Valley of Limbo, Valley of Fear

Two days ago, I witnessed an arrest.

After I took my daughter Rose to the polls with me, while we were waiting at the bus station for the next bus up the hill to my house, there was a woman waiting on the bench next to ours, with a man I assumed was her boyfriend or husband. She was skinny and dressed in tight jeans that made her look skinnier; her red hair was disheveled and wild, like the hair of a witch in one of Rose’s fairy tale books. Her hands were shaking as she played with her old, battered smartphone; she dropped it, and the cover broke off.

My daughter was playing in the leaves piled up on the curb, around the bend where no cars drive except the bus every twenty minutes, running up and down the whole length of the concrete island to hear her feet scuff, collapsing in a heap in the corner where the leaves were piled high against a light pole. She also had a smartphone, a pretend plastic smartphone from Dollar Tree, and she consulted it from time to time. “Eighty twelve missed calls? Give me a break!”

I called to her to come up on the curb when I saw the police car—not a regular cruiser but an SUV. Behind him was a normal-sized police car.

Rose got out of the leaf pile and watched eagerly; she likes emergency vehicles. She has toy ambulances and fire trucks at home, but not a police car.

A pasty-white face with respectable white hair leaned out the window, smiling at the skinny woman with the broken phone.

“How you doin’?” asked the police officer.

The woman stared at him like a doe in the headlights.

“There’s a bench warrant out for you,” the police officer said, still smiling, “For trespassing. You ran from us.”

There was another pause. Perhaps the woman said something; I couldn’t tell.

A third police car came into the bus station from the opposite direction—there were now three police cars parked in front of a diminutive woman who looked as though she couldn’t walk more than a few paces without collapsing.

The pale policeman in the big black SUV was still smiling. “You’re under arrest.”

The woman stood, shaking. She kissed the man she was with and handed him the remains of the phone; then she walked, swaying like a cattail in the wind, to the police cruiser. And the three policemen in their three cars successfully apprehended the terrified woman who’d committed a nonviolent misdemeanor, and they drove away, smiles on their faces, a job well done.

When they were gone, the other woman on the bench next to me got out her own phone. “I ain’t stayin’ here,” she said with agitation. “She… she shouldn’t ‘a been turnin’ tricks. She shouldn’t ‘a been trespassing. She shouldn’t ‘a run. When they has a bench warrant against you, you just stay put.”

I murmured noncommittally.

Rose went back to playing in the leaves and checking her eighty twelve missed calls.

“I got outta jail twenty-three years ago,” said the woman, still desperately searching her phone for someone to pick her up and take her away from the bus stop. “I served three years, nine days and twenty-four hours for pot. I ain’t never goin’ back again. I don’t want no trouble with no police.”

The bus came before she’d found another ride, so she got on it with me, and we were gone.

Fear is the normal state, here.

The next day, after the late night news, we were all afraid. It was cold and rainy; the leaves did not crunch under our feet on the way to the bus stop.  I’d planned a trip to the library, to get my mind off things.

It didn’t work.