by Mark Johnson
So I know this little road at least as well as the bushy-haired bicyclist attempting to elude me. She probably didn’t think I would follow her down this path, but I know where the holes and humps are and maneuver around them, staying right on her rear fender.
Over the PA again, I adopt a calm, conversational tone.
“Ma’am, this is a restricted road. Private. You’re now trespassing.” Her posture and effort remain Olympian. “Don’t hurt yourself, just give it up. You can’t outpedal me.” For all her effort we’re still at the 7 or 8 mph range. Either she’s tiring or my avuncular reasoning is working on her: she slows down. But doesn’t stop. “I’ve already got backing units en route to the other end of this road,” I bluff.
This works, finally. She abruptly stops and dismounts, breathing heavy. I skid to a stop, and she drops the bike, the rucksack, and her purse to the ground. Without a command from me, she even assumes the position, leaning forward, hands on the hood of my car, legs spread, as I put it in park and get out.
“Three-twelve, subject detained, about halfway between Pinehill and Halls Mill, on the dirt road along the south bank of the creek,” I advise Dispatch, trying hard to sound matter of fact, tamping down any hint of triumphal tone to my transmission. This is, after all, just a ninety-pound female suspected of being in possession of maybe thirty bucks worth of copper scrap that will be all but impossible to prove is stolen. Not exactly a major apprehension.
I come around the front of my car, and in the blink of an eye she bolts down the passenger side of my cruiser, back down the road we had just traveled, and then cuts down the levee through the tall weeds toward the creek as I run behind her, barking “Three-twelve! Subject’s running down into the creek!” into my shoulder mike.
When she gets down the levee near the water’s edge, the reeds are as tall as she is, and thick, and she slows. Right behind her, I discover why: it’s a wet, thick, boot-sucking bog. She struggles, and I struggle, and then I’m on her with all my weight, tackling her, and we both go down into the oozing muck. She struggles, but not against me. She struggles as I do to keep from getting hopelessly tangled in weeds and sucked under the black muck. I manage to regain my feet and she reaches up to me. We’re both soaked and slathered in a dark, thick, reeking ooze. I jerk her to her feet and we struggle together back up the levee, back to my idling cruiser.
I wipe the muck from my hand and key my shoulder mike. “Three-twelve, subject’s in custody, everything’s 10-4 here,” again trying to sound calm, cool, and in control, though enraged at my mud-caked uniform and embarrassed that she played me after I said on the radio that I had her detained.
I open the backdoor to my car and sling her into the cage, slamming the door shut. I pop the trunk and pull a couple towels out and smear most of the thick muck from my face and clothes, but there’s no way I can do this shift without a shower and a change of uniform. I’m dreading the ribbing I face from my squad and sergeant.
My prisoner pleads from the cage to roll down the window. “It ain’t no aih up in here! Cain’t breathe! Please, officer, I’m sorry, but I be suffercatin’ up in dis mug!”
I don’t reply because I’m too pissed at her to say anything without triggering a profane tirade I might regret, and I’ve got enough to regret already this morning. I lower her window from the control panel on my door’s armrest and walk around the front of my cruiser to empty the contents of her purse on my hood and the rucksack on the road in front of my car. Freshly cut copper plumbing lines, faucets, and fixtures clank into the dust. Among the contents of her purse on the hood of my car are a pack of Newports containing a glass crack stem and a small baggie of weed and another containing three little crack rocks that look like broken baby teeth. I sigh with relief that at least I have something more than a misdemeanor to arrest the bitch for, and look up just in time to catch a glimpse of her with her skinny bone-thin hand reaching through the bars of the cage on the door with the window down, opening the door from the outside handle.
Oh, shit, I think, I didn’t lock the backdoor! Who knew she was so skinny she could reach between the bars of my cage and let herself out? My thieving little mudbug has jumped out, escaped! I leap around the front of my car just in time for one of my outstretched hands to slither down her bog-slicked arm as she rounds the trunk and slips my grasp. My duty boots feel like they weigh a ton with the muck still clinging thickly to me from the knees down. She circles around my car and is off in a flash, scampering lickety-split down the road in the original direction I’d pursued her. I lumber along behind her, reporting her direction of travel and clothing description on the radio, hoping somebody’s 10-8 to catch her at the end of the road, because I’m just not all that into this thing anymore.
I hear Tyrone on the radio report he has a visual on my subject just as I see him zooming toward my scampering Mudbug from the other end of the road where it ends at the back of the seafood place. I’m about “give-out,” a half a football field from my fugitive and losing ground, when I see ’Rone jump out of his car and draw his Taser. Mudbug stops dead in her tracks, looks back at me huffing toward her, leaves the road and runs behind a clump of bushes and small trees. ’Rone pursues, and they run circles around the bush as if they’re schoolkids playing ring around the rosie, till Balzer rolls up in a cloud of dust, jumps out, fires his Taser from three yards as the circling Mudbug comes ’round the bushes directly toward him, and drops her. One Taser prong strikes just below her left nipple, the other embeds in her neck. Balzer gives her the whole five-second ride, and she’s screaming in satisfying agony as I drag myself to the scene wheezing, mud caked, and humiliated.
Yeah, back at the precinct, where they take Mudbug for questioning by a detective, I catch a ration of shit. Everybody comes in off their beats to get a look at me and Mudbug and yuck it up at my expense. But Mudbug is a changed, chastened woman. She’s had an epiphany and wants to change her ways. She tells the detective where she and her ole man have been staying, and tells him about all the copper he’s been stripping from houses in the neighborhood, which she’s been taking to Ward’s for him, several times a day. Mudbug recognizes now that she’s been used by her boyfriend, she’s been taking all the risk, and not even getting her fair share of the money, and she is more than happy to testify against him, if the detective could just see his way to overlook the paraphernalia, marijuana second, cocaine possession, receiving stolen property, failure to obey, escape, and eluding charges. She tells them right where they can find her old man, who’s waiting for her to return from Ward’s Recycling with the cash.
By the time I come back to the precinct in a fresh uniform, Mudbug has been sprung and her old man is in custody, charged with eleven felonies: eight counts of burglary, one receiving stolen second, possession of burglar tools, and possession of controlled substance. The detective thanks me for helping him to clear a backlog of cases. Four weeks later he gets Officer of the Month for his multiple case clearances through the arrest of one of Mobile’s most prolific burglars.
12
Stranger in a Strange Land
I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid strangers in their birthplace . . . they may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred.
—W. Somerset Maugham
In Waukesha, Wisconsin, in the early nineties, I was successful, prosperous, and well loved by friends, neighbors, employees, board members, donors, agency directors (even the Boy Scout exec!), the newspaper (where I wrote a weekly column), the pastor and my fellow elders at First Presbyterian, and the many earnest and sincere, sober members of the Badger Recovery Group. Ten years later, and three years into policing, I found myself asking how on earth did I end up here, on the meanest streets of Mobile?
Nancy has been asking that question in countless ways, verbal and otherwise, for nearly two decades now. She began asking well before I quit Mobile’s United Way to become one of Mobile’s finest, to tangle with thugs like Fine
st. And the longer I’m here, the more I find myself wondering the same thing. We have now lived in the Azalea City longer than either of us lived anywhere else, including St. Louis, Colorado, Wisconsin, and Louisiana (where I spent my first five blissful years in Luling, just upriver from New Orleans).
It’s no great mystery, really, why I left Waukesha: I hated the Wisconsin weather. The cold was brutal: 20 below was not unusual. Hard even to breathe in that cold. A deep breath of frozen air burns in your lungs, freezes your snot, and makes your nose run when you get back indoors. But worse for me than the stinging freezes was the Great Gray. To me it was palpable. It seeped into everything. The absence of sunlight, the short days and long nights, the six or more interminable months of winter, year in, year out. It hung on me, pulling me down, like heavy, damp, itchy wool. It demanded my attention to things I didn’t want to think about: fabrics, and layers, and thermal insulation ratings and chill factors and hat hair and wet gloves and earmuffs and neck scarves and windshield scrapers and snow shovels and protecting my boots and my car’s undercarriage from rock salt damage, and allowing time for battery charging, engine warming, tire chaining, defrosting, and icy creep-along low-viz-blizz road conditions complicating every simple outing to the grocery store for a quart of milk, or to a movie, or to visit a friend across town. There’s not much spontaneity in Wisconsin in the winter. And in Wisconsin it’s always winter.
Even worse for me than the burden and confinement of the cold gray was the chilling, plodding dullness of the visual gray and the human gray. It’s the pale gray that is the universal color of all human activity and interaction, the absence of color spectra in people, in personality, in perspective. It’s the absence of color, not just in the chromatic sense, but as you might read in a guidebook, in the phrase “colorful indigenous populations.” Color that comes from difference, from eccentricity, variety, passion, and agitation. Wisconsin’s dull gray is the color of sameness, uniformity, homogeneity in all measures: education, race, ethnicity, income. It’s the dull grayness of the spirit, of the plodding upper-Midwest German/Norwegian culture of dogged duty, conformity, discipline, predictability, safety, planning, and good orderly progress in all things. The complete deliberate elimination of surprise, serendipity, risk, whimsy, color.
There was exactly one black guy in Waukesha: guy named Spraggins, head (and sole member?) of the Waukesha County NAACP. He lived around the corner from me, did something with the state board of education. (Coincidentally, he was a native of Whistler, Alabama, a village near Prichard, a suburb of Mobile.) When I told Spraggins I was thinking of moving to Mobile, he lit up. Told me with visible pride that Mobile had, unlike much of the South (especially in Alabama), avoided overt racial strife. The kind of thing that is synonymous with Selma, Montgomery, Birmingham. Spraggins was walking, talking proof of the Mobile difference: he was in the first integrated graduating class of a Deep South university—Mobile’s own Spring Hill College—even as Governor George Wallace made his infamous schoolhouse stand. (It didn’t dawn on me to ask Spraggins how or why he had ended up in the most lily-white dull gray Republican county in Wisconsin.)
Waukesha did have a small cluster of Hispanics—enough to warrant a United Way–funded agency, La Casa de Esperanza, and its doggedly pedantic executive director whose mission was to address the unique challenges and needs of the descendants of migrant farmworkers who had harvested the county’s crops for generations before La Casa was established to harvest the county’s Nordic guilt. As agricultural work became automated and corporatized and clusters of McMansions sprung up in the former rolling cornfields and tidy pastures that had been home to the contented bovines of stolid dairymen, I guess the Mexican workers had to learn new trades, and having brown skin and foreign accents and not much education or money, they had hardships in 95 percent white Waukesha County, where the median household income exceeds $70,000, the median price of a single-family home hovers around $300,000, and more than half the population has at least a few years of college.
All was not dark Lutheran bleakness: ice fishing, snowmobile racing, cross-country skiing, tailgating at Brewers and Packers games, Sven and Oley jokes—all good clean hardy, wholesome fun, to be sure. Proud community spirit was amply manifest in generous philanthropy, quality education and health care, extensive parks and recreation infrastructure, a history of progressive politics, strong family bonds and genuine neighborliness, a cozy tavern with Pabst on tap at every corner. Though you had to search hard as a charitable fund-raiser to find scenes of poverty and despair for the annual tug-at-your-heart-and-wallet campaign video, it was really a pretty easy gig. “Giving back” having long been such a big part of the upper Midwest culture, it’s relatively easy there to raise ever-higher campaign totals, rust belt economies notwithstanding. The affluence, homogeneity, education, and universal values, while wholesome, and good for fund-raising and community building, are nevertheless mind-numbingly dull for a self-indulgent, somewhat decadent slacker like me. I was at once successful, somnambulant, and stricken with a deep ennui.
A mere twenty-minute jaunt to the east on I-94 lay the menacing black urban ghettos of Milwaukee, seething with crime and poverty, referred to in national media as among the top-three hyper-segregated communities in the nation, just behind Detroit and Chicago. Now that, I figured, would be something I could really sink my teeth into. Only on a smaller scale, and in a warmer clime, with a tastier cuisine, funkier music, and more eclectic cultural currents.
I had long nurtured idealized childhood memories of Luling and New Orleans: the warm, sunny, friendly, easygoing Deep South. Steeped as I was on Mama’s sleepy-time readings of Uncle Remus stories, my own visions of moss-draped live oaks, the brassy jubilant sounds of the music and maskers of Mardi Gras, and the soothing soft singing of Essie, who cleaned our house and changed my diapers. The cliché about the difference in race relations between the North and the South must have been originated by someone from the Deep South: northern whites love the black race but hate the individual Negro (with whom they refuse to live), while southern whites love the individual Negro (with whom they live cheek by jowl) but hate the race. Which is worse? Both are deplorable, but to me it seemed that the southern attitude lacked the self-righteous hypocrisy of the North.
I do know what it means to miss New Orleans: I could still see fields of tall clover, almost waist high to a child, through which we’d make intricate mazes, all paths leading to the giant live oak with the vine-covered branches dripping thick coils of Spanish moss, branches that would hang so low they would nearly touch ground, like a father bending down to scoop you up in his arms. We’d construct multilevel, multichambered tree houses and forts in these live oaks. I remember Mama taking me into town, to Luling’s sole barber, Claude, whose shop was in a converted boxcar on a side spur a block from the river road. There was a Kool cigarette penguin sign on the front door: “It’s Kool inside,” Mama would read to me each time from the penguin’s word balloon. Blueish white icicles hung from “Kool.” The small one-chair shop was frigid compared to the humid blanket of Louisiana summer. Claude was a garrulous older fella with a mustache, brown skin, and a funny—but common—accent that I would recognize years later as Cajun. He would set me on a special seat across the chair’s armrests and pump the chair up high. The buzzing tickle of his shears around my ears would give me goose bumps. Then he’d set me up for what he called the “coo-day-grah,” extolling the virtues of his famous Lilac Vegetal aftershave, which would give me a cold jolt as he slathered it on my neck before dusting me with a fragrant white-bristled brush. Then he’d pump the chair back down and sweep his barber’s apron off me with a flourish to shake my shorn locks to the floor, declaring to my mother, “Dar he be, Miz Johnson: Eee-ree-sistable! De plu’ beau p’ti’ garcon dis side o’ Noo Awwwlins!” Claude’s shop was near the part of town where the colored people, including sweet Essie, lived. I knew even at that tender age—without ever entering their tiny, unpainted shotgun shacks—that th
ey were way less fortunate than I, that they had somehow been screwed by somebody or something. It wasn’t fair.
As for me, my early childhood was filled with nothing but happy sweet memories of the weekly shopping trips with Mama, starting with a car ferry ride across the expanse of the Mississippi, which looked to me like an endless flow of chocolate milk. The ferry boarded at a dock just over the levee across the River Road from the entrance to Daddy’s plant, which was marked by a big sign on which the “Lynall doggie” resided—which was my description, never having seen a lion, of the mascot logo of the Lion Oil Company. After the ferry crossing, the next stop would be the Morning Call in the French Market: steaming, aromatic, chicory-laced café au lait for Mama, chilled orange juice for me, warm sweet powdery beignets for both of us. The houses in N’wolins were older, taller, all built up higher and narrower, but much fancier than the identical modern ranch homes in Luling built by the company for managers. In the city, the houses had hardly any yards, but they were enveloped by blazing jumbles of viney flora sprouting out of every window box, hanging from the arches of every gallery. Roots of towering palms and ancient live oaks heaved up sidewalks making even foot traffic, much less cycling, an adventure. In the late afternoons after a full day of shopping and visiting, Mama would always stop at the Frosty Top drive-in for root beer in chilled mugs. On the roof of the Frosty Top’s kitchen was a giant rotating, illuminated frosty mug. Then we’d head back to Luling, requiring a return river crossing, this time not by car ferry but by the Herewego, which is what I called the Huey P. Long Bridge. It was high and scary and thrilling. Built tall enough to accommodate Mississippi River traffic, with a long gradual ascent and equally stretched-out descent to accommodate the shuddering, chugging freight-train level just beneath the automobile level, it was always choked with thundering truck traffic muscling its way over the river in its narrow lanes, which had low side railings and a view that gave me tingly shivers every time, a view that took in countless puffing smokestacks of trains, ships, and complicated chemical and oil refineries, the low-slung cityscape of all New Orleans, the snakey bayous and low-lying swamps flooding thick and tangled spooky spikey trees sticking up right out of the waters, waters in every direction, waters filled with alligators and garfish and slithering snakes and nutria and crabs and crawdads and Cajun men on long flat pirogues, still waters of Lake Pontchartrain on one side, the muddy, churning working waters of the mammoth industry-choked Mississippi beneath us, including the tall stacks and huge round tanks of the plant where Daddy worked in the distance, and finally the wide endless waters of the Gulf and then the ocean to the south. From the top of the Herewego I could see to the very edges of the world.