Adam Johnson - Emporium

Before I can realize what a minute of wandering thoughts will cost me, I am held fixed for a moment, mesmerized, because nearly all the people I care about in the world are out there tonight, including my son, Mac. I stand, mouth open, held, until I come to my senses, until I remember the dog and my finger feels for the semiauto’s safety. The way you shoot a tiger is the way you stick your head into the smoking cab of a Traffic rollover. It’s the way you kick down a tenement door or pull the covers to shine your Maglight on the sheets of a rape scene. You just take that breath and go. It’s how you drive your son home from school after he’s broken another boy’s fingers, three of them, for no reason, he says. It’s how you keep from thinking what it means to have this dog’s piddle on your worn-out cop shoes. You just take that breath. You go.

* * *

The next day, Woco and his new girlfriend, Tina, show up in the late afternoon to barbecue. I have already hosed down the patio furniture and stoked up the grill, and it is still hot enough out that the smoke doesn’t want to rise. Sue is silent as she chops vegetables. She has been in the library all day and still has that fluorescent glow on her skin. The neighbor has informed her that Mac’s eye is the result of his “arresting” and “detaining” two of the younger boys down the street, and coming home to the news we’re having company is yet another ambush in her eyes. She could care less about my plan, she says as she goes at the carrots, whacking them down. She hasn’t shaved her legs in a week, she adds. In the midst of all this is Mac, standing on a kitchen chair repeating mumbled words over and over to the African gray parrot. About his hair, Sue won’t even speak.

So it is with caution that I answer the door when they arrive. Woco does a finger quick draw as he comes through the threshold and Mac spins and drops to the kitchen floor. Sue shoots Woco a wicked glance over the salad spinner as I watch my son jump up and smile after his near-death experience.

“Look at that hair,” Woco says, his voice booming through the kitchen. “No wonder the kid’s got a shiner with a haircut like that. What’s next, you gonna make him wear a dress?” But even this gesture seems forced, and Mac doesn’t quite buy it.

In the backyard, I put on hot dogs and pass out beers. We sit around a picnic table in the shocking heat, Sue leaning against a post with her feet in my lap and Tina massaging Woco’s shoulder. It could be pleasant, this scene, but after the initial greetings are over, uneasiness settles. Sue takes soft pulls off her beer. Tina feigns interest in the empty yard behind me.

Woco opens his mouth a few times, but always pauses and thinks better of it. He is unsure these days of what’s safe to talk about, and without news of holdups or hit-and-runs, there is little to say and we are silent. These are the dangerous moments in my life lately. As the hot dogs sizzle and our eyes float around the yard it seems we’re all wondering how many more of these fumbling evenings we have left in us, how long before we’re all at a loss. On the force, there were two levels of response to things: one and ten. It was either a polite are you aware this is a school zone? or you were reaching for the thumb break on your holster. On the force there were no in-betweens. What I have learned in the past year, since the time my son first felt a finger break in his hand, is that life on one is the harder of the two.

Sue finally breaks the silence. “Are you going to tell him?”

Woco smiles and looks from her to me and back. “What?”

“Go get the paper plates,” she says to Mac.

He just rubs the shaved back of his head. “What for?”

“Kitchen. Counter,” she says and glares at him until he’s inside and the door is shut. She leans back again and speaks to the porch roof, not quite bitter, but more or less resigned. “He’s got a plan. He thinks if he gives you all his old uniforms in front of Mac, it will solve everything. He’s got them dry-cleaned, in the hall closet, ready to go. His big plan. Uniforms.”

Woco looks to me for confirmation. Listening to Sue describe the scene I can see it for the foolish notion it is. The grand symbolic act, she’ll be calling it, his solution to the bomb. I shake my head at Woco.

“What can hurt at this point?” I ask him. “I mean, it’s worth a shot.”

“Worth a shot,” Sue mutters to the roof.

Tina speaks. She hooks her hand around Woco’s neck and takes a drink off his beer. “What’s this all about?”

Woco pats her leg under the table. “Kid’s got growing pains.”

“It’s more than growing pains,” I say as Mac comes out the door eating a carrot. He walks with the other hand on his belt buckle like it’s a light he’s shining in your eyes, a habit picked up from me. Orange mouthed, he’s grinning, so I know something’s up. I watch him all the way to the bench, where he tosses the paper plates, face down.

Inside we hear the parrot screech twice. Then it says, “Code — nine.” What was Mac’s silly phrase yesterday now has me by the collarbones, a sudden anxiety that stuns me until I realize the parrot has the perfect scratchiness of a radio dispatcher. Code nine, the parrot repeats and a knowing smile comes across Mac’s face so obscene it scares the shit out of me. I watch him silently mouth fuck yeah.

I feel myself moving toward ten. “Did you teach that bird to say that?”

Mac blankly chews his carrot.

“It’s going to say that forever. Do you know that?” All of us are watching now, and suddenly it’s not so easy for him to smile. His face is bunching up, getting flustered, and I want this. I want to get through to him. I want him to stand in the hot glow of ten. “Forever. Did you think about that?”

“Okay,” Sue says, “enough.”

“Answer me,” I say. “Answer.”

But then something strange happens. There is a splash in the dog pool, a sharp plunk. Something bounces off the barbecue, sending sparks out the dome. Then I see it, a short hail of rocks sailing in from the alley. There is the crunching of feet in the alleyway and the stones bounce off the roof and skitter onto the porch as a group of kids yells and taunts Mac.

Mac is moving across the yard before I know it. With one high step and a leap, he’s over a six-foot fence and all I have of him are streaks of pumping arms through fence slats as he begins his pursuit. Sue shakes her head like I should get up to follow, but I don’t. I will not chase my son like a fugitive down our alley.

“So much for the grand solution,” she says.

We sit there in the quiet, looking at each other through the smoke of burned hot dogs, listening to the sounds of disappearing feet. On the force things would be easy. On the force I would know what to do. But now, there is no procedure, and I can only close my eyes and try not to think.

After a while he appears, breathless through the side gate. His ribs are heaving, his feet a throbbing mess. “I need my shoes,” he declares and then puts his hands on his knees, breathing deep. “I need shoes.” Sue glares at me.

* * *

At the zoo a yellow Post-it waits on the guard shack. I don’t look forward to these notes, to the extra duties Mr. Bern has waiting, but it’s best to just plow onward and get it over. Though tonight I pull up short. Mac is in my thoughts, has been since he pedaled down the drive at sunset, and as I picture him weaving off into the dark neighborhood, I can’t help feeling a connection between my son and a distant note I can’t quite read, though I know what news it will bring.

It’s foolish, I know, standing here in the parking lot, afraid of a note. For the first time I think I’d rather Mr. Bern told me in person the animals I was to cull, that one night he’d follow me around to see what it takes to make these notes good. But, like I said, he’s weary of me, and it was only because Sue’s veterinary professors put in a good word that I was hired at all. When people find out you used to be a cop, you can see the options run in their eyes: couldn’t hack it, not good enough, crooked. Or worse, they imagine some tragic life-and-death scene that makes you quit, that changes a guy forever. The stray bullet that hits a tourist. The kid with a toy pistol. People never pause to think that such scenes can stop being tragedies after a while.