Rush

by Wozencraft, Kim

  “You didn’t.”

  “Had to do something.”

  I walked over and lifted the towel from his arm and, where the track had been, his skin was disgustingly maroon, bubbled with blisters.

  “How could you?”

  “I had to.”

  “Christ, Raynor, you’ve got a second degree burn!”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “It’ll be okay.” He replaced the towel and began walking in circles around the coffee table. “Look, I was pressing a shirt and the ironing board tipped over and I grabbed for the thing and it landed against my arm. That’s all. That’s the story.”

  “We don’t even have an ironing board. I don’t believe you did this. I mean, you could have gotten a tattoo or something.”

  “I’d rather be in hell with a broken back,” he said. “Tattoos are about a no-class deal if I’ve ever seen one.”

  I poured a couple of shots of scotch and brought one to him.

  “I’ll bandage it before we go in,” I said.

  “You’re not supposed to bandage burns anymore.”

  “You can’t have your shirt rubbing against it. Let me take another look.”

  He pulled the towel back. It hadn’t gotten any prettier.

  “Jesus that’s nasty.”

  “It’s ugly all right.” He sighed. “But it does what it’s there for.”

  The Vice Office was tucked away off a hall near the back door of the police station, away from everything but the evidence vaults. It was small, square, and windowless, full of fluorescent light, with two metal desks and a back wall solid with file cabinets: black, beige, army green, covered with stacks of paperwork, arrest ledgers, various files.

  Jim had his legs crossed, his arm resting in his lap, and rotated one foot in a small tight circle while he furiously smoked a cigarette. Dodd crossed the room in four steps, his boot heels hitting the beige linoleum with rhythmic, rubber-clad thuds, about-faced at the north wall, and clomped back four steps to the opposite side of the room. There, he turned and began his journey again.

  I sat behind one of the desks, my stomach squirming like a netful of live fish, and paged through the Bust-Out Book, a big, blue, loose-leaf notebook full of names, addresses, photos, descriptions, and offenses. One hundred and twelve citizens, one to a page. Head ’em up, move ’em out. The arrests would begin in two hours.

  I couldn’t believe it was actually over. Just like that. Jim had been under for almost nine months, I for a little over seven. Now, in the space of a few hours, we were expected to slip back over to the other side, the straight world. Jim had done it so many times that he never quite made the transition anymore, regardless of which direction he was shooting for. And me? I was just there, my body was there in the station and I was doing my best not to lose it and run screaming out the back door.

  El Jefe, Dodd, the D.A., the grand jury—they would want to see Officer Kristen Cates, clean-living, brave, honest. She hadn’t been around in awhile. I like being Flo, I was Flo, I loved getting wired and staying out all night, staggering from bar to bar to private home, peeling hundred dollar bills off my municipal bankroll to buy dope. Smoke it, snort it, swallow it, fix it, mix that dope, go up, go down, go sideways, go so fucking fast that you tongue can’t keep up with the neurotransmitter Ping-Pong championship popping in your brain, go slow and easy, watch your eyelids come down in a twenty-minute blink, go Quaalude crazy, swallow those pills with Cuervo, Lone Star, or that essence of East Texas corruption, Wild Turkey liquor. Just like a fucking senator.

  I felt cramped within the pale green cinderblock walls of the Vice office, as though I had just returned from a long journey in a foreign land and was looking with new eyes at the customs of my native people. The so-called straight world.

  In a few hours all hell would break loose and more than a few people would be looking for Jim and me. And Walker. I didn’t know how many of the threats would be real; there was never any way to tell until something actually happened. For a few redneck assholes it would be a matter of defending their manhood; no woman was going to get away with busting them.

  I was not looking forward to my required appearance in a briefing room full of uniformed cops who would be making the arrests. A room full of harness bulls chafing to get out there and swoop on the dealers, eager to kick a little ass. I could see it in some cases, wanted it as much as they did in some cases, but the street cops I had known, well, discretion had never particularly been the better part of their valor. Attitude hung in the building like some high-pressure system that promised weather. Cops moved about quickly, efficiently, eagerly. And I needed help.

  I walked to the ladies’ room twenty minutes before the briefing was to begin and took a good healthy snort of FNU LNU’s pink-white Bolivian and then tucked the vial away in my boot.

  Handle it. Right. There was the momentary paranoia that always undercut that cool surge of cocaine confidence, heightened, no doubt, by the fact that I was standing next to a clean porcelain bowl in a red metal stall in the ladies’ room of the police department. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was just there, just standing there breathing, afraid to think, knowing that the good guys were out there, in offices, in hallways, in the lounge. For some reason I wondered if they had policemen’s balls in Beaumont, if once a year they sold tickets to a benefit or something like that. I was surrounded by cops who thought I was one of them. Legally, I was, and I had a brand-new nickel-plated badge to prove it. Vice officer. Badge number 714. Seven one four, it was too good to be true. Rorer 714, the identification code stamped on every Quaalude tablet that rolled off the assembly line. Ah, excuse me, Officer, is that your badge number or your recreational drug of choice? I slammed a hand against the metal stall door just to hear it echo in the bathroom, leaned toward the wall mirror to check my nostrils and walked back toward the Vice office.

  I felt a tingle spread upward from the point where my skull met my neck, my hair stood on end. What if someone noticed, knocked me off as high? I told myself to relax. They wouldn’t even be looking at me. They just wanted to knock somebody in the head. Wanted any reason at all to scream resisting arrest and pop someone with their goddam nightsticks, slap their handcuffs on a pair of bruised wrists. And so what if they snapped? Even if some patrol goon got suspicious, his accusation would wind up in El Jefe’s office, and it sure wouldn’t be news to Nettle that his narcs were running around wasted.

  Jim was leaning against the wall outside the office. “Tonight’s the night. . .” he sang quietly.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “I feel like shit,” he said. “Fucking bust-outs make this white boy plenty nervous. Where you been?”

  “I went to the ladies’ room to powder my nose.”

  “I hear you, baby. I’m chasing the old yellow dog myself.”

  “How’s your arm?”

  “Feels like I stuck it in a hay baler.” He put a hand on my shoulder. “Damn, girl, you look plenty scared. You’re pale.”

  “That’s what I am. I am plenty scared.”

  “Look. Don’t be getting all drove up here. Lots of folks gonna be screaming a lot of shit about they’ve seen us do some things. Never, even if they’re dangling the goddam evidence right in your face, never admit anything. Nothing.”

  He leaned close to me and in a Richard Nixon voice said, “Don’t cop out.”

  “The things we’re gonna get accused of?” I shook my head. “You think anyone would even begin to believe it?”

  “You got it, baby. That’s the whole goddamn reason things get done the way they do.”

  When he said that I heard a song in my head, “The Way You Do the Things You Do,” and it would not go away. It hung there, the chorus repeating itself over and over. Rita Coolidge, no less, singing in her mellow-drenched, drawl-tinged voice, with the white girls in the background doing “ooh-oohs” trying to sound spiritual.

  I railed at myself for getting stuck on the song and then finally walked back into the office
and plunked down behind a desk to sweat it out. Time was stuck somewhere in the near future, it couldn’t arrive fast enough.

  Court was going to be a regular roller coaster. When these scumbags got up there and began telling their tales, heads would turn for sure. The jurors would sit there listening to each side try to out-lie the other, all the time thinking, “This couldn’t have happened. Not here. Not in Beaumont, Texas.” Like Jim said, everyone would lie. Court. Fucking right-wing absurdist theater with its black-robed critic perched up high on the bench. Justice R Us.

  Soon all those defendants would be downstairs in cages, then lined up to be photographed, fingerprinted, tagged, labeled, and filed, then handcuffed again and chained together and transported in windowless white vans to the county jail where they would be photographed, fingerprinted, tagged, labeled, and filed again, and then the lawyers and bondsmen would come to take their money, ill-gotten or earned, and secure for them a temporary freedom, a county-size make-believe universe wherein they could walk and talk and eat and sleep just like regular citizens, but where their dreams would be of the district attorney’s office, the district courts, and the Texas Department of Corrections.

  The Drug War. Tell me about it.

  Dodd led the way downstairs to the briefing room. Jim and I didn’t even know our way around the station yet.

  Confronted by row after row of scrubbed, close-shaved, healthy-looking men in dark blue uniforms with shining badges pinned precisely one-half inch above their left breast pockets, I wanted only to flee to my apartment, to call the defendants and tell them to get the hell out of town, fast, no questions because I couldn’t possibly explain even if there were time, just go, go far away and never come back, go and live the freedom that I could only dimly perceive, but pretended so well to have.

  I remembered a night in Pasadena, in the briefing room before deep night shift began. I’d been talking with an officer who had worked undercover a year or so before I was hired. We had traded war stories, and then, from nowhere he said, “Yeah, I met some pretty good people. And the thing was, well I don’t know. Did you ever get the feeling that maybe they were the ones who were right?”

  The cops rose to attention when El Jefe entered the room. Standing in back with Jim and Dodd, I was somewhat awed by this semi-military display of discipline, especially over this fish-faced creep entering the room. Things at Pasadena had been rather less formal.

  The Chief introduced Jim and me as the two newest members of the department, explained that we had been undercover for months. A harness bull on the third row sat staring open-mouthed at us until I got tired of his glaring appraisal and winked at him. He snapped his mouth shut below its tight little mustache and turned his attention to Nettle’s instructions.

  El Jefe, still only acting chief until the City Council approved his nomination, stood there telling everyone to be careful, to avoid unnecessarily harsh procedures, to use courtesy whenever possible. Then, in his smooth, oil-slick voice he said, “Of course we all know there are going to be some dangerous characters out there, the agents have documented well over fifty-seven percent of them as carrying weapons in their vehicles or on their persons, so do what you have to in order to protect yourselves.”

  I loathed the man completely, could find nothing about him that I did not despise. El Jefe. The Chief. HMFIC, Dodd called him. Head motherfucker in charge. So calm, so meticulous, and suffering from the worst case of tunnel vision I’d ever seen. Forward ho! (But cover your ass.) Come now, men, push me up this ladder. He stood there with his vest and tie and shoulder holster, his flabby white arms sticking out of short sleeves. I have never been a slave to fashion, but I just couldn’t deal with a man wearing a vest over a short-sleeved shirt, especially this man. It was pathetic somehow. And he had that mustache, that tiny dab of whisker above the upper lip that made me want to remove it with tweezers, hair by hair. He didn’t take care of his troops. He cared about nothing but his own petty advancement. He was in the world for Donald Nettle, for nothing, and nobody, else.

  That night on the roadside, near the church, his boneless hands grabbing my jaw, his shapeless lips pressing toward my face. I should have slapped him, could have shot him. I jumped from his car and ran.

  I pictured the back portion of his skull splattered behind him there in the briefing room, gray matter stuck to the chalkboard. A single hair driven clean into the ceiling. Imagined what it would feel like to slip my pistol back into my shoulder holster, the barrel still warm from firing.

  “They’ve done a hell of a job,” Dodd was saying, his voice booming in the room. “Jim, Kristen, would ya’ll like to say anything?”

  Oh what I would like to say. Jim looked at me.

  “I can’t tell you how good it is to be back in civilization,” I lied. “All I can really say at this point is that you folks have a lot of respect on the streets.” Did that sound good? Did I pass? I wanted more cocaine.

  The officers nodded, a few puffed up visibly, some even laughed with delight. I scanned the room. There were six of them with those piss-ant mustaches, almost a fifth of the men in the room unwittingly paying homage to El Jefe, growing miniature tributes right there above their stiff upper lips.

  “I’ve had a few run-ins with some of you dudes on the street,” Jim said, “and I can damn sure tell you that I was plenty nervous. You’re doing a hell of a job out there.”

  More laughter, the narcs were doing good.

  “Take a look at the special notes on the bottom of each page in your notebooks,” Dodd said, “concerning suspects who carry weapons. Be sure you check it before attempting any arrests. The radio will probably be pretty damn busy tonight, so keep traffic to a minimum. Call in when you’ve got one in custody, otherwise, try to keep the airwaves clear.”

  The briefing broke up and the patrol officers milled toward the exit. Dodd pushed his way through the crowd to where Jim and I stood waiting.

  “Okay,” he said. “Kristen, you’re with my group. Jim, you’ll ride with Group One, Chief’s in that one. Y’all got one arrest to make, and that’s Gaines. If you want more action after that, radio me and I’ll get someone to swing by and pick you up.”

  Jim walked toward Nettle, who was standing next to the lectern at the front of the room.

  “I’ll be right with you, Sergeant,” I said. “Let me just pop into the ladies’ room.”

  I had anticipated the moment for such a long time that I was actually almost relieved when it finally happened. Relieved and terrified. The squad cars surrounded Drillers, officers blocked the front and rear exits. Dodd walked into the club with his troops behind him and me at his side, mounted the D.J.’s stand, and zipped the needle across the AC/DC album that was playing. He badged the D.J. and grabbed the microphone, his beer belly sagging over his Texas-shaped belt buckle as he paraded back and forth on the stand.

  “Don’t nobody get alarmed,” he drawled into the mike. “I’m Sergeant Dodd of the Beaumont Police Department and we’re here to execute arrest warrants on several suspects who are believed to frequent this establishment.”

  People began looking at one another suspiciously; a sudden buzz of conversation filled the club.

  “If you’ll . . . If you’ll . . . EXCUSE ME. I’D LIKE TO HAVE YOUR ATTENTION. WE DON’T WANT ANYONE GETTING HURT HERE!”

  The club grew quiet but for one or two whispering voices. I could see the bartenders looking toward the back door. A couple of clients headed for the restrooms but were stopped by uniformed officers. The bartenders sighted me, stared uncomprehendingly.

  “If you’ll just produce some form of identification and file in an orderly manner toward the front door, officers will check your I.D. against our list and if there is no warrant outstanding on you, you’ll be free to leave.”

  He stepped from the D.J. stand and began herding people toward the front door. Then he walked over to me and said, “See anybody?”

  “Both the bartenders,” I said. “That guy over there in the
red shirt, that’s Douglas. The waitress in the black tights is one of Jim’s cases.”

  Dodd ran off to grab the defendants and I sat down at a table. The people who had lined up at the front door were staring at me, at Sergeant Dodd, who was also in street clothes, and at the harness bulls who were sweeping through the club, looking under tables and behind the bar, checking for stowaways.

  Douglas and the two shag-headed bartenders were marched past, hands cuffed behind their backs. When they neared me, Douglas slowed, leaning back against the officer holding him by the cuffs, looked over at me, and silently mouthed the word cunt. I knew that I should do something, but I sat quietly in the chair, tapping my index finger on the tabletop, watching as he was dragged to the parking lot and the waiting squad cars.

  He had trusted me. They had all trusted me. It hit me then in a way it never had at Pasadena. There, I’d been such a rookie that I couldn’t feel anything but fascination. This time was different. I hadn’t counted on growing close to so many of the defendants. They’d believed I was their friend. I had pretended to be their friend. I felt like a snail, spreading ooze in front of me so that I could slither ahead another inch or so, not really getting anywhere, just going for the sake of moving forward.

  I sat there wondering if there was any way in the world I could rationalize all one hundred and twelve arrests, knowing that I couldn’t.

  Dodd drove back to the station about ten that evening, when the bust-out was well underway and close to sixty suspects were in custody. He led the way downstairs, to the holding cells in the basement.

  At one point I lost him and a jailer tried to push me into the fingerprint line.

  “I’m one of you,” I said, and the suspects standing in line turned to look at me. I recognized many of them, had been in their homes, had met them at clubs, at parties.

  “You a cop?” one said. “I thought you was Jim’s old lady. Man! It ain’t right.”