Cal turned his flashlight on to step over a tangled shadow crossing his path. It was a fallen tree. He turned the light off again. “But you would probably like that,” he went on, “plowing a field, because you are so stupid.”
The horse stepped over the log and stood next to Cal. Cal could see its eye in the moonlight, looking back and forth, its ears pinned upright and turning toward night sounds. Cal thought about abandoning the horse after it bucked him, but in fact he was thankful for the company, and he brought it along because it was the right thing to do. He didn’t know if the horse could find its way back the way a dog might, and he knew how much people have tied up, financially and emotionally, in their horses. Even though Ted abandoned him, Cal could not abandon the horse. He despised his loyalty with every step. He wished he could be a real sheriff, a Rooster Cogburn sort of sheriff, just eat the horse, avenge his honor, but Cal despised that thought as well. Minus the whiskey, he couldn’t pull off the Wild West if he tried. He needed people too much. Typical, bleeding-heart Cal.
“Just think of it, Mr. Horse. You could walk back and forth with your plow. Eat your oats. Crap in the grass. That’s all a horse needs, isn’t it? Hey, maybe you could fix up an old cabin by a lake, get a dog, drink coffee in a pickup truck for the rest of your career.” Cal raised his voice. “Well, life ain’t that simple, Mr. Horse! No it ain’t! Because life don’t leave a man alone!”
Cal turned to walk again. The reins tightened and the horse plodded behind him. The grass parted as Cal stepped into it, mocking as he went. “You could move up into the Northwoods of beautiful Wes-consin. Land of the Beaver, they say. Well, I hate beavers. Hate ’em. Waterlogged sausages with their tree-chewing and tail-beating, as if anyone cares.”
Wisconsin hadn’t panned out as peacefully as Cal’s chief suggested it would, but then again, Houston hadn’t panned out either. Stress was constant in Houston. In Wisconsin, it was simply absent, or at least different in nature. In Houston he had reasons to be unhappy, circumstances to blame. Every night there were the same calls. Someone else shot, or shot at, or having heard a shot. Someone else getting bandaged up on a front porch, kids standing on couches and peering through windows while Cal tried to make some sense of what some grandmother told him. It was a man. A young man. And he had a gun. Cal could finish the story for any one of the witnesses on any night. And then, Officer, my grandson, son, daddy, brother—who ain’t done nothing—he got shot at right there under that streetlight. There was a time in his career when Cal still believed the nobility and innocence. The older cops seemed callous. Eventually it began to blur, the testimonies became redundant, mundane. Life and death became like mail, or bills, or laundry. Cal worked at night and slept during the day. He had pancakes for dinner when he got off graves, because the regular people were having breakfast, and then he’d turn in for a few hours as the midmorning sun beat through the slits in his apartment blinds. Whiskey helped put him to sleep, but it made nights worse, the streetlights harsher, the voices louder. He ate and slept and took reports. Rarely was there any real resolution, any progress. And after about four years of it, Cal’s life began to scare him. That he could feel this beaten, this numb, only a few years out of the academy was a startling revelation. The academy had been all green grass and firing ranges, drinks at the Foxhead. Cal had loved the idealism, the posturing, even though he recognized it as such. He was a fit young man with something to give to the world. But then a pain grew in his chest that wouldn’t go away. A doc gave him pills for gastric reflux—which seemed pathetic this early in life—and the pills made his stomach feel like a gallon of milk sloshed inside it, so he threw the pills in a sock drawer and forgot them. After that, Cal had a patch of gray hair sprout above his right temple, and then he caught a head cold that left him deaf in one ear for a month. The same doctor asked him if the ear bothered him in any way, and Cal told him, “No, other than the fact that it doesn’t work—it’s a terrific ear.” He went back to his apartment that day and drank until he fell asleep on the carpet. He woke shivering in the air-conditioned darkness, afraid.
“And then, Mr. Horse,” Cal said with finality, “there was that kid and his mama.”
Cal pulled the collar of his jacket up around his neck to ward off the cooling air. He and the horse stepped out of the river grass onto a higher bank covered in knee-high tangles of shrubs. White pines grew on the higher land, and the forest opened up beneath their massive trunks and branches. Cal remembered passing through white pines earlier in the day. As disorienting as the forest was, this rise in the land felt familiar. At least he hoped it did. Cal pointed his light into the shadows, turned it off again. He waded into the brambles.
It was getting harder to be a cop. Some of the old-timers who still came around the department talked about a time when a good guy could punch a bad guy and the crowd would cheer. But that hasn’t been so since the sixties. Nowadays things were backward. Bad men were the victims. They had hard lives. They weren’t fathered well. Who with half a heart could truly blame them for their choices? Well, Cal could. He’d seen fear in women’s eyes. He’d seen, no, he’d smelled the kids with the bruises and swollen diapers. He’d seen the violence that can come out of men. And he’d seen time and again some abusive deadbeat choose to behave perfectly well when a cop is present, get all weepy and apologetic. But Cal didn’t know how true that felt anymore either. There were some nights when everyone present—kids, mothers, old cops, young cops, deadbeats too—seemed to Cal to be a victim of something, which is part of what made him stop by that house that night in August with two sacks of McDonald’s and a pack of diapers.
“Of course,” Cal told the horse, “everyone said it’s no good for a cop to get close. But I had to know. I had to see progress. I had to believe that just one mom and one kid were better off. Can you believe that? Well, it’s the truth.” Cal knew the story sounded so predictable, so typical, it embarrassed him to imagine other cops telling it in locker rooms. So this young cop arrests this dirtbag father, checks in on the family, befriends the kid—stupid move—and then the husband starts coming back around and one thing leads to another. But it wasn’t a stupid move to befriend that kid. If it was, there was something wrong with the cosmos, not with Cal. Of that he was certain. The night Cal first arrested the kid’s dad, the kid came out of the bedroom all sleepy-eyed, carrying a stained blanket and sucking on a pacifier. The kid looked to be too old for a pacifier, but what struck Cal most, what hurt him enough that he had to come back, was that the kid didn’t seem startled by the commotion of it all. It seemed like just another night, Mom crying on the kitchen floor, cops around, Dad in cuffs. The kid smiled at Cal, and made a gun with his fingers, and shot it at him. Cal didn’t know what to do with that, so he smiled and shot his fingers back, and walked the dad outside and started his cruiser with shaking hands.
“And do you see what happens, Mr. Horse, when someone tries to have a heart?” Cal held his arms wide. “Banishment, Mr. Horse, to the pine forest. That’s what the good guy gets when he punches out the bad guy.” Cal stopped walking, thought of the whiskey in his pocket, the moon overhead. He shook his head and walked.
“But talk is cheap, Mr. Horse. It’s cheap.”
The end of that story sounded typical too. The men telling it in locker rooms would never believe Cal only ate dinner with that mother, that he sat on the couch and ate chicken nuggets and watched TV while the kid played with blocks. But that’s what he did. Cal tried to make the kid smile once or twice, but the kid seemed to smile as if to humor him, like he was the one who was older and wiser. No matter, the kid’s eyes seemed to say. And then the night came when that proved true.
It was an hour after the bars closed on his night off, and Cal stumbled into his apartment to a ringing phone. It was the mother, frantic. The dad was out of jail. He was outside on the lawn, throwing rocks at the house, kicking the railing off the porch, all the typical stuff. Cal recalled only a handful of details about that night. He remembe
red spilling a bottle of whiskey in his lap as he fumbled to start his car. He remembered headlights lighting up the side of a white house. He remembered bending back the fingers of a man until the knuckles popped and the man squealed on the lawn. The rest of the story was recounted to him the next morning in the chief’s office, with the oppressive aroma of cheap coffee filling the room while Cal learned his fate. There’s an interim position in Wisconsin, a snowy place of pine and forest, the kind of place a bleeding heart can relax and be forgotten.
Cal often wondered if he would have done the same thing sober. It’s not something he’d been able to fully answer yet. He was also still learning to navigate his new, northern life, this new solitude. But if he was being perfectly honest, Wisconsin wasn’t entirely miserable. He did have a dog, and he did have a truck, and though he spent the first winter sitting on top of the heat register in his drafty cabin, there was hope here where there was none back home. The closest he’d come to an answer regarding his true motives that night on the lawn was that he didn’t see any other way out. Cal could face down a grown man at three in the morning, but he was too afraid to leave a career he knew was killing him. Why? For the same reason those women stayed with bad men, he supposed. He lost his ability to believe. He befriended that kid and his mom to believe again. He beat that father into the grassy lawn to believe again. But Cal didn’t know how true that sounded either.
Cal pulled his collar up more tightly around his neck. The river to his left shone like a polished stone, and the stars above were brilliant in a way they could never be in the city. There were times he stopped hating his drafty cabin here in the Land of the Beaver, even when he was cussing it all, up on a ladder, prying off rotten trim from around windows. It made him feel like a person with a life to live. He lived in daylight here, more or less called his own hours when duty allowed. Pancakes became a breakfast food again, and people did breakfast well in the North, kept a person warm. Cal took a deep breath of the night air. The pines reminded him of the smell of lavender, and Cal allowed himself to smile even though he was dragging a horse through a forest at night. Tiffany, he thought. Here in these lonely woods, banished forever, he had a house and a dog, and maybe, just maybe. What were the words she’d written down on those bills in her kitchen? It was poetry. Cal liked the idea of loving a woman who wrote poetry on bills. He couldn’t remember the words, but he occupied himself with the thought of them, and of her.
The sound of water drew Cal’s attention to the river. He and the horse had crossed over the pine-covered rise and were descending again toward berry bushes and river grass. At the bottom of the hill, Cal stepped to the edge of the riverbank. The ground was firmer here. Downstream, the black mirror of the river’s surface parted around an island, broke into a million points of moonlight, and rushed over boulders and rocks. Cal stooped and dropped down the embankment to the water’s edge. Firm gravel crunched beneath his boot.
“We made it, girl,” he said, and the mare stood on the bank and tugged her reins, but Cal held her steady.
Across the river, Cal could make out the large rock outcropping they’d passed that morning, the one with the cedar tree growing out of it, where the trail had ended.
“I don’t suppose you’ll carry me across this?” Cal asked, turning to the horse.
The horse just stared at him with its big white eye.
“I didn’t think so.”
Cal removed his holster and belt and slung it over his shoulder. He thought of placing it in the saddlebag with the rest of his gear, but if the animal bolted for good, he’d be without a sidearm. Gotta divvy it up, Ted had told him. Cal was thankful for that lesson at least.
The water was terribly cold, waist-deep, and the current was strong enough that he had to lean into it, but Cal made it easily to where the river parted above the island. He remembered from the morning’s crossing that the first channel had been deeper than the second. He paused a moment and studied the current. He couldn’t remember the exact path they’d taken across. He’d just held on to the horse’s mane and cursed the cold water when the horse stumbled and swam. Over the entire width of the far channel, the water fell through a shallow and glass-smooth depression about ten yards in length before rising again and breaking apart in the rapids. The horse now waded in upstream of the depression, and Cal figured it best to follow the horse’s lead. The water seemed to come up only to the animal’s thighs, which meant Cal’s stomach or chest, but it would be manageable.
He waded into the channel and the current became immediately stronger. He leaned into its force when it got above his waist and chose his footing more carefully. He felt around with the toe of his boot for a stone or boulder, pressed his heel into the gravelly bottom, and then lunged forward to gain both feet again. He looked across the river. The shore was about twenty yards distant. The horse was nearly across. Cal placed his hands on the water’s black surface and reached his toe out for another foothold. He felt a smooth rock about the size of a grapefruit, placed his foot there, and lunged. As he put his weight on the rock, it broke free from its gravelly hold, and in the moment it took for Cal to realize what was happening, he was up to his neck in water and moving rapidly downstream.
He felt his feet rake the river bottom. Cal used his hands to dig against the current, hoping to find a hold, and then the gravel bottom simply dropped away.
Cal felt water go up his nose as the river took him under. He opened his eyes to a complete absence of light. He felt himself get tumbled, his torso pushed downstream faster than his feet. He reached upward until he felt air on his hands and face, saw stars overhead. The current was so fast, so black. Cal spun and caught sight of the horse lifting its glistening body to shore in the moonlight. Cal slipped down the face of a glassy wave, the shoreline slipped from sight, and Cal heard rapids downstream. Dread leapt like water.
“Horse!” he yelled. “Horse!”
He kicked his legs and paddled with his hands. The first wave of whitewater broke over his head. The wave engulfed him in a vacuum of silence and night, sucked him down, released him again, sucked him down. He tried to take breaths between the succession of waves, but only managed to exhale and choke. No matter how hard he kicked, he sank lower in the water. Another wave hit him in the face. The water went into his throat, and he tasted the river as he shot beneath its surface.
He felt his body tumble along a gravel bed at the river bottom and felt as if he were watching himself go through the ordeal, coaching himself, giving himself advice. Stay calm now. But I can’t be calm! You’ll get a breath soon. No I won’t! Keep your head now. And then he felt something hard hit his tailbone, and his world ignited in pain. It lifted him into the air again, and Cal tumbled over the hump of a giant boulder. Downstream of the boulder, a hole in the river glistened in the moonlight and opened its mouth. Cal, do you see that hole coming? I see the hole! You’re going to want to take a deep breath now. Cal’s throat opened just long enough to take one chestful of night air before he plunged back down into darkness and cold.
This hole was deep. Cal felt his hands dragging along a smooth rock bottom. He felt as if he was slipping down a wall, grasping for an exit in a pitch-black room. The smooth rock crumbled and turned to gravel, and Cal clawed his hands into it. Though underwater, Cal’s only thought was to fight the current, to make it stop.
His lungs ached.
Water roared against his ears. His hands bit in the gravel for a moment. Darkness pressed in. Cal saw himself flapping like a flag in a stiff wind, like the one they’d flown the day he’d graduated from the academy. Guns saluting. Standing at attention. Sons given rare hugs by fathers.
This is a bad place to stay, Cal—Cal? What? Let go. I will not!
And then the river bottom crumbled in his grip.
Cal soon found himself washed up onto his hands and knees in a lapping pool of knee-deep water. Cal took in a warm breath of air. He looked down at the water, exhaled, panted. Water dripped from his hair and nose. He sti
ll held two handfuls of gravel in his fists. He smiled and dropped them in the water. And then he threw up.
When his stomach was emptied of river water, Cal crawled closer to shore where the water was only a few inches deep. He flopped onto his back and started to laugh. His senses felt intensely assaulted. It was as if he could smell the granite in the river, the tannins, the limestone. The air he breathed was filled with miles of dark forest and moss and oak, abandoned birds’ nests, anthills. The stars were large in the sky, a terrifying map of blues and greens and yellows. And all of it rumbled through him, out of him. In the waning intensity, his body felt tired, so very tired. The exhaustion made him feel as if he might start crying right there in the water. Cal wasn’t a crier. He used to be, as a boy, but he could still hear the words of his swim-coach father breaking him of the habit sometime about middle school, telling him to suck it up, keep it in, don’t you dare let anyone see you cry. It was typical Coach. That’s what he and his friends called his dad in the years following middle school. And he heard Coach’s voice in his head all the way through his undergrad years, all the way through the academy, in all the alleys of Houston too. The voice always told him he didn’t measure up, and that he needed to keep this truth about himself a secret, just keep it in. Fake it till you make it. Don’t piss off Dad. Stop your crying. That voice made many decisions in Cal’s life.
Out of habit, Cal damned the tears in his eyes, and then took his flashlight from his vest pocket. The light still worked. He lost his pistol, and he didn’t even care. Somewhere back in those rapids, on that river bottom, a thought had come that terrified and thrilled him. He knew it now the way he knew he was lying in water. Something whispered during that black roar, You never did want to be a cop. Cal remembers the day he mentioned the possibility to his dad. They were driving back from a swim meet. His dad nodded approval, actual approval—That’s a man’s job, he said, turning the station on the radio—and something between them in the car seemed to lighten. So Cal pursued it, started telling himself and his friends and his teachers he was going to be a cop. But all he really wanted was his dad’s nod, the way his dad’s eyes seemed to say, if only for a moment, You got this. The thought hit him now with regret and sadness and anger all at once. The admission was terrifying, but hopeful too. He could actually quit this. And he could actually ask Tiffany Robins out on a date too. He could listen to her poems, fall in love, have babies. Cal’s breath stopped with that thought. The image of Tiffany, pregnant and beautiful, stunned him to silence, and Cal felt an overwhelming and urgent need to paint the trim on his cabin, fix the screen door, mow the path to the river, make sure the front steps were tight and level. He felt keenly responsible for whatever happened next, as if he’d nearly stepped off the edge of something, was yanked back, and now must step very carefully. A new sort of eagerness filled him. He had to do something right now, choose something new right now. He took the whiskey bottle from his pocket, uncapped it, shook its contents into the river, and pitched it up at the moon. The bottle splashed in the river.
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