BODY SCISSORS
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11:30
P.M.—706 East Thirty-eighth Street
In
the dirt by the door sat a half-gallon stainless-steel
dog dish with three hardened king-size dog nuggets, next
to a coiled dog chain and monster collar, a silent unmistakable
message to potential intruders to back off, low-tech security
provided by an imaginary Doberman named Wolfgang. Woofles
for short. I opened the door onto an American living room,
so well-kept and at the same time inviting that I was
always surprised to remember it was my own. Rachel trailed
me in and pushed the door closed.
I
turned to her. With her going-out-to-dinner heels on,
she nearly reached my height at six feet even. We squared
off, Rachel staring me down with her big, dark blue eyes
with a slightly Asian turn at the corner, smooth skin
and chestnut brown hair brushed back from her low forehead.
She moved near, a close-cut dress calculated to show off
the curves of breasts and hips, to show others what they
were missing, what I went home with. I kissed her, then
drew back and looked into her eyes.
If
I had a photo album, it would look like this: My mother,
a glamour shot, taken around 1950. My parents' wedding
picture, her hair piled up as she towered over my scrawny
dad, the unlikely Mr. and Mrs. Reles (rhymes with "zealous").
Me as a baby, my mother cradling me, kissing my tiny hand;
my dad looking on, brooding. Me at ten, in the front window
of my parents' apartment in Elmira, New York, the day
of my father's release from prison, as my mother packs
her bag, kisses me goodbye and disappears in a blue-and-white
taxi. Me at fourteen in boxing gear, at a Mafia gym in
Elmira, a hard look in my eyes as I fight my way up the
ranks of the Golden Gloves competition. Bleary-eyed at
fifteen as my father wakes me in the middle of the night
to tell me he's made an influential enemy and we're leaving
the state-now! At eighteen, graduating from Austin High
School, class of '71, capped and gowned, my eyes blank.
In my MP uniform in Frankfurt. At the University of Texas
in jeans and a T-shirt, but on the inside, wound up to
my core: uptight in relaxed clothes, looking like a narc.
Marrying Amy, a tiny blonde with a domestic dream, cuddled
in my big arms. Being left by Amy, punching the walls
of our little, empty house on Avenue F. Making rank, Sergeant
Dan Reles, and no one to share it with. Appointment to
Organized Crime Division. Reassigned to Homicide. With
my mentor Joey Velez. With his widow, Rachel.
Rachel
and I had gotten a place in the Cherrywood section of
Austin. I'd pushed for a rental, even though she could
have gotten us a great deal and added her commission to
our bank account. She laughed off my reluctance to buy,
tacked it on to the fact that, after two and a half years
together, I hadn't dropped a hint about marriage. She'd
dropped a few. The house itself sat on the south side
of a public golf course, a run-down patch of grass and
shrubbery with a few holes and no fence around it. A gesture
of democracy, it allowed the poor to impersonate the space-consuming
rituals of the rich. If you grew up in the area and wanted
a place to get high at night or make out with your girlfriend
or maybe rape someone, that was the spot. A hundred feet
away, on the western border of the golf course, sat the
house Rachel used to share with Joey Velez.
Senior
Sergeant Joey Velez had recruited me eight years earlier
to work on the Gautier case, pulling me from a low-level
assignment I'd been working since I'd made sergeant. With
a little help from me and a dozen others, the Gautier
case targeted major and minor players of a cocaine and
car-parts racket operating out of Bertrand Gautier's famous
blues dub, and landed them in prison; and it got Joey
and me assigned to the newly founded Organized Crime Division.
A political shift bounced us off the division, and Joey
saved me, mentoring me onto the Homicide squad and becoming
my first real friend. He was like a father to me, except
that he gave useful advice. If he knew my greatest desire
was to jump on his wife, Rachel, he kept his mouth shut
about it. And then he died. Now, three years after he
was gone, I'd still catch him whispering advice, or as
often, goofy things into my ear when I was supposed to
be paying attention. I tried not to listen, part of my
practice of pretending to be sane. I tried not to blame
Rachel for his death, for not loving him. And I tried
not to blame myself, for loving his wife.
A
while after Joey died, I got promoted to senior sergeant.
At work, I still missed Joey, the way you'd miss your
father if he died when you were young, his absence felt
keenly each day. At home, I tried not to think about the
fact that I was sleeping with his widow. Rachel took my
promotion as a good sign. We rented this house. She got
up every morning at six to stretch and aerobicize in the
living room, sunlight scorching her from the east window.
I would sneak peeks at her by way of the hall mirror,
watch her desperately pounding against the inevitable
changes of time and gravity. I kissed and treasured the
occasional gray hair I spotted on her head before she
found and painted it, the slight shifts in weight and
shape that made her more real and human and mine.
That
night we'd been out for dinner with Ray and Marissa Tierney,
"old friends from Houston, lawyers both." I
wasn't supposed to know from the awkward pauses and the
avoided eye contact that Ray, now a criminal defense attorney,
was an ex-boyfriend of Rachel's, and Marissa his clueless
wife, or that Ray had hurt Rachel bad. The bridge-night
fantasy Rachel staged served multiple purposes. It convinced
Rachel we'd be like other couples no matter how we'd met,
no matter that we'd first kissed under the watchful eye
of Joey's ghost. And it sent out a message to Ray, one
I was glad to back up: cop trumps lawyer.
I
left the porch light on, hung up my jacket, looked through
the house and checked the locks. The carpet everywhere
muffled my footfall, I worried, as it would muffle the
steps of an intruder. I spotted Rachel wiggling her ass
up the short hallway to the bedroom, wearing a black satin
robe I took as a good sign.
By
the time I reached the bedroom, she was lying under the
blanket with the lights dimmed. I undressed and slipped
in beside her. At thirty-seven, I'd kept my boxer's build—beefed
up with strategically rounded shoulders—and made
a pretty good appearance in spite of a hairline that had
slipped a few degrees north at the temples and halted,
as if to remind me who was in charge. Along with that,
I showed a dozen odd scars and a boxer's nose: broken
once when I was a kid and again a few years back. You
should see the other guy.
Rachel
slid into my arms and greeted me with a full, wet kiss,
then settled in and kept still.
I
asked, "Is something wrong?"
"No,"
she lied, it's just...We're always working. We come home
in time to floss and go to bed. On weekends we clean the
house and play catch-up."
"We
just went out tonight."
"That's
what made me think of it."
I
didn't want to blow the moment if it wasn't already over.
Here was a woman who spent her youth coked to the rafters,
cleaned up and spent the last ten years making money.
She didn't know what a real home was any more than I did.
"Well..."
I said, warding off frustration. "What do you want
to do besides this?"
"I
don't know," she said. Then, "What do people
do?"
Between
us grew a box of sad, empty space. We had decent jobs,
a nice house, each other. Now what?
"Do
you have Monday of" I asked.
"Why?"
Monday
was Manin Luther King Day, an optional holiday in Texas,
on the same level as Rosh Hashanah, Good Friday and Confederate
Heroes Day. You could take off anyone of them, depending
on your religion or your politics.
"We
could take a long weekend, maybe go away. Do something
fun."
She thought it over. "Like what?"
"Whatever.
We'll think of something."
The
space between us fizzled and she was pressed against me,
sweetly kissing, when the cordless phone rang on her nightstand,
splitting the night, and I clicked that I was the detective
on call. Rachel grabbed it on the second ring as I said,
"No, don't."
"Yes?"
she said, as the hope drained out of her eyes. She held
the receiver out to me. The base should have been on my
side of the bed since I was always taking the midnight
calls, but the line from the base to the wall wouldn't
reach and we should have gotten a longer line but we didn't.
"Who?"
I said.
She
imitated the operator's twang. "'Dispatch, Mrs. V.'"
I
took the receiver with a standard apology written on my
face. "Reles."
"They
need you at 1610 Confederate Avenue. Behind Matthews Elementary.
Now.
"Who
died?"
"I
think a kid."
When
I reached over her to hang up, Rachel was facing the wall
and smoking a cigarette.
"I'm
sorry," I said.
After
a while, she shook off an idea and flicked the ash in
a tray by the phone.
I
stood and dressed. "It could be over by the weekend.
We could still go away."
And
again nothing as I left the house and double-locked the
door behind me.
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