From The Missouri Review
If I were a painter this is how I would paint the Napa Valley: not like those gallery scenes of mustard in bloom or harvest-ripe fruit, but this ghostly silver secret landscape, the vines dormant and white with frost, the moon full, jackrabbits scattering across the roadway before me like mercury beads. Once I was a police officer for a very short time in Saint Amelia, an exclusive postage stamp of a town, and acquired an intimate knowledge of this landscape, four miles square, in the darkness of graveyard shift. Our uniform patches were comical — not authoritarian stars or eagles but orchid-hued grapes set against streaks of orange and green vineyard, glossy and enameled in appearance, which is how I thought of the town. I ached for sleep, longed to hold my sleeping husband’s body, drove the same streets over and over, turned at the same boundaries, waited for something to happen. Like a pinball moving constantly, bouncing against its limitations.
When my shift ended, I would hurry to my home in the city of Napa, thirty minutes south. My husband and I couldn’t afford to live in Saint Amelia; none of the cops who patrolled there could, except a couple of old-timers who’d bought property way back when. I’d race daybreak to my bedroom with tinfoil-lined windows, where I could preserve the illusion of night and sleep. Desires — for sleep, for my husband, for something unnameable — converged. My husband, a young assistant winemaker, smelled of bleach, wet cement floors, the brackish tip of a wine-soaked cork, wet stainless steel, sweat, oak, sun. When he’d been working in the limestone wine caves, which bloom with multicolored fungi and mold, his hair and skin would be infused with a heightened artificial scent of roses. When he slept, his skin was so warm, like chocolate left in the sun just as it reaches melting point, beaded with moisture. I wanted to press as many of the planes of my cold body against his as possible, quadriceps to hamstring, stomach to back, jaw to jaw. I’d undress and place my gun on my nightstand under an open book, and then, just as I’d fold back a corner of the blankets, dancing with joy inside like someone about to enter a hot bath, his alarm would go off, the third or fourth snooze alarm, the one that meant he was late.
In our twenties we were broke and blue, and my police job was important to us for the health insurance. The Napa Valley had lost its bucolic charm, and in moments of desperation I tried to talk my husband into moving to Czech Republic, Argentina, South Africa, any other winemaking region in the world where opportunities might exist for a young, ambitious American with talent but no connections. Napa Valley winemaking was a kind of Hollywood, which ironically is where my husband first worked; he had a film degree. Idealistically, he insisted that the job could be learned only by hands-on experience, that winemaking degrees were worthless. So we were outsiders from the start in a closed, incestuous industry where the demarcation between insider and outsider felt absolute. Then, at about the same time Saint Amelia hired me, he was hired as the assistant to a “cult” winemaker who had waiting lists to buy his mythic, perfect cab. We were still broke — but with a difference. We were on a path to the inner circle, my husband assured me, if we played things right. He’d spontaneously belt out, “I’ve got a golden ticket!” and then worry that if he appeared too happy, the gods might snatch it away.
Our primary form of entertainment when we were alone was telling each other stories that demystified the Valley. He’d tell me about tanks of white accidentally pumped into tanks of red and then say, “This is a small valley. Talking ruins careers.” He’d warn me that people might try to milk me for information. “Oh, please,” I’d say. “You didn’t have to sign a confidentiality agreement like I did.” I’d tell him about the mystery of the naked dead man, found face-down in front of a winery chateau. It was assumed at first that he’d leaped — or been pushed — from the third-story window. (In fact, as near as anyone could tell, he’d woken from a drunken sleep and mistaken the French doors, which opened on a thirty-foot drop, for the guest bathroom.) And I’d tell him the whole collection of pervert-in-the-vineyard stories the other cops liked to tell me on uneventful shifts. At first I thought they were teasing me, but I learned that every city, large or small, always has one crime, the sex crime. In the month before I’d been hired, two women — both lived in exclusive homes backing onto vineyards — reported waking in the night to find a strange man in their beds, touching them. At the first sign of struggle he disappeared into the darkness like some malevolent vineyard spirit, leaving them to wonder if they’d only dreamed.
I couldn’t believe they’d hired me. I couldn’t believe they’d given me a real badge and a real gun. I started working day shift during a hot week in November, the air heavy with decaying grape must, and everything seemed tinged with the erotic, from the creak of my new leather belt to the voice of my field training officer, Ken, a voice that made me think of the word patina. My first week on the job was grace week, a time to ride along and observe, free from daily scores and penalties, while Ken drove. Ken showed me secret roads through vineyards, hidden mansions, shortcuts through the gravel pit, all of which were routine to him but exhilarated me. He showed me places where chanterelles could be picked after rains. At first daylight he showed me the “snail lady” creeping through her neighbor’s dew-laden yards, plucking snails and sticking them to her arms, chest, cheeks, until, heavily barnacled, she brought them home to mesh crates, fed and cleaned them and sold them to restaurants. I sometimes felt like a girl cruising with her boyfriend, and when Ken drove me to the secluded Upper Reservoir and commented on the quality of light on the water and the ivy-tangled ruins of a ghost winery, I had a sudden ludicrous and sickening image of us embracing, the hard shells of our body armor knocking, our utility belts bristling about us like porcupine quills.
I bought a special purse with a hidden Velcro holster to carry off duty. At first I was terrified that the gun would accidentally discharge; after a while I would have forgotten it was in my purse, except for the ever-present weight. I could shoot pretty well for someone who’d never shot before academy, but I didn’t enjoy it because of the noise (it made my heart pound) and an irrepressible fear that the gun would malfunction and blow my hand off. Sometimes my husband reverently polished the grips with a chamois and said, “You’re so lucky,” but the gun was a burden to me, a burden complicated by the trivial nature of most calls in Saint Amelia — “10–91, hummingbird loose inside La Dolce Vita Cantinetta. RP requests assist.” I’d been trained in tactics at the Napa Valley Academy by members of the San Francisco SWAT team, and many of the things they’d stressed — never shake hands, for example; someone could be preparing to use a wrestling maneuver on you — would not make sense in Saint Amelia. I would observe Ken, to my chagrin, routinely standing on curb edges, rocking on the balls of his feet, hands in his pockets, arms folded or clutching a soda, instead of planting his feet in a balanced ninety-degree stance, hands ready.
As I drove the city my second week, I felt — how shall I put it? — sex and death all around me. It might seem overwrought, as though I’m making it up. But that’s the way it was from the beginning. Saint Amelia never hires. It’s “antigrowth.” Then an old-timer had a sudden embolism, and I became L-7. During lunch they showed me a videotape of his funeral, and the dispatcher wept and said, “No one can ever replace Tony, ever.” (Folks I met would sometimes say, “So you’re the one replacing Tony.”) Tony’s death had motivated another old-timer to retire, so they were down two officers, but I was the only new hire. Everyone seemed jittery and full of tough posturing because the vineyard pervert was still at large. Graveyard shift had just taken a report from a woman who’d had sex with him because she thought her husband, home early from a business trip, was waking her in the middle of the night, lifting her silk jersey gown, disordering her Frette scalloped bedding that smelled of lavender. And in the course of things, she’d had the incredibly creepy realization that it wasn’t her husband. When she screamed and kicked, he vanished out a sliding glass door and into the vineyard. And she couldn’t describe him.
“You’re lucky,” Ken told me. “This is a good opportunity to learn that we don’t often have.” He had me read sex-crime reports and review sex-crime codes and rape protocol. Then one of the old-timers, Hash, cleared out a vineyard encampment of migrant farm workers, and the cops said that probably takes care of our pervert, just wait, we won’t hear anything more about him. The police blotter was either dull — towed car, barking dog, lost bicycle — or mildly comical. Even when violence was involved, the paper took a lighthearted tone, such as the time two men flashed semiauto pistols in a restaurant and grabbed a bottle of wine, not even an expensive one at that. But I could feel him out there still, anonymous and concealed, especially now that I’d seen Saint Amelia’s secret landscape.
Something else was making all ten sworn officers — four dispatchers and two half-time community service officers — jumpy. I knew city buildings had recently been rekeyed, and when I asked why we had to bring the shotguns and AR-15s in from the cars during shift change, leaning them against the wall by the briefing table piled with Thanksgiving pies and breads from supportive citizens, Ken told me. Second Sergeant Donald had been fired, had sued and appealed and lost, and had now taken his case to the state supreme court, flexing the atrophied muscles of his law degree (he’d never been able to pass the bar), and they hoped he wasn’t disgruntled. Bit by bit, during the first weeks of my employment, I learned the story from the gossipy dispatchers: in the locker room, Second Sergeant Donald had drawn his gun on an officer who was having an affair with Donald’s wife. The officer having the affair was called “Little Buddy,” though no one called him Little Buddy to his face — they called him Bill. Little Buddy was L-l, the officer with the most years on the force, but he was lazy, so no one liked him. The catalyst, apparently, was not the affair itself, or the divorce that followed, but the divorce settlement that awarded Donald’s wife his new van, and the fact that Little Buddy had begun driving Donald’s ex-wife’s van to work.
That second week, when I started driving, was a comic disaster. I tried to leap out of the car to respond to a choking baby call but couldn’t because my seatbelt was still on. I dropped my ticket book in a puddle. Once my awkward side-handle baton pushed up against the electric seat-adjustment buttons, gradually moving my seat forward and wedging my knees against the console while I panicked and pulled off onto the shoulder. There was a brand-new field training manual, thick as a phone book, that they’d had to come up with to comply with new state requirements. The idea was that every day Ken would cover an area of training in the book, discussing it with me as we drove; I would display competence, and both our initials would appear in columns in the book’s pages. Ken never opened the book. He made me take it along, and since there was no place to put it, I jammed it on top of the radar gun. Ken was also responsible for filling out a daily performance evaluation, which rated my performance in thirty different categories on a scale of one to ten. These he filled out and turned in to the Chief at the end of most days, often asking me to refresh his memory as to what we’d done. On the day I couldn’t get the radar gun out from under the book in time to lock onto a speeder, fumbling with the cord when I should have been in pursuit, he gave me low scores.
Ken, I decided, was a man in the first stages of asking himself what his life meant, and the ensuing frustration had clouded his normally passive nature. When I tried to make conversation by asking him why he’d become a cop, he said, “I ask myself that question a lot lately.” His only child, a five-year-old daughter born late in his life, had just finished chemotherapy for a rare form of brain cancer. On day shift Ken mostly liked to go to the middle school, where he taught the DARE curriculum, and talk to the women teachers in the lounge during recess. They would dish up some pineapple crumble for him and ask him about his daughter’s progress, all the while mooning over him and hanging on his every word. On his part, lie felt their undivided attention was deserved, because his daughter’s illness was the most overwhelming feature of his otherwise placid life.
Ken spoke very slowly, and my impulse was to interrupt him, finish his sentences and run curlicues around his thoughts, but he was dogged and would ignore me and complete his sentences until finally I drove silently. In this manner I learned all the details of the chemotherapy drama, and progressing from there, Ken’s fixation with retirement, how far off it seemed, possibilities of what he could do, etc., like he was waiting for his real life to begin. Or like he’d been asleep, and his daughter’s illness had awakened him. All week long, this is how we operated: I drove and he told stories and I listened and sometimes counseled him or even tried to rally him to inspiration. At the end of the day we returned to the PD, and I sat at the briefing table nibbling pumpkin bread while he struggled with my score sheet. He handed it to me, I scanned the column of low scores, felt the sting of humility, signed the sheet to show that I had read it, and pushed it back across the table to him.
Ken’s routines were entrenched. Park by the elementary school and watch for double-parkers, he’d say. Then swing by the Exxon for his jumbo Diet Coke. Drive around a bit. Then head back to the barn so he could empty his bladder. He’d gone to get a sandwich while I ate my lunch at the briefing table one day, and when he returned, he said, “Let’s go. I’m driving.” A volunteer at the elementary school, he told me, had observed an esteemed male teacher, an acquaintance in fact of Ken’s, fondling a boy in the classroom, placing his hand in the boy’s pants and holding a couch pillow over his lap while reading a story. This had the potential to cause hysteria. Children with last names you’d recognize if you drink Napa Valley wine would have to be interviewed, lots of children, with powerful parents. After we talked with the principal, Ken drove around the perimeter of town, on quiet cul-de-sacs bordering vineyards. He drummed his hands on the steering wheel. I understood that he was not going to let me drive. “A good thing to do in situations like this is to make a list. Detailed lists of everything you have to do.” “Uh-huh,” I said. “Let’s head back to the barn,” he said.
I spent hours at the briefing room table trying to study the map of Saint Amelia; I’d say over and over to myself, “north, east even,” which is how the street numbers progress, while Ken made his lists and talked on the phone in the little office off the briefing room, interminably, in his slow, low voice. He had begun conducting interviews with children in the evenings and had confirmed four victims. “The important thing in a case like this, in a city like this,” Ken told me, “is not to move too quickly. We don’t want to cause a panic. That’s the one thing we don’t want.” And I said, “But we’ve got a molester in a classroom, who has no reason to suspect anyone knows, who will therefore continue molesting.” I heard Ken in the Chief’s office, trying to get out of handling the case, and the Chief saying, “You’re the only one who can handle it right now, Kenny, we’re all feeling the pinch.”
I’ll admit to you, I’m a daydreamer, and I did not make the best use of my study time because I hated memorizing code. In the office supply closet I found the old police ledgers dating from the turn of the century, written in lead pencil like a lifting fog. I stopped listening in on Ken’s phone call — he was talking to someone in the FBI about accessing the teacher’s hard drive — and I read them one by one with tunnel vision.
So engrossed was I that I did not glance up at the sound of the back door being unlocked, nor did I see when a stocky, bearded man, former Second Sergeant Donald, walked into the briefing room carrying a shotgun. There were some confused moments then, when the dispatcher, who saw him entering the back door on the video monitor, locked herself in the bathroom and ignored the phone. Ken pleaded with Donald to put the shotgun down, while I watched, holding my place in the ledger with my finger. Finally the Chief, who was away at a meeting, was phoned and the whole thing sorted out. The Chief, a naturalized Swede who blushed a violent crimson every time he spoke — with me, with anyone — had neglected to tell anyone that Donald had won his last appeal and was reinstated, albeit demoted in rank to patrol officer.
“I’m not saying you should have pulled your gun on Donald; that would definitely not have been good,” Ken said, “but my point is, you should have reacted somehow. You should have seen him first from where you were sitting.” Ken was furious with me. I didn’t feel like arguing with him, saying how highway patrol guys and even plain-clothed detectives from the Sheriff s department came in the back door all the time to eat their meals or stop off and write paper, and no one ever explained or introduced themselves to me. I felt that the quickest way out of this lecture was silence, compliance. “You just sat there! Reading, or whatever,” Ken said. This observation renewed his indignation. Shortly afterward, I was moved to swing shift to drive with Jason, due to the intensive nature of Ken’s case.
This is when it started, I think, when it was decided that I did not see, that I lacked the faculties of a trained observer. That my competence as a police officer was fatally flawed by an inability to process details of the concrete, physical world around me, and that only a plan to ensure that I remarked on every car parked in a red or blue zone, every expired reg tab, every loud muffler or tinted windshield, could potentially redeem me.
Jason, or Baby Cop, as he was known, looked like he was twelve years old. His wife had just given birth to their first child, and he handed out Hershey bars with customized wrappers that said, “Here-she-is,” giving me extras “to keep my blood sugar up.” It was his first time as a field training officer, and he wanted me to like him. “Ken tells me you really need to work on your observation skills,” he said. “What we’ll do — maybe later — is work on some observation techniques,” he said. “I’ll name an object, and you call out when you see it,” he said. “For example, can you tell me right now where this is: a giant tomato?”
“Are you serious?” I said, mildly offended. “That’s Pizzeria Pomodoro.”
“Good, very good,” he said, like I’d just performed a trick surprisingly well. “Can you give me the address where there’s a lawn jockey?” he said, upping the ante.
“No clue,” I said. Oh, he was pleased to have stumped me. He beamed.
“We’ll work on it some more later. Don’t worry about it. It’ll come.”
Jason told me I really should get the brass snaps changed out on my belt so that all the snaps were uniformly silver, as directed in the dress code. Also, I might want to invest in a matching pen-and-pencil set like his, to wear in my pocket. He recommended using a mechanical pencil. Pencil, Ken might have neglected to tell me, as traffic was not his thing, was necessary for writing comments on the back of tickets. He asked to see my ticket book. “This is kind of a mess,” he said. “Let’s see if we can fix this.” He showed me how he’d arranged his ticket book, where he’d taped his cheat sheet and kept his Qwik-Codes and his crayon for marking tires. After I promised to change my snaps all to silver, buy a pen-and-pencil set, and reform my ticket book, Jason seemed to relax. “It’s a shame Tony can’t be here to train you,” he said, referring to the deceased who’d made my hiring possible. Tony had been the senior training officer.
That first swing shift I put on my rain suit and rubber boots, checked my radio, readied the car, scanned the police log, and waited to go. I sat at the briefing table clutching my FTO manual for an hour before I realized that the Chief and Sergeant were both away, and therefore the pace would be slower. My heart sank as the sun disappeared, as surely as any lost hiker’s. I had wanted to drive during the precious remaining hours of daylight, to acclimatize my eyes before plunging into the wet darkness. Jason talked three hours with Rolando, who was halfheartedly trying to catch up on reports at the computer. Rolando and Jason were the newest hires, and their favorite topic, when they were alone, was what the department would be like when all the old-timers retired. When Rolando and Jason were not talking about the future of the department, they talked about women. Jason always initiated these conversations and gradually drew Rolando in. Once Rolando actually salivated and smacked his lips as he described an Italian girlfriend of his who had “the most gorgeous black peach fuzz” all over her arms and legs — like a connoisseur describing a stinky cheese or a wine made from mummified grapes.
My best work as a police officer always involved investigations or writing reports, both of which I could do independently and efficiently, unlike traffic stops. Which means I did not fit the profile of the average officer, I inverted it. For example, after we’d arrested Wexler for felony possession of firearms, I followed my gut and found it was an invalid arrest, then let the Chief and Deputy DA know so they could prepare for his lawsuit. Wexler was another pervert, which had me thinking Saint Amelia had more than her share of perverts per capita. I remember an old priest who moved from Chicago to the Napa Valley telling me once that he believed the low crime rate must be directly related to the extreme physical beauty of the place. I wonder now if the beauty tempts perversion, like Blake’s “Sick Rose.”
Wexler, who frequented the Saint Amelia library to view Internet porn, had been kicked out one day for masturbating while watching a high school girl read. Because the girl had been totally unaware and the librarians hadn’t actually seen what he was doing under his magazine, there was no victim and technically no crime. Wexler made a scene at the library, then at his psychologist’s office, and finally in the PD lobby, where he wanted to file a complaint against “those whore-librarians.” When I reported for swing shift, I found the Chief, dispatcher, CSO, and day-shift sergeant crowded behind the lobby door, peering through the dispatch window at Wexler talking to Donald in the lobby. They were quietly and gleefully laughing at Wexler, whom they likened to a werewolf, because of his bushy hair and beard, and a unicorn, because of a large, bulbous growth on top of his head. “Look,” they told me, “it’s like a second head.”
While we were gawking at Wexler, who reeked so alarmingly of garlic that the scent had infiltrated the ballistic glass that separated us from him, his psychologist called and said she felt afraid for her safety. Wexler had offered to “show her what he’d done at the library,” and when he began unzipping his pants (he had impulsivity issues), she told him to leave. Wexler left her office enraged, twice ousted by women in one day, and she knew he owned a gun or possibly guns.
The dispatcher ran him for rap sheets and gun licenses, and when she found he’d been convicted of felony battery against a police officer in another state ten years before, the Chief said, “Bingo” and claimed the arrest as mine. Everyone wanted to know when the arrest would take place, if I was nervous, seeing as it would be a rite of passage: my first felony arrest. A jolt of testosterone had just affected everyone in the room but me. I felt no aggression toward this disheveled man with his girlish wrists; I felt nausea, at the unpleasant thought of having to touch him. I was also conscious that watching a six-foot brunette cuff and search a petite perverted freak might appeal to the other officers as something interesting to watch.
By eight P.M. we had a signed search warrant for Wexler’s third-story apartment over a garage in a gated Seventh-day Adventist compound outside Saint Amelia. Jason, with whom I normally drove, was on his days off, and Sergeant Tom, with whom I drove on Jason’s days off, was tied up with a traffic collision. So the group consisted of the Chief (whose call-sign was A-1, like the steak sauce), Donald (who felt he’d established a good rapport with Wexler), a deputy (since it was county jurisdiction), and me. We learned from Wexler’s landlord that he was away at a Sex Addicts Anonymous meeting and would probably be home at nine-thirty or ten, which was great because we could get him separate from his guns, and the plan was to wait. I rode with Donald, who’d scouted the place, which was difficult to find at night. I noticed that Donald’s hands trembled visibly, and I wondered if he was on medication or just especially nervous.
It was dark with our headlights off, and I remember looking up at the stars while we waited for Wexler. The only sound was the landlord’s two rottweilers barking behind the gate. Donald had the idea that he and I should get Wexler’s landlord to let us into the apartment to observe the layout and scan for weapons, which I was not happy about, legally and because it meant negotiating the rottweilers, but we did it anyway. Wexler’s landlord doubtfully watched us as we checked drawers and closets for weapons. “He’s a sweet man,” the landlord said. “He wouldn’t harm a fly.”
It was like looking at a physical manifestation of Wexler’s crazy yet ordered mind. In the entry room were three bare cots, but Wexler slept on the floor in the second room, on a pillow made of plastic grocery bags, hundreds of them stuffed one inside another. On his kitchen counter were myriad plastic bags of lentils and dried beans secured with rubber bands, carefully spaced in rows. And dominating the room was a huge, walk-in gun safe, locked. We went back to the cars, and everyone was burning to know, speculating on what might be in that safe — not only what weapons but what dark evidence of perversion. Videotapes, maybe. At ten-thirty we left, as our warrant was not endorsed for night service.
The next day I reported early for my shift. Jason and Donald and the deputy and I were to attempt the arrest during daylight. Wexler’s landlord said he was home, so the plan was for the landlord to call Wexler when we arrived and get him to come down on some pretense. But when the time came, Wexler’s phone rang and rang. “Maybe he’s got it unplugged,” the landlord said. “His car’s here.” I looked up that narrow flight of stairs to Wexler’s third-story apartment, and then I followed Jason, who was behind Donald, single file up those stairs. Donald drew his gun and held it behind his leg, and then Jason did, and I looked behind me at the deputy, who had his drawn, and I drew mine and said, “Oh, I guess, we’re taking our guns out now,” realizing as I said it how inappropriate it sounded.
“I find it interesting that I’m not sexually aroused by you because you are so much larger than me.” This is what Wexler said when I cuffed him. He had been studying calculus when Donald knocked, and he answered the door amicably enough that Donald reholstered his gun and stepped inside. Donald then presented the search warrant, and, while I cuffed Wexler as a safety measure, he asked for the combination to the gun safe. You can imagine the suspense when the heavy door finally swung open. Everyone was almost disappointed to find it only contained two pistols and a shotgun, each loaded and with a round in the chamber, cocked and locked, and 105 rounds, including six loaded magazines of.45 hollow-point ammunition. “Search him now,” Jason said, and then all eyes were on my searching technique.
Wexler wouldn’t shut up. He kept saying, “This isn’t right.” I can’t tell you the disgust I felt touching him, pinching and twisting his thin, grayed dress shirt, undoing his belt (“My trousers will fall to my knees,” he warned me, and they almost did), grasping his bony legs, inhaling the reek of someone who rarely bathed, even patting at his snarled hair. Sweat was sheeting off my forehead as I untied his shoes from behind him. I kept telling myself, be slow, be methodical, don’t miss anything, because I’d once missed a razor blade tucked under a belt during a practice search in academy. I told myself, pretend they’re not here watching you, because the three cops were hovering over me, like they could scarcely keep from touching Wexler themselves. “What would you do if I reached over and brushed against your thigh? I could, you know,” he said. Calmly, I said, “If you do that, I’ll be forced to use a compliance technique and take you to the ground for your safety and mine.” Wexler replied that he might enjoy it (that old cliché), and suddenly everyone in the room was talking, drowning out my voice. They were all unbearable and needed to fight or run or take a cold shower.
On the night of Wexler’s arrest, Jason wouldn’t let me eat dinner because he was so stressed about boxing and labeling all the evidence we had collected. I would have swept it all into one big box, labeled it “Wexler,” evidence-taped it, and been done with it because we still had to take Wexler to the county facility in Napa. But Jason made me find just the right shape box for each item. I had to seal each box with evidence tape and sign my initials and the date, and he’d say, “Now wait. Don’t touch anything! Let the ink dry.” Then he’d turn around and get flustered and say, “Where did my sheet of paper go?” At the end of the night we were exhausted, and Jason couldn’t find the small rechargeable flashlight that was always in our car. He swore at the thought of Hash finding out he’d misplaced gear, the teasing he’d have to endure. I told him not to be such a baby; anyway he could always blame it on me.
“Tell me something. How’d it go tonight? In your estimation.”
“Well, you were there. I mean, aside from our initial approach plan not working, things went smoothly.”
“How about tactically?” I said I hadn’t expected Donald to suddenly head up the stairs without any discussion. “I am not happy with Donald,” he said. Then he asked me if he’d heard correctly, had I said, “Oh, I guess we’re taking our guns out now,” as we approached? “We’ll do your evaluation tomorrow,” he said. “I just want you to think about something: What would you have done if I’d been shot? What if I lay on the stairs bleeding to death? Because I’m a father now.”
The next day I got on the phone to the out-of-state PD that had arrested Wexler ten years earlier. I decided not to say anything to Jason about my concern that the arrest might be invalid because he always said, “If their lips are moving, they’re lying.” I called the correctional center where Wexler had served time, the prosecutor’s office, the superior court clerk, and parole board and requested the case file, probation presentence report, and prosecutor’s postconviction sentence statement. Over the next couple nights I received faxes and learned that his conviction had been reversed and remanded for a new trial and that the court had overturned the conviction and released him; Wexler’s rap sheet had never been amended to show this. Legally he was entitled to own guns. I wrote a report supplement and attached a memo to the Chief when Jason invited the ambulance crew over for pizza and eggnog. I included a copy of a court-ordered psychiatric evaluation that described Wexler as having latent paranoid schizophrenia with probability of becoming actively psychotic, so that we could work on a strategy for keeping his guns legally. If Jason had asked what I was working on, I’d have shown him. But Jason was flirting with the female EMT, showing her how his numchucks worked and, at one point, chasing her around the briefing table and putting a piece of apple pie down her blouse.
The Chief asked to speak with me in his office. Jason sat next to me. The door was open. I’d always had reason to think the Chief liked me because once or twice when he’d seen me working at the computer he’d said, “How’s our future sergeant?” And when he’d hired me, he’d sounded almost apologetic about the department, as if he wanted to give me a chance to reconsider. But now he looked like someone who has been deeply disillusioned. He asked me a rapid series of questions that seemed insane in their lack of context.
“What do you like best about this job?”
“The fact that you never know what’s going to happen next.” I watched him turn rose-geranium pink.
“Uh-huh. And how does your husband feel about you working Christmas day?”
“He’s very supportive.” The pink deepened a notch.
“How would you feel if you found a dead body?”
“Horrible, I guess.”
“How ‘bout if I arrange for you to view an autopsy?”
“That would be great,” I said. “I’d appreciate it.”
“Wrong choice of words,” he said dryly. “But we’ll see what we can do. I’ll contact the coroner and request something unholy, if possible. We may have to be patient.” I was confused. Was seeing a dead body supposed to have some effect on my marriage?
The Chief began talking about the creeping darkness that invades the life of an officer, what with shiftwork, holidays spent away from family (Jason, for example, would miss his daughter’s first Christmas), and so often observing only the negative side of human nature. “Everyone here really likes you,” he said. “We don’t want you to change.” He paused and looked at me like he wanted a response, a signal as to how to proceed, that I was not giving him. He had the advantage, I thought, of knowing the contents of my in-depth psych profile; I wished I could have read it so I’d know which buttons he thought he was pushing. The Chief held out my performance evaluation from the night I’d arrested Wexler. When I’d searched Wexler, I’d had my gun side toward him for two minutes — Jason had counted them — when Wexler, though cuffed, could possibly have reached the gun. They were going to give me a remedial mark in my evaluation. I would have to watch a video on officer safety and then demonstrate competent searching techniques.
“Now having said that, I read your supplement on Wexler. You’re working at a seasoned investigator’s level in some respects. But what good is that if you don’t nail your traffic stops?” He asked me why I still let potential stops pass by. Was I afraid of confrontation? Working swing shift in the nontourist season, there were not a lot of incidents, and it was true, I did sometimes throw them back, like too-small fish. “Is there anything we can do better on our end?” the Chief said, in a clipped manner, like he was wrapping things up and expected me to say no, and thanks for asking. I mentioned that no one had yet cracked my field training manual open, that I’d never been quizzed and that I wasn’t following any type of formalized training program, as were trainees I knew working in Napa, Fairfield, West Sacramento, Vallejo, Antioch, and Richmond. “We’ll fix that,” Chief said.
On Christmas day Sergeant Tom told me I had a rare opportunity. They’d never had a police sketch artist come in before, and he was sure I could benefit from watching because the drawing process is all about paying attention to detail. A red-headed woman in a silk dress was swiveling in her chair and licking her coffee spoon. She didn’t seem like a victim. She was laughing and telling the artist, a cop from the Bay Area, how she was fixing lobster ravioli for Christmas dinner. The woman, staying in a guesthouse bordering a vineyard, woke in the night and saw a man at the foot of her bed. She yelled and chased him outside into the vineyard, clutching a high-heeled pump, which she threw at him.
“That was a stupid thing to do,” the artist told her. “What would you have done if you caught him?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking that far ahead. I was just pissed off. I think I hit him with my shoe!”
I could see this woman being referred to as “spunky” or “a real spitfire” and felt mildly jealous. The artist had sketched a face shape and was now asking the woman to choose eyes from a book of all possible eye shapes. The woman became frustrated that she’d never find the right eyes and wanted to take a smoking break, then suddenly said, “These!” Gradually, a face emerged with long hair, high cheekbones, almond eyes. A good-looking face. “No, no, I can’t remember,” the woman said, looking depressed for the first time. “Look, tell me what’s wrong and we’ll fix it,” the artist said.
I felt a constant slow, fateful pressure after that day and sometimes imagined that I was a splinter being extruded from a finger. I’d think of George Orwell’s essay about shooting an elephant and how he called his police career an “unsuitable profession.” Every impulse in my personality seemed in conflict with the extroverted, grounded, aggressive, sensory nature of a cop. Still I did not relent, though it occurred to me that I had become like someone who enjoys watching pigeons get fed — oh, lovely, lovely, all those crumbs — so circumscribed had the pleasures in my life become. When skinny, acne-scarred cadets, awkward in suit and tie, interviewed for the remaining trainee position, they were labeled “too aggressive,” “won’t stay long-term,” “not enough life experience,” until a bit of hope would rekindle in me that I was, after all, an adequate fit.
In January shifts rotated, and the way they described graves to me was this: Nothing happens. But if something does, it’s more likely to be dangerous. My life was as silent and dark as the surface of the moon. No matter how much I slept, nights I was slow, leaden, and ill, a false vampire working against my own vigorous diurnal metabolism. All I wanted in the world was to sleep, which was dangerous. But when I drove home in the mornings, in the lightening sky, I would experience a strange kind of euphoria I don’t understand, a kind of chemical surge in my blood, a prickling warmth and expansiveness, like the first chills of fever. I drove with my windows open, and the air was so sweet it was like breathing deep into a carnation. I wanted to scream things into the wind, “I love my husband,” or crazy things, “I will live forever.” At home, I’d fix us eggs, coffee for him, sometimes a martini for me, then I’d sleep, and dream. I ran through the streets of Saint Amelia into the moonlit vineyards, and I felt no pain or tiredness, no burning lungs or side stitches, but a kind of ecstasy of ever-growing strength, as if I could run forever. Sometimes I’d fly over the rooftops of Saint Amelia, and all the roofs of the houses would gently loosen and float away, so that I could observe the floor plans and even fly in for close-ups of the sleeping citizens.
This is how I thought of graveyards: one hundred miles, four miles square. Because I’d put one hundred miles on the car in one night, driving the same streets over and over again, in four square miles of city. Some officers, I learned, would nap most of the night, then take the car out on a large loop into county territory, so when they recorded the odometer at shift end, it would look like they’d been out patrolling. The boundaries of the city elicited frisson, but once when I wanted to take a run down Beaujolais, just out of bounds, not to poach or anything, just for a change of scenery, my training officer told me I didn’t know enough details about Saint Amelia yet. I needed to go deeper, he said — even though I knew every alleyway, dead end, greenbelt, vineyard perimeter. The intimacy of patrolling, committing to memory each nuance of that highly cultivated and celebrated bit of land, seemed to me similar to the intimacy of love, with one difference: I was motivated by desire to know the geography of my husband’s body, but I lacked such a motive for Saint Amelia. Ken had wrapped his investigation and moved to graveyard shift, and he asked me what kind of lock the alley door of Rita’s Margaritas had. I didn’t know, so we drove down the alley. “Here,” he said, “turn off your alley light. See the bar lock? Look for that silhouette, and you’ll know it’s locked.” Once or twice in ten years he’d had to wake Rita because whoever had closed had forgotten to lock up. Later that night he said, “Do you want to see something wonderful? Turn the spotlight on.” I turned it on, and I didn’t see anything wonderful. “Don’t you see?” It was a train car in someone’s backyard; chickens nested in it. Sometimes I caught Ken looking at me like someone helplessly watching a drowning woman. But how could I possibly fail — or succeed for that matter — when nothing ever happened?
I dreaded the nights when I had to drive with Sergeant Tom, which was half of the time. The first time I ever drove with him he said, “I hate fuckin’ winemakers. They’re all a bunch of fuckin’ pricks.” As a rule I adopted a tone with him that was light and full of laughter, as if everything he said was funny, and sometimes it worked and he ended up laughing despite himself. Tom’s conversation was dominated by rounds, slugs, bullets, powder, deer tags, bear tags, payload, and megabytes. Eventually, nightly, he would work himself into a barely controlled rage because of the stupidity of everyone — out — there — all — of — them — fucking — idiots! The only thing we had in common was that we both liked listening to Art Bell’s radio program about alien encounters from eleven to two A.M. Though it occurred to me that we were exactly the kind of nameless, faceless, expendable beat cops, driving in the middle of the night, who always find the alien ship, decide to investigate alone and are hideously crushed or exploded within the first fifteen minutes of a movie.
It is to Tom that I ascribe the ultimate outcome of my field training at Saint Amelia because Tom had rank, and he gradually decided that my time would best be spent not in patrolling the city but in learning how to pick Master Lock padlocks, cutting up pieces of rebar with giant wire cutters, fuming fingerprints with Krazy Glue, fiddling with a narcotics analysis kit, checking out his form-making software, listening to various versions of “Stairway to Heaven” in his MIDI file collection — anything that kept me sitting at the PD briefing table or close by, such as washing the patrol car or playing with the night-vision gear in the broom closet we called our “armory.” Because mind games are so much a part of police culture and training, beginning with tear-you-down-build-you-up-again academy, it was difficult for me to know whether Tom had accepted me into the lazy heart of things as one of them or cut me off. I was soon to start the shadow phase of my training, where I’d be solo in a car and a training officer would shadow me on calls. My evaluation scores were average, above average in certain areas (neatness and appearance), though they’d dipped lately, accompanied by absurd comments. “Officer hits road obstacles,” for example. I hadn’t hit anything, so I asked Tom what he meant. “One thing about you that really pisses me off,” he said, “is your driving. You run right through potholes and over speed bumps. And you’re anal about using your blinker and coming to a complete stop at stop signs. Who do you think is going to notice at three A.M.?” But when I rolled through stops, he deducted points for that.
My one chance to escape the PD came at two A.M., when the two bars on Main Street closed. Tom liked to watch the bar patrons leave and have me try for deuces, then take a walk down Main Street and check all the business doors, which kept him from feeling too sleepy. At three A.M., we’d always head back to the PD for lunch (he always ate spaghetti or fried chicken and tapioca pudding), then read the morning papers when they were delivered. When Rolando was working, he and Tom would discuss impending salary negotiations between the Police Officers Association and the city. Occasionally they’d take these conversations into the sergeants’ office and close the door. There were new educational requirements. The Chief wanted Tom, who had an AA in criminal justice from the local junior college, to go back to school for a BA. When we first met, Tom asked if it was true that I had an MA in English, and after that he would make me drive to quiet, dark places where wildlife crept in the brush, eyes glittering like moonstones, and quiz me on Vehicle Code, most of which he’d memorized, unlike the other officers, who used cheat sheets, until finally he determined that my memory was subpar. I always felt we were doing something slightly sordid, our knees almost touching, the dome light glinting off his pomaded hair and thick glasses, tinted a subtle yellow like that elementary school glue, mucilage.
One morning about two-thirty, I was driving along cul-de-sacs and side streets that border vineyards because it had been raining, and Tom didn’t want to walk downtown. If I’d been alone, I might have closed my eyes for a moment under the moonlight, but I was not alone, Sergeant Tom was riding with me. It was like driving with someone who has Tourette’s syndrome. Every pothole or speed bump elicited, “Fuck! Damn! Shit! Holy Mother of God!” That’s why I got the idea to go down a certain unpaved private vineyard lane we almost never patrolled, because it was the one place I really didn’t want to go with Tom beside me.
It was a stealthy maneuver on my part. I drove around the tiny industrial park, past the lumberyard and day-care center, and then made a hard right into the vineyards. I had been down this lane once before with Ken on an alarm call. At the end of the lane, you’d never believe it, was the most gorgeous Italianate mansion, owned by a banking family whose last name is on credit cards. That night I was possessed; I persisted in driving down the long, muddy lane, spraying gravel into the air and nearly stranding the car in the vines, waking dogs in neighboring parcels. I turned a bend, and my headlights flashed off the eyes of a huge, dead buck in the middle of the road, its antlers glistening white. “Holy shit,” Tom said, jumping out the passenger’s door before I’d come to a complete stop. “It’s fresh. I’m calling my dad,” he said, suddenly in a golden mood. “Gonna get me some venison sausage.”
He told me to pop the trunk and get disposable gloves out, and I helped him drag the carcass to the side of the road. Tom got back in the car. “Turn around,” he said. “It’s lunchtime. I’m gonna eat and then wake up old Dad.”
“What do you think killed it?” I asked, putting the car in drive.
“Some vehicle. Who the hell cares. It’s good to go.” He clucked like a peahen and fidgeted in his seat with pleasure. The road was too narrow to make a U-turn, so I continued on down the lane half a mile, planning to turn in the gravel half-circle in front of the mansion. But before I turned, my headlights glanced off the windows of a parked car in just such a way that I had the impression someone might be sleeping inside. The lane went on for a space past the mansion and its drive and then abruptly ended. The car was parked there, as if the driver had run out of road and didn’t know what to do. “Lovers’ lane?” I said.
I pulled in behind the car, a pale blue ’70s station wagon with a blanket hung inside the rear window.
“What are you doing?” Tom asked irritably.
“I think someone might be sleeping inside; I’m going to run a 28.”
“Leave it for day shift; it’s probably a vineyard worker. I’m hungry.”
“Just let me check something,” I said. I called the plate in to dispatch, and she told me to hang on, the terminal was down.
“Fuck it, let’s go,” Tom said.
“Just a second,” I said. I put the car in park, took off my seatbelt, got out, flipped on my portable radio, and grabbed my light. I gave dispatch my location, and when Rolando asked over the radio if I wanted backup, I said yes. I approached the rear on the driver’s side and held my light up to windows opaque with moisture. I wasn’t sure what I was seeing; dim colors inside seemed to move, like fish in a dirty aquarium. The hood was damaged and streaked with blood. My heart was pounding loudly enough to wake a sleeping man; my breathing became shallow, and I forced myself to take deep, controlled breaths; my vision narrowed to a small point in front of me. I was shivering violently, wiping at my dripping nose with my icy fingers. I moved away from the door in a bladed stance and tapped on the rear window with the light in my left hand, keeping my right hand ready.
Tom was standing off to the side of the patrol car in the shadows, his arms crossed, looking up at the sky as if asking God to help him bear the burden of riding with me. He had no idea who was in that car; if he had, he sure as hell wouldn’t have let me handle things. I don’t think he understood until much later, after the dispatcher had come back on the radio and the man had bolted into the vineyards, after I’d chased and tackled him and pinned him to the vineyard floor in a kind of stasis where he tried to unsnap my holster but was unable to, and I tried to get him into a carotid but was unable to. Tom cuffed him, and we jerked him to his feet, and Tom said, “Goddamnit! Goddamnit! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” at all of blighted creation. I was embarrassed for him; a law enforcement officer should have more self-control, I thought. I realized that he was furious not that the suspect had run into the vineyard, or that his uniform was muddy, but that I’d changed his plans. It hit me as ludicrous that he’d be so furious about missing his lunch or losing out on venison when it seemed likely we’d caught our vineyard rapist. “I’m driving,” he yelled. “Rolando’s doing the CHP 180 form.” He said nothing to me during the drive, and when we arrived at the PD, he said, “Go eat and read the papers.” He was calmer then, which filled me with dread.
At five A.M., the Chief walked in the back door, wearing jeans. The Chief never came in before seven. He and Tom went into the locker room, and when they came out again, the Chief was in full uniform. Chief drummed his fingers on the kitchen counter while his coffee brewed. He poured it slowly into a cup and walked into the briefing room, where I sat, trying to conceal the fact that I was reading the paper. “Got a minute?” Tom followed us into the Chief s office and closed the door. Perhaps we didn’t have the vineyard rapist in custody after all.
Tom wouldn’t look at me. His skin seemed fluorescent and waxen beside the Chiefs beet-colored face.
“Have you agreed with your daily evaluation scores, for the most part?” the Chief asked.
“I don’t think I’m in a position to agree or disagree,” I said.
“That being the case…” The Chief handed me a crisp letter of termination for failure to meet the standards of the field training program. “We think you are not a confrontational person, and that’s what this job’s about,” the Chief said. They both flinched as I hit the magazine release on my gun and then struggled to eject the round jammed in the chamber. I fumbled with it and cleared it. Had they expected me to put my loaded gun on the desk, alongside the badge?
I managed to shake hands with them both and say something completely untrue and absurdly pleasant, which perhaps proved the Chief’s point. If I was the kind of trainee who ticked days off the calendar, I would have known that the date was exactly three months from the day I’d been hired, the day when I should have gone solo. We never mentioned the morning’s events, never discussed the fact that I’d caught the vineyard rapist. I wonder now how long my termination had been planned. Weeks, I suppose. So that once the decision had been made, last-minute change would seem too perplexing, too embarrassing, to be feasible.
“Don’t be a stranger” was the last thing Tom said.
For a long time I couldn’t drive into the city limits of Saint Amelia without feeling panicked. This was difficult because the events of my husband’s growing social calendar — tastings, dinners — were often in or around Saint Amelia. When I slept I dreamed about nameless, faceless groups of men rejecting me, or wounded men with broken backs begging me for help. I took a consulting job in San Francisco and told myself I would make more money in six months than the Chief made in a year, as if that mattered. And I tried to find solace by becoming something unattainable to the men I’d driven with — a very beautiful woman. So my nails always glistened, I painted my eyelids like a chanteuse. Men cluster to me, like moths around a flame. And if their wings burn, I know I’m not to blame, I’d sing along with Marlene Dietrich. I’d tuck gardenias behind my ears. But I still didn’t — though I no longer needed to worry about being in a ground fight — wear earrings or necklaces or rings.
One Saturday night, about five months after my dismissal, we were invited to a party in the middle of a vineyard just south of Saint Amelia. An old couple from Texas who’d made a small fortune in forklift propane had bought the vineyard for a retirement hobby, and in a bid for authenticity they’d hired my husband’s boss as consultant winemaker. Which means my husband made their wine. The party was to celebrate bottling their sauvignon blanc and merlot, and they’d invited all their kin, children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, to help with the bottling. I didn’t know anyone, and — though I was relieved that no one would ask me about the progress of my law enforcement career, something that had been a sort of amuse-gueule at certain dinner parties — I wanted to leave immediately. A small area was clear of vines and had been sprinkled with sawdust, tables set up and strung with lights shaped like chili peppers, campfires built, and barbecues lit. There was a table full of hard liquor, and the old Texans started off drinking glasses of gin or whiskey and Coke. One of the sons up from Los Angeles, who was asking my husband about wine-making, said, “Isn’t it ironic that the locals drink whiskey, not wine?” and my husband, who was drinking a beer, caught my eye, and we smiled, because these folks were so obviously not.
We ate steaks on round tables, under a honey-colored harvest moon, which seemed out of place since it was spring. I’d made a friend at dinner, a frosted-blond daughter-in-law from Pasadena. (We met when I asked her where the restroom was, seeing as we were in the middle of the vineyard. She said someone had stolen the vineyard workers’ portable toilet — all the women were very upset — but she had Kleenex if I needed to go out into the vineyard.) I’d been cutting my sauvignon blanc with water all night, with an eye to leaving. Oh, she was just beginning. Wait till midnight, she said. About this time, several women decided to make a group trek into the vineyards to urinate. I know this sounds very strange, but you have to understand, no one wanted to go out there alone. There was some talk first about whether anyone was sober enough to drive into town to use the hotel facilities. I was sure we’d be thrown out — the big drunken group of us — if we tried. So into the vineyards we went. I caught my husband’s eye on the way and thought how he’d laugh if he guessed what we were doing. I could hear him talking permits and licenses with men anxious to get their hands on the little 150-case parental wine hobby and make it grow, men salivating over the idea of owning a Napa Valley winery.
We staggered over dirt clods, under the preternatural moon. “What’s this?” one of the women asked me, as if I would know by the leaf whether we were walking through merlot or cabernet or sauvignon blanc. Some of the women were making educated guesses, like “this must be merlot, the leaf is larger than the palm of my hand.” I began to feel uneasy. There I was in the middle of a starlit vineyard on a cold spring night — it’s funny when I think of it now — increasingly tense, irritated, sober. The women were all very drunk and giddy, holding children, tripping over the uneven soil and into each other, laughing, losing their shoes, as we walked farther from the glowing lights, Frank Sinatra’s crooning, farther into the cold, green vines. I was walking with a balanced stance, my hands at a ready position, pivoting my head from side to side, forcing myself to see — what? (I thought of Ken saying, “Throw your vision out there.”) There wasn’t anything in the darkness. Feeling that some malignant spirit was laughing and watching for the moment we’d all drop our pants or lift our skirts and flash the vines.