Ethan Chatagnier - Warnings from the Future

They roll out at 10 p.m. with the radio crackling. Whit tries to keep his mind on the LSAT study books hidden in the book bag at his feet. The messages coming through the speaker urge everyone to be careful, to exercise caution, but the whole night-shift fleet is swirling around the parking lot like a cloud of energized bees. In the hallways of the station, the mood had been somber, almost silent. It was amazing to see grown, armed men feel so vulnerable in the guarded hallways of their own station. But now that each pair is wrapped in a cruiser, some doing donuts or fishtailing out of figure eights, the lot is a rave of red and blue lights. The men roll past Whit and Vargas flashing three fingers in the air, expecting to see them flashed back. Whit does not lift his hand. Though he’s always had the tendency to be carved by the expectations of others, he won’t celebrate this. He remembers this mood. High school. Homecoming. The radio says stay safe out there , but the body politic says be aggressive , B-E aggressive .

Vargas rolls out plenty slow, the caboose of the train, steering with his elbows while he eats his nightly cup of chocolate pudding. He regards himself as some kind of sage or oracle, and Whit supposes anyone who’s been patrolling so long without being promoted out of it has to. He waxes his mustache, not with a hipster twirl but into a fat black slug that overfills the entire upper lip. Somehow he never gets his pudding in it, which does indeed feel like a mystical power. Vargas also thinks there’s power in moving slowly. Whit is not sure there’s power in anything the force does. But other times he thinks every one of his actions is a wasted act of power: resting a hand on a holster, speeding down an empty night street, or even stopping on a busy sidewalk to double-knot a loosened shoelace.

When the cars come out of the lot, they split left and right into two trails, and from there into smaller and smaller groups until finally he and Vargas are alone headed southwest on International. You can smell the canal and the marshy coastline a few blocks away. The smell travels farther at night, a stink of plant matter ripening in still water. A few blocks more and they’re in what Vargas calls Zombieland: weak, irregular streetlamps illuminating now and then the dead souls pushing shopping carts full of obsolete VCRs, or walking that slow junkie waltz with the whole body rocking. Then there are the groups, the gangs, three or four or five teens walking abreast in the street, enlarged by their oversize athletic apparel. If there’s a pipe being passed or a gun tucked in the back of a belt, or anything else citable, Vargas likes to startle them with the lights and siren and watch them scurry, he says, like bugs.

Whit’s foot nudges his satchel, heavy with two fat books of practice questions.

“You know what the people who live here call it?” he asks Vargas. This would have been a good retort if he’d said it months ago, when Vargas had first claimed the naming rights. He’s thought of the word often since, but not until tonight has it seemed important to point out. Vargas raises his eyebrows, waiting to be amused.

“Home,” he says.

“Not as catchy.”

They pass a bum toting an out-of-season Christmas tree over his shoulder, nearly dragging a soggy-hipped basset hound behind him; a ten-year-old weaving down the street on a bicycle with a basket full of groceries; a donut shop they both choose not to mention tonight, the only lit storefront on an avenue composed of security-gated laundries, vacuum repair shops, ethnic groceries, and massage brothels.

“Besides,” Vargas says, “you’re assuming their view from the inside is more accurate than ours from the outside. Those uncontacted tribes in the Amazon—you think they can see themselves more clearly than we can? You think you see yourself more clearly than I do? You think those law books say the same thing to me?”

Vargas has dropped hints before that he knew what was in Whit’s bag, but this is his first direct statement about it. Whit has broken new ground, perhaps, with his challenge to the Zombieland moniker. The exchange feels, in a sad way, like something that could pass for closeness.

“What do my books say?” he asks.

“My mother taught me about when you can’t say anything nice.”

At eleven thirty, they see a kid holding ground on a known corner. Vargas tells Whit to shake him up a bit and parks across the street, where he has a good line of sight.

“Be safe,” he calls as Whit gets out of the car. “Exercise caution.”

Whit walks over to the darkened corner: a minimart porched by a single concrete step, on which the kid stands, leaning back against the crosshatching of the door gate. He’s a teen, by his size, but more is hard to tell given the scrawny, loose-limbed body and the incongruous baby-fatted face. Whit shows his badge and says his name. The kid says nothing. Whit asks his name. He says it’s Gino.

“Isn’t that an Italian name?”

“Holoman,” Gino says. “Isn’t that kind of mayonnaise?”

Whit’s always been able to feel it when he blushes: a girlish warmth that hits the neck as much as the cheeks. He smirks through it. It was a good line. Whit wants to show the kid he can laugh at himself without giving away authority, that he’s not one of the brutes who’ll slam Gino’s head into a wall for a stray word. Someday Whit will need honest information, and this decency, this showing of humanity, will pay dividends. Though if his test prep course is worth its ridiculous sticker price, he might not be around to see it. But that damn blush—it flushes any authority down the toilet.

“You know how it works,” he tells Gino. The kid puts his hands against the wall. Whit pats him down: his ribs, his back, his moist armpits, the back and front of his belt, where they like to keep their guns, though corner kids get frisked enough they usually know better. His ankles, calves, knees, thighs. Whit pats the outsides of his oversize pockets. It can be hard to feel anything but pills in there—he’s missed things before, been razzed for it by the most asinine of street cops—so he reaches into Gino’s pockets to check for powders, weed, money, scraps of paper with phone numbers penciled on them. There’s nothing, as he expected. The stash will be hidden nearby. But he has to check, they say: if you don’t catch the dumb ones you won’t catch any. He brushes something soft through the fabric of the pocket, and his hand startles back.

“Buy me a drink first?” Gino says.

“A real comedian,” he says. He digs an elbow into the kid’s back, the way he remembers his own older brother doing when he pinned Whit down as a kid, an unbearable pressure against the ribs. But since there’s plenty of space between Gino and the wall, there’s too much give to cause him any discomfort.

“Shiatsu,” he says. “Hot stone.”

“Go home,” Whit tells him. Whatever lookout he might have has scooted off. “What kind of mother lets her kid out at this hour?” The kid does a little dance, snapping his fingers above his shoulders at Whit. Then he does a twirl and slides off.

Vargas chuckles as Whit climbs back into the cab, and Whit goes hot in the neck again. Vargas says he’ll tell the boys Whit tried. “But off the record,” he says, “you’ll never outclown a kid with no bank account. What they lack in material assets they make up in cheap irony. You can’t smooth talk them, kid. They only love the boot.” He sees the look Whit gives him, and offers back a mockery of his piety. “It’s not racist. I came up around here.”

Aimless driving. They take a call for a toddler having febrile seizures, and stand around in the wet night air while the paramedics do their thing. A noise complaint: lovers’ quarrel, a woman in a bathrobe holding a cheese grater like it’s a deadly weapon. No B&E from dispatch, though, no gunshots lodging in the studs of apartment walls, no carjackings. At 1:13 a.m. a howl comes in not from dispatch but from another black-and-white: responding to apparent burglary at Weston and Campbell, broken storefront glass, young black male seen nearby with a suspicious backpack. It doesn’t make sense: that intersection is just a bail bondsman and an electronics repair shop; why rob a place where everything is broken? At 1:18 another call comes through with a little more octane on it: shots fired at Campbell and Booth, officers unharmed, suspect down. Whit’s stomach lurches. And Vargas has that slow way about him, and his mouth half hidden by that baby-shit mustache, and Whit can’t tell at all what that expression means. Regret, amusement, resignation, righteousness? Is it giving him too much credit to say he sighs when he responds?