Wireman

CHAPTER 5

Houston, Texas

^{Summer 1976}

John Marcus Deshane, known to everyone as Jack, awoke before the alarm sounded and lay staring at the ceiling. He could hear his ten-year-old son, Willie, snoring from the other bedroom, but that was not what woke him. He had gone to bed the night before upset. He still believed he and the other policemen could have taken the butcher knife from the Chicano youth without killing him. Why did the boy have to die in a rain of bullets as if he were a mad dog foaming at the mouth?

Jack was one of four patrolmen who had arrived at the scene. There were three others from the precinct and a total of eleven men altogether fanning out around the sixteen-year-old. He had escaped from the psychiatric facilities of Ben Tabb Hospital, and he still wore a starched white hospital gown over a pair of ragged jeans. He was barefoot and dancing in small circles around the grass. His dark hair was plastered across his smooth forehead, and his eyes gleamed craftily as he looked from one man to another. They knew he was on a hallucinogen. Every few seconds he screamed a high piercing scream that made Jack’s hair stand on end. Chills crawled down his back like spiders down a bean pole. They tried to talk the boy into giving up his knife.

“Come on, kid. This isn’t going to get you anywhere. Hand over the knife and we’ll talk about it,” Jack urged.

The boy screamed again, but it was cut off sharply when Jack’s partner tried to close in from the circle. Bill Lorenza, a four-year veteran, kept speaking in soft Spanish.

Jack had not drawn his gun from the holster. He did not believe for a minute that weapons would have to be used. The kid was having a psychotic episode, and no one could predict his actions from one second to the next, but what could he do with a single butcher knife against eleven armed men?

Bill and a detective from homicide took turns talking Spanish to the boy, but Jack did not think they were getting anywhere. The boy’s reality lay elsewhere and he continued to scream.

Jack would never be able to say who was responsible for the first shot. Bill Lorenza had edged in toward the boy and stood ten feet from the brandished knife. Bill had holstered his gun to come toward the boy with both hands out in a gesture of help.

Suddenly the youth gave a shattering cry that rooted Lorenza to the spot, and as he lunged forward with the knife, the shots rang out in a thundering hail, bringing the boy to his knees. He was sent sprawling, bleeding on the dry summer grass. The knife lay at Lorenza’s feet.

It would not be the last time Jack would see things that were unjust. He knew that. It was simply the first time he had witnessed it.

Jack rolled from bed and shut off the radio an instant after it started to blare. Six A.M. Usually his best time of day, but now sullied with leftover images of vague nightmares he could not recall and a pervading feeling of defeat he could not shake.

The young man’s death triggered a refrain in Jack’s mind as he showered. It might be Willie some day, he thought.

He knew that was farfetched but enough of a threat to frighten a father. Right now Willie was a good boy, bright, obedient, and loving. But after a year as a patrolman on the Houston Police force, Jack had seen plenty of good kids influenced by their peers who got into trouble with the law. Every thinking parent in the country feared for their children’s future. Drugs were in the grade schools. Juvenile offenses were on the rise. Violence was becoming an accepted part of everyone’s life.

Jack dried himself roughly with a towel as if to rub off all memory of the day before. He glanced at the clock radio to see he had spent twenty minutes in the shower. Jesus, the kid’s death was getting to him. He knew he was going to have to forget it. Maybe if he talked to Sam about it. After work tonight, maybe Sam could tell him how to erase the guilt he felt for the eleven men who were only doing their jobs.

On Jack’s return from duty in Vietnam, Willie had asked him why he wanted to be a cop, but Jack had no pat answers. It was a combination of things, and to say one ideal or one ambition made a man want to be a policeman was too simplistic. He had not been able to answer Willie then, so he had said something silly, trying to bring a smile to his son’s face. “To keep you in line, jock, what do you think?” And Jack had to admit part of the reason he had joined the force was to set an example for Willie. They had been alone since the divorce when Willie was two. Being a single parent was not easy, and his responsibility sometimes weighed heavily on Jack.

“Hey, Dad. You gotta run that thing with the bathroom door open?” Willie stood in the hall scratching at a recent mosquito bite behind his ear. His sleepy eyes looked up at his father. Jack turned off the electric razor and grinned.

“Okay, sport, you tell me how to get my whiskers shaved without a little noise?” Willie shrugged and grumbled all the way back to his bedroom.

“Time to be up and at ‘em anyway,” Jack called as he turned the razor back on. “I’ll have to leave soon.”

Willie groaned and pulled the pillow over his head.

Jack finished shaving and stroked his cheeks. The three-inch raised scar that ran horizontally below his right cheekbone always looked inflamed after shaving. Within minutes the redness would fade, but the ridge of skin still bothered him. He often caught himself tracing the scar with a fingertip while thinking. A Viet Cong sniper grazed his cheek, the open gash hastily sewn up with a field medic who had two severely wounded men awaiting his services. It was not the worst wound Jack might have received. It was far less of a battle scar than some of his friends would carry with them the rest of their lives, but it served as a daily reminder that life was a precarious business—a reminder that served him well as a rookie patrolman.

He looked at his wristwatch: 6:45, Mrs. Lawrence, his housekeeper-babysitter, would be arriving in another few minutes. She would raise holy hell if Willie was still in bed.

“Willie!”

“Yessir, I’m getting up,” came the muffled voice.

“Five minutes or I drag you up.”

“Okay, Dad, okay,” Willie burrowed farther into the pillow and prayed for sleep to return. No kid he knew had to get up at seven o’clock in the morning during the summer.

Mrs. Lawrence was a punctual woman. When her employer expected her at seven in the morning, she arrived at seven on the dot.

She knocked smartly on the DeShanes’ door before entering. As she closed the door behind her, she announced in a loud voice, “Mrs. Lawrence is here and on time. Jack, ready yourself for breakfast. Willie, outta that bed, boy. It’s a brand-new day!”

Jack grinned into the bathroom mirror when he heard his housekeeper’s voice. When was she not on time?

And when had she failed to announce it?

Willie grumbled and slid from his bed. “Oh, geez,” he muttered, blinking away sleep. “Dad?”

The call brought Jack to his son’s bedroom. “What, son?”

“Never mind.”

“Yeah, I know. You don’t want to get up. You don’t want to be cheerful and polite. You think it’s unfair.”

Willie smiled. “Yessir, how’d you know?”

“The eggs are breaking and the coffee’s perking. Come on now,” Mrs. Lawrence called from the kitchen.

“Since when was life fair? Let’s go, jock.” Jack turned and headed for the kitchen.

“Yeah, since when,” Willie repeated, and drew himself up to his four-feet-one-inch height and stretched long lanky arms above his tousled head. There was no fighting the combined forces of his father and Mrs. Lawrence. She was the most determined woman he had ever known. It was seven o’clock on Monday morning, June fifteenth. At least this way he had the whole day to enjoy so maybe they were right about that early-to-bed-early-to-rise garbage. Maybe.

It was the smell of bacon frying that finally pulled him, against all good sense, to the kitchen and into the company of the two people who made up his family.

The small wooden table in the dining alcove off the country-sized kitchen was covered with a red-and-white checkered cloth. Dishes of food made a rough circle in the center of the table. When Jack entered the sunny room, he always found perfect order. Betty Lawrence presided over this order. Her dark skin gleamed like polished mahogany. The silver in her black wiry hair gave her the air of a matriarch.

“It’s getting cold and don’t blame me,” she said peevishly. “I work and slave, slave and work, and what do I get?” She never waited for an answer. “I get late-bodies, lazy bones, and grumbling children. And what will the department think of a young cop coming in to work with egg on his face because he lazed around when I told him it time to be gone?”

“Now, now, Mrs. Lawrence. I’m not going to be late.”

“Well, where’s the boy?” She poured two glasses of orange juice and set them squarely above the silverware.

“I’m right here, Mrs. Lawrence.” Willie sauntered to the table and took his place without looking at the black woman.

“Did you wash your face? Did you comb your hair? I can see for myself you didn’t bother to tuck in your shirttail.” She moved to the counter to pour Jack’s coffee. “I don’t know what’s gonna come of the boy,” she said to the canister set.

“I did too wash my face.” Willie did not want to get into anything complicated. One out of three was not so bad. And what could he do about that cowlick that stuck up from the back of his head, bop it with a baseball bat?

Mrs. Lawrence ladled out heaping spoonfuls of grits into Jack’s plate. He raised a palm to stop her, but she ignored the gesture. Feeding the troops was her business.

“I seen where that Mexican boy got shot,” she commented. She began to ladle smaller portions of the grits onto Willie’s plate. “It seems a crying shame to me, but who am I? I ain’t no policeman. I’m only a working woman, and what I say don’t count.”

Jack’s appetite vanished. “I was there, Mrs. Lawrence. It couldn’t be helped, believe me.”

Willie’s head shot up in excitement. “You were there, Dad? Honest? You never been in a shooting before, huh? Did you shoot him? Did he try to hurt you?”

Jack wearily rubbed his eyes with the back of one hand. He wished he had not mentioned his part in the mess. “Willie, you’re going to have to get it out of your head that all police are trigger-happy cowboys. No, I didn’t shoot anyone.”

“Well, who did? Did you see ‘em, Dad?” Willie’s interest was bright and that bothered Jack.

“Willie, listen to me,” Jack glanced at his housekeeper and she turned her back to busy herself at the sink. “I’m not playing cops and robbers. It’s not the way you see it on television. When people die, sometimes it’s a terrible thing, and in this case it couldn’t be helped. The boy was on drugs.” Jack carefully emphasized the last word. “He didn’t know what he was doing. We tried to talk to him, calm him down, but he tried to stab my partner and… and… it just happened. It couldn’t be helped, but we aren’t proud of it.

“You understand, Willie? None of us wants to hurt anyone. That young boy’s life is lost now, and the men who had to kill him have to live with that fact. It’s not easy. It’s hard, real hard.”

The excitement went out of Willie’s eyes and his face changed into a sad, serious expression. “I’m sorry, Dad.”

“It’s okay, Willie. I just don’t want you to think a policeman is some kind of god. We make mistakes and we suffer. We try to do our best to protect society and ourselves at the same time. Sometimes it’s not just or fair, it’s dirty and sad.”

“Well, then.” Mrs. Lawrence bustled around the table and began to remove the margarine tub and empty orange juice glasses. “I’m telling you they’re going to razz cop DeShane if he don’t get himself moving. Time’s wasting and the morning’s waning. And ain’t that the truth,” she added as she went into the kitchen.

Jack and Willie finished their eggs, grits, bacon, and toast in silence. Mrs. Lawrence would never admit it, but she was battling her own demons on injustice, prejudice, teenage death, and world chaos as she scrubbed the skillets and pans until they sparkled. These people need me, she told herself. They need my schedules and my strength, yes they do. They’re nothing but babies, both of them, and the big one don’t even know it, no sir.

Jack rose from the table and adjusted his holster. He gave Willie a warm smile and pressed down the obstinate cowlick as he rubbed his son’s head. “Do what you’re told,” he said, donning the visored cap that all policemen despised.

“Don’t worry, he’ll do what’s told him,” Mrs. Lawrence called after him. Impulsively she winked at the boy.

“Bye, Dad.”

“See you later, jock.”

As the front door closed, Willie tried to make a quiet exit from the table.

“Whoa, boy. Pick up the mess first. You know the rules. You can’t fool Mrs. Lawrence.”

“Aw, geez. I feel like a girl when I gotta clean the table.”

“Didn’t your daddy tell you about what is and what ain’t fair?” She stood over him, her hands on her hips.

“Well, what ain’t fair is leaving me to the messes when you’re perfectly capable of helping. And what is fair is doing some work, picking up after your ownself.”

Willie knew there was no way out of it, so he started stacking the plates and forks.

“Now ain’t that better? That’s a whole sight better than lazing around. He’s a good boy,” she told the saltshakers.