T. Parker - Laguna Heat

“This cactus makes my brain loose,” Theodore began. “I’m rememberin’ some more of what Algernon told me. He said punks knew he had money at first, then it got changed to sound more like one punk — kept sayin’ him this and he that. I think he was drunker’n hell too. Said this guy had it in for him for a long time. Got reasons to believe he’s comin’ back to get me, he said. Come to think of it, it sounded less like money than hurt he was after. He said havin’ a hog like me around might keep him safe. He said he’d pay for his sinnin’ when he was dead and he wasn’t in a hurry to get that way. Yeah, that’s what he talked like.” Theodore reclaimed the bottle and gulped. “And he told me he wasn’t worried just for himself, but some other people, too.”

“Any by name?”

“He said, I think there’s more than me in danger. A fine old woman who lives in town might be, too. Hope it’s Greeley, he said. What the fuck, I said, call the cops, Tim. He said it wasn’t the kind of matter cops could handle. Guess he was right on that one, eh, Shephard?”

Theodore growled and wheezed: a laugh. Shephard, feeling the lugubrious effects of tequila, took the statement broadside and felt shamed. It was a feeling he’d had often as a rookie, often too in his first few years as a cop. But over time he had built up that protective coating that any cop who stays a cop needs. Wade had lost his stomach for it. No surprise. Somewhere it must all be stored up, he thought, as Theodore passed back the bottle. Somewhere inside everything that you deflect collects. He knew it was true. When he drank he could feel those deflected items stirring, some thick and sad, like those he had felt just now, others jagged and painful, like a river of broken glass trying to get out. His father had told him once that cops are the true garbage collectors of society, that cops see, consume, and store the million instances of ugliness that everyone else wants to put out of their lives. The suicides, the murders, the slow poisonings, the “accidents” where a sober young man plows a new car into a lightpole at a modest and accurate forty miles an hour. We see it, Wade had said; the rest just get it from the papers.

“How’s the old man?” Theodore asked.

“Strong. Happy. Not the same man I grew up with.”

Theodore seemed to ponder this. He rubbed his beard and spit. “What do you think it was got him into the God business instead of bein’ a cop?”

Shephard had thought about it often himself. “He said once that the pains of loss are the bricks of miracles. I think that might explain it.” Shephard was aware that his mind, now tequila-drenched, was not altogether clear. He thought of Jane Algernon and wondered what she was doing.

“That’s good. I’d use it in one o’ my books ’cept there ain’t no miracles in the story of a fat bodyguard like me. Pass that bottle, jackass.”

“Wonder if it’s worth it?” Shephard asked.

“What worth what?”

“The pain, just for a miracle.”

Theodore responded only after a long, silent pause. “Everybody’s got the hurt. Takes a special sort like your old man to turn it into somethin’ decent. Miracles go around to lots of folks, they don’t just go into somebody’s wallet. Most of us can’t make no miracle even if we tried. We just rot and die. ’Course, anybody knows the hurt, your old man does. Tequila, young Shephard?”

Shephard took the bottle, which seemed suddenly heavy, and drank. His thoughts rioted. “When I was a kid, he used to leave at night with a bucket and a fishing pole. Told me he was going fishing. But he never came back with anything. This was once a month or so, every few weeks. So one night I followed him. I had a little motorcycle then, so I cut the lights and he didn’t know I was behind him. All the way to the pier south of town. He left his bucket in the car and walked onto the pier. I followed but stayed so he couldn’t see me in the shadows. He walked right down the center of it, never looked to one side or the other, walked with his head down faster and faster. Had to hustle to keep up. And when he got to the end he just kept on walking, right over the edge and into the water. He’d told me a hundred times not to jump the pier because once a month the tides are low enough to kill you. He never even looked over the side. He didn’t want to know. He just walked off the edge and swam back to shore. I watched him and stood there an hour trying to figure out why he did it. I couldn’t figure it out. Still haven’t. Nothing but rocks under that pier at low tide. Dried his clothes at a laundromat so I wouldn’t know.”

“What with your momma bein’ shot dead, maybe it was understandable. I ain’t no genius, but I figure having your old lady dying in front of you must make for a whole heap of miracle bricks.” Theodore held up the bottle and the moon perched on top of it. “Maybe they was gettin’ too heavy for him.”

“I’m basically uncompromising when it comes to loss,” Shephard announced, his words now running well ahead of his ability to think. “I mean there’s too much of it to even be an issue. You go to sleep, you get up. Morris Mumford is a helluva loss to me. But I’ll be damned, Theodore, if I was standing there again if I wouldn’t shoot him again, too. Maybe that’s the cactus talking. Maybe those are just words. Maybe that’s just a miracle brick Morris paid for and nobody’s ever gonna pick up.”

“You ain’t no reverend, Shephard. You’re just a scrawny cop with too much tequila in him. Pass that tequila, faggot.”

Shephard felt an overwhelming desire to do something, but the feeling passed.

“What happened to that sonofabitch shot your momma? Dead, ain’t he?”

“Yeah. Died in prison a while ago.”

“Well, don’t go gettin’ hard on yourself,” Theodore growled. “The world ain’t set up for doin’ decent. Look at it. Some dumbass kid takes a knife to a cop because the cop’s the closest thing he can hate. You shoot the kid so he don’t do the same to you. The newspapers make a buck sellin’ it, the lawyers get rich talking about it. And some pecker in office makes a committee to study the problem. Nobody gives a shit about Morris in the end, except maybe you. You’re probably the only one who’ll remember him twenty years from now.”

Shephard weighed this argument against another jolt of tequila, and found it wanting.

“He had a girl,” he said. “I saw her.”

“She’ll do better. So don’t worry it to death. The only people who do any good in the world are whores and bartenders. Don’t worry it. It don’t look good on you.”

“I guess we got off the topic.”

“We didn’t have no fuckin’ topic. Hang tight, little runt. You want me to break that feller’s arms, just gimme a call.”

Suddenly the roar of Little Theodore’s Harley burst across the night, pounding Shephard from a hundred inebriated angles, rattling his teeth. He pushed the starter and the LaVerda joined the outrage, a hoarse, low growl that spun higher and faster as he twisted the throttle. Theodore hurled the empty bottle into the darkness and his bike jerked ahead. They rode slowly through the lot, side by side past the billboard of Jesus and the children until they hit the boulevard and bellowed away in different directions.

Shephard returned to his denuded apartment early in the morning. Stripped to bare essentials, the place suggested beginnings or endings, but no present. And what is the present but an exit from the past and a waiting for the future, he wondered gloomily as he leaned over the toilet and gave up his tequila. Crossing the bathroom he caught his reflection, spectral and hollow, studying him from the mirror. “I’m starting over,” he mumbled.