Free Form Jazz. Lee Lamothe
by and exuberantly pounded his biceps, to engrave them into his flesh.
After the second shooting, there was only a brief phone call and a message to hang in there. He sat at home and grew his hair and beard in the silence.
One night his daughter, Alexis, had come down to the basement where he’d taken to sleeping. She cuddled up to him on the sofa. “We’re okay, dad.” Her hair was blond like Karen’s. She had his thin features and he wondered often if he was looking at the features of the mother he’d never met.
He sat with his arm around her. “Anything you want to ask me, Ax?”
“Nope.” She wouldn’t say anything else except, “We’re cool.”
The next day, in the middle of a fight, Karen flat out asked if it was true, if he was a racist. He packed what possessions would fit into the backseat of a taxi.
At the Swamp his second shooting was cleared reluctantly and they sent him marching orders. He found himself in the alleys, feasted upon by insect life, festooned with bleeding bites and blemishes.
Forgotten, someone joked, but not gone.
* * *
Somehow he’d made a painting of the slashing looping greens. A forest, maybe, or a view of a jungle from a long distance away. There was a suggestion of things hidden, verdant things ready to pounce or reveal themselves. Ray Tate carefully detached the page from the spiral book and put it to dry on the kitchen counter.
His first telephone call was to an inspector at the Swamp. Ray Tate didn’t really trust anyone above duty sergeant. Duty sergeant was the ultimate, he believed, a mentor to the troops, a guy who never heard a joke he hadn’t already heard before. A duty sergeant was the master of his domain, a leader of his tribe. Only good dutys could create good cops. Get above duty sergeant and people feared your career arc instead of respecting your words and deeds. But the inspector he called was a good, young guy whose old man had died early on the job and he’d been raised by a legion of blue uncles who never left him abandoned or confused, who crammed his summer evenings with ball games and winter dawns with hockey practise.
The inspector listened to the list of names from the Chemical Squad roster. Most of the city guys were slobs, he said, duffed-out guys with habits. He warned Ray Tate to beware of the skipper up there. “Gordo’s very … sharp,” he said. “Fifteen to the dozen.”
“This Statie they got me with. Brown? The dyke? What about her?”
“Not a lot of back story,” the inspector said. “She went straight from the State Police training college to the Spout. You know the Spout? Up in Indian country, where they put you when they want you to volunteer to quit, cheap. ‘Up to the Spout, where they pour you out.’ She’s up there, oh, six, seven months with a detachment full of farm boys who never saw a black chick, never mind a dyke. There’s something happens and her partner shows up at the local hospital with his face all beat in. He says some Indians jumped him but it gets around that she went after him with her stick. He quits and she hangs in for a month or so but the farm boys and their wives complain. She’s down to the Capitol, shuffling paperwork. Then the Feds start up Gordo’s task force and next thing, she’s seconded down here, driving him nuts.”
Ray Tate thought a moment. “I’m partnering with her. They want me to put her down. Could be that she’s out to get me? Get out from under her own stuff?”
The inspector hummed. “The word down here, Ray, is that the mayor wants you out. You and all the other city guys working chemicals. You want to be careful, in word and deed. You know? There’s a lot of opportunity to fuck up, a lot of loose cash floating around you can stub your toe on.”
“Thanks.”
“Ah, Ray? Is it interesting that they’re partnering you up with a black without breaking your trigger finger first?”
Ray Tate called a half dozen sergeants and duty sergeants. The Chemical Squad, they all agreed, was a shooting gallery where cracked city guys were always in season and you could take your limit. There were warnings about Gordo the skipper and commiseration about being partnered with a psycho Statie dyke.
He called a sniper on the Statie tactical shooters he’d done some training with and listened to a lot of funny stories about Indian country.
* * *
Djuna Brown took a photocopy of the skipper’s memo home with her. She filed it in a folder stuffed with other sheets of paper. A dated and signed trail of slights, of conflicting orders, of her mileage and hours worked down to the minute. There were the scrawled notes she’d found on her desk, many of them calling her a dyke, a rug muncher, and an all around generic bitch. There were racist cartoons. There were flyers advertising gay revues in the Rainbow Valley. There was a computer-enhanced picture of her face printed over a girl going down on a grossly fat black woman, her tongue a foot long. There were digital pictures she’d taken of used condoms left on her office chair, glued to her desk drawer. There were licence numbers of cars she’d found suspiciously parked near her apartment.
Another folder, much slimmer, contained commendations, atta boy memos, and newspaper clippings: high profile arrests up in Indian country, saving a Native baby from a burning trailer, running a self-defence class for at-risk children, a sex-ed class for teenage girls.
Her duplex was within walking distance of the satellite. She kept her head down as her slippers trudged the same hills Ray Tate had gone up and down a few hours earlier, past the same cemetery. She didn’t stop for a cup of leisurely coffee, she didn’t look at the streets as though she were meeting old friends. She bought some yogurt at a convenience store, allowed herself to buy a pack of Marlies.
In her living room she ate the yogurt without interest and waited until six o’clock to pour a gin and tonic. By seven o’clock she was smoking continuously and weaving a little through the duplex, straightening up, avoiding looking at herself in the mirror.
The Gay-Glo association after-hours hotline was picked up on the first ring. “Dee-joon,” the woman, a perpetually bitter former patroller, sang, “you gonna join up with the folks who love you? Make your voice heard?”
“Soon, I think, Haze. I’m okay,” she said softly, making her voice wistful. “So far.”
The Glo wanted Djuna Brown with a vengeance. She hit all the right notes: female, dyke, black, some Chinese, and a Statie. It was widely known that she’d been harassed, both physically and sexually, and had fought back. There were no Staties in the Glo, they were barracked across the rural portions of the state.
“So, what can I do for you, sister?”
“You know this city guy, Ray Tate?”
“The gunner? Sure, he shot a black guy back, oh, before you came down here. He got away with it. So then he shot another one about a year ago. Got away with that one, too. They’re protecting him, keeping him out of sight until they can bring him back.” Hazel was tapping into her computer. The Gay-Glo had its own little intelligence network. It collected slights and troop movements, helped its members avoid traps, to step around the machinations of the homophobic thugs at the Swamp. “What’s up with Ray Tate? You hear something on him?”
“They put me with him today. Any chance he’s a rat? Or should I just be worried that he’ll put one in my queer black ass?”
“Whew. That guy, anything’s possible. You want to write everything down, like you write the other stuff. Tape what you can. It would be nice to be the ones that put the hat on him, drag him before the governor’s review board. But be careful, okay?” She paused, revealing the tap of typing. “Look, I’m going to put this stuff into a file, okay? If something happens to you, we want it documented that they put you with a racist killer, in an at-risk situation.”
“Sure.”
“Perfect. You, ah, seeing anybody? We’re having a meeting tomorrow night, why don’t we have dinner first? Go out after, have a drink. Strategize. Girl talk.”
“Let