Joseph Wambaugh - The Blue Knight

“Slipped and fell off a fire escape. Whadda you think about me retiring, Laila?”

“Retiring? Don’t be ridiculous. You’re too full of hell.”

“I’m in my forties, goddamnit. No, I might as well level with you. I’ll be fifty this month. Imagine that. When I was born Warren G. Harding was a new President!”

“You’re too alive. Forget about it. It’s too silly to think about.”

“I was sworn in on my thirtieth birthday, Laila. Know that?”

“Tell me about it,” she said, stroking my cheek now, and I felt so damn comfortable I could’ve died.

“You weren’t even born then. That’s how long I been a cop.”

“Why’d you become a cop?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“Well, what did you do before you became a cop?”

“I was in the Marine Corps over eight years.”

“Tell me about it.”

“I wanted to get away from the hometown, I guess. There was nobody left except a few cousins and one aunt. My brother Clem and I were raised by our grandmother, and after she died, Clem took care of me. He was a ripper, that bastard. Bigger than me, but didn’t look anything like me. A handsome dog. Loved his food and drink and women. He owned his own gas station and just before Pearl Harbor, in November it was, he got killed when a truck tire blew up and he fell back into the grease pit. My brother Clem died in a filthy grease pit, killed by a goddamn tire! It was ridiculous. There was nobody else I gave a damn about so I joined the Corps. Guys actually joined in those days, believe it or not. I got wounded twice, once at Saipan and then in the knees at Iwo, and it almost kept me off the Department. I had to flimflam the shit out of that police surgeon. You know what? I didn’t hate war. I mean, why not admit it? I didn’t hate it.”

“Weren’t you ever afraid?”

“Sure, but there’s something about danger I like, and fighting was something I could do. I found that out right away and after the war I shipped over for another hitch and never did go back to Indiana. What the hell, I never had much there anyway. Billy was here with me and I had a job I liked.”

“Who’s Billy?”

“He was my son,” I said, and I heard the air-conditioner going and I knew it was cool, because Laila looked so crisp and fresh, and yet my back was soaked and the sweat was pouring down my face and slipping beneath my collar.

“I never knew you were married, Bumper.”

“It was a hundred years ago.”

“Where’s your wife?”

“I don’t know. Missouri, I think. Or dead maybe. It’s been so long. She was a girl I met in San Diego, a farm girl. Lots of them around out here on the coast during the war. They drifted out to find defense work, and some of them boozed it too much. Verna was a pale, skinny little thing. I was back in San Diego from my first trip over. I had my chest full of ribbons and had a cane because my first hit was in the thigh. That’s one reason my legs aren’t worth a shit today, I guess. I picked her up in a bar and slept with her that night and then I started coming by whenever I got liberty and next thing you know, before I ship out, she says she’s knocked up. I had the feeling so many guys get, that they’re gonna get bumped off, that their number’s up, so we got drunk one night and I took her to a justice of the peace in Arizona and married her. She got an allotment and wrote me all the time and I didn’t think too much about her till I got hit the second time and went home for good. And there she was, with my frail, sickly Billy. William’s my real name, did you know that?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“So anyway, I screwed up, but just like you said, Laila, there was no sense anybody else suffering for it so I took Verna and Billy and we got a decent place to stay in Oceanside, and I thought, what the hell, this is a pretty fair life. So I reenlisted for another hitch and before long I was up for master sergeant. I could take Verna okay. I mean I gotta give her credit, after Billy came she quit boozing and kept a decent house. She was just a poor dumb farm girl but she treated me and Billy like champs, I have to admit. I was lucky and got to stay with Headquarters Company, Base, for five years, and Billy was to me, like… I don’t know, standing on a granite cliff and watching all the world from the Beginning until Now, and for the first time there was a reason for it all. You understand?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“You won’t believe this, but when he was barely four years old he printed a valentine card for me. He could print and read at four years old, I swear it. He asked his mother how to make the words and then he composed it himself. It said, ‘Dad. I love you. Love, Billy Morgan.’ Just barely four years old. Can you believe that?”

“Yes, I believe you, Bumper.”

“But like I said, he was a sickly boy like his mother, and even now when I tell you about him, I can’t picture him. I put him away mentally, and it’s not possible to picture how he looked, even if I try. You know, I read where only schizophrenics can control subconscious thought, and maybe I’m schizoid, I don’t doubt it. But I can do it. Sometimes when I’m asleep and I see a shadow in a dream and the shadow is a little boy wearing glasses, or he has a cowlick sticking up in the back, I wake up. I sit straight up in my bed, wide awake. I cannot picture him either awake or asleep. You’re smart to adopt out your kid, Laila.”

“When did he die?”

“When he was just five. Right after his birthday, in fact. And it shouldn’t have surprised me really. He was anemic and he had pneumonia twice as a baby, but still, it was a surprise, you know? Even though he was sick so long, it was a surprise, and after that, Vern seemed dead too. She told me a few weeks after we buried him that she was going home to Missouri and I thought it was a good idea so I gave her all the money I had and I never saw her again.

“After she left, I started drinking pretty good, and once, on weekend liberty, I came to L.A. and got so drunk I somehow ended up at El Toro Marine Base with a bunch of other drunken jarheads instead of at Camp Pendleton where I was stationed. The M.P’s at the gate let the other drunks through, but of course my pass was wrong, so they stopped me. I was mean drunk then, and confused as hell, and I ended up swinging on the two M.P.’s.

“I can hardly remember later that night in the El Toro brig. All I really recall was two brig guards, one black guy and one white guy, wearing khaki pants and skivvy shirts, dragging me off the floor of the cell and taking me in the head where they worked me over with billies and then to the showers to wash off the blood. I remember holding onto the faucets with my head in the sink for protection, and the billies landing on my arms and ribs and kidneys and the back of my head. That was the first time my nose was ever broken.”

Laila was still stroking my face and listening. Her hands felt cool and good.

“After that, they gave me a special courtmartial, and after all the M.P’s testified, my defense counsel brought out a platoon or so of character witnesses, and even some civilians, wives of the marines who lived near Verna and Billy and me. They all talked about me, and Billy, and how extra smart and polite he was. Then the doctor who treated me in the brig testified as a defense witness that I was unbalanced at the time of the fight and not responsible for my actions, even though he had no psychiatric training. My defense counsel got away with it and when it was over I didn’t get any brig time. I just got busted to buck sergeant.

“Is it hot in here, Laila?”

“No, Bumper,” she said, stroking my cheek with the back of her fingers.

“Well, anyway, I took my discharge in the spring of nineteen-fifty and fooled around a year and finally joined the Los Angeles Police Department.”