Part 71 (2/2)

Bunny rolls her eyes, looks away, staring back at the house, pursing her lips as though your request, simple, humble even, is causing her pain. You follow her glance back to the house and see the porch lights on. Until this moment you had not realized how dark it is. Not until your wife asks, ”What is it Carson? What do you want?” do you realize that night has fallen and you feel it close and smothering.

”Come on, get in.”

”Now you wanna talk.”

”Yeah, now I wanna talk.” You keep the words forceful but strong, tap down the rage you feel. Begging your own wife to talk to you. Bunny, like everybody else, against you. On the other side. Standing there looking at you like you're some jive nigguh on the corner trying to rap to her. You remind her, ”I still got rights.”

Bunny opens the door and slides into the car. She sits where only moments before Juwan sat staring at you. You openly appraise her, the black wool turtleneck sweater and the tight jeans, the big hoop earrings. You've been apart thirty-eight days, and every time you see her she looks better. Rested. She's even shed some of the weight she'd gained years ago with the twins. Thirty-eight days. Nine hundred and twelve hours. Fifty-four thousand seven hundred and twenty minutes. Bunny squirms beneath your gaze, and looks at her hands, looks anywhere but at you.

”If you'd come back . . .” You lean closer to her, all the smells mingling, enveloping you in a coc.o.o.n of hope and longing, and she slides away from you, closer to the door. b.i.t.c.h.

”Carson we've been there.”

”Well, let's go there again.” You lean in closer, just to f.u.c.k with her. Your lips almost touch. You want to kiss her. You could kiss her. You're still my wife.

”Why you freaking? Acting like I'm gonna hurt you. Like you don't even want me to touch you, huh? I mean, look at this. You take my kids. Leave me at the worst possible time. I'm getting sued. I got lawyer's fees.”

Hearing your voice, everything you've just said, how the words careen and pile up, how they ring with the sound of ruin. You decide to back off.

”Carson, I'd been thinking about leaving for a long time.”

”I quit the force. Isn't that what you wanted? Isn't it what you've always wanted?” You ask her this gently. A peace offering.

”Once I thought it might make a difference. I thought that might save us. I thought I couldn't get close to you because you were always wearing your uniform. Even when you weren't in it. But after what happened, I saw it wasn't the uniform. It was you.” She's looking at you as she says this and now you wish she'd look at her hands. You offer peace. She wants war.

”Carson, just give us some time,” she says, reaching to touch you. You want to feel her hands on you. Even if she just touches your jacket. You're sure you'll feel her fingers through the cloth. You miss her that bad. But instead this time you pull away.

”I don't have time. Not anymore,” you say, shaking your head, quick, fast, with everything inside you. Like Juwan. ”I can't live like this. Visiting my kids on the weekends. My own wife not wanting me to get close to her.”

”Carson-”

”Standing by while you get involved with some other man.” The accusation slithers through your lips as you look at Bunny out of the corner of your eye. You look at her and you are not moving, not breathing. So you can catch the flinch, the giveaway expression she'll try to hide.

”You know there's no one else.”

”Do I?”

”Carson, it's only been a month.”

”It's been five weeks,” you correct her, stung by the ”only,” when you've felt each day like an eternity.

”We've needed some time apart for a while.”

”Maybe you've needed to be away from me. But I've never needed to be away from you.”

Bunny looks at you skeptically and you see all your sins in her gaze. ”I haven't been perfect. I know that-”

”Don't say anymore, Carson, please.”

”Maybe you can live without me. I can't live without you.” There you said it. You've been whipped since you first laid eyes on her. You're pus.h.i.+ng too hard. You feel her pulling away again. Not her body this time, but her feelings. Stop. Stop. Back off. She's still your wife.

But you can't stop. ”I want you and the kids back. I'm not gonna let you screw me like the department did, stringing me along for months, making me think I had a chance and then kicking me off the force, telling me to resign or I'd be fired. What kind of choice is that? Like I'm a murderer. Like what happened to me couldn't have happened to one of them in a second. In a split second. Bunny, I want to know by the end of the week if you're coming back. f.u.c.k this trial-separation c.r.a.p. This isn't anything I want to try on for size.”

These are the words that have filled you head with a wayward clamoring. And yet, you say them quietly. Quietly. You don't want to frighten her. You want her back.

”Bunny, whatever it's gonna be, tell me.”

”I will, Carson,” she whispers.

”I still want the kids this weekend.”

”I'll bring them over on Friday, after school.”

She squeezes your hand, which is tight and red-knuckled, gripping the steering wheel. You don't touch her, because if you do, touching her hand, her arm or her face won't be enough. You'll want everything. And you don't want to scare her. Not when what you're feeling for her and about everything is scaring you.

”I'll have the girls call you tonight.” The words sound like a salve, but they are salt eating into your wounds. I should be grateful.

”Alright.”

”Good-bye.” With that word, she's out of the car.

You watch her walk toward the house. If she looks back, even with a glance tossed over her shoulder like looking at an object she no longer needs. Even if she turns to look quickly, hoping you won't see, no matter. Just look back. But Bunny walks away from you with long, defiant strides. Like she's crossing the Sahara. Climbing Everest. Treading a path she's charted in her mind, alone, without you. Her arms are folded in front of her. Sealing her tight. Against you. She doesn't look back. The front door closes behind her and stares at you like the smug, grim face of the entrance to a vault.

Fifteen minutes later, you're cruising the streets of your old beat. Martin Luther King, Jr., Boulevard is a wide, four-lane stretch of road that's always busy. Every major city you've visited in America has got a street named for King and it's always the main drag of the ghetto. Even when you weren't in your squad car patrolling the area, the hyper, unpredictable energy of this commercial zone clung to you like sweat. Although it's been eight months since you were last on duty, driving these streets that you will never patrol again, you still have the eyes of a cop. Suspicious, probing, curious, you had to know the street and be prepared for anything, all the time. They didn't ask much of you being a cop, just the d.a.m.n near impossible.

There are the fast-food places, Popeyes, KFC, McDonald's, Wendy's, the liquor stores, like outposts, one every third intersection, the car washes, and the p.a.w.n shop housed in an old laundromat, the words p.a.w.n SHOP large in garish green and yellow neon, crowning the building. Until this moment you've never wondered why cops called the stretch of territory you'd been sworn to protect against crime and mayhem a beat. But that's what the streets did to you. The length and breadth of this section of Cartersville is veiled in a permanent gloom. Cops call it ”Dodge City.”

If you were still on the force, you'd have started your s.h.i.+ft at four o'clock, savoring the early near-quiet first hour before the traffic accidents, speeders and red-light runners took over. Then when people got home, got settled, and the domestic disturbances flared like summer brush fires. People couldn't wait to get home, but then soon as they open the front door, they lose it. Two brothers argue over who controls the T.V. remote control. One lands in the hospital, the other in jail. A woman locks her boyfriend out of the apartment and throws his clothes out the window into the parking lot. You're called to mediate. Kids spray paint store windows. Complaints of barking dogs. A couple that's lived together three years argues, the woman accuses the man of rape, then recants the story an hour later. You collar three fourteen-year-olds selling weed in the unlocked bas.e.m.e.nt of an elementary school. A father suspects his son of stealing his money to buy drugs and wants you to evict him from the house.

You pull into a gas station and get out to fill up. The gas station mini-mart is crowded. You walk over to the coffee stand and pour a decaf into a large Styrofoam cup. Tear open two packs of sugar, stir, snap the top on and get in line. It's almost nine o'clock. You stand behind a burly, gray-haired taxi driver who pulled in moments before you. The line for lottery tickets at the second cash register is long and you recall having seen something on the news about the state lottery. Was it fifty, sixty, eighty million dollars? The people in line haven't got a prayer and they seem to know it, standing solemn, cheerless, quiet as penitents clutching crinkled bills in their hands, staring into s.p.a.ce, or deep in thought, worrying about bills, wondering what they'll do if they win. The odds against them are criminal. And even if they won, nothing would change, you think. Nothing that matters, anyway.

The Pakistani who owns the station smiles at you in recognition. ”Sergeant Blake,” he says, the words clipped and heavily accented, the voice flush with a respect for you that you have never heard in an American voice. He's got large, droopy dark eyes and a thin angular face that tells you nothing of his age. He reaches for the dollar and quarter for the coffee. But when you tell him ”Twenty on number seven,” he nods and waves a brown hand, his skin darker than yours, saying, ”Have a good night.”

Since you arrested the men who robbed him and his son a two years ago, he's insisted on giving you a free fill-up when you come in. They burst through the door of the mini-mart two minutes before closing, pistol-whipped the son, blinding him in one eye, then tied father and son up and locked them in the back storage room. All for $387.50. Two nights later you caught the two at the end of a high-speed chase that lasted half an hour and involved six squad cars. They were driving away from the third station they'd held up in an hour and a half. It took a year for the case to come to trial. They got five years. After the arrest, Mohammed Musharraf's wife brought a banquet of Pakistani dishes to the station one night as a show of thanks. Standing in the station house Musharraf kept shaking your hand, and saying ”Anything, anything, I can do for you just tell me.” He knows what happened. Knows you're not on the force anymore, but calls you ”Sergeant” anyway. You let him.

Outside you put the nozzle in the tank and fill up. In the distance, atop a rise that is part of the Belle Manor apartment complex, you see a group of boys shooting hoops on a tiny patch of cement court. It's a Monday night. You've seen those boys shooting hoops in the snow. In the rain. A mural of Tupac, sloe-eyed and watchful, hovers over the boys' shoulders.

You've made one hundred and fifty arrests in twelve years, and ”Dodge City” still overflows with drugs. It's a wasteland. You're not a sergeant. You're a garbage collector. (You will always think like a cop. It will always be present tense for you.) The still neat but weathered bungalows that line the streets adjacent to King Boulevard are home to some of the first blacks who moved out to Cartersville from D.C. Some of their kids are dealers. Some of them are buyers.

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