1BEFORE THERE WAS DARKNESS by LongLashes1
PART TWO
It didn't take Jim long to realize that nothing could have possibly prepared him for the sights and sounds of war. He had always prided himself on the measure of toughness he seemed to possess; he had no doubt going in that he was strong enough and had been exposed to enough growing up on the streets of Red Hook, that there couldn't be much he would encounter on this short tour of duty that would even remotely affect his sense of well-being.
But, four days on the front lines of combat and a subsequent transfer to "clean-up" duty guaranteed that he witnessed, first hand, the absolute worst of what man could do. Even after his tour was over and he was back state side again, leaving the heat of battle and the smell of death half a world away, he was not immune to the shock of those images. Not sure what to do with it all, he did as he had always done, and buried it deep inside, along with the thousand other painful memories he hoped would never surface again.
Growing up in Red Hook had taught him a thing or two about survival. As if not enough to negotiate the mean streets, day in and day out, he found himself in the unenviable position of having to apply those same survival instincts at home. It wasn't that he grew up hard. It was just that in the Dunbar house, there was an eternal battle raging over the bottle, a battle that, for all intent and purposes, was heading to a terrible conclusion.
The better part of his teen-age years had been spent shielding his younger brothers from the hurt of that environment. Jim could handle it; but Ricky, three years his junior, and Tom, just a year behind, they needed to be protected from as much of it as possible. Jim took that burden upon his broad shoulders; he was keeper, confidant and guardian.
There were far too many recollections of holding the two of them, tightly against his chest, trying to reassure them that this would all be gone, someday. The closed bedroom door was never barrier enough to escape the reality of their world; the pleading ministrations of their mother, struggling to control the demons that were slowly eating away at the semblance of the man they had once lovingly called Daddy.
It's not that love didn't exist in their house. It did. It was there in her gentle touch, the way she nutured and encouraged. On days when it looked like he might finally be crawling his way back to sobriety, there was love from their Daddy too. Those were the good days, the days when they were a family, the days when it seemed that life might almost be right again. There just never seemed to be enough of those days.
Jimmy had always admired the fact that his mother could be so resilient, able to deal with the curse of booze and still have something left to give to her sons. He didn't know where she found the will or the courage to hold it all together, but she did. He was old enough to understand that she did it because she had to; there was no one else; there would never be anyone else.
It had been a tumultuous upbringing at best, but the Dunbar boys knew, because she made sure they knew, that in a better time, in a better place, they had been the apples of their Daddy's eye. She also made certain that they understood it wasn't anything they had done, or anything she had done, that had driven their father to seek solace in a bottle. It was just something, a sickness of sorts, that grew inside, and there was nothing they could do for him, nothing anyone could do for him until he decided it was time to do something for himself.
That was the bane of Jim's existence. He dedicated himself to the things he knew would someday lift him out of this hole; he was, as his teachers would describe him, gifted and determined, though, perhaps, because of his acquired penchant for privacy, no one really understood the underlying reason for that determination. Jim did; he recognized that if he worked hard enough, and studied hard enough, this reality would be his only as long as it had to be, only as long as he was too young to have any say in the matter.
He swore that once he was able to fend for himself, it would never be his life again. He was resolute in his efforts to secure a better future, in spite of the barriers that existed simply because he had grown up in a lower-class home in a hard section of the city. Dreams, he discovered, were wonderful things; he could lose himself in thought, quiet contemplation about where he would go and what he might do when he was able to leave this world behind.
His father finally took that last drink when Jim was just 17. Although he allowed himself a period of mourning for the man he would never really know, for the family left behind, for the days when life was good, as good as it could get growing up in Red Hook with a drunk for a father, he pushed all of that down too, down to a place that he hoped would keep it suppressed forever. And he moved on.
Being a New York City cop was one of the first things Jim could honestly say made him happy. It fulfilled him and defined him as nothing else in his life had been able to do. Except perhaps for the boxing.
As a teen, his introduction to boxing had served a two-fold purpose; first and foremost, once he began to show promise in the ring, no one seemed to mess with him anymore. He was a strapping, good-looking youth, broad shouldered and sturdy, but because of the quiet, private nature of his personality, Jim found himself at odds with many of the elements of Red Hook. Boxing changed that. Getting into the ring, going round after round with an opponent was a freedom for him, a place to let go of and abandon all of those emotions he couldn't push down. He was a fighter; in more ways than one, he always had been, and, he was a damn good one too.
When he joined the NYPD, though, it was as if life had finally opened up and found him; or, in retrospect, perhaps it was more that he had finally opened up and found life. He had the mind for police work; he had always been overly analytical anyway, and was fortunate enough to be gifted with an inane ability to piece things together, especially on those occasions when vital pieces were missing. God knows, he had the stomach for it; after the sights and sounds of war, there wasn't much that shocked him anymore; there certainly wasn't anything that he hadn't seen before on a much grander scale.
He looked forward to getting out of the bed in the morning, in anxious anticipation of what the new day would bring. It wasn't always exciting work; he witnessed his fair share of domestic disturbances, petty larcenies, stolen cars, drunk and disorderlies, and a handful of poor bastards who had finally had enough of life. It never mattered to him what the call was or how mundane the assignment, the satisfaction of a job well done left him feeling complete. He was at home on the beat, patrolling the neighborhoods of his precinct. He was, in a word, content.
"I'm a cop," he'd say, and the simplicity of that statement, the truth behind it, the very certainty of it, made him smile. After years of wondering what the future might hold, he finally had the answer he'd been searching for and it satisfied him. A cop; that's what he was; that's who he was; a cop.