Breaking Rank (18 page)

I filled the tub with water as hot as I could stand and stepped in. As I sank down I imagined myself riding across wheat-colored hills with the marshal and Chester.

We're off to an abandoned shack where the bank robber is holed up. He's wearing a black hat when he busts out and makes a run for it. I pull my rifle from its saddle holster and take cover behind a huge boulder. The bad guy is blasting away with a six-shooter in each hand. One of his rounds chips a chunk off the boulder, right next to my head.

I scowl, stand up, take a bead on him.
Blang!
One shot and he's down, writhing in the dirt. Matt walks over, picks him up with one hand, shoves him up on the extra horse we've brought along. He tells the crook to stop his bellyaching, tells him he's lucky to be alive. “My deputy only meant to wing you.” He looks over at me and winks. “Nice shot, partner.”

I stuck my head under the cold faucet and kept it there for a long time. It was essential to get used to cold water, and to learn to hold one's breath underwater for as long as one could. One never knew.

Shivering, I turned off the tap and started to reach for the tattered blue towel on the rack when something stopped me. I froze. The room turned gray and everything went all muted and flatlike. Everything except the tweezers. They glistened up there on the glass shelf above the towel rack.
Pick me up
, they said,
and do something outrageous with me.
So I did. I stuck the tweezers in the electric wall socket. I guess I figured it would put an end to something, which it did. It knocked out every light in the house. And sent a jolt up my arm and into my head.

“Hey!” “What the . . .” Voices from the dining room. “Norman?” “Hey!” “Norman, are you okay?” Well, I was naked and quaking and a bit out of kilter from the dark and from the spooky feeling in my body, but I reckoned I was okay. I listened for
his
voice. It came soon enough, along with the thundering footsteps of his stocking feet. I squeezed into the far corner next to the toilet just as the door crashed open. He was one big shadow. He stood there for a second, then lunged. The belt slashed first across my face, and stung my eye. He brought it down again and again. And again. It felt like he was never going to stop. Someone, Uncle Don, produced a flashlight and that made it really awful, me naked in front of the grownups and all.

Everyone was yelling at him to stop. There was quite a crowd in the doorway, Dad, his sister, his brother-in-law, his wife. My brothers knew better, they stayed put in their bunk beds. Anyway, all the yelling didn't work. He just kept at it even when at one point Mom stepped between us and shouted some words I've forgotten, something unexpected. Dad pushed her. It was the only time I saw him lay an angry hand on her. Then Uncle Don stepped in. Dad turned on him like he was going to hit him. What a night. I'd never seen my father hit a grown-up. But he just said, “You stay out of this,” and went back to work.

He hadn't done it this long, ever. I started to cry, then cried even harder when I realized I was crying. Finally, the belt caught a jar of cold cream on the glass shelf and both the jar and the shelf crashed to the tile
floor, shattering. Shards sparkled in the beam of the flashlight. We kept dancing, though, my father and I.

It was weird. The only serious cut was to the
top
of my foot. But it was a bad one, gushing and spurting everywhere. Uncle Don jabbed the flashlight toward the wound, then to the pool of blood in front of the toilet. “Satisfied, Gene? Satisfied?” Dad stopped, then walked out of the bathroom. A second later he was back.

“Gimme that flashlight, will you, Don? I gotta go check the fuses.” Dad and his brother-in-law, working together on a home improvement project.

After Uncle Don and Aunt LaVella left, Mom shrieked at Dad that I had to be taken to the emergency room, but he kept saying no. It was understood that Mom couldn't drive at night—she was unable to read the street signs, and she saw things jump out at her from the shadows. She kept yelling at Dad as she applied bandage after bandage to my right foot.

A little later I hobbled off to bed, my foot swaddled in layers of gauze, two or three pairs of sweat socks, and white adhesive tape over the whole works. It resembled a cast. “Look,” I said to my brothers. “I have a broken foot.”

“Wow,” said Roy.

“Geezo,” said Brian.

I removed my helmet, a violation of department policy, and sat down on the bed. Five kids swarmed me, the youngest fighting for my lap. A couple of them were giggling, asking if my gun was real, if I'd ever shot anybody. I answered their questions, then asked some of my own, trying to remember what our criminal law instructor had told us about questioning kids. I was pretty sure you could “lead” young children, if necessary, to get the story out of them. But I tried not to need to, so I asked questions like:
What happened? Has something like this happened before? How did your mommy get tied up? Why was your mommy bleeding? How did you get that bump? Do you have any other ‘owies'?”

That last question triggered a lifting of shirts, blouses, PJs. There were
large belt welts on all but the youngest, a crawler sitting in the corner with snot rolling out of her nose and over her lips. “See, see?” “Lookie here!” “No, no, policeman, lookitmine, lookitmine!” “He done these ones yesterday.” “Oh yeah? He jes' whupped me jes' today.”

“Who's ‘he'?” I said.

“Daddy,” they said in unison. “Daddy.”

I'd noticed the number scrawled in crayon all over the crumbling plaster walls of the bedroom. It was impossible to miss: 232-6981. It looked familiar. When I figured it out I chuckled. I hadn't yet memorized it, the phone number of the San Diego Police Department. “What's this about?” I said, waving a hand at the walls. My own mother would never have called the cops, or given us the phone number. Cops were for writing traffic tickets, catching the bogeyman, bringing wayward boys home to their parents. But not for coming into your house.

“Momma said that's for when he does it the next time,” said the oldest, a boy with mocha skin and velvet-painting eyes. His welts were the worst. “I tried to call it but . . .”

“You mean tonight?”

“Yeah, but there wasn't nobody on the phone.” Daddy had ripped the instrument from the wall.

Finally, I had a tale worth telling at the nightly critique. I picked up the story at our arrival on Thirty-fifth. I told the story of our 415 family dispassionately. Like it was nothing.

But it was not nothing. It was one of the most influential events of my police career. In that split second in the hallway, when I looked upon that mom and her kids, I knew I would never again question the “essentialness” of police work, or police officers.

On Labor Day, days before his death in 1990, I wrote my father a letter. I hadn't really talked to him about it, so I spent a paragraph or two telling
him, as an adult, what I thought of his racial intolerance, his physical violence, his endless pronouncements of my unworthiness. I wrote that I'd forgiven him all that.

But I also reflected on other things we'd never talked about: his grabbing a life-saving ring and jumping into the Pacific Ocean (he couldn't swim) to rescue a downed pilot, for which he was awarded the Navy Cross in World War II; his lifetime of backbreaking construction work to feed and house his wife and four boys; his voracious reading which made him as well-informed as any talking head on the tube; his taking us to Padres ball games at Lane Field, and on Sunday drives to Mission Valley after stops at Niederhoffer's for ice cream cones.

I told him how deeply moved I was when I recalled, as an adult, his tenderness in nursing me when I was hurting. Not always, of course. But he'd stayed up with me all night during many early childhood bouts with the croup, making a tent of my bedding, filling it with steam, rubbing my chest with Vicks. When I fell from a rope swing and severely sprained both my wrists he gave me two silver dollars he'd won in Vegas that weekend. And he rubbed bacon (bacon!) on my foot after I'd stepped on the tip of a pencil, driving its graphite tip deep into the bottom of my foot.

I played hooky from work the day after I'd finished the letter. I took Dad to see a Harrison Ford movie, the letter in my pocket. We sat in a mostly empty cavern of a theater. When an unmarked police car appeared on the screen, Dad said, loud enough for everyone to hear. “That's the kind of cop car you drive, isn't it, Norman?” I knew it was my father's way of saying he was proud of me. We were going to go to dinner but he was too tired so I took him home, to my brother's house in Santee, and put him to bed. I gave him his morphine, and left the letter on the nightstand.