Back in the living room, I saw the stack of papers again, and again circled the room looking for a pen. I found one by the stereo and paused to alphabetize the tapes. When they were straight I hurried back to the papers. I signed them. I stuffed them into the envelope provided. I made out a deposit slip and signed the check. I put it into an envelope and had to go look for a stamp. I went by the bedroom and noticed the sheets needed changing. I stripped the bed and took the dirty sheets to the washing machine. The first load was done and I moved it to the dryer. I put the sheets in the washer and headed back for the living room.
I saw the envelopes sitting neatly on the table and slapped my forehead: a stamp, of course. I found one in a small drawer of the telephone table. But there were several directories there that were more than a year out of date. I carried them to the recycle box and decided I should move the box out to the curb. I did, and noticed that the yard was a mess.
I turned on the spotlights, got a rake, and managed to pile up several large heaps of leaves, dead grass, and so on. I went back into the house to get garbage bags and saw the envelopes again. I remembered the stamp, now in my shirt pocket. I put it on the envelope and took both envelopes out the front door. There was a mailbox on the corner, and no time like the present.
But as I reached the sidewalk in front of the house I noticed a stack of newspapers I had never gotten around to picking up. I grabbed them and took them to the recycle box. I carefully leaned the two envelopes against the recycle box so I would remember where they were. I took the plastic bags off the newspapers, sorted the newspapers by date and stacked them in the recycle box. I took the bins to the curb.
I got back from the curb and saw the heaps of refuse in the yard. I walked back into the house for garbage bags and noticed the dryer had stopped. I put the sheets into the dryer and took the dried laundry out to sort it.
I carried the stuff to my bedroom and dumped it on the bed. On top of the heap was a tiny pink sock.
I picked it up. It must have been left in the dryer. It was just one small, pink sock. It had been my daughter’s.
I fell on the floor beside the bed as if somebody had bashed all my bones in with a mallet and I lay there, holding the sock. I just lay there and cried for over a half hour. After a while no more tears would come; I’d dried up my tear ducts. I lay there for another twenty minutes making raw, ratchety
sounds until I just ran out of energy. Then I just lay there for another half hour. Finally I got up and slumped wearily down the hall. I got my pistol.
This was the second time I tasted the barrel. There was such a pain in my heart that I didn’t even have the strength to pull the trigger. I would have loved to, but all the energy was drained out of me and into that small, pink sock. I sat there in my easy chair with the gun in my mouth and watched the sun come up.
I was still sitting when Charlie Shea, my partner that year, showed up to see how I was doing.
Charlie took the pistol out of my hand and made coffee. He even got me to drink some. Charlie was very persuasive. He was a lousy cop but a very nice guy.
I drank a cup of coffee with Charlie while he talked about precinct gossip, the Dodgers, and the latest from Putz Pelham. Putz had been undercover, looking into kiddie porn. He’d gotten carried away and screwed about two dozen “actresses.” Now he was scared to death he’d caught something and was dying. Charlie thought that was pretty funny.
Charlie never said a word about the forms I was supposed to sign, although I was pretty sure he got some heavy pressure to talk to me about it. But he was a good enough cop to know what it means to be a partner, so he just talked about nothing for a while.
Outside, the recycling truck came. I heard them collect my stuff and I thought about the forms and the check I had left in with the old newspapers. But I was tired. I sipped my coffee. That seemed to make Charlie happy.
It was after that morning I started to find my feet again. I don’t know if it was the release of finally crying, or the realization of how close to the edge I had been, or even Charlie Shea’s soft and pointless talk. Maybe it was the combination, perfectly timed. In any case, I was starting to come back.
I still gargled my gun from time to time. I would work up my nerve to go out somewhere—the grocery store, even a movie—and something would remind me of Jennifer or Melissa. I would see a box of a particular brand of cereal and my hand would start to shake. I would go past a swingset where Melissa had played, or the place where Jennifer had her hair done, and my whole body would feel numb. I’d be filled with that pointless energy again, and often as not, I’d end up fondling the barrel of my weapon and looking down into the chamber, thinking about inhaling.
The walls of the house began to close in on me. It was Jennifer’s house, after all. We’d figured out together what we could afford and she had searched until she found this place. It was small, but it was in Venice. Jennifer said that meant the air was better, which was important with kids to think about. The schools were good here, too, and if it wasn’t really safe to walk the street at night—well, it wasn’t really safe anywhere, was it?
Now I found it impossibly small. Everywhere I turned I found some small reminder of my dead family. I couldn’t stay in the house, but I couldn’t go out too long, either.
Everything was a reminder to me. I slowly started to realize that if I was going to live I had to get out of L.A.
Even that thought caused panic in me. I had no idea how to start doing that.
Luckily, I was still having episodes of manic energy. Fugues, I think they are called. In one of them I sat down with a calculator and a stack of real estate ads. Comparable houses in my area had increased in value tremendously in the last three years. With what I could get for this one, I would be pretty close to rich. I could go anywhere, do anything, live the kind of life every man wants to live.
Whoopee.
In another of my fits of manic energy, I mailed in my resignation from the LAPD and put my house on the market. Soon after that Roscoe McAuley came to see me.
I know why they picked Roscoe to come talk to me. I don’t know why they thought it would do any good.
Roscoe got the job because he was slicker than anybody else in the precinct that year. I knew him as well as anybody did—but nobody really knew him. We’d been at the Academy together. A few years back he’d gone on some ride-arounds with me because Captain Spaulding thought that was the best way for Roscoe to learn the turf. The captain hoped some street smarts might rub off on Roscoe, but if they did nobody noticed.
I guess it made more of an impression than I thought at the time. Roscoe had remembered and come all the way across the continent to see me when his own kid got killed.
Anyway, Roscoe had a long talk with me. He said I still had a future with the force and I was throwing it all away. I told him I knew I was throwing it away. I told him I was throwing it away because it was garbage and that’s what you did with garbage, you threw it away. He looked at me with those Command College brown eyes and said he could understand that I felt that way now, but in case I changed my mind I might want to leave a door open.
I told him thank you but I had other plans. And it came to me, right as I said it, that it was true. I did have other plans. I was going to move back to Key West and go fishing every day.
I guess I thought of Key West because I had lived there at another troubled time in my life and found some peace of mind there.