What shall we do with the drunken soldier, early in the morning?
by Joel Deutsch
A Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department patrol car swung in off the road, cutting its siren but leaving its light bar flashing. What a tableau they must present, thought Daniel. A muscular Mexican dwarf and an earth mother redhead, now holding the .357, which was registered to her, standing guard over a disheveled man who could have been the veteran of at least two different branches of the service and two different wars, with a dazed-looking bespectacled professional type thrown in for good measure.
There were two deputies. The driver was a trim, middle-aged white man with graying temples whose name tag said Garner . His partner, name tag Lee, was a sturdy-looking young Asian-American woman, korean,Daniel guessed. Clipboards in hand, they interviewed. Deputy lee talked to Miguel and Nora, Deputy Garner had Daniel. At one point, Deputy Garner arose from the seat he had taken next to Daniel at the table, walked over and asked Nick for his side of the story, but Nick just lay glaring up at him from the ground, propped up on his elbows with his useless legs outstretched before him at unnatural-looking angles, saying nothing.
Then, their interviews done, together Garner and Lee had lifted Nick up between them and deposited him, unresisting, into their patrol car’s back seat.
While Deputy Lee crammed Nick’s folded wheelchair into the pursuit cruiser’s trunk,, Deputy Garner picked his clipboard off the car’s hood where he’d left it and came back over to Daniel.
“So you’re sure you don’t want to press charges?” he asked, clicking his ballpoint repeatedly. “If I was you, I sure as hell would. You’ve got witnesses and everything. Maybe you need to see yourself in a mirror.”
“I don’t know,” said Daniel. “ I think a few hours in jail sobering up should be enough to teach him a lesson. I think he’s just a bad-luck Viet Nam vet with a drinking problem and maybe some other kind of substance abuse issues.”
“What if I told you he wasn’t really a disabled vet?” said Deputy Garner . “What if I told you he wasn’t even in the Army, ever?”
“Seriously?”
“It’s all bullshit, sir, pardon my French. This guy has been causing trouble around Santa Barbara for as long as I’ve been with the Department. Not to mention Oxnard, or Ventura, or San Luis Obispo, or any other place he has enough gas in that van to drive to when he “forgets” to take his medication and starts drinking. He’s what they used to call manic-depressive.”
“bi-polar,” said Daniel.”
“yeah,” said Deputy Sheriff Garner. “That’s it. “Bi-polar. And he’s supposed to take these meds. But sometimes he doesn’t. And then he starts drinking. And all hell breaks loose.
“what we have here is not a man who’s suffering from post traumatic stress related to military service. I can tell you that flat-out. He had polio when he was a kid. As I understand it, he not only survived it but regained his ability to walk, although this was with a bad limp. But now the polio comes back sometimes and he needs to use crutches or the wheelchair. Which you can see for yourself.
“And he’s not poor, either. Not by a long shot. His family owns Z-Man’s Pizza, up near the University. They’ve been in business for years. The place takes up half a block all by itself, and their parking lot takes up the other half. Even when the chains came in, like Pizza Hut and those, it didn’t make a dent. They’ve got a big house in town, they’ve got a rancho with its own vineyard up in the hills in Montecito, and a nice little yacht down at the Marina. Right across from Zenetti’s Seafood which, you guessed it, is them, too.
“For all the good it did this one, I guess,” said the cop, with a nod at Nick, sullen in the cruiser’s back seat. The father died a couple of years ago, and the business went to the brother. Both businesses. So like I say, we aren’t talking about a war hero who’s having a bad day. he’s just a troublemaker, living in the mother-in-law cottage in back of the family house on some kind of trust fund and acting up like this every once in awhile.”
Daniel smiled wistfully at the story.
“Change your mind, sir?” asked Deputy sheriff Garner. “Feel more like pressing charges now, maybe?”
“No,” said Daniel. “I’m pretty sure I’m going to be okay. So why don’t we just let it drop.”
“Your call,” sir,” shrugged Deputy Sheriff Garner , and produced a business card from his shirt pocket. “If you want to talk, here’s my contact information.” He got up, went over to the patrol car, where Deputy Lee was already waiting inside, got behind the wheel and pulled his door shut.
“We’ll get this guy’s van towed off the lot for you folks in a couple of hours,” he said to Miguel and Nora, firing up the engine and shifting into Drive.
“Wait, Don,” said Deputy Lee. Deputy Garner braked, and the patrol car, already nosing forward, lurched to a stop. “What, Myrna?”
Deputy Lee raised her hips off the car seat, pulled something from a trouser pocket and handed it to him. He looked at the object and then held it out the window.
“Whose cell phone is this?” Miguel and Nora just shook their heads. Nick didn’t even look. Daniel patted his pockets, got up from the table and came over, and the deputy dropped the cell into his upturned palm. Daniel flipped it open to glance at the screen, flipped it closed again. “It’s mine, he said. “thanks.”
“He was kind of lying on it,” explained Deputy Lee. “I forgot to say anything. Sorry. He was a real handful.”
* * *
Daniel, his head on a pillow, lay on the couch in the living room of Nora and Miguel’s trailer. Nora prodded and palpated, daubed on disinfectant, applied gauze and tape.
“That should feel better in a few days, maybe a week.” She got a glass of water from the kitchen, put it on the coffee table, sat back down on the edge of the couch and produced an amber plastic pharmacy bottle from which she shook two caplets into Daniel’s hand. “Sit up a little,” she directed, and passed him the glass of water and the pills.
“What were those,” he asked her after he swallowed.
“Just Vicodan. Nothing major. Now lie down again. You want a cover?”
And all the time he’d been seeing himself driving home. Very funny. “Yeah,” he said, letting his head fall back, closing his eyes and folding his arms across his chest. “That would be nice.”
There was the soft drift of some kind of quilt or comforter settling onto him, the cocoanut fragrance of Nora’s hair, then nothing.
To be continued…