Tropical Depression Read Online Free PDF Page A

pain shot around my skull if I tried to use my head for anything except pointing my eyes.
    I had plenty to think about and it all hurt. Jennifer and I had just finished another of our early-morning screaming matches. She had this nutty idea that just because she married me she ought to see me every now and then. She said I had this two-year-old daughter who thought the mailman was her daddy.
    A cliché like Cops and Divorce can be a tremendous pain in the ass when you’re living through it. You can’t find much comfort in the fact that you’re falling in with the statistical norm. I was fighting it with both hands, but we were edging closer and closer to divorce. It seemed like every morning when I left for work and every night when I came home there was another yelling session. Each time we shouted we said things we shouldn’t. Each awful thing we said was a little worse than the one before, a little harder to gloss over, apologize for, rationalize. I felt like we were both passengers on some kind of wild amusement-park ride. The guy running it was drunk, the ride was spinning out of control, and nobody could do any more than ride it out and hope we all landed okay.
    Except lately it was looking like we weren’t going to land at all.
    We’d said some truly hurtful things this morning. Most of them centered on my shortcomings as a father and a human being. It was getting tougher to explain myself—even to me. I loved my wife and my daughter, loved them so much it hurt sometimes. But I worked long hours. I had to. I was a cop. I had been a cop for a long time before I got married, and I expected to be a cop for a long time to come. It was the only way I had been able to work things out for myself, to balance what I believed with who I was and how I lived. It worked for me.
    And on the darker side, I loved the faintly queasy thrill of it, of never knowing when a bullet or a knife might be aimed at my back. I loved waiting for danger, meeting it, beating it. I loved the high-stakes crap game of putting my life on the line, gambling it to keep the rest of the world safe.
    It was not just the thrill of danger, but danger that meant something. Resisting it mattered, helped in a small way to make things better—or at least kept things from getting much worse more quickly. I guess that’s what Roscoe meant when he said I was still a rookie in my heart. Most cops lose their idealism pretty quickly; I never did. I liked doing something that was both important and dangerous. I never felt so alive as when I was answering a call that might mean my death. That’s why I resisted promotion, fought to stay on the street. I loved seeing results, and I loved the danger.
    I could see where that might not make sense to someone like Jennifer. She was a resolutely Good Person. She was tough, strong, but she hadn’t seen what I had and so she still believed in the basic goodness of human beings.
    I never tried to disillusion her. That sweet inner core of hers was my anchor to the fake Real World that most people live in. I came home from work in my world and gladly stepped into the loving order of hers. I could leave it all at work: the whores ripped up by their pimp’s knives because they blew their money on crack, the shit-bums who drowned because they were so wracked by wine and TB they couldn’t even roll up onto the sidewalk when it rained, the day-old babies fished out of dumpsters in several pieces—all the grisly, nightmare pieces of reality that swept me along every time I went on duty. I could walk away from it and into sanity in a way that most cops can’t, and it was only because of Jennifer. She kept that bright, wonderful, silly version of How Things Are alive and well, and I let her, grateful that it could include me, somebody who knew better.
    I could see now that was a mistake.
    I lived in both worlds, understood both sides. She never did, never could understand what it meant to be a cop. She thought of it as a career,