“Thursday,” he said thoughtfully. “What day is today?”
“Mon—It’s after midnight. Tuesday.”
As he checked his watch, Eric and Angie reached his side of the car. “Look bored,” he told me.
Whatever!
He hit the switch to roll down his window. “Mr. Wexler. Ms. Pettit.”
Eric nodded and slurred, “Officer After.” Angie shrank behind Eric.
“You’re both about a year and a half too young to be here.” I loved listening to his calm authoritarian voice, when it wasn’t directed at me.
“So are you,” Eric said, but he didn’t sound as cocky as he had at the bridge. Probably not quite as drunk.
“It’s my job to be here,” John said. “I come here just about every night to break up a fight, between, oh, eleven forty-five and—” He turned to me. “What would you say?”
“Twelve fifteen.”
“Twelve fifteen,” he agreed, turning back to Eric. “So keep that in mind the next time you’re thirsty. In the meantime, you’re not driving home drunk. You need to call your daddy to come get you. And Angie, if you’re not riding with Eric’s daddy, you need to call your own daddy.”
Angie stepped from behind Eric. In her cute pipsqueak voice, she asked, “Can’t you take me home?”
If she batted her eyelashes, I was going to get out of the car and slap her.
“It’s a law enforcement vehicle, not a taxi,” John said.
I pressed a hand to my mouth to suppress a burst of laughter, then acted like I was clearing my throat.
Eric leaned down to give me the evil eye through the open window. I half expected him to call me a stupid bitch. But such things did not happen when you were allied with Officer After.
“Got your cell phone?” John prodded Eric. “Let’s see you call your pop.”
“What if I don’t want to do that?” Eric asked.
John bent over his clipboard again. Holding it so only I could see it, he quickly drew an amazingly accurate little Eric face with its tongue sticking out. “My shift ends at six A.M.,” he said without looking up. “I can sit here and watch you until then. Turn the ignition over and I’ve got you.” He rolled up the window.
Eric took the hint. He led Angie back across the parking lot to the Beamer, weaving a little. He held his head high and swung her hand, trying to save face. But there wasn’t any face to save. I smiled.
“God,” John said. “She’s acting like she’s trying to make me jealous or get back at me. And then she asks if I can take her home. Why would she do that? I’m telling you, she’s the one who broke up with me.”
I didn’t like this turn in the conversation. I wanted to get back to the beautiful, dark look he’d given me. But if he was interested in Angie, well…A blue-haired girl didn’t have a chance against a midget girl, or a dead girl, either. You gotta box your weight. “She wants you back,” I said.
“I don’t want her. She was very decided and very detailed when she explained why she didn’t want me anymore last fall. I’m sure this will pass. College must not be working out for her.”
“What’s her major?” If it was something other than early childhood education, she probably was in trouble.
“Crap.”
Now I did burst into laugher. I kept my eye on Eric and Angie in the Beamer across the lot and hoped they’d think I was having another coughing fit.
“Bitchy crap,” John added.
There was no disguising the laughter now, and even John was grinning at me. Gasping, I said, “She’s majoring in bitchy crap? Well, that’s just silly.”
John straightened his shoulders and his face. “You can’t make a living if you major in bitchy crap.”
That was it. We both let go. Angie’s punishment was the knowledge people were laughing at her.
I couldn’t leave it alone, could I? Into the laughter, I asked, “Why’d you start dating her in the first place? Because she’d do you?”
Dimples still showing, John sniffed and rubbed the tears away from his eyes. He nodded toward Eric. “You would know. It goes a long way when you’re seventeen. Obviously.”
“Speaking of which,” I said.
He rubbed his thumb back and forth slowly across his soft bottom lip. “Where were we? 6:01 A.M. on Thursday, huh?”
I grinned.
He swallowed. “What exactly are we talking about?”
“Oh, no. You’re not entrapping me. I’ve watched prostitution stings on Cops. I won’t be the first one to mention the sex act.”
Under his dark blue uniform, his chest rose and fell rapidly. I wished I dared put my hand there to feel how his heartbeat sped up. It was nothing compared with mine. I could hardly believe my luck. I had a crush on a cop, and for some unknown reason, he crushed on me right back. I, blue-haired girl-felon, was seducing Officer After.
“I’ve been through this before with Angie, remember?” he said. “She left town and dumped me. This would be the same. Wouldn’t it?”
“Not if there were no strings attached,” I said.
Oh, the gentle lip-biting. “I’m not sure I can function with no strings attached.”
“Try it. You’ll like it. Just once. Get it out of your system.”
He sat back against the vinyl seat and gazed across the parking lot at the Beamer. “I think it might be a disaster.”
“I think it would be perfect,” I said truthfully.
He passed his fist across his clean-shaven jaw, then picked up his pen and busied himself scribbling on the clipboard. “6:01 A.M. on Thursday, then. Write that down in your notebook, and we’ll call it a plan.”
11
He let me drive! It took him until night four, but he let me drive!
Well, only for a few minutes.
And only a few feet.
And not the police car.
A March storm had blown up, soaking the cold night with rain. A car skidded off the slick road at the Birmingham Junction and got stuck in the muddy shoulder.
While the driver pressed on the gas, John threw his weight onto the back bumper. The tires spun, and the car didn’t budge.
I got out of the cop car to help, despite the rain. Not that I really expected to be of assistance. But it was better than waiting around for John, making him fruit cobbler in my mind. He signaled the driver, and we both pressed our weight against the back bumper.
At least, that’s what I thought. I pushed as hard as I could, and the tires spun. Then I looked over at John.
He was standing up. Staring at my ass. Now that he called my attention to it, I did feel a draft where my jacket rode up as I bent over. He was staring at the tattoo on my lower back of a bird escaping from a cage. That tattoo had cost me months of tips. The artist charged me extra because getting a tattoo at under eighteen was illegal without my parents’ consent.
I straightened and put my hand on my back. I hoped John wasn’t considering a sting operation on a Birmingham tattoo studio. It was out of his jurisdiction.
No…he was considering 6:01 A.M. Thursday. He focused on my hand where he’d seen my tattoo a moment before. Slowly his eyes moved up my body to meet my eyes. He blinked against the rain and remembered he was On Duty.
Then he squinted at the driver. “This is too distracting. Go trade places with that guy. It’s his Goddamn car.”
So I slipped into the driver’s seat and watched in the rearview mirror for John’s signal. When he pointed at me, I stomped the gas. The tires spun, then caught. The car shot forward. I checked the mirror again. The driver was wet with rain but otherwise spotless. John, plastered with mud, wiped dirt from his mouth with his sleeve.
The driver happily skidded away. Back in the cop car, John blew mud out of his nose with a Kleenex from the trunk. “I hate to go home and change with less than two hours left in the shift. What do you think?” He sneezed.
“If I were a criminal—and I am not—I wouldn’t find you very intimidating right now. I would find you bedraggle
d.”
“’Nuff said.”
His apartment was in one of those complexes with twenty buildings, all the same, that had sprung up along the interstate. They housed people who worked at the car factory here in town but didn’t want to commute from Birmingham. That is, people with no life.
It was only a minute’s drive from the Birmingham Junction. Why, he could probably hear the car crashes from his patio. He definitely could hear the drone of the interstate. I heard it as soon as he pulled into a space and turned off the engine.
We sat there in silence, except for that hum of distant eighteen-wheelers, for ten seconds.
“Should you come in?” he asked.
“Why not? You don’t want me to see your apartment?”
“It’s not that. Somehow it just doesn’t seem appropriate.”
“I’m going to see it at 6:01 A.M. Thursday anyway. Unless you want to do it behind the storage buildings.”
In the dim lights of the parking lot, I couldn’t see him blushing. But I could hear him blushing as his breaths came more quickly.
“Yeah,” he said, “but that’s twenty-four hours from now.”
I looked at my watch. “Twenty-five.”
He pulled my wrist toward him and looked at my watch himself. Which sent sparks shooting down my arm, because he could have looked at his own watch. He chose to touch me instead.
“And forty-seven minutes,” he said so close to my shoulder that I felt the low notes of his voice vibrate through me. “But if you stay in the car, I’ll have to leave the keys so you can keep the heat on. And now that I’ve let you behind a steering wheel once tonight, I’m afraid you’ll go for a joyride.”
I smiled and winked at him.
“Come on in.”
I expected his apartment to have walls, carpet, and kitchen tile the color of masking tape, as virgin as the day he moved in. Or little touches of homeyness, calico curtains and cookie-scented candles, left by the cobbler-baking phantom wife. This is not what I got. The living room was a gallery. Bold drawings crowded the walls, some framed, most tacked up bare.
My first thought was shock at what cool taste he had. My second thought was wonder at how he paid for actual drawings by actual artists. My third thought was suspicion the drawings were all by the same artist. They were similar in style, somewhere between photographic realism and manga. And similar to the little sketches in the margins of Johnafter’s Spanish homework, perro, sombrero, corazón.
“You can draw!” I exclaimed.
“Yeah,” his voice echoed from the kitchen.
“I mean really draw, like a professional. How can we claim to call a truce, and be friends, and plan for 6:01 A.M. Thursday, when you’re hiding this whole other side of yourself from me?”
“I told you I would major in art, hypothetically.”
“Yeah, but I thought the bullshit you fed me about lifting up the human spirit was compensation for not being able to draw.”
He laughed.
I took a couple of steps over so I could lean around the kitchen doorway and see his dimples. “What do you use? Is this chalk?”
“Oil pastel, and some pencil.”
“Instead of paint?”
“More control.” He had taken off his muddy boots and stood in his socks by the sink. He reached up his pants leg, unstrapped a gun in a holster, and slid it onto the kitchen table. Then he ran the edge of his hand down his pants leg and threw the mud in the garbage can.
“No matter how careful you are,” I said, “there’s going to be a mess, and you’re going to have to clean it up afterward.”
“Mmph,” he said, scraping off more mud.
I began beside the kitchen and moved around the living room, examining each drawing. Every one was a treasure of color and penciled detail. I could have stared at each of them for hours, but I felt like I had to hurry and get them all in. I would be back here at 6:01 A.M. sharp tomorrow morning, at which point I would be busy doing something else. And after that, I would never come back.
The drawings were like a map of his trip through Europe. There was the pyramid at the Louvre, the Matterhorn, and beach after beautiful beach that could have been anywhere on the Mediterranean. People stood in the foreground with their backs turned, enjoying the view. People, punctuated with the occasional green alien, or an elephant wearing a hat.
Strange that all this was hiding in that dark blue uniform.
In it, or behind it.
I made the entire circuit of the room, came even with the kitchen again, and stopped short in front of my favorite drawing so far. Venice, judging from the canal boats and the colorful buildings. A boy and a girl, too distant for details, stood in the middle of a bridge over the canal. But just to one side of them, the drawing dissolved into blank paper.
“That’s one of my favorites,” John said from the kitchen. “I hate that I couldn’t finish it. The street flooded at high tide, and I had to move.”
I nodded like I knew all about the streets flooding at high tide in Venice when you were trying to finish your drawing.
The last frame in the room, beside the front door, wasn’t a drawing but a large photo of a family of four, with clothes and hair that would have been fashionable in the late nineties. Printed in black and white, the way people displayed photos that were really special. Blonde mother, dark father. The blond little boy with the dark eyes was John. The blond teenager with longish hair must have been his brother. Other than light eyes, he looked more like John than John.
“Does your brother live here in town?” I asked.
Water ran in the kitchen. John was washing his hands. He dried them on a towel and looked at them.
“John?”
He washed his hands again.
I used my best guilt-ridden murderess voice. “Out, damned spot! Out, I say!”
“Macbeth. Tenth grade.” He dried his hands.
“Does your brother live here in town?” I repeated.
“No, he left.” He unbuckled his gun belt and laid it on the kitchen table beside the holster from his leg.
“Can I touch it?” I crossed the living room, into the kitchen, and peered at the guns in their holsters. “Do you think I’ll shoot you?”
He watched me with an amused smile. “Actually, I was thinking I should show you some basics, as part of your education this week. Or in case I get knocked out in the next twenty-five hours, and you’re left in the vehicle with an unconscious police officer and a loaded weapon.”
I hadn’t expected him to agree. “You can’t be too careful with guns,” I reminded him.
He picked up one of the pistols and showed me some basics anyway. How to take out the clip of bullets, and how to check for a bullet in the chamber. He seemed to be concentrating on the gun. But there was no way he missed the way my hands shook on the table as he went through these motions so familiar to him.
I didn’t want to see his sympathetic look for a frightened girl. I hated myself for being frightened.
He offered the gun to me, with the muzzle pointed toward himself. “No bullets,” he said. “Safe.”
I held out my shaking hand, and he placed the gun in my palm.
“Heavy,” I said. Foreign. Strange to hold it in my hand. Warm from his body.
I held it as long as I could stand it, then offered it back to him—with the muzzle pointed toward the door, not myself. “Okay, I’m through with it.”
“So soon?” He took the gun gently back from me. Click, click, pop, and it was together again.
“I am full of fear.”
“Of a gun?” He cocked his head to one side, watching me. His voice was honey as he guessed, “Of 6:01 A.M. Thursday.”
I’d never been scared of sex. It was what might come after that terrified me, tethers tying me down here. I shivered.
He touched my shoulder. “God, here I am worried about what I look like to suspects when you’re soaked, too. Come with me.”
I followed him through the living ro
om and into his bedroom. More drawings covered the walls. On his bedside table sat a police scanner, humming, occasionally crackling with Lois’s voice.
He disappeared into his closet and brought out a long-sleeved T-shirt emblazoned with the words To Protect and Serve.
I took it from him. “Wow, I’ve crossed over.”
He disappeared again and brought out another leather cop jacket.
I took it. “Does this mean we’re going steady?”
He gave me the one-dimpled smile before looking in the closet once more for a clean, pressed uniform on a hanger. “Be right back.” He walked into the bathroom and closed the door.
I could have secreted myself in the closet to change. But since I was me, I shed my wet jacket and shirt there in his bedroom. I paused just a few moments in the hope he would (gasp!) catch me in my bra. But even if that happened, that’s all that would happen, because it was not yet 6:01 A.M. Thursday, and John went By The Book. I pulled on his warm, dry shirt and jacket.
I started my circle around this new room of the art gallery. One of the first drawings I came to was of the Devil fountain at Five Points, with several of the animal statues coming to life and wearing hats. Then more angles of the artsy section of Birmingham, ornate mansions next door to dilapidated apartment buildings.
And then, across from his bed, right where he could see it first thing when he woke up each morning (or afternoon), was a large drawing of the bridge.
With no green aliens in it, no hat-wearing animals. No people.
Just the bridge, a stark shape against the too-blue sky.
He burst from the bathroom. At least, you would think he had, the way I jumped back from the drawing.
While he stepped into clean boots, I crossed to the dresser like nothing had happened, uncapped a bottle of cologne, and sniffed. That wasn’t it. I picked up another. That wasn’t it, either. If his scent of cologne was really laundry detergent or deodorant or even aftershave, I would be disappointed.
He reached past me for the last bottle and handed it to me. “It’s this one.”
I unscrewed the top and wet my finger with cologne. I half thought he would kick me out of his apartment, never to return, not even at 6:01 A.M. Thursday, for what I did next. I did it anyway. I reached up to touch his neck. Sliding my hand past his dark collar, I rubbed my finger across his collarbone.