I bought a special purse with a hidden Velcro holster to carry off duty. At first I was terrified that the gun would accidentally discharge; after a while I would have forgotten it was in my purse, except for the ever-present weight. I could shoot pretty well for someone who’d never shot before academy, but I didn’t enjoy it because of the noise (it made my heart pound) and an irrepressible fear that the gun would malfunction and blow my hand off. Sometimes my husband reverently polished the grips with a chamois and said, “You’re so lucky,” but the gun was a burden to me, a burden complicated by the trivial nature of most calls in Saint Amelia — “10–91, hummingbird loose inside La Dolce Vita Cantinetta. RP requests assist.” I’d been trained in tactics at the Napa Valley Academy by members of the San Francisco SWAT team, and many of the things they’d stressed — never shake hands, for example; someone could be preparing to use a wrestling maneuver on you — would not make sense in Saint Amelia. I would observe Ken, to my chagrin, routinely standing on curb edges, rocking on the balls of his feet, hands in his pockets, arms folded or clutching a soda, instead of planting his feet in a balanced ninety-degree stance, hands ready.
As I drove the city my second week, I felt — how shall I put it? — sex and death all around me. It might seem overwrought, as though I’m making it up. But that’s the way it was from the beginning. Saint Amelia never hires. It’s “antigrowth.” Then an old-timer had a sudden embolism, and I became L-7. During lunch they showed me a videotape of his funeral, and the dispatcher wept and said, “No one can ever replace Tony, ever.” (Folks I met would sometimes say, “So you’re the one replacing Tony.”) Tony’s death had motivated another old-timer to retire, so they were down two officers, but I was the only new hire. Everyone seemed jittery and full of tough posturing because the vineyard pervert was still at large. Graveyard shift had just taken a report from a woman who’d had sex with him because she thought her husband, home early from a business trip, was waking her in the middle of the night, lifting her silk jersey gown, disordering her Frette scalloped bedding that smelled of lavender. And in the course of things, she’d had the incredibly creepy realization that it wasn’t her husband. When she screamed and kicked, he vanished out a sliding glass door and into the vineyard. And she couldn’t describe him.
“You’re lucky,” Ken told me. “This is a good opportunity to learn that we don’t often have.” He had me read sex-crime reports and review sex-crime codes and rape protocol. Then one of the old-timers, Hash, cleared out a vineyard encampment of migrant farm workers, and the cops said that probably takes care of our pervert, just wait, we won’t hear anything more about him. The police blotter was either dull — towed car, barking dog, lost bicycle — or mildly comical. Even when violence was involved, the paper took a lighthearted tone, such as the time two men flashed semiauto pistols in a restaurant and grabbed a bottle of wine, not even an expensive one at that. But I could feel him out there still, anonymous and concealed, especially now that I’d seen Saint Amelia’s secret landscape.
Something else was making all ten sworn officers — four dispatchers and two half-time community service officers — jumpy. I knew city buildings had recently been rekeyed, and when I asked why we had to bring the shotguns and AR-15s in from the cars during shift change, leaning them against the wall by the briefing table piled with Thanksgiving pies and breads from supportive citizens, Ken told me. Second Sergeant Donald had been fired, had sued and appealed and lost, and had now taken his case to the state supreme court, flexing the atrophied muscles of his law degree (he’d never been able to pass the bar), and they hoped he wasn’t disgruntled. Bit by bit, during the first weeks of my employment, I learned the story from the gossipy dispatchers: in the locker room, Second Sergeant Donald had drawn his gun on an officer who was having an affair with Donald’s wife. The officer having the affair was called “Little Buddy,” though no one called him Little Buddy to his face — they called him Bill. Little Buddy was L-l, the officer with the most years on the force, but he was lazy, so no one liked him. The catalyst, apparently, was not the affair itself, or the divorce that followed, but the divorce settlement that awarded Donald’s wife his new van, and the fact that Little Buddy had begun driving Donald’s ex-wife’s van to work.
That second week, when I started driving, was a comic disaster. I tried to leap out of the car to respond to a choking baby call but couldn’t because my seatbelt was still on. I dropped my ticket book in a puddle. Once my awkward side-handle baton pushed up against the electric seat-adjustment buttons, gradually moving my seat forward and wedging my knees against the console while I panicked and pulled off onto the shoulder. There was a brand-new field training manual, thick as a phone book, that they’d had to come up with to comply with new state requirements. The idea was that every day Ken would cover an area of training in the book, discussing it with me as we drove; I would display competence, and both our initials would appear in columns in the book’s pages. Ken never opened the book. He made me take it along, and since there was no place to put it, I jammed it on top of the radar gun. Ken was also responsible for filling out a daily performance evaluation, which rated my performance in thirty different categories on a scale of one to ten. These he filled out and turned in to the Chief at the end of most days, often asking me to refresh his memory as to what we’d done. On the day I couldn’t get the radar gun out from under the book in time to lock onto a speeder, fumbling with the cord when I should have been in pursuit, he gave me low scores.
Ken, I decided, was a man in the first stages of asking himself what his life meant, and the ensuing frustration had clouded his normally passive nature. When I tried to make conversation by asking him why he’d become a cop, he said, “I ask myself that question a lot lately.” His only child, a five-year-old daughter born late in his life, had just finished chemotherapy for a rare form of brain cancer. On day shift Ken mostly liked to go to the middle school, where he taught the DARE curriculum, and talk to the women teachers in the lounge during recess. They would dish up some pineapple crumble for him and ask him about his daughter’s progress, all the while mooning over him and hanging on his every word. On his part, lie felt their undivided attention was deserved, because his daughter’s illness was the most overwhelming feature of his otherwise placid life.
Ken spoke very slowly, and my impulse was to interrupt him, finish his sentences and run curlicues around his thoughts, but he was dogged and would ignore me and complete his sentences until finally I drove silently. In this manner I learned all the details of the chemotherapy drama, and progressing from there, Ken’s fixation with retirement, how far off it seemed, possibilities of what he could do, etc., like he was waiting for his real life to begin. Or like he’d been asleep, and his daughter’s illness had awakened him. All week long, this is how we operated: I drove and he told stories and I listened and sometimes counseled him or even tried to rally him to inspiration. At the end of the day we returned to the PD, and I sat at the briefing table nibbling pumpkin bread while he struggled with my score sheet. He handed it to me, I scanned the column of low scores, felt the sting of humility, signed the sheet to show that I had read it, and pushed it back across the table to him.
Ken’s routines were entrenched. Park by the elementary school and watch for double-parkers, he’d say. Then swing by the Exxon for his jumbo Diet Coke. Drive around a bit. Then head back to the barn so he could empty his bladder. He’d gone to get a sandwich while I ate my lunch at the briefing table one day, and when he returned, he said, “Let’s go. I’m driving.” A volunteer at the elementary school, he told me, had observed an esteemed male teacher, an acquaintance in fact of Ken’s, fondling a boy in the classroom, placing his hand in the boy’s pants and holding a couch pillow over his lap while reading a story. This had the potential to cause hysteria. Children with last names you’d recognize if you drink Napa Valley wine would have to be interviewed, lots of children, with powerful parents. After we talked with the principal, Ken drove around the perimeter of town, on quiet cul-de-sacs bordering vineyards. He drummed his hands on the steering wheel. I understood that he was not going to let me drive. “A good thing to do in situations like this is to make a list. Detailed lists of everything you have to do.” “Uh-huh,” I said. “Let’s head back to the barn,” he said.