Sympathy Between Humans Read online

  He gave me a small smile. “I designed that pole,” he said. “That’s what I do for a living. Well, I do a couple of things. That’s one of them. You want a smoke?”

  “No, thanks,” I told him.

  “Well, I’m gonna have one,” he said.

  Usually the men are nervous, and in a hurry. This man acted like we’d just sat down together at a lounge for cocktails. He was entirely at ease, rolling down his window to exhale with almost lordly pleasure. “Yeah,” he said reflectively, “I heard you’ve got some of the best fishing in America, up in your lake country. Is that true?”

  “I don’t fish,” I said lamely. I’d never had to make small talk with a john before. This really was not going well at all.

  “Some friends told me I should come,” he went on. “My wife died a few years ago. I haven’t taken any vacation time since then.”

  His eyelashes were black, much darker than the rest of his fair coloring would have indicated, when his gaze flicked downward as if he were shy about saying that last part. I wondered if he’d been with another woman in those years he’d referred to, or if he was trying to work up to making me the first. And I imagined myself standing before a judge someday, not long from now, and explaining that in a world full of men who beat up prostitutes, spent the milk money on sex, and brought diseases home to their wives, I had gone out on the streets on Hennepin County’s behalf and caught a courteous, widowed fishing pole designer.

  “ Gary,” I said, straightening, “are you ever going to ask me for sex?”

  He blinked, but I thought I saw a flicker of amusement behind his thick glasses. “Are all you Minnesotans in this big a hurry?” he asked.

  “Well,” I said, “I can’t speak for all Minnesotans, especially since I come from out West, but in my case it has a lot to do with the fact that I’m a Hennepin County Sheriff’s detective. And if you suggest some kind of sex-for-money deal, then I’m going to have to arrest you, and I’d really rather not do that if it’s all the same to you. I’m guessing it is.”

  Gary, who had come perilously close to dropping his cigarette from his mouth onto his lap, said, “You’re a cop?”

  “On my good days,” I said, and opened the door to the Chevy and climbed out. Then I turned in the doorway. “One last thing,” I said.

  I’d been planning to leave him with an admonition to leave the working girls alone while in Minneapolis, but then I saw something I should have noticed before. His hand, resting on the steering wheel, had a warm tone from the sun even where it wasn’t freckled. All except for a slightly paler line on the ring finger. The tan line was too recent for the passage of time he’d been widowed. He’d been wearing the ring much longer. My glib words dried up in my throat. “Never mind,” I said.

  That should have been the end of it, but Gareth’s voice caught up with me.

  “Sarah,” he said.

  I turned back.

  “Be safe,” he said.

  It was an unexpected kindness, and I merely nodded, not knowing what I might have said.

  Perhaps five minutes of pacing my spot again let me recover my composure, even a little bit of bravado. That made two men I’d let slip through my net tonight. The next guy so much as looks at my ass, I thought, I swear to God, I’m going to arrest him.

  The next car was a gleaming dove-gray sedan. Again a window rolled down, and I leaned over to look in. A middle-aged man sat behind the wheel, slender, balding, a little Mediterranean-looking, wearing a well-tailored suit.

  “May I offer you a ride?” he asked.

  “Why don’t you pull around the corner,” I said, “and we can talk for a minute, okay?”

  Unlike Gary, this man had no interest in learning my name, although he told me I could call him Paul. The car’s interior smelled new, and a sticker identified it as part of a rental fleet. Paul was from out of town.

  “What’s on your mind tonight, Paul?” I asked.

  “I thought you might want to make a little deal,” he said. “Do you like coke?”

  I looked at him sidewise. Better and better, a soliciting bust with a side of narcotics possession. “Who doesn’t?” I said.

  “I thought maybe with a few lines you could go down to fifty dollars for a half-and-half.”

  Just what the world needs, a frugal john. “Seventy-five.”

  “That’s fine.” Paul’s heart wasn’t in the negotiation.

  “And I need to see the blow first.”

  “It’s right back there, in my briefcase,” he said, indicating the backseat with a slight wave of his hand. “Do you have, ah, someplace we can go?”

  Ignoring him, I rose to my knees and turned, pulling his slender briefcase onto the front seat with us. “Is this thing locked?” I asked, but didn’t wait before I pressed the release with my thumb. It snapped noisily, and I opened the case. There it was, such a world of trouble for this guy in such a little plastic bag.

  Paul was unfazed by my coarse behavior. Paul was a man of the world. He knew that an expensive suit pays for itself in the long run, that business class is a rip-off, and that $75 hookers give their johns a hard time. As I snapped the briefcase shut, Paul restated his earlier question.

  “So,” he asked, “do you have somewhere that you take men?”

  “I sure do,” I told him cheerfully, pulling my shield out of my leather coat.

  ***

  It was after four in the morning when I left work, after staying late to cover for a co-worker whose child was sick. But even when I left, I wasn’t tired, just hungry. I was thinking that if I knocked on the back door of a bakery, I might be able to buy something really fresh and warm from the oven.

  It was on this errand, which took me toward the outskirts of the city, that I saw a woman refilling a Star Tribune rack. Impulse made me pull to the side of the road. Shiloh had taken care of our subscription to the Strib, and in his absence, I’d let it lapse.

  The days of the newspaper boy, the kid on the bike, are largely over. The circulation driver was perhaps 30, with a pinched, makeupless face and short, flyaway hair. Her Toyota Starlet idled by the curb. The look she gave me as I approached was wary; she thought I was looking for a free paper before she closed the rack.

  “Go ahead,” I told her. “I’ll buy one after you’re finished.”

  The woman set up the display copy in the window and let the door close with a slam. I stepped into the place she’d been, fishing for a pair of quarters.

  “Is that a kid, at this hour?” she asked, behind me.

  “Is what a kid?” I asked absently, feeding the coin slot.

  “Yelling like that. You didn’t hear it?”

  She must have had ears like radar. Or maybe she had kids and there was such a thing as maternal intuition.

  “I don’t hear anything,” I said.

  “Over there,” she said, pointing.

  I looked. Empty street, streetlights, shuttered businesses. A running figure on the sidewalk, about 10 or 11 years old. A child in the street. At four-thirty in the morning.

  I ran to intercept him.

  Closing the distance between us, I raised my hands and gestured for the boy to stop. He was thin, and breathing like a fire horse. He had pale skin, but black hair that looked like it had been cut in the time-honored bowl method with household shears, and his shirt and pants were too big.

  “What’s wrong?” I said, dropping to my heels before him. “Is someone hurting you?”

  The boy released a torrent of words, but all in what was, to the best of my knowledge, a Slavic language. We stared at each other in mutual frustrated incomprehension. Then he twisted away from me and pointed back in the direction he’d come.

  A drainage ditch ran through this small, light-industrial neighborhood; I could hear its full-throated sound, working overtime after the heavy recent rains. Where it went under the street, a fence of three tubular rails lined the sidewalk, rib cage-high on an adult. Near it, on the sidewalk, were stiff forms of metal that
resolved themselves, on a closer look, into bikes heeled over on their side. Two bikes. One kid.

  The boy was right behind me as I ran over for a closer look. Just before the drainage ditch went under the street, it dropped a surprisingly good distance into a wider pool bounded by cement walls to prevent overflow onto the street in rains like the kind we’d been having. In drier weather, we’d probably have been looking down into some mud and marshy grass, through which ran a sedate creek. Not now. This early morning, the rains had created a catchpool that roiled irregularly, turbulently.

  “Did somebody fall?” To illustrate, I made walking fingers with one hand toward the railing, rising slightly to illustrate climbing, and then I imitated a plunge down.

  The kid nodded and said something I didn’t understand.

  The newspaper driver had arrived behind us. “Call 911,” I said, swinging a leg over the railing. “Tell them a kid fell in. Take this boy with you and keep him calm.” I didn’t wait for her to acknowledge my request, climbing down to dangle from the lowest railing, with my feet swinging above the surface of the water.

  All this, from the kid pointing to the water to my instructions to the newspaper driver to my climb over the fence, took maybe ninety seconds. But it was long enough for me to think of last fall and 14-year-old Ellie Bernhardt. I’d jumped into the Mississippi River after her and briefly made myself famous around the department for it, particularly because I wasn’t a very strong swimmer.

  I wish I could say that when I flashed back on Ellie Bernhardt I was thinking something ironic, like, Why does this stuff always happen to me? But I wasn’t. I was simply thinking, God, don’t let me drown. Then I let go.

  This water was warmer than I remembered the waters of the Mississippi, but still cool. And turbulent, pulling in varying directions, but not hard. I felt the tugging most strongly low down, toward my calves and feet, in the direction of the underpass, where the water was being drawn under the street.

  Diving down, I opened my eyes, to see nothing before me but a brown-gray wall. I felt around in the direction the water was flowing, toward the street. It stood to reason that anything heavy that had fallen into the water would have gotten pulled in that direction. But my fingers brushed nothing, and my lungs began to burn. Air never seems to last as long as it should in these situations. It didn’t help that my heart was probably slamming away at 140 beats a minute. I rose and broke the surface, panting. As I did so, something bumped my foot.

  I inhaled fast and made a jackknife dive, feeling ahead of me again. This time, something brushed against my hand, not solid, more like cloth. It was animated by water, so that it rippled against my hand. When I caught it in my hand and pulled, I felt a corresponding resistance. It wasn’t just an old shirt that had ended up in a canal. Someone was in it.

  Surfacing was one thing, but it was harder to pull the child up. The thin body had no buoyancy and was weighed down by sodden clothes and waterlogged shoes. Wet black hair broke the surface first, shining and plastered against pale skin. I rolled him over so that his face was raised toward the still-dark sky.

  In the rescue textbooks it looks so simple; the diagrams are so clean and neat. The boy and I were illustrating something else: the messiness of real life. I was trying to get a feel for whether he was breathing, if his rib cage was rising and falling under my encircling arm. Theoretically, I should have been able to tell, but I couldn’t. I looked hopefully up toward the railing for the Toyota woman, but she wasn’t there. Just concrete wall on every side, at least five feet of it above the water level. There was no purchase, no handholds that I could see. The boy’s weight kept pushing me under, my legs working hard, treading water, wanting support where there wasn’t any.

  Just then, a face appeared at the railing. He was a stranger, but the sight of his face filled me with relief.

  He was quite young, perhaps 23 or 24, and Asian, his face sculpted in hard, clean lines, his eyes thoughtful. He’d shaved almost all his head, except for a patch like a trapezoidal Mohawk near the front; it should have looked silly but didn’t. I couldn’t see what he was wearing, a uniform or civilian clothes, but I didn’t need to. Some people show up in difficult times, and it doesn’t matter that you’ve never met them before. You see their faces and immediately know they’ve come to help. He was one of those.

  “How you guys doing down there?” he asked.

  “Not good.”

  He nodded, quite calm. “Okay,” he said, looking at the water thoughtfully as if this were a physics problem in a textbook. “I’m going see if I can’t drop a backboard.”

  That’s what he did. When I’d gotten the boy onto the board, I watched his chest and stomach, wrapped in the wet embrace of a sodden red T-shirt. It fell as I watched, rose again. He was breathing. My mind was eased by the sight, like my body felt newly light at being shed of the boy’s weight in the water.

  When I was up on the street again, I could see that the rescuer wore the dark-blue jumpsuit of a paramedic. His partner, younger yet and blond, was taking care of the boy. The Asian medic glanced over at them, sized up the situation as under control, and sat on his heels next to me.

  “I’m all right,” I said.

  “I know,” he told me.

  There we were: a tall, courteous kid with a postmodern haircut and a half-drowned county detective.

  “Sarah Pribek,” I said, holding out my hand. “Hennepin County Sheriff’s Department.”

  He shook my hand. “Nate Shigawa,” he said.

  “Pleased to meet you,” I said.

  From behind him came a high, thin cry. The newspaper driver had returned, and she wasn’t alone. With her was the boy who’d raised the alarm about his fallen brother and a woman in an inexpensive print dress and long black hair tucked back in a head-scarf. The woman was looking around- not at her son, whom the young EMT was attending to, but everywhere else. Into the back of the ambulance, on the nearby ground, at Shigawa and me. She spoke rapidly in the same Slavic tongue as her son.

  When her sharp, urgent inquiries earned her only blank looks, she ran to the bikes. She pointed at one of them, then to the boy who stood by the Toyota, dry and unharmed. Then she picked up the second bike and pointed to the boy on the stretcher. Then she thumped the handlebars of the second bike, as if to indicate a rider there.

  Shigawa and I looked at each other, having the same terrible realization: this woman has three children.

  We both went to the railing, to look down at the water rolling below, unbroken by anything that resembled a hand or a foot or a scrap of material. It had been too long. Far too long.

  “I’ll go,” I said. “I’ve already been in.”

  “No, don’t do that,” said Shigawa’s partner, coming to join us. His name tag identified him as Schiller.

  “Somebody’s got to,” I said.

  “In a couple of hours it’ll be daywatch,” Schiller said. “The county can send some divers out. They’re trained for this.” Schiller was clearly a newly minted EMT, and I’d seen the expression on his face before, a hard fixed look that young rookie cops affect when they don’t want the world to see that the job hasn’t made them jaded and world-weary yet.

  I shook my head. “No. This can’t wait.”

  “Why can’t it?” Schiller asked, his face empty with incomprehension.

  I did not want to put my body back in that opaque, dirty water, did not want to get it in my ears and eyes again. But I had to. In my mind was the image of a child’s body under that brackish water, scudding along the bottom of the canal, perhaps sucked against some natural barrier or manmade screen, hair floating, maybe rolling over and over like a log for hours. I couldn’t imagine leaving him or her there, like a piece of trash, while we went off for dry clothes and breakfast. I tried to find the words to express that to Schiller and couldn’t. But I didn’t have to.

  “If you don’t understand why, she can’t explain it to you,” Shigawa said.

  There was a beat of silence a
s Schiller looked away from me, to his partner, registering the minor betrayal. “You don’t have to take an attitude about it, Nate,” he said, and walked away.

  I swung a leg over the railing again.

  “I’ll be right up here,” Shigawa said.

  “I know,” I said. “See you soon.”

  ***

  In the end, we had the whole 911 experience, a fire engine and an MPD cruiser joining the ambulance at the scene. The MPD officers were Roz, a sergeant in her fifties with short sandy hair, a former K-9 handler rumored to have no less than eight dogs at home. She was acting as the field training officer for a rookie, Lockhart, who looked like a teenage girl in a police officer’s uniform.

  Beyond the emergency personnel was a semicircle of neighborhood people. Maybe the noise had woken them, or perhaps they’d already been starting their day when they heard the commotion. It was after five now, the sky turning a pale electric blue.

  The kind of people who show up at accident scenes are often derided as morbid sightseers, but more than once they’ve supported my faith that people essentially want to help each other. One woman, seeing my drenched clothes, went to retrieve a long-sleeved thermal shirt and sweatpants that belonged to her husband; I gratefully accepted them and awkwardly changed in the crew space of the fire engine at the curb, taking an extra moment afterward to sit and draw strength from the dry warmth and unfamiliar musk of the clothes before emerging again to see the aftermath of the terrible little tragedy.

  I found the body about where I expected to. The intensity of the spring runoff had created a vertical nest of branches and twigs up against the opening where the canal went under the street. The barrier had caught all kinds of things in its embrace, beer cans and scraps of tarpaulin, the plastic rings that hold six-packs together. And amid all of that, the soft flesh of a little boy.

  “You need to get looked at,” Shigawa said now, by my side. “Why don’t you ride back in with us?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m all right.”

  “There are infections you can get,” Shigawa said. “You should see a doctor.”