“I’ll get the cheque.”
* * *
At the beginning, when he started to make his way down her body, she said, “Ray, you don’t have to do that, you know. I told you I’m not a dyke, right?”
He stopped, looked up, and spoke with careful and serious enunciation. “Well, I believe you said you didn’t say you were. Not the same thing. I can check my notebook if you want me to give sworn testimony.”
He listened to her laughing and carried on. Inside he felt huge and complete and artistic, and full of laughter and something else. He thought of his wife, after the second shooting, after she found demonstrators in front of their split. Ray? Ray? You’re not a racist, are you? She was a cop’s daughter and her dad had never unholstered his gun, except for cleaning and duty inspection. He thought of the skipper and his hatred of Djuna Brown but realized it was simply a connection to the worst part of his life, a dead child in a garage. Djuna Brown had unknowingly revealed the moment when the skipper’s soul exposed itself and he was embarrassed by it. Ray Tate thought of the story Djuna Brown hadn’t talked about but everyone had heard: after she beat the teeth out of her moronic partner she’d been ambushed by the roadside and found naked by a passing motorist. The legs of her uniform pants tied at the ankles and a bratwurst sausage glued into her freshly shaven crotch. Someone brought the battery-operated razor, someone brought the glue, someone brought the sausage. Who else but cops? The very best people in the world and the very worst. She should have shied away from ever wanting to be one of them but she hadn’t and now she was here under his face.
She made a sound. He thought of a joke he’d once heard: how to do know when you’ve gone to bed with a lesbian? When you wake up in the morning you’ve still got a hard-on and your face is glazed like a doughnut.
He lifted his face to tell her that one. She grunted in urgent frustration and forced him down. His head was in a muscular vice of the cinnamon and the salty and he realized he was happy, felt that until now he’d walked a journey planned in advance for him from foster homes to high school to police college to uniform to plainclothes and back to uniform where he ended up with his Glock in his hand, standing over freshly dead black men. No one said: mix paints and slap them on canvas, dream about Paris, go down on a black chick, and when you’ve done all that you’ll be … What?
She began shuddering and whooping and then went boneless and he realized she’d been as without as he had. She patted his head like a boy when she was done. “Ray Tate, the king of swing. Jazzy Ray.”
“Well,” he said modestly, moving back up her body. “It has been said I blow a cool axe.”
* * *
After midnight, when she was in the shower, he took the gin from his bag and realized he’d forgotten to get mix. Wrapped in a towel he went barefoot out onto the icy motel landing and looked for a dispenser machine or at least an ice bucket. The machine was wrecked, there was no ice. He saw a group of Indians clutching bottles leaving from the back of the diner, the cook counting a wad of money.
He made gin and taps in plastic cups and carried them to the sagging bed. She came out of the washroom wrapped in a towel. They stretched out. She sprawled on top of him, weightless, he thought.
She began talking, her voice sometimes muffled, facing away from his face, her head on his chest.
* * *
She’d been one of only four minorities at the academy. The others were a dour heavy black woman and two Native ladies who looked almost identical. She was the smallest of them all and took some pretty good beatings on the self-defence mat. Often she found herself paired against the largest man, then the largest woman, the black one, then both of them together. There was a sexual aspect to the grappling, particularly with the black woman who loved to get her into a body scissors while overpowering her head with her breasts. Throughout her training she ached and nursed bruises; she had twisted fingers from small Japanese come-alongs and shooting pains in her elbows and shoulders from the takedowns. She had hickeys on her neck from the sport of the larger men who could apply them thoroughly in the ten seconds it took to legally pin her down. But none of it bothered her; she deflected the interest of the woman and the men with humour.
“I knew it was going to be rough,” she told Ray Tate, entwining their legs. “My dad drove a taxi nights in the capital and he saw cops all the time taking people down. When I told him I was going to apply he said I was too small. He wanted me to be a secretary like my sister or a nurse like my mum. When I told him I was giving it a try anyway he sent me to a self-defence school, twice a week for a year while I waited to get evaluated. Mostly what I learned was that you get up fast, afterwards, even if you lose. You look around for somebody else to get into it with. Even if you lose, my dad always said, make sure you’re not the only one going to Emergency.
“Anyway, the physical stuff wasn’t the problem. The problem wasn’t even the guys, at first. There was one guy who just wanted me. He was a nice young guy, farm boy from up Stanton way; he just locked onto me. Hangdog stuff. Little notes in my textbooks, helping me up after we grappled on the mat, invites out for drinks. I wasn’t too attentive to how I handled him. So one night when he asked me out for beers, near the end there, on a weekend, I said I couldn’t, that I had a date. He was okay. You know, oh shit, sorry, I didn’t know, sorry, sorry, sorry.
“So that night we all went into town on a bus. Everybody goes off to do their thing and I headed out in a taxi for a little restaurant, a little out of town. After dinner I go into the bar to have a couple of pops before heading back to get the bus. The other black trainee, Bernice, was off in a corner of the bar. She comes over and sits down. Nice to have a night away from the boys, she said, let’s have a girls’ night out. I right away told her her scene wasn’t my scene. Okay, she said, and we had a couple of drinks and chatted. Just chitchat about this part of the course, that instructor, where we wanted to work when we graduated. It was okay. She had some funny stories about living down south — she was from near Knoxville — and we laughed a lot.
“So we get a taxi and we head back to the bus. We’re walking up the road and there’s the farm boy waiting to board. He sees us and he looks at me funny. I said to Bernie: Oh, shit, he asked me out. I told him I had a hot date tonight. And bang, just like that she’s got her arm around me and twists my face around, plants a big fucking wet one on me. I thought I was going to choke on her tongue. She had a very long tongue. ‘Stuck up cunt,’ she said, ‘see how you like being a dyke.’ All night she’d hated me. All night she just laid back in the weeds and waited for a shot.
“After that I was a dyke. No way to undo it. Don’t even try. All the guys I’d been friendly with, gentle with when they asked me out or flirted, you could see their faces, that Bernice was the honest one — she didn’t hide her flavour. But I’d betrayed them, trying to pass as straight and leading them on. You can hop into bed with a hundred guys after that and it doesn’t matter. Word got around. Boy, did word ever get around. They put me as far away from civilization as they could, way up north where they don’t like blacks particularly, even if they’re Christian blacks. Bar fights, domestics, kids killing themselves huffing gasoline in bags, kids killing each other because … Well, who even knew? Frozen babies, burned babies, beaten babies, chewed babies. Jack-lighters and bear gallbladder poachers and guys who operate moonshine rigs. Laid-off workers hanging themselves from trees like empty pods.”
She lay there a few moments thinking: I’m giving him all the bad stuff. She wondered if she should talk about sudden rivers of fish, kind old men coming by the bright wooden detachment with creels of trout and presenting them in respectful silence, the sickening but soulful smoky smells of sweat lodges, of the open-faced youngest children who came by with beaded god necklaces. Her pre-dawn rounds when she couldn’t sleep, driving the big old cranky four-by-four through the Indian country, through the white trash Christian towns full of churches, wishing she could hate it all but loving it more and more.
“Anyway,” she said, “they call it the Spout up here. If they don’t want you, you go to the Spout and they pour you out.” She turned her head and looked