“Okay.” He takes my card and heads for the door. I look to Clevenger, he looks to me.
“Oh, and, Mr. Buckner?” Riggens says.
“Yeah?”
“I have heard of you. I know you been gone a long time but people still speak your name. And no matter what anybody’s opinion of you is they all say one thing.”
“Really? What?”
“You’re the baddest motherfucker to ever wear this uniform.”
“I could have told you that.”
I think he smiles and leaves. Clevenger closes the blinds and comes back to the board.
“Alright. Catch me up,” he says, hands me the marker.
46
I tell Clevenger about the dope angle. Cherry and Danny. The other buyer, this Pinky Meyers.
“Might be Delilah killed everybody. Burned everything down,” Clevenger says.
“Sure. Maybe,” I say, thinking.
Clevenger looks at me and says: “What now?”
“I start talking to more people.”
He snickers. Then: “Think you might kill one of ’em?”
I look him in the eye and start erasing the board. Ben Boothe’s name disappears. Finally I say: “Yeah. Probably before it’s over.”
47
What I remember is Clevenger beside me at my hospital bed.
I think Molly was with him sometimes. The constant beep of the monitors. The way my arms were restricted by medical tape and IV needles. Having to lay flat on my back. No amount of pain killer took away the dull, pervasive throb of my head wound. The catheter pinched. It was foreign; the sensation of something sneaky trying to invade my body through alternate routes. Slithering.
I never had a lucid head while in the hospital. My memories of that place are as vivid as a strong dream: scenes cut from one moment to the next. No connections or clarity as to why the movie reel of my mind was running the way it did. Dialogue stood out clearly, but for the life of me I couldn’t tell who said what. I might have imagined the whole thing. It was a thousand piece puzzle broken up and scattered just enough to where the picture could be made out even without the pieces fitting together. But the light in the room kept changing colors and the brain never made sense of the puzzle. The function wasn’t there.
So many things fragmented. My mind smearing was so much worse then. The boiling frustration at the onset. The realization that a human brain is eons more complex than any traffic scheme, any computer program simultaneously solving multiple algorithms, more complex than the movement of the winds and the tides and the interplay between all life and nonlife.
The realization that my brain had been derailed. Permanently. The sickening feeling of it. I had arrested guys like me. The smeared. I hated dealing with them. Now I was one.
But one night I know Molly was there. Her voice was a song from out of an old Disney movie. Through the beeps of the monitors she asked: “So, Richard, why did you want to be a cop?”
Anything that came in through my eyes was a blur. The light was too much, the shadows made me afraid. Her hair had a glow; a blonde aura that gently hung about her. An angel’s halo. But the question, it was small talk. I think my answer didn’t make sense. She never brought it up again.
“My mother took one beautiful picture,” I said. “It was on the mantle.”
It wasn’t a real mantle, my folks just called the central shelf a mantle the way they also called Miracle Whip mayonnaise, the way the called Spam dinner and oil-stained scraps of cloth diapers were Kleenex.
The smell of my childhood home greeted me with the memory of a place I have painted black. Home. omeHParked on three wheels and a jack. Utilities being constantly cut off and switched back on. I never liked it when it came back on—even in winter—because that meant that dad had spent his beer money on the utilities. Ergo, he’d become a real motherfucker.
My mother fought her instincts and tried to be domestic, planted flowers once in the community garden. Mrs. Beckman had to tend them, the same way she wound up tending to me as I grew up.
The smell of wet ash rising out of the throw rug mom laid down still filled my nostrils all those years forward. The lights illuminating the highway billboard outside the park we called a neighborhood would drown out the starlight and the moon. Billboard light would rain down through my bedroom window, which was a screen with a tear through it and a towel for a curtain. There was no glass at all. Ever. Got kind of shitty during the winter. I got good at taping up trash bags as patches. They would breathe with the night breeze and whoosh in and out. I’d fall asleep to that constant sound. Like the tide.