stick your nose into a School Police case? All you need to do now—:::::: He forced this business of conceivable carnal attractions out of his head. But his smile and his stare never changed. Neither did hers… until she began to compress her lips slightly… Nestor interpreted it as meaning “We can’t say everything that’s on our minds, can we.”
Pop! That swelling bubble vanished the moment she heard her brother coming out of the kitchen. She stood up from the chair and said, “Philippe, is that you?”
“Yeah.” You could tell the boy was trying to force his fifteen-year-old voice down into a manly baritone.
“Come here a minute,” said Ghislaine. “There’s somebody I want you to meet!”
A pause… then, “Okay.” Somehow he managed to push his voice down still deeper in search of the sludge of put-upon boredom at the very bottom.
Ghislaine arched her eyebrows and rolled her eyes upward. I’m sorry, but we just have to put up with this.
Philippe, a tall but terribly skinny boy, came walking into the living room with a slow rocking gait that Nestor recognized immediately as the Pimp Roll. The crotch of his jeans hung down practically to his knees… the waistline went around his hips… revealing about nine inches of a pair of luridly patterned boxer shorts. On top, a black T-shirt featuring some flashy yellow script saying, UZ MUVVUZ, a Neg so-called rasta-rap group Nestor was vaguely aware of. A cartoonish picture below the UZ MUVVUZ took you into an alligator’s gaping maw, teeth rampant, and right down the beast’s dark gullet. The boy, Philippe, topped that off with a bandanna around his forehead in loud shades of green, yellow, and red, shot through with white… all this rather dated black Street Dude haberdashery adorning a body the color of café au lait… and a gang bandanna crowning a babyish teenage head! The boy had a delicate face, or delicate for a Haitian, in Nestor’s eyes… almost Anglo lips… but slightly too wide a nose… It was a sweet face… even now as he surveyed the room with his eyebrows folded over on his nose at eye level and his jawbones swung off-center in an attempt at a fuck-you scowl… it was still a sweet face.
Ghislaine stood up and said, “Philippe, I want you to meet Officer Camacho. You remember my telling you about Officer Camacho, don’t you?… and that big article in the paper—the thing that happened in Overtown while I was there with South Beach Outreach? Officer Camacho’s here about that.”
By now Nestor was on his feet, and Philippe was looking straight at him. The boy’s expression had completely changed. But what exactly was on his mind all of a sudden? He was… wary?… or just surprised?… or baffled?… or maybe startled by the extraordinary musclescape in navy chiaroscuro that now stood before him? As they shook hands, Nestor said, “Hi, Philippe!” with all the Cop Charm he could muster. Cop Charm was the other side of the coin of the Cop Look. The Cop Look worked because the cop had the confidence of someone who knows he has the Power and the official go-ahead to use it—and you don’t. Cop Charm worked for the same reason. I have the Power—and you don’t—but my intention right now is solely to be warm and friendly, because so far I approve of you. Radiating Cop Charm tended to strike a mere civilian as a present, a gift from a man who has the sanction to be violent. Nestor could see the boy’s entire attitude change with a completely unconscious gratitude.
At first Philippe just stared at Nestor, wonder-struck… all at once not a basso profundo… but a timid teenage tenor struggling to work up enough courage to say, “Gosh… I saw you online last night!”
Nestor kept radiating Cop Charm. “Really?” he said.
“There was a picture of you and a picture of this big guy you fought. He was really big! How do you fight somebody like that?”
“Aw, that’s not really fighting,” said Nestor. “You’re not trying to hurt the guy. You’re just rolling in the dirt, so you can arrest him.”
“Rolling in the dirt?”
“That’s what they call it,” said Nestor. “ ‘Rolling in the dirt.’ It could be on the floor, the way I was, or on a sidewalk or out in the middle of the street—that happens plenty of times—and plenty of times it really is in the dirt, but it’s all called ‘rolling in the dirt.’ ”