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By Root 677 0

and racial polarization and overpopulation and a jurisdiction in gradual decline. The old Bulldogs were white men with bottles in their desks. The odds were stacked in their favor. They were up against low-tech murder in a stratified and segregated society. Everybody respected them or feared them. They could employ coercive methods with impunity. They could work a dual-world scheme without the fear of dual-world overlap. They could work murders in Niggertown or wetback El Monte and go home to the safe world where they stashed their families. They were bright men and driven men and men susceptible to the fleshpot temptations of their on-duty world. They were bright men. They weren’t prescient thinkers or dystopian futurists. They couldn’t predict that their on-duty world would swallow their safe world one day. There were 14 Bulldogs in 1958. There were 140 today. The increased number said there was no place to hide. The increased number contextualized my old horror. It implied that my old horror still packed some clout. My old horror lived in pre-tech memories. The Blonde told people. Barstool talk was still floating around. Memories meant names.

The holidays ended. Helen went home. Bill and I went back to work.

Chief Clayton gave us some names. The El Monte Museum director gave us some names. We checked them out. They went nowhere. We hit the two El Monte bars still in operation since 1958. They were redneck joints then. They were Latin joints now. They’d changed hands a dozen times. We tried to trace the ownerships back to ’58. We ran into missing records. We ran into missing names.

We chased names around the San Gabriel Valley. People moved to the San Gabriel Valley and rarely moved out. Sometimes they moved to skunk towns like Colton and Fontana. Bill made me drive every day. Freeway driving made him retire. I made him unretire. This meant I had to play chauffeur. This meant I had to stand abuse for my poor driving skills.

We drove. We talked. We spun off our case and encapsulated the whole criminal world. We drove freeways and surface streets. Bill pointed out body dump locales and riffed on his old cases. I described my pathetic crime exploits. Bill described his patrol years with picaresque zeal. We both worshipped testosterone overload. We both reveled in tales of male energy displaced. We both saw through it. We both knew it killed my mother. Bill saw my mother’s death in full-blown context. I loved him for it.

It rained like a motherfucker all through January. We sat out rush-hour traffic and freeway floods. We hit the Pacific Dining Car and ate big steak dinners. We talked. I started to see how much we both hated sloth and disorder. I lived it for 20 years solid. Bill lived it once-removed as a cop. Sloth and disorder could be sensual and seductive. We both knew it. We both understood the rush. It came back to testosterone. You had to control. You had to assert. It got crazy and forced you to capitulate and surrender. Cheap pleasure was a damnable temptation. Booze and dope and random sex gave you back a cheap version of the power you set out to relinquish. They destroyed your will to live a decent life. They sparked crime. They destroyed social contracts. The time-lost/time-regained dynamic taught me that. Pundits blamed crime on poverty and racism. They were right. I saw crime as a concurrent moral plague with entirely empathetic origins. Crime was male energy displaced. Crime was a mass yearning for ecstatic surrender. Crime was romantic yearning gone bad. Crime was the sloth and disorder of individual default on an epidemic scale. Free will existed. Human beings were better than lab rats reacting to stimuli. The world was a fucked-up place. We were all accountable anyway.

I knew it. Bill knew it. He tempered his knowledge with a greater sense of charity than I did. I judged myself harshly and passed the standards of my self-judgment on to other people. Bill believed in mitigation more than I did. He wanted me to extend a sense of mitigation to my mother.

He thought I was too hard on her. He liked my