Briggs did not let go of the cuffs. He kept his hand clamped on the steel and used it as a handle to steer Isaiah across the gravel path toward the cruiser, and every step Isaiah took sent a fresh ache through his stomach where the punch had landed and through his wrists where the metal had cut. Isaiah walked as steadily as he could, because he refused to stumble and give the officer another reason to use force, but his legs felt unsteady beneath him and his breath still came in shallow pulls that did not seem to fill his lungs. The cruiser sat at the curb with its back door open, waiting like a mouth, and the hard plastic of the back seat was visible inside, a surface built for prisoners and not for people. Isaiah looked at it and understood that once he was inside, he would be sealed away from the street and from Mrs. Alden on her porch, and whatever happened next would happen out of sight.
At the door Briggs shoved him forward with a sharp push between the shoulder blades, and Isaiah, with his hands cuffed behind his back and no way to catch himself, pitched toward the opening. His head struck the edge of the roof as he went in, a hard crack of bone against metal that sent a bright flash of pain through his skull and down his neck. The sound of it was dull and ugly, and for a second the world tilted sideways and the light at the edge of the park blurred into a smear of green and gray. Isaiah felt a warm wetness begin at the point of impact and knew without touching it that the skin had broken and blood was starting to flow. The blow to his head joined the blow to his stomach and the cuts on his wrists and the torn skin on his cheek, and together they formed a catalog of injuries that no single report could honestly explain away as a routine arrest.
Briggs did not pause and did not ask whether he was hurt. He pushed again, harder this time, driving Isaiah down into the hard plastic back seat hard. The seat was cold and unyielding beneath him, shaped to hold a body in place without comfort, and the door slammed shut behind him with a finality that closed off the morning air and the voice of Mrs. Alden and the sight of the playground. Inside the car the world became smaller and quieter, reduced to the smell of cleaning fluid and old vinyl and the sound of his own breathing, ragged and uneven. Isaiah sat with his hands still cuffed behind him, his shoulders aching from the unnatural position, and he leaned his head back carefully against the seat to ease the throbbing at the point where it had struck the roof. Blood from the cut trickled slowly down the side of his face, and he felt it trace a warm line toward his jaw.
Outside, Briggs walked around to the driver's side with the unhurried pace of a man who believed his morning's work was complete. He opened his own door and settled into the seat, and Isaiah watched the back of his head in the rearview mirror and noted the set of his shoulders, relaxed now, as if the violence had released something in him rather than burdened him. The officer adjusted his mirror and checked his radio, and his movements were calm and ordinary, the movements of a man starting a routine drive rather than a man who had just beaten a cuffed prisoner at a playground fence. He saw himself as a man who had done his job, and the job, in his mind, included whatever force he chose to use. Isaiah thought about the complaints that had followed Briggs from the neighboring county, quietly settled and softened in reports, and he understood that this morning was not an aberration but a pattern that had finally met a man who would not let it pass in silence.
The car began to move, and the park fell away behind them, the swings and the slide and the fence shrinking in the side window until they were only shapes in the fog. Isaiah turned his head as far as the cuffs and the seat allowed and looked back at Mason Park, and he felt a pang that had nothing to do with his injuries. He had come to the park to protect children from a rusted swing and a loose bolt and a cracked slide, and he was leaving it as a prisoner in the back of a cruiser, his head bleeding and his wrists cut. The irony of it sat heavy in his chest alongside the pain. But he also felt something else beneath the pain, a hard and steady resolve that had been with him since the first moment Briggs ordered him off the equipment. He would remember everything, and he would say it all plainly when the time came, and no report written in a quiet room later would be allowed to replace what had happened in the open air of a Sunday morning. The car rolled on toward the station, and Isaiah sat in the hard plastic seat with blood drying on his face, and he began, methodically and without hurry, to fix every detail of the morning into his memory so that it could never be taken from him.
Chapter Fourteen
The Things He Memorized In The Back Seat