Images dans la Nuit

"I don't know, man. I haven't...well, you're the first person I've told."

"No way..."

"Way, Amigo. Deal with it."

"So, like, what do you want to do? I mean, like have the kid?"

He shrugged. "I don't know, man. It feels too big for me, like I can't handle it."

"You love your wife, don't you, man. If you love her you got to step up, make it right."

He nodded, then looked at the kid. "What about you, man? What got you?"

"My girlfriend dumped me and I got bummed at work, and the manager fired my ass?"

"Really? What the fuck for...?"

"Oh, some customer started ragging on me and I shot my mouth off, told her to fuck off..."

He laughed with the kid. "No shit? Bet that was a sight..."

The kid looked at him, shook his head. "I don't know, man. It wasn't right. What she said, what I did. Nothing was right."

"Wasn't right for your boss to shit-can you, was it? I mean, what would you have done in his place?"

The kid leaned over, put his hands in his face. "I fucked up, man. Fucked up big time. Not sure I can make it without Amy, ya know?"

"What happened with her? Do you know?"

"No, not really. She started hangin' with another dude in study hall and before I knew what hit me they were going out, then she just fuckin' dumps me."

"That's fuckin' cold, man. Sounds to me like you're better off without her."

"Yeah. Maybe."

"What about your folks?"

"They don't fuckin' care, man. No one cares, ya know?"

"I know it feels like that sometime. Like all the world is just hangin' out there, waitin' to take a shit all over you. Funny thing, though, sometimes just hangin' back, chillin' out for a while, finding someone to talk to, that's all it takes to get things back in perspective. The trick is to learn how to hold on to your feelings -- at least 'til you can get to that place and talk it out."

"I got no one to talk to, man."

"Sure you do. You got me, don't you?" He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a business card. It had his name and badge number on it, and a couple of department phones numbers printed near the bottom, but he took a pen out and scrawled another number on the back. "That's my home number. You get in deep shit, need someone to talk to, give me a yell."

"Thanks, man."

"You ever been flyin'? Like in a small plane?"

"No. I ain't been up in nothing. Never even been outta the city..."

"Well, tell you what. I'm taking a guy up this Saturday, in the morning. You want to come along?"

"What?"

"Yeah. I teach kids how to fly. You wanna come along?"

"What? You gonna teach me to fly?"

"Who knows, kiddo. Stranger things have happened."

"So...what happens now?"

"You get in the back of the ambulance and take a ride down to Parkland. I meet you down there and we talk to a doc. If you want, I can call your folks, try to help you straighten things out. If the doc thinks you're okay, you go home, and you go flyin' with me Saturday morning."

"You want this?" the kid said, handing over the 'pistol' -- which turned out to be a squirt gun, a water pistol.

"Yeah. Better let me get rid of that..."

He got back to the station as the day shift took to the streets, at 0800, and he went to his locker and changed into his street clothes, then called Annie and talked with her about his night. He grabbed a cup of coffee after, and his notepad, then went to the briefing room and started in on his reports from the night before, but a half hour later dispatch called him on the intercom, asked him to come up to the lobby.

The kid was there, along with his father, talking to the watch commander, and when he came out into the lobby the kid's father came over and shook his hand.

"I just wanted to thank you, for what you did last night," the man said.

"You're welcome, sir," he said.

"About this flyin' thing...did you really mean that?"

"Yessir."

"I ain't never been in an airplane. Is it safe, for my boy, I mean?"

"Yes, it is. There are risks, but there are risks when you cross the street, or step in a bathtub."

The man nodded his head. "Any way I could come along?"

"Sure. I can do that."

"When and where?" the father asked.

"Saturday morning, how 'bout eight o'clock, at Red Bird, by the old terminal building."

"Know it well. We'll be there."

"Lieutenant, I'm still working on reports and, well, I'm supposed to be on at two and haven't been home yet..."

"Taken care of. You're off until Monday. Go back and finish up, and see me before you head for the barn."

"Thank you, sir."

When he got back to the briefing room Deb Desjardins was sitting at the table, reading through his notes; she'd already read his -- unfinished -- report, but she looked up when he came in, and she smiled.

"I remember your handwriting, you know. Looks like a draftsman's script. I never got how you do it, especially in a car."

He shrugged.

"You told the kid you got Micki pregnant?"

"I needed an insurmountable problem, needed to appear vulnerable. I needed to get him to empathize with me in order to get him to trust me."

"Jesus H Christ. And what, you just came up with that standing out there? And he had a gun in his hand?"

"I could tell something was wrong about the thing. It looked like at didn't have a clip in it..."

"A magazine?"

"Yeah, sorry. And he wasn't acting, well, threatening, not yet. Somebody who wants to commit suicide usually doesn't want to take someone with him, and when I saw it was a kid, well..."

"How old is he?"

"Fifteen."

"I saw him in the L-Ts office. Looks like a fuckin' mountain."

"Play's offensive line over at Duncanville High. Made varsity his sophomore year. He's a good student, too."

"The shrink, at Parkland? He called the chief this morning. Said he watched you talking to the kid down there, that you saved his life. Anyway, he wanted us to know."

He looked away, shook his head.

She shook her head, too. "I wonder if he knows how lucky he is?"

"Lucky? What do you mean?"

"Well, how many cops responding to a call like that would have seen the gun and taken him out, no questions asked?"

"Well, how many times might someone like that turn on the cop as soon as he pulled up, try to shoot him?"

"So, why did you do it?"

He sighed, shook his head. "You remember our first week? They guy in the pickup truck?"

She shook her head, too, turned back to run through the memory, reliving their approach, then that 'boom' -- and the cab filling with smoke. Then opening the door, seeing all that stuff on the ceiling and running down the inside of the glass. "Yeah, you know, there are nights I can't stop seeing those things. It's like they're never going to leave me, ya know."

"I know. I wake Annie up in the middle of the night. Screaming, sweats, racing heart -- the whole nine yards. I'm kind of resigned to them now."

"Them?"

He laughed a little, nodded his head. "Ghosts, maybe. I don't think they want us to forget them, forget their pain, so they come by for a visit from time to time."

"Our last night together? You remember that one?"

"The bedroom window?"

"Yeah. That one..."

The call had come out mid-evening, around eight or so, parents called about their son, a kid in middle school. He'd fallen in with a bad group, drugs, falling grades, and they'd had a big falling out at dinner, a really big argument that quickly got out of hand, then the father had threatened to send the kid away to school, a military school, up in Indiana. When they got to the house the mother was distraught and the father livid, domineering, his blustering voice audible from the street as they got out of their patrol car.

They had gone inside, figured out the basic contours of the conflict, but the kid had locked himself in his bedroom and wouldn't come out.

"Does he have any forearms in there?"

"Yeah," his father advised. "A Colt Diamondback, 22 caliber, and a Winchester, model 94."

"30-30?"

"Yes."

He looked down at the briefing room table, at his report, then he looked up at Desjardins and nodded his head. "That may be the worst nightmare I have."

She nodded her head, too. "I know. I know..."

Standing outside the kids room, knocking on the door. Hearing a commotion inside the room, hearing a train in the distance. The window opening, the train louder.

Something's not right...

Kid's not in the room anymore...

He kicked down the door, saw curtains fluttering in a strong wind, saw lightning outside, then the deep rumble of thunder...close, and getting closer...

The the train...close, and getting closer...

He ran to the window, lightning flashed and he saw the kid running across the field behind the house, towards the tracks. He crawled out the window, jumped to the ground and took off, but after days of rain the field was almost a muddy swamp and his boots sunk into the ooze with each stride, and the kid had a fifty yard head start.

He saw the train through falling rain as he ran, then he saw the kid lay down by the tracks, put his neck on the rail, and he drove his legs through the mud, running as hard as he ever had in his life, closing, closing...getting close now...

He dove for the kids legs, pulled him back as the train passed and he sat up, saw the kid's decapitated body crumpled up by his own, twitching now -- and he sat up and screamed, began crying and pounding his fists in the mud...

Desjardins ran up and gasped, got on the radio and called in, then the kid's parents ran up.

The boy's father looked, then turned away, walked back to his house.

But the boy's mother looked at her son, then at him, and she knelt there by him, and hugged him. She held his head while he cried, rocked him like a baby, and Desjardins came up to him and she held his head to her thigh.

"Know what?" she said, bringing him back to the present.

"Hmm, what?"

"I fell in love with you that night. With your humanity, I guess."

"Did you really --" he said, grinning.

"How many?"

"How many -- what?"

"Suicides?"

"Me? On view? Maybe ten."

"How many have you talked down?"

"A couple."

"You know, there's something I've always wanted to ask you."

"Now's as good a time as any. Fire away."

"That form you threatened to fill out? The 4301, I think you called it? When you were going to cut me from the department?"

"Yeah?"

"I checked a few years ago. There's no such form."

"Yeah? How 'bout that...?"

"Why? What made you change your mind -- about me?"

"I don't know. Just a feeling I had. Funny how things work out, isn't it?"

© 2017 | adrian leverkühn