T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

I gave him three twenties and a five. As the crisp folded bills passed between us, I felt we’d attained some sort of brotherhood, a moment of truth and accord, and I took advantage of it to ask the sergeant if he could possibly tell me when the prisoner might be released. His eyes were glass. Five fat fingers lay on the bills like dead things. When I saw that no answer was forthcoming, I wheeled round, irritated, and blundered into an officer dressed in the uniform of the California Highway Patrol, replete with mirror shades, Wehrmacht boots and outsized gunbelt.

“Oh — excuse me,” I gasped, regaining my balance and letting the final vowel trail off in a little bleat of urbane laughter meant not only to implicate him in a shared responsibility for our collision and the foibles of the human condition in general, but to assure him that it had been purely accidental and that, just as he would think no more of it, neither would I. I was grinning like an idiot. He was not grinning. The shades in fact seemed to draw his eyes together into a single horrific Cyclopean mask that rendered the rest of his face expressionless. He stood there a second, rocking back and forth on his heels, then tore off the sunglasses. “You,” he snarled.

“Me?” The smile had gone sick on my face. I recognized him in that instant, the guilt I’d felt on entering the station house infesting me like a cancer, my mind racing through the minuscule store of legal knowledge I’d accumulated under duress in the past, thinking moving violation, his word against mine, judicium parium aut leges terrae.

All for naught. He threw me against the wall in an explosion of shoulders and arms and began to shout in my face. “What in Christ’s name do you want here?” he spat, his voice breaking on the expletive. The room had gone silent. All the others — big, beefy local cops — looked up from their coffee and clipboards and took an involuntary step or two toward us, like a defensive backfield converging on the ball carrier.

I began to offer an explanation when my antagonist bellowed for me to shut up. His hands pressed my elbows to the wall. He was breathing hard, his upper lip was wet and his eyes shone with the fierce fanatical glow of righteousness one recognized in the eyes of Muslim zealots. A black plastic plate over his shirt pocket identified him as Officer Jerpbak.

There in the police station, up against the wall, physical harm and worse shouting me in the face, I found a moment to indulge myself in the luxury of philosophy, to acknowledge my debt to empiricism, causality and John Locke. A mere eight hours ago I’d been padding round the apartment in my bathrobe, listening to the rain and Stravinsky preparatory to turning in. All was right with the world. And then the Grail, in the form of half a million dollars, sashayed through the room and I ducked out into the rain, inserted the key in the ignition of my Toyota, welcomed the answering shriek of the enervated engine, and drove here, to Tahoe, where I had managed to make an enemy of the most desperate and lawless sort — a cop — simply because I’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Suddenly I felt indescribably weary. “Get your fucking hands off me,” I said.

Officer Jerpbak responded by spinning me around like an Indian club and slamming me back into the wall in the classic shakedown position. “Spread ’em,” he snarled, patting me down with all the finesse of a middleweight working out with the body bag. He gave elaborate consideration to the genital area, all the while breathing obscenities over my shoulder. “You fuck,” he whispered, his voice trembling at the breaking point. “You stupid-ass dildo motherfucker: you nearly killed me out there, you know that? Huh? Huh?” His breathing was furious, incendiary: I could hear the hardened snot rattling in his nostrils. All I wanted at that moment was to swell to Laestrygonian proportions and murder him, pound the other beefeaters to hamburger, set fire to the station house and go home to bed. Instead, I listened to the harsh jangle of handcuffs and relaxed under his grip.

“You know who was in that ambulance?” he demanded, leaning into me with one broad hand while he fumbled with the other for the cuffs. “Huh? Huh?” It was a quiz, that’s what it was. Twenty questions. Hit the jackpot and win two free tickets to the Martial Arts Exposition. “Merv Griffin, that’s who, shit-head. Merv Griffin.” There was reverence in his voice — he could have been naming the Pope’s mother or the winner of the Miss America Pageant — reverence, and outrage. “The man took twenty-two stitches in his thumb — he could of bled to death.” Suddenly he was shouting again. “You hear me? Huh? Huh?”

My hands were torn from the wall and forced behind me, there was the cold bite of the cuffs, the furious breathing, and then, just when things had begun to look grim, the soft restrained tones of a second voice, deus ex machina: “John, John, take it easy.” I looked over my shoulder. Officer Raab had joined us. He had a head the size of a beachball, crimson face, white hair. His voice was as soothing and softly modulated as a shrink’s. “John,” he repeated, “the man hasn’t done anything. He’s here to bail somebody out is all.”

Jerpbak wheeled round on him. “I don’t give a shit.” There was a whining edge to his voice, the young hothead reluctantly deferring to a higher authority, and I realized in that instant that Jerpbak was no older than I. It was a jolt. I could have submitted to a middle-aged cop — an Officer Raab or the mute desk sergeant — could have rationalized the father figure’s need to assert himself and all that, but with a coeval like Jerpbak the experience was humiliating, deeply shameful. A whole series of childhood episodes suddenly flooded my mind. I saw every physical confrontation in a flash, tallied up the wins and losses, counted the times I’d backed down, conjured the faces of the class bullies and extortionists as if they were snapshots in a riffled deck. No older than I. I jerked my neck at Officer Raab. “You don’t get these cuffs off in two seconds, I’ll sue everybody in this place for false arrest, and, and”—I was so wrought up I nearly sobbed the word—“brutality.”

Officer Raab had a soft puffy hand on Officer Jerpbak’s upper arm. They’d moved off a pace, and the older man was whispering in the younger’s ear like a lover. I watched Jerpbak: he looked like a cobra having his hood stroked. When I opened my mouth, Raab glanced at me as if I were a bit of offal — talking offal, something of a curiosity perhaps, but for all that worth no more than a cursory glance — and then moved off across the room and down a pitted corridor, Jerpbak in tow.

I was left standing in the middle of the room, hands manacled behind my back. Every cop in the place was staring at me. After a moment’s hesitation, a wizened little deputy crossed the room, released the cuffs and told me in a quiet voice to wait on the bench. I was exhausted, confused, furious. I eased down on the bench, breathing in gasps, adrenaline bubbling in my veins like grease in a deep fryer. Two minutes later I was snoring.

I was awakened by a pressure on my arm and a voice repeating my name. It was Phil. He looked as if he’d just emerged from the third tier of an opium den, his eyes drooping, shirt torn, hair wedged to one side of his head, and he was smiling the fragile smile of a man with a terminal headache. “Shit!” he said, breaking into a grin, and then he repeated himself six or seven times, alternating the exclamation and my name like a cheerleader trying to rouse a stand of lethargic fans. I blinked twice. There were pins and needles in my feet. All the fearsome G-forces of the spinning planet tugged at me as I rose wearily to exchange the backslapping hug we’d used in greeting ever since we saw Beau Geste together at the age of fourteen. “Kid,” I said. Then we stood there looking at each other for a moment, both of us grinning now, until Phil said he didn’t know what I was doing in Tahoe but that I couldn’t have come at a better time and did I happen to have another sixty-five dollars on me.