10
Late the next morning Bradley stood before Mrs. Perez’s sixth-grade class at Lincoln Elementary School up in the Antelope Valley, north of L.A. This was high desert, where a constant wind whistled through the housing tracts and blew flotillas of plastic bags against the windward walls and fences. Antelope Valley was serviced by LASD’s Lancaster Station, and was considered a Siberian assignment by most deputies. Bradley looked out a window at the flat brown grass of the playground as he tried to answer the question.
“Well, I’ve never shot anyone on duty because I’ve never had to,” he lied. “The goal of any good deputy is to do his or her job without resorting to force.”
“What if someone pulls a gun on you?”
“You waste ’em!” offered a skinny boy.
“No, you try to talk to them,” said Bradley. He wanted very much to agree with the student. You can’t talk to a surprised kidnapper with a gun in his hand. “Circumstances change quickly and you have to keep up. Things get complicated fast. It’s like a game. Like. . I don’t know. I’m not being clear here. Sergeant Padilla, maybe you can weigh in on that one.”
Bad verb choice, he thought. Padilla easily tipped the scales at two hundred. She glanced at him. His headache was back. The room on this cool morning was heated to what felt like ninety degrees. The children were alert and attentive and annoying. Padilla droned on about appropriate use of force and limits of restraint and last option and the like. Bradley watched a dirt devil unravel across a field. He imagined Erin in a Max Azria dress years ago when they’d ditched a party down in Baja and taken a midnight stroll on a beach and made love standing up in a sand dune.
“What if they pull a knife on you?”
“Don’t mess with no blade,” said the skinny boy again. “That’s what my daddy says.”
“He’s a wise man,” said Bradley.
“Not wise enough to stay outta prison!”
Bradley thought of Erin now, her middle distended, just days away from making him the proudest father on earth. How could he have fallen so far, from a world in which Erin loved him even in the sand dunes of Baja, to one where she was scarcely able to look at him without pity or anger or amazement at his self-absorption and greed? He felt cursed and singled out for tragedy. And worse yet, unlucky.
“I’m sure he’ll be out of the can soon,” he said, then looked at Sergeant Padilla. “Sergeant, I’m going to take a quick break. Just get a sip of water outside.”
“You stay right here, Deputy Jones. We are just about done.”
Padilla spoke in the cheerfully condescending tones of some elementary school teachers. She covered the three signs of drug and alcohol abuse, pedestrian safety on the wide new boulevards of the Antelope Valley, and dealing with suspicious adults. Near the end of the period she told the students about Maslow’s pyramid of self-actualization, where once your basic needs are met you can then be free to strive for excellence. And a career in the LASD, she pointed out, was a wonderful base on which to build your life.
Outside in the soon-so-be-busy hallway Padilla stood before Bradley and launched a finger into his chest. “I don’t care what kind of a celebrity you think you are. I’m a superior, and when I say jump, you ask how high. Got it?”
“Ma’am yes ma’am.”
“And quit staring out the windows. You’re worse than the children.”
• • •
After shift he waited in a bar off Highway 395 in Adelanto. It was the nicest place in town, though still a hellhole, he thought. From the booth he could see the old motel still boarded up, its sign lying in the rubble of broken asphalt and bottle glass that was once a parking lot. The wind had blown the tumbleweeds up against the security fence and they looked like they were trying to get inside. He looked up at the sign by the highway: WELCOME TO ADELANTO, CITY OF UNLIMITED POSSIBILITIES. He caught his reflection in a window and noted that his hapkido-toned shoulders and arms were flattered by the uniform shirt, but his eyes looked heavy and dead. The STAR Unit, he thought. Maslow’s pyramid. What happened to my life?
Mike Finnegan came in a few minutes later, dressed for golf in a lemon yellow shirt, green pants, saddle shoes, and a red newsboy cap with PGA stitched in gold. He had a white sweater tied around his neck against the high desert chill. He came to the booth with a smile on his face and the sound of his cleats clicking on the floor.
“This is the first time you’ve actually invited me anywhere since your wedding,” he said as he climbed into the booth. Mike was a short, stout man. He took off his hat and Bradley saw that Mike had again changed his hair from its usual red to black. “After all these years! It makes me very happy.”
“I’m not happy. I’m at the end of my tether. All tethers.”
“Talk to me.”
They ordered drinks from a wispy blonde with tired eyes and no smile. She was chewing something as she took their orders and still chewing it when she brought the drinks back and set them out. Two men came in and looked at everything in the room except Bradley. The Blands, he thought. CIB’s trusted watchdogs. He waved at them and they looked briefly his way.
“Friends?” asked Mike.
“Department watchers. Criminal Investigation Bureau.”
“No wonder you’re not happy.”
“They’re just a small part of my trouble. Although when I caught them loitering near my home I felt like shotgunning them both.” He said this loudly so they could hear. They ignored him and took a table on the far other side of the room. Bradley marched over and slid a fiver into the jukebox and chose the six loudest, fastest songs he could find.
Back at the table he sat and looked into Finnegan’s optimistic blue eyes.
“I am here to listen and help,” Mike said.
Bradley gave a heated description of CIB’s treatment of him-the endless interviews and accusations, the watchers near his home in Valley Center, the watchers shadowing him while he was on patrol, the CIB prying into his banking, tax, and phone records, the threat of a polygraph, his new assignment to the STAR Unit.
“STAR Unit?”
“Success Through Awareness and Resistance. It’s for students. It’s actually a good program,” he said without conviction. “Keeps the kids from being taken advantage of.”
“That’s important.”
Bradley sipped his beer and looked out the dusty window at the traffic moaning up and down 395. And of course his thoughts turned to Erin again: He remembered time they’d driven up that highway to Bishop, where Erin and the Inmates played the Millpond Music Festival. They’d taken a few days to go camping high up in the Sierras north of there. He pictured Erin with her little ultralight spinning rod and reel, catching trout in a lake, the way the high-altitude light turned her hair to radiant copper. Now a boxy-looking vehicle buzzed up 395 trying to outrun a big rig, and it was the same color as Erin’s hair had been in that brief but eternal moment. He’d taken her picture. What a face. What a smile.
Then he began talking about her. His voice softened and he looked down at the tabletop as much as he looked at Mike. His heart felt so full yet so constricted. It felt good to let some things out. He had no one in life to speak to, really, except his wife. His brothers were scattered; his father missing-in-action, as he always had been; his mother a ghost. Erin was his best friend, now alternatingly tolerant and furious at him. He told himself it was her hormones but knew it was more than that. When he thought of his soon-to-be-born son, Bradley felt the tears well up in his eyes. He felt locked out of fatherhood, robbed of his natural right to protect and nurture, extorted out of something that should already be his.