But he can’t get bored. Because bored he won’t see the obvious — the missing tags on a beat-up hoopty driven by a carload of young punks looking for trouble and determined to find it. But this night he is bored by 9:45, when he walks into a 7-Eleven near the litter-filled streets of a housing project known as “The Jungle” to buy coffee and a doughnut: Carson ignores the group of high school — age boys hanging out in front of the store at almost ten o’clock on a school night, rapping, jonin’, joking, lying. Matches waiting to be struck. Don’t they have homes? Carson wonders for the thousandth time, then recalls what he has seen in some of the homes these boys live in — rats, roaches, three kids sleeping on the living room floor, toddlers playing near stacks of cellophane-wrapped crack cocaine, no heat in the winter, stifling ovenlike apartments in the summer, overworked mamas, long-gone daddies. Those homes make the parking lot of 7-Eleven seem a step up in the world.
Still, why the hell were they standing outside to talk? Just hangin’. He’d read somewhere that this was street corner culture, an integral part of the Black experience. Some urban ritual. But this is Prince George’s County. No inner-city street corners here, like in nearby D.C. But niggahs, he thinks sullenly, can turn anyplace into a ghetto.
Nearly all the arrests he’s made, all his stops, involve boys like the ones he barely looks at as he passes by, feeling them grit on him with a steely stare because he’s a police officer. To them he’s a cop and he is, in their eyes, the enemy. He’s fed up with arresting young Black males — aimless, directionless, often involved in nonviolent crimes that set the stage for all the shit that hits the fan in their young lives. Just last week he was called to the scene of a shooting and saw a kid no more than seventeen, dressed in spanking new jeans, two-hundred-dollar Air Jordans, and a Phat Farm sweatshirt, loaded into the Emergency Services vehicle, dead. Shot in the back while standing outside a Popeyes, from the passenger side of a Crown Vic that careened past the spot where he stood munching on a spicy chicken breast and a biscuit while talking to his baby’s mama. The car didn’t even slow down to make the hit. As Carson watched the EMS vehicle drive away, he wondered how many hits the kid had made. Revenge, payback, and a brutal, bloody synchronicity ruled the lives of too many of the young men he arrested. He saw precious few truly innocent victims. Predators, that’s what he calls them, kids like that fourteen-year-old who walked into a convenience store in Oxon Hill and tried to rob it at 5 a.m. and ended up stabbing the Korean owner to death. What the fuck? Carson sometimes wonders. God damn, my people, my people, envisioning the future of the race in every act and every choice these young men make. He’s tried to talk to them, standing in groups like these or in handcuffs in the backseat of his cruiser, but he might as well be speaking Mandarin.
So yeah, he is tough, and he is hard on their Black asses. There but for the grace of God … He has a son who in his worst nightmares turns into a wannabe thug giving these young bloods a run for their money. None of it makes sense. On more than one shift he’s arrested suburban Black boys from Leave It to Beaver homes, hungering to be criminals, proving their street smarts by being stupid enough to land in jail. He’s arrested boys with a plasma TV in their basement and their father’s BMW SUV and mom’s Lexus and their Honda parked in the garage. He’d been a young punk once too, angry, feasting on his own sense of deserved and superfluous rage at a world he couldn’t control and that he was sure would never give him room. But bored, this night, Carson doesn’t even say a word, just figures his presence, the patrol car, the weapon the boys know is in his holster, will do all the talking for him. He swaggers past the cluster of boys, all of them dressed in baggy jeans and oversize shirts, blue bandanas tied around their cornrowed heads. Carson strides a bit more forcefully than usual, preening to let them know that the convenience store is his turf, not theirs.
Everybody thinks it’s postal workers who are the major victims of workplace crime. It’s really the immigrants and teenagers and retired giving-my-own-business-a-try salesclerks behind the counters of convenience stores who are the most vulnerable workers in America. It’s always open season on them. Every damn day of the week is a “good day to die” for one of them somewhere in the land of the free. By just standing at the magazine rack, thumbing through copies of Hustler or Newsweek, or shooting the breeze for a half hour with whoever is working, Carson can stop a crime.
Because Carson doesn’t tell the boys to move on, to go home, they continue to stand outside, as loud and boisterous as if they were playing video games and sipping forties in their living room instead of standing in a public place. He could get them for congregating beneath the No Loitering sign, but he doesn’t.
He and Eric used to debate all the time which was worse, more dangerous: the boredom that makes you lazy, careless, stupid, or the nights of pure adrenaline, responding to priority calls back to back. And don’t let it be another officer down. But that’s why Carson is out here. Why he’s a cop. He loves the rush. The risk. Everything on the line. The pressure. The chance to change somebody’s fate, save a life, because he got there in time to catch the burglar, prevent some jerk from giving his wife an ass-whooping and turning her into a corpse. Or maybe he stops a killer on the side of Route 450, pulls him over because the knucklehead is driving a car with broken taillights, expired plates, and when he runs his license through the computer he discovers this is a live one, the kind of scum they build prisons for, and when he searches the car he finds a weapon. And not just any weapon, but one that’s loaded and has been used in a murder.
Still, 95 percent boredom. That’s Carson’s average week. Sometimes his average month. This isn’t nearby Washington, where there are weeks when somebody gets killed every night. This is the ’burbs. But still.
On this March night, a night when it is not quite spring, when it’s a chilly forty degrees, there’s this flat-out wide-faced moon in the sky. A moon so big and awesome it’s like a gigantic neon eye or face. A full moon, bursting the seams of the heavens. Milky and liquid and trembling. It’s not white but some strange kind of orangey yellow, like no moon Carson can ever recall seeing in the sky. The full moon. That’s the only odd thing. The only unexpected thing on this night, when Carson has given a couple of speeding tickets and the radio has been mostly silent.
Carson isn’t superstitious. Not like Steve, who keeps a rabbit’s foot in his wallet, or Eric, who recited the Twenty-third Psalm, closed his eyes and said it silently in the squad car before he pulled out of the station lot. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” No, Carson figures all that just attracts catastrophe. Why depend on luck instead of yourself? Why close your eyes to pray when what you fear could be closing in? So that moon, which he will tell Bunny about if she’s awake when he gets home, that’s the only strange thing so far this night. His patrol service area includes everything — the area around Martin Luther King Boulevard, the weathered houses and streets of the working-class neighborhood near the FedEx Field football stadium, and the moneyed community called Heaven’s Gate. It’s mostly the area around King Boulevard that keeps him busy with burglaries, robberies, drug traffic. But this night, one hour before his shift ends at midnight, Carson congratulates himself. It’s been quiet. Maybe too quiet, even for a weeknight. But there is nothing in the quiet that makes him think that the worst will be saved for the last moments of his shift.