The True Believer

I keep getting the impression that people think I should be ashamed of Brick because he's more than a little fanatical on the subject of traffic enforcement.

It's not happening.

There are plenty of reasons why I get irritated with Brick but the way he conducts his professional life has never been one of them. I guess I've always understood his motivation.

That and I've seen how people in this town drive.

We had only been married a couple of months when Brick came home in the early hours of the morning. I was asleep, which was a rare thing in the early days. I just didn't sleep well when he was gone. I don't know why I thought evil-doers were just waiting to break into my house in the middle of the night (yes, I do, but that's another story). Anyway, I was so asleep that, for the first time, Brick accidentally on purpose woke me up.

There he was, at the foot of the bed, sitting hunched over after performing the world's loudest shoe drop, uniform in disarray, and a stunned expression on his face. He started telling me about an accident, how some young kid had been racing, lost control of his car, and was crushed up against a tree. Brick got there right after it happened and tried desperately to put enough of the kid's face together to perform mouth-to-mouth as the kid lay dying in front of him. He was up most of that night, going over every move, trying to think of something he could have done to save the unsavable.

There have been a lot of nights since the first that I've been awoken so he can talk about the bad ones, a lot of accident scene photos spread across my kitchen table, a lot of stories about what force and motion do to the human body.

It's simple for him. Bad driving causes accidents -- accidents kill people -- traffic enforcement is the stick that coerces people to drive better. He's a true believer.

And so am I.