This is how I thought of graveyards: one hundred miles, four miles square. Because I’d put one hundred miles on the car in one night, driving the same streets over and over again, in four square miles of city. Some officers, I learned, would nap most of the night, then take the car out on a large loop into county territory, so when they recorded the odometer at shift end, it would look like they’d been out patrolling. The boundaries of the city elicited frisson, but once when I wanted to take a run down Beaujolais, just out of bounds, not to poach or anything, just for a change of scenery, my training officer told me I didn’t know enough details about Saint Amelia yet. I needed to go deeper, he said — even though I knew every alleyway, dead end, greenbelt, vineyard perimeter. The intimacy of patrolling, committing to memory each nuance of that highly cultivated and celebrated bit of land, seemed to me similar to the intimacy of love, with one difference: I was motivated by desire to know the geography of my husband’s body, but I lacked such a motive for Saint Amelia. Ken had wrapped his investigation and moved to graveyard shift, and he asked me what kind of lock the alley door of Rita’s Margaritas had. I didn’t know, so we drove down the alley. “Here,” he said, “turn off your alley light. See the bar lock? Look for that silhouette, and you’ll know it’s locked.” Once or twice in ten years he’d had to wake Rita because whoever had closed had forgotten to lock up. Later that night he said, “Do you want to see something wonderful? Turn the spotlight on.” I turned it on, and I didn’t see anything wonderful. “Don’t you see?” It was a train car in someone’s backyard; chickens nested in it. Sometimes I caught Ken looking at me like someone helplessly watching a drowning woman. But how could I possibly fail — or succeed for that matter — when nothing ever happened?
I dreaded the nights when I had to drive with Sergeant Tom, which was half of the time. The first time I ever drove with him he said, “I hate fuckin’ winemakers. They’re all a bunch of fuckin’ pricks.” As a rule I adopted a tone with him that was light and full of laughter, as if everything he said was funny, and sometimes it worked and he ended up laughing despite himself. Tom’s conversation was dominated by rounds, slugs, bullets, powder, deer tags, bear tags, payload, and megabytes. Eventually, nightly, he would work himself into a barely controlled rage because of the stupidity of everyone — out — there — all — of — them — fucking — idiots! The only thing we had in common was that we both liked listening to Art Bell’s radio program about alien encounters from eleven to two A.M. Though it occurred to me that we were exactly the kind of nameless, faceless, expendable beat cops, driving in the middle of the night, who always find the alien ship, decide to investigate alone and are hideously crushed or exploded within the first fifteen minutes of a movie.
It is to Tom that I ascribe the ultimate outcome of my field training at Saint Amelia because Tom had rank, and he gradually decided that my time would best be spent not in patrolling the city but in learning how to pick Master Lock padlocks, cutting up pieces of rebar with giant wire cutters, fuming fingerprints with Krazy Glue, fiddling with a narcotics analysis kit, checking out his form-making software, listening to various versions of “Stairway to Heaven” in his MIDI file collection — anything that kept me sitting at the PD briefing table or close by, such as washing the patrol car or playing with the night-vision gear in the broom closet we called our “armory.” Because mind games are so much a part of police culture and training, beginning with tear-you-down-build-you-up-again academy, it was difficult for me to know whether Tom had accepted me into the lazy heart of things as one of them or cut me off. I was soon to start the shadow phase of my training, where I’d be solo in a car and a training officer would shadow me on calls. My evaluation scores were average, above average in certain areas (neatness and appearance), though they’d dipped lately, accompanied by absurd comments. “Officer hits road obstacles,” for example. I hadn’t hit anything, so I asked Tom what he meant. “One thing about you that really pisses me off,” he said, “is your driving. You run right through potholes and over speed bumps. And you’re anal about using your blinker and coming to a complete stop at stop signs. Who do you think is going to notice at three A.M.?” But when I rolled through stops, he deducted points for that.
My one chance to escape the PD came at two A.M., when the two bars on Main Street closed. Tom liked to watch the bar patrons leave and have me try for deuces, then take a walk down Main Street and check all the business doors, which kept him from feeling too sleepy. At three A.M., we’d always head back to the PD for lunch (he always ate spaghetti or fried chicken and tapioca pudding), then read the morning papers when they were delivered. When Rolando was working, he and Tom would discuss impending salary negotiations between the Police Officers Association and the city. Occasionally they’d take these conversations into the sergeants’ office and close the door. There were new educational requirements. The Chief wanted Tom, who had an AA in criminal justice from the local junior college, to go back to school for a BA. When we first met, Tom asked if it was true that I had an MA in English, and after that he would make me drive to quiet, dark places where wildlife crept in the brush, eyes glittering like moonstones, and quiz me on Vehicle Code, most of which he’d memorized, unlike the other officers, who used cheat sheets, until finally he determined that my memory was subpar. I always felt we were doing something slightly sordid, our knees almost touching, the dome light glinting off his pomaded hair and thick glasses, tinted a subtle yellow like that elementary school glue, mucilage.
One morning about two-thirty, I was driving along cul-de-sacs and side streets that border vineyards because it had been raining, and Tom didn’t want to walk downtown. If I’d been alone, I might have closed my eyes for a moment under the moonlight, but I was not alone, Sergeant Tom was riding with me. It was like driving with someone who has Tourette’s syndrome. Every pothole or speed bump elicited, “Fuck! Damn! Shit! Holy Mother of God!” That’s why I got the idea to go down a certain unpaved private vineyard lane we almost never patrolled, because it was the one place I really didn’t want to go with Tom beside me.
It was a stealthy maneuver on my part. I drove around the tiny industrial park, past the lumberyard and day-care center, and then made a hard right into the vineyards. I had been down this lane once before with Ken on an alarm call. At the end of the lane, you’d never believe it, was the most gorgeous Italianate mansion, owned by a banking family whose last name is on credit cards. That night I was possessed; I persisted in driving down the long, muddy lane, spraying gravel into the air and nearly stranding the car in the vines, waking dogs in neighboring parcels. I turned a bend, and my headlights flashed off the eyes of a huge, dead buck in the middle of the road, its antlers glistening white. “Holy shit,” Tom said, jumping out the passenger’s door before I’d come to a complete stop. “It’s fresh. I’m calling my dad,” he said, suddenly in a golden mood. “Gonna get me some venison sausage.”