Hello everyone. Are we allowed to post things our family wrote? My dad wrote this story and he would like advice and reviews. So if we're not allowed to post it some high-and-mighty can move it if they want.
Officer Spooner
Officer Spooner was scary to all of the kids in town because we grew-up hearing he was the top most authority in our little society. He was even more powerful than our parents. Couldn’t he arrest them and put them in jail, take them out of their lives, and ours? He had that kind of awesome power, so we had to be extra careful when he was around. We had to make sure we didn’t break any rules in front of him, which was tough since we didn’t even know what all the rules were.
Fear dominated our impression of this constant character in our midst. Only some of that was due to our allotting him such awesome power. We were already halfway to terrified by his very appearance. He was a tall man, and that height was augmented by the dome of the trooper-style hat the city chose for his uniform. Perhaps they thought it was more impressive, and it was, at least to silly young children. To any child, however, the most fearful apparition had to be the revolver at his thigh, huge compared to our toy six-guns, and heavy with firepower. The mere sight of him brought mouth-drying fear, drove us out of his sight as quickly as possible, and put us on the lookout for his following, wherever we chose to go to be free of his sharp eye for failure.
The one time he came to my family’s house, I almost wet my pants in terror. Who had he come after? Was it me? What had I done? Was it someone else, and if so, who? I hid in the living-room, peering around a chair so he couldn’t see me watching. I was too frightened to even pay attention to what he was saying to my Dad, even though now I realize on looking back, he was smiling all the time they were talking. Perhaps I thought he was smiling because he liked arresting people and dragging them out of their homes at night. Well, he did neither, and I just thought we had been lucky, avoiding the dreaded splintering of our family.
We learn so much as children, and I don’t want to get into making a listing of all the aspects and nuances now, but only wish to describe what we came to understand about Officer Spooner. The seemingly misplaced fear of youth proved to be ironically astute. By the time we were in our mid-teens, my friends and I, we had experienced enough real encounters with the good Officer to learn much more accurately who and what he truly was. He was a clown! He was an arrogant, self-important egomaniac, who liked nothing more than using his status as “the leader of the law-enforcement community” to over-impress the young, the easily-intimidated, and the stupid among us.
I began to see this truth when still rather young, a gauge I use to judge my own intelligence. Somewhere around ten, I was playing basketball at the primary school playground, at about five in the afternoon. Officer Spooner pulled up to the basketball court, so close we had to stop playing, and slowly got out of his cruiser. Part of the time he took to disembark was spent putting his nightstick back into its appointed spot on his belt. Perhaps he thought the six of us were going to cause some trouble, so he’d better be prepared. And prepared he was, for his revolver was at the ready too. Its appearance had lost the power to emit automatic fear, but he probably didn’t know that, being almost completely without the capacity for reasonable observation. Out onto the court he strode, took a stance meant to impress, legs wide and fists on hips, and he stared at each one of us in-turn before saying a word.
“You boys ought to be heading home for supper, your folks will be looking for you,” he said with all the seriousness of one warning us against a life-threatening situation.
We were confused into speechlessness. We played ball until six almost every night, and never had anyone of us heard that we should be home sooner. None of us knew what to say. We didn’t want to argue with a police officer, but at the same time, he was completely wrong. Finally, one of us, I don’t recall who, although I’m sure it wasn’t me, told him that we usually played about an hour more. Well, you would have thought the boy had spit into his face his reaction was so quick and extreme. His face got red, his teeth were bared and ground together, and his hands closed into white-knuckle fists.
“I said go home, and I want no more argument about it!” he shouted. We didn’t dare do anything but what he said.
Once at home, I explained what had happened to my parents, defusing trouble he may try to cause, but they just made faces of discussed understanding and told me not to worry about it.
I heard that Officer Spooner almost got fired once, when he slapped a beer out of a kid’s hand outside a school dance one night. I guess the can, or maybe Spooner’s hand, caught the kid on the cheek and gave him a pretty mean black eye. The kid’s parents went nuts and claimed police brutality, demanding Spooner’s removal. There was an investigation, but he got off. It was decided that the beer can caused the damage.
A town official said in the public announcement concluding the case, “had the boy not been breaking the law, drinking the alcohol, and in public, no less, the incident would never had taken place. An injury occurring to a party committing a crime is the fault solely of the criminal.”
I don’t know if that was so, but I do know that the beer can saved the policeman’s butt, in one way or another. I think Officer Spooner had been looking for an excuse to get tough with that kid for a long time, seeing his chance, he took it. Whack!
Another example of Spooner’s over-the-top behavior came when he happened upon a robbery of the Handy Mart down on Simpson Street. He walked right into it. A guy was holding a knife in the face of the young woman tending the store, while she emptied the cash drawer. Officer Spooner pulled his revolver, drew down on the guy and yelled for him to freeze. The guy dropped his knife, put up his hands, and Spooner hit him in the stomach with the barrel of the gun, putting him immediately on his knees. Spooner then almost broke his arm putting handcuffs on him. He was so rough, the clerk told him to take it easy on the guy. She told the local paper that Officer Spooner looked crazed when he saw the knife, and didn’t seem to calm down, even after the guy had been slammed into the back of Spooner’s patrol car.
This brings me to the purpose of my tale, the downfall of our Officer Spooner. About a year ago, there was another crime committed in our town by the over enthusiastic officer. There was a kid, a wiseass kid it’s true, but still just a kid, who took every opportunity he could to tell Officer Spooner just what a jackass everyone thought the policeman was. He gave names, dates, and exact quotations of people from all walks of town life; bankers, schoolteachers, merchants, parents, and even the Mayor at the time. Spooner hated the kid, and rightfully so, anyone would admit. Yet, there are boundaries about one’s actions that cannot be breached, and even more so for a law enforcement officer. The more force one has at one’s disposal, the more constraint one must place upon actions, a notion completely beyond Officer Spooner. To no one’s surprise, and as it turned out, Spooner was gunning for the kid, literally. One night, as I said, about a year ago, the kid was caught by Spooner wandering loudly down Main Street, at about two in the morning. He was obviously drunk. A party had just broken-up and the kid had been sent out, supposedly to go home. Since he was making so much noise, the people from the party were watching him out their window, considering taking him home. The story they tell of what they saw is chilling.
Officer Spooner arrived on the scene, called in by another neighbor’s complaint. As was his way, he got out of his car slowly, gathering all of his weaponry, and in this case grinning from ear to ear for his good fortune, to finally have that wiseass kid right where he wanted him. Spooner approached the kid, but distance made it impossible for the observers, or as it turned out, witnesses to hear what was said. It must have been the type of comment this kid was famous for because they saw Officer Spooner become instantly enraged. He grabbed the kid by the shirtfront, sneered in his face, and poked him in the stomach with his nightstick, hard. The kid dropped to the ground like aldante spaghetti stood in end. That should have been the end of it in the eyes of the witnesses. They never would have said a word, thinking at some level the kid deserved it, but Officer Spooner made that silence impossible. He picked the kid up, shook him, slapped him, swung him, and threw him against the patrol car, where the kid hit headfirst against the front bumper, and again, dropped. The people watching had hoped that was enough to satisfy Spooner. They were now in a heated debate as to whether the policeman should be called to task for his obvious mistreatment of the kid. They thought the beating was over when Spooner picked the kid up again just looking into his obviously non-responsive face. And they were right. It was over, for the both of them.
The kid was found the next afternoon at the bottom of a small cliff by the lake, his neck was broken. An accident was quickly assumed, he still smelled of beer, and everyone in town began to find justification in the kid’s early passing due to wildness, everyone except the witnesses. They called anonymously to the Coroner’s office suggesting the kid was dead when he went over the cliff. Upon their raising such a possibility, a more thorough investigation was undertaken, and proof of that fact was discovered. Knowing their waiting too long to come forward with the truth would only look worse for them, the witnesses went to the nearest State Police barracks as soon as they had alerted the Coroner. His evidence blended perfectly with their statements, making the unbelievable truth irrefutable. Bringing the reign of terror for our Officer Spooner to an end.
It could be said, and I’m sure it has been by many, that society had failed the wiseass kid, giving such power to such and unbalanced man as Spooner. Everyone knew Spooner was a jerk. But I’m here to defend society, our society, our freedom-loving American society. We all, just like Officer Spooner, have the right to be jerks, have the right to be arrogant, self-involved, and scary. And many of us openly enjoy that freedom, to the sorrow of the rest of us.
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That's it! We hope you enjoyed it. He's kinda old so take it easy on him.
