“Besides,” Vargas says, “you’re assuming their view from the inside is more accurate than ours from the outside. Those uncontacted tribes in the Amazon—you think they can see themselves more clearly than we can? You think you see yourself more clearly than I do? You think those law books say the same thing to me?”
Vargas has dropped hints before that he knew what was in Whit’s bag, but this is his first direct statement about it. Whit has broken new ground, perhaps, with his challenge to the Zombieland moniker. The exchange feels, in a sad way, like something that could pass for closeness.
“What do my books say?” he asks.
“My mother taught me about when you can’t say anything nice.”
At eleven thirty, they see a kid holding ground on a known corner. Vargas tells Whit to shake him up a bit and parks across the street, where he has a good line of sight.
“Be safe,” he calls as Whit gets out of the car. “Exercise caution.”
Whit walks over to the darkened corner: a minimart porched by a single concrete step, on which the kid stands, leaning back against the crosshatching of the door gate. He’s a teen, by his size, but more is hard to tell given the scrawny, loose-limbed body and the incongruous baby-fatted face. Whit shows his badge and says his name. The kid says nothing. Whit asks his name. He says it’s Gino.
“Isn’t that an Italian name?”
“Holoman,” Gino says. “Isn’t that kind of mayonnaise?”
Whit’s always been able to feel it when he blushes: a girlish warmth that hits the neck as much as the cheeks. He smirks through it. It was a good line. Whit wants to show the kid he can laugh at himself without giving away authority, that he’s not one of the brutes who’ll slam Gino’s head into a wall for a stray word. Someday Whit will need honest information, and this decency, this showing of humanity, will pay dividends. Though if his test prep course is worth its ridiculous sticker price, he might not be around to see it. But that damn blush—it flushes any authority down the toilet.
“You know how it works,” he tells Gino. The kid puts his hands against the wall. Whit pats him down: his ribs, his back, his moist armpits, the back and front of his belt, where they like to keep their guns, though corner kids get frisked enough they usually know better. His ankles, calves, knees, thighs. Whit pats the outsides of his oversize pockets. It can be hard to feel anything but pills in there—he’s missed things before, been razzed for it by the most asinine of street cops—so he reaches into Gino’s pockets to check for powders, weed, money, scraps of paper with phone numbers penciled on them. There’s nothing, as he expected. The stash will be hidden nearby. But he has to check, they say: if you don’t catch the dumb ones you won’t catch any. He brushes something soft through the fabric of the pocket, and his hand startles back.
“Buy me a drink first?” Gino says.
“A real comedian,” he says. He digs an elbow into the kid’s back, the way he remembers his own older brother doing when he pinned Whit down as a kid, an unbearable pressure against the ribs. But since there’s plenty of space between Gino and the wall, there’s too much give to cause him any discomfort.
“Shiatsu,” he says. “Hot stone.”
“Go home,” Whit tells him. Whatever lookout he might have has scooted off. “What kind of mother lets her kid out at this hour?” The kid does a little dance, snapping his fingers above his shoulders at Whit. Then he does a twirl and slides off.
Vargas chuckles as Whit climbs back into the cab, and Whit goes hot in the neck again. Vargas says he’ll tell the boys Whit tried. “But off the record,” he says, “you’ll never outclown a kid with no bank account. What they lack in material assets they make up in cheap irony. You can’t smooth talk them, kid. They only love the boot.” He sees the look Whit gives him, and offers back a mockery of his piety. “It’s not racist. I came up around here.”
Aimless driving. They take a call for a toddler having febrile seizures, and stand around in the wet night air while the paramedics do their thing. A noise complaint: lovers’ quarrel, a woman in a bathrobe holding a cheese grater like it’s a deadly weapon. No B&E from dispatch, though, no gunshots lodging in the studs of apartment walls, no carjackings. At 1:13 a.m. a howl comes in not from dispatch but from another black-and-white: responding to apparent burglary at Weston and Campbell, broken storefront glass, young black male seen nearby with a suspicious backpack. It doesn’t make sense: that intersection is just a bail bondsman and an electronics repair shop; why rob a place where everything is broken? At 1:18 another call comes through with a little more octane on it: shots fired at Campbell and Booth, officers unharmed, suspect down. Whit’s stomach lurches. And Vargas has that slow way about him, and his mouth half hidden by that baby-shit mustache, and Whit can’t tell at all what that expression means. Regret, amusement, resignation, righteousness? Is it giving him too much credit to say he sighs when he responds?
“Well,” he says, unreadable. “That’s one.”
Whit had thought it was all bluster and bluff. How could it be otherwise? That thought: this can’t be the world. As though Vargas can see the kind of spiral Whit is headed down—forehead against the cold window, mouth gone mute—he pulls into a Denny’s parking lot and tells Whit he has no choice about getting a cup of coffee. Whit goes along. He wants off the street. The counter waitress is Joan, but just the N on her nametag has turned sideways so it reads JOAZ. This is all Vargas calls her, flirting in a way she clearly wants nothing to do with. He pours so much cream and sugar into his coffee it’s like he’s trying to make another cup of pudding.
“You’ve got to keep your imagination in the right place,” he says. “Whalen’s fiancée curled sideways on the least comfortable of ICU recliners while all those monitors beep away like fucking R2-D2. Waking up to see his face interrupted by a ventilator tube. Nguyen’s wife. Think of her awake right now, middle of the night, knowing that tomorrow she’s going to get a dozen visits from people she can barely understand. A guy like Nguyen probably had thirteen kids that all live off the rice noodles his paycheck afforded. Tomorrow her house is going to look like a florist’s wet dream, but she’s only going to be able to think about the dwindling sack of rice in the pantry.”
“Mercy,” Whit says. Vargas clearly doesn’t know what he means, and neither does Whit, but Vargas stops.
“Tell me about this test, then. You have to know all the laws?”
“That’s the bar. This is just a test of logic.” Whit tells him about the three sections: reading comprehension, logical reasoning, logic games. The games are the hardest, at least at first—full of weird scenarios governed by weird rules. Six students are each going to see one of four movies. Three canoes with four seats each, and each canoe needs one adult and three children. Who is the best tennis player? If G plays golf, he’s the worst tennis player, but if he doesn’t, he’s the third best. But it’s the most learnable section—at least that’s what his teacher, barely more than a kid in fancy threads and glasses, promises every class. So far, yes, the games make more sense if he spends an hour on one, but when he tries to get through four in the thirty-five minutes the test gives him, it’s like trying to read computer code. That’s not what he tells Vargas. He tells him there are four game types, and each one has its own sketch. He explains, as best he can, how to form the contrapositive to a conditional statement. He finds himself cribbing words from his instructor’s lectures pretty much verbatim, but he sounds confident. It occurs to him that this is what Vargas was going for: getting his brain into a sphere where it’s more comfortable. He doesn’t mind the manipulation. He keeps going even when Vargas’s eyes glaze over.