Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You (9 page)

“Bye-bye, Daddy.” Victor has the gun pointed at the dad.

“VICTOR!” I snap his name like a bullwhip.

“Oh, damn,” Roger mutters behind me.

Victor looks at me, and the gun swings slightly my way. “I'm not gonna hurt you, miss. You've been nice to me.”

“DROP THE GUN. NOW!” I use the command voice they taught us in the academy. Deep from the diaphragm.

“I can't.” He has started to cry again. The gun is shaking, wavering somewhere between me and the dad. “I have to stop it.”

I tighten my index finger on the trigger. “Victor, this isn't the way. PUT the gun DOWN.”

“Ya got backup pulling in now,” Roger whispers.

“Tell them round back. Hurry.” I only hope the backup isn't some damn John Wayne rookie who doesn't know how to read a scene.

“Victor, we got other people coming now, Victor. They aren't gonna be as patient as me. Come on, Victor.”

“I won't hurt you, miss. I promise. Just him.”

“VlCTOR. NO.” Squeezing back on the trigger. Do not make me do this, Victor.

“Victor!” A new voice, tiny, frail. From Dad? No. From behind Dad. Oh God, it's the mother making her debut.

“Mama?” Victor starts to whimper.

“Lady,” I yell. “Get back.”

The small, white-haired woman, hunched over but solid and mobile, quick-steps daintily out into the room, toward Victor, toward the gun.

“Jesus, lady. Get down. VlCTOR, DROP THE DAMN GUN!”

Then my backup, Sergeant Burnnet, my father, rounds the corner through the door at the back of the room, behind and to the right of Victor. He is four or five feet back from Victor, and his gun is drawn, pointing dead on at the back of Victor's head; he braces himself
against the far wall. For less than a second I am out of my body, away from this, watching, disbelieving.

“DROP IT, MOTHERFUCKER!” my father bellows.

“Mama?” Victor's eyes are startled moons, his mouth slightly opened.

“WAIT,” I yell at my father. He cuts his eyes over at me, then he's steady back on Victor.

With that flick of dismissal, the realization hits me, leaves me breathless, in a vacuum: my father is a perfect burly target over my sights. The anonymous silhouette figure at the end of the firing range with the bull's-eye that wins you the prize, your life, solid three hundred. If I moved my gun slightly to the right I would be smack on, in the middle of his forehead, the yellow-gray curls a frame for the perfect kill zone; just a sixteenth of an inch more pressure on the trigger and I could have Victor and my father. I could have my father. He taught me himself, out at the range, to shoot two rounds at a time. Everyone would understand: of course it was an accident, and what a terrible burden for his daughter; but he was rather close, almost in the way, he should have known better.

He is right there, across from me, and it would take less than a heartbeat.

A noise, like a train whistle with too much air, comes from the dad in the hospital bed.

I jump, gun swinging right onto the other dad then back quick as a finger snap on Victor. My father readjusts his stance, gun still steady, his chin tucked into his shoulder, sighting down his arm. Victor swivels, a sluggish wide arc of both arms, and pulls the gun toward the dad again. The mother crosses in front of my line of fire. I snap the gun up, pointing the barrel toward the ceiling.

“Oh, lady,” I moan. I watch my father; he is only half-seconds away from shooting. I have seen that look before.

She marches up to Victor, her neck about even with the gun in his hand. She stands blocking the line of fire between my father and Victor. I'm squeezing back on the trigger, my sights on Victor's chest.

“Victor, you're trying my patience. Gimme that gun 'fore you hurt yourself.” The mother holds out her hand, palm up. The other hand holds the saucer from the teacup.

One heartbeat. Two. It's hot in here. Too hot.

“Get the situation under control, Officer.” My father's voice is harsh, unforgiving, familiar.

Such a simple decision, really: shoot to kill. I move the gun slightly to the right. I wait for the bullet to leave the chamber. Let the shot surprise you, he'd tell me at the range; steady pressure back on the trigger.

“Victor, listen. Gimme the gun now,” the mama shrills.

Victor's hand moves slightly, wobbles; his eyes shift.

BAM! BAM!

The gun kicks tight and familiar in my hand; the fresh smell of burnt gunpowder fills the air, bites my eyes and nostrils. I have pulled the gun up at the last moment, giving my father's life back to him. I want to laugh—this is funny, a weird horrifying funny—but I'm still too stunned. My father's face is blank, his mouth slightly opened. Sweat beads his upper lip. And a tic I have never seen before, there is a rapid tic under my father's left eye. It quivers, the flesh folded beneath his eye. It is the only part of him moving.

Victor sags to the floor, unhurt, leaving the gun in the mother's hand. I am already standing, moving toward her and Victor.

My father looks at me. It is a look I am more accustomed to seeing as a child when I would face myself in the mirror.

“Oh-oh-oh. Bad boy. Bad, bad,” Victor whimpers.

The mother turns to me, and I meet brilliant, piercing bird's eyes. I take the gun from her outstretched palm. Her hand is trembling, as is her voice. “It weren't necessary to shoot up my good room, Officer. Victor was coming round to minding me.”

I watch my father locate the two bullet holes in the wall, three inches at most above his head. He looks back at me, then at the wall again. He stumbles getting to his feet.

Two officers come skidding around the corner. I holster my gun and nod toward Victor. “Cuff him. Gently. And Code 4 this, will you? My portable's down.”

I cross over to the body, Frankie, and check with two fingers for a pulse at the neck. No pulse. “Roger,” I holler. “It's safe now.”

He sticks his head around the corner, grins, then walks toward the body, his partner behind him.

The adrenaline kick starts to ease, and I feel one knee start shaking rapidly but ever so slightly, not enough for anyone to notice. I expel a deep breath, then turn back to the mother. She stands by the dad. They are both watching me.

“He's dead, ain't he?” she asks.

I nod. “I'm sorry.”

“I suppose you gonna take Victor from us, ain't you?”

One officer has cuffed Victor and they lead him past me, out to a unit. Victor doesn't look at me; his eyes are on the ground, his face expressionless.

“He's got to be booked, Mrs. Franconi. But you can get him out tonight if you want. If it was really self-defense, no jury will convict him.”

She nods, twisting her head to look up at me.

I take another deep breath, and my anger curls out into the air between us. Anger at her, at the dad, at myself, at my father. I am conscious of my father watching and listening. And the dad; his eyes have stopped rolling. This close to the old man I smell his death, lingering close by, waiting. He is watching me too. They are all watching me.

I see Victor's face again, distorted and panicked, and I am weary.

“Tell me, Mrs. Franconi. Did your husband really throw Victor against the wall when he was a child?”

She hisses air through her teeth. Her eyes snap up at me. “Your question's got no business bein' asked.”

“I'd say it was extremely relevant to the matter at hand.” I keep my voice tight but soft.

My father walks up behind me, clearing his throat before he speaks. “Mona.” His voice is still gruff and imposing, but with something new in it, something I can't identify. “A moment?”

I hesitate, then nod, lifting my index finger up to Mrs. Franconi as I turn to face my father. He still holds his gun loosely at his side.

“That was close,” he says.

“Perhaps.” My knee no longer quivers.

“I applaud your restraint with a gun.” He rocks slightly on his heels. Some color is returning to his face; red blotches ripple over his cheeks and forehead.

He wants me to say I won't try it again; he wants a guarantee, a capitulation. I look at him, the sweat, the blotches, the tic. I meet his eyes, and I let him see it all. I let him see his daughter.

He breaks first. His gaze shifts. “Well—” the gruffness, the newness to his tone still there.

I smile. It spreads into a grin. Unable to stop, I laugh quietly. Reaching out, I barely touch him on the arm.

“You can holster your gun now. I've got it here,” I say, then slowly turn my back, take a pen and notepad out of my shirt pocket.

I hear the squeak and whisper of leather. My father's gun slides back into the holster, and the strap snaps closed.

You are cleaning your gun. It is an ordinary, early spring afternoon, and you should be at work. Protecting the public. Instead you are here in the kitchen, drinking rum from a plastic cup, suspended without pay. It is not unusual to be sitting in this straight-backed chair with your gun on the table—bristle brush, bore rod, and oily rag nearby—listening to the hum of the refrigerator and the uneven drip of the kitchen sink. Except your husband has taken your daughter and left you. You light another cigarette and savor the familiar smell of gun oil and smoke as you admire the shine, the straight cold lines of the gun, the lethality of something so simple.

 

You walk around for eight, maybe ten hours a day with that gun bumping and rubbing against your hipbone. There is a permanent bruise on the skin; the area stays sore and discolored. Your gun is a natural extension of your body. It was not always this way. At first, you couldn't figure out how to hold your right arm down by your
side—the gun got in the way. So you tucked both thumbs into the front of the gun belt and rested your forearm on the gun and holster. But you are told this is dangerous: you are unprepared, you can't draw your gun as quickly. So you try resting your palm on the butt of the gun, but this is awkward, uncomfortable, and threatening to the public. You return to letting your right arm dangle out at an angle over the gun. As you walk, the grip chafes a small, oblong spot on the inside of your forearm the color of grapefruit. This becomes as natural to you as breathing.

 

You pick up the gun from the kitchen table and let it lie in your hand. The weight is soothing, the gun as familiar as your daughter's face. You pop open the cylinder and check for the third time that it is indeed loaded. Six little lead circles stare back. Push the ejection pin with your thumb and watch the bullets tumble out and roll out across the kitchen table. Stand them up in a neat row, then close the cylinder with a snap—the sound echoes coldly through the empty kitchen. Do this several times: thumb open, flick wrist, snap closed.

It would feel good to scream right now. But you don't. You resist the urge. Like you should have last night.

You raise your eyes. Your daughter's stuffed lion stares back. It sits on a corner of the kitchen counter where you threw it last night, before you hit her. Study the yellow quilted lion with its chewed legs and fraying mane as you begin loading and unloading the gun by touch alone. You have learned many ways to handle this gun. You can break it down and reassemble it with your eyes closed. It is as familiar to you as your husband's hand—every bump and scratch and groove.

 

Your father was a cop too. He trained you to use and respect a revolver, a shotgun, a rifle. He let you hold his matching pistols with inlaid Mexican silver and promised that one day they would be yours; never mind your brothers, he said, they don't have the discipline. You stood watching him at the pistol range and mimicked his every move.

Look at this gal, he'd tell his buddies, she's a natural.

Just like her old man, they'd throw back in reply.

And you expanded under this strange warmth, wanting it to last forever. When he started drinking, you pulled yourself inward, trying to become invisible as he took on a new smell, one that choked off the usual mix of whiskey, metal, and sweat and became a vague pungent odor, thick and seething.

Your father has a difficult job, your mother would say, usually after he had hit her. She was always slightly out of focus, a blur of cooking, fresh sheets, too-soft hands, a washed-out voice. This is what you knew: she was afraid of loud noises, the night, guns. Sometimes your father. Nothing frightened you more than those occasions when your father said, a slight smile coating the disgust on his tongue, You're just like your mother.

Once, long before he died, your father took you on a hunting trip up in the Texas hill country during dove season, a rare father-daughter trip. You were seventeen and felt warm and safe watching the fire play across his face, the trickle of water over stone nearby. Your mother is a good woman, he said, so softly it might have been your imagination, a man needs someone to quiet the voices. You think of her broken nose, the shaved eyebrow, her black eyes. You want to love him. You want to believe.

Then he shrugged and reached for a beer, throwing you one. Let's see how you handle your liquor, he said, his laugh an echoing clarion noise that opened up the sky and pushed back the night. That evening you sat under stars, drinking beer and cleaning your gun, thinking maybe things would be different from now on.

You move out of your father's house for good when you are nineteen and suggest your mother does the same. She doesn't. Two years later you join the police department; your father pins the badge onto your uniform shirt at graduation. Just like your old man, his buddies say. You can barely meet his gaze. Five years after that he stops a fugitive on a traffic violation and dies from the blast of a double-barreled, sawed-off shotgun. They say he never felt a thing, but in your dreams he lies on the pockmarked cement, conscious of the blood streaming from his chest, unable to act, unable to save himself. The irony of it does not escape you.

Your mother said soon after, Perhaps now you'll quit that job, give up this strange fascination with guns. She buys you a bulletproof vest when your daughter is born. You always wear the vest. You have learned many things from your father.

 

You are still loading and unloading your gun by touch alone. A cigarette dangles from your lips, burning your eyes. You hold your head at a funny, half-canted angle to avoid the smoke.

You wish your daughter were here right now, as she usually is when you sit cleaning your gun. She would talk: half-formed words, slurred, jumbled baby talk. Her voice would rise in a lilting song—perhaps the alphabet song, or “I'm a Little Teapot.” You would sing along with her, if she were here. You would talk about the birds outside the window, and she might begin the “what dis” game. Momma, what dis? And you would answer her: That's a chair, that's the stove, this is my nose, those are your hands, that is Momma's gun. After each item, she would ask over and over, maybe four or five times, What?

If she were here right now for you to hold, to inhale her warm baby-shampoo odor, maybe you would lock up your gun and the two of you would share a bowl of ice cream. You would laugh and giggle, play tickle and tag. And if you had to go to work, if you weren't on a thirty-day suspension for roughing up a prisoner, maybe you would call in sick and spend the time rocking her back and forth. Momma's girl, you would croon, you are Momma's special girl. If she were here, if last night had not happened, perhaps that's what you would be doing now.

Instead, you are cleaning your gun.

 

You walk a fine line between the reality of yourself and the reality of the streets—back and forth, in and out, a shadow dance along the fringe. You are afraid, terrified at times, a terror that wells up from your soul. Your childhood bogeyman awaits you in the quiet hum of a brilliant summer day or in the freezing rain on a darkened stretch of interstate. You will never know when, where. In the suffocating dark
ness within a vast warehouse, your gun clenched tightly to your side, your heart racing upward to a dry mouth, your inner voice trembles forth: Momma, I don't like being here. And suddenly, that is where you would give anything to be—in her lap, her hands—dusty with flour—clasping your head tight against her chest, her honeysuckle perfume enveloping you. But only for an instant. The larger part of you always takes over, and you push past the fear, triumphant at having won again.

You do not share these fears with anyone. There is a vague unwritten rule that forbids the discussion of fear and anxiety. You share moments with other cops, but they are moments centered on fighting: swinging nightsticks, high-speed chases, drawn guns. Your common language is one of profanity, technical information, and terse commands. You trust them with your life but not your frailties. Cops aren't supposed to be frail.

You can spend hours with these men and women discussing the peculiarities of other people, but you don't touch upon your own. You have slowly lost your civilian friends. They see only your badge and gun; you are sure they cannot comprehend the brutality of your world. So you draw closer into the circle where other people's pain and secrets are an everyday occurrence to be dealt with. Your own are tucked away.

 

Silence presses in. You push away from the gun, from the table, stand up slowly, and brace yourself at the kitchen sink, bury your head in a wet dish towel. Over and over you lift cold water to your face, as though the chill will carry up to the brain and freeze forever the events of last night, the last month. You are stopped by your image in the small silver mirror hanging near the door, the mirror your husband bought on your honeymoon in Mexico. Everyone says you favor your mother: the widow's peak, the sharp chin, the dimple in your right cheek. But it is your father's eyes that stare back at you, dark and bloodshot, full of an angry, familiar pain.

Gratitude washes over you. Your daughter has her father's eyes.

 

You spend ten hours a day, four days a week, working in a world of mostly men. You are their buddy, their partner, their backup. You are your father's daughter.

One day you fall in love. With a cop. With his steady intelligence, his fierce devotion to right and wrong, the long second before he laughs, the taste of his upper lip. His disdain for violence first intrigues, then amuses you. He is a cop, but not a cop. He carries a gun, but his work is in the labs, part of the crime scene division, analyzing violence already committed. His is a safe job, but you would never tell him this.

You aren't sure why he falls in love with you. He smiles when you swagger your female appropriation of macho-male copness. He calls you pet names. And he holds you tight to his chest in the quiet of the bedroom.

As time passes, you laugh at his frown or pretend not to notice his disappointment when you drink too much or talk of bashing heads. He walks out of the room when you snap in anger or scream in frustration. He puts a sign on the kitchen door:
LEAVE THY WORK BEHIND
. You laugh and attribute it to his sensitivity, something your father would agree with if he were alive.

Your father was the job and nothing more, your husband says.

He was a good cop, you say.

But he wasn't a good man. He wasn't a good husband or father.

But he was a good cop, a damn good cop.

He looks at you, your husband. And that's enough for you?

 

There is now a single bullet in the chamber, and you are spinning the cylinder round and round with your thumb, popping it back and forth. You palm it closed and open your eyes, wincing when your knuckles hit the edge of the table as you reach for another drink. They are raw from being punched through Sheetrock last night, after he walked out.

Turn your head and bury it in your shoulder—inhale. You are wearing one of his old T-shirts smelling of sweat, gun oil, and baby powder, a hint of the aftershave he wears. The smell cocoons you in his gentleness. He is a gentle man, your husband the cop. Everyone says so.

Put the gun up flat against your cheek. Let the tip of the barrel rest against your nose. Blowing off a piece of your face would not begin to atone for last night. So the question becomes, What would? You think of your father and the way he steadied the rifle on your shoulder, the stock tucked tight against your cheek as you took aim at a target.

With one hand you reach out for the bottle of rum and pour more in the glass. The gun never wavers in your grip, flush against the soft contours of your face.

 

Last night he said you were dangerous. As he threw you back against the wall, he said you were out of control. Screaming in your face, he told you that you were a lousy mother and a lousy wife and a lousy cop. As he yelled, you watched your child, yours and his, become even more rigid and wild-eyed. Drawing within herself, becoming invisible.

Then he went rigid and quiet too, barely quivering in his anger. My God, he whispered, the words reverberating long after he left, What have you done to us? A muscle fluttered along his jaw as he stared at you. And you stared at your daughter. Then he turned and scooped up your child, yours and his, and walked out. And you don't know where they are. And you don't know if they'll be back.

But she had been chattering so. On and on, weaving in and out between your feet. Questioning this, wanting that, whining, bumping up against you, twirling that lion round and round with arms outstretched. And you felt like a real lion, pacing in this kitchen, drinking too much, smoking too much. She chattered on and on and pulled and tugged at you, holding on to your legs, weaving in and out, around and about you. Every step you took, there she was, underfoot, wanting something. She wanted to know how come you hadn't gone to work like Daddy and was it true you'd been a bad girl and how come she had to have peas for supper, she'd had those last night, and she wanted Daddy to feed her and Momma she wanted more juice
now
and you whirled, slapping her—very hard and very fast.

Not as hard and as fast as you hit the prisoner last week, the thirty-day-suspension blow. Too many recent incidents of unwar
ranted aggression in your folder, they said, too many complaints. You need to learn to restrain yourself. You have a problem with drinking, Officer. You have a problem controlling your temper. Never mind that the prisoner you backhanded had just set his four-year-old son down on a lit stove burner. You should control your emotions, Officer. You aren't the judge and jury on the streets, sweetheart. Maybe you should seek some help, they all said.

To hell, you had yelled back, to hell with all of you. I'll take the thirty days.

 

You slide the gun along your cheek and place it against your lips. The danger is that your aim will be off just enough so that you won't die instantly but do considerable damage and bleed to death. Or live. It all depends on the angle of the gun when you put it in your mouth.