Free Snapper by Brian Kimberling Page A

like you’d use to stop traffic. It was four inches across and two deep, but it was also six feet long. Whatever that makes it, I don’t know. He found it at the parking lot entrance. The point is that he was slugging that parking meter with it as hard as he could.
    I didn’t think of it then, but at 4:30 a.m. that kind of thing is really loud.
    Still, the parking lot was next to a local history museum. The place was dead asleep even during the day, and it didn’t occur to me that we were in any danger.
    John, I said. There’s easier ways to get spare change. The campus had lots of fountains and if nobody had soaped them lately you could just go wading for it. I bought a lot of beer that way.
    John just kept hammering that parking meter. He knew it wouldn’t break, but he put his whole body into it just to show it who he was.
    I learned from the cops later that an old lady across the street had called. I looked in the daylight and decided she must have been in the little white ranch house with a prim garden.
    The whole parking lot washed red and blue. They didn’t turn on their sirens until they had us in sight, and they shouldn’t have done that. Woke the whole street up.
    I was tall, thin, and very drunk, and I tried to hide behind a telephone pole.
    John, I later learned, dashed over something and through something and climbed up something else. He lost his glasses, but drunk as he was, he even outran the hound dogs.
    My arresting officer, Gene, was pretty amused with that telephone pole.
    Don’t worry too much about these, he said, cuffing my hands behind my back. They’re more a formality.
    He read me my rights while I fidgeted in the backseat of his prowler, and he sounded pretty bored. He perked up when we got to talking though. It was Gene who told me about the old lady’s phone call.
    You were two blocks from the station and it’s four thirty a.m. Otherwise I think you could have gotten away with it.
    He didn’t ask me anything about John. I’m sure he knew at first glance I was a student, and he didn’t ask about that either.
    You guys been out drinkin’, huh? I can smell it.
    I said yeah. I didn’t mention the railway fire since there’s probably a law against that. It’s perfectly safe, though. There are no trains anymore and you can flip it onto the gravel instantly, stamping on the scattered embers afterward.
    Don’t worry too much, said Gene. Happens a lot more than you think.
    The parking meters?
    No, said Gene. Drunk kids. I dress like a cop but half the time I’m just a babysitter. No offense.
    None taken.
    When my boys reach your age I don’t want to know what they get up to. I do not want to know.
    After that night I used to look in every squad car I saw to check if it was Gene behind the wheel. I could have bought him a coffee and asked about his kids, I thought. I never saw him again.
    At the station, which sits directly under the jail, there was a fat cop and a wiry one with a mustache. Actually there were cops everywhere—doing the delousing and the strip search and handing over my jumpsuit. Most of them were like Gene—they didn’t apologize or anything, but they made it clear that these were all formalities, nothing personal, no offense.
    Fat cop and mustache man, on the other hand—I think they were paid some kind of asshole commission.
    Says here you hid behind a telephone pole, said mustache.
    I guess that was kind of dumb, I said.
    We call it resisting arrest, said fat cop.
    Says here you were hitting a parking meter with a two-by-four, said mustache.
    It wasn’t actually me. I am not sure it was a two-by-four.
    You’re still an accessory to destruction of municipal property, said fat cop.
    And attempted theft, said mustache.
    And attempted theft, said fat cop. You could tell he wished he had thought of it first.
    Tell us your friend’s name and address.
    Not sure, I said. I just met him.
    Now we got you on obstruction of justice, said mustache. I don’t think fat cop