Adam Johnson - Emporium

I see Sam moving under the carpet and watch him slowly cross our living room. He’s a Mexican boa, five foot, that I inherited from the zoo one night. There’s a hole in the carpet behind the couch where he gets in, and in the summer heat, he roams the whole house, a prowling shape between the cool padding and shag. The other pets are unsure of him, including my Dalmatian, Toby, so things work out. Sam runs into the side of Mac, who doesn’t move, who’s gotten used to this dark-roaming shape. Sam is also indifferent to what might be out there; he turns and swims off toward the television set, where Ponch and John now appear in a five-lane freeway. With their white bikes and round helmets, they are like bowling pins, a seven-ten split. “You think that’s really them riding those bikes?” I ask.

Mac knows how I feel about this show. He doesn’t even take his eyes off the screen. “I want my shoes back.”

“Those bikes have never even taken a real turn. There aren’t even scratches on the footpegs, and those sidecovers are spotless. They’ve never been down.”

“They catch a lot of bad guys,” he says.

“They catch old movie stars, has-beens.”

“At least they’re out there riding,” he says, “and not code nine at home.”

I try not to escalate this, especially over a show Mac usually says is for “dildoes,” a term whose meaning, at nine years old, he seems sure of. “What makes you an expert on code nine?” I ask him.

He turns back to me for the first time, a little too proud that I can now see he has picked up yet another black eye from somewhere. “You,” he says with enough drama to make me think he’s heard the term somewhere and assumes it means more than merely off duty.

I try not to be coplike about all this. I watch Ponch and John pull over a limo with a Jacuzzi full of bikini-clad women. The girls bounce and throw handfuls of bubbles on Eric Estrada, who feigns a mock defense, and I tell you I’m really trying.

“Come on,” I say. “Let’s cut that hair.”

“For the shoes.”

It’s dangerous to give him too much leverage here. “One day. No more, okay?”

“Affirmative,” Mac says. “Roger that.”

Aff-erm-tive , I hear from the kitchen. It took me a year to teach that bird to say that. But you can’t unteach them once they’ve learned.

In the kitchen I grab Sue’s veterinary shears and open a pack of hot dogs she’s left on the counter to thaw. Taped to all the cabinets are her anatomy lists and dosage scales. On the fridge hangs a chart of the parasitic cycle. I snap off a half-frozen hot dog and crunch on it while I wonder how much animal science Mac has picked up the last four years I was on night patrol. Only now, as a rent-a-cop, do I think about how many times he’s reached for the cereal, the bowl, the milk, and read the secrets of animal husbandry. Slowly, unknowingly, he must have picked it up.

When he comes in the kitchen I get my first good look at the shiner, a deep purple-brown that swoops and fans out to his cheekbone. He doesn’t say anything about it and neither do I, which is our version of life after the bomb. The first black eye was last year, and he learned the worst possible lesson in the world for an eight-year-old: it didn’t hurt nearly as bad as he’d expected. Next time, I knew, he would punch first. The boy’s been punished, rewarded, tested, and medicated, and here we are, postbomb, as Sue says, stealing our son’s shoes.

We had long ago made a deal, and it was supposed to go like this: she’d do most of the child-raising work while I made it through the academy and the first three years on Traffic, then I’d watch Mac while she made it through vet school. Well, Mac is nine now, Sue’s exams are here, and I am no longer a cop. I am no longer the same kind of father that once thought Mac was a good name for a boy, who used to describe motor-throwing car crashes to his son over dinner each night, who referred to hurt people as occupants and ejections and incidentals.

He snaps one of the cold hot dogs off the pack and sticks it in his mouth like a cigar. Though chewing frozen hot dogs on hot days is a habit he inherited from me, I am confronted with a portrait of him in what seems to be his natural state: bored, bruised, and sullenly indifferent to anything an afternoon with me might bring. I take a breath, open the door, and step out into the summer heat.

Out back, I set him on a stool so he can watch his haircut through the dog slobber and paw prints on the sliding glass door. I hook up Sue’s grooming shears and then stand behind him, a sweating father and his black-eyed son reflected in a patio door. He is too large for his age, with bully sized shoulders and thick hands that already have a hunch about how to get their way.

“I hear there’s been some trouble in the neighborhood,” I say and flip on the shears.

He simply shrugs and bends his head forward, chin to chest, waiting for me to start. I palm the curve of his head and roll it side to side as I run the buzzer up the back of his neck. Toby trots up with the desert tortoise in his mouth, an object he carries everywhere, and he shows it to Mac and me as he eyes first the buzzer and then the half a hot dog in Mac’s hand. The tortoise has long since resigned itself to this fate and even lets his legs hang out, which serve to funnel the slobber.

“Mom says you’ve been telling the kids I’m back on the force.” I say this and I’m suddenly unsure if I’m going about this the right way, but his head feels loose and pliant in my hand, the hair soft and short like when he was young.

“So.”

“So, is this true?”

“Mom told me you didn’t turn in your badge. She says you can go back anytime you want.” As easily as he spoke, he waves the hot dog back and forth before Toby, who sways and drools but can’t figure a way to eat without letting go of the tortoise.

“You know that’s not true.”

He shrugs.

I spin his head halfway round, so he can see me out the sides of his eyes. “I’m not going back there, so it doesn’t matter. You listening to me? Believe me on this. That’s over.” But even as I say this I see he’s messing with the dog. He’s shaking Toby by the nose, pinching the nostrils so its cheeks puff out around the tortoise. “Let go of the dog.”

He does this and then I let go of Mac’s head, which rolls back down to his chest.

“Brad’s dog. You can hit it with a brick and it won’t even blink.”

“I’m serious. I’m not going back on the force. You hit a dog with a brick?”

“I’m just sayin’,” he says and scratches the dusting of stubble on his arm.

“Did you?”

“What?”

“Throw a brick.”

“Mom says you’re lazy, says you want to be code nine.”

Code nine, he says and I can feel his lip curl, sense the slouching indifference of his shoulders, and suddenly I don’t want to keep shaving him. Suddenly, I can see him in a not-too-distant future, a tattoo on his arm, an earring maybe, wearing a black concert shirt with a wallet on a chain, and I don’t even want to touch him, because for a moment I know this kid. I have arrested him a hundred times.

I flip off the buzzer and tell him to go hose off.

“What about my hair?” he asks, but it is not a question. “This sucks.”

“Hose, now, ” is all I can say as I point him away, toward the hose and the algae-green dog pool beyond.

* * *

You’d be surprised how many animals get killed at a zoo. We cull old ones, young ones, sick ones, extra ones. I cull them. Yesterday I spent most of the night scooping baby scorpions out of Desert Dwellers. They’d gotten out of their glass enclosure through the vent tube and were all over the atrium. I used a fishnet to scoop them up and drop them into a bucket of water, where they sank like dull pennies. The night before that, I fished all the newly hatched alligators out of Reptile Land with a long-handled pool skimmer. I dumped them in a feed tub and then placed it in the big cat meat locker till they were hard as tent stakes. I cull the overbred carp and the pigeons that swoop in from the capitol. I’m the one who harvests the ostrich eggs, and unless you’ve entered a dark pen of nine-foot birds, armed only with a pole and a flashlight, to try to take their eggs, you don’t know what I’m talking about. An ostrich can put a man’s ribs out his back, which is something I’ve seen, though not from a bird. Last week I shot a tiger.