JON ROGER
Home is a beat bungalow kept tidy by the weekly maintenance subscription he pays for, and Nita is a competent homemaker with a talent for ducks. JON ROGER thinks them filthy. It’s early spring and the ducks have not yet started laying so his meal is insipid commercial chicken eggs from the megafarms. He’s drinking tea, black tea brewed strong. Homegrown chives. Heavy salt.
JON ROGER looks around the tidy kitchen with its dustless plastic panel cabinetry. There are dishes heaped in the sink but the counters are bare. Everybody knows JON ROGER likes clear surfaces. No utility can be derived from clutter, failed accumulation, substance without meaning or function. He looks past the sink to the splay of green at the window. Past the glass a fat junco lights on a tangled cotoneaster.
Ducks squabble at the bottom of the yard. JON ROGER stares at the damp garden choked with early weeds. He turns his attention from the green to the tines of his fork where a morsel of breakfast is cooling, and sees that in his morning funk he has undercooked the egg. The chalaza has not broken down. A gelid white translucent awful mass shudders a handsbreadth from his face with terrible viscid integrity. JON ROGER chokes a little on a sudden clutch of bile.
He hears a thud and laughter and Nita’s soft voice chivvying the kids along the hall from the bedrooms at the back of the house. As they approach JON ROGER, still holding the fork, washes down his gorge with cooling tea. The kids pile into the kitchen with Nita after them, the hood of her robe up to hide a blacked eye, limping. When they notice he is still there everybody stops stock still like the floor is covered in steel jawed bear traps ready on a hair trigger to snap shut with sudden crushing force. JON ROGER is running late. Time did strange things while he stared at the ropy chalaza.
His eldest, Penny, eight, breaks the silence.
“Morning Daddy.”
“Morning Peanut.” JON ROGER’s voice is flat. Nita will not meet his gaze. He puts down his fork and makes to leave.
He gathers his keys and baton, checks his pocket for his wallet and turns to the door, slowly, as though immersed in some resistant fluid. The whole time, his family watches, moving not at all.
The youngest kid, Bear, still in arms, makes a mewl of dissatisfaction. Nita shushes him. JON ROGER steps out the door. There are clear indications of incipient rain as he unplugs his wheel from the house power. He turns back and the family has moved only slightly, into the kitchen. Penny’s on her phone already, which she knows he doesn’t like. Mikey is just staring at him. Nita’s at the counter cutting chunks of banana for Bear, cutting with a little paring knife with a sunshine yellow plastic handle. The handle is tight in Nita’s grip. She’s taken down her hood and the bruising is on the other side. He notices how pretty she is, even in disarray, and the way her full lips shape her profile. Is the lower lip quivering? He grabs an umbrella from the stand with a spasm. He is running behind. He turns to his wheel and rolls away, popping up the umbrella as he goes.
** ** **
JON ROGER rolls to a stop in the underground parkade and sets himself up for the day. Everything goes into lockup, even the baton. No non-regulation objects past this point. After turning out his pockets he puts on blue uniform coveralls. His back twinges in protest as he bends to lace the high boots. He resolves to be more diligent with stretching.
JON ROGER’s feet scuff the concrete of the stairwell; a hollow echo sounds back from above. Clack through a fire door and into the bullpen, a fluorescent lit range of desks arrayed irregularly around a rack of cabinets. Scrawled notes and tacked photographs of armed confrontation sprawl across whiteboards on three walls. Robust, swarthy Largo in his constant ballcap is just concluding a riposte to Bunny, whose hair is in high pigtails over a full face of makeup.
“Hey, JON ROGER, perk up! You look like balls. Check this – Largo thinks he can bag a hat trick today. Bet a week’s pay with Demmick on graves. The cheek. I told Largo you could beat him to it and he told me to suck eggs.”
“It’s true. Demmick is dim. Dim Demmick. Four freshies from Southside, they speak Spanish. I speak Spanish. No other motherfucker here speaks Spanish. Sure as shit not Demmick on graves, who only shouts. No nuance. I can for sure crack three.”
“Fuck that. No race. I’ve got the rookie today anyhow. Where is Said? I told him to be early and ready to go.”
“I sent him out for empanadas,” says Largo, filling out a petty cash form.
The tight high buzz of the lights hangs in the air like a stone flung over a cliff edge.
“I see a Carter on the hardcase list. Book me number 3 with that one. Empanadas? ”
“Sure thing.” Bunny makes a change to the board. “There’s a new truck set up over in D-9. Sonora Mormons. Real good food. Mr. Spanish here giggled the whole time he was giving Said the order.”
“All about nuance.” Largo sets down his pen. “And I don’t giggle.”
** ** **
JON ROGER and Said are standing over a metal chair with a man cuffed to it. The man is wearing a blindfold. He is bound hand and foot. His body bears obvious signs of rough treatment. He is freshly missing a tooth.
The tiled room is dimly lit. A bench with an array of hand tools and small apparatus squats to the left. A spigot with a length of hose attached sits under a set of hooks holding neat coils of hanging rope on the right. The floor is wet. A little water is pooled around a grated drain.
“Not that way. Too much shoulder. Too tense with the thumb,” says JON ROGER. “You’ll cramp up. Here’s how: you get one boot on the toes and then lean in, pressure comes from the other foot through your posterior chain. With the lean you get both ends at once. Like this.” He presses his weight into a thumb carefully placed just so at the corner of the captive’s jaw, boot grinding on toes. This elicits a scream. “There now. Show me what you’ve got.”
They set to work.
Some hours later the floor is very wet. Water and blood stream down the drain. Said works the hose. In the chair the man is also wet. The wet bound man is semi conscious, chin slumped on his chest. JON ROGER is winding a set of wires around a battery that’s obviously seen heavy use.
“Heyo, Said! Spray him up for a word.”
A cold jet of water arcs across the room and splashes across the battered torso of the bound man who responds in fits and starts. A broad cloth blinds his eyes, his mouth is stuffed with a bloodied sock. The broken toes of his left foot are exposed. On his right foot is the mate of the sock in his mouth. When the spray hits his face it sprays up the prisoner’s nose and he thrashes and grunts like a wild thing suddenly confined.
“That’s enough!” says JON ROGER to Said, who diverts the flow of water to a recalcitrant smear of phlegm and vomit on the pale tile. “Now Mr. Carter. Hello!” He pats the cheek of the captive, whose lolling head orients toward the brute avuncularity of JON ROGER’s speech. “We’re going to give you some time to have a little think. In just a while we’ll be back to see if you’ve anything left in you. Once we’re satisfied of that, well then you too are due for a rest. A nice wash and a kip and bob’s your uncle. All done with the hard bit, eh.”
JON ROGER walks to the bench and retrieves a pair of heavy earmuffs. He takes irregular, scuffing steps. “Yes, old fellow, a fine rest. Once you’re free of secrets. Not til then.” He cocks and lashes a backhand across the bruised face of the bound man. The smack of it slaps back from the hard walls. “Not til then.” Earmuffs snap into place, cutting off all sound.
“And, done. Said. How’s your yoke? Bit of strain, eh?” JON ROGER clasps his hands, twists them, and raises his arms overhead. “I’m bushed. We’ll come back, give him a kicking, then knock off for the forms. Graves can wring him out. Demmick’ll have aggro to spare if those empanadas are all that Largo claims.”
The younger man turns off the hose.
“The day is looking up, lad. Age before beauty. I’m famished. Sonora Mormons. Damnedest thing.”
** ** **
JON ROGER depresses the latch of his front door. Golden light shining out through the windows illuminates the evening, casting the fog into dancing motes. A wave of warmth envelops him as he steps past the threshold and into the little anteroom, depositing his umbrella in the corner. His keys and baton go in a plaster bowl sitting lopsided on a battered table bearing the juvenile etchings of the kids.
“Dad’s home, monsters. Dinner’s on,” Nita, still in work clothes, calls from the kitchen. “Hey, Big Guy. I’ll sort the goblins. You settle in.”
He moves to the washroom and fills the basin with warm water, rolls his sleeves to the elbow and scrubs his face and hands. There are showers at the office but JON ROGER likes to clean up when he gets home. He combs his hair, and then, clasping the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger, JON ROGER takes big deep breaths. In for a four count, hold for a four count, out for a four count, hold for a four count. Do it slow. Visualise a box. The doctor said this would help. The doctor said a lot of things.
When he told Bunny about the breathing she told him that “Badly informed modulation of prana can be very dangerous.” She recommended he take up handicraft. Bunny practices crochet in her off hours.
When he emerges everyone is already at the table, reading books or drawing or smearing a crayon across a slab of rough coloured paper. Nita had put together a lasagne, which everyone was known to like. And salad. Not just salad; a DIY salad bowl buffet with home made croutons. Delightful.
The meal passes in quiet harmony, all mouths too full of stratified pasta for talk. Until salad, which in JON ROGER’s house is for afters, to help with digestion. You can talk around salad. Mkey tells playground stories of hijinks and shenanigans, heroes and peril. A short gang of ruffians roaming the ball fields and wooded verge of the schoolyard. Including Bruce the Putnam kid. Led by Bruce the Putnam kid. Outrageous.
“Mikey, I told you not to play with Bruce..’
Mikey’s brow furrows. Bruce knows where to find the best sticks and all about dragons.
“Bruce is nice.”
“Jon …”
“Careful, Nita.” his voice as hard as teeth on tile. “You listen, Mikey. No. Goddamn. Bruce.”
Sudden incarnadine haze.
Nita is crouched, tending to Mikey’s cut lip. There are tears. Nobody makes a sound.
In for a four count, hold for a four count, out for a four count, hold for a four count.
Nita speaks. “Can’t things … Can’t things be nice for a while, JON ROGER? Can’t they?”