Joseph Wambaugh - The Blue Knight

“Why did you do it, Bumper? The police force?”

“I don’t know. I was good at fighting, I guess that’s why. I thought about going back in the Corps when Korea broke out, and then I read something that said, ‘Policemen are soldiers who act alone,’ and I figured that was the only thing I hated about the military, that you couldn’t act alone very much. And as a cop I could do it all myself, so I became a cop.”

“You never heard from Verna?” asked Laila quietly, and suddenly I was cold and damp and getting chills laying there.

“About six years after I came on the job I got a letter from a lawyer in Joplin. I don’t know how he found me. He said she’d filed for divorce and after that I got the final papers. I paid his fee and sent her about five hundred I’d saved, to get her started. I always hoped maybe she found some nice working stiff and went back to the farm life. She was one who couldn’t make it by herself. She’d have to love somebody and then of course she’d have to suffer when something took them away from her, or maybe when they left on their own. She’d never learn you gotta suffer alone in this world. I never knew for sure what happened to her. I didn’t try to find out because I’d probably just discover she was a wino and a streetwalking whore and I’d rather think otherwise.”

“Bumper?”

“What?”

“Please take my bed tonight. Go in and shower and take my bed. You’re dripping wet and you’ll get sick if you stay here on the couch.”

“I’ll be okay. You should see some of the places I’ve slept. Just give me a blanket.”

“Please.”

She began trying to lift me and that almost made me laugh out loud. She was a strong girl, but no woman was about to raise Bumper Morgan, two hundred and seventy-five pounds anytime, and almost three hundred this night with all of me cold dead weight from the booze.

“Okay, okay,” I grumbled, and found I wasn’t too drunk when I stood up. I made my way to her bedroom, stripped, and jumped in the shower, turning it on cold at the end. When I was through I dried in her bath towel which smelled like woman, took the wet gauze bandage off my leg, and felt better than I had all day. I rinsed my mouth with toothpaste, examined my meat-red face and red-webbed eyes, and climbed in her bed naked, which is the only way to sleep, winter or summer.

The bed smelled like her too, or rather it smelled like woman, since all women are pretty much the same to me. They all smell and feel the same. It’s the essence of womanhood, that’s the thing I need.

I was dozing when Laila came in and tiptoed to the shower and it seemed like seconds later when she was sitting on the bed in a sheer white nightgown whispering to me. I smelled lilac, and then woman, and I came to with her velvet mouth all over my face.

“What the hell?” I mumbled, sitting up.

“I touched you tonight,” said Laila. “You told me things. Maybe for the first time in years, Bumper, I’ve really touched another person!” She put her hand on my bare shoulder.

“Yeah, well that’s enough touching for one night,” I said, disgusted with myself for telling her all those personal things, and I took her hand off my shoulder. Now I’d have to fly back to L.A. in a couple of weeks to set this thing up with Laila and her family. Everyone was complicating my life lately.

“Bumper,” she said, drawing her feet up under her and laughing pretty damn jolly for this time of night. “Bumper, you’re wonderful. You’re a wonderful old panda. A big blue-nosed panda. Do you know your nose is blue?”

“Yeah, it gets that way when I drink too much,” I said, figuring she’d been smoking hash, able to see right through the nightie at her skin which was now exactly the color of apricots. “I had too many blood vessels busted too many times there on my nose.”

“I want to get under the covers with you, Bumper.”

“Look, kid,” I said. “You don’t owe me a goddamn thing. I’ll be glad to help you flimflam your family.”

“You’ve let me touch you, Bumper,” she said, and the warm wide velvet mouth was on me again, my neck and cheek, and all that chestnut hair was covering me until I almost couldn’t think about how ridiculous this was.

“Goddamnit,” I said, holding her off. “This is a sickening thing you’re doing. I knew you since you were a little girl. Damn it, kid, I’m an old bag of guts and you’re still just a little child to me. This is unnatural!”

“Don’t call me kid. And don’t try to stop me from having you.”

“ Having me? You’re just impressed by cops. I’m a father symbol. Lots of young girls feel like that about cops.”

“I hate cops,” she answered, her boobs wobbling against my arms, which were getting tired. “It’s you I want because you’re more man than I’ve ever had my hands on.”

“Yeah, I’m about six cubic yards,” I said, very shaky.

“That’s not what I meant,” she said, her hands going over me, and she was kissing me again and I was doing everything I could to avoid the pleasures of a thousand and one nights.

“Listen, I couldn’t if I wanted to,” I groaned. “You’re just too young, I just couldn’t do it with a kid like you.”

“Want to bet?”

“Don’t, Laila.”

“How can a man be so aware and be so square,” she smiled, standing up and slipping off the nightie.

“It’s just the bluesuit,” I said with a voice gone hoarse and squeaky. “I probably look pretty sharp to you in my uniform.”

Laila busted up then, falling on the bed and rolling on her stomach, laughing for a good minute. I smiled weakly, staring at her apricot ass and those thunder thighs, thinking it was over. But after she stopped laughing she smiled at me softer than ever, whispered in Arabic, and crept under the sheet.

I WOKE UP Friday morning with a terrible hangover. Laila was sprawled half on top of me, a big smooth naked doe, which was the reason I woke up. After living so many years alone I don’t like sleeping with anyone. Cassie, who I made love to maybe a hundred times, had never slept with me, not all night. We’d have to get twin beds, Cassie and me. I just can’t stand to be too close to anybody for too long.

Laila didn’t wake up and I took my clothes into the living room and dressed, leaving a note that said I’d get in touch in a week or so, to work out the details of handling her bank account and dumping a load of snow on Yasser and the family.

Before I left I crept back into the bedroom to look at her this last time. She was sprawled on her stomach, sleek and beautiful.

“Salām , Laila,” I whispered. “A thousand salāms , little girl.”

I very carefully made my way down the stairs of Laila’s apartment house to my car parked in front, and I felt a little better when I got out on the road with the window down driving onto the Hollywood Freeway on a windy, not too smoggy day.

Then I thought for a few minutes about how it had been with Laila and I was ashamed because I always prided myself on being something more than the thousands of ugly old slimeballs you see in Hollywood with beautiful young babies like her. She did it because she was grateful and neurotic and confused and I took advantage. I’d always picked on someone my own size all my life, and now I was no better than any other horny old fart.

I went home and had a cold shower and a shave and I felt more or less human after some aspirin and three cups of coffee that started the heartburn going for the day. I wondered if after a few months of retirement my stomach might begin to rebuild itself, and who knows, maybe I’d have digestive peace.