First Avenue (4 page)
“Nobody is cut out for that. You did a good job.”
“Did I? It seemed to me that you did most of it, and I just hung around in the corners, afraid to look.”
“You did what you were supposed to do.”
She nodded slowly as she looked past him out to the water. “Maybe you’re right. Anyway, what the hell am I worrying about me for? Do you ever wonder what you got yourself into, with this job, I mean?”
“I don’t think about it anymore. That’s what I like about the kayak. I sweat it out of me before I get here. By the time I’m home, I’ve forgotten all about First Avenue. It’s a whole different world, and I don’t belong there.”
“Maybe I should get a kayak.”
“It doesn’t work very well on concrete.”
“I’m not sure it would help anyway. Sometimes I can’t forget things.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll learn how to do it.”
He left unsaid the danger if she did not. He had seen that, too. Better to hold it away, to forget.
He made sure she was comfortable, that she had a fresh glass of whiskey, and then he excused himself to take his shower. He was overdue for that. He shed his clothes, and as he pulled the sweatshirt over his head, the death smell passed by his nose again. It was impossible to get rid of it. He stuffed his clothes into a plastic garbage bag and tied the end into a knot. This time he would not even try to wash them.
When he returned to the deck, she was asleep—the second glass of whiskey half consumed on the table beside her. He sat down carefully in the other chair. She seemed so small curled up on the recliner, so fragile, her wrists and hands hardly bigger than a child’s.
Out in the Sound a tugboat was passing. It pulled an empty barge toward the grain terminals, its diesel engines pounding a war dance rhythm across the water. Seagulls swooped down to the barge and squawked their disappointment when they found it empty.
On his deck a silent guest arrived without invitation. There was no extra chair for her. She sat alone, off to the side, too small to stand. He would not look at her and rubbed his eyes hard with the palms and fingers of both hands. Even so he could not push her away. He squinted into the sun and remembered.
“
That was the baby’s name. He mouthed the name silently to himself as his fingers drummed the cadence of the diesel engines on the arm of the deck chair, taking him back, taking him to that other world where he did not belong.
The edge of the western sky was red with sunset, and a pe
Katherine stood on the hillside a block up from the station. Her uniform was draped over her arm in a black plastic bag. She watched the blue-and-white police cars darting into and out of the garage like bees from the open end of a hive.
The shift had not begun and she was already tired. She was tempted to turn away. What good would she do if she walked down the hill? She never accomplished anything, and yet there was never an end to what she would not accomplish. Maybe she should go back to her office job and admit that becoming a cop had been a mistake. Nobody would care. Her family would be relieved, and her friends, those still left, would stop thinking she was some kind of circus sideshow.
More than anything else,
Down the hillside of concrete there was an unbroken view to the deep gray harbor. At this time of day’s end the buildings on either side of the street rose from long shadows. Her shadow lay far up the hill and dwarfed her. She could easily turn around and follow it.
Numb with reluctance, she moved from her place and, like a highwire performer who dared not look at her feet, continued down the hill and into the garage as she knew she must.
Inside she nodded greetings and forced a smile as she headed for the locker room. She found her locker and dressed in front of it. She did not try to squeeze in front of the one small mirror with the five or six other women who were preparing for work or leaving it, but she appreciated their voices. She wished there were more. She wished there would be so many that their voices would be indistinct and unrecognizable.
At roll call she stood in the third row, farthest from the front, one of three women in the rows of men from the two squads that worked the late rotation. When her name was called, she lied and said “Here” like all the others.
The streetlights were on when
Cherry Street
, and he reached to the control panel and flipped on the headlights. It was
Radio rhythmically logged on cars and dispatched the non-emergency calls that had accumulated during shift change.
Two weeks earlier the shift began in daylight. It would be nine months before they worked in light again. Soon it would be dark when she left for work, dark while she worked, and dark when she went home. Was that the reason
She looked out the side window as they crisscrossed randomly through their district.
First Avenue
was opening and coming to life. Kids began to gather on the corners, black and white, Indian and Mexican, standing in groups for company and protection and watching openly as the police car passed. Street prostitutes, serious and sharp-eyed about their business, turned and walked away when they saw the blue-and-white car approaching. Pimps, dopers, and small-time hustlers pretended to ignore them while customers glanced at them uncomfortably and fleetingly.
There were already drunken leaners outside the door of the Seafarers Tavern. A shout rose, hung in the air, and vanished when
When they drove by the
Donald
Hotel
,
Dancing girls jiggled in the window booths across the street from the Donut Shop and waved to them as they crept along
Pike Street
. The Donut Shop was closed. She had hardly noticed it before, but now she looked carefully into the dark windows.
An hour into the shift, after their third meaningless call, Mike pulled to the curb in front of their coffee spot and punched the button to release the portable radio. “Coffee?” he asked. It was an announcement rather than a question.
“Sure,” she said, repeating her part flawlessly.
Mike liked to stop early in the shift for coffee.
He sat across the booth from her in the modest but respectable hotel coffee shop that was popular with the sector cars and looked at his calendar. He kept it in his shirt pocket. After writing the overtime hours from the previous night on his calendar, he added the numbers aloud. He re-added the numbers each night, even if they had not changed, as though somehow they might have disappeared or increased clandestinely. He added four and three-fourths hours from the previous night.
He used the extra money for his toy fund, as he called it, and she imagined he kept it in a can hidden in his garage and took it out and counted it every night when he went home. His wife, who worked part-time in a health insurance office, used her wages for groceries. If there was extra, she could use the surplus as she pleased. It seemed like a strange way for married people to live, but what did she know?
“Eight hours already this period,”
He must be feeling good to call her partner. That was held in reserve for the times he felt expansive. They were not really partners, not like some who worked together year after year and knew each other’s habits, weaknesses, strengths, loves, hates, hopes, fears, families, friends, enemies. They had tolerated each other for the past three months, and that was all. She couldn’t go to the sergeant and request a change because she was only eleven months out of the academy.
Katherine wondered if
Since that night a month earlier when
First Avenue
for the evening and punched him a few extra times for pleasure. “Visiting?” he asked, pointing to the word she placed in quotation marks on her report.
“That’s what he said.”
“I see. Yes, that would be too good to leave out. Maybe you should add, ‘and a good time was had by all.’ They used to say that in my grandparents’ hometown paper when the neighbors visited each other.”
As she sat smiling beside the typewriter wondering what else was in that hometown paper and where such a newspaper could be, he told her he could always tell when she filled out the log because it was so thorough. It took a moment to realize he had given her a compliment. No one before had ever said “good job.” Since that night, she had thought of him when she filled out the log sheet and made sure he received information that might be useful. On the dashboard of their car, she left extra notes of details that could not be included in the official log or that filled in the gaps on the nights
Katherine found it pleasant to meet