House of Sand and Fog (25 page)

Once in Daly City, Lester was working the six-to-six overnight and the bars had been closed a half hour when he got a call on a disturbance a block from the scene, an all-night self-serve gas station. He was in the lot of a coffee shop walking back to his car and he dropped his full cup into a trash barrel and got into his cruiser, accelerating with only his flashers on, no sirens. Two men were in the shadows just outside the light of the pumps. One of the men was small and lay curled up on the ground covering his ears and face with his arms while the other swore in Spanish and kept kicking him in the head, neck, and back. He pushed the man over with his boot, then began kicking him in the chest and stomach. The big one looked up only briefly at the blue flash of Lester’s patrol car, but he didn’t stop and Lester felt sure he was going to bolt any second, but even when Lester got out of the car and identified himself as a deputy sheriff, the big Latino kept kicking and Lester felt fear move through him like a cold wind. He called in for an immediate backup and for a second he thought about waiting for another cruiser to show, but the man on the ground had dropped his hands, his head jerking and rolling with each kick, his mouth and jaw flapping open.

“Step away!
Now!”
Lester unsnapped his holster, but the Latino didn’t even look up, just kept kicking, and Lester repeated his command, this time in Spanish, and now the man stopped. He was breathing hard and in the light from the pumps Lester could see the shine of sweat on his cheeks and chin. His shoulders were wide and rounded beneath a black T-shirt, and there was the ornate crawl of prison tattoos on his thick arms. The Latino smiled, kicked the unconscious man once in the head, and Lester drew his pistol, flipped off its safety, but held it at his side and ordered the man in Spanish to lie facedown on the ground. But the Latino smiled again, cocking his head back slightly like he was on to Lester’s charade, and he began to walk toward him. Lester raised his pistol and aimed it at the man’s chest. “Get on your knees!
Now!”
Lester’s own knees felt like spun glass, and his voice had a waver in it that he knew was betraying him. The Latino stopped and Lester felt his finger slide over the sheen of oil on the trigger, his heart pulsing in his nails. The backup car pulled into the lot behind him, its blue flashers spinning across the Latino’s face like a strobe. But he didn’t look or seem alarmed. He smiled hard at Lester, nodding his head at him and his pointed gun like it was a small problem he would take care of in due time.

The officer behind Lester ordered the man down and Lester jumped, his finger cramping away from the trigger as the big Latino became a shadow sprinting back over his victim and into the darkness around the corner of an auto parts store. Lester gave chase, but the long sidewalk was empty, its streetlamps broken except for one thirty yards ahead, casting a dim glow on the concrete beneath it, nothing but blackness on the other side. The quiet street was to his left, closed stores and supply outlets on his right, and he knew the man was probably in one of their doorways. He imagined him crouched down low, ready to pounce; Lester stopped and didn’t walk any farther. He glanced once more at the lit section of sidewalk ahead of him, then the darkness beyond, and he backed away and returned to the young Daly City police officer who was calling in an ambulance for the unconscious man. Lester said he’d lost the perp, and the young cop, who was chewing gum, looked at Lester a long moment, then shook his head.
“Shit.”

For the rest of his patrol, Lester tried to tell himself he hadn’t let a dangerous man go because he was too scared to find him. He tried to take comfort in one of the major directives of the
Field Training Manual:
Don’t get in over your head. Don’t be afraid to wait for backup. But the truth was, Lester often felt he was in over his head, that one day someone would see just how unfit and weak he really was and then it would be all over, the true Lester would be revealed. And in Daly City, he knew if his backup had responded a half minute later, if that big Latino had kept coming, Lester would have shot him, and probably not in the shoulder or knee either, but where his gun was aimed, at the bully’s heart. Because Lester had not only feared the big man with the dark mustache like his own, he had despised him, despised him because he feared him and because he was every Chicano Lester ever had to face in Chula Vista, his father gone to Texas, his mother working, his little brother staying inside to take refuge in hours and hours of television. He was Pablo Muñoz, Lester’s girlfriend’s brother, who was over six feet and lifted weights and had the flattened nose and cheeks of a Mexican Indian, his eyes dark slits in an almost handsome face, pockmarked from acne. He had dropped out of the high school and worked as a forklift operator at the lumberyard across from Lester’s house. Lester had first seen his sister at school in late spring with four or five Chicanas in hip-hugger jeans and halter tops, their flat brown stomachs exposed. They all smoked cigarettes and chewed gum except for Charita, who was short and lean as a gymnast, her long black hair falling to her waist where Lester could see two small dimples in the brown skin above her buttocks. By the end of the day he’d introduced himself and by the weekend had shared two Tall Boy Schlitzes with her in the high weeds outside the lumberyard fence and they had kissed and touched and she tasted salty and sweet, like a spice he couldn’t name. She called him Lezter and one Saturday afternoon she sat on his porch steps with him on Natoma Street, the sun high, all the adobe row houses on both sides almost too bright to look at. She held his hand in her lap and he could feel the warmth of her skin through the denim. He wanted to take her upstairs to his room but his mother was home so it would have to be the lot next to the lumberyard, the weeds they could lie down in and be seen only by birds, and he had stood to pull her in that direction when her face changed, her mouth open in a sudden oval, her eyes on something across the street. It was Pablo dropping down on the other side of the chain-link fence, his forklift’s engine running on the other side as he moved swiftly through the litter, snatching off his work gloves, his eyes on Charita as he crossed the street without looking. He wore a faded sleeveless T-shirt, his brown skin sunburned, the muscles of his shoulders rounded and defined. He pushed Lester down with one hand, grabbing Charita’s hair with the other, jerking her onto the sidewalk. Charita screamed, her face covered by her hair as she held on to her brother’s arm. And Lester jumped back up and didn’t remember moving down the steps. He was on the sidewalk, close enough to Pablo to do what he hoped he was going to, to punch him or grab his arm or kick him in the knees—anything—but Pablo reached over with his muscled arm, put his free hand on Lester’s face, and pushed him, Lester backpedaling eight or ten feet and falling on his side. Charita wasn’t screaming anymore, but crying, saying something to Pablo. Lester stood but could no longer step forward; it was like trying to move quickly through waist-deep water, Pablo Muñoz and his thick arms and shoulders, his flat face sweaty and smeared with grime as he held his tiny whimpering sister by the hair and pointed a finger at Les. “I catch her with you again I will cut your white face off and toast it,
gavacho.”
He tightened his grip on Charita’s hair and she let out another scream and Lester’s stomach, arms, and legs were a storm of electric nerves; he wanted to run forward but Pablo’s black eyes were on him, so Lester stayed where he was, everything backing up on him, his body suddenly concrete in damp ground.

Pablo pulled Charita off the sidewalk. She tripped on the curb, one of her sandals knocking loose, her brother letting go of her hair to grab her arm, and once they were halfway down Natoma, going around the corner for the main entrance to the lumberyard fence, Charita’s small dark face looked once back at Lester for a long hot-faced moment, as if she wasn’t quite sure what she’d see there when she looked.

Once again Lester had felt nauseated with shame. He went back inside the house, lay on his bed, and for hours imagined an entirely different scene, him taking Pablo’s hand, crushing it in his own, then punching Muñoz so hard in the face he’d be unconscious for days and wake up in mortal fear of Lester Burdon. Or he imagined himself sidestepping Pablo’s arm only to grab it, jerk it behind his back, and break it. And these pictures in his head were not new. He had them for every boy he ever had to fight at Chula Vista High. Maybe because he was tall and quiet and thin he called more attention to himself than the other anglos at school. But always it was the same—“Bur
done maricón!
Bur
done maricón!”
—and Lester would try to avoid the fight as long as possible. First he would deny to himself that that was where this name-calling was really going; he would try to smile off whatever insult was coming his way, and only when he felt the push of hands on his chest would he push back, hoping that would be enough, which it never was, and he would hold up fists he had no faith in only to be knocked to the ground, where he would stay curled up waiting for a teacher or someone to break it up or for the bully to lose interest and disappear. But they rarely did. Even when you arrested them, they showed up in your sleep, determined to unmask you, and show you to be the coward you really were.

Sometimes Lester would wake Carol and tell her his dream, but this was always a mistake, because it just gave her more ammunition in her nearly seasonal attempts to get him to quit the Sheriff’s Department, a job she had never quite accepted or understood him training himself for in the first place. Not only is it too dangerous, she would tell him, but “my God, you are so above those cowboy simpletons you work for. Any lamebrain with a GED can go to the academy and do what you’re doing!” She’d tell him he wasn’t living up to his potential, he should go back to school and get his master’s in education, and if there weren’t any teaching jobs in California, then she was quite willing to relocate for any job he might get.

But Carol was wrong, Lester would sometimes remind her, because he was already a teacher, a field training officer for the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Department, one of eight in the entire county, and of those eight, he was the youngest, with only six and a half years on patrol before they gave him the job. They were all assigned fresh recruits from the academy at Gavilan College, and for four weeks at a time—sometimes the six-to-six day shift, sometimes the overnight—he’d sit in the passenger side of his patrol car while his young trainee drove and he would deliberately and methodically begin to unload everything he knew about being a deputy sheriff. And what
did
he know? He knew if you were taking things personally you were more dangerous. He knew that he had once put a wife abuser away illegally, and that more and more he found himself coming down harder on some arrestees than others. Not the petty criminals—the car thieves and purse snatchers, shoplifters or even drunk drivers—it was the bullies, the wife and child beaters, the suspected rapists, anyone who used his weight to crush another. He kept his record clean but he took pleasure in the arrests, in jerking a wife batterer’s arm far up behind his back while he lay facedown on the floor or sidewalk. He’d squeeze the cuffs on too tight, then pull him by the wrists to his feet. If he cried out, Lester would lean close to his ear and tell him to shut up. When he put him in the patrol car he wouldn’t bother to guide his head and he’d let him bump it on the way in. Sometimes they were big men, usually drunk, and Lester would fear them and squeeze the cuffs so tight they cried out. But other times he’d see a wife or child bruised or bleeding, sometimes burned or unconscious, and Lester’s stomach would fill with a galvanized, almost nauseating heat, a tremor in his hands and arms as he jerked the man to his feet, sometimes running him face first into a door casing on the way out, sometimes kneeling all his weight on the man’s neck as he tightened the cuffs even more.

But after these arrests, Lester’s rage and adrenaline would fade back and he’d feel spent and physically weak. Then the remorse would come, remorse that with each impassioned arrest he was doing his job less and less justice, and he’d vow not to get sucked in again, to instead perform his duties the way he was trained to. But these vows would fall away like cool ashes the next time he saw the bruised and broken evidence of one more man pushing his poison onto someone smaller and weaker and Lester’s heart would take over again. And then after the booking, when he was back out on patrol, drinking a soda behind the wheel, trying to fill the desert in his mouth, fear would begin to pool at the base of his stomach like a cold underground spring, fear that he was beginning to lose control and it was only a matter of time before one of these perps saw through his uniform and badge and gun, saw that Officer Burdon was an impostor, that he was one of those men who has never been in a fight and come out ahead, that all his swagger was really nothing that couldn’t be stepped on like a bug.

For a few months at a time, Lester was able to control his temper. He’d keep his eyes and ears off the wounded. He’d make the arrest and slip on the cuffs comfortably, escorting the man—and sometimes a woman—to his patrol car. He’d breathe deeply through his nose, ignore the onlookers, and open the back door. But sometimes the arrestee would struggle a bit getting in, or else yell something to a friend or family member standing nearby, or swear at Lester, and he would slam the door shut, pretending not to notice if his prisoner’s shoulder or leg wasn’t all the way in the car yet. Again, he was letting his emotion control the situation, even the Filipino boy out on the coast; he was young and scared and it would’ve been impossible for Lester not to feel fatherly toward him and do the right and patient thing. But what if the boy had been a grown man? Would Lester have drawn down on him? Shot him?