Anyway, Jim was watch commander the night it happened to JJ, and when the “officer down” call came to dispatch, Jim stayed at his post until he knew who it was.
When Jim got there, JJ’s cruiser was still parked up on the shoulder of PCH, with the lights flashing. It was a routine traffic stop, and the shooter was out of the car and firing before JJ could draw his gun. JJ’s partner had stayed with him but also called in the plates. They got JJ to South Coast Medical Center but not in time. One of the reasons they built South Coast Medical Center forty-seven years ago was because Gordon French was shot and died for lack of medical care in Laguna. Then they build one, and it’s still too late. Life is full of things like that, things that are true but badly shaped. JJ was twenty-five – would be thirty-eight today if he hadn’t seen that Corolla weaving down the southbound lanes. They caught the shooter and gave him death. He’s in San Quentin. His appeals will take at least six more years. Jim wants to go if they execute him. Me too, and I won’t blink.
THE NEXT TIME we saw Jason was at the hardware store two days later. I saw his bike leaned against the wall by the door, and I spotted him at the counter as I walked through the screen door that Jim held open for me. He had on a knit beanie and a long-sleeve black T-shirt with some kind of skull pattern, and his pants were still just about sliding off his waist, though you couldn’t see any boxers.
“Try some ice,” the clerk said cheerfully.
Jason turned with a bag of something and started past us, his lips fat and black. His cheeks were swelled up behind the sunglasses.
Jim wheeled and followed Jason out. Through the screen door, I could hear them.
“Dale do that?”
“No.”
Silence then. I saw Jason looking down. And Jim with his fists on his hips and this balanced posture he gets when he’s mad.
“Then what happened?”
“Nothing. Get away from me, man.”
“I can have a word with your brother.”
“Bad idea.”
Jason swung his leg over his bike and rolled down the gravel parking lot.
The next evening, Dale came up our driveway in a black Ram Charger pickup. It was “wine thirty,” as Jim calls it, about six o’clock, which is when we would open a bottle, sit, and watch the osprey try to catch one of the big trout rising in our pond out front.
The truck pulled up close to the porch, all the way to the logs Jim had staked out to mark the end of the parking pad. Dale was leaning forward in the seat like he was ready to get out, but he didn’t. The window went down, and Dale stared at us, face flushed red, which with his short red hair made him look ready to burst into flames.
“Dad told me to get over here to apologize for the jewelry, so that’s what I’m doing.”
“You beat up your brother because he brought it back?”
“He deserved every bit he got.”
“A twelve-year-old doesn’t deserve a beating like that,” said Jim.
“He’s thirteen.”
“You can’t miss the point much further,” said Jim.
Dale gunned the truck engine, and I watched the red dust jump away from the ground below the pipe. He was still leaning away from the seat like you would back home in July when your car’s been in the sun and all you’ve got on is a halter or your swimsuit top. But this was Idaho in June at evening time, and it probably wasn’t more than seventy degrees.
“Get out and show me your back,” said Jim.
“What about it?”
“You know what it’s about.”
“You don’t know shit,” said Dale, pressing his back against the seat. “I deal with things.”
Then the truck revved and lurched backward. I could see Dale leaning forward in the seat again and his eyes raised to the rearview. He kept a good watch on the driveway behind him as the truck backed out. Most young guys in trucks, they’d have swung an arm out and turned to look directly where they were driving. Maybe braced the arm on the seat. JJ always did that. I liked watching JJ learn to drive because his attention was so pure and undistractible. Dale headed down the road, and the dust rose like it was chasing him.
“Someone whipped his back,” I said.
“Dad.”
“You made some calls.”
Jim nodded. Cops are curious people. Just because they retire doesn’t mean they stop nosing into things. Jim has a network of friends that stretches all the way across the country, though most of them are in the West. Mostly retired but a few still active. And they grouse and gossip and yap and yaw like you wouldn’t believe, swap information and stories and contacts and just about anything you can imagine that relates to cops. You want to know something about a guy, someone will know someone who can help. Mostly by Internet but by phone too. Jim calls it the Geezer Enforcement Network.
“Dale’s father has a nice jacket because he’s a nice guy,” said Jim. “Aggravated assault in a local bar, pled down to disturbing the peace. Probation for assault on his wife. Ten months in county for another assault – a Vietnamese kid, student at Boise – broke his jaw with his fist. There was a child-abuse inquiry raised by the school when Dale showed up for first grade with bruises. Dale got homeschooled after that. Dad’s been clean since ’93. The wife sticks by her man – won’t file, won’t do squat. Tory and Teri Badger. Christ, what a name.”
I thought about that for a second while the osprey launched himself from a tree.
“Is Tory an Aryan Brother?”
“Nobody said that.”
“Clean for thirteen years,” I said. “Since Jason was born. So, you could say he’s trying.”
Jim nodded. I did the math in my mind and knew that Jim was doing it too. Clean since 1993. That was the year JJ died. We can’t even think of that year without remembering him. I’m not sure exactly what goes through Jim’s mind, but I know that just the mention of the year takes him right back to that watch commander’s desk on August 20, 1993. I’ll bet he hears the “officer down” call with perfect clarity, every syllable and beat. Me, I think of JJ when he was seven years old, running down the sidewalk to the bus stop with his friends. Or the way he used to comb his hair straight down onto his forehead when he was a boy. To tell you the truth, sometimes I think about him for hours, all twenty-five years of him, whether somebody says “1993” or not.
That Saturday Jason came back over and split the wood. I watched him off and on from inside as he lined up the logs in the splitter and stood back as the wood cracked and fell into smaller and smaller halves. Twice he stopped and pulled a small blue notebook from the back pocket of his slipping-down jeans and scribbled something with a pen from another pocket. The three of us ate lunch on the porch even though it was getting cold. Jason didn’t say much, and I could tell the lemonade stung his lips. The swelling around his eyes was down, but one was black. He was going to be a freshman come September.
“Can your dad protect you from your brother?” Jim asked out of nowhere.
“Dale’s stronger now. But mostly, yeah.”
Jim didn’t say anything to that. After nearly forty years of being married to him, I can tell you his silences mean he doesn’t believe you. And of course there were the broken lips and black eye making his case.
“If you need a place, you come stay here a night or two,” he said. “Anytime.”
“You’d be welcome,” I said.
“Okay,” he said, looking down at his sandwich.
I wanted to ask him what he wrote in the notebook, but I didn’t. I have a place where I put things for safekeeping too, though it’s not a physical place.
Later that night, we went to a party at Ed and Ann Logan’s house on the other side of Spirit Lake. It was mostly retired SoCal cops, the old faces from Orange County and some Long Beach people Jim fell in with whom I never really got to know. I’ve come to like cops in general. I guess that would figure. And their wives too – we pretty much get along. There’s a closedness about most cops that used to put me off until JJ died and I realized that you can’t explain everything to everybody. You have to have that place inside where something can be safe. Even if it’s only a thought or a memory. It’s the opposite of the real world, where people die as easily as leaves fall off a tree. And the old cliché about cops believing it’s them and us, well, it’s absolutely true that that’s what they think. Most people think that way – it’s just the “thems” and the “usses” are different.