dog fight

I fell into the dream as if my bed parted and the floor opened up beneath me. All at once an quickly I was on Forestview, on the hunt, walking through the thick blackness of spring's nighttime. A call came out, an area where the fugitive was last seen, not far from my prowling. I tracked him down into a dilapidated house sloping lazily to the west of the river that slices the town in half. No one had lived there for some time and inside it smelled of dust and animals and air that had been deprived of sunlight for too long. He heard my approach and I watched as he ran down a hallway and slithered into a hole in the drywall, small and scared and like a wayward country mouse. And in the next instant we were outside, feet digging in to the slipping mud, thawing snow guiding our tangled limbs down into the swollen river. And then, it was just churning water, and nothing working, and fighting, and mud, and being carried quickly away. The flotsam and jetsam of the lake sluicing past as I struggled for higher ground, to just not be pulled under.

And then I woke up and it was early morning, my clock tick tocking in the corner and the world outside still dark, and pure. And my first thought was of him.

Try sleeping.

I try to figure out what makes the difference, a slight variance in piece of paper, one in triplicate, the other, not. Two aluminum casks in my black cordura, one my father carried with him, the other given to me by a mentor. Hubris plays its part, makes my hand reach for the one emblazoned with Irish, and I wonder if that is a failing on my part. But mostly it is random, and happenstance, and governed by circumstances that I do not think I even understand. And does it matter? But I wish that it did. Sometimes the easiest decision is the one that has already been made for you. He told her, my world is too black and white, and I, I thought, I think that mine is too much in the grey. But what can we do but play our cards and do the best we can to conjure up some kind of poker face.

And I was so distracted, today. When I closed my eyes I could still feel the warmth of my bed, and the two of us tangled up in sleep, and the tired feeling behind my eyes only fueled my happiness because it made me remember. The scent of salt and sweetness filled the cab and I could not help but smile, even as it snowed, even as the world proved itself to be raw and cutting and visceral. And that it could not touch me, that it did not matter as my phone beeped and there was a whole other world beyond the reach of frost and ice and incredulity. It is like a secret that I keep locked up and hidden on a top shelf so that the grittiness of my daily slogging does not find it. A touch, a whisper, his voice, what he says and how it can make me feel so vulnerable and that I am addicted to the dance. And still, I am smiling.

I am a fool, I know. But it is wonderful to let go.

Wolves at night.

The snow reflected blue like millions of tiny diamonds under the streetlights and the rising orb of the moon, hanging listlessly to the east. Piled high and sloppy under feet, the dew point was pregnant and waiting to explode, again. And he comes, headlights illuminating the pale of the garage door, exploding incandescence out into the night. It is like a tiny seed that I planted, and put a fence around, and water, and keep warm against the threat of frost. Beautiful for its simplicity.

And then lately in the thick darkness of the early morning I wind my way to my father's house and we make the long and sluggish trek to our bailiwicks together. He tells me stories from the past, and I laugh and we swear together and the cab smells like coffee, and old smoke.

Let me always remember when we first met. Today at work one of my colleagues had me laughing so hard that my eye watered for two hours. So hard that it physically hurt. How did I get so lucky? What have I done, just Lord let me be always grateful.

H2 Recovery Unit

Because, at some point in one's life, one should own a Jeep. Sweet Jesus.

A.M.R.

He smelled like sunshine and salt and I pressed my nose into his stomach and drew in a deep breath. The littlest hand in the whole entire world encircled my one finger and squeezed and did not let go. She scooped him up and handed him to me and he was the most fragile and beautiful and amazing thing I had ever held. Every moment of him sleeping in my arms was a small miracle, and I kept thinking that it was not even yet a full day that he had been on this earth. He snored, and woke, and ate, and I remained mesmerized by every tiny detail. Welcome to this life, kiddo, I cannot wait to help you figure it out.

Just, thank you. The tiniest blessing, may we all be always grateful.

Butterflies

It's like falling into an already written plot, but that it's not bad in any way, in no way at all. Overwhelming and all at once like a rip tide. Because it is easy, and unexpectedly works, and somehow makes sense. Forgetting everything you knew in an instant, and being ecstatic to learn it all over again. A whisper, a laugh, a glance in a roomful of people, a parting of the sea. She said, it's like forgetting the words to your favorite song, you can't believe it, you were always singing along. And it was, so easy.

My heart contains all of the giddiness of a child on Christmas Eve and it brings a self-conscious smile to my lips.

And the daylight. It is so different, and I do not take myself nearly so seriously, though I do catch my brain giving my mouth reminders to be civil. That I have to pull out a new lexicon for these new situations. I take my cues from the funniest man that I have ever met in my entire life, and make a game of upping the ante. Yesterday I told a high dollar lawyer that this one is on me the next one is on you as I handed him a warning and sent him, nervous and over-joyed, on his hurried way. Progress. Each step counts and considering that I started out with my hand on the cold steel as I sidled forward, this is no small achievement.

And how lucky we are, how lucky. She in her world, me in mine, our orbits overlapping every now and then to just, give, thanks. The best day on the hunt yet was when she was sitting shotgun, fleeting as it was. There is nothing we cannot achieve, my dear. Just, remember.

Atmosphere

My strategy had been simmering in the back of my mind after I hung up with her, the appointment made. Grace made it so that my mentor, the great verbal manipulator, was on and this time it was all about him. Running in the basement alone in the house our eyes locked, even though he didn't know, and the strategy boiled away. My immature giddiness about these things is trumped only by his.

Driving down the crowded highway in the still black morning, I had Jay-Z as loud as the car would stand, him helping me put my game face on. This is what I'm good at as I caught a reflection of myself under the passing lights. Hunting. Turn me on she arrived early and I could see her sitting in her car in the parking lot. Deep breath in and out, steeling herself, I thought. I made her wait when she found the resolve to come in.

We sat down in calculated silence, her eyes were red and half-shut and belied the strength that she wanted to display in the rest of her face. I flipped the switch on inside, and it was me watching me on the treadmill, removed and distant, with script in hand. I read it. And it worked, and it was instead of like a chess game more just like taking the chess board and throwing it across the room, having no need for it but wanting to hear the sound of it crash against the wall. She was scribbling on the piece of paper I had readied, and I noticed that her hand shook. My lips let loose bits of compassion and empathy, and I laughed cynically to myself that yes, that too was part of the script. When the door closed and she freed herself into the cold dawn air I could not put away the cheshire cat as he spread himself across my face, baring all of my teeth. And the teasing that followed, and that I did not care.

And that I got an atta boy from the one man who still intimidates me there. That it could be so easy to put such a thing together, but that it could still be appreciated.

And I do believe that our hands could wash each other's and that not one speck would remain. And then, and then. If it takes you, then I hope it takes me too.

But my God, how lucky I have been.

It's, just

Be firm, be men of good faith, let thy will be unyielding. Do not waver, do not let thyself be easily persuaded. So much of this life is dust, ashes -- how can one be bothered by something so easily carried away by the slightest wind?

She looked in the mirror, said resolve yourself and before the glance could be reciprocated the flesh was steeled, gaze iced. How could one fail? All of this time that is spent internally, over thinking he used to say, you know where you want to be. And also, how to get there.

One foot in front of the other, with each step you remain true to yourself. Just, remember. He said, The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. My dad told me to measure myself by what I do when no one is looking, and by no other benchmark.

And to that, a quiet and lonely, Amen.

a quiet glory

The snow sublimated slowly into the late afternoon, shrouding the fields of cut hay and cornstalk stubble in a pervasive fog. That not even the sun could dissuade. There was a black and yellow sheriff's car in the middle of the intersection, blue and red lights made eerie in the pressing haze. He stood in the road and waved us around, a circuitous detour when I just wanted to get home, directly. She told me who was there, just beyond the fence, and what they were doing. Parsing metal and wire from flesh and bone, blood mingling with mud and snow and gravel, a job to be done.

And later, what he said, how he described it. There was a look that passed over his face, and I traveled back in my mind to the death that I had seen, our cross to bear. The way he described feeling their souls watching, just above and over the shoulder, and all that you can do is offer up a prayer and hope that your hands can do what they are tasked with. The way it is almost embarrassing, as if you have trespassed on a very private moment in someone's life, but you have to be there. The body is still but the will shakes.

And as he described it I could not help myself but to say a greedy and jaded thanks, that there are those of us who heard the call, and answered it. That he was out there praying over the dead as he zipped the bag shut, that she runs like a tornado when her pager goes off with a working fire, that I will go in and put on my body armor without thinking about it. To the blessed few who know what it's like to feel faithful departed watching over your shoulder, to those who are called.

Fight or Flight

She had eyes like pieces of agate, that the sun makes dimensional so that you could stare at it for so long and never, not ever get to the end of it, the dark place where the soul coalesced. We set up in two long lines with me at the front and her facing, and me throwing out a preemptive joke, unable to retire my sense of irony, or deprecation, even while staring down such stoicism. I tucked my chin, like her, and iced my glaze and steeled my flesh, like her. She held the bags and swung wide and hard and fast my arm came up to counter and my weight sunk low and fluid into my knees and hips and quads, all the while our pupils locked in a kind of unspeakable balance for power. Control. For understanding.

At the end of it she talked about what was new and being offered and again, our gaze locked and there was a whole lifetime of conversation that passed between us, unspoken yet understood, and I knew, I knew. What makes a warrior, where is the place inside that decides that all begins and ends with the self, with the power of the soul, and the determination to never, ever be second best? How is it that such a vague and unquantifiable quality can be sensed, scented, recognized in the rare and isolated brethren? And then when he questioned her and my ears went red and hot and I could not help myself but open my mouth and yell across the blank expanse of our empty warehouse, and the held glance after.

Then, later. My forearm ached and when he told me I had a strong right hook I remembered how it happened. And later than that, even, a picture on a wall, after a hesitant longing, a calculated pause before an explosive embrace and me there, alone for a moment and looking, scanning, assessing, trying to take every small piece in for the larger picture in my mind which is, as yet, incomplete. And wondering how I got there, and with what luck it was that I could remain.

And the quiet open spaces of the road at night and driving home, and the darkness and the isolation which I covet more than any other possession. Later, in the early morning by then, and her telling me that she could never hurt anyone that she knew, and the incredulity of it, my utter disbelief. The wolf snarled and bared her teeth as I spat out that you should have a plan to kill everyone, with no disclaimers. That I tried but could not wrap my brain around the idea of living so passively. I dismissed it, easily, tallied her up as a fool, and walked on.

You are your own best investment, always.

To the hunters, may we always choose the former instinct over the latter.

Daybreak

I tried, but I couldn't. I didn't give it enough of me. Maybe. I stirred, and she found me, and I knew that she would not let me go again, not now, and I lay there with it sinking in as the new day crested, the dark of it. The light in my room, a pinpoint of resistance.

My mind wandered back to that early western morning and me waking up to him sitting upright and looking out. Looking at nothing, looking at a place two thousand miles away, the anxiety of it veiling his face in lines and veins and thickness. My breath expired with everything else in my waking, and the next surge of air was to an emptiness, a resignation. Sometimes we take on more than we can manage just to see how far we carry such a load. And then comes the moment of clarity when you remember yourself and you put it down, without thinking, you walk away, and on, and on.

She looks at me lately and there is something in her eyes, a memory floating like ghosts, something that passed between us though I can't remember when nor what it was. Flailing around in my recollection and I look away before admitting that it won't come back. That some things are just unknowable.

We are too early a thing yet for me to let go, completely. Though my body wills it so. But brain remains too stubborn to obey. The pieces moving around on a board as if I had enough left to see more than two moves ahead. The anxiety of change wells up in veins, and is passed off again into lungs to be released, and forgotten. I had a dream that we were in a hotel room and I looked at him, knowing what was coming, and told him I am going to need for you to trust me, and him looking back with those big eyes that one could get lost in, were it not for the dark. And him just replying, yes, of course, but without the need for words, without saying it. How perfect an understanding, I thought just before waking.

I tried, but yet I am still awake. With the clock ticking its thick tocks as I slowly slip toward daybreak, toward movement. I will learn by being led, later, but for now the world is still dark, and quiet. Familiar.

Spare change

All I ever really needed to know I learned from MacIntyre. Well, that's not true, really. But, maybe. He has affected my thinking in a way that nothing before or since has been able to match. Or even whisper by. So where does one turn, after virtue?

I threw my hands up, I think, to a certain extent. I listened to them debating, and my mind turned down its well-worn path; how can we be arrogant enough to think that values can be measured, or prioritized, or charted even, as if there were some scale that we could refer back to when the arguments become grey and murky and obfuscated. Freedom or safety, they ask. It is ridiculous to think that such a question could even be posed. The words jumped from the page and etched themselves in my mind like the reversed images of a camera obscura. For always. You win the day by being more articulate, turning a better phrase, beating your fists upon your chest and not stopping for air. You don't know what the words mean, but you like the way they sound when they roll off your tongue. You beseech your listener to remember her forebears, and with what spirit they endowed her, and the smoke and the mirrors on cue as you wave your arms and look back with conviction.

I turned it off. I put my layers on and meandered out into the cold blanket of white, again, and crouched down low to tell if it was fox or coyote track laid fresh. The deer are easy, and they are many. High above and far away a familiar bird song, that sounds like spring, and you wonder if he is confused, or just hopeful. Always knowing that the thaw awaits, even if we closer to the earth forget that everything changes, always.

So what do I do, Alasdair? I haven't read your other books thinking that I'd be able to come up with the answer on my own. Under a street light somewhere, gritty dark and cold, like He would find me in any one of the random encounters. There is no way to win the debate on virtue without first having a teleology. We are so foolish. So there is the spartan winter, and the beauty, at least, of being heard by someone more intelligent.

A quiet doxology

The woods were dark and lovely and lonesome and deep, snow crunching dry and light under each footfall, I turned every now and again to see my tracks laid deeply in the twilight of it. The wind swept winter's diamonds from tree branches, to the air, and down to the forest floor to be carried off again later, after my passing. Impressions along the path revealed that deer and rabbit and dog and ski had gone before, and I followed the animal path through the trees, into the plain, along the river and over trees that bridged the space between. I could not help but smile, could not help but feel my kid-heart overcome with the pressing beauty of it. Just knowing that you exist helps me to remember that I am never alone. I paused in my meandering to take the spartan cold into the very marrow of my bones, to keep the vision of it in my soul for the hot days filled with people, and places, and obligations. To not forget the perfect simplicity.

I wound my way back west and found myself saying an improvised and gritty prayer out loud, offering whatever I might have had for the remembrance of the evening. Passed my grandfather's bench, the ones their names are etched upon, passed sandstone crucifixes in stark contrast to the white of the world surrounding them. I thought about the path that had led me to that exact moment in space and time and continued on in my amateur benediction. God how lovely is the world, sometimes.

The call came and he opened with a joke to set my worried heart at ease and then told me day shift, and I soaked the news in, unsure of how to answer. Of course, yes, of course, how can one say anything other to such a man? The conversation ended and I lay in my bed, thinking. She tells me that it's overrated and I, of course, agree. My mind wandered to the darkness of night, and the figure-eights I had grown so accustomed to, and the people, the places, the unnatural somnambulism that I had taken as ordinary. That I had acclimated myself to. And now daylight, and people, and responsibility, and the semblance of normal life and a normal schedule. I had prepared myself for a long and lonely winter.

Well, perhaps not lonely...

I cut a wide and random path through the golf course on my way back home, as the idea of it settled in upon me. The sun had set and all was blue, the way the snow is at night. Beautiful. The rolling hills were undisturbed and I lost my depth perception and laughed when my legs navigated hills that my mind had not anticipated. I thought, how can a hunter be at the same time a poet, a mystic, a philosopher, a soul in need of a telos, a home? How can the two purposes not be mutually exclusive? I thought of my forebears, and their legacies, and the span of geography that binds us to each other and realized that, well, there must be a way, there is an answer that they had already discovered. And now, me.

And then, and then. How funny it is to feel longing. A stirring prurience. How strange and crazy and unexpected to feel so familiar so fast and for the brain to be so consumed despite the posturing of the will. I am vulnerable, and I had to laugh when I thought it, because, doesn't that make things so much more meaningful?

Blessed Father, guide me.

The new year's eve.

My eyes had not yet adjusted to the cold twilight outside from leaving the warm and glowing inside. The door slid shut, frost scraping gently in the track, and I fumbled my way in the dark. Alone, the world quiet. When I opened the lid a large breath of steam billowed out and I watched as it chased itself up above the treetops, into the frozen air. Climbing in, the body resolves itself, slowly, into the heat, like the letting go of a climax when tense muscles are overpowered, and useless. My eyes closed and I sank to the bottom.

I could hear the wind rustle dry, broken leaves down the valley. Hear them break free of their lofty heights and fall, icy, to the floor, the ravine. I heard the twig-snaps of predators, making their first rounds of the night -- one more hunt in a long and unyielding succession of their eking out. The flipping of a calendar page obscured by obligation, by survival.

And an owl. Far off in the distance, singing some song unknown to me, but more beautiful for its strangeness. My eyes had long made their adjustments, rods and cones in delicate balance, and the sky was a deep, dark blue beyond the near trees, and beyond the crest of a far hill.

I sunk lower into the hot water, to dissolve the frost from my cheeks, my hair, and at once became strangely aware of the warmth surrounding me, not a body alone in a spa but a globe of warmth in the center of a cold and snowy wood, the night spinning and slipping by. I opened my hand to reveal the one pebble I had held onto for the greater part of this year, and offered it up to the darkness of the sky, the cold. She told me, in her judicious and merciful harshness, that I had better cast it down into the ravine, and not take it with me down the path of this next year. That all I would need I contained, and there was no need to carry any thing. And with the pressing hush of the forest I let the stone loose and listened as it careened down sandstone bluff and ice-slick, and into the trickling water far below. I smiled.

Back inside and climbing into the shower a quick glance in the mirror and I was shocked to see that my entire head -- face, hair, cheeks, lips -- was covered in a fragile and delicate frost. But I hadn't felt the cold. I laughed. Maybe the casting off could endow a person with an unknowable impermeability? Maybe I was just a fool. But I was happy.

The night subsided into itself, and I lay awake in the dark, thinking, for a long part of it, but it didn't frustrate me as it normally does. My mind wandered, and was slow, and my body was grateful. When I fell down into the warmth of sleep it was to a new, but surprisingly familiar embrace, and to the unlimited loveliness of potential.

May we never stop at all.

Where soul meets body

All of his sixteen years were fidgety, nervous energy, clothes hanging off loosely and sloppy, belying the athlete underneath, the animal, the prey. I remember becoming aware of his telegraphs, the lizard brain's Morse code, and trying to engage E in eye contact, but he too focused on his task to notice. I thought he is going to run a second before he did, and when his pupils dilated, the adrenalin dumped itself into his vessels, and flight instinct took over the brain stem, I pushed him. He righted himself, steadied, and floated over the hedgerows, into the dark of backyards and fence. My feet churned up the yards, wet with dew almost frozen, and I heard the other two say what the hell is going on to no one.

Later, after he was in handcuffs and being put into the back of the car I asked him what his name was, and he told me G-- and then looked with the big kid eyes, into my irises, grey-blue and irritated, sleepy, bothered. I remembered him, then. The takedowns blotted his face out making it just shadow and darkness, but I knew he was smiling when he saw the connections form in my head. As if we were old friends, met at night. He ran from me before, I thought. Five months ago. He laughed when all I could think to say was his last name and then well that sucks, your mom is going to be really pissed this time. And a little place in my heart moved, as if from sleep, when I thought of Jon and that these two had so much in common.

In the jail he laughed and enjoyed his roll in the game, and we talked, casually, until I realized that I did not want to be called to his house in five years to assist the medics with an overdosing man-child with no future, and no options. I stood close to him as I said it, and it came out profane and ugly and honest and he sat there and said nothing. And then his mom came, with the tired look, and then he was gone.

Then later, the long and monotonous anonymity of the drive home, and pulling off all of the dark blue, and showering, and laying my head down, at last. Sleep came fitfully in stops and starts and then crashed over me all at once and deeply, as if to make up for lost time. When he released me the house was dark, and empty, and I roused myself from bed to street to running in a long and liquid movement.

The night air outside was cold but carried the smallest warmth in the center of it, as if spring could lay pregnant in the deepest recesses of winter's chill, germinating there through the freezing and frost, so that it would be ready when called, months from now. How much anticipation my body felt for that warmth, buried in the cold. The road clipped by in rhythmic footfalls, and when I got to the track I practiced sprints and tempos and stride-length until the bells downtown reminded me that I had better get back home, to see to my obligations, my rituals.

The streetlights, the empty neighborhoods, the wetness of the asphalt, the sound of my breathing. Remember what your goals are, where you want to be. I felt lucky, in that moment, to be running, unencumbered. It smelled like a year ago, winter turning to spring, and how much has changed since then, how the road has leveled out and grown wider. The fog slowly lifted, and I moved, again, finally, for myself.

First snowfall

I have this memory that I keep in the dark recesses of my heart, and I told her about it once, or maybe twice, but most of the time it is guarded, entombed, and I only visit that place where I keep it on slow, sleepy days where the world outside is wet with rain, grey and immutable. We were perhaps two. In that room we shared in our first city, a few football fields from the churning of the lake's faux tide, she slept and I, I lay idly by. I recall my eyes opening to not a thing at all, pregnant afternoon sun seeping in through the drawn shades, my mother, perhaps, taking a much needed repose from our boisterous and incessant stirrings. Through the plywood pegs of crib I turned on my side and watched her, sleeping, downy tufts of blonde hair askew all over face and neck and quilt and mattress. Another look to the ceiling and with my two year old sinewy body I stood, tiny fingers gripping safety slats, and looked out upon my kingdom, our room.

A thought. I remembered that there was something that I was supposed to remember. Grasping at it the way one might cling to the sandy and slipping surface of a cliff, as you watch yourself tumble down into the surf, into the world that awaits. It was fleeting, and I knew it was fleeting, and nothing I could do to bring it back.

Why are you here? She asked herself. Why are you here, remember. Just try to remember. There is some thing to accomplish, some mission that you tasked yourself before taking that deep breath and jumping out into the wide, cold, open space of the world. I recall thinking to my toddler flesh and bones that there was a purpose to this life, and that I was mad I had already forgotten it. I lay back on my gummy spine and hips, all cartilage of it, and gnashed my teeth as I looked up into the swirling miasma of the afterlife, still so close and prescient and influential, as the realization hit me, in stages, that I would not be able to bring that memory back. That it was gone, and that it was a shame.

I offered up an early prayer for the forgetting, rolled to my side to watch my doppelganger in her slumber, and I, fell, asleep. My earliest memory, and it left my wanting.

I think of that sometimes, most recently when I read my grandfather's journal and stumbled across an entry that he scribed regarding me. He said I was a talkative kid, he joked about how incessantly I went on about the things around us, and me, then, maybe all of five or six. A devilish smile played itself upon my lips when I read it, for, as much as I would like to think of myself as calm, rational, detached, the truth of his words belied the child within.

What was that purpose that swirled away into the ether?

And now, and now. The scent of him plays languidly on my neck, my wrists, my pillows and when I stir the memory of it comes back in waves and wends its way from fingertip to toe and all of the tiny, greedy places in between. Like a grape that you play with on your tongue, and suck the skin off and let the juicy pulp sate itself fatly against your cheeks, your lips. How come to this? Sometimes, night, she surprises me with her generosity, her giving.

It has been nearly thirteen years for the one, and just over one year for the other. In an interview, once, I told the man that it was important to know where you came from, because, without that, how could you ever know where you were headed? He nodded, and he said Amen, thickly.

Zavod

The way the different jurisdictions sound, when the radio is keyed. There was that heavy and pregnant scratching, and I knew it was my Sergeant, and I readied myself, pen poised in the glow of map-light, for the address and scenario. I was two blocks away when it came out, too close for lights to play against houses, too near for the sirens to render useful in the empty and ice-slick streets of a midnight weekday neighborhood. I rolled up, I parked, I saw them standing in kitchen, watching, waiting, and all of the words of my previous colleagues, the cautions and sidle-steps and calling out with "standing by" went up into the air with so many chimney fires and I keyed the mic, locked my car up, and approached, crunching through the snow.

Got to the door and he was there, waiting for me. We talked, and me, incredulous (I love how that word rolls off of her tongue) not believing his whining, I went inside to get the other side of the story once my backup, finally, arrived. She spoke to me, and I watched her as her hands produced vials of medication, sequestered away inside zip-loc bags for the journey that awaited. In my mind I wended back to Patrick, and the last months, and the things that I broke, and my dad coming to pick me up in the safety of his Ford Ranger, and the gun shows that we attended, together. A kind of fail-safe that one cannot account for, nor articulate the importance of. He told me then, you can't allow another person's happiness to be beholden upon your own. And I knew, instantly, that it was true, and how to get there.

The scene was a mess, and all skulked about, pupils farther dilated than is normal, and I fastened the cuffs around four wrists, brought them both in for fingerprints and photographs, as if casting a wide net would somehow makeup for the recent and staggering lack of empathy. He joked with me as I rolled his fingerprints, sweating in the far too hot jail, and I wondered, is he flirting? Circumstances as they were, I would have liked to drop him, drug him impotent back to his cell, and never had another moment with the guy. But I continued in my task, heard his familiar tale of wedded bliss gone bad, gave him his orange suit and finally, found my hidy-hole and nearly finished the story of Suttree, and his perils. And God, how I do not want to let him go.

Later, a house we were called to, an older man fallen out of bed his wife unable to lift him back into same. We arrived to the stink of it, he had lost his bowels and lay there on the floor, helpless. I arrived last and there were jokes about the young blonde who had arrived to assist, and I could not help but feel an empty feeling in the pit of my heart when I looked at him. Back into bed, wife more like nurse-maid looking on, I left in haste and tried to stop it from my mind. Tried to think of happier things when the sushi flattened out thick on my tongue, hot, sweet, sultry with the ripeness of it. Lord, let me have a viking funeral, let the people that I love bear witness and push me out to sea, to lake.

They called me back at 3pm, when I woke, and I prepared myself in a psychotic swirl of duty, and things that one has to accomplish before life can trod along its well-worn path. Done, done, I made my way home to her, to them, to my family, my friends. We drank in the darkness of the bar and toasted a kindred spirit that had passed too long ago. And I thought, what would I give to share a drink with him, now, as an adult, to hear his stories and what he had to say.

The nightmare

It was the big overgrown man-child and we were in his house this time, him out of control and drunk and petulant and his flaccid father having given up years ago, sat idly by in an adjacent living room, watching tv. The man-child looked at me with those wild-fire eyes like we knew each other before and I had left his friendship owing, him coming to claim his debt now, through the miasma of purgatory's holding pattern. He wanted flesh and bone, soul if he could have it.

Ed stood in the corner of the room as the focus winnowed down on me, and he started his pensive dance forward. I pulled my gun and he laughed. Ed continued with the talking as if he was ghost image, engaged in another call entirely. I put the cold steel and polymer away and pulled my Taser. He laughed at this as well because when he clumsily lurched onto me the plastic and unspent electricity was more burden than tool. We fought and rolled and he ripped the cross off my neck and I beat his face with my fists, my training long abandoned in favor of the lizard brain and its ugly but effective strategy. Finally, Ed. We were able to subdue the boy, father still watching tv in next room, and as we struggled to lock the cuffs around his over-sized wrists I thought that he reminded me of all the rich catholic boys I had ever known. And how they shared the same insecurities.

A hole in the story and I can't remember why we were unable to properly get the cuffs on him but there he sat, edge of bed, Ed on phone in corner making arrangements that made no sense, and me, licking wound by door, watching. Waiting for it to start. He lunged and I punched him and we fell to the ground and my arms were tied up around his head and we both saw this at the same instant and he went for the leather and steel and cleared it with one movement, so fluid like he had been practicing for this climax since that cold night in November. Ed not noticing, still on phone. In that hoarse scream of late-night terror I tried yelling he has my gun he has my gun but nothing came out and we wrestled for ownership all over that bedroom floor. With a grapevine and some wiry scrapping I rolled on top and with all four of our hands we shot him in the chest, his hands yielding, at last, for the fate that he wanted. His eyes were greedy as I realized what he had done, what all of the dance had meant, and I fell off, screaming, angry, used. Finally, again, Ed. People came, pictures were taken, measurements made and they whisked him away. The whole time I lay on the floor, sobbing. E arrived at that house on the corner and rubbed my back as I shook there. Would you think that I was a monster? Would you say that I did the right thing but would the eye contact change? A diminutive black man in a very official looking suit came and gave me a few flyers articulating the whys and hows that made my actions just. I remember leaving them on the coffee table for the father before I woke up.

north wind

I ran. The tone of the emergency phone ringing all over the station that freezes you, at first, and then pumps blood rich and fast and furiously, flipping that internal switch, the one that sends its flesh-and-bones machinery into a practiced and subconscious checklist. AF passed me in the hallway and tossed me his keys and I could not hide the smile as I met the cold air with his go get 'em trailing behind. Car in drive, lights playing tag against the already blackened houses, sirens preparing every single light for my approach. And passing. I gave thanks for the recent training as I used the skid and scuttle of the loose rear tires to navigate the turns faster than, probably, I should have. First to arrive some habits do not quit and I told them to step it up, step it up.

He was the first to find me, and in his wild-eyed delirium could not make words into sentences. His two small children trailed dreamily behind, and I scooped them up and put them in the back, in the warmth, safe, sequestered. Is there anyone else inside I asked as I watched the black smoke ebb and billow and suck lazily out and away. A soft and gentle and wicked orange glow from within the structure. Next she came and was the most frantic and idiotic thing I have, as yet, experienced. Screaming, wailing, like those banshees they described in the old parts of the bible. Her eyes looked through me, into whatever dark and horrible past she had dredged up in that obfuscated file folder, which held nothing, no scrap of paper even from which one could start anew. She just kept screaming for her dogs, which were roaming freely the neighborhood, and would not let go the idea that I was going to dive into the heat and stink of it, and rise out again, one in each arm. They ran past us again and she hallucinated them into invisibility. I told her that she needed to be strong for her children and she did not hear me and took up her broken lamentations for the lives of her dogs and a stream of consciousness about I just survived cancer goddammit and I wanted a new garage but not like this, not like this, what am I going to do oh God I am sorry that I asked for a new garage. I put my grown up voice down, useless as it was, and, just, walked away. Tasked the neighbors with her deliverance back into the night, reality.

The fire department arrived, finally, and I watched, incredulous, as they walked into the structure with no air, no water, no masks. Just hubris and some kind of sense of inevitability. The air was heavy with things that would kill you, or plant the seed of some poison deep within the fatty tissue, to sprout and give fruit much later when all one could ask was why, and that was from where I stood twenty yards upwind. I thought of E, and what she would say to me, were she standing by my side to bear witness. The things that complacency engenders. And I prayed that there would always remain some part of me that was afraid, and took the necessary precautions.

Later a fight broke out and I was thankful for a task that I could understand, a role I knew and performed well. People are so much easier than disaster. And then later than that, even, another call down the block and around a few corners, and I was the first one there again and found the tender flame licking brick and beam as I hugged the ground on hands and knees, following smoke. Later when she told me that the brick can explode I regretted having stood so close to watch their fumbling and hesitations. Next time I will know. And then the warmth inside the car, and the lateness of it, and no purpose but to keep people out, I fell asleep to Mewithoutyou and my favorite fairy-tale. The complacency of it. Waking, the irony of it all was not lost on me.

With my jaded kid-heart I put the car in drive and said a loud fuck this to absolutely no one at all, and pointed the push-bumpers in the direction of their home. Cold, tired. The trip home was long and it folded out foot by foot in front of my car's hood. And after the phone calls and brotherly harassment and sympathetic disbelief, I lay my head down and pulled sleep over me, disappearing in the dark of it.

How thin is the line some days.

Is better than

The way the clock moves in the quiet hours of pregnant anticipation when the only task is to just, wait. Every other stroke of the second hand falling fatly, to be outpaced by the short staccato that follows. I lay awake, listening. Hanging on each thick tock, the room clung to me darkly as body and mind, both, resigned themselves into the slow slide of sleep. At last. Warm, happy, exhausted.

We met them at the station, and the diminutive figure that was to be my charge was dressed in all of her holiday finery, red wool coat buttoned with circles of ebony to make her look like she had just stepped from a movie. She hid her face in her mother's leg when I told her how beautiful she was, and I remembered being that age, and how easy it was for the kindness of a stranger to reduce me to tears. We climbed up into the hulking mass of the Excursion and her eyes were big as saucers when I explained the lights and switches and static. We wound our way to where he said to stage, sun cutting through the cold of the morning, lulling us into a kind of warmth there, in the cab. The throng of blue uniforms and black and white cars was crushing when we finally alighted, and I was not at all prepared for the welcome that waited. So used to the sleepy anonymity of being alone in the car at night. I found an outpost and planted myself there, and let the tide of people jostle around me. Watching. When we left again it was to snake through city streets in a two-mile procession of lights and sirens and noise and smiles and waving and disbelief. It was unreal, almost. Men in parking lots put hands over hearts, people looked on, mouths open, and old women plugged their ears for how loud we were. We, in the middle, towered above the sedans, and she laughed and screamed as her tiny fingers made the siren sing different songs, and never tired of it. The hours to follow passed in a kind of delirium, and when it was over the sting of tears turned to acid each time my eyes blinked kept me awake until I, finally, made my way home.

And there was that moment in the hall when four or five of them stood in a gaggle and the eye contact that passed was too telling to wave away. The ignorance I feign sometimes, unable to turn that part of the self off even when it is unnecessary, or painful. And I remembered that the heart will betray the mind in even the most disciplined of people, and was instantly glad that those encumbrances are all gone now. That now, the heart could do what it wanted, and the mind could step back and just be grateful.

Then later a smile, and laughter, and how easy it is, sometimes, to fill a moment with someone else. And how lucky I must be, to have that knowing. A long and slow parting, and I found myself again, listening to the clock tick each second thickly by in the blackness under covers. And as sleep came it was something else that he pulled me into, the memory of a feeling, a whisper, a sigh, and the warmth of his touch still playing on my skin.