Jodi Compton - Sympathy Between Humans

But in the morning, Cheryl Anne and Erin noticed a few shards of glass my clumsy efforts had left behind. They also inspected the kitchen trash and found the broken remains of a champagne flute that had been a keepsake from Erin ’s sister’s wedding. They suggested it was time I found a place of my own.

I found a vacancy in a three-story rooming house. Kenny’s big truck would have made the move a lot easier, but he and I weren’t speaking much.

August broughtthe hottest days of summer, and the most humid. Everyone who didn’t have air-conditioning was out on the streets. My third-floor room was a very efficient trap for the heat, so when the weekend came around, I also planned to spend as much time away from home as possible. The bar was air-conditioned, and after a certain hour, the bartenders were too busy to notice someone underage in the corner.

One Sunday morning, I woke up in a holding cell, with a pounding headache. When the jailer came down, it was Kenny.

“What’d I do?” I asked.

“If you don’t remember,” he said, “why should I tell you?”

Half a dozen possibilities ran though my mind, none of them good. I thought of Wayne and his broken nose. I thought of the beautiful deep-gray Nova I’d just bought and told myself I’d never drive drunk. Please God, not a hit-and-run.

Kenny relented. “You didn’t do much of anything,” he said. “Just drunk and disorderly in public.”

“Okay,” I said, sitting on the bench with my hands dangling loosely between my knees. “I get a phone call, right?”

I was thinking I’d have to call a bail bondsman. Who else was there? Silva? The shambling old man across the hall from me at the rooming house, who smelled of layers of cigarette smoke and whose last name I’d never learned? Kenny was my closest friend, and clearly there was no help coming from that quarter.

“You’d get one phone call if you’d been arrested,” he said. “I didn’t arrest you last night. You’re not officially here.”

“What?” I said.

“I brought you in here to sober up and think a little.”

I should have been grateful, but instead I just got angry. I stood up, and immediately my blood pressure rose, making my head throb. “You think I want favors from you?” I said. I held out my hands as if for handcuffs. “If I did something wrong, arrest me. If I didn’t, then let me out.”

Kenny shook his head.

“No, arrest me if you think I deserve it. Then at least I can call someone, make bail, and get out.”

But Kenny shook his head again. “I don’t want to do that today for the same reason I didn’t last night,” he said. “I don’t want you to have an arrest on your record, because it could hurt your chances.”

“Chances for what?”

“For being a cop,” Kenny said.

I let my hands fall. If he had said, For the space program, I couldn’t have been more surprised. My voice, when I spoke, was faint. “Are you kidding?” I said.

“You’re too smart to be a miner and too mean to be a college girl,” Kenny told me. “You’ve got a lot of energy and it’s all going nowhere. You need a job you can pour it into.”

“You’re not serious,” I said. “They don’t need people here, anyway. There probably isn’t even a vacancy in the every-other-weekend citizen’s reserve program that you do.”

“No, there isn’t,” Kenny said. “But they’re always looking for good people down in the Cities.”

“You’re serious,” I said.

“Yes,” Kenny said.

For a moment I didn’t even feel the ache in my temples. Kenny thought I could be someone like him, and this amazing realization made all my anger drain away. He was wrong, of course.

“Listen, Kenny,” I said, “thanks, but I’m not cut out for it.”

“How do you know?” he asked.

“I just do. You’re reading me all wrong.” After another moment I said, “Really, I’m sorry.”

When he saw I meant it, Kenny fished for his keys.

Weeks passedand September came. Kenny had gone back to his work, patrolling the mines during the week and the streets and jail on the weekend. I went back to what I did best, drinking on the weekend nights.

Around 3 A.M., after a typical Saturday night, I was in a familiar position: kneeling over the toilet bowl. When you throw up on a fairly regular basis, you lose your distaste for it. Afterward, I wiped the corner of my mouth with my hand, swaying slightly on my knees, feeling the dampness of unhealthy sweat on the nape of my neck, grateful for the cool night air from the open sash window. I’d just brushed my teeth and was splashing water on my face, when outside the window, a woman screamed.

I froze, completely still except for the water droplets crawling on my face, and then I went to the window.

“Hey!” I yelled. “Is someone out there?”

The bathroom window looked out onto a grassy slope, which led up to the railroad tracks. It was dark there, except far to my right, where I could see the signal lights on the tracks.

“Hey!” I yelled again. There was no response.

“Goddammit,” I said, fumbling for my towel. I wanted to hear drunken tittering, or a sour voice saying, Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. I wanted to feel irritated. It was preferable to feeling worried about someone in the dark who’d screamed and now wasn’t answering.

Back in my room, I undressed and pulled back the bedcovers, instructing myself to forget about it. I told myself that animal noises could trick you sometimes. Like bobcats, for example; they sounded a lot like women screaming. Or barred owls.

It wasn’t any bobcat. It wasn’t any owl.

If anyone was out there, and really was in trouble, they’d have screamed again. They’d have answered when I called.

You don’t know that.

For God’s sake, what help would I be? I was still half drunk. Surely someone else, nearer, had heard it as well. Someone else would look into it.

You can’t be sure of that. You don’t know that anyone else heard. You only know that you heard.

“Son of a bitch,” I said tiredly, and started looking for sturdier clothes to wear than the ones I’d worn drinking.

My only weapon back then was a Maglite, but it was beautiful, four D-cells long with a body of anodized cherry-colored metal. As I went up the slope behind the house, still a little unsteady on my feet, I swung it in arcs, illuminating the brush and shadows. “Is anyone out here?”

When I’d finished searching behind the house, I doubled back. The scream might have come from the front of the house, a trick of acoustics bouncing the sound waves off the slope and back toward the bathroom window. I retraced my steps down the slope and went out into the street. Walking toward town, I shined my light low onto lawns and into front entryways, careful to avoid the darkened windows beyond which people slept. Then, as I got into town, I found myself looking into alleyways and at the front steps of businesses. Nothing. There was no sign of any trouble, and the streets were quiet as a movie set by night.

I ended up standing in the town square, completely sober and totally alone in the center of town. The night was nearly gone. Dawn would come in an hour.

Kenny wasdressed for church, in a coat and tie, with his hair slicked down, when I knocked on his door at seven-thirty in the morning. He took in the sight of me at his door, Maglite still in hand, with a mildly quizzical expression.

“I think I want to be a cop,” I said.

“I don’t see a case here,”Kilander said.