After (3 page)

Carson recounts the incident, filling the narrative with all the questions and the doubts that plague him, working through the silences that strangle him and hurtle him back into the moment with the retelling. “I know now that I should’ve waited for Jordan. He radioed he was on the way. It all happened so fast. So goddamned fast. I lost control. I mean, before I knew it he was reaching into his waistband and had turned around and was on his feet. On his feet, facing me. It couldn’t have been more than a few seconds before I lost control of the stop. That’s not supposed to happen, I know. But once he was on his feet, facing me, he was holding this object—he wouldn’t drop it like I kept telling him to. He kept trying to tell me something, but I wouldn’t listen, I couldn’t take the chance. He looked like a good kid. He gave me some lip, but he wasn’t at all what I was expecting. I was afraid for my life. I thought he had a gun.”

Frey listened, knowing that memory is fractured and heightened, made suspect by the lingering effects of trauma. Every time an officer tells him details of a shooting he’s been involved in, Frey recalls the conclusion of his favorite writer, Gabriel García Márquez, that life is not what one lives but what one remembers. Carson tells him much more than he needs to know. The days and weeks and months looming ahead of Carson will be even more crucial than this moment, as he helps him to remember the incident in ways that would render what happened inevitable rather than criminal. “You don’t have to make a statement when you go back to CID. Get one of the other officers to take you and I’ll meet you there. I’ll help you fill out the Discharge of Firearms report. You’ll be asked what happened. You’re not to say anything. Do you understand?

“Yeah.”

“Have you ever fired your weapon before?”

“No.” Then Carson asks, “What’s gonna happen to me?”

“I don’t want you to worry about that tonight. I’ll protect your rights. Just know that.”

Carson has been in CID many times but never like this, with the eyes of the few officers in the building offering him so much compassion, never with those same officers stopping in the hall to pat him on the back, tell him he’ll be okay, to ask how he is.

In an office next to the area where roll call is held, Carson is asked by a Colin Barnes if he wants to make a statement. Barnes at two-thirty in the morning wears a cashmere jacket over a cream-colored shirt with a silk navy blue tie and large silver cuff links, stylish as always amid the grimy gray funk, the stale, listless air, the battered furniture and indifferent decor that Carson knows too well and that weigh on him with an awful heaviness at this moment.

Then Barnes reads Carson the Advise of Rights form:
You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you
. Carson is now a cop who has been Mirandized. He signs the form.

“Don’t people know when you say ‘Drop what you’re holding,’ we mean drop what you’re holding?” Colin murmurs irritably as he places the form before Carson to sign.

The Discharge of Firearms report asks everything from the type of weapon used in the incident to how much sleep Carson had in the last twenty-four hours. The single eight-line paragraph that Frey tutors him on will be used for a press release that the Office of Communications will send to the media.

Carson agonizes over the brief paragraph, which contains the sketchiest rendering of the event even as it answers the primary who, what, when, where. The only question left unanswered is why. Carson hands Barnes the form studded with erasures, damp with sweat, the cursive script small and tortured.

“You been given a replacement weapon?” Barnes asks.

“No, not yet.”

The gun used in the shooting is now evidence. He can’t leave CID without a gun. On administrative leave, he is still a police officer. Still expected to protect and serve if he sees a “situation,” while gassing up his car or shopping for a new pair of shoes. He’s got to have a gun. He could be on some thug’s kill list. Maybe he’s got enemies he doesn’t even know about among all the people he’s arrested and helped send to jail. He’s responsible for
his
life. The lives of others. And his Beretta gives him all the authority he needs. The one or two times he’s left home without his weapon he’s felt naked, like a moving target. His Beretta is a strap-on body part. He wants a gun but can’t imagine holding it without remembering how he held it moments before the shooting, with focused, unfamiliar horror and dread. If he had to fire his weapon again he is not sure that he could.

Matthew Frey waits with Carson for Derek Stinson, the armorer who provides officers with new weapons. Stinson, a small, monklike man who like Matthew Frey was awakened from sleep, arrives carrying the metal case that is with him at all times. He’s an ex-cop who keeps a collection of guns in his St. Mary’s County home.

Stinson places the metal case on the same desk that Carson used to sign the Miranda forms and to write the report of the shooting. The four guns lie in the case embedded in foam, with magazines for each gun. Stinson gently lifts the Beretta and a magazine from the hold of the foam and offers them to Carson. Carson holds them in his dry, ashen palms with a reverence that stills the moment. Derek Stinson tells him, “In situations like the one you were in tonight, this is your only friend.”

After Carson has put the new Beretta in his holster he tells Stinson, “I’d never fired my weapon at a suspect before. I never wanted to have to do it, but still I wondered what it would be like. Now I’d give anything not to know.”

At 5:30 a.m., Carson unlocks the door to his house, weak with the desire to see the faces of his children. It is a desire that fills him like hunger. Like thirst. He walks quietly in the dark to his twin daughters’ room, which he painted pink for their birthday. The night-light plugged into the wall socket casts an eerie frosting of muted half-light over the room’s darkness. Barbie posters claim nearly all the space on the walls. Stuffed teddy bears, dolls, and Beanie Babies are scattered all over the carpeted floor. Standing in the doorway, Carson is stunned by the cheeriness of the room and it nearly buckles his knees, nearly sends him crashing onto the floor, but he steadies himself and walks to the bed of Roseanne, lying on her side, sucking her thumb reflexively in her sleep, her body curled, snail-like, beneath the sheet. Carson wipes the tiny beads of sweat from her forehead with his fingertips. Leaning closer, he listens to the heavy grunt of her breathing. He closes his eyes and allows that sound, the slightly asthmatic, ragged breathing of his daughter, to drench him like rain.

After a few moments Carson pads softly over to Roslyn’s bed. She is sprawled on her back, arms and legs akimbo. A gentle fluttering of her eyes behind her closed lids makes it seem as though she’s merely feigning sleep. Roslyn’s left leg twitches several times and she turns on her side.

In Juwan’s room, the boy sleeps too, a copy of
Treasure Island
tucked beneath his pillow. Carson stares at the face slack with sleep. He looks deeply into the face of a son that he is sure, even before this night, he has already lost.

Carson stands outside Juwan’s door and considers the steps he will have to take to enter the room where his wife, Bunny, sleeps. The thought of those steps fills his mind like a forced march. Bunny wakes up at 7:00 a.m. Maybe, just maybe, he will have a reprieve until then. He knows he won’t be that lucky but walks back downstairs anyway, slumping into a chair at the breakfast nook in the kitchen. He is more than tired, feels an ache that is primordial and awful in his bones and in his skin. He’d like to make a cup of coffee but doesn’t want to make any movements that would signal that he is home. There have been other times in his twelve years on the force when he was hours late because of a fatal accident. Sometimes he had a chance to call. Sometimes he didn’t. Bunny knew this was part of The Job. Shit happened. So she would have guessed, Carson convinces himself, that shit happened last night. To someone else.

If he can just be alone for a while. So that he doesn’t have to face Bunny, to tell her what he did. Even if alone means having nothing and no one to distract him from the images and the memories of the shooting playing over and over in his head. A videotape that on the ride home he promised that he would only allow to play for fifteen minutes of every hour, a promise he has absolutely no power to keep.

The clock on the kitchen wall ticks in all this silence, too loudly, and when he finally switches on the kitchen light to see that he has been sitting in the breakfast nook for half an hour, Carson hears Bunny coming down the stairs. She stands in the kitchen doorway, bundled in a terry-cloth robe, her hair in rollers.

“I couldn’t sleep. I haven’t been able to sleep all night,” she complains, yawning and walking over to the table.

“What’s wrong? Why are you so late?” she asks sleepily. “Why are you sitting down here? Why didn’t you come to bed?”

“I know I should’ve called,” he begins.

“I was worried…I started to call the station,” Bunny whines.

“I’m sorry.”

“Carson, sorry just doesn’t cut it. You don’t seem like yourself. You look strange, Carson, what’s wrong?” she asks, sitting down heavily beside him.

He thinks he will tell her calmly, slowly. Instead, the words speak themselves, stumble out. “I’d given him the ticket. The stop was over. I was on my way home.”

“Carson?” Bunny asks, saying his name like a question, and to Carson his name sounds as odd as the inquiry he has heard, it seems, a thousand times this night,
Are you okay?

“It was dark. Hell, I didn’t know. How could I? All he had to do was drop what he was holding. Like I told him. Then I would’ve known.”

“Carson, you’re scaring me.”

“It happened so fast.” And that is the truest thing Carson has thought or said this night. “It happened so fast. I killed a man. I stopped him because he was speeding and driving with no headlights.”

“And you killed him?” Bunny whispers, rising so quickly she nearly falls, clutching the collar of her robe tight at her throat and covering her mouth with her hand. Carson stands and walks to Bunny as if he could protect her, save her, from the wrath of what he has done. They cling to each other. Never before have they held each other with love so total and so blind.

They sit down again at the kitchen table and Carson tells Bunny what happened. He can tell the story now without thinking. “I couldn’t believe it. That I’d actually shot him. And he was holding a cell phone, not a gun. That’s what was in his hand. God, Bunny, God help me, I don’t think I really saw him,
really
saw him, until he was dead.” Carson searches Bunny’s face for forgiveness but sees only confusion and horror and pity for him.

Bunny hugs Carson and lays her head on his shoulder. “You didn’t mean to kill him. I know that. You were afraid for your life.”

Afraid for your life. Afraid for your life.
Like the forty officers killed all over the country last year while on duty, nine of them during traffic stops. Like Cecil Warren, a D.C. cop shot in the back with his own gun a decade ago, whose story was a case study at the police academy of what not to do. Afraid for your life. Four words that are supposed to provide absolution but provide Carson with no peace. Four words to explain the inexplicable. The four words that provide a police officer with a moral escape hatch but that can sometimes turn the heinous into the justifiable. The mantra every cop knows by heart, “I was afraid for my life.” I was afraid for
my
life, so I took
yours
. Before you could take mine. Carson has never until this moment heard the chilling paradox embedded in the words. The brutal math. If the cell phone had been a gun, would his anguish be less searing? If he’d killed a kidnapper, a robber, a murderer, would he still feel consigned to hell?

Was he afraid? Although he has told everyone, Matthew Frey, Melvin Griffin, the investigators at the scene that he was, he doesn’t remember what he was feeling. He remembers only what he did. “Even while I was pulling the trigger, Bunny, I was praying it was a dream. And when I saw what I had done I prayed that he was asleep, or maybe that I was. That if he didn’t wake up, then I would.”

2

Maybe it’s a dream.
Carson allows himself to think the hopeful blasphemy, throwing off the sheets and spread, sitting up, his feet hitting the bedroom floor with a thud that sounds to him, on this morning, totally ominous. He looks around the bedroom, sees everything he knows so well—the deep green and red paisley drapes at the window, the photos of Bunny and the children, his mother, and Bunny’s parents atop the mahogany chest of drawers, the twenty-six-inch television on a wide wooden table that faces the bed, the clock radio, the mobile phone, Bunny’s nightgown and robe flung over the back of the leather recliner, three pairs of heels huddled in a corner. It’s all familiar, and it’s all so strange. His uniform is bundled on the floor near the entrance to the bathroom. He tossed it there after stripping it off at six-thirty and diving beneath the spread and the sheets to hold Bunny, to let her hold him a few more minutes before she woke the children, prepared them for school, and left for work.

It was under the sheets as they lay together that Carson said, “I’ll tell the children that I’ll have to be off from work awhile. I’ll tell them what happened.”

“Everything?”

“As much as I think they can handle. I’ll pick them up from school today.”

“Are you sure?” Bunny asked skeptically. “There’s still time.”

“No, there isn’t. It’ll be in the papers today, maybe tomorrow. They’ll have to know, and they need to find out from me.”

He has made
that promise, and now, sitting on the side of the bed at eleven o’clock, Carson wonders if maybe what happened was a nightmare. He can’t shed this hope, even as it’s contradicted by the brooding malaise and queasiness festering inside him.

Nothing would have seemed out of the ordinary to his children this morning. Carson often sleeps through their departure for school. When he’s on the midnight shift and sleeps during the day, they’ve been told to use their “quiet voices” when they come home from school, tiptoeing without much success outside their parents’ bedroom door, behind which Carson’s body clock struggles to adjust to the rhythm he has to maintain for the three nights of the shift. He’s in permanent flux. Four days on the day shift and then three days off. Three evenings on the night shift and three days off. On the day shift, he hits the streets while Bunny and the kids are showering and getting dressed. On the evening shift, he misses dinner. On the midnight shift, he comes home to an empty house at 8:00 a.m.

It would have seemed like any other morning to Juwan and Roseanne and Roslyn. While they dressed for school and bickered over breakfast, Daddy was asleep. How will he tell them? He sits on the side of his bed, a stranger inside his skin. He’s on leave with pay from the department. Still a cop. But not able to be a cop. He can’t even work his part-time security position. Anything that might require him to use a gun is off-limits. But, he thinks with a bitterness that swells his heart near to bursting, because he’s still a cop, he couldn’t leave district headquarters without a weapon.

Carson stands up and sees the blinking red light on the answering machine. He’d heard the call as he lay in bed, unable to sleep, unable to rise, an hour ago. It was Matthew Frey calling to ask if he was okay, if he needed anything, telling him that he would have his secretary call him to set up an appointment for next week. Telling him to call him anytime before then if he has questions or just wants to talk. “If you need a mental health professional to talk to, I can provide you with some names. It’ll be confidential. No one in the department will have to know,” he assures Carson in the slow, melodious baritone that schooled Carson last night on what to do now that he is on the other side of the law.

In the twelve hours since the shooting, he’s been seized by the desire to end
once and for all
the guilt he feels, guilt undiminished by the sanctuary he found in his wife’s arms. Surely he’s damned, but he’s not crazy. Not yet. He’s not ready to eat his gun after a bad shooting, like Boone, James, and Tremont, their names whispered like a shameful taboo, three police officers in the state of Maryland
that he knows of,
since he joined the force, who took their own lives. Carson stands looking at the answering machine, off-balance, dizzy, longing to conceal and to confess.

On a normal day he’d wash a load of clothes for Bunny, pick up grocery items on the running list on a pad held to the refrigerator by a duck-shaped magnet. But this isn’t like any other day, so after Carson has showered and dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt he stands in front of the open refrigerator, enveloped in a cocoon of cool air, sickened by the sight of shelves bulging with food, and in the end makes a cup of instant coffee. The house is too quiet. If this were a normal day he’d have relished the quiet of the neighborhood of prosperous retirees who spend as much time on jazz cruises or volunteering at the nearby schools as they do at home, and the busy two-income professional couples who don’t pull into Paradise Glen until six or six-thirty in the evening. But this day he’s cloistered by the silence intermittently broken by the sound in his head of bullets discharged from a gun. Imprisoned by a sound that erupts relentlessly, that he cannot stifle or escape.

Even the daytime court shows, which he flips through after settling on the sofa in front of the television in the family room—
Judge Hatchett, Judge Joe Brown, Judge Judy
—don’t muffle the intermittent flashbacks. The sight of the hapless adulterers, embezzlers, and con artists standing before the TV judges intensifies the trembling of his hands, the painful galloping of his heartbeat, the hallucinatory image of the mask of awful surprise on the face of the young man he shot.

Carson sees the
Washington Post
tossed by Bunny near the fireplace before she left. He rarely reads newspapers anymore, and even when he does he barely trusts the veracity of what’s in them. Yet when he turns, his fingers slick with sweat and shivering with a chill, to page 2 of the Metro section and sees the brief account under “Crime & Justice: Maryland,” Carson knows what he’s reading is the truth.

OFFICER INVOLVED IN FATAL SHOOTING

A man was fatally wounded last night by a Prince George’s County police officer, who stopped the man for speeding and driving with no headlights. The shooting occurred shortly before midnight in the parking lot of the Watkins Glen Mall on Central Avenue and Watkins Park Road. It was not immediately clear last night what prompted the officer to open fire. It could not be learned if any weapons were found at the scene. None of the people involved in the incident were immediately identified.

The article renders the tragic as routine. Carson suddenly realizes he doesn’t know the name of the man he killed. He should know at least that. But soon he will know, for tomorrow’s paper will identify the dead man, and then he will know more than he can bear. Carson folds the paper and turns up the volume on the television. Maybe that will silence the sound of the gun that keeps going off in his head. The last sound he ever wanted to hear.

It had gotten so that Carson rarely told anybody he didn’t know that he was a police officer. When he was out in plain clothes, shopping, at a game, shooting the breeze with a stranger, people were friendly. If it was a woman, maybe she would flirt. But then somehow it came out that Carson was a police officer and instantly silence oozed like poison, filling the suddenly yawning space between them. The relaxed, easygoing banter curdled into a wary hesitance that left the man or woman Carson was talking to bereft of speech, except to ask in a hushed whisper, “You’re a police?
For real?
” When he confirmed again that yes, he was in
law enforcement,
people sometimes backed away from him or turned to talk to the person in line behind them. They’d shut their mouths, fold their arms protectively across their chest, look at Carson not only as though because he was a cop he was undoubtedly corrupt and brutal, but as if they were afraid he could see into the tight, tiny chambers of their hearts and glimpse the unpaid traffic tickets, the supplies stolen from the job, the dress shoplifted when they were sixteen, their fantasies of hiring someone to hurt the boss they hate but have to kiss up to in order to keep their job.

In the eyes of those people, every White cop hog-tied and beat Rodney King, a brutality caught on videotape and shown around the world. Every cop shot Amadou Diallo, unleashing forty-one bullets into the body of that skinny kid from Senegal in the doorway of an apartment in Brooklyn. And to some Black folks, there’s a war on Black people, and cops are waging it. Because he killed an unarmed man he’ll be considered a foot soldier in that war.

Then there was Bunny accusing him of wearing his uniform all the time. What was he supposed to do? He carried a gun everywhere. He slept with a gun—not in his hands but in his head.
A cop is a cop 24–7,
Carson thinks, feeling the coffee incite a rumbling inside his empty stomach.
A cop
while singing hymns in church on Sunday morning.
A cop
sitting in a restaurant with his family, eyes scanning the place (he can’t help it, it’s automatic), hoping,
Please, nobody go crazy up in here and start acting a fool
. But just in case, his revolver is strapped to his ankle.
A cop
when stumbling out of some bar in plain clothes, head tight, but not quite wasted, coming upon a robbery, the sight instantly clearing his head; he pulls out his revolver, and when a fellow officer,
in uniform,
arrives, he yells, “I’m on the job. I’m on the job,” thrusting his shield into the darkness so
he’s
not pegged as the thief. So
he’s
not busted or blasted. He’s out of uniform, so he’s just Black, not Black and blue. Carson goes into the bathroom and pulls off his sweatshirt, wipes his arms and chest and back with a towel, and finds a bottle of aspirin under the sink. He swallows two with a glass of water.
Maybe this will ease the sweats and chills,
he thinks, but without much conviction. What can he take to stop the sound of the gun firing in his head?

It was 1988 when he joined the force. With only a month on the job, Carson was called to break up a fight outside a liquor store. His partner had called in sick that day. Young. Inexperienced. Scared of fucking up, making a bad arrest. Driving to the parking lot of a warehouse-size liquor supermarket that was a magnet for troublemakers and rowdies, Carson had a blast of adrenaline pumping, pushing through his veins, making him feel crazy/invincible and, yeah, still scared. Right off the bat he violated rule number one: wait for backup. But he wanted to prove himself. He’s always wanted to prove himself. Surely, he thought, he could handle this.

There was a crowd, but they were just watching the two men go at it. A big burly Incredible Hulk mutha and a wiry short guy, bloody but unstoppable. Carson radioed for backup. But he didn’t wait. He couldn’t wait. Hell, the guy could get killed. So he jumped out of his cruiser and swung into the crowd. His nightstick broke when he slammed it on the back of the bruiser, who turned around, not even flinching at the sight of Carson in uniform or the sound of him shouting into his hand radio for backup. Carson tried to body slam him, but it was like scaling a mountain. Suddenly Carson was on the ground and the monster was astride him, choking the life out of him, he was sure. The crowd’s voice was lurid, wild, jeering, some rooting for Carson, some shouting, “Kick the cop’s ass!” Straining to remove the huge greasy hands from his neck, Carson heard the sound of his radio sliding cold and slick across the parking lot into the crowd. The bastard started banging his head against the cement. Once. Twice. Pain blasted across Carson’s temples and he was momentarily blind. Then two men from the crowd jumped in, wrestled the guy off Carson just as two police cruisers arrived. The lights and the sirens, loud, disorienting, scattered the crowd. And that wasn’t the only ass-whooping he’d gotten. He was shot in the arm at the scene of a bank robbery, suffered whiplash when his cruiser crashed into another patrol car chasing a stolen SUV. But he always gave as good as he got. Got even. Got even and then some.

Back then they had partners, and Carson’s first partner was a White guy named Deek Rehnquist. Deek had a slow, country, long-legged gait and the beginnings of a paunch. His buzz crew-cut revealed more of his scalp than was legal. He schooled Carson those first months on everything he needed to know, how to write a comprehensive, readable crime report, the importance of keeping his uniform crisply starched and his appearance neat at all times. It was called “uniform integrity,” and sloppiness was a violation. They’d been trained like soldiers at the police academy—obedience, honor, integrity, service. You sucked it up and just forgot shit you couldn’t handle.

His uniform wasn’t just the gray shirt and light purple pants with a stripe running down the side; it was his gun, pepper spray, his ammo pouch with two magazines that held fifteen bullets each to back up the fifteen in his loaded Beretta, handcuffs, and a baton, all this strapped around his waist. Deek told him how they had to be courteous with the public. “You don’t know how many times I’ve been called a honky bastard or a son of a bitch during a stop. Carson, you just got to let them call you a motherfucker and say ‘Yes sir, yes ma’am, but I still have to write you this ticket.’ ”