A Beginning for Gina Frye

Gina Frye showed up to her second day of work with a black eye and an angry red scratch on her face.

Taylor was one of those mountain towns you could walk from one end to the other in twenty minutes. Gina left work late to walk Second Street, to feel the mountains all around and hear the few cars on Main mixed with the sound of geese landing on the river. The sun had just set and it smelled cold, like the first wet snow of the season was thinking about showing up. No skiing within a hundred miles, so the tourists here rested in cheap motels between destinations.

The quiet heightened Gina's senses and put her on edge. Last week she'd left her job in Denver and moved her husband and two kids to Taylor to become the City Manager. Downtown Denver was a comfort, and you walked noise-wrapped most hours of the day, a cop on every corner. Taylor blanketed her in a silence enhanced by small sounds. The crunch of her boots on crushed gravel, the sounds of the bar on Second on a Tuesday night. She heard a car door slam and glanced back in the dusk, watched a woman carrying groceries disappear into a tiny home.

Gina smelled beer and turned, and saw a man lurch out the back door of the Second Street bar into the alley directly in her path. He wasn't tall, but he was solid and suddenly the bar noises seemed to drown out every other noise. She glanced to the back door of the bar, shut tight against the cold. Gina took her hands out of her pockets and stepped to the right, meaning to walk around him, and she saw his eyes snap to her face, saw the sneer.

He unbuckled his belt and slid it off through his belt loops. "Hey, come here," he said, and it was like one of those movies playing in her head where she knew he was thinking it would be over quick if she didn't struggle.

She felt sorry for him.

He held the belt in his right hand and reached for her with his left, but she moved towards him, into the smell, and yanked the belt from him. She held the leather with both hands and struck him in the face with buckle.

He stumbled and went low knocking her to the ground. She brought her knees and elbows in. He punched her face, twice, two quick blows that cut out all noise. Everything went dark except for his sneer and she noticed he was wearing a short-sleeve t-shirt with no coat. She pushed out with her knees and hit the drunk in his sternum. He fell back and she extended her leg, kicking his face, hard. She broke his nose and blood exploded.

She jumped up and wrapped the belt around his neck, sliding the leather through the buckle tight. She backed up to a dumpster, dragging him by the belt, by his throat. Blood seeped into his shirt, his pants, and he stumbled up once but she had him off-balance and he fell backwards. She hung the belt leather by a buckle hole onto a bolt on the dumpster lid, and he hung there a little, choking. After he blacked out she found an old furniture mover's blanket in the weeds next to the dumpster, sticky with mud. The blanket covered him up to his neck. She took the belt off the screw and let him slump to the ground, then she loosened the buckle around his neck.

Adrenaline was coursing through her, loud in her ears. She turned and scratched her face on the screw, ripping a gash near her bruised eye. She walked into the bar and used her cell to call the sheriff, then she called her husband.

The drunk was identified, a man from Kansas on a motorcycle trip to California, fresh from losing his job and a domestic violence conviction. She felt relief at that, as if it wasn't Taylor itself attacking her but some distant, freak event that wasn't likely to happen again.

In the coming years Taylor's brutality would manifest in more subtle ways.

The Place I Never Leave

One photograph, ten years old, of my law enforcement training class.
One Leadership Award, ten years old.
Photographs of my children and my husband.
Photographs of my parents and my sister.
One photo of my niece.
A Goonies screensaver.
A 2013 twelve month wall calendar.
Two lamps with lights softer than florescent.
One round table in the corner. Four gray chairs.
Three bookcases. Thirty four binders.
A footstool where I rest my feet when I wear heels.
A painting that looks like a scene through a window.
No windows.
An Our Lady of Guadalupe coin I ordered from an online Catholic superstore.
A laminated card with a prayer, saved from the funeral of a coworker's parent.
A GirlFight poster featuring Michelle Rodriguez in boxing gloves.
A filing cabinet.
A drawer of personnel files.
One file of documentation supporting demotion of an employee.
One file of documentation supporting a corrective action of an employee.
A candy dish with two dusty hard candies.
An Iron Man sticker.
An 8 1/2 inch by 11 inch white paper with the words "I love u Momee happee mothers day"
"'Oh crap, was that today?': Working on a deadline" door hanger depicting two dinosaurs watching Noah's ark sail away.
One white iHome.
Three cans of soup (Hearty Tomato, Tomato and Basil, Chicken Dumpling).
One bowl, 2 cups, plastic spoons.