The Twilight Swimmer (14 page)

Sally shook her head, disapprovingly. “Why would I want to put a crate full of dishes in a jail cell?”

“Because it’s a blue crate,” said Dallas with a sigh.
“Greenish blue.”

“It was bluish green ten seconds ago.”

Sally patted his arm, as if consoling him for his stupidity. “Just get the blue crate, would you, dear? That’s a good boy.”

Brandi watched this exchange with amusement, forgetting to announce her presence. But Sally finally caught sight of her and threw her arms up in celebration. “Brandiwine! What a treat that face is! I’ve been staring at
his
mug all day, and he’s got nothing on you.”

Dallas turned quickly, following Sally’s gaze. When he spotted Brandi, he momentarily forgot his crate. It tilted in his hands, and sure enough a saucer slipped off the top and dove for the floor. It shattered on impact, startling them all.

“Dallas! That saucer’s older than you!” Sally stooped to pick up the shards. With a sheepish smile at Brandi, Dallas spun on his heels and carried his cargo back into the other room.

Sally shook her head as he walked away, for Brandi’s benefit. “That boy does not belong in a uniform, if you ask me. He belongs in an apron washing dishes, maybe. And I emphasize the word ‘maybe’. You see he’s a hazard for any saucer unfortunate enough to make his acquaintance.” Sally waved Brandi forward and embraced her, one narrow shoulder digging into Brandi’s chin. “It’s unforgivable I haven’t seen you for, what is it now, a year or two.”

“Probably three,” answered Brandi. “But it’s okay. I know you’re busy.”

“Young lady, I was
not
apologizing. I was accusing!” She placed her hands on her bony hips, head tilted to drink Brandi in with a more discerning eye. “If you’ve got an excuse why you haven’t stopped in to see me sooner, I’d be dumbstruck to hear it. Go ahead, dear. Strike me dumb.”

Brandi held up her hands, apologetic. “No excuses from me. I’m just a bad person.”
            

Sally’s demeanor softened. “Don’t get carried away, now. You’re young. And that’s its own excuse, isn’t it? For just about everything.”

She walked Brandi over to an unoccupied desk and introduced her to the switchboard. It was an antiquated technology, big and clunky. The dozens of switches spread across its central panel were coated with a patina of dust for lack of use. There were only two policemen in town, and no need for so many channels to communicate with them. One of the speakers, to the right of the switch panel, had torn and fallen in on itself. It fluttered almost imperceptibly with the persistent hum of the machine.

“Don’t you sit here?” asked Brandi, as she lowered herself into a hard wooden chair with a painfully straight back.

Sally waved her hand dismissively. “I prefer to remain on my feet. Keeps me wakeful and ready to run if the Grim Reaper should remember my age and come a’courting. Those there, the headphones, see them?”

Brandi nodded and picked them up, oversized monstrosities from a decade long since passed.

“Totally worthless,” said Sally with a grunt. “Your dad rigged a phone jack off the side, there. Phone’s hiding behind the box. See it? Yup, you’ve got it. Calls from concerned citizens pour through that ringer at the lightning fast rate of once or twice a day. And girlie, let me tell you, you have arrived on an exciting day! Not five minutes after I settled down for my tuna salad sandwich – half a sandwich, actually, doctor’s orders – that phone rang and I picked her up and whose voice should I hear on the other end but Waylon McPheeters. He was grunting more than talking, but I know that voice anywhere. Why is a long story, so don’t ask. So he’s grunting, and saying words like ‘hurts’ and ‘help’ and ‘choking’. I was skeptical, obviously. If you knew Waylon like I know him you’d understand why. But he was persistent with his distress, and so I asked if I ought to send over a paramedic. But sure as you sit before me – after three years! – Waylon barked out the word ‘yes’ and I heard a tiny little bump on his end. ‘What was that, Waylon? I heard a yes and a bump’. Then he was coughing, then saying ‘no, nevermind’. It was a lozenge caught in his throat, if you believe that. He coughed it up right onto the phone mouthpiece, bump, and he could breathe again. So, way I figure, I saved his life and didn’t even have to set down my sandwich to do it!”

Sally wandered off without waiting for a response from Brandi. There was purpose in her pace, and she dove back into the storage cell with renewed gusto.

Brandi slid off the hard wooden chair and dragged it over to her father’s desk, across the room. He had a large, leather office chair that tilted and swiveled and did everything else a real chair ought to do. It had been a gift from Brandi’s mother, two Christmases ago, despite Conrad’s insistence that he didn’t need such creature comforts while on the job. Brandi’s mother wouldn’t listen to such nonsense, of course. If she couldn’t abide the uncomfortable chair at Conrad’s desk, she was certain that Conrad was only feigning satisfaction. An all-day shopping trip and two hundred dollars later, and her husband was stuck with a chair that embarrassed him far more than it could ever comfort him. He didn’t exactly hate the chair, but confided to Brandi that he did resent it.

Brandi made the swap as quickly as she could, with one eye on Sally’s gray head as it ducked and rose behind the wall of boxes. She would certainly notice the change at some point, but not before Conrad, Brandi hoped. She wanted her father to at least pay this small price for forcing her to do her penance here, at the station. She rolled across the room, seated, and retook her seat at the switchboard. With a yawn, she leaned back and shut her eyes.

“I’ve been thinking about borrowing his chair for months, but couldn’t work up the nerve.”

Brandi opened her eyes to find Dallas standing beside her, his arms crossed over his chest. She couldn’t help but notice how snugly his uniform fit, how crisp the fabric was from obvious and recent ironing. He looked much different than her father did when he wore his rumpled browns. He had allowed Sherri to bully him into accepting a new office chair, but he put his foot down when she threatened to have his uniform dry cleaned.

“Sally has you on the switchboard already, huh? Sure you can handle the excitement?” Dallas uncrossed his arms and slid into a seat at a nearby desk. The surface was barren except for a single photo from his high school graduation. Black robe and tasseled board perched on his head. He hadn’t aged a day, from all appearances. Brandi remembered, now, that he had only finished school two classes prior. So young to already be working for her father.

“I’ve been warned. I know what a lodged lozenge sounds like, and how to handle it.”

Dallas chuckled. “Since I’ve been on the force, I’ve made exactly one arrest. For jaywalking, if you can believe it. And it was my cousin Rob, outside the diner.”

“People can get arrested for that? Family members?”

“Usually, no. But Rob was so belligerent. I asked him not to jaywalk, so he did it again with a big grin on his face. Told me he saw me pee in a sandbox when I was nine, which means I’m no big shot man of the law and he can do whatever he wants in front of me. He jaywalks again, trying to get my goat. So I didn’t ask the second time. I told him. Do not jaywalk. Did Rob listen?”

Dallas waited a moment for Brandi to answer. She smiled, but she wasn’t willing to play along completely.

“No, Rob’s not much of a listener.” Dallas went on. “He ran back across the street a third time, nearly got himself hit by a van, he was so intent on watching me watch him defy me. I wrote up a citation. He mimed like he was wiping his rear end with it, then spit out his gum in the middle, folded it up and threw it away, right in front of me.”

“So you arrested him?” asked Brandi, still smiling.

“Only sort of. I tossed him in the back of the cruiser for an hour, then called my Aunt Patty. She gave him a hiding and drove him home. And believe me, that was a lot worse for Rob than spending an afternoon in there with Sally’s boxes.”

Brandi laughed aloud, her cheeks turning just a little red. She looked away from him so he wouldn’t see.

“If I want to make a real arrest this lifetime, I’ll have to move to Boston. Think they’d have me?”

“After they hear how you handled cousin Rob, probably not.”

Now Dallas laughed, shaking his head at his own deficiency. “I didn’t even have a pair of handcuffs on me. Would have had to use a twisty tie from a trash bag just to restrain him.” Dallas scooted his chair a bit closer to Brandi’s station, awkwardly propping one elbow on the corner of her desk and leaning his cheek against his fist. “Did I even tell you my name that night?”

“I already knew your name.”

“I mean, I swooped in there playing cop, ultra-serious. Playing the authority figure—”

“You are a cop, and you are an authority figure,” she answered with a smile.

Dallas eases his elbow off the desk and rubbed it, wincing. “I didn’t have any right to ask you about personal things, about your family, your sister. I was out of line, and I want to apologize for that. I
am
apologizing for that. I don’t know if you can look past a bad first impression, but I’m hoping to undo whatever damage I did with my general oafishness.”

 
           Brandi studied Dallas’ face for a long moment. His ears protruded just a bit, but in a pleasant way. Almost like they were playfully waving hello from under his neatly trimmed hair. His nose was small and rounded at the end, with no hook or sharp bridge to call attention to it. His dark green eyes were set under heavy brows. Not caveman heavy, but strong. There was a tiny cluster of laugh lines extending from the corner of his left eye. She found herself staring at the spot, anticipating the moment when he might smile and draw the inviting lines that much more deeply in his skin.

Feeling her eyes on him, and getting uncomfortable with her silence, he did smile at last. “What does it mean if you don’t answer? Good sign or bad sign?”

“I don’t know what to say. You didn’t do anything wrong. If it wasn’t for you, that night, I’d have had to explain to my father why I lied about spending the night with my real friends to hang out with a bunch of pyromaniac hooligans. You know him well enough to know how well that would
not
have gone.”

Dallas raised both his eyebrows in feigned horror. “I’d rather tell him I crashed my cruiser trying to pull a stick of gum out of the glove box. That brand of buffoonery is less offensive to a man like him than… well, whatever you call hanging out with pyromaniac hooligans.”’

“Rebellion?” she asked with a grin.

“Was it? You were rebelling?” He narrowed his eyes, a hint of concern in his tone.

“They’re not really hooligans. And no, I’m not rebelling. What am I supposed to do? Sit at home and learn how to knit? Have you met my mother? She can teach me how to hire someone to knit for me, but give her ball of yarn and she might try to cook it. I’m serious. She’d think it’s imported pasta.”

Dallas folded his arms across his chest and leaned back, stifling a belly laugh. “Too much. I believed you until the pasta line.”

“Come over for dinner some night and see what she can do in the kitchen. That’s a dare,” said Brandi, fighting off a laugh of her own.

“Oh, well, I never back down from a dare.”

He extended his hand for a shake, and she gripped it firmly. “I won’t say you signed your own death warrant, but if they have sick stomach warrants—”

“Yeah, I get the idea. I’m queasy already.”

Sally reentered the room and stopped in her tracks, taking in the sight of Brandi and Dallas enjoying each other’s company. Her eyes narrowed, it seemed, to measure the distance between their two chairs – not much distance at all. Dallas picked up on her casual analysis and scooted away, returning to his desk and turning to face a neat stack of paperwork. Before she could say anything, the front door of the station swung open and Conrad poked his head inside.

“You’re half in my parking spot,” he said to Dallas, a bit out of breath. He tilted his head to steal a glance at Brandi, but said nothing to her before disappearing back through the doorframe.

Dallas jumped out of his chair and chased after Conrad enthusiastically.

“Don’t be offended if he doesn’t ask you for a date,” said Sally.

“What? What are you talking about?” asked Brandi, blushing.

“No one in his right mind tries to get fresh with the daughter of his boss. That’s a good way to end up not just strung up by your toes, but unemployed to boot! Picture that, eh? Upside down with your pockets hanging out, swinging freely, and not a cent spilling out on the concrete. Makes a pitiful image. And if you add in the possibility of incarceration on trumped up charges? I’m not saying your father would arrest him. I’m saying he might be afraid your father might arrest him. Are you even listening to me? Your eyes are glazing over like a Christmas ham.”

Brandi was staring at Sally, too surprised by her outburst to respond.

“But he is handsome, isn’t he?” added Sally with a smirk as she spun on her heels and left the room.

Brandi lay on her stomach, legs bent at the knee and socked feet waving overhead. She had her laptop open in front of her on the bed and she pounded away at the keyboard without looking at the keys.