Cop Town (5 page)

Patrick was twenty-one years old, the same as her. He had a brother already serving. His father was a lawyer. He was studying to be an engineer, which seemed like one of those essential jobs you were always hearing about, like doctor or lawyer or son-of-a-politician. Patrick was none of these. He was a big Irish Mick with a seemingly high draft number who’d just met the girl of his dreams.

They had been together just over fifteen months when he got called up. His father wasn’t connected, but Kate’s was. Patrick refused to allow favors to be called in. He didn’t think it was right. And he was right that it wasn’t right, but by then they were married and Kate was furious at her stupid, stubborn husband. She’d refused to see him off for basic training. When they’d kissed goodbye at the door, Kate had held on to him so tightly that he’d warned her she was going to break a rib.

She wanted to break all of his ribs. She wanted to scratch out one of his eyes. She wanted to take a pipe wrench to his knee, a bat to his head. But she had let him go, because in the end, that was all she could do.

She was in love, she was married, and she was alone.

And then September 14th rolled around.

What were the odds?

Kate was helping her parents entertain when she heard the doorbell ring. Mary Jane was in the cellar because someone had asked for wine. Kate answered the door. Instead of party guests, two soldiers were standing
on the front porch. Her first thought was how odd it was to see white men wearing white cotton gloves. They were dressed identically. They stood with identically straight spines. Their uniforms were wool, long-sleeved. The weather was unseasonably warm. Beads of sweat dotted their closely shaven upper lips, rolled down the sides of their thick necks.

They both took off their hats in practiced unison. She almost laughed because the synchronization was so perfect. Only one of them spoke. He called her “ma’am.” Kate heard the words “regret to inform you,” then she found herself coming round on the couch with all the party guests gone. Their half-filled glasses and still-burning cigarettes were abandoned around the room. The soldiers left her a brochure entitled
Death Benefits
.

“Such a phrase,” her grandmother had said.

“An oxymoron,” her father had noted.

Her mother had smoked a stranger’s cigarette from a nearby ashtray.

Kate had no idea where the brochure was now. She didn’t really care. She didn’t need death benefits. She needed her husband.

Lacking both, what she really needed was to get ready for work.

Kate took off her robe as she walked into the bathroom. She checked to make sure her hair was securely pinned up before turning on the shower and stepping in.

She gasped at the cold spray. The plumbing was menopausal, which was a funny joke considering she lived in a hotel exclusively for women. One minute the water was too cold, the next it was too hot. The stream fluctuated depending on how many women were using identical bathrooms on identical floors. If too many toilets were flushed too closely together, they were all screwed.

Kate stared blankly through the translucent shower curtain as she washed. The view wasn’t much: her bed, and the wall on the other side of her bed. She closed one eye, then the other. Her vision was mottled by the green-tinted plastic curtain. She tried to remember what she had liked so much about this place when she’d first seen it. The anonymity? The sterileness? The beigeness of it all?

That hadn’t lasted long. Her mother had swooped in with her credit

card and her good taste, and now abstract art hung on the walls, a white shag rug covered the awful tan carpet in the bedroom, and Kate’s bed linens were more suited for a display window at Davison’s than a downtown hotel for single women.

Honestly, Kate preferred the place the way she’d found it.

She turned off the taps and quickly dried herself. The bedside clock had been playing games, flipping ahead almost half an hour while she stood under the water. She would have to stop letting her mind wander. The same thing had happened this morning on the way back from breakfast at the diner. One moment she was asking a man in the street for the time, and the next she was sitting on a bench, staring up at the blue sky, as if she had all the time in the world.

Daydreaming was the old Kate’s luxury. She lived on her own now. She had rent to pay. She had to buy her own food and clothes. She could no longer while away the hours reading trashy paperbacks and drinking her father’s gin.

Death benefits
.

Kate tore away the plastic dry cleaner’s bag and laid out her clothes on the bed. From the hallway came the hustle and bustle of girls on their way to work. She thought of them as the first shift—the office girls with their neatly bobbed hair and daringly short skirts. They were young and pretty and still worried about what their parents thought of them, as evidenced by the fact that, as audacious as it was to live alone in the big city, they did so in an establishment that strictly forbade any male guests above the lobby floor.

The second shift would follow in approximately fifteen minutes, older women like Kate who were in their mid- to late twenties. They were all personal secretaries or head tellers. Career gals. Independent. Full of spunk. Kate loved watching them in the elevator. They were constantly checking themselves. Eyeliner unsmudged. Lipstick perfect. Blouse tightly tucked. Hem sharply pressed. Before the car reached the bottom floor, they’d reflexively checked at least three times to make sure that their stockings were straight.

And then they walked across the lobby, heads held high, as if they

hadn’t a care in the world. Between their shockingly good posture and pointy brassieres, they reminded Kate of ships sailing off to war.

The clock was sneaking up on her again. Kate muttered a curse as she pulled on her underwear. She sat down on the bed and rolled on her pantyhose. She stood up to adjust the waistband. She sat back down to put on a pair of black socks. She slid into the stiff, navy-blue pants. And slid, and slid.

“Oh, no …,” she groaned.

The pants were enormous. She stood up to assess the damage. Even with the belt tightly buckled, the material hung like a deflated balloon around her waist. This must have been done to her on purpose. Kate had given the supply sergeant all of her measurements. She was five feet nine, hardly diminutive, but the legs of the pants were so long that they reached past her toes. A string of curses followed as she searched her underwear drawer for a pack of straight pins that she eventually found in the medicine cabinet.

Kate pinned up the pant legs until the edge just grazed the top of her foot. And then she remembered the shoes. They were obviously designed for men, bulky and ugly, the sort of thing a prison warden or high school math teacher would wear. The heel was too wide. Even with the laces tight, her feet could slip out.

Kate ignored the issue, settling on one problem at a time. Blisters would be the least of her worries if her pants weren’t properly shortened. A few more adjustments with the pins and the hem fell just shy of the shoelace.

“Good job.” She allowed herself a smile of relief. Then she caught her reflection in the mirror and was too stunned to speak.

She looked like a new form of centaur: a woman who was a man from the waist down. The sight would’ve been comical had it not been so jarring.

Kate turned away from her reflection, pulling on the stiff navy-blue shirt. Also too big. The collar scraped her earlobes. The breast pockets were at her waist. The emblems on the sleeves were at her elbows. She

flapped up her arms, trying to get her fingers past the long sleeves. Finally, she managed to poke one hand through, then the other. She rolled the shirt cuffs until it appeared she had two large doughnuts on her wrists.

Kate closed her eyes. No crying this morning. That was her promise. No crying until her shift was over.

“Laugh about this,” she coached herself. “Laugh because it’s funny.”

She buttoned the shirt. Her hands were steady. Maybe this
was
funny. Maybe a week or a month or a year from now, she would be telling the story of the first day she put on this ridiculous outfit and tears would come to her eyes—not from the horror, but from the hilarity.

She found the S-shaped metal clips that were designed to hold the utility belt. The equipment was too heavy for just one belt. She had to have one belt looped through her pants in order to support the second belt. Kate hooked one metal clip on each hip. She tried not to think a few hours ahead, when the constant wear would seem like Chinese water torture.

“Silly,” she mumbled. “The blisters on your feet will take your mind off of it.”

She picked up the thick leather utility belt. This, at least, looked like it would fit. She pulled the tongue through the buckle, piercing the last hole in the belt, making sure that the metal S-hooks had taken hold underneath the edges.

And then she tried not to think about Virginia Woolf walking into the river with rocks in her pockets to ensure her suicide.

Flashlight on the hook. Handcuffs in the pouch. Radio transmitter clipped to the back. Shoulder mic threaded up to the epaulet. Keychain attached to the ring. Nightstick through the metal loop. Holster secured around the belt. Gun.

Gun
.

Kate weighed the heavy metal revolver in her hand. She ejected the cylinder and let the brass blur as the bullets spun around. Gently, she clicked the cylinder back into place, then tucked the gun into the holster.
Her fingers were oily from handling the revolver. Her thumb slipped as she snapped the leather safety strap into place.

Oddly, the gun felt heavier than anything else on her hips. She’d only fired the revolver a couple of times at the police academy, and both times all she’d been thinking about was how quickly she could get away from the grabby instructor. Kate wasn’t sure she’d cleaned the gun properly. The grip seemed greasier than it was supposed to be. The instructor wasn’t very helpful. He’d said that he was against the arming of females.

Honestly, having spent two weeks with the rest of the women in her class, Kate shared the man’s reticence. There were a few serious recruits, but many were there on a lark. More than half of them signed up for the typing pool, where they’d receive the same pay as officers on patrol. Only four women in Kate’s group had asked for street assignments.

In retrospect, maybe Kate should’ve paid more attention in typing class. Or secretarial school. Or paralegal training. Or any number of the jobs she’d tried and failed at before seeing a story in
The Atlanta Journal
about women police officers being trained for motorcycle patrol.

Motorcycle patrol!

Kate laughed at her naïveté. If the firearms instructors were loath to train women, the motorcycle division was downright hostile to the idea of women on bikes. The riding instructor wouldn’t even allow them inside the garage.

The bedside clock clicked as the numbers turned over. Time had jumped forward again. Noises filled the hallway—the career gals heading out to work. Soft voices. Occasional laughter. The swish-swish-swish of nylons rubbing against slim skirts.

The hat was last. Kate had worn hats before. They were all the rage in high school—pillbox mostly, like Mrs. Kennedy. Kate had found a leopard skin to match the Dylan song. She’d pinned it at a rakish angle that made Kate’s mother send her straight back to her room.

This hat would’ve sent her mother into apoplexy. Dark blue and, as with everything else to do with her uniform, overly large. Wide brim. Gold, round badge sewn onto the center. City of Atlanta Police Department.

Inside the circle was a phoenix ascending from the ashes.
Resurgens
. Latin: rising again.

Kate put on the hat. She looked at her reflection in the mirror.

She could do this.

She
had
to do this.

3

Fox sat in his car smoking a cigarette. The windows were rolled up tight. Smoke filled the space. He thought of tear gas. Not for the first time. Not for the last. The needle wouldn’t skip on that record. Lachrymatory agents, they were called, which was a fancy way of saying your eyeballs were going to be impaled on spikes. Twenty seconds of exposure was all it took. The gas overstimulated the corneal nerves. Pain, tears, coughing, sneezing, and blindness followed.

Boot camp.

Fox had stood with the men in his unit as they watched the first team get gassed. The exposure was supposed to toughen them up, prepare them for jungle warfare, but what it did was break them down. Grown men screamed like little girls. They tried to scratch out their eyes. They begged for mercy.

Fox had watched them writhe around like worms and thought they were idiots. They had all gotten the same briefing. Sure, it hurt, but you just had to wait it out. Thirty minutes later, you were fine. Thirty minutes was nothing. You could do anything for thirty minutes.

Then it was Fox’s turn to be gassed.

Hot tears blistered his eyes. He inhaled needles into his lungs. He panicked. He dropped to the floor. He begged for mercy just like all the worms who had come before him.

That was where the shame came from. Not the crying or the choking, but the begging. Only once before in his life had Fox ever begged for anything. He was twelve years old, and he had quickly learned that there was no use begging, because nobody was going to help you but yourself. So, twelve-year-old Fox had vowed that his begging days were over, and then seven years later, he was at Camp Bumfuck rolling on the floor alongside twenty other grunts like a helpless, pitiful worm.

Should Fox take even a little bit of pride in the fact that he wasn’t the one begging the loudest?

A guy from his unit had died from exposure. Undiagnosed asthmatic, the brass had said, but who trusted the brass? Probably they were trying out a new formula on their own men before sending the caustic gas into the field. Wasn’t the first time. Wouldn’t be the last. War was nothing but a grand experiment. Behind every senseless tragedy, there was some guy with a clipboard.