Fiction: "Statesville: the captive repatriates"

Few people had dared cross Gina Crowley-Sanchez, ever, in her whole life. Neither male, nor female.

She was hot-headed and she knew it, and contained it within a fierce, quiet pride that had always stopped bad manners toward herself in their tracks before they started. And, as the only daughter and youngest child of an Arlington police captain, and herself a prominent Dallas prosecutor, she knew better than anyone alive, how to handle a cop in uniform.

But this Officer Cipisi was getting under her skin. She knew this too, and didn’t like knowing it, nor did she care at all for this big Italian lady everyone was calling “Sergeant Lisa” with such irritating admiration.

For eight days, Regina Crowley, or Gina, as she was called by everyone and always had been (besides her husband Jim, who occasionally called her “Rems” after her initials as Regina Elizabeth Martinez-Sanchez, when his thoroughly Anglo-Saxon temperament was put out with her exasperating “Texmexitude“. "Rems" was a fighting word, and was the most seductive thing about him, when he got brave enough to say it, though she vowed never to let him know it…), had watched this Sergeant Lisa Cipisi, NYPD, in action.

The lady obviously had a thing for married men: she was constantly being solicitous and accommodating with every husband in the massive room, and Gina wasn’t the only wife there who was getting fed up with the way their men melted before her. Sgt. Cipisi was what used to be called a “handsome woman”, not pretty at all, but trim, fit and orderly, wearing her smartly-cut blue as New York’s Finest in what the Texas ladies agreed (among themselves) was a provocative way; her long, coal-black hair immaculately brushed and neatly folded above her collar, her sensible black walking shoes spotless, her leathers, weapons and gear painfully shiny…

Gina had decided that she hated her, down to her short, unpainted nails, the way she’d hated Leslie Farkowycz, the only girl Jim had dated in high school during the many years she herself (and with her father's full approval), had refused to even look at him. That “LeeLee” (where “Rems” was affectionate provocation from Jim, “LeeLee” was now forbidden him to utter…) had been Jewish, had always particularly stuck in her craw. That this “Sergeant Lisa” was so thoroughly Italian, Gina saw as no more tolerable.

“Ma’am, if you’ll just go back to your area and wait, we’ll be finished with the invoicing as soon as we can. We have hundreds of items here, and have to get every bit of this accounted for before we can distribute anything.”

“My daughter has ONE more dose, Officer. One.” (She’d refused to call her “Sergeant.”) She glanced imperiously at her watch.

“Yes, ma’am, I know that. I spoke to Mr. Crowley a moment -”

“Yes”, Gina glanced dramatically toward the half-dozen lovestruck Texas husbands, waiting their turn with the Sergeant, “I’m sure you did. Officer. Thank you.”

Her heels tapped out the voice of her fury, as she turned and strode purposefully across the immense concrete floor, their urgent rhythm reverberating around the suddenly quiet room. Neither woman had raised her voice nor become visibly agitated, but Regina realized to her horror, that everyone in the waiting area of the "distribution center" had been watching the exchange.

For days now the talk, that had quickly hushed in her presence, had been of what form the inevitable showdown between these two formidable, capable, absolutely breathtaking women, would take:

("in this corner...")

Gina was quiet (on her better behavior) and petite, and owned every encounter as if she were ten feet tall and spoke with a voice of thunder, an Old World duena in the tidy person of an impeccable and attractive modern woman. She was a professional working mother who never lost her temper: she rarely needed to, on the strength of vague rumors that she had at times, and that the recipient’s experience had not been one to be envied. As an ADA she was unmatched, if over-qualified. Her colleagues, mostly men, feared more than liked her, she liked it that way, and she treated them all with an unfailing etiquette for which she was legendary. Her political and civic network as a recognized professional and community leader was deep and broad, and she was thoroughly accustomed to being deferred to in every realm of her life.

Lisa Cipisi, ("...and in THIS corner...") was five-eight, gym-hardened, and imposing. Prone to a sharp tongue and cutting tone born of seventeen years on the streets, herself the youngest with three (to Regina’s four) older brothers. Raised in Queens and educated at the Academy, she was the bruiser to Gina’s velvet gloves; the neighborhood tough girl to Regina’s cultivated prep-school class president; the decorated serving officer, neighborhood matriarch and local hero to Regina’s summa cum laude and office wall full of credentials; the proletarian union boss and Tammany vote-getter to Mrs. Crowley-Sanchez‘s aristocratic chairwomanship of her chapter of Professional Conservative Women of America. Lisa blew her top constantly, like the Italian grandmother she was: her partner Jerry “Glitz” Glitsky and the other men she worked with adored her for it, and they prodded her mercilessly. It was when she said nothing at all, that they knew there was going to be a problem with everyone’s favorite cop.

Eight days in, since the State Department had ordered Texas travelers sequestered (but with no budget allocations, administrative procedures nor projections of duration accompanying the order), the coming collision of the two most admired and respected people present in this vast La Guardia hangar, was practically all anyone was talking about.

In the silence of the great hangar, broken only by the portentous drum-beat of her heels, Regina knew this, all at once, and was suddenly quite afraid of this much greater thing happening to all of them, to her beloved Texas, to the whole country, to everyone.

Because, she realized in that instant, she had no idea on earth what might happen next. She’d managed the unknowns of life with her own reliable ability to be one of life's known quantities, for as long as she could remember, but this new situation had her completely outside her own ability to manage anything.

She slowed her step ever so slightly, lightened the impact of her heels almost imperceptibly, went to her cot and sat next to her wide-eyed Emmy. She suddenly feared, for the first time in her life, that she might break.

But only for a moment.