Apprehensions & Convictions

by Mark Johnson

  I remember thinking, it’ll probably hit me later, the panic, confusion, and emotions, but for now: protect the scene, contain the evidence, keep the family back (but don’t let them leave), scan the gathering crowd for weapons and suspects, string the yellow tape, look for shell casings and other dropped or discarded weapons. But as my squad secured the scene’s perimeter, controlled the crowd, and began identifying and questioning witnesses, and as I reported both orally and in writing what I had seen and found to my sergeant, then to Homicide detectives, there was still no nerve-jangling shock or even an inkling of dismay at what I’d just experienced. In fact, it felt more like the opposite: thrilling!

  And finally, hours after the completion of all duties, reluctantly peeling off my duty belt and vest and collapsing on the couch at home, I wondered and marveled at myself, replaying the scenes in my mind. Had all that training and drilling, seemingly so insipid and obvious at the time, really been effective? Had it changed me? Made me so coolly efficient? Or is it just the gun, the badge, the uniform, the body armor that has this effect, on anyone? Did I just rise to this particular occasion, drawing on unknown wells of resolve and focus? Is this a fluke? Is this really me, or have I become somebody else? If I still get choked up by lonesome, loyal dogs, orphaned and lost children, grieving widows and grandmas, and even corny romantic comedies, how does that square with the guy commanding the murder scene? Why aren’t I weeping for fifteen-year-old Demetrius “Meechie” Creyton who died in my arms? Or at least for his stricken, hysterical mama and kid sisters? Or vowing to see justice brought to his shooter?

  Instead, I just feel nothing, save exhaustion. But I’m aware of a tiny, tingly sneaky hope for more shifts like tonight. As I drift off, I allow myself to peel it back slowly. Man! That was the Shit! The Real Deal! You were there! The sweet dreamless slumber of a newborn embraces me. No night sweats, terrors or tremors, no shock or dread or rage. Nothing. Wow. That’s cool. Isn’t it?

  6

  Baby-Mamas and Bastards

  My job is to save your ass, not kiss it.

  —attributed to Officer Jack Balzer

  Sharon Brown was almost four months along when I first met her—just starting to show, although it depended on what she was wearing. She mostly wore loose-fitting tops and baggy blue jeans. There was no mistaking that she was a mother, however: her three previous children occupied most of her time, energy, and attention. They were Lucy (fifteen months), James (twenty-eight months), and Rayford (three and a half years); Sharon was just twenty-three.

  She resided in a “transitional living” apartment for single moms, a program run by a United Way agency. The agency’s director had suggested Sharon as a success story worthy of a campaign video. The hardest part of producing a campaign video is to find a good subject—someone whose misfortune resulted from circumstances beyond her control, to which no blame could be attached. (This rules out the lazy, the addicted, the self-indulgent, and all the blamers, schemers, demanders, and dramatizers.) You need a hard-luck case with integrity, humility, and strength, someone who had lived by the rules, worked hard, stayed true, but found herself nevertheless in impossible circumstances. Someone who would make you think, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” Someone who, with just the right break, could overcome her dilemma and live happily ever after. And if you can find those qualities in someone who’s reasonably articulate and attractive, you’ve got a winner. It seldom happens.

  Sharon was that winner, a fund-raiser’s dream. She possessed an uncommon beauty, seen immediately in her deep brown almond-shaped eyes, clear and guileless yet shyly averted. If she returned your gaze even for the briefest of moments, you could get lost in those eyes. Her long lashes, perfectly arched brows, creamy caramel complexion, full tender lips, and silky black mane were free of all artifice and cosmetics. Frequent smiles flashed pearly perfection worthy of a Crest commercial, yet her countenance conveyed a modesty and simplicity unmarred by vanity.

  She had joined the army right out of high school but had been released when she became pregnant the first time. The return to her hometown and junior college had produced an associate’s degree in mechanical drafting and a brief marriage, from which her second child was born. Her husband had turned out to be an abuser. “He had a temper that would just take ahold a him; he couldn’t help it. But neither could I. Seem like it never was nu’n I could do right for him.” She shook her head dolefully. “Mama warned me he had the rage in him, she saw it, but I didn’t listen. Thought I could just love it away, or the babies would soften him, but . . .”

  Rather than live in fear and raise her babies in violence, Sharon left him. His stalking was relentless until she left town altogether and, babies in tow, moved in with her older sister in Atlanta. There she fell in love with her employer, a successful older man, a city alderman who had built his own insurance agency and had promised to leave his wife for her. Her naïveté had resulted in a third child. “He was my boss, a big public man, and I believed him,” she said, embarrassed. The alderman provided generous child support in exchange for her silence.

  “I will say, he’s good about that. I couldn’t have made it without his checks every month—or almost every month. There’s been some lapses.” Sharon paused with a downcast look but shook it off with a deep breath and a bright smile. “But that’s why I’m so thankful to the Women’s Center for this place. We are truly blessed. We’d be out on a park bench, and that ain’t no place for babies, is it Ray Ray?” She bent to hug little Rayford, who tugged on her knee.

  I didn’t ask about the father of the unborn child she carried now. I didn’t want to know. I was enthralled by the matter-of-fact candor with which she spoke of her life. There was no trace of bitterness, blame, or self-pity. No despair. Sharon’s full and boundless heart was plain in her delight with her firstborn, as she gave Rayford a tender squeeze and set him toddling off to resume play with his brother, a gap-toothed grin stretching ear to ear. Sharon spoke on of her gratitude to the center, unfazed moments later by the interruption of Lucy’s plaintive whimpers from the crib. The infant quieted as soon as Sharon scooped her up and nuzzled her to a breast with a practiced, efficient modesty. “This place has other mamas like me, and when the center helps us find work, we’re able to fix our schedules so we can help each other watch the kids. I’ve met some really good people here, people who’ve had it way worse than me, but they’re still such good, nice people. They’re even gonna help me move into my own place, soon’s I can find somebody with a truck.”

  Despite the seeming chaos of squallers and crawlers, Sharon’s tiny apartment was tidy and clean, if sparse. The children were content and healthy. There was a noisy, cozy harmony to the household, and it emanated from Sharon. I got some great footage, and Sharon’s spontaneous audio would require minimal editing.

  “I’ve got an old pickup,” I told her. “When do we start the moving?”

  “Why are you doing so much for that woman?” Nancy inquired after I’d spent the better part of a weekend getting Sharon and all her babies settled in her new place. “I don’t get your endless compassion for her, anyway. She keeps making the same mistake, over and over, and doesn’t seem to learn from it. Hasn’t she ever heard of birth control?”

  “She has shared her story, basically exposing herself to everybody who’s gonna see the video, with no expectation of payback in any way,” I reply. “And it’s gonna be my best, strongest work yet. It’s the least I could do.”

  “But hasn’t she heard of birth control? She’s in her twenties, had some college. The pill’s been around now, for what? Two, three decades?”

  I feel myself getting defensive, like my video lacks credibility or my compassion is misplaced. Or both. “She just falls in love easy . . . she’s from a small town, never with more than one man at a time . . . she’s a real good mama, and working her ass off to provide for all those babies.” I can hear myself getting louder, strident. “Working twenty hours a week, taking two college class
es, doing child care for the other women at the center almost every day, and nurturing her own kids around the clock!” I’m forgetting to take a breath, my face is reddening. “And she’s so grateful for everything! Says she’s ‘blessed,’ of all things!”

  “Whoa! I’m sure she’s very kind and a good mother and hardworking,” Nancy replies, calmly earnest. “I’m just saying, I don’t get it. What’s her problem?”

  “Don’t you see? She has a compulsion. It’s got nothing do with education, or culture, or even logic,” I say. “Everybody has their own blind spot. Some people, it’s alcohol or drugs. Other people, it’s status or the corporate ladder or getting rich and powerful. It’s just their . . . their thing-that-trips-them-up, that consumes them, something they think they’re good at, and they think is a good thing, or at least good for them, but they don’t even see what it’s costing them. They just can’t help it. With Sharon, it’s babies. Or maybe certain men. Or both. But mainly babies.” I had just articulated something I hadn’t really thought through myself and doubted Nancy would get it. Or buy it.

  To my surprise, she sort of tilted her head, pondering, and began nodding. “Yeah, I guess that could be it. Never thought of it that way.”

  I won several local and regional United Way and PR association awards for my campaign video that year, and we had one of our most successful fund-raising efforts ever. We even introduced Sharon and her kids at the post-campaign awards banquet. Sharon’s second daughter, fatherless child no. 4, Felicity, was with us by then, along with Rayford, James, and Lucy, all of whom were very well behaved and cute as speckled pups. Sharon thanked everyone on behalf of her family and the other single moms at the Women’s Center and announced that if all went according to plan she would receive her BA from the university by next May, which would mean a bright future for her and her kids. She received a standing ovation.

  The following year I moved to the United Way in Waukesha County, Wisconsin, a larger community, halfway across the country, and lost touch with Sharon. She sent me a long, newsy upbeat letter a few months after I got settled in there, wished me good luck in the new job, and asked me to write back. Months passed; I had my own struggles in the new job and didn’t keep up my end of the correspondence. One afternoon I came across her letter and called the Women’s Center, asking for her. She was no longer there, they said. Sharon had met someone, a man who had a good job on the Alaskan pipeline, and she had packed up all her babies and gone off with him. She had managed to complete her BA before she left, they said, but had taken up with the oil man before starting a career. The last they had heard, she was expecting again.

  Years later in Mobile, at my third United Way, I had been asked to join the Quality Assurance Committee of the local office of the Alabama Department of Human Services. It’s one of many such committees and task forces that a local United Way guy is asked to join. Among my duties on this committee were quarterly home visits with caseworkers to DHS clients. We were to monitor the professionalism of the DHS staff and acquaint ourselves firsthand with the often daunting challenges presented by the DHS caseload.

  I’ll never forget the visit to a rundown Section 8 project house in Prichard, Alabama. Prichard is the shame of Mobile, if not of the state of Alabama and the entire Gulf Coast. Half the housing units are vacant, burned-out hulks, set ablaze accidentally or otherwise by cracked-out, homeless squatters. The occupied units intersperse the charred, collapsing wrecks and the weedy vacant lots with nothing but heaving sidewalks to orphaned steps to bare foundations strewn with broken glass, used condoms, syringes, and soiled Pampers. Prichard is worse than the worst of Detroit or Chicago or New Orleans. Prichard’s Alabama Village looks worse than anything in Beirut or Baghdad. It looks like the end of civilization.

  On my DHS Quality Assurance home visit to Alabama Village I met the Fannie Dortch family of twelve who reside in a three-bedroom home with one bath, a small kitchen, and a living room. The packed-dirt yard was strewn with trash. Underneath the house, mangy pit bull mongrels snarled menacingly among mounds of their own flyblown feces. The wretched curs were restrained with stout chains looped around the cinder blocks supporting the house. Inside the house was even worse than outside. The floors sagged. The furniture was ripped and broken. Bare mattresses on the floor served as beds for three or more. Plastic garbage bags overflowing with sour clothing served as chests of drawers. The kitchen sink was piled high with greasy, crusty pots, pans, and dishes. The stench would gag a goat. The floors, cabinets, and countertops were alive with vermin. I didn’t want to stand still for too long and damn sure wasn’t gonna sit down anywhere. I felt itchy after just minutes.

  The lone adult in the home was Fannie Dortch, twenty-nine, mother of all except the newborn, who was the child of Fannie’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Shermekya, who (according to Fannie) was at school. Fannie was clearly not right in the head. She alternated between aggression, terror, and vacant wordless stares in her responses to the checklist of questions the cheery caseworker posed from her notes in the case file. (“I don’t see any green leafy vegetables in your salad crisper. Remember what we talked about last time, about proper nutrition?” “How’s Keisha doing with her asthma? Have you gotten her prescriptions filled? Where’s her inhaler?” “And Jamarcus—why isn’t Jamarcus at school today? We haven’t been suspended again, have we?”) Children ranging in age from Shermekya’s infant to eleven or twelve years old were everywhere, in all stages of undress and varying degrees of filth: crusty eyes, running noses, scabby and sore-ridden cheeks and arms, stained underclothes. Some would stare sullenly or smile shyly at the caseworker and me. Some would chase each other screaming right between us as we attempted to converse with mama in the kitchen, or crawl underfoot as the caseworker gingerly checked the refrigerator, the pantry, and the medicine cabinet.

  As we drove back to the DHS office, the caseworker (a dispassionate, orderly, relentlessly professional MSW* in her eighth year with DHS) explained the Dortch family to me: all the children had different fathers, some of whom paid child support, most of whom did not. Fannie has been diagnosed as bipolar and learning disabled and did not progress past the fourth grade. The home is a frequent scene of domestic violence between the various fathers, sometimes between the older children themselves, and between Fannie and all of them. I asked why the children had not been removed from the home, adopted or parceled out to foster care, or even institutionalized. “We’re about keeping families intact, flooding them with resources and supportive programming aimed at building on their strengths, not focusing on their deficits, breaking them up and scattering them to the four winds. We’re all about family, for the obvious societal, moral, and legal reasons.”

  I nodded thoughtfully at her words, thinking, this is no family. This is a multigenerational train wreck. How many more like this are out there? No amount of state, federal, or United Way funding, or DHS casework, is going to make any difference to Fannie Dortch and her brood.

  A couple years into policing, I’m dispatched to back Jack Balzer on a domestic. Balzer is an eight-year veteran, mid-thirties, with a quick, irreverent wit, lots of swaggering trash talk. (“My Balzer bigger’n yours!”) He’s the kind of quirky, mischievous guy who will wander around your home at a Christmas squad party, notice you have the word NOEL in decorative, wooden block letters nestled in holly on your piano top, next to the Christmas tree, and surreptitiously rearrange them to spell LEON. You discover the rearrangement and move the letters back to spell NOEL, only to find them ten minutes later changed back to LEON. You leave them unchanged. A half hour later, he confesses, snickering. You look at him blankly for some kind of explanation.

  “Who the fuck is Leon?”

  “Santa Claus, in the ’hood,” he replies with a broad grin. “He’s a dope slinger in my beat. Everybody knows him and likes him. We shouldn’t forget the Leons of the world in this season of goodwill to men.”

  I still don’t get it. But that’s Balzer’s off-kilter sense of humor
. He’s always playing the smart-ass for laughs with Sarge at roll call, always the center of outrageous storytelling at squad keggers. Sometimes when he’s been drinking (which is frequent) his mouth writes checks his fists can’t cash, and he gets cut down to size. One night at a squad party, Balzer got into a shouting match with our corporal, a big bear of a guy, 6 foot 3, 300 pounds, who wouldn’t hurt a fly. His size made it rarely necessary for the Bear to even raise his voice. But Balzer had gotten carried away, teasing the Bear about being out of shape. They stood nose to nose shouting taunts at each other, until Balzer made an unfortunate remark about losing all respect for the Bear, at which point Bear, with one lightning-fast stiff-arm to the chest, launched Balzer airborne over a table and into a flower planter on the opposite wall. It was a sight to behold, like out of a movie, one that was described many times over at subsequent squad socials, often by Balzer and the Bear together.

  One time Balzer and a few of his buddies were drinking at Legends Lounge, a low-rent bar down Dauphin Island Parkway favored by outlaw bikers and loose women. A brawl erupted, with Balzer right in the thick of it. When a heaved chair shattered the back-bar’s mirror and its proud display of whiskeys, the barmaid screamed, “Somebody call the law!” Balzer looked up from the hapless brawler he was beating senseless in the midst of the fray, raised a bloodied fist, and bellowed, “I am the Law!”

  Always in debt—largely due to his several ex-wives and hefty child support obligations—Balzer would use up all his vacation days, comp time, and sick days as soon as he earned them, to work extra jobs and do mechanic work to make ends meet. Gifted with a wrench, he always managed to keep his Harley and his truck roadworthy, as well as those of his loyal customers (mostly cops and bikers). In a scheme to get ahead of his debt once and for all, Balzer quit the department to go to Iraq to do contract policing or quasi-military work for one of those hired-gun outfits employed by the Pentagon. The promise was six figures, tax free, for a nine-month tour of duty. He returned to the department in about two months, reporting that it was totally FUBAR and the promises were bogus. The experience cost him all the time he had built up in his PD pension and did nothing to improve his bank balance.