Hips

Update: Serenebabe pointed out in her comment that this is a tough piece, and maybe needs some warning. OK, you're warned. Don't read this if you aren't up for some graphic bad stuff.

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Another little piece of fiction. It's only the first half or so of it, though, since that's all I had time to write last night. I got in mind where the rest of it's going, but we'll see when I have time to get it down. The title isn't explained in this half. [shrug] What are you gonna do?

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So, we hit this place with a dope warrant. Another trailer in that shithole trailer park where we spent so much time. If that "mobile home community" would burn to the ground, or if God would eat it with one of his trailer-scouring tornadoes, we always said, the crime rate for six miles around it would drop 75% overnight.

But we were in a hurry - there was a party at the FOP lodge, and we were going to be late as it was. And we needed a party, too. We'd been working an average of 60 hours a week for a month on this cooking operation. They were long overdue for a hit, and we were long overdue to come out of the deep and take a breath of normal air.

Anyhow, you can't kick a trailer door down. The doors on trailers all open "out," y'see, so we yanked the door off the peeling, dirty-yellow double-wide by hooking a loop of winch cable to the knob and backing the SWAT vehicle up smartly. Ripped the door (along with a good-sized chunk of siding) right off its hinges. We blasted into the house screaming "POLICE! POLICE! POLICE! SEARCH WARRANT! EVERYONE ON THE FLOOR!" over and over again as we cleared the place. Four people were home not counting the little girl I found in a dog cage in the shower of a reeking bathroom.

She was covered in sores and what turned out to be semen, and feces were smeared around her small sleeping mat. Judging by the watery yellow stain running out of the bottom of the cage to the shower drain, she spent a lot of time in there. I thought she was only about four or five, but we found out later she was eight. The abuse and neglect over most of her life had just made her pretty small for her age. We got her out of the collie-sized cage and I carried her out and laid her on the trashed bed of her parents in the adjoining bedroom as gently as I could. She didn't look like she had any broken parts, but you never know, and I didn't want to hurt her anymore. She was as compliant as a doll.

Her teeth were a rotting yellow, her hair was stringy-thin, her skin was like waxed parchment, and she had a sharp, acrid smell. But I'd seen that before. It was the chemicals, you know, the vapors and fumes and the concentrated hydroxy-methyl-ethyl-badshit that was part of her life. Being in a trailer all these months while they cooked meth, all the toxins -- well, it's like being in a slow motion gas chamber, you see, and it eventually just starts eating any little kids that are hanging around like they're in an acid bath.

The EMTs said she would probably live - they'd seen worse, they said. When they took her, she'd never said a word. Don't know if she ever did, either. I never saw her again.

Lightheaded and a little nauseous, I went back into the livingroom where the adults were handcuffed, sitting on the couch in a row. The girl's mother and her mother's boyfriend were spitting and snarling and swearing they'd kill the snitch that did them and sue for the front of their trailer which was currently laying out in the street attached to our SUV.

I'm not sure what happened - it was almost an out-of-body experience. I heard/felt an odd buzzing sensation, like my skin was being electrified, and suddenly I felt like I was floating just behind and slightly above myself watching with considerable bemusement as I kicked over the coffee table and stood in front of them, trembling. I didn't say anything, but hawked up a big lunger and spit in her face, and when he got all bowed up about it, I hit him so hard that the shock ran lightning-bolt jagged up my arm clear into my shoulder, which snapped me back into full awareness.

I thought I'd broken my hand. Stupid. I knew better than to hit anyone in the head with a fist (too bony, too protected - always go for the soft parts.) I found myself trying to claw my gun out of my holster with my off-hand while I stepped toward him. He was flopping around on the couch like a beached fish, eye swelling shut and bleeding heavily from his nose, trying to scramble out of the way of the sudden death he saw coming for him.

Then everyone dove on me, yelling and I went down, my face into the filthy off-green shag carpet. They took my gun away from me and dragged me out of the house, called me a dumb motherfucker and told me to get the fuck away from there before I killed someone or got everyone sued or some silly shit.

After some heated discussion on the street, I finally got into my crap undercover car and left. I thought about going home, but I knew at that moment I couldn't bear seeing my bright, shiny little kids or touch my wife with these hands. So I went to the lodge.

Essentially our union hall, the lodge was cops-only, or invited. It was the only place in town I could strip off body armor down to a black t-shirt and raid pants and combat boots and have a drink without sticking out like a sore thumb.

The party was going pretty good by then. A bunch of the blue crew was there, a couple of wives, some miscellaneous cop groupies, emergency dispatchers from the Sheriff's Department downtown and the PD the next town over. A good mix. I was in kind of a disjointed, disconnected, crappy mood, still trying to scrape all my shit back into a single pile, but after a couple of JDs, I was feeling a lot better.

It was a good party.

I was sitting on the old leather couch in the bar area bullshitting with a uniformed Lieutenant. Well, he wasn't uniformed right then, understand, but was a patrol Lieutenant, I guess you'd call him - he'd be in a uniform if he was working. We were hip-deep in an argument about some silly policy turd that had been flushed down our way from Administration when MY Lieutenant came through the door. He peered through the half-lit semi-darkness, which is how we preferred to keep the bar area, and spotted me.

He strode over to the couch and said, "Hey, Eric, give me a few minutes here, willya?"

"Sure," the patrol guy said, and left to go chat with a knot of officers and women over by the bar. The LT sat down next to me.

"So, how's it going?" he asked. "I hear you stepped on your dick tonight."

"Yeah, I did," I said. "It was a tough night. Sorry about that, but I'm OK now."

"So I heard," he said. "Your guys are covering your ass as hard as they can, you know that, right? If you take a hit on this, they're all gonna get a hicky."

I hadn't considered that.

"Look, LT, I fucked up. I'll take the bite if I need to, but there's no point in getting my crew wrapped around the axle here. Tell me what I have to do to make it right."

"Make what right?" he said. "The paperwork I've seen says that some meth maggot got his ass kicked resisting arrest. He's bitching about it but..." he shrugged eloquently, expressing the level of credibility of the meth maggot.

He let that sink in for a moment.

"Sounds kinda fishy to me," he said, "but I'd probably be inclined to just move on to another problem. We got operations running all over town and Internal Affairs already has plenty to do anyhow. At least I might think that, if I was made happy."

"Yeah," I said carefully. "I'd like to make you happy, LT."

"Glad to hear it," he said. "What would make me happy is if I don't see you anymore for a couple of weeks. Vacation, maybe. Sabattical. Medical. Fishing trip. Sleep. I don't give a fuck. Take your time and go do something else, because as of right now, if I see you set foot into the station or onto the Job anywhere for at least 10 days, I'm gonna feel like I should be looking at this a lot closer."

"Yessir," I said. "I can do that."

He looked at me closely. "Yeah, I believe you can." He paused. "You sure you're OK, right?"

"Yessir," I replied. "Going on vacation tomorrow, and I'm just fine."

"Uh huh," he said, "very convincing." He reached under his jacket and produced my gun and handed it over to me. I put it into my empty holster (fucking hand was still sore.)

"Thanks, LT," I said, "I owe you."

"Fuck you," he said, rising to his feet, "You stay the fuck away from me for a couple of weeks, and don't you ever put me in a jackpot like this again." He turned and walked out the front door.

I discovered I'd been holding my breath, and as I let it out in a long, shuddering exhalation, the hair trying to stand on my arms prickled like a wave of cold-chill and I felt sweat beading my forehead.

"What was that all about?" she asked. I hadn't seen her walk up. Her name was Paige. She was a dispatcher, and we were friends from before, back when I was in patrol on graveyards. I would take my breaks by coming up to the dispatch center for coffee and company. We'd actually gotten to know one another pretty well, and I liked her a lot, and she - well, she liked everyone, but seemed particularly well-disposed toward me for some reason.

Some dispatchers were sluts and/or cop groupies, some were prudes, and most, probably 90%+ were just women doing the best they could in a tough job. But Paige was different. She was one of those "good girls" you run across now and again. You know the type. They always stand out anywhere.

She was reserved and quiet, and friendly, and shy. And every cop who ever met her instantly felt an overwhelming urge to protect her from - well, from what was never clear. She was just someone you wanted to keep safe. It's all very white knight, almost instinctive, and for a cop, virtually irresistable.

As my Sergeant explained, trying to be derisive but sounding almost impressed, "She wouldn't say 'shit' if she had a mouthful of it."

She was in her early 30s, and pretty enough. She was no raving beauty or glamor queen or pinup sex babe. Just a nice woman who, under that friendly, vaguely innocent face, was just another layer of nice.

She sat on the couch next to me.

"What was that all about?" she repeated. She looked at me closely. "Are you alright? You look pretty rugged."

"I...uhmmm...." I said intelligently, and when I looked up at her, she was blurred. Tears. There were tears in my eyes, and my face was wet. What the fuck was wrong with me?

"Oh!" she said, surprised, and looked quickly around the room to see if anyone had seen me. She reached over and took my drink away from me and said "Come with me."

She practically dragged me to my feet, and pulled me to the back of the bar area, and out the fire door into the fenced parking lot. The cool air hit me like a slap.

"You damned cops," she said, a flash of annoyance peeking through. "You're in trouble, but you tough guys don't want to be around their crew when they look like you do. Don't blame you, I guess. You'd catch hell for a month."

She glanced around. "Sit here," she said, pointing to the hood of her car. "You're OK, I got you. Take a breath, and tell me what's wrong."

I leaned against the car feeling as weak as a kitten. I couldn't get my breath, and my heart was hammering, pounding blood into my splitting head, and the nausea was back. It was like a nasty adrenaline rush, but I didn't have anywhere to put it. I knew I wasn't going to die, but it felt like I was dying, which is a pretty odd thing, but I didn't much care one way or the other. I was wrapped tight in a suffocating black.

"Talk to me," she said. "What's going on?"

"I don't know," I said. "I just hate it when the LT jumps in my ass. I fucked up pretty good and busted some guy up, and the LT's pissed."

"That doesn't sound like you," she said. "What did you bust the guy up about?"

"Jesus, Paige, I don't know," I said, suddenly angry. "Don't you get it? I'm unravelling and I don't know what's going on. I'm getting crazy, I think."

I explained to her about floating behind myself in the trailer and how I'd been shocked watching myself trying to kill a guy who was, for all practical purposes, a complete stranger.

"I think I'm losing my mind," I finished.

"Tell me about the warrant," she said. "Walk me through what you did when you got there."

It was a long story. The weeks of work, an average of four hours of sleep per night, some a lot shorter than that, finally making the case, SWAT ripping the front off the trailer while the adrenaline hammered and we waited for gunfire that never came to pour out at us and the stink of the meth cook and sweat and human grease in the place and the raped little girl in the dog cage and the time I found that dead kid in the crib that no one had reported because they hadn't noticed, and bruised, bleeding women, and belts and cigarettes and lighters and baseball bats and the time a mom had beaten her five-year-old daughter for days, breaking things all over her, and finally came to the hospital with her because she couldn't find a home remedy to treat the constant seizures the kid had developed because of brain swelling, and she said the little girl deserved it because the little girl was hateful and didn't love her as much as the other four did, and the little boy that mom dipped in boiling water because he wouldn't stop wetting his pants who watched me with dying blue eyes, wide with shock, while the ER docs peeled dead skin like sodden paper off of everything below his ribcage....

It was a long story.

And I suddenly realized what I was doing, that no one should have to listen to any of this, and I looked up a Paige. She was standing quietly, tears running down her face.

"Ah, Jesus, Paige, I'm sorry," I said. "Don't cry. I shouldn't have said any of that stuff."

"I'm not crying for them," she said, wiping her face. "Tell me, what happened to them, all of them, even the ones you didn't say?"

I shrugged, suddenly depressed again.

"Some died," I said. "Some got well and lived. Most somewhere in between."

"Did you let ANY of them go back into hell?" she asked. "What happened to their parents?"

"No, I never let any go back. Most of the parents are in jail, or on probation, or whatever. But they ain't never getting them back."

"So," she said, "even the ones it was too late for, you were there. I wasn't crying for them or their sad stories because they've got a happy ending, even if it's only for a minute. I was crying for you, because you have to absorb it all just to make things a little better for them even for that minute. And I'm so sorry for you, and I'm so glad you're doing it, and I'm so sorry you're going to have to do more, and I'm so glad you're going to be there for even a split second in their lives when they need you and no one else will do.

"Don't you get it?" she said. "You're the good guy and I don't mean just that you're 'a good guy.' I mean you're 'The Good Guys,' the white hat, the edge of the sword. Most of you idiots are, even if you've forgotten it.

"You goddam cops are so damned frustrating and I hate seeing you this way. You've been battling in the mud, and knocked off your white horses so often that you forget that under all the dirt and mud and blood is the part of you that got you into this work in the first place, and sometimes when it gets covered up and stops gleaming you lose your way in the dark, and sometimes you NEVER come back, and it scares the shit out of me when I see one of you sliding away.

"Dammit, dammit, dammit, all that stuff that made you want to do this is still in there!" And with that she punched me in the chest, not hard, a little girl's overhand punch, banging on a locked door.

My mouth hung open with astonishment at her outburst as she stood there in front of me with tears running down her face.

"Jesus, what the hell was I thinking coming to work someplace where I'm surrounded by you assholes all the time? Do you have any idea how much happier I was when all I knew about cops is what I saw on TV?" And then she burst into tears, crying for real now.

In Our Next Episode: Depends on whether I'm bored with this and move on to something else.