“Maybe it’ll work out, Spencer,” Father Willie offered as his partner drove east on Eighth Street away from the sun’s dying harsh rays.
“Work out? Work out? Four years to my pension and she’s gonna foal, and then how can I retire with a little rug rat crawling around?”
“Oh well,” Father Willie shrugged. “Oh well.”
“A man gets drunk and careless and screws himself into another ten years on the job. It ain’t fair.”
“Oh well,” said Father Willie.
“Everything happens to me!” Spencer said.
Spencer Van Moot was interrupted for a moment by catching a glimpse of a seventy year old pensioner who lived in a Seventh Street fleabag called the Restful Arms Motel. He pushed his wheelchair down the sidewalk backward with his foot as he held his useless arthritic hands in his lap. The pensioner was trying to get to the mom-and-pop market one block west where he could buy two cans of nutritious dog food for his dinner.
“Things could always be worse, Spencer.”
“Oh sure, I’m gonna be unloading shitty diapers at forty years old and…”
“You’ve got a new camper. You can get away with your wife sometimes and go fishing.”
“Oh sure. I got a new camper. I’m so thrilled, so happy! I’m in debt again. I was getting insecure not owing money.”
“It’ll work out.”
“Yeah, it will. I’ll be dead soon. No one in my family lives very long. I got an uncle that died of old age at forty-five. That’s what the doctor said. Every organ in the man’s body was old, dissipated. I won’t last long. At least then I’ll be rid of my old lady I tell you, Padre, she’s got a tongue so sharp it’s a wonder she don’t cut her mouth to pieces and bleed to death.”
“You want to come to church with Geneva and me?” Father Willie offered. “Some of the best Witnesses I know came to God later in life. And what with the early deaths in your family…”
“Goddamnit, I ain’t dead yet!” Spencer cried, suddenly frightened. “Padre, gimme a chance! I ain’t lived yet!”
“Well, I only meant with poor health and all…”
“Poor health? Poor health? I’m too young to be thinking about dying. Jesus, partner, you’re getting morbid!”
It was almost an hour before Spencer fully recovered from the suggestion of his imminent demise. He had the worst sick record on the nightwatch. He was tall and strong, in the prime of life, and had seen vats of spilled blood and acres of mutilated flesh in his sixteen years of police work, but he became faint when he’d scratch his finger. He could bear any pain but his own.
Just before dark they passed the Mary Sinclair Adams Home for Girls, a funded institution where young women who were pregnant and indigent could be cared for. It was a converted two story home two blocks east of Hancock Park and had once been a palatial residence of an eighty year old virgin who died envying young girls the fun they had growing round bellies.
There was a teenage girl with an eight month stomach standing in front of the house: cigarette dangling, eyebrows plucked to nothing, eyes shadowed to three inch black orbs, talking to three young men on chopper motorcycles.
“The Stork Club,” Spencer remarked, shaking his head disgustedly “They go in there, drop a frog and cut out.”
“I hear the county’s okayed the installation of interuterine devices in some of these girls they place in foster homes,” Father Willie said.
“Someone shoulda plugged my old lady’s birdbath and I wouldn’t be in this fix,” Spencer answered, blowing a cloud of smoke out the window. “Old dried up sponge, I don’t know how she ever got knocked up. I’ll just have to cut down on expenses, live like a goddamn Trappist monk. I won’t be able to eat like a human being anymore, that’s all.”
“It’ll work out all right,” Father Willie said. Then, “Spencer, we’ll still be able to eat roast duckling with orange sauce, won’t we?”
“Oh sure.”
“With glazed carrots and shallots?”
“Oh, we’ll still eat at our restaurants for free just like we always have,” said Spencer, allaying Father Willie’s fears. “I meant at home I’ll have to starve. My wife and kids’ll have to go without and maybe wear old clothes with patches.”
Father Willie felt like suggesting Spencer could make patches with some of the fourteen Italian suits which hung in his closet, when he spotted a Lincoln blow the red light on Wilshire and Western. The Lincoln pulled over the moment Father Willie tooted his horn.
“You just have to learn to budget,” Spencer sighed as they gathered up hats and ticket book and flashlights now that dusk had settled. “Mail your check for the telephone bill to the gas company and theirs to the electric company. By the time they send them back and forth you can balance your checkbook.”
Father Willie nodded as they got out of the black and white Matador and walked forward, crisscrossing so that Father Willie, whose turn it was, could approach the driver’s side while Spencer went to the other side and shined the light in the window to protect Father Willie’s approach.
The driver, a balding fat man about Spencer’s age, smiled and said, “What’s the problem, boys?” He offered Father Willie his driver’s license without being asked.
“You were a full second late on that red light, sir,” Father Willie said, his light on the license, checking that it was not expired, noting the Beverly Hills address in Trousdale Estates.
“That doesn’t seem possible,” the man said, getting out of the car and following the little officer to the police car where Spencer waited in the headlight beam between the two cars.
“Careful, sir,” Father Willie warned, as a car sped by very close to the Matador which was stopped behind the Lincoln, three feet farther into the traffic lane to protect the approaching officer from being picked off by a motorist who might be driving HUA which meant: Head Up Ass.
“Officer!” the fat man appealed to Spencer as Father Willie began to write the ticket on the hood of the radio car. “Surely I wasn’t late on the red light, and if I was I didn’t mean it.”
He offered Spencer his business card which said, “Murray Fern’s Stereo Emporium.”
Spencer Van Moot’s eyes brightened with visions of a new stereo system in his barroom at home. At wholesale, of course. He was about to suggest to his partner that Mr. Fern probably deserved some professional courtesy when he saw that it was too late. The ticket was already started, and since they were numbered it was impossible to cancel one without a report and explanation. So Spencer shrugged sadly and handed the business card back to the man.
“You gonna write me a ticket?” Murray Fern asked Father Willie.
“Yes sir,” Father Willie said, never looking up as he wrote.
“Why me? Why me?” Murray Fern demanded, reminding Father Willie of Spencer.
“You ran a red light, sir,” Father Willie said, looking up for the first time then continuing with the citation.
“But I can’t get another ticket. One more and they’ll suspend my license. Christ, gimme a break!”
Father Willie did not answer but continued to write in embarrassed silence.
“Just my luck to get stopped by a couple of pricks,” the fat man said as he paced in a tight circle. “A couple of ticket hungry heartless pricks.”
Now Spencer Van Moot no longer cared about a cut rate stereo set and looked around the rear of the car for a taillight violation that Willie could add to the ticket.
“A couple of two bit, ticket happy, stupid fucking pricks!” Murray Fern said as Father Willie continued his writing without comment.
“Sign on the line,” Spencer said coldly, speaking for the first time.
“Fuck you,” said Murray Fern. “I’m innocent and I’m not signing.”
“You’re not admitting guilt,” Father Willie said quietly. “If you don’t sign, thereby promising to appear, we’ll have to take you in and book you on the violation.”