He told me to pop the trunk and get disposable gloves out, and I helped him drag the carcass to the side of the road. Tom got back in the car. “Turn around,” he said. “It’s lunchtime. I’m gonna eat and then wake up old Dad.”
“What do you think killed it?” I asked, putting the car in drive.
“Some vehicle. Who the hell cares. It’s good to go.” He clucked like a peahen and fidgeted in his seat with pleasure. The road was too narrow to make a U-turn, so I continued on down the lane half a mile, planning to turn in the gravel half-circle in front of the mansion. But before I turned, my headlights glanced off the windows of a parked car in just such a way that I had the impression someone might be sleeping inside. The lane went on for a space past the mansion and its drive and then abruptly ended. The car was parked there, as if the driver had run out of road and didn’t know what to do. “Lovers’ lane?” I said.
I pulled in behind the car, a pale blue ’70s station wagon with a blanket hung inside the rear window.
“What are you doing?” Tom asked irritably.
“I think someone might be sleeping inside; I’m going to run a 28.”
“Leave it for day shift; it’s probably a vineyard worker. I’m hungry.”
“Just let me check something,” I said. I called the plate in to dispatch, and she told me to hang on, the terminal was down.
“Fuck it, let’s go,” Tom said.
“Just a second,” I said. I put the car in park, took off my seatbelt, got out, flipped on my portable radio, and grabbed my light. I gave dispatch my location, and when Rolando asked over the radio if I wanted backup, I said yes. I approached the rear on the driver’s side and held my light up to windows opaque with moisture. I wasn’t sure what I was seeing; dim colors inside seemed to move, like fish in a dirty aquarium. The hood was damaged and streaked with blood. My heart was pounding loudly enough to wake a sleeping man; my breathing became shallow, and I forced myself to take deep, controlled breaths; my vision narrowed to a small point in front of me. I was shivering violently, wiping at my dripping nose with my icy fingers. I moved away from the door in a bladed stance and tapped on the rear window with the light in my left hand, keeping my right hand ready.
Tom was standing off to the side of the patrol car in the shadows, his arms crossed, looking up at the sky as if asking God to help him bear the burden of riding with me. He had no idea who was in that car; if he had, he sure as hell wouldn’t have let me handle things. I don’t think he understood until much later, after the dispatcher had come back on the radio and the man had bolted into the vineyards, after I’d chased and tackled him and pinned him to the vineyard floor in a kind of stasis where he tried to unsnap my holster but was unable to, and I tried to get him into a carotid but was unable to. Tom cuffed him, and we jerked him to his feet, and Tom said, “Goddamnit! Goddamnit! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” at all of blighted creation. I was embarrassed for him; a law enforcement officer should have more self-control, I thought. I realized that he was furious not that the suspect had run into the vineyard, or that his uniform was muddy, but that I’d changed his plans. It hit me as ludicrous that he’d be so furious about missing his lunch or losing out on venison when it seemed likely we’d caught our vineyard rapist. “I’m driving,” he yelled. “Rolando’s doing the CHP 180 form.” He said nothing to me during the drive, and when we arrived at the PD, he said, “Go eat and read the papers.” He was calmer then, which filled me with dread.
At five A.M., the Chief walked in the back door, wearing jeans. The Chief never came in before seven. He and Tom went into the locker room, and when they came out again, the Chief was in full uniform. Chief drummed his fingers on the kitchen counter while his coffee brewed. He poured it slowly into a cup and walked into the briefing room, where I sat, trying to conceal the fact that I was reading the paper. “Got a minute?” Tom followed us into the Chief s office and closed the door. Perhaps we didn’t have the vineyard rapist in custody after all.
Tom wouldn’t look at me. His skin seemed fluorescent and waxen beside the Chiefs beet-colored face.
“Have you agreed with your daily evaluation scores, for the most part?” the Chief asked.
“I don’t think I’m in a position to agree or disagree,” I said.
“That being the case…” The Chief handed me a crisp letter of termination for failure to meet the standards of the field training program. “We think you are not a confrontational person, and that’s what this job’s about,” the Chief said. They both flinched as I hit the magazine release on my gun and then struggled to eject the round jammed in the chamber. I fumbled with it and cleared it. Had they expected me to put my loaded gun on the desk, alongside the badge?
I managed to shake hands with them both and say something completely untrue and absurdly pleasant, which perhaps proved the Chief’s point. If I was the kind of trainee who ticked days off the calendar, I would have known that the date was exactly three months from the day I’d been hired, the day when I should have gone solo. We never mentioned the morning’s events, never discussed the fact that I’d caught the vineyard rapist. I wonder now how long my termination had been planned. Weeks, I suppose. So that once the decision had been made, last-minute change would seem too perplexing, too embarrassing, to be feasible.
“Don’t be a stranger” was the last thing Tom said.
For a long time I couldn’t drive into the city limits of Saint Amelia without feeling panicked. This was difficult because the events of my husband’s growing social calendar — tastings, dinners — were often in or around Saint Amelia. When I slept I dreamed about nameless, faceless groups of men rejecting me, or wounded men with broken backs begging me for help. I took a consulting job in San Francisco and told myself I would make more money in six months than the Chief made in a year, as if that mattered. And I tried to find solace by becoming something unattainable to the men I’d driven with — a very beautiful woman. So my nails always glistened, I painted my eyelids like a chanteuse. Men cluster to me, like moths around a flame. And if their wings burn, I know I’m not to blame, I’d sing along with Marlene Dietrich. I’d tuck gardenias behind my ears. But I still didn’t — though I no longer needed to worry about being in a ground fight — wear earrings or necklaces or rings.
One Saturday night, about five months after my dismissal, we were invited to a party in the middle of a vineyard just south of Saint Amelia. An old couple from Texas who’d made a small fortune in forklift propane had bought the vineyard for a retirement hobby, and in a bid for authenticity they’d hired my husband’s boss as consultant winemaker. Which means my husband made their wine. The party was to celebrate bottling their sauvignon blanc and merlot, and they’d invited all their kin, children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, to help with the bottling. I didn’t know anyone, and — though I was relieved that no one would ask me about the progress of my law enforcement career, something that had been a sort of amuse-gueule at certain dinner parties — I wanted to leave immediately. A small area was clear of vines and had been sprinkled with sawdust, tables set up and strung with lights shaped like chili peppers, campfires built, and barbecues lit. There was a table full of hard liquor, and the old Texans started off drinking glasses of gin or whiskey and Coke. One of the sons up from Los Angeles, who was asking my husband about wine-making, said, “Isn’t it ironic that the locals drink whiskey, not wine?” and my husband, who was drinking a beer, caught my eye, and we smiled, because these folks were so obviously not.