Before the Law

Before the Law

         "Man, if my father had told me before taking this job how messed up people can be, you guys wouldn't have met my sorry ass--that's for sure," he said.
         The thin officer spoke with great seriousness; it hung on his words the way his gun belt did on his hip. It never seemed to fit right. Sitting around the table were two other officers of the law: one of them in his thirties, the other an old timer, a Sergeant. The one in his thirties shrugged his shoulders, rolled his eyes as to express his discontent with the matter. He had seen other rookies say the same thing; and it's true, some men aren't cut out for certain tasks. Also, at five in the morning, picking at some soggy diner toast, he could find more interest in the rooster's crow.
         Outside the glass window of the diner, two police cars sat in the parking lot; they faced the building like horses at rest. The sun just a dream away in the night’s last efforts of existence. Morning was to come at any moment. The younger officers had just finished their night shift, the older one about to begin his.
         “Ya know, as much as I’d hate to go along with somethin’ like that,” spoke the officer in his thirties, as if coming from a laborious deliberation, “this one took the cake. I’m almost considerin’ quittin’, too. I ain’t gon’ do it, though. I ain’t no little girl.” He finished the last of his soggy toast in reluctance. “For truth, I couldn’t tell ya precisely why I stay in this line of work. Maybe a sense of duty. Maybe it’s the comfort of havin’ a gun.”
         “I’d like to tell you I’m doing it for the great state of Texas,” said the Rookie. It brought him an ounce of comfort to say that.
         “No, no. That won’t do,” the other officer replied; “Ya ought to throw that pride away right straight. Ya got to do it for somethin’ beyond yerself and yet somethin’ that deals directly to ya. The “great state of Texas” ain’t got nothin’ to do with ya. Ya think a country so hard on its people, so spaced-out can do good with ya? If I were ya, I’d throw that away right straight.”
         The Sergeant, while the two officers talked, thought about this time when he was a kid; thought how saying it would be relevant to the topic. He began:
         "I'll give you somethin' to hear, as long as you're up to hearin' it."
         The other two officers looked to each other in a dumbly covert way, as if to register something with each other. They turned to the sergeant and nodded.
         “Alright. This story’s from when I was a boy, when me and the family lived in this dingy rat’s nest trailer park in this here El Paso county. From before I was interested in the law and keepin’ with it. I was eight years young, and my father decides to take the family on this trip, me, my little brother, and my mother—all takin’ this trip up to the mountains. Didn’t think much of it. He says that we were goin’ to take a look at the peaks. You ever take a walk up the Guadalupe Peak? It’s rather a strenuous activity. Me and my wife went on up there nearly four years ago, took us almost nine hours to get up to the top. They said it’s supposed to take a little less, but I guess that’s what happens when your body hits a certain point in its life.
         “Anyways, my father told us we were headin' to that particular peak. Me and my brother were agruin’ over whether we’d be at the base of it all or the peak itself. (I suppose if you’d be on the peak lookin’ at it, you’d have nothin’ to look at except down.) Well, while we were arguin’, my mother starts the same with my father over the stuff we’d packed from home. I mean, they had just about thrown everythin’ I wore in the car, same with my brother, and the rest follows. Sooner or later, me and my brother stop our nothin’ talk because my mom kept gettin’ louder and louder—I mean, she was blarin’ it. I was beginnin’ to think she was sad or somethin’ since those two emotions seemed to happen simultaneously, the fury and the sadness. To my surprise, though, my father was the one who started with the tears—but it wasn’t due to my mother’s hollerin’. It was something else, some other wailin’ sound in the back of us that made almost the same noise my mother did.”
         “Was that wailing sound a police car?” the thin Rookie asked.
         The sergeant nodded.
         “What happened?”
         “Some years later, when me and my brother were old enough to know, my mother told us what had happened. Turned out that my father, uncomfortable to our trailer park surroundin’s, went out and dealt drugs. Cops were onto him and took him into the pen. He left us as kids that didn’t know any better, died in the clink at the hands of another man, probably someone he owed money to. My brother loved the man, still does. I figured I’d let him have his peace. But no matter how my mother painted it, I wouldn’t…”
         The Sergeant took to the last of his coffee, gazed into the gold of twilight out the window as the night clung to the sky by singes.
         "I suppose I keep with the law because of that. Every time I'm out there, I sort of have it in my head that I'm goin' to stumble into stoppin' him. It would do me some good, since I have a few words prepared."
         As if stuck in a picture mistook, the two officers sat with dumb faces. Everything halted their noise, save for the Sergeant’s audible fiddling with his empty coffee cup atop the thin wooden table.
         He rose from the table with a smile, adjusted his holster.
         “Make sure you guys leave a tip,” the Sergeant said as he took out his wallet and thumbed a five and three singles; “Old Edna may not see well, but it don’t mean money loses value the less you see it.”
         He proceeded to exit the diner after having a word with Edna at the register.
         The officers kept their eyes on the sergeant’s back as he left into the gold of outside. As the Rookie's gaze lingered, the other officer motioned to get the tip.
         “Well, don’t just sit there lookin’ a fool.”
         “Aren’t you a bit taken aback by the old man’s story?”
         “Yeah, but what can ya do? A man’s reason for doing things is his business. I can’t tell him otherwise—and neither can you. Let’s just leave as is.”
         The two officers rose from the table, the Rookie in a cloudy hesitation, the older one regularly. They headed to the register to get their tab and were surprised with what the cashier told them.
         “The sergeant yonder told me that “the young pups” got his tab,” Edna told the officers, her glassy eyes in a playful search between the two characters.
         One of them laughed, the other looked at the other sternly.
         “Come on, boys,” Edna continued, “Everyone’s got to pay for somebody else’s every now and again.”


Word Count: 1242