Two Cops Come to the Door

Yes, I saw something. I was making my regular Friday night sauce-and-cheese sandwich. It’s like pizza on an Italian bread. When I went to junior high, Fred’s, the pizza place, sold sauce-and-cheese sandwiches at lunch hour for a dollar; came with a Coke, but now I like to have it with a glass of wine. Took nearly 40 years to realize I could make it at home. It’s so delicious. I don’t even bother to make it with excellent quality mozzarella, and I use bottled sauce, but I also drizzle olive oil on the bread and Pecorino Romano. It’s really better than pizza because the bread holds so much sauce you rarely, if ever, put it down between bites. First of all, it’s warm in your hand, and second, you’re going to want to keep eating.

So, I was by the window, which is by the toaster oven, which is where I make my sandwiches, when I saw Alan Hemshaw running through the backyard.  Actually, it was the ginger cat running away from Hemshaw that triggered the motion detector that triggered the floodlights, and a few seconds later, Hemshaw came through. I didn’t see his face, but I recognized him by his gait. You can recognize a person by their gait more reliably at 30 yards than any other measure. That’s my theory, anyway, never read about it anywhere. You guys want coffee?

December, it gets dark by 4:30, and the floodlights are very spooky, when they shine up into the pine tree especially. Did you ever hear of David Crosby, from Crosby Stills & Nash? You’re probably not old enough. Anyway, Hemshaw has this tall man’s gait; I was gonna say he reminds me of Neil Young, but then I realized, not really. He’s a tall, wide shoulders, leaning forward kind of guy, looks like he’s eating at the sink even when he’s at a wedding, and he goes running by. I figured he got into it with Jeanette Fiero, the daughter of the retired school superintendent, Jim Fiero. Jim Fiero used to live two doors down from me, and when Jeanette married, she lived up the block the other way, and Hemshaw and me, we’d gone to Nutley High together; we’d meet at the Tick Tock Diner after dates on Saturday nights to compare notes, which is to say to brag, which is to say we lied, so I was very familiar with Hemshaw’s attitudes towards women generally, and to Jeanette Fiero specifically, which is to say, basically Neanderthal. He’d been up Jeanette Fiero’s leggings for 38 years, at least aspirationally, plus one stint before she got married and another last year after she got divorced.  You sure you don’t want some coffee? I’ve got crumb cake from Styertowne. 

Last year, July 4^th weekend, I saw them packing up her Rav 4.  I’m pretty certain they were headed to the Shore; at least, when I see someone in a straw hat sliding a beach chair in the back of a Rav 4, that’s what I think. I figured they’re together again, and it had this offbeat, whaddya know vibe as far as I’m concerned, going back, as I say, to Nutley High. In high school, you’d know kids like Denise Santangelo and Dean Mercuris were going to get married the summer after graduation, and now they have grandkids like a deck of cards dropped on the living room floor, but there were others, the near misses, like Johnny Hamnett and Leslie Gaulin. They should have been a couple. Seriously, you’d see them in the hallway, and their heads were almost touching, and he wrote sonnets for her in the school paper, but she had something to prove and he was not the one she wanted to prove it to, which is a shame because she could’ve used a sensitive guy like that, and then there were the ones like Hemshaw and Jeanette Fiero, if you ever heard of slam dancing — probably before your time, too — that’s how Hemshaw and Jeanette Fiero were, a total collision; so it was the ginger cat followed by Hemshaw; they crossed in front of my garage and through the pergola, back behind the Bernhardt’s house, and, I do not believe, with all the fences and swimming pools, that you can even get to Rutgers Place through the backyards the way we did when we were kids, so I don’t know where he went from there, but he was carrying a gun.