Cross the Night

That night, I was on curfew patrol alone. It was in the dead early hours around 4:00 a.m., a hot and hazy night. I was thinking about two things: my son, drunk on freedom, overcome with dreams in another land; and Jesus on the cross saying, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” I was thinking of these two things side by side — maybe because I carried both a letter from my son and a wallet-sized Gospel of Matthew in my pocket together.

So I was thinking about my son and I was thinking about Jesus when I pulled up to the intersection of Giblin and Hall by the abandoned auto parts store. There was just a blurry little moon low down on the horizon. I was looking at the moon, but I still saw a shadow move. I’ve been on the force 30 years, so I can see a thing without looking for it.

It was in the strobing blue of the emergency lights that I saw him sliding along the wall of the auto parts store. I jumped out and shone my flashlight into the shadows, sidearm at the ready, and ordered him to stop with a voice made of ammunition — not that it always works, you understand, but I have noticed that the boys who use a gun too much are the ones who don’t know how to use their voices.

I caught him then in the flashlight beam, and he stopped, pressed back against the wall. He was young, late teens — maybe close to the age my own son was when he up and left and immigrated to Angola, following some dream of a life the young always seek. The boy before me now was tall, maybe six-three, no shirt on, his right arm pressed up against his body. I ordered him to put his hands in the air, and when he did, an old shirt he had been clutching fell to the ground. It was then I noticed that he was barefoot as well as shirtless. He swallowed so hard I could see his Adam’s apple bobbing.

“What’re you doing out this time of night?” I said.

He swallowed again and said quietly, “Trying to walk home.”

“Where’s home?”

“The Forest Park Refugee Camp.”

“That’s, what, six, seven miles from here.”

“I know.”

“You’re barefoot, kid.”

He didn’t answer but looked at me with the resignation of a martyr. There was something in that look — like he was just too mournful or tired to be afraid of me, like he really didn’t care what I did next.

“ID, please,” I said.

He put his hands into the pockets of his shorts, looked up at me, and said, “I lost it.”

“Failure to produce ID is a misdemeanor, you know. And breaking curfew is a finable offence.”

He shrugged and said again, “I lost it.”

“Well, your name then,” I said. “And don’t go telling me you’ve lost that as well.”

He refused to answer, so I had no choice but to arrest him. I couldn’t very well give a curfew citation to someone with no identity who refused to give his name. He offered no resistance when I patted him down, and I was about to cuff him when I saw just why he had been holding his right arm when I first stopped him. There was a deep gash running from his elbow down to his wrist. His arm was covered in dried blood, and a thin trail of fresh blood continued to ooze from the wound.

“What happened here?” I demanded.

He said, “Fell off a bridge.”

“Fell off a bridge,” I repeated skeptically.

He drew his arm toward himself and cradled it. “Jumped off a bridge.”

“Fell or jumped? Now which is it?”

He closed his eyes and winced — and again that patient look of a martyr. When he opened his eyes, he said, “I jumped from a bridge, sir.”

This one was a puzzle to be sure. I opened the back door of the patrol car and ordered him in. Then I went to the trunk to get my first aid kit. It struck me how quiet and dark everything was. The emergency lights on the car strobed soundlessly. The headlights stabbed like the tines of a fork through the thick and hazy air.

A piece of paper crinkled in my pocket — my son’s most recent letter. His language teacher had pronounced him fluent in Portuguese, he said, and he is now starting to learn Umbundu. He loves the dazzling lights of Luanda. He loves the city’s expansiveness, the wide waters of the Atlantic, the seaport where he works. Why? I had written. What can you find in Angola? He said, Here we are free. Here, they lived a long time without freedom, and so they understand it. They love it. Liberdade. Elianjo.

My son left the U.S. to find freedom. The world has turned on its head.

I opened the car door and ordered the kid to stand with his back to the car while I dealt with the wound. I was just a little nervous standing out there in the open, deserted street. The kid seemed harmless enough, but there had been instances within the last two years of law enforcement ambushed and murdered. Once, children were used as a decoy. Matter of fact, I knew the man murdered in that incident — one of the last good men on the force.

I put on gloves and applied an antiseptic to the wound. The kid winced. I wanted to say something to get his mind off it.

“Know anything about Angola?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said. “Southwest Africa. Political Reform Movement in 2040. One of the leading exporters of diamonds.”

“What’s the capital of Louisiana?” I asked. A lot of people assume it’s New Orleans.

“Baton Rouge,” he said.

He was informed, at any rate.

“This needs stitches,” I said, but I did what I could with a non-adherent dressing. Jumping off a bridge, I mused. You don’t get a wound like that from jumping off a bridge. You get a wound like that from sharp objects like knives — although this cut wasn’t as clean or straight as I would have expected from a knife.

When I looked up from dressing the wound, I saw that the kid was staring past me. I turned quickly, but there was nothing there except that thumbnail of a moon above the horizon. I looked back at him and saw that he had the dazed expression of someone who is looking at nothing. He seemed to remember where he was and said, “I’ve never been arrested before.”

“First time for everything,” I said as I ushered him back into the car, but then I wished I hadn’t said something so cavalier. It didn’t seem right, somehow. No, but nothing seemed right about this. Something strange in it. Jumped from a bridge?

I got in the car and started driving — but not toward the police station, not yet. I needed time to think. There were questions I wanted to ask this kid. But I had to be careful about that. I was always conscious of the dash cam and the microphone recording everything I said and did on duty. When I was demoted a couple of years before, I thought they would monitor my work closely and look for some reason to find fault. But they didn’t. Instead, they decided to ignore me. Put him out on curfew patrol. Out of sight, out of mind. Maybe they knew from my record that I had always followed the law precisely. What they didn’t seem to realize was that this was exactly why I did what I did during the St. Louis University protests.

The fact was that I didn’t want to bring this kid into the station, and I wasn’t sure why I didn’t want to, and it was this — this hesitation of mine to follow the law — that made me uneasy.

“What bridge did you jump off of?” I finally asked.

No answer.

“Why were you jumping off a bridge?”

No answer.

I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw that he was staring straight ahead. Was he even hearing me?

“What’s the official language of the Netherlands?”

“Dutch.”

Okay, so he was listening.

“Why were you jumping off a bridge?” I repeated.

He said, “I wasn’t trying to commit suicide if that’s what you’re asking.”

“I asked what you were doing, not what you weren’t doing.”

“Does it matter? You’re arresting me for standing on a street, not for jumping off a bridge.”

Huh. He had a point — that is, I had never heard anyone summarize a curfew violation quite that way before. Standing on a street — it’s against the law now, ladies and gentlemen. I drove for a few minutes, thinking. We were passing through a residential area full of dark-windowed houses. I saw one light shining from a house at the end of the street and wondered: early bird or night owl?

It reminded me of how my wife used to leave the stove range light on for me all night when I was young and fresh from the academy, working nights. Back then, nights had seemed like a clear and steady bell ringing in my veins. When I would come home in the dusky morning, sometimes I would find gifts my wife had left out for me on the kitchen table: cookies, dramatic written accounts of her day, a corny joke torn from a magazine.

Then somehow time got away from us — in many ways. I found myself in the year 2054 wearing riot gear. The students at St. Louis University were protesting, and a few windows had been smashed around campus. Anti-presidential pamphlets descended like dew. Someone spray-painted on the library wall a caricature of the university provost kissing the U.S. president. Low-level law breaking was in vogue, and we were worried it could get out of hand.

I remember it — how the students held a rally one cold morning in January, and we were there to keep order, and I was wishing they would protest in April instead of January. Then — I don’t know why — down came the order to disburse the crowd and arrest their leaders — five young men and two women who were making speeches from the porch of the art museum. Arrest them? For what? For talking? I was the only one who disobeyed the order that day. And this was what surprised me most — that not one of the others hesitated. But what could I do? I stood before my captain that afternoon and said, “My conscience is clear. Regarding this matter, sir, my conscience is clear.”

“Your conscience?” the captain shouted. “Is it your conscience that gives you the right to defy direct orders?”

I made no other defense. I let him rant, and I didn’t protest about the demotion. My wife took it quietly too — took it so quietly that she would not say a word. We’d often had long silences before, but never quite that long or quite that silent. After a week, she packed a suitcase and said, “You couldn’t just bend with the times, could you? You couldn’t be just a teeny bit flexible and think of other people, could you?” Then she left and went to stay with her mother in New Orleans.

So by the time I arrived on that hot summer night two years later, I had no one left to disappoint except myself. Myself, yes, and of course God.

I was thinking something to this effect when I turned the corner and saw headlights up ahead — a whole swarm of cars blocking the road. None were marked, but as I got closer, I saw why — the cars belonged to the Terrorist Elimination Corps. On the north side of the road, there were lights on in a large, white-paneled house with its front door wide open. I could make out two TECs standing by the cars as if they owned the road.

I may as well say right out that I hate the Terrorist Elimination Corps. Sincerely, I hate them. They are what every police force in America tried to avoid becoming once upon a time — secretive, inhumane, totally unaccountable. They don’t even seem to realize that they are a painful and unoriginal knock-off brand of every fascist police force in history.

I know perfectly well it’s wrong to hate — forgive them, for they know not what they do — but I can never feel convinced, for after all, surely they do know what they do. I’ve tried to pray for them, really I have, but it feels a lot like praying for the chicken pox.

One of the TECs saw me and came over to my car. Based on the TEC’s figure passing in front of my headlights, I could see this one was a woman. Generally, the TEC recruits men, but there are a few women in their ranks. I rolled down the window. She was masked, of course, as all the TECs are. All I could see of her was the area between the bridge of her nose and her eyebrows. Her dark eyes slid to the kid in the backseat and then back to me.

“Trouble?” she said.

“Not really,” I said. “Just curfew breaking and no ID.”

A crash came from the house, followed by a muffled confusion of shouts. The TEC by my window stepped away and hurried back to the blockade of cars. A moment later, several TECs emerged, more or less escorting, dragging, and herding nine or ten people from the house. It seemed to me as if the light of the house spilled out after them.

The TECs were hurrying their prisoners into the cars. I could hear a man’s voice shouting a long string of profanities until his voice was suddenly cut off by the closing of a car door. Someone else was crying. The female TEC was coming toward my car again, this time pulling a handcuffed woman along with her.

“Fortunate you’re here,” the TEC said.

I didn’t agree.

“We don’t want to transport them together,” she said, “but we’re short on cars. This one’s yours.”

Lucky me. I got out of the car and took the prisoner by the arm. In the scattered beams of the headlights, I could see she was a middle-aged woman with a sort of motherly look and graying black hair. Her lip was puffy and bleeding. She was crying — not loudly, but steadily, tears gleaming in the light and mixing with the blood on her chin. The TEC walked away and the prisoner looked at me.

“I don’t know anything about it,” she said. “I don’t.”

“Neither do I, ma’am,” I said.

I opened the back door and pushed her in gently. And that was when I caught a glimpse of the kid’s face. It’s strange, but I had almost forgotten about him for a minute — he’d been so quiet, and I had been so busy hating the TEC. But now I saw that he was watching the TECs through the window, and on his face was a look of pure dread. What made it worse was that I could see he was trying to hide his fear and was failing miserably.

A few moments later we were all pulling away, this cavalcade of oppression foisted upon me as if I were Simon of Cyrene. As I followed the TEC car in front of me, I took one more look at the house they had just raided. The TECs had left the door standing open and the lights of the house blazing. The house stood in this profusion of light like a jilted lover saying, “Why have you forsaken me?”

The woman in the back seat continued to cry. She looked at the kid and said, “I don’t know you. I don’t know anything. But they won’t believe me.”

He said, “No, they probably won’t.” Then he turned away from her with a clenched jaw.

We drove to the Wellston station and there unloaded the TEC prisoners. The woman in my car had stopped crying and was trying to wipe her face dry on the shoulder of her blouse — not really an easy thing to do in handcuffs. While I escorted the TEC prisoner into the station, I left the kid in the car — which is, of course, against regulations, but I just couldn’t do it somehow, couldn’t bring him in there into that den of TECs.

“Yours, I believe,” I said as I handed the prisoner over to the female TEC. In the glaring light of the station, I could see that the TEC had beautiful chocolate eyes — but with an expression so hard it seemed you could chip a tooth just looking at them.

The prisoner stared at me desperately as if I could save her — me, a policeman, an upholder of the law in this Godforsaken city. I wonder, did she see through me and know, did she know that I felt stuck — like the thief on the cross, a captive spectator to all this good and evil. I was not the savior, just another guilty witness, one who could only say, “Remember me.”

I left the TECs and their prisoners and went back to the car in the parking lot. The kid was exactly how I had left him, staring straight ahead. I sat down in the front seat and took my son’s letter from my pocket. My son said, I’ve joined a philosophy club. We meet in a bar on Thursday nights and talk about everything. We talk about religion and art and literature and politics and history. We talk about everything, and we don’t care who hears us. The others are interested in my views on human rights. Sometimes, I have trouble expressing my opinions in Portuguese, but still, in the end, I say what I want to say, and no one minds. Here we are free. Here, they lived a long time without freedom and so they understand it. They love it. Liberdade. Elianjo.

I turned around to face the kid in the back seat. I really wanted to justify the action I had already decided to take.

“One more time,” I said. “What bridge?”

He met my eyes, and something in his face changed. Maybe he, like the TEC prisoner, saw me for what I was — a prisoner too, forsaken by the law I serve.

“The Old Chain of Rocks Bridge,” he said.

I knew that bridge. It wasn’t in use anymore. It was a dark, deserted spot. “And what were you doing there? Why were you out after curfew?”

The kid looked at me steadily and said, “If someone you cared about was in trouble, you’d break curfew. You wouldn’t just stay home. You’d go help them.”

He was right about that. Say it was my son or my wife. I would break curfew. I would run down the street barefoot. I would jump off a bridge. I would follow a higher law.

I pulled out of the station, already thinking about what my captain would say if he did happen to check the dash cam — and what I would say in response. Maybe I would say, “He reminded me of my son.”

I drove south to Lindell Boulevard on the edge of Forest Park and pulled over under the shadow of the trees. It was quiet, no one stirring yet in the refugee camp beyond the trees. The kid was watching me warily. I got out, opened the back door, and motioned him out. He stood looking from me to the tree line of the park.

I said, “I’m letting you go with a warning. I believe there were extenuating circumstances. Be sure you’re off the streets at night from here on out.”

He looked at me dubiously for a moment as if he suspected a trap.

“Well, are you going?” I said. “Or do you want to be re-arrested?”

“I’m going,” he said. He looked down at his bandaged arm and up at the sky where the darkness was beginning to soften. Then he disappeared into the trees. I never saw him again.

It was after 5:00 a.m. by then, and my patrol was done. After signing out at the station, I went home to a dark and silent house. I slept fitfully through the morning. That afternoon, the body of a young woman washed up on the eastern bank of the Mississippi below the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge. I heard about it when I came to the station for my shift in the evening. All night as I drove the streets, I pondered: wounded boy, dead girl, high bridge. What could it mean?

I went to the bridge myself in the early dawn, after my shift. Dense fog hung over the river, and the air was still and hot and damp. I walked the length of the bridge and found bullet casings from two different weapons. And yet, neither the boy I found on the street nor the girl who drowned in the river had been shot, and no weapon was found nearby. So then, who had carried the guns? Why had these two fallen or been pushed or leapt through sixty feet of empty air that night while the heat of summer radiated through the city and a thin moon shone on the empty streets?

I will never know. No one knows, and no one ever will know but that boy and God. Still, I will always believe he told me the truth that night. I believe that he hazarded the law, risked his life, for a girl on an old, abandoned bridge that we had all forgotten.

In the days that followed, I thought more and more about a young man jumping from a bridge. Love compels us all to do the inexplicable.

I have been thinking of him ever since.

First published November 15, 2024 in Heart of Flesh Literary Journal.