April Smith - North of Montana

“Well, it didn’t. I live right.”

My arms are folded and my legs stuck out in front of me. Defiant now. Catch me if you can.

“I’m glad you’re taking this lightly, Ana.”

“I don’t take anything lightly that has to do with my job, but I think, with respect, Duane, you’re overstating the situation.”

“I don’t. You showed poor judgment. That’s my assessment.”

His use of the words “judgment” and “assessment” just about causes my heart to stop. “Judgment” is one of the categories of our semiannual performance appraisals. If he gives me poor marks in judgment, it will derail my progress in the Bureau for years.

I know what I have to do and it is as onerous and revolting as if he were actually instead of symbolically forcing me to suck his dick.

“Message received. Next time I’ll call it in.”

“No, Ana, I’m afraid ‘sorry’ doesn’t cut it.”

“I didn’t say I was sorry. I said, Next time I will call it in.”

Duane gives me a real serious look. Serious and sober, Big Daddy concerned for my best interests.

“I see you’ve applied for transfer to the C-1 squad.”

“Correct.”

“Ana, you know I believe in full disclosure …”

I can’t wait to tell Barbara that one.

“… so I want to let you know up front that I’m going to attach an addendum to your request.”

“What kind of an addendum?”

“I’m going to say that in my opinion as your immediate supervisor you have demonstrated poor judgment and are not ready for transfer. We need to keep you close to home a little bit longer.”

By now my entire body is stiff with icy cold. I can hardly bend my knees. I wonder if moving slowly like this, taking my time to stand up, makes me seem unaffected and casual.

“You can’t make that call.”

“I know. It’s up to Special Agent in Charge Galloway.”

“And his decision remains to be seen.”

Duane nods almost warmly. “It remains to be seen.”

I walk past the message center, collect two messages from Mrs. Gutiérrez, and continue to my desk, although the lights in the bullpen seem awfully dim and in fact there is darkness on both sides of my vision so the world narrows to what I can see directly in front of me which turns out to be my telephone, which I try repeatedly to rip out from the floor connection with both hands and although it’s screwed in there tight I do manage to pop the cable from its staples all along the floorboard so that it has enough play to finally enable me to pick up the telephone and hurtle it against the wall.

Arms are around me and the smell of a man’s starched shirt and suddenly I am on the stairwell with my face up against the cinder block, hands pinned behind my back.

My nose is bending. I am hyperventilating.

My hands are released. I stand still. My shoulders ache from being twisted and wrenched.

“Are you sober now?”

I nod, still facing the wall. When there is no further action from behind I turn and slump down on the metal stairs. Donnato sits next to me.

“I hope I’m the only one who witnessed that little display.”

I brush my nose with my sleeve. It is scratched and bleeding. Doesn’t feel broken.

“Sorry. I had to get you out of there. Didn’t know if you were armed.”

“Armed,” I echo hoarsely, as if an assault rifle could have stopped that sweeping awful wave of darkness.

“I knew when he beeped you at the bank that Carter was get ting cute. He’s spent most of his career walking over bodies. Yours isn’t any different. Don’t take it so goddamn personally.”

I lean over and put my head in my hands. I want desperately to disappear. To be that small being in a dark place, inconsequential and alone.

“Talk to me,” he says, so gently that a tear actually leaks from my eye.

I shake my head silently. I don’t understand these overpowering, nameless sensations. I can’t seem to get control of my voice.

Someone passes us. I turn my face away. Donnato calls out very brightly, “How’re ya doin’?” and the person continues to clatter down the stairs.

“Seven-year burnout,” he says when they are gone.

“Is that what it is?”

“Unless you’re psycho and been hiding it from me all these years.”

A crooked smile: “Been trying.”

“This is a new Ana Grey. What’s going on?”

I can’t describe it. “Pressure.”

“I can dig that. Let me buy you a drink.”

I am deeply ashamed of having behaved like an asshole and certainly don’t want to sit around and dwell on it. If I weren’t fixated on the searing humiliation of having lost control, I might have heard the tenderness in Donnato’s voice.

“Thanks but it’s better if I work out in the pool.”

“You’re too good.”

“Hey, I’m perfect.”

“You try to be. That’s why you’re throwing phones against the wall.”

We are moving back toward the doorway of the stairwell. My body feels like it has been run over by a truck.

“It’s not just Carter.” Struggling to put a label on it: “There’s some weird stuff that came up that might involve my family.”

“I hope your grandfather is okay.”

“Him? Healthy as a horse and knocking the hell out of golf balls in Palm Desert.” It makes me feel brighter to think of Poppy in his yellow Bermuda shorts out there at seven in the morning with the other old farts — a foursome of retired policemen if you can picture that, cursing and telling racist jokes all the way down the fairway — embraced by the baking heat of the rising desert sun and the infantile pleasure of their unbroken routine.

“Poppy’s got it wrapped,” I tell Donnato. “No, it’s these other people.”

“Relatives.” Donnato shakes his head. “Take ’em to Disneyland.”

The wonderful simplicity of that idea makes me laugh.

“Okay now?”

I nod.

“Can you take care of it?”

“Sure.”

Donnato squeezes my arm. “Good triceps.” That wry, affectionate look. “Go swimming. See you tomorrow.”

When I duck inside to grab my bag I notice the Bank Dick’s Undercover Disguise embracing the phone in a tangled heap on the floor, the empty hanger still rocking above it.

A FEW DAYS later I slip into my car with the intention of returning a humidifier. I hadn’t been too precise about changing the water so it stopped working last winter and rotted in the bedroom all spring. When I finally dumped the tank out sometime around Halloween it was evident that new life forms had sprouted inside. The store where I bought it guarantees a “lifetime warranty” so you can keep bringing in the old fishy-smelling one and exchanging it for a brand-new one, no questions asked, for the rest of your life. I know, because I already pulled this stunt last year, when the original humidifier dried up and died.

Somehow despite the excellent intention of running over to Century City and back during my lunch break, I am still sitting here in the G-ride without having turned on the engine. I have found the Bible that belonged to Violeta Alvarado thrown on the passenger seat along with a ton of papers and law books and am looking through it, suddenly disoriented in the middle of the parking lot of the Federal Building.

Slowly removing the crossed rubber bands with the same care as Mrs. Gutiérrez, I run my finger down the dense type printed in Spanish on delicate tissuey pages and look through the faded snapshots again, stopping at the one of Violeta’s mother holding a baby. Behind them the landscape is gray green, scrubby and heartless.

I have never been to the tropics. I cannot know what life is for that woman and that baby. My past begins and ends with my grandfather — his California boyhood, his own mother’s trek across this country from Kansas, his devotion to the moral duties of police work in the expansive fifties, have formed my sense of myself as a full-blooded optimistic American and, growing up, there was never any reason to question any of it.