for ringbone, they could have the rest of the day for playing. After they studied for a minimum of one and a half hours on weekdays and two on Saturdays and Sundays. And after they took turns pitching and catching a baseball for forty-five minutes on weekends.
Roscoe Rules had convinced both his sons that they would be allstar players their first season in,Little League. And they were. And he had convinced them that if they didn't get straight A's through elementary school they would get what the recalcitrant pony got when it misbehaved.
Roscoe's two sons hated riding as much as the pony hated being ridden, but when the pony wouldn't ride, Roscoe would snare the pony's front feet, loop his rope around the corral fence and deftly jerk the animal's legs back toward his hindquarters, catching the beast when it fell with a straight right between the eyes. He wore his old sap gloves with the lead filled palm and padded knuckles (which a sob sister sergeant had caught him beating up a drunk with and which he had been ordered to get rid of). That jerking rope, that punch and the bone bruising force of crashing to earth never failed to tame the pony who would obey for several weeks until the stupid creature forgot and became stubborn. Then he would require "gentling" again. Roscoe Rules believed that animals and people were basically alike: they were all scrotes.
Roscoe was very proud of the clean healthy life he had provided for his sons away from the city. He counted the years, months and weeks until he could retire with a twenty year service pension to his little ranch east of Chino and live out his days with his wife Clara (a secret drinker), and raise grandchildren in the same American tradition and perhaps buy them ponies and make ballplayers out of them. And give them all the advantages he had provided for his own children.
Roscoe was, like most policemen, conservative politically by virtue of his inescapable police cynicism but more so because of his misanthropy which had its roots in childhood. He had served in Vietnam and had almost made the Army his career until an LAPD recruiting poster had forced him to compare the benefits of police work to military service.
Roscoe was not a religious man. He scowled at American Legion benedictions. He scoffed at his Presbyterian wife and forbade her to make weaklings of their children by taking them to Sunday school. He said that instead of turning the other cheek you should sap the motherfuckers to their knees then choke them put until they were "doing the chicken" on the ground and then step over their twitching, jerking, unconscious bodies and kneedrop them with the full weight of your body down through the spear of the knee into the kidney. And that if Jesus Christ didn't have the balls to treat his enemies like that he was just another faggot Jew. Roscoe Rules wasn't raising his sons to be faggots.
But Roscoe Rules had a sense of humor. He carried in his wallet two photographs from his Army days which were getting cracked and faded despite the plastic, envelopes he kept them in. One showed a Vietnamese girl of twelve or thirteen trying gamely to earn five American dollars by copulating an emaciated oxen which Roscoe and several other American cowboys had lassoed and tied thrashing on its back in a bamboo corral.
The second photo, which everyone at Wilshire Station had seen, was of Roscoe holding the severed head of a Vietcong by the hair as Roscoe leered into the camera, tongue lolling, neck twisted to one side. The photo had "Igor and friend" printed across the bottom. The thought of the photo was to trigger Roscoe's finest hour as a member of the Los Angeles Police Department.
Whaddayamean Dean hated being the partner of someone as mean as Roscoe Rules. He knew his own physical limitations and rarely talked tough on the street unless he was absolutely sure that the other person was terrified of police, in which case he allowed himself the luxury of tossing around a few