After Read Online Free PDF Page B

immediately identified.
----
    The article renders the tragic as routine. Carson suddenly realizes he doesn’t know the name of the man he killed. He should know at least that. But soon he will know, for tomorrow’s paper will identify the dead man, and then he will know more than he can bear. Carson folds the paper and turns up the volume on the television. Maybe that will silence the sound of the gun that keeps going off in his head. The last sound he ever wanted to hear.
    It had gotten so that Carson rarely told anybody he didn’t know that he was a police officer. When he was out in plain clothes, shopping, at a game, shooting the breeze with a stranger, people were friendly. If it was a woman, maybe she would flirt. But then somehow it came out that Carson was a police officer and instantly silence oozed like poison, filling the suddenly yawning space between them. The relaxed, easygoing banter curdled into a wary hesitance that left the man or woman Carson was talking to bereft of speech, except to ask in a hushed whisper, “You’re a police?
For real?
” When he confirmed again that yes, he was in
law enforcement,
people sometimes backed away from him or turned to talk to the person in line behind them. They’d shut their mouths, fold their arms protectively across their chest, look at Carson not only as though because he was a cop he was undoubtedly corrupt and brutal, but as if they were afraid he could see into the tight, tiny chambers of their hearts and glimpse the unpaid traffic tickets, the supplies stolen from the job, the dress shoplifted when they were sixteen, their fantasies of hiring someone to hurt the boss they hate but have to kiss up to in order to keep their job.
    In the eyes of those people, every White cop hog-tied and beat Rodney King, a brutality caught on videotape and shown around the world. Every cop shot Amadou Diallo, unleashing forty-one bullets into the body of that skinny kid from Senegal in the doorway of an apartment in Brooklyn. And to some Black folks, there’s a war on Black people, and cops are waging it. Because he killed an unarmed man he’ll be considered a foot soldier in that war.
    Then there was Bunny accusing him of wearing his uniform all the time. What was he supposed to do? He carried a gun everywhere. He slept with a gun—not in his hands but in his head.
A cop is a cop 24–7,
Carson thinks, feeling the coffee incite a rumbling inside his empty stomach.
A cop
while singing hymns in church on Sunday morning.
A cop
sitting in a restaurant with his family, eyes scanning the place (he can’t help it, it’s automatic), hoping,
Please, nobody go crazy up in here and start acting a fool
. But just in case, his revolver is strapped to his ankle.
A cop
when stumbling out of some bar in plain clothes, head tight, but not quite wasted, coming upon a robbery, the sight instantly clearing his head; he pulls out his revolver, and when a fellow officer,
in uniform,
arrives, he yells, “I’m on the job. I’m on the job,” thrusting his shield into the darkness so
he’s
not pegged as the thief. So
he’s
not busted or blasted. He’s out of uniform, so he’s just Black, not Black and blue. Carson goes into the bathroom and pulls off his sweatshirt, wipes his arms and chest and back with a towel, and finds a bottle of aspirin under the sink. He swallows two with a glass of water.
Maybe this will ease the sweats and chills,
he thinks, but without much conviction. What can he take to stop the sound of the gun firing in his head?
    It was 1988 when he joined the force. With only a month on the job, Carson was called to break up a fight outside a liquor store. His partner had called in sick that day. Young. Inexperienced. Scared of fucking up, making a bad arrest. Driving to the parking lot of a warehouse-size liquor supermarket that was a magnet for troublemakers and rowdies, Carson had a blast of adrenaline pumping, pushing through his veins, making him feel crazy/invincible