He sighed softly.
She’d been gone a long time now. Left him, married her dentist, and moved to Knoxville, where he knew they had no castles, but he guessed they had a few pink-bricked houses with big backyards. A few years later, he heard that the dentist had bought her a bigger house with a bigger yard. He didn’t know where she lived now. Didn’t know if she had ever gotten to England.
A.J. looked back at the rookie on the bridge.
His name was Andy. The leather jacket squared off his shoulders, making him look tougher and beefier than A.J. knew he was underneath the stiff leather. Andy’s blue trousers were knife-creased, and speckled with rain and mud from the climb down the hill. They were a might short, too, and every time Andy leaned on the bridge, A.J. could see a flash of his bright white tube socks.
Andy’s eyes, A.J. had noticed earlier, were a pale brown, the color of beach sand. Kind, trusting eyes, but eyes that held no sense of command. A.J. knew that people — bad people — noticed things like that. A nervous gesture, a tremor in the voice, a wrong step in the wrong direction, all those small things that told the bad guy who was in charge and who would win if it ever came down to it.
Andy would have to lose that look if he was going to survive.
A.J. shifted in his seat to ease the stiffness in his lower back and glanced at the clock, wondering where the detectives were. It was almost midnight, shift’s end. Usually he could gauge the time pretty well without looking, and he was surprised it was this late. He raised his hand to the flickering computer screen to check his watch. The crystal was a little fogged and he blew on it to clear it. Sometimes that worked.
The watch was probably in its final days, but it had been a good watch, the kind a cop needed. Something that could get smacked against a wall, dropped in a lake, and even stepped on, and still just keep on ticking, like the old commercial said. When it died, he wouldn’t throw it away. He would lay it to rest in his jewelry box along with all his old service pins and outdated badges.
It had been his daughter Sheila’s last gift to him, given to him in June of 1998. He had thought it was a Father’s Day gift until he realized it was wrapped in Christmas paper, left over from six months earlier when he hadn’t shown up in Knoxville at the dentist’s house like he promised he would.
Sheila didn’t understand too many things back then, like how long it took to remove crumpled cars, wet Christmas presents, and dead bodies from a freeway interchange. She didn’t understand that he had called the next morning to apologize and wish her a good Christmas. And she didn’t understand that ex-wives had their own reasons for not giving daughters messages from their fathers.
He supposed most sixteen-year-old girls didn’t understand stuff like that. They saw the world only through their own narrow, selfish prisms, and sometimes one tiny mistake could be that one thing they thought ruined their life forever. His not being there that Christmas was that one thing for Sheila.
He hadn’t made it to Knoxville the following Christmas, either, but he had called and asked Sheila to come see him. The day before, she canceled, leaving a message on his answering machine telling him she had places to go and cool people she wanted to see over the holidays. A.J. wasn’t one of them.
He tapped on the watch. The crystal was still clouded.
He wondered if the Seikos clouded up. Probably not. Those beauties were sterling silver, emblazoned with the police department logo, and inscribed with the officer’s name on the back. They were given to officers after twenty-five years of service, presented in a satin-lined case by the chief at a ten-minute ceremony that the wives and children could attend.
A.J. reached down and picked up a half-eaten Hershey’s bar off the console and broke off a square of chocolate.
The department had stopped giving out the watches last November. Said they couldn’t afford it anymore, what with all the recent pay increases, EEOC-mandated promotions, lawsuits on excessive force, worker’s-comp injuries, and the high cost of computers, radar guns, patrol cars, tin badges, and gasoline.
A.J.’s twenty-fifth anniversary was next month. He had mentioned that to Andy a few days ago, and Andy had asked why he didn’t just buy a watch and have it inscribed to himself.
Don’t ya think it loses just a little meaning that way, kid?
He looked back at Andy, hitting the wipers again to clear his view.
Suddenly Andy leaned over the railing and lost the rest of his country-fried steak dinner into the river. He coughed a few times, drew himself tall, and with trembling hands used a neatly folded handkerchief from his back pocket to wipe his mouth.
A.J. peered up at the sky. It was still raining, the drops floating from the sky like Lorraine’s love dust, but not hard enough, he guessed, to drive the kid back inside the cruiser. He’d let him stay out there awhile.
In the pale glow of the lone streetlight, A.J. studied Andy’s slender face. It looked ghostly and pained, and A.J. knew the ghostly part came from what lay under the bridge. But the pained part, well, that was something else.
It was embarrassment, something A.J. understood. No one wanted to lose their cookies in front of a senior officer. It was pretty damn undignified to puke all over your crisp blue trousers and your just-out-of-the-box Rockports.
A.J.’s eyes drifted along the empty bridge. Maybe there was something that happened to men when they stood on bridges, like standing in the middle of a bridge put them halfway in-between something good or bad. Or weak or strong. Or between yesterday and tomorrow.
He had stood on a bridge once. A high-arcing overpass near the airport. It had been his assigned post back in — when was it? — nineteen eighty-seven? Eighty-eight?
The ice had started dripping from the sky about nine A.M. By nine-thirty, two cars had slid off the overpass into the snowy banks below.
A.J. had been sent to the bridge to monitor traffic, slow speeders, and call ambulances for idiots who still thought they could race their way across a high patch of ice fifty feet in the air.
He had a ride-along passenger that day, some woman from a neighborhood-watch committee who the chief thought needed a tour of duty in order to gain a greater awareness of how hard the police were working on community relations.
It would have been a fine day, normally, with the ice storm a perfect setting to allow an epic display of police compassion. Except for the fact that A.J. had a touch of the flu that had settled in his intestines and he knew the moment he stopped the cruiser next to the overpass guardrail that it was going to be a long morning.
The stomach cramps started around ten, and by noon he was covered in a suit of ice, his fingers so frozen he could barely key the radio to ask to be briefly relieved.
The request was denied. Three times. He was needed, they said. There was no one else.
So he had toughed it out. Four hours, standing on the side of the overpass, waving his flashlight at the foggy, slow-moving headlights, his body shivering uncontrollably, shoes frozen to the road, and watery, burning shit running down the back of his legs.
The neighborhood-watch woman never asked what the smell in the cruiser was. But there was a look of disgust in her eyes as they made their way back to the precinct, like she thought he was some sort of animal who was too lazy or too uncivilized to use the toilet like decent human beings do.
The easy chatter of the radio pulled him back to the moment. Andy was still bent over the concrete wall, head in his hands. A.J. thought about going to him, but decided not to. He’d come back when he was ready.
The car was growing cold. A.J. reached over to flip up the heat. The fan rattled and the vent puffed out lukewarm air.