Sleeping Policemen by Dale Bailey Page B

said who he meant by “they,” but then he didn’t really have to. “They” were all the people who got men like Frank Laymon by the short hairs, the landlords and bosses, the creditors and corporate lawyers who had hamstrung his worker’s comp claims, leaving him half a lifetime to nurse his hatred for them. Suits, he called them, the faceless men who had sentenced him to a paltry disability stipend and a life term in the sagging clapboard house where he would never again climb the stairs.
    Sighing, Nick dropped his book bag and sat down in front of a computer. He dug the flyer out of his shirt pocket and spread it open on the table, smoothing the crinkles with trembling fingers. Casey Nicole Barrett stared up at him from some lost moment of joy, and suddenly Nick was glad he hadn’t made it to Modern Poetry.
    Stillman, the instructor, was the diametrical opposite of Gillespie: a youngish guy, a decade removed from grad school and steeped in the victim-chic ideology of his day. His class was less about literature than sociology—oppressed ethnic minorities and their oppressors, dead white males mostly, though Nick figured oppression had less to do with race and gender than with money, the only true equalizer. Stillman’s favorite question, usually rendered with a sympathetic twist of his bovine physiognomy, was, “How did this poem make you feel ?” Ransom tradition had it that a legendary English major of years past, a guy named Wohlpart, had responded to this earnest question one morning with a table-shivering, beer-fueled fart, but Nick had his doubts about the veracity of this story.
    Still, the question rankled and never more so than now, as he stared down into Casey Nicole Barrett’s dead face.
    How does this make you feel ? Stillman inquired inside his head, and Nick grimaced, knowing that even if he lived a hundred years, he would never feel any worse.
    He reached for the mouse to open Google, and typed in a name to start a search: Alfred Reynolds Barrett.
    â€œSo did you get rid of it?” Sue asked.
    Blushing, Nick darted a glance across the table at her, feeling trapped, the way he had felt when he was a kid, when Jake and Sam had discovered the cache of skin magazines he’d stashed in his closet. The shame of the moment—his brothers teasing him, Hey, Nicky, you all grown up now, you beatin the meat ?—came rushing back. He hadn’t been able to meet their mocking gazes, and now he couldn’t meet Sue’s, forthright, as though she were asking something she already knew the answer to. Maybe she did. Sue had a sense about things like that. She wasn’t shy behind closed doors. Nick could attest to that.
    Not that you could tell by looking at her. She had met him at the door of her apartment, clad in a pair of his cast-off sweats and an LSU sweatshirt, her copper hair pulled back in a ponytail. She looked like a high-school girl, her face scrubbed and open. Innocent. Nick had dumped his book bag in the foyer, hastily ditching his coat beside it as she slipped into his arms.
    And it wasn’t the money, either. He hadn’t wanted her to know that he had the tape still, there in his jacket pocket—that he couldn’t make himself destroy it, that he kept fingering it, like a miser’s gold.
    â€œC’mon,” she had said, leading him into the kitchen.
    Pots boiled and simmered there, pasta and some kind of white sauce with fresh peppers and white chunks of chicken cooked in oil, a fresh salad. Savory aromas drifted in the air.
    â€œI’ve been Krogering.”
    â€œSo I see.”
    She turned to him with wine, a pale shimmer in a crystal goblet. She had the bottle in an ice-bucket on the counter. Nick thought that was kind of stupid—the refrigerator was right there—but endearing at the same time. Sue had already had a glass or two, he could tell. A flush pinked her cheeks and the faintest hint of old