All American Boys (22 page)

If you're wondering if I had been having nightmares, y'know, about that day, the answer is, no. I hadn't been. Not until Wednesday. Actually, it started Tuesday night after my friends and family left my room, and I decided to finally read Chief Killabrew's card. I couldn't figure out if he had inserted the creed as some kind of reminder to me that if I'm guilty to fess up, and that I was expected to never lie and steal, or what. Maybe he really was trying to encourage me. Maybe he was saying that because I was a cadet, there was no way I could be guilty. I don't know. I just know that it rubbed me in a weird way, because ROTC, especially to people like my dad, was the first step to the military, and ultimately into law enforcement. I mean, for all I knew, Galluzzo could've been in ROTC when he was my age. Was he “the future of America”? Was he upholding “the American way of life”? I guess it depends on who you ask. Maybe. And maybe it was these thoughts rattling around my head that sparked the nightmare.

I was back in Jerry's, but in the dream, the chips were located in the drink fridge. So I'm standing at the refrigerator staring through the glass, when I hear a voice coming from behind me.

“I know what you're doing,” the voice said.

For some reason, I didn't turn around. I just looked into the glass to see the reflection of whoever was there. And it
was him. Officer Galluzzo, like Goliath standing with his hand already on his weapon, sizing me up.

“I ain't doing nothing,” I said, still facing the glass.

“I know what you're doing,” he repeated, taking a step closer, the sound of his boots thumping on the vinyl floor. I knew I should've turned around, but I couldn't. I was frozen. But I could still see him through the glass, his mirrored image becoming clearer as he got closer and closer. Then I adjusted my eyes to see my own reflection, my own face. But I couldn't. I mean, my face was there, but . . . it wasn't. There were no eyes. No nose or mouth. Just blank brown skin.

And that's when I woke up, my heart pounding, my throat scratchy and dry. The dream seemed to last five minutes, but it had actually been hours, and it was now Wednesday morning. I reached over to the food tray beside my bed for the leftover cranberry juice from dinner the night before. In hospitals, juice comes in the same kind of cups as fruit cocktails and applesauce, the ones where you have to peel back the foil. Damn things are hard to open. My hands, for some weird reason, were weak, wouldn't work right. Maybe it was the dream. Maybe it was everything that was going on—the reality. Whatever it was, I struggled to pull the aluminum seal back far enough to take a sip of juice. And I
needed
it. My throat felt like I had eaten my blanket.

I pulled and peeled, until finally the stupid foil snapped
away from the plastic and cranberry juice spilled all over the place. Of course.

I snatched the wet sheet back. There was still some juice left, so I decided to get what I could. Right when I took a sip, there was a knock on my door. Now, I know it was probably just a regular knock, but at that moment it sounded like a bang, and I was so jittery that I spilled whatever was left of the juice on myself.

“Shit,” I grumbled.

“Watch your mouth.” My father was pushing the door open. He poked his head in—a strange thing that everyone does at the hospital for some reason—before entering.

“Good morning,” he said, eyeing me as I dabbed juice into my gown, the burgundy blotches on my chest and stomach looking like blood.

“Hey,” I said. “What time is it?”

“Just about seven.”

“Why are you here so early?”

Dad closed the door behind him and came to the foot of the bed. “Wanted to catch you before I went to work. See how you were doing?”

“Oh,” I said, kinda shocked. “I'm okay. How 'bout you? Ma told me you were sick.”

“Yeah. Something didn't agree with my system. But I'm fine.” He sat on the edge of the bed, which was different for
him. Usually he sat in a chair on the other side of the room—as far away from me as possible.

“Cool.” I wasn't really sure what else to say.

Dad sat there staring at the side table where my phone and the spirometer were.

“Listen, I, uh . . . ,” he started. “I want to tell you a story. When I was a cop—” Pause.

Here's the thing. My father has three different ways to start a parental sermon about a whole bunch of
I don't want to hear it
.

1. 
When I was your age:
always about how he was doing way more than I am when he was in high school. Let him tell it, he put the principal in detention.

2. 
When I was in the army:
always came whenever I was tired. It didn't matter what I was tired from. If I showed any signs of exhaustion, he would hit me with how when he was in the army he wasn't allowed to be tired, and that if he even yawned they made him drop down and give them a thousand push-ups.

3. 
When I was a cop:
always came whenever he was either defending cops or insulting teenagers.

“When I was a cop,” he started. He reached up and loosened his navy-blue tie. Then he hiked his khaki pants up, just
enough to show his tan socks, peppered with dark-brown diamonds. Office clothes are as boring as offices. Anyway, I braced myself and prepared to ignore whatever was coming.

“One time,” he began, “I got a call that there were a few guys making a bunch of noise in the middle of the night, over on the East Side. You know how it is over there. Nine o'clock, that whole neighborhood shuts down. Now I was used to these quick runs. You drive up, hit your lights and your siren, and if the kids don't take off running, you just roll down the window and tell them to keep it moving. Never really a big deal.” My father was still staring at the spirometer. As if he was talking to
it
, as if I wasn't in the room. “So my partner and I answer the call and head on over. When we pull up, there's a white kid in tight black jeans and a sweater and this black kid going for it. A backpack was upside down on the side of the curb, and these two were just throwing down, scrapping. The black kid was dressed like . . .” He looked at me, finally. “Dressed like your brother. Hair all over his head. A hoodie. Boots. His pants were damn near all the way down. And he was mopping this boy. My partner and I jumped out of the car and approached them, and before we could even give them a chance to stop fighting, I ran over and jacked the black boy up because I knew he was in the wrong. I just knew it. I mean, you should've seen how he was pummeling this kid. And he fought me back, telling me that I had it wrong.
He slipped right from my grip and ran for the backpack. I pulled my gun. Told him to leave it. He kept yelling, ‘I didn't do anything! I didn't do anything! He's the criminal!' But now he's wheezing, like he was having a hard time speaking. Then he grabbed the backpack. By now, my partner's got the white kid. I tell the black dude to leave the bag and put his hands up. But he doesn't, and instead opens it. Puts his hand inside. And before he could pull it out, I pulled the trigger.”

Holy shit!

“What!” I yelped. I had never heard this story, and I thought I had heard all the stories. I heard all the ones about the people he saved—the woman who had been beaten by her husband; the high-speed chase of a bank robber, who Dad eventually caught after running him off the road, movie-style. I had heard all the stories about how Dad had been shot at. And definitely the one about how he had been shot. I saw the bullet wound in his chest every morning when he got out of the shower, like a tiny crater or a third nipple, a symbol of near death. But I had never, ever,
EVER
heard this one.

Dad's Adam's apple rolled down his throat, then back up. Then he continued. “He was reaching for his inhaler. Turns out, he lived in that neighborhood and was walking home late, when the white kid tried to rob
him
. He was trying to fight the kid off, and when we showed up, his adrenaline went so high that he couldn't breathe. Asthma attack. So he had to
get to his inhaler, but he was having a hard time telling me that. I just assumed he . . .”

“Wait. Wait . . .” I put my hand up, pushing the words back into my father's mouth. If there was ever a time that I needed, for once, to control a conversation with him, it was now. I only had one question. “Did you kill him?”

“No.” Dad teethed his top lip. “But I paralyzed him from the waist down.”

I just sat there, dumbfounded. My dad,
my dad
, had paralyzed an unarmed kid, a black kid, and I had had no idea. My dad shot a kid. I mean, to me, my father was the model of discipline and courage. Sure, he was stern, and sometimes judgmental, but I always felt like he
meant
well. But to that kid—and now my head was reeling—to that kid, my dad was no different than Officer Galluzzo. Another trigger-happy cop who was quick to assume and even quicker to shoot.

My father filled in the silence my lack of verbal response had created.

“You know, you were still very young, but Spoony remembers it all. The news. The drama. I'm not proud of it. It'll never stop haunting me, and I think it messes with your brother still too.”

“It probably messes with that boy's—what's his name?” I asked, hard.

“Darnell Shackleford,” he rattled off. It was clearly a name he couldn't forget.

“It probably still messes with Darnell and his family too.”

“Right.” Dad nodded, sadly. “Thing is, I had been in so many other situations where things had gotten crazy. A hand goes in a pocket and out comes a pistol or a blade. And all I could think about was making it home to you, Spoony, and your mother. It's a hard job, a
really
hard job, and you could never understand that. You could never know what it's like to kiss your family good-bye in the morning, knowing you could get a call over your radio that could end your life.”

I could hear the struggle in his voice. Like, he really wanted me to understand this, and part of me did. Part of me could even appreciate knowing he thought of us every time he left the house. But still. “Then why did you choose to be a cop?”

“Believe it or not, I wanted to do some good. I really did. But then I realized after a while that most of the time, I was walking into situations expecting to find a certain kind of criminal. I was looking for . . .”

“For me?”

Dad reached over and picked up the spirometer and started inspecting it from every angle. He couldn't say it, and instead just finished the story. “So I quit the force.” He took a deep breath, and I got the feeling that he felt both relieved and ashamed that he had gotten that off his chest.
“Look, all I'm trying to say is that not all cops are bad.”

“I know that.” I hadn't even noticed—mainly because of my nervousness—that the foil from the juice cup, I had taken it and rolled it between my thumb and pointer fingers, over and over again, until it had become a perfectly round pellet. A tiny, uncrushable thing.

“As a matter of fact, most cops are good. I worked with a lot of great guys, really trying to make a difference. You need to know that they're not all wolves.”

“Dad, I do. But not all kids who look and dress like me are bad either. Most of them aren't. And even the ones who are don't deserve to be killed, especially if they don't have no weapons.”

“But a lot of times they
do
, Rashad.”

“But Spoony was telling me yesterday that most times, they
don't
.”

“Spoony doesn't know everything.” I could tell Dad was getting frustrated. “And neither do you.”

“And neither do you.” I couldn't back down from him. Not this time.

Dad stood up, smirked, and nodded. He looked at me as if it was his first time seeing me. As if I had just taken off a mask, even though I was practically wearing one with all the itchy gauze taped to my face. Maybe it was him who had just taken off a mask. He set the spirometer down on the
side table and reached for my hand. “Listen, I gotta get going. Your mother said she was coming by later, and that she might be bringing a lawyer in to talk to you. She wants to press charges, so . . . yeah. Be on the lookout for her.”

Press charges? My initial thought was that pressing charges was a bad idea. My second thought was that I would have to go to court, which I already wasn't too keen on. My third thought was just an echo of my first thought, that pressing charges was a bad idea, but there was no point in trying to talk my mother out of it. Even my father knew that.

“I'll be here.” I stated the obvious. We shook hands, awkward and formal.

“Okay.”

He headed for the door.

“Dad,” I called. He turned around. “If I'm checked out by Friday, I'm thinking about going down to the protest. If I go, you should come.”

He didn't respond. But as he left the room, something in his face dimmed.