Officer Hadley walked to the wall behind the counter, past the potted plant and the stack of forms, and stopped in front of the row of framed photographs that he had walked by every morning for a year. He found the third from the left. He bent and read the brass plaque beneath it, and his lips moved, and then his voice came out hoarse. “Officer Raymond Benavidez. Phoenix Police Department. Medal of Valor, nineteen seventy nine.” I am Ray Benavidez, eighty two years old, and I stood in the line with my cane hooked on my arm, with the gold badge shining in my open wallet. The whole room had turned to look at the wall.
In 1971, at twenty seven, I joined the Phoenix police. I was one of eleven Hispanic officers on a force of eight hundred. I rode a beat on Van Buren for eight years, and in the summer of 1979 I walked into a burning motel on the east side of town and carried out four children and their grandmother, one at a time, with my uniform on fire. The department gave me the Medal of Valor. In 1981, after the third surgery on my shoulder, they handed me the gold retirement badge that I carry in my wallet, and I became a bus driver, because I wanted a job where I could keep moving.
The clerk at Window Four, a heavyset woman of fifty five named Lorena, came out from behind the counter and walked to the wall, and touched the glass of the photograph gently. “Ray,” she said, “I have known you for twenty years, and I never knew.” The kid in the Suns jersey took out his earbuds completely. The lady with the purse, who had been standing behind me, put her hand over her mouth. A man at the back of the line, an old fellow with a Vietnam veteran cap, began to clap, once, twice, and then stopped, embarrassed.
A gold badge clipped inside an old wallet gave one retired bus driver a long line at the DMV to bring a young officer back to the truth in Phoenix.
I gave my terms when Officer Hadley turned back from the wall with his shoulders stiff and his coffee forgotten on a counter. “Son, I am not going to report you. You are twenty six, and you are good at your job, I can see that. I would ask only that you take a minute with the men in those photographs. Read every plaque. Find out who they were. And then I would like you to go back to the precinct and tell the next young officer who stops an old man in a line that he ought to look at the wall first.”
The eyes of Hadley were wet. “Mr. Benavidez, I was in the academy class of twenty twenty two,” he said. “We were taught about the Medal of Valor. We read a paragraph about a man who carried four children out of a motel on Van Buren.” He swallowed. “I stood in front of that photograph every morning and I never once connected it. I told you to get out of the line.” His voice cracked. “I called you old timer. My own grandfather drives a bus in Tucson.” I put a hand on his arm.
But the last of his panic would not be calmed. Hadley, caught in the glare of the whole DMV, suddenly reached out and snatched the gold badge from my open wallet and bolted for the glass doors, evidently meaning to run it through the system in his patrol car before the shame could overtake him. He got ten feet. The clerk Lorena stepped out from behind Window Four and planted herself in the aisle. The kid in the Suns jersey slid into the gap on one side, and the old veteran in the cap closed it on the other.
Hadley stopped, with the badge in his fist and a ring of people around him, and for a second nobody breathed. Then Lorena spoke, in a low voice that carried through the whole room. “Officer,” she said, “the man gave you his name, and you did not listen. Give him back his badge.” Hadley looked at the gold in his hand, the scratches, the worn number. He walked back to me slowly. Standing in front of everyone, he pressed it into my palm and closed my fingers around it, and stepped back and saluted.
The consequences were good. The DMV, on the advice of Lorena, put a framed copy of the medal citation beside the photograph on the wall. Hadley came to my stucco house in Maryvale on his day off, in his own clothes, with a six pack of root beer, and sat on my porch for three hours listening to stories about Van Buren. He brought his grandfather. The two of us argued about bus routes until dark. The department invited me to speak to the new academy class, and I have, twice.
In the name of my wife Lucinda, who passed in 2019, I started the Lucinda Benavidez Fund. It pays for scholarships for the children of bus drivers and sanitation workers and for a police cadet program for young people in the neighborhoods, in Maricopa, Pinal and Yavapai counties. In the first year we sent twenty five young people to community college and enrolled forty cadets. One was a girl from Maryvale whose father drove the Number 17 bus, and who is now in the police academy.
On a hot afternoon in July, I stood in line again at the DMV, with my cane over my arm, to renew my license. The swamp coolers of the old building rattled in the heat. A young officer in uniform came in for his coffee, saw me, and stopped. It was Hadley. He walked up to the line, and with a small bow, he said, “Mr. Benavidez, would you like to go first?” I smiled. “Thank you, son,” I said. “But I have been standing here forty minutes. I believe I will wait my turn.”