Boot(s)

1- Boot

Sergeant Jackson

"Sergeant, I really just can not thank you enough for this. It was truly inspiring to hear your story, and I know all the kids were really moved. Truly."

I had been nodding at her, a tight-lipped, when-will-this-conversation-be-over smile cemented on my lips like it was permanent. But her voice was high and nasally, and all the questions were pounding around inside my head like a group of middle schoolers playing dodgeball, so I allowed myself to look away from the principal's purple spectacles for a moment.

My eyes scanned my familiar stomping grounds with a precision and focus that I never had until I enlisted. Girls shrieking, chasing each other around the swing set. Boys dangling from monkey bars. Backpacks placed carefully on the top of the playground's chain-link fence posts. I felt myself smile for probably the first time in weeks. As a middle schooler at this very fine Atlanta Public institution, I was more of the toss-the-backpack on the mulch and run for the court kinda guy. Kids these days were quite clearly more evolved. And so was this place.

Instead of an empty parking lot and basketball hoops without nets, this place—the pick-up lot and playground at my former middle school—was absolutely teeming with doting mothers, fathers, nannies, grandmas, and gay uncles, many of them paying close attention to the double doors I was coming out of, their necks craned as they waited for their child's emergence from school. The other half of the responsible adults were waving at their kids in the playground, begging them to get in the minivan. A few were even carefully watching their child's technique as he or she dealt Pokemon (or whatever the hell it is these days) on the picnic tables.

Satisfied with the mere seconds it took me to do this surveillance, I was about to turn back to face my hostess, when something—a clusterfuck of atoms in my brain, a mutated cell in my heart—told me not to.

And I didn't. So I saw it all happen.

Leaning over the edge of the chain-link fence that separated the kid's world from the outside world, was Bobby O'Callahan. He was smiling that boy-next-door smile that he was famous for, and not just in Atlanta anymore. He was waving on a child—a girl? Brown hair? Glasses?

A girl. No glasses. Black, shiny hair that Jesus himself seemed to shine light onto. She was laughing and swinging her backpack around her arm as she leaped through the gate and beelined towards Cal. As soon as he saw her coming, he picked himself off the fence—that smile wider now—and caught the backpack the girl had catapulted at his chest. He threw his head back and laughed, ran a hand through the girl's hair, and then gave her a very well executed high five.

The two of them exchanged some sort of banter I couldn't make out, then headed towards the parking lot. She looked to be about ten or eleven, but she didn't even attempt to look before jumping in the street, so Cal's arm slamming into her chest and stopping her was the only thing that kept her from running in front of some distracted housewife's Audi.

All he did was turn to her, raise his eyebrows, then direct her safely across the street. The two of them got in his truck—the same one he's had since he turned 16 fourteen years ago—and slowly pulled out of the lot. Windows were down. Country music was blaring. A painter's ladder and construction tools littered his truck bed.

The last thing I saw before they turned out of the school's lot was Cal, toothpick in his mouth now, look over at his daughter, ruffle her hair once more, and smile.

And for some reason, for some inexplicable, completely unreasonable, very unprompted, and absolutely ridiculous reason, my heart wanted to burst.

"Sergeant? Are you with me?"

"Sergeant?"

"That was Bobby O'Callahan." I realize I had probably been staring at Cal, completely ignoring the school principal, for upwards of a minute now.

She chuckled. "Yes, I know, bit of a hometown celebrity now, ain't he? Well, he's just the cream of the crop. Best man I've ever known, really. My sister—the one who came down with leukemia a month ago, the one I was just talking about—hired him for some roof repair back in the winter. He wouldn't sleep until that roof was fixed. Did two week's worth of work, absolutely free. That Bo O'Callahan, Sergeant, he is one helluva guy."

I swallowed. My throat was apparently still coated with Middle Eastern dust.

"Ain't that right," was all I could squeeze out of my rapidly constricting chest.

"Of course. Now, I think that's your nurse there, pulling up in the van. There she is." Her feet bobbed up off the ground excitedly, her kitten heels clacking against the pavement as she waved her arms in brutally exaggerated circles.

My body still involuntarily twitched at her use of the word nurse. She turned to look at me once more, satisfied that she caught Nancy's attention.

"So, same time tomorrow?"