A tale of purgatory. A scenario of transition. A true, short tale of a time between military active duty and the subsequent transition to civilian life. I’ve changed the names because…well…I’ve just changed the names. It made it easier to write. Rated R for language and sexual content.
“Yo, Matt!”
Matt Turner snatched the tossed car keys from the air with his left hand.
“It’s clean, right?”, he asked. The question provoked the expected reaction.
“Stop fuckin’ worrying about whether the patrol car is clean…”
“I am worried about whether the fuckin’ patrol car is clean. I gotta spend the next twelve hours in it.”
He waited a few seconds.
“It’s clean, right?”
“Fuck you!” Jim Dawson, turned and ducked inside the door of the office behind him.
Matt opened the door of the little vehicle and looked closely at the seat. It didn’t appear to have any signs of the chewing gum he’d sat in before. The car, while not spotless, wasn’t especially filthy. All patrol division security guards shared the limited number of vehicles that the company provided. Matt pulled the door shut and inserted the ignition key. Without turning the key he stared out of the windshield.
Three seventy five an hour. He repeated it. From an officer in the United States Army to three seventy five an hour. Out of which came the purchase of his security guard uniforms and gas money for the trips to and from work. Nowhere near the six dollars an hour he was making while working as a lumber handler at Ray Lumber. Even at that, it was barely enough to make ends meet and the long hours during the day on black asphalt in the broiling Arizona summers made it an all-around miserable experience.
He hadn’t returned to the lumber yard after his latest Army Reserve gig. The other workers had resented the fact that he’d made more than their four dollars an hour, a fact they’d learned from a jealous yard boss. So, when he hadn’t bothered going back, no one raised a protest. Then again, he thought, his current pay as a patrol officer was a step up from the three and a quarter an hour that he’d made as a stationary guard. Security guards weren’t licensed at the time and the company required that they provide their own sidearms. He checked his Smith and Wesson Model 28 Highway Patrolman one last time. When he swung open the cylinder the primers of six .357 Magnum rounds stared up at him. Satisfied, he holstered the weapon.
Yeah, they’d said, go to the premier military academy in the world. Even if you don’t make the military a career, they’d told him, you’ll be able to get a good job that others can’t.
He sat there a moment longer, fighting the urge to feel sorry for himself. Then he turned the key.
As he pulled onto Indian School Road he saw the restaurant coming up on his left. Most nights he and fellow patrolman Diego would meet there for dinner at the beginning of their shifts. This was, strictly speaking, a violation of company policy. Each officer had a “beat”. Within that beat, they had a given number of accounts needing to be checked during their shift. The officers were not to leave the geographic area of their beat. This rule was violated on a per shift basis as the officers would get together for meals. Eating “lunch” at 0100 hours, and eating it alone, simply heaped more misery on what was little more than an extra-paycheck job. Tonight Diego was already on a call. Dinner would have to wait.
Matt remembered the early morning when he’d approached an individual standing on the lot of one of his auto dealership accounts. “Sir” was all he’d said when the large man suddenly whirled around and rushed at him, spewing epithets. Matt stood his ground but turned slightly to move his weapon a little farther away from the individual. Instinctively he’d dropped his hand to the butt of the pistol. “If he comes within arm’s reach…”, Matt thought. The man stopped just a few feet away, fists balled and face flushed.
“Get out of here you fucking rent-a-cop! Leave me alone!”
Matt hadn’t moved. “Sir, I just need…”
“I don’t give a FUCK what you need, you low-rent cop-wannabe! Leave me the fuck alone!”
When Matt still didn’t move the man turned and quickly walked to a parked pickup truck. Matt got the license number and gave it to the police officers when they arrived. One of them said, “You should have shot the sonofabitch.”
Matt smiled. “Ammo’s expensive.” Grinning, the officer radioed the information.
“Yeah”, Matt thought as he’d fired up the little Chevette that was his home for the shift. “Three seventy five an hour.”
The first half of his night had proved uneventful. It wasn’t much after 0200 that his radio broke the monotony of the little car engine’s droning.
“Twenty Four, Dispatch.”
Matt reached for the handset.
“Twenty Four.”
“Twenty Four, I have a number for you to call. Are you prepared to copy?”
“Stand by.”
Well, this is odd, he thought as he pulled over at an all-night convenience store. He’d never had to make a phone call on shift before.
“Dispatch, Twenty Four. Prepared to copy.”
After he’d written down the number he heard dispatch make the same call to Diego who was now back on the road. Digging some change out of his pocket, Matt made the call from one of the store’s pay phones. A woman’s voice answered the ringing.
“Hello.”
“Hi, this is Matt Turner. I was told to call this number…?”
“Matt! Matt, it’s Caroline!”
Caroline. The dark-haired little cutie who held down the dispatch slot some nights when Matt was on duty. Her shift ended at midnight. Matt felt himself smile.
“Hey, girl, what’s up?”
“W-e-l-l”, she was being coy. “We’re having a little party here at my place. Wanted to see if you want to drop by for a while.”
Matt’s smile faded. “You know we’re not supposed to go out of our beat area.”
Silence. Then,
“Just for a little while. You and Diego, no one will know. Look, do you want to come by or not?”
Back in the car, Matt studied the street map. Then he turned off the overhead light and put the car in gear. He didn’t like it. What if it was a test, or a trap? What if someone just wanted to see if he’d break company protocol? As Matt pulled out onto the road he felt himself starting to smile again. Three seventy five an hour.
Matt and Diego arrived at the address at the same time.
“What’s going on?” Asked Diego in a half-whisper.
“No idea.”
As they approached the front door Matt felt that there was something wrong. He couldn’t put his finger on it but a sixth sense caused the hair on the back of his neck to rise. There were no cars in the driveway except the cruisers. Matt rang the bell. When there was no answer he rang it again and followed up with loud knocking. When there was still no answer he tried the door. It was unlocked. He drew his weapon. Almost simultaneously, Diego drew his own. Matt opened the door and stepped inside.
Smoke. Smoke so thick it moved about like a stray cloud that had lost its way and didn’t know that it was supposed to live in the sky outside. Marijuana. After a cursory glance about the room, Matt saw a figure lying on the couch. It was Caroline, dressed in her panties and a T-shirt. Mat touched her shoulder.
“Caroline. Caroline! Wake up! Hey, Caroline, wake up!”
Hearing a woman’s voice behind him, Matt turned to see Debbie, the other half of the before-midnight-dispatch duo, sitting up on a love seat. Diego was with her.
After a while, seated next to Caroline she seemed to Matt to be coming around. She yawned.
“Are you OK?”, he asked her. She nodded. “Good”, he said. He got up and started toward the door. Caroline intercepted him.
“Are you sure?”, she asked as she stood in front of him. She reached up and kissed his neck. “Are you sure you want to go?” She began to push him, gently, back into the room. She pushed him back until they were behind the couch.
Matt spun Caroline around and gave her a slight push between the shoulders. With a startled, “Oh…!” she bent forward over the back of the couch. He dropped to both knees behind her. Pressing his lips against one cheek just above the top of her panties, he hooked his fingers into the fabric and slowly worked them down. His lips followed, kissing her bare skin repeatedly as he moved his mouth left and right. When he’d eased the panties to the tops of her thighs, he kissed the top of the valley created by the mounds of her buttocks. With a hand on each cheek, he began to gently spread them as his tongue traveled downward. One inch down, half an inch up, one more inch down, half an inch back up. Caroline remained quiet and immobile. Matt felt her sphincter tighten as it responded to his tongue’s teasing.
Suddenly, Caroline stood up and spun around. She leaned forward and covered Matt’s mouth with hers. After what felt like an hour of fervent, open mouth kissing, Matt got off his knees. Caroline completely removed her panties from around her thighs and, taking Matt by the hand, she said quietly, “Come with me. We can do better than this.” Out of the corner of his eye Matt saw Diego on the couch with Debbie. They were beyond a casual greeting.
Lying in bed a sweaty Caroline turned to a tired Matt. She smiled. “What will you say if they ask why you’ve been out of radio contact?”
He turned toward her and chuckled. “Hell, I hadn’t thought about it. They don’t call that much, maybe no one noticed.”
It was her turn to chuckle. “Yeah, except Diego!”
“Yeah”, Matt returned, “Except Diego.” Not completely spent he reached for her thigh beneath the covers.
“Whoa, big boy, you don’t have the time.”
He stopped. After a moment Matt slowly got out of bed. He looked around the bedroom for pieces of his uniform that had been spread to all four walls.
“You’re right”, he said, bending over to pick up his underwear. “I really don’t have the time.”
Dressed, Matt took his gun belt off the bedpost and buckled it around his waist. In a bathrobe, Caroline walked him to the door. Matt noted that there was no sign of Diego. Caroline reached up and gave him a lingering kiss on his lips.
“Thank you”, she smiled.
“Believe me”, he said, “The pleasure was mine.”
The remainder of Matt’s shift was uneventful. By comparison, most things would be uneventful, he thought. There had been no further contact with dispatch.
As Matt checked out at headquarters at the end of his shift, a bedraggled Diego, complete with sleep creases on his face and badly mussed hair, wandered through the door. He threw Matt an “Oh, well” look of resignation. Walking over to the lieutenant’s desk Diego dropped his badge. He said, “Here you go, you’re going to fire me anyway. I didn’t check half of my accounts.” The lieutenant seemed dumbstruck. Diego looked at Matt and shrugged his shoulders.
“I fell asleep.”
Matt successfully refrained from smiling until he’d made it outside.
A week later, things went south for Matt. At the start of his shift he saw the sticky remnants of a spilled soda on the driver’s seat of his vehicle. He hurried inside, hoping that Dawson hadn’t left yet. He was in luck.
“Hey, Dawson! There’s soda all over the seat of the car! What the hell is wrong with you? Lieutenant, I’m going nowhere in that car until this pig cleans it up!”
Dawson retorted loudly, “You can’t talk to me that way!”
Matt had his back toward him and started to turn around.
“The hell I can’t…”
Matt didn’t finish his sentence. He saw Dawson’s stance. As Matt would tell a friend later, “That motherfucker was going to draw on me!”
The lieutenant flew around his desk. “Go home! Both of you, go home! Now!”
Matt broke the uncomfortable silence that followed.
“Here!” He dropped his badge onto the lieutenant’s desk. “Shove this up Dawson’s ass!”
This incident, like others of its nature, would turn out to be a blessing in disguise. Working 12 hour shifts, Matt had little time for other pursuits. Now he was free to move on. He took a job as a stationary guard for Wells Fargo while at night taking classes in another of his passions: computer programming. It was a move that would lead to a greatly satisfying carer.
Diego wasn’t gone long before the security firm, realizing they were losing one of their best men, rehired him.
Matt would see Caroline again but not on intimate terms. He would learn from a former colleague that it had been her aspiration to make it through as many of the male security force in the company as possible. She wasn’t interested in retreads.
Matt was left shaking his head. What sort of boring, mundane existence was being led by the individual who said, “Nothing good happens after midnight.”
And so it goes.
—
Dempsey 🌵
Chalk Dust 