vocabulary for it. In any language. It's possible,” she says, “that figuring this out is the next big thing that needs to happen. Not only for me, but for everyone.”

  “I’m sorry that happened to you, Sigrid. I sincerely am. But it was an ambiguous situation. You had to act. Maybe Roy did too. As you said, it was almost the same.”

  Sigrid really had wanted Burim to halt. To stop. To come to his senses. To see her as someone there to help him. His girlfriend, Adrijana, had been the one that tipped off the police about the gang. She was born in Serbia and adopted in Norway, having been an orphan from the war. Her Norwegian was native and her countenance was that of a young woman from the wealthier part of town—the west end.

  Why would a girl like that, a modern girl, a stylish and educated and trusting girl who walked into her police station to help save a lost child, be involved with a young man whom Sigrid would have to shoot like a rabid dog? It didn’t make sense. But there he’d been, running toward her with a knife. The analysis and backstory told her that she was not in danger. These were just suppositions, though. Ideas of the mind. Hopes about human nature, hopes about relationships and the kind of people who love, about female judgment and dating bad boys—all of that came from later in evolution. That wasn’t the part of her brain that was firing in that moment. She wasn’t building conceptual models and running regressions on probability. She wasn’t thinking with her cerebral cortex; this was her limbic system kicking in—fight or flight. Eat or be eaten. She had been looking at a man with a knife charging toward her with the inertia of a bear. How could she have been expected to ignore that? She shot him. The nine-millimeter round was not entirely effective, because it had limited stopping power. So she shot him again and this time in the center of the heart.

  She has wondered, though: Am I simply exonerating myself by saying that I didn’t have the time or resources to think of something better? Could I have stood aside and let him run past, allowing the back-up units to later surround him after he was winded and possibly more self-possessed, and feeling less irrational?

  And what about Roy? If Jeffrey had had a real gun, a leg shot would not have ended the confrontation. The need to make a decision had been immediate. Wasn’t it fair for Irv to make the case that the police officer was doing his best?

  Yes. It would have been fair. Irv was right.

  If.

  If the very same officer were to ignore the laughter of the other children, and the presence of the woman in the kitchen window casually washing dishes, and the relaxed expression on her face as she watched her son frolic on her property with his friends, and the youthfulness of Jeffrey’s movements and body language, and the time between the emergency phone call and the actual confrontation—almost fifteen minutes—during which time nothing bad had happened when that same officer arrived.

  If you ignore everything observable that would have contradicted Roy’s presumptions, then of course it would have been fair to say he had only been doing his best. Are we really saying that officers should not be held accountable to situational assessment? To specificity? To actual reality?

  Ambiguous?

  “No, Irv,” Sigrid says as the waitress takes a hamburger to a patron who receives it without pleasure. “My situation was ambiguous because Burim was charging toward me with a knife and didn’t respond to my calls to halt. There was no time delay and there was nothing else I could have used as a cue. But for Roy, it was entirely different. You know . . . I’ve heard people talk about institutionalized racism before. It’s one of those terms that floats around these days. But they always talk about it like it’s a psychological condition or a ghost in the police machinery. I never really understood what people meant. But in the past month I have stared at that idea, from a Norwegian perspective, in terms of what happened between me and Burim, and now I’m looking at what happened with Roy and Jeffrey. And I think I’ve come to understand something. This is what I think it means: It means that your policies, your doctrine, your training, your classroom education, your academic credit system, your textbooks, your case studies, your decision-making tools, your final exams, your grand jury procedures, your measures of success for promotions, the qualities you celebrate . . . all the tools that institutions use to create professionals and direct their actions . . . all shift the risk of violence during ambiguous encounters onto the citizens, but it’s the moral duty of the state—the social contract itself—to better manage and better shoulder that risk. Because in a democracy, Irv, the citizen cannot live in fear of the state and its shortcomings. It is simply not acceptable. There has to be a relentless commitment to self-improvement. The case of Jeffrey Simmons was not ambiguous because everything that told the officer that he wasn’t in danger was ignored or interpreted through the fact that Jeffrey was black. It was the officer—not Jeffrey—who should have read the situation differently. It was the officer who should have been trained and required to make that situation unambiguous through careful measures to protect everyone involved, and especially the people he was sworn to serve and protect. And you should know that.”

  The corn muffin and bagel arrive.

  The corn muffin’s mushroom head has been lopped off and the two sections fried in butter on the grill and then semi-reassembled on the plate, to be served with two additional pats of butter wrapped in golden paper that glisten with ice crystals. The bagel has been slathered in cream cheese and heaped with thirty dollars’ worth of salmon for a charge of $4.95 plus mystery-tax. The woman returns with fresh coffee to the depleted cups and says, “Anything else,” in a way that prevents it from being a question, and walks off.

  Irv forgoes the extra butter and rather daintily picks off a piece of the crisp muffin top and eats it. While chewing he says, “I agree with you.”

  “What?”

  “I agree with you. American police shoot people. We handle ambiguity badly. We have a tendency to make bad situations worse rather than doing the opposite. We often attract the wrong kind of blue-collar kids rather than pulling in top recruits. There’s too much cronyism and too many guns. We have a long way to go. The thing is, Sigrid, we’re in a diner in the middle of a black hole and our job is to get through it. If you don’t help me find Marcus, I’m worried things will get out of hand. Just like you said. I’m not threatening you. Or him. I’m saying . . . Marcus is in more danger than you know. After Jeffrey, there’s a lot of tension out there. The streets are warming up. The commissioner wants Marcus for Lydia’s death. The Simmons family wants justice for Lydia too. That means Marcus is being hunted.”

  “He didn’t do it.”

  “If he resists arrest an
d gets hurt, no one is going to care. Do you understand?”

  “That sounds like a threat,” Sigrid says.

  “It’s not. Saranac Lake is out of my jurisdiction. But I have relationships and friends who can help. I’m your only chance. Like you said, the job is to bring the tension down.”

  Sigrid bites into her bagel. The salmon is surprisingly good, but there’s too much cream cheese.

  “So anyway,” Irv says, sounding suddenly jovial. “I took an interest in Norway while you were sleeping at Melinda’s house. Spent a whole hour on the internet. I read the Economist, U.S. News and World Report, Wikipedia, and something about stacking wood. I learned that you invented the cheese slicer—so you get a point for that—but Quisling sold you all out to the Nazis, so that’s two points off. On the other hand, your resistance stopped the Germans from building a heavy water reactor, so you get three points for that, almost leaving you in the plus column, but—uh-oh . . . along comes A-ha with ‘Take on Me,’ which is a really bad song that makes no sense. So minus two. So you’re back to zero. Meanwhile, America? We invented jazz, rock–’n’-roll, and chocolate chip cookies. Anyway, it eventually occurred to me that I’m a sheriff, so I just called your chief in Oslo. It was late, but they put me through.”

  “You did not.”

  “He’s weird.”

  “Oh no. You did.”

  “I said I was calling from New York, which I guess he took for the city, and he had questions. He wanted to know why Jews had Jewish last names. As it happens, I know the answer. I explained that, in fact, they didn’t have last names until the early nineteenth century when the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Russia insisted they start using them. Until then they used Patronymics and Matronymics. So most of the ones they picked are the ones we associate with Jewish names today. Your chief was very impressed and now we’re good buddies and have you in common. He told me all about your case with Sheldon Horowitz. Old marine had you chasing your tail.”

  “Yeah, well. He was a pretty exceptional guy.”

  Outside the window four semis and their trailers whiz by in rapid succession.

  “Apparently you are a very good police officer, Sigrid, despite being a godless communist in an American diner. Work with me. Tell me how you were planning to find your brother in the big bad forest.”

  Sigrid picks up Irv’s pen and draws a circle around Saranac Lake on the unfolded map. “I wasn’t going to look for him, because you’re right, I wouldn’t have found him—even if the professor was right about his favorite spots. I could pass within ten meters and never know it, especially if he didn’t want to be found.”

  “So?”

  “I was going to make him come looking for me.”

  “How?”

  “Eventually Marcus’ll need supplies. He’s resourceful and experienced outside, but he’s no survivalist. While he could very well be in Fiji or Peru by now, I’m guessing he’s probably in here . . .” she says, drawing a circle three miles in diameter around Saranac Lake. “If that’s true, he’ll most likely go to one of these seven supermarkets or hardware stores for supplies within a week at most. My plan was to take a bus to the town, put up pictures of myself on all the bulletin boards and telephone poles around there, make an inside joke in Norwegian that only we’d know, proving it was me, and then I’d leave my phone number. At that point I was going to buy a bicycle to get around and otherwise sit back and wait for him to call while also avoiding you.”

  Irv sips his apple juice from the purple bendy straw provided. “That’s a good plan.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’ll still work.”

  “The first half will.”

  Irv continues: “It’ll be easier to get around with the Wagoneer to put up all the pictures. Actually, I think we can get some of the young’uns to do it. Frank Allman’s the sheriff out here. He’s a bit soft around the middle but he’s all right, and his people can work wonders with staplers.” Irv finishes his apple juice with a loud slurp. He uses the end of the straw to chase around the last drops that are settled in the irregularities of the glass. “Sounds like we’re going to have a little together time, you and me, as we wait for Marcus to get hungry,” says Irv. “What do you think we should do with all that time?”

  “Isn’t it obvious, Sheriff?”

  Irv smiles and leans in. “No. Tell me.”

  “We are going to find out what actually happened to Professor Lydia Jones.”

  King Canute

  Irv drives Sigrid back to Melinda’s house, chasing the high beams over black asphalt. They leave the radio off.

  Melinda meets them at the door at four thirty a.m. wearing a bathrobe and a vacant stare. Sigrid, unlike her new roommate, is wide awake and caffeinated. She steps inside and makes her way to the guest room, where she flings the messenger bag to the bed, kicks off her shoes, and heads to the bathroom to wash the stink of the biker bar from her hair.

  Irv slides into the house gingerly and smiles at Melinda, who does not smile. She slams the door closed behind him with a flick of her wrist and a blink.

  “So that all went swimmingly,” Irv says to her, checking his watch and rubbing his face.

  “Why did you come back here?” Melinda manages to say as her robe falls open to reveal an extra-large Go-Gos concert shirt underneath. “You couldn’t get a motel?”

  “You kidding? It’s creepy out there.”

  “Of course.”

  Irv pats her on the shoulder and tells her to come to the office at ten rather than eight and bring Sigrid with her. Though Melinda’s eyes are almost completely closed, she still manages to squint out a message of confusion.

  “She won’t pull an O.J. on us,” Irv says. “I converted her. She’s on our side now.”

  “How did that happen?”

  “I agreed with everything she said.”

  “And that worked?”

  “Isn’t that how you win over any woman?”

  “Are you planning to stay too, boss?”

  “Me? Hell no, I’ve got a home. I’ll see you both tomorrow.”

  Irv caught four hours of rack time figuring that—as sheriff—he could stretch out his boots after lunch and take a nice power nap like his Western forebears who had the same jobs. When he arrives at the office, Cory is already there and the evidence of yesterday’s birthday party has been erased by the overnight cleaning crew. Everything is back to normal except for a bright light on Irv’s telephone answering machine that blinks away like a warning.

  Ignoring it for now, as he does most warnings, Irv plops down at his desk, powers up the desktop computer, and ventures forth into the unknown by pressing that flashing light and activating the recording that turns out to be a request for a call back by the New York State Sheriffs Association: they want a rundown on the state of affairs in the county and they’ve asked whether Irv might be good enough to ring them back.

  Technically speaking, which is how he typically chose to think about it, Irv didn’t have a boss or a line manager. As an elected official the buck stopped with him, and while he did have to account for his actions to the county commissioner—and occasionally speak with the Sheriffs Association and their chums—he didn’t actually have to punch any clocks or kiss any real ass; if the voters didn’t like him, they could express that disapproval during the cyclical bloodless political revolution America called voting. They don’t get to do that, however, for another two years, which is precisely why democracy is not very effective.

  But Irv isn’t a dummy. He knows that unless he is on proper terms with the powers that be, his own powers would be nullified because no one will return his calls. The whole checks and balances thing plays out in lots of complex ways, but in the end it all boils down to calling people back. Which is also what makes democracy ironic: It’s only because it’s ineffective by design that it’s accountable at all.

  The person at the center of the cobweb, as best as Irv can reason it out, is Howard Howard—who understandably goes o
nly by Howard. He is the right-hand man of the commissioner, and whatever Howard says into the commissioner’s ear comes out his mouth. It’s a neat trick, actually.

  Howard is as tall as a tree and has feet like flippers. He should have been a backstroker in high school but missed his calling. His voice is a Barry White baritone that regularly bottoms out Irv’s telephone speakers. Cory’s dog, Muppet, hurries to Irv’s office door whenever Howard calls: mouth agape, ears up, eyebrows in the awe position. Irv suspects that Muppet would chew off his own paw if Howard were to command it.

  Irv calls Howard back on the office phone. The sound through copper wires, he notes, is always warmer than the digital buzz through the cell.

  “Howard Howard Howard.”

  “Just Howard.”

  “How’re ya doin’, Howard?”

  “Sheriff Wylie.”

  “When are you going to sing ‘What a Fool Believes’ for me? Huh? People say Barry White, but I think more Michael McDonald.”

  “I only sing in the shower.”

  “You could have had two, three ex-wives by now if you’d ’a let your freak flag fly.”

  “What’s new, Irving?”

  “The usual, Howard.”

  “No, I mean it. What’s new?”

  “Oh. That missing Norwegian? His sister showed up. All the way from Norway.”

  “That’s quite a coincidence.”

  “Not really. He dropped off their radar too, so she came looking for him. Same as us, mostly. The fun part is that she’s a cop. Maybe a good one. She’s cooperating. Or she’s playing me for a fool. It’s definitely one of those.”