“I wonder where it came from,” I said.
“Somewhere,” the cop replied aimlessly.
He opened the door of the patrol car and gently pushed my head down as I crouched. I was glad there were no cameras around. We drove slowly, both of us looking from side to side.
“You live around here?” the cop asked.
I told him my address. He said he knew where it was. Then he asked me what I did for a living.
“I’m an English teacher,” I told him. “Edgewater High. Richard McManus.”
He looked at me through the rearview mirror. “That’s where I went,” he said. “I thought you looked familiar.”
“Were you one of my students?”
“No, my sister was though. Maybe you remember her? Her name was Taisha Duncan.”
The rolodex that is every teacher’s brain rolled, and a face appeared from a few years back.
“Sure, I remember her,” I said. “Nice kid. Very good writer. Said she wanted to be a reporter someday. I wrote some letters of recommendation for her. Last I heard, she had gotten a scholarship to Georgetown, I think it was.”
“That’s right; that was her. Hey, you know, I think she kind of had a crush on you.”
“That’s because I’m so debonair. Where we going, officer? I think the station’s on the other side of the canal we just passed.”
“You in a hurry to get to jail, Mr. McManus?”
“Not really,” I said. “But these plastic cuffs are cutting into my hands.”
He was silent for a few moments, then stopped the car suddenly and got out. I didn’t know what to expect, and it seemed to me, judging from the landscape, that I wasn’t going to know what to expect for a long time. I had a morbid vision of being thrown to the ground and kicked repeatedly in the stomach. There was fear and a weird kind of excitement that I didn’t understand.
The cop came around and opened the door. “Come on out,” he said. “This is bullshit.”
I got my legs over, stuck them through the door, and stood up. He told me to turn around and then, much to my surprise, he undid the plastic ties and threw them over his shoulder. He smiled at me as I rubbed my wrists.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“What were you doing in that 7-Eleven?”
“I wanted to buy some cigarettes.”
“This might be the omen to quit you been waiting for,” he said. “You want to take a ride with me? You know, just drive around, check things out, look for adventure.”
I must have appeared dumbfounded. He laughed.
“Sure,” I said lamely. “Why not?”
“You want to drive?” he asked.
“I think that might be against regulations,” I offered.
“The whole fucking world is against regulations. Look at this place. He spread his arms and peered around. I looked with him. He had a point. God had poured the city of Homestead into a blender and dumped the contents onto what was left of the street, and in that world nothing was impossible. In that world English teachers could be shoplifters and shoplifters could drive police cars.
“Okay,” I said. “What the hell.”
We drove around for about an hour, talking about everything and nothing. The young cop’s name was Robert Paulson, and he told me he had been in the Gulf War over in Iraq. I asked him what it was like.
“Not much,” he said. “We sat in the desert, doing squat for six months. Then we rolled. There was a lot of smoke and fire, but it was all over quick. I never even fired my gun. We were lucky; nobody I knew got killed or anything. You had to be careful of mines though.”
“You been out long?” I asked.
“It’s, Have you been out long? You’re not forgetting your stuff, are you, Mr. McManus?”
“Well?”
“A few months. Not long. It seems long though. It’s funny: You come back from a war and something like this hurricane happens. Shit,” he said. “This place looks worse than Iraq.”
“Maybe I should be getting back now,” I said. “It’s getting late.”
“Okay, but we got to make a stop first.”
“Where to?”
“My old place. I’ll tell you how to get there. Are you cool with that? It won’t take long.”
“What happens if another cop sees me driving you around?” I asked.
“Man, don’t you know? You’re undercover.” He laughed and slapped me on the shoulder.
We drove west for a few miles. The sun that had seemed so high earlier in the day was plummeting now, dragging the day down with it behind a row of broken trees. With all the lights in the neighborhood out, the coming darkness affected me in some primeval part of myself, and for a moment something akin to panic began to overtake me. I wanted to go home. Even my house with its gone wife, its ripped-off roof, and its drowned car was better than the sprawling mess the world had become. I began to talk to dispel my nervousness.
“How’s Taisha doing? She must be in college now.”
For a moment the cop said nothing, and I wondered if he had heard me.
“Taisha’s dead, man. Didn’t you know?”
“Dead? What are you talking about?” I couldn’t turn to look at him. I had to keep my eyes on the darkened road.
“Drunk driver. You know how it is. About a year after she graduated from Edgewater. It was up near Gainesville, near her aunt’s house. Maybe that’s why you didn’t hear about it.”
“Jesus,” I said. “A young kid like that. I can’t believe it.”
“Maybe you heard about it but forgot. You must have had a lot of kids in your class over the years.”
He was right. They came and they went. Some students you would remember for better or worse for the rest of your life, while others left barely a trace of memory behind them when the semester was over.
“No, I remember Taisha,” I said, wishing in a way that I was lying. I didn’t want that sweet young face floating around in my head with night coming on, not in this shattered world.
“Turn here,” the cop said. “I recognize that tree.” He pointed to an uprooted banyan tree lying on its side.
“Where are we?” I asked. “What is this place?”
“My old crib. Go on down this way. I’ll tell you where to stop.”
I soon saw that we had entered a cul-de-sac. The houses were small wrecks of wood and lopsided roofs. At the end of the street I saw the silhouettes of a man and a woman sitting on the front steps of their house. I drove slowly. When my beams from the headlights hit them, they stood up and went into the house, shutting the door behind them. They had moved so quickly, I thought they might be looters. I glanced at the cop. He was looking straight ahead.
“Stop in front of the house,” the cop said. “That’s where I used to live.”
“You know those people?” I asked.
“That’s my wife, or rather she used to be my wife.”
“Who’s the guy?” I asked.
“A friend of mine, used to be. Since I got back, everything is used to be, seems like. I asked him to keep an eye on Doris when I was over in Kuwait. Sources say he got a little bit too dedicated to the mission. You know what I’m saying?”
I looked at him. He was still staring straight ahead. He was locked in position. There was a sphinxlike quality to his profile that I didn’t like.
“We had better leave,” I said. I put the car in reverse and turned around to see where I was going. That’s when I saw the pump action shotgun lying on the backseat, or rather, I saw its shadow. I didn’t like the look of it. Without warning the cop reached over, grabbed the steering wheel, and with his other hand shifted the car back into park. We jerked to a stop. We stared at each other. The next thing I knew, I was looking at his gun, its small triangular sight lined up quite nicely with the middle of my nose.