And even when that doesn’t happen, Lew said, it’s just so fucking frustrating.
I’m sorry, I guess I should watch my language.
No, that’s all right, Charles. Don’t worry about anything like that.
Well, it’s how he said it. But I’ll watch it from here on in. I don’t know what you’re gonna do with all this stuff, but I might as well keep it clean for you.
But about domestics. You get a man beating his wife like she’s a rug, and the neighbors call it in or she calls us herself, and he’s there in his underwear, smelling like a bomb went off in a liquor store. And she’s sporting two shiners and a split lip, and that’s her tooth on the floor there, and you want to pack this bum off to Folsom or Q, and you’re lucky if you even get to haul him in. Because maybe six times out of ten she’s hanging onto his arm and telling you it was all a mistake, that she fell down, she’s just so clumsy. And the rest of the time you take him in, and he’s out the next day because she won’t press charges. Oh, officer, it was all a mistake, plus it only happens when he drinks, and he never has a drink except on days ending in a Y.
You get the picture.
Well, we had our share of those. Part of the job, you know? Then one night we get a radio call, “See the woman,” and it’s an address on South Olive. Don’t ask me which block, and anyway that whole part of downtown’s completely different nowadays. Whatever house it was, you couldn’t find it today. Torn down years ago and something else there now, and no loss, because it wasn’t the best part of town.
And Lew says, “Oh, hell, not again.”
And on our way over there he tells me about this woman, Mildred’s her name, and how her husband beats her like he wants to see how much damage he can do. And she won’t press charges. She can always manage to come up with an excuse for him.
“Oh, he really loves me. Oh, it’s my fault, there’s things I know I shouldn’t do because they make him angry, but I do them anyway. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
Like that.
“No kids,” he said. “Usually you see kids in situations like this. What they all got in common, they got the oldest eyes in the youngest faces.”
I knew what he meant. You’d see young troops come back from the front lines and their faces’d still be young. But not their eyes, on account of what they’d seen.
“He had kids and beat up on them, be jail tonight and the pen tomorrow. We wouldn’t need her testimony to put him away. But she’s the only one here, and she gets everything he hands out, and the stupid bitch keeps coming back for more.”
The houses on that block were painted different colors, but they were all the same idea — one story tall, and what we used to call bungalows. Maybe they still call ’em that. I haven’t heard the word in a long time, but maybe they still use it.
This one was like its neighbors in that it had concrete where most freestanding houses will have a lawn. That’s where we parked. I guess she heard us drive up, because she met us at the door, wearing open-toe bedroom slippers and a housedress with the color washed out of it. Stringy blonde hair, patchy red polish on her toenails. Imagine what she must have looked like, and it was two, three times worse than that.
He was in a chair, passed out, a bottle on his lap. Three Feathers, that was the brand. It’s a cheap blended whiskey, or it used to be. No idea if they still make it anymore.
The cap was off the bottle, and there was maybe an inch of whiskey left in it. Funny what you remember.
I forget his name, but it’ll come to me.
Lew said, “Millie, you about ready to press charges?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Lew.” Wringing her hands and not meeting his eyes, so you know all I don’t know means is No. “You all put my Joe in jail and then what am I gonna do?”
Joe, that was his name. Told you it’d come to me.
“Live your life,” Lew said. “Find a real man.”
“I got a real man, Lew.”
“Find one who keeps his hands to himself.”
“It’s my fault as much as it’s his, Lew. I know better than to say the things I say. But I go and get him upset, and he’s had a drink or two—”
“Or twenty.”
“—and he can’t help himself. I’ll be okay, Lew.”
We got back in the car, on account of there was nothing else for us to do, and the rest of the night Lew never said a word unless he had to. Long silences, and if I tried to start a conversation it didn’t go anywhere, so I let it go.
It wasn’t two weeks later that we got another call for South Olive. See the woman. Lew let out a sigh when he heard the address, and when we got there it was the same story, except this time Joe hadn’t reached the point of passing out. He was belligerent, and he ran his mouth a little, and that gave Lew the excuse to smack him upside the head. And all that did, besides shut Joe’s mouth, was make her feel the need to stand by her man. I said her name a minute ago and now I can’t think of it. Damn, what was that woman’s name?
I believe you said it was Millie.
Millie, that’s right. A man gets old and things just come and go out of his memory. First I can’t think of his name and then I can’t think of hers. Joe and Millie, Millie and Joe. “Oh, don’t hit him, Lew, don’t you dare hit my Joe!” And they’re arm in arm, a united front against the damn cops.
We got out of there, didn’t even bother to ask about pressing charges. Would have been a waste of breath.
Rest of the night same story. Lew’s quiet. We wind up in a greasy spoon a block from Pershing Square, sitting over eggs and home fries and coffee, and out of nowhere he says, “You wouldn’t know it, but that’s a fine-looking woman underneath it all. Beautiful girl, she used to be. Son of a bitch cost her her looks, along with her spirit.”
I asked how he knew her. He was quiet, then pointed out something on the other side of the room. Somebody he recognized. Far as how he knew Millie, I never did get an answer.
There may have been a third time we got called there, or maybe not. Hard to keep everything straight. But then our shift changed, and we were working days, and if there were any calls to see the woman at the Olive Street address, well, we were off duty by the time they came in.
I think there must have been. And looking back I think Lew kept up with it, checked reports. He had an interest that ran deeper than mine.
A month, maybe six weeks, and we rotated back to nights. I liked nights better. You didn’t have the traffic, and it was dark, and just being in the car was better at night. The things Lew would find to talk about, and the way a conversation would just twist and turn like an old river. And the silences, too. It was all somehow better at night.
Of course domestics were the downside of working nights. Now you’d have husbands drink any hour of the day, so you could in theory have a domestic disturbance on the stroke of noon, but they mostly happened in the hours right after midnight. And we weren’t back on the night shift a full week before we heard the Olive Street address coming over the radio. “Seven-forty-four South Olive, see the woman.”
You hear that? I just remembered the street number, it popped right into my head. Now ten minutes from now I may forget my own name, but right now I remember the address.
At least I think that was it. But you know it didn’t matter when I couldn’t remember it and it doesn’t matter now. All torn down now, anyway. I can picture that little house clear as day, for all that I only saw it in the middle of the night, but in a few years when I’m gone there probably won’t be a person alive who remembers it.