Shooting at Midnight

Prologue For my thirteenth birthday, Da gave me a Midtown South sweatshirt that was too big for me, NYPD shorts, and a pair of running shoes. It was just what I'd asked for. The next morning, bright and early, I put them on and drove with my Da to Van Cortlandt Park on the north edge of Bronx County, just the two of us. He used orange traffic cones stored in the trunk of the car to set up a small obstacle course while I stretched. When he was finished, he showed me how I was supposed to run it. "Is it like this at the Academy?" I asked. "No, but this is a good place for you to start," he said. I put everything I had into running that course, and when I had it mastered, Da made me run it in reverse. I loved every minute of it. From then on out, usually once a week, Da would take me to Van Cortlandt Park and I would run whatever course he set for me. I'd run it in snow and rain, sunlight and humidity. Couple times his partner, Uncle Jimmy, would join us, and they would smoke and drink beer and watch and heckle and give me pointers. Couple times that year my sister, Cashel, went with us too, but she hated it and, after the third time, didn't come back. So Saturdays became days for my Da and me, for my Ma and Cashel. Which I thought was just great. For my fourteenth birthday, Da gave me a new pair of running shoes and a set of boxing gloves. Just what I'd asked for. We went out to Van Cortlandt Park and Da set up the same course as he had a year ago to the day, and he timed me as I ran it, and when I was done, he showed me the records he'd been keeping in his little notepad, showed me how much I'd improved. "That's my girl," he said. Then he put on sparring mitts, and he taught me how to throw a punch that would knock a man down. From then on out, we always ended our sessions with me wearing the boxing gloves. "They'll make it hard on you. You're a woman, and they'll make you pay for it every inch of the way. But we'll fix it so they never know what hit them. You're smarter than me. You'll be tougher too. You'll get the gold shield I never got; hell, you'll get your own command. You'll have all the education and all the ability, and you'll have the heart and the strength, and that's the most important thing." "Yes, Da," I said. "That's my girl. Now ... let's see that uppercut." For my fifteenth birthday, Da gave me new shoes, a new MTS sweatshirt, new shorts, a sports bra, and a copy of the cadet's handbook. When I opened the sports bra, he blushed and said, "Your Ma picked that out." We went to Van Cortlandt Park and reviewed my progress, and Uncle Jimmy came along, and when I was done working out that day, Da and Uncle Jimmy gave me a beer. Then they gave me another one, and another, and I made it through most of a fourth before I got sick-drunk and passed out. Da joked about how well I could hold my alcohol. He hadn't figured out that I'd been sneaking beers after school for months already, drinking with friends. He hadn't figured out that I'd begun smoking pot. Even when I started missing my dates with him, either spending the night at a friend's he thought he could trust or claiming I was sick because I'd caught a bad bug rather than a savage hangover, he didn't see it. He was disappointed, but he never said so. And by the time he suspected, by the time he was willing to admit what his eldest daughter had gotten herself into, I was gone. I spent my sixteenth birthday living in an abandoned apartment in Alphabet City, trying to steal enough money to score. Three months later it was over, Da and Uncle Jimmy bringing me back home to the Bronx at four in the morning, laying me in my bed. I was screaming and shouting and Da held me down while Jimmy gRucka, Greg is the author of 'Shooting at Midnight' with ISBN 9780553578270 and ISBN 0553578278.