Someday_ADE Read Online Free PDF Page A

Molloy asked.
    —If a cop calls you, what does he say?
    —What do you mean, what does he say?
    —I mean, how does he say he’s a policeman? What’s the official way to do it? The desk cop was silent for a few seconds.
    —A cop called you. What’d he say? What’d he want?
    —He didn’t call me, he called a friend.
    —What did he say to your friend?
    I couldn’t hang up, because I wouldn’t get the information I wanted. If I hung up, Molloy could have the call traced. I’d be in trouble for making harassing calls to precincts, which would be extremely ironic.
    —He said to her… he said, Hello, I’m the police.
    —Yeah. Then what?
    —And then, then he said…
    I didn’t want to tell him the story, give my friend’s real name, tell him about her tickets in two states, and her car being parked illegally, and her bribing the guy in the corporate lot. But I had to give him some sense of the situation in order to get the information I needed.
    —He said to her, Hi, Diana. Hi, I’m the police. Then he said, he said, Diana… Diana… have you done anything wrong lately?
    There was a very long silence.
    —Have you done anything wrong lately? Molloy repeated.
    It was weird coming from a cop’s mouth. He gathered his thoughts, while I remained breathlessly quiet.
    —A police officer wouldn’t say that, Molloy answered soberly. A police officer wouldn’t say that.
    —He wouldn’t, I repeated, just as gravely.
    The cop thought again, for a longer time.
    —Listen, I want you to let me know if he ever calls your friend again. Because a cop shouldn’t do that… He trailed off.
    —That guy’s impersonating an officer.
    —Oh, yeah. I’m sure he won’t… he probably won’t call her again. But if he does, I’ll phone you immediately, I promise.
    —You do that, Molloy said.
    —I will. Thanks, I said.
    —Yeah, he said. Maybe Molloy didn’t believe any of this, but he did the whole thing straight.
    I called my friend, and we stayed on the phone for hours, laughing about how crazy I was to say “Have you done anything wrong lately?” to a cop, with all its implications, and we laughed about her racing out of her house to the corporate lot, jumping into her car and driving off in search of a legal parking space as if she were being chased by the devil.
    Maybe the devil was chasing her and me. Because we laughed off and on for about a year more, and then we had less to laugh about, and then nothing to laugh about. I don’t know, we grew to distrust each other, and stopped being friends. Maybe Molloy laughed later.

Give Us Some Dirt

    On long, summer nights in Pin Point, the Georgia air hung still as a corpse, and they’d wait for a breeze to save them. The heat felt like another skin on Clarence. His Mother would say, Clarence, what have you been up to? Playing by the river again? Oh Lord, we’ve got to clean you up for church, but aren’t you something to behold? And his mother would clap her palms together or spread her arms wide, like their preacher. Oh, Lord, she’d exclaim. Sometimes she’d point to sister and lovingly scold, “She doesn’t get up to trouble like you, son.” Clarence scrubbed the mud off until his knuckles nearly bled, while his sister giggled.
    These days she wasn’t laughing so much.
    The dirt couldn’t be washed away, not after Clarence kneeled in their white church, and they slimed him with derision. They couldn’t see who he was, how hard he’d worked, what he’d had to do, but he knew how to act. Behave yourself, boy, Daddy would say. Clarence’s grandfather, Clarence called him Daddy, was a strict, righteous man, who never complained, not even during segregation times, didn’t say a word, so Clarence wouldn’t, either. Those days were over, and they had their freedom now. He set Daddy’s bust on a shelf near his desk in his new office.
    The D.C. nights mortified him, the air as suffocating as Pin Point’s. Clarence couldn’t free himself of history’s