Dominion (41 page)

“You use mace often?”

“Maybe four times in fifteen years as a uniformed. Nightstick less than a dozen times. See—and I’ll talk slowly because you people in the press don’t understand this—some of these guys won’t come with you to police headquarters if all you say is, ‘Pretty please.’ Truth is, I went to the hospital too. The guy bit me. See this?” He showed him an inch and a half scar on his left hand.

“That’s from this guy? No kidding?”

“No kidding. I could show you all my scars and tell you the stories, but I don’t disrobe for journalists.”

“Thanks, Ollie. You have no idea how much I appreciate your restraint. So what happened next?”

“The DA’s office came after me. They needed a scapegoat. The
Trib
and Norcoast made me out to be this brutal racist cop. They described the perp as a ‘mentally handicapped motorist’ and a ‘possible suspect’ in a robbery. Didn’t mention we’d seen him do it, that he pistol-whipped this girl, that he was out of his mind on drugs, trying to kill us and bystanders, that he’d taken us on a high-speed chase, he was resisting arrest, bit me in the hand, and so on. No mention that he was a convicted drug dealer, and who knows how many kids had turned to crime and gangs and died or become killers because of him. None of that mattered. He was a victim. Then the next thing you know they did interviews with him, and he was a hero, a martyr talking with this peaceful childlike voice about how he wished people could just love each other.”

“You sound bitter,” Clarence said.

“Maybe I am. You know the worst part? See, my mom was from Idaho and my dad from Arkansas, so I grew up bilingual. My dad was no racist, no matter what you might think, but I had some uncles and cousins that were the worst, like rejects from the Klan, the kind that used to tell stories about how black kids were born with tails and they had to be cut off by the midwives. Psychos. Next thing I know they send me a postcard and say, ‘We’re on your side, cousin—we’re glad you beat the crud out of that nigger.’ One of them said that to me at a family reunion, and I just lost it. I slapped him silly. Hurt him worse than I hurt the perp. Thought my cousin was going to press charges. Oh, well. One less Christmas card to send.” Ollie pretended it didn’t matter. “Did you see the front-page picture they ran of me, the closeup?”

“Yeah. Barely recognized you.”

“Nobody recognized me. This scuffle went on like fifteen minutes. I guess someone at the
Trib
was monitoring the police band, and this photographer was already out in Hillsboro, so she had time to get to the scene. This gal keeps getting in close while the perp is swinging these big meathook arms. I was afraid he was going to take her out. She wouldn’t back off. Anyway, she takes these photos, and I swear, I come up lookin’ like Hitler on a bad hair day. My wife said she’d never seen me look so mean. I didn’t know it was possible to make this beautiful mug look that ugly.”

The photographer was a woman? Must have been Carp. “So you blame the
Trib
for what happened?”

“Jake told me, ‘The press goes to scandal like a buzzard to entrails.’ They crucified me,” Ollie said.

“You’re seeing the media through the lens of your own bad experiences,” Clarence said.

“Sure. Isn’t that the same lens you see cops through? Whose experiences do we operate by if not our own? What bothered me is that I became a cop not to bust heads, but to do some good. I didn’t mind risking my life, but once I was accused of this, suddenly all those years—my career, my record—none of it mattered. I believe to this day if Jake Woods hadn’t done his own investigation and found out the other side and written it up in the
Trib
, I would have gone to jail.”

“Must’ve been tough.”

“The worst part was when my youngest daughter, then she was sixteen, kept getting harassed by kids and teachers at school who believed the newspaper. One day she comes and asks me, ‘Daddy, did you really do those things to that black boy?’” Ollie’s eyelids got heavy. “That’s when it hurt. Sure, police brutality happens and sure, there are racist cops. I’m not one of them. But I was made to pay for their sins.”

Clarence thought about how often he’d been made to pay for the sins of black criminals who were the exception to the rule. “One last question. Jake told me something, but I want to hear it straight from you. Tell me about Bam Robie.”

Ollie looked surprised, as if he hadn’t heard the name for a long time.

“Prostitute. Crack fiend. Arrested him a half-dozen times. One night, this was maybe a couple months before the brutality charge, I was bringing Bam in for soliciting Johns. Suddenly, right outside the police station, he drops down on the street. Stops breathing.”

“And…?”

“I did what I was trained to do.”

“Which was?”

“CPR. Then mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.”

“What happened?”

“He revived. The paramedics worked with him awhile. He ended up okay, brief stay in the hospital, and later that night, at the end of my shift, they brought him in and we booked him.”

“Did you know he had AIDS?”

“Yeah, I knew. Bam was high risk, to say the least. You get to know a lot of these guys on the streets, the regulars. He’d lost a lot of weight, was pretty scrawny by then. Everybody knew he had AIDS.”

“And you gave him mouth-to-mouth anyway?”

“I was just doing my job. Was I supposed to let him die?”

“I’m not sure I would have done it,” Clarence said. Silence. He cleared his throat. “You didn’t mention Robie was black.”

“You keep bringing that up like it’s important.”

“To me, it
is
important.”

“You’d think even if I didn’t win points with the black caucus, I would have been a hero with the gay lobby or some AIDS group. Don’t know if there’s a prostitutes or cross-dressers union, but they could’ve given me a medal too, I guess. No awards. Got a lot of razzing from the guys, though, for doing a mouth-to-mouth on Robie. I figure, hey, it’s not like I married him.”

“Why do I see the events on earth in succession?” Dani asked Torel. “Why do I seem to experience the passing of time? Doesn’t the Bible say, ‘And time shall be no more’?”

“You are quoting a hymn, not the Bible,” Torel said. “Have you not read Elyon’s Word where it says, ‘There was silence in heaven for half an hour’? For finite beings, there is always time, wherever they are. As fish live in water, the finite live in time. Timelessness is for the infinite. Only Elyon exists outside of time, and to interact with his creatures, even he enters into it. Time is measured in the succession of events. One thing happens first, then another. There is a before, a during, and an after. That is time. Christ came once to earth, he rose and ascended, he will return again. The inhabitants of heaven eagerly await that day. In that sense, heaven is on earth’s timetable. Consider the music you have heard in heaven and the music you make here. Does it not have meter, tempo, and rests? All these require time.”

“There’s something else,” Dani said. “I thought we would forget the things of earth here. True, some things don’t come to mind, but they haven’t been erased, just eclipsed. I have such vivid memories of earth. Not only that, but I can still see what’s happening on earth. I always thought that for heaven to be heaven we couldn’t be aware of pam on the earth.”

“Heaven does not make your mind duller, but sharper. You are aware of the rebellion on earth and the ugliness of hell. Happiness here does not depend on ignorance of reality. It depends on having God’s perspective on reality. Elyon and the angels know there’s evil and pain on earth, but heaven is still heaven for them. Your joy can be full even though there is evil in the universe, since you know that soon evil will be destroyed and the Carpenter’s just dominion established forever.”

After a long plane flight with a connection in Denver, Clarence walked into the Chicago Ritz around six o’clock, feeling more like a tourist than a customer. It dripped with class. He couldn’t help but feel a little self-important walking around here. He was wearing his best suit, a Nick Hilton, and Alden shoes, usually reserved for only the most important occasions. But here, just walking in the front door was important.

The bellhop, a young black man, led the way to his room. Clarence looked at the sculptures and artwork all around him. Even the ashtrays looked straight out of an art gallery. He tipped the bellhop and wandered around his room. Incredible. A mammoth king-sized bed, a lavish flower arrangement and fruit basket, and a personal note of welcome from Mr. Sam Knight, Raylon’s friend. A bar, a kitchen, a living room with beautiful sofa, two TVs. Geneva would love it here. Why hadn’t he thought to invite her?

His bathroom looked like something out of a magazine. Ivory-like washbasin with what looked like gold-plated handles. A private Jacuzzi! Clarence felt on top of the world. After exploring every feature of his suite, he walked out in the hall, passing by other well-dressed occupants.

He pulled in his stomach and pushed out his chest a bit. He could think of worse ways to spend the evening—like in Cabrini Green, where he would go first thing tomorrow morning to his cousin Franky’s. Clarence felt excited about doing this inner-city feature article, especially since most
Trib
columnists got a feature assignment maybe once a year, if that. As he walked to the elevator, a service cart came around the corner in front of him, ramming into his thigh.

“Oh, sir, I’m so sorry.” The silver-dollar-sized eyes looked even more frightened and apologetic than the voice sounded. The nameless black woman, about Clarence’s own age, seemed terrified, as if she had offended royalty who at a whim could command her beheaded.

“No problem,” Clarence assured her, aware of the patronizing tone of his own voice—kind, magnanimous, the sort royalty uses with inferiors to remind themselves of their philanthropy.

“Forgive me, sir.”

He didn’t know what he saw in her eyes, and it bothered him. Was it mortification at having done a terrible offense? Or was it that she felt wonder or envy that one of her kind had made it to Clarence’s station in life, that he could actually stay in such a place, not just be a bellhop or cleaner or candy machine supplier here? He sensed she had expected a white man and had been surprised to see him. Were blacks who had “made it” even more insufferable than whites, who take their privilege for granted?

He took the elevator down to the lobby and looked the place over. He saw a sign that said, “Ritz restrooms for guests only.” Outside of it stood a tall young black man who had pumped his share of iron. He wore a tuxedo.

A restroom bouncer? In a tuxedo?

Clarence wandered into the plush restroom, which had a huge lounge area with chairs and paintings, then inside it another section with washbasins, and finally beyond that the facilities people actually went to bathrooms for in the first place. He remembered the Mississippi outhouse he visited a few times a day until he was ten years old and they finally got indoor plumbing.

He didn’t really need to use the Ritz restroom; he was just exploring. The works of art hanging on the wall made it seem an ivory-colored museum. He wondered if artists considered it a great honor to have their paintings hanging in a John.

Opulence knows no boundaries.