Read Online After by Marita Golden - Free Book Online Page B

say. He sat in his car so long, a group of boys riding bikes in front of the house next door huddled together and began whispering and pointing at him.
    Now Bunny was sitting across from him in a booth at Rips. Listening to him. Since the night he almost gave her a ticket Carson had tried to plot out what he’d do, what he’d say, if he were lucky enough to get inside her house. Nothing about his complex, haunting desire inspired him to think that what was happening would happen so easily, so fast.
    “Did you always want to be a policeman?”
    “No, I never thought about being a cop before I became one. I joined the army after high school. It made me feel like I was part of an effort much bigger and more important than me. I was stationed in Frankfurt, Germany, did two tours, and when I got back stateside I went to Prince George’s Community College for two years, then decided to join the police force. I wanted to get that feeling back again.”
    “I’ve never been overseas, but I heard those German women love Black men,” Bunny said while reaching for a bread stick from the basket on the table, then shifted her gaze to a penetrating study of the bread stick she held between her fingers.
    “Yeah, some of them do.”
    “Did they like
you
?”
    “Some of them did.”
    “Did you like them?”
    “I liked quite a few. But it was never serious. I always felt they had an ulterior motive, like wanting to get to the States.”
    The women Carson had been involved with had often been older divorced women with children. Bunny’s hazel eyes, now gazing at him, were a crystal ball in which he could see the real meaning of those relationships, how he had been just marking time. Stalling. Waiting for this. Waiting for her.
    “Are you ever afraid on your job?”
    “Sure,” he told her with an easy shrug.
    “Have you ever fired your weapon?”
    “Not yet. I hope I never do. It’s not like the cop shows on TV. They make more arrests in one day than we make in a month. When they shoot someone, they’re back on the streets the next day. In real life we get put on leave that can last days, weeks, sometimes as long as a year.”
    “What do you like about it?” Bunny asked each question with no hesitation, cradling her chin in her palm. Carson felt as if he’d never been looked at or listened to until now.
    “Catching a bad guy, saving somebody’s life.
    “My first assignment was in my old neighborhood. So I knew everybody and I had to arrest some guys who’d been my friends. That’s probably the hardest thing I’ve done so far.
    “The first time you see a corpse it’s a shock. Nothing prepares you for it. All that time I was in the army I was never on a battlefield. But my first week on the force a guy got shot in a drug deal that went bad. Shot in the face. I was just out of the academy, but I had to look at the body, get over the horror I felt, and knock on doors in the neighborhood to see who knew anything, who might have seen what happened. I learned pretty quick how to stand a few feet from a corpse and talk about sports or some TV show, how to laugh at another officer’s joke, all so as not to lose it or fall apart because I’d just seen someone’s brains splattered all over a kitchen wall or heard a four-year-old girl tell me or another officer that her daddy had raped her.
    “I’ve seen my own death in my mind. I’ve imagined it. Because I’ve seen other people die, up close, in a way I couldn’t explain away. I found a sixteen-year-old girl murdered and buried in a shallow grave behind a high school. Most of the time it’s quiet, but when all hell breaks loose, my own death flips through my mind. I can’t help it. I’m not anticipating it, just acknowledging that anything,
anything,
could happen.”
    “Then you probably value life more than most people.”
    “I try to. I really do. Most people wouldn’t think a cop would say that. They think we’ve all seen so much that’s ugly, that’s bad,