Taft

by Ann Patchett

  And Ruth, who made a point of never being hurt, looked hurt for just a second. "It wasn't my intention to blackmail you, if that's what you're worried about." She shook her head and took a healthy sip of her wine. "You are the stupidest man I ever met in my life," she said to her glass.

  "I'm sure that's true."

  "You coming over for dinner tonight?"

  "Tomorrow night," I said.

  "Tomorrow. Well then, I guess I'll see you tomorrow. Tell that little waitress of yours that her Aunt Ruth said not to be so sensitive."

  "I'll tell her."

  She downed the rest of the wine and picked up her purse.

  "You take care of yourself," I said.

  "Count on that," Ruth said.

  As I was watching Ruth walk away I couldn't help but think I'd gotten up too early. That was my problem. Every time I tried to think about Franklin, the other things started crowding him out. What I needed was a simpler life. I'd have settled for the one I had a week before.

  "Cyndi," I said. "Go back in the kitchen and get me some olives. We're about out."

  "You know where the kitchen is," she said and kept right on walking. News of what I'd done, or some version of what I'd done, seemed to be traveling fast. I wasn't much when it came to a code of honor, but there was no sense in trying to explain this one to anybody. Maybe that was me feeling bad about Carl, trying to at least give him the dignity of telling whatever lies he was telling. People have short memories. Just look at Marion. They'd all be mad for a while and then they wouldn't be. The thing to do was keep quiet, pour drinks and wipe down the bar. That's exactly what I did until five o'clock when Wallace came in. He hadn't asked me any questions the night before and I hadn't said anything, but I had to admit there was some comfort in having him there.

  "How's it been going?" he said, stepping behind the bar and tying an apron around his waist. Most men won't wear aprons, but most men aren't Wallace.

  "It's been a real joy."

  He pressed his lips together and nodded. "I figured as much. That one giving you trouble too?" He pointed at Cyndi.

  "That one always gives me trouble."

  "I've been wondering about her relationship to the defendant," he said. "Not that it's any of my business."

  "This is a business," I said. "It's all our business."

  "Tonight's the night you show me about the money. I figure with your family in town"—he stopped for a minute—"and everything, that it might do you good to spend a little less time here in the evenings."

  "I wonder who's working for who these days."

  "I'm not telling you how to run the store, chief, I'm just offering."

  Good man, Wallace. "I appreciate that, and about last night—"

  Wallace put up his hand. "As long as the problem is gone then you don't need to say anything else about it."

  "It's gone." But it was always possible to speak too soon. The phone was ringing even as the words were coming out of my mouth and since I was standing closest to the phone, I was the one who picked it up.

  "Let me talk to Fay," Carl said.

  Fay was still spending her time hiding out in the kitchen. "Fay," I hollered through the door. "Telephone."

  She followed me out into the bar, not too close. "You want to take it up in the office?"

  "I can get it here," she said.

  She picked up the phone behind the bar and it seemed like an awfully long time before she said anything, and when she did all she said was "Christ."

  "All right," she said. "All right. I'm coming." After she hung up the phone she stood there and looked at it like she was waiting for it to start ringing again. Wallace and I tried to make ourselves busy.

  "Carl's in jail," she said, like it was an old secret and she was just the last one to find out. "I'm going to need you to drive me down there, I guess. I could take a cab, but I want to be able to leave right away."

  "In jail?" Wallace said.

  She nodded.

  There was a part of me saying no, no rides to jail. It was the same old tired part of me that had said no to everything concerning Fay and her brother right from the word go. I was sorry that it didn't ever seem to be the part that won out.

  "You're going to be busy," I said to Wallace. "Just you and Cyndi here."

  "I'll give Arlene a call," he said. He took it all in stride. Life didn't seem to surprise Wallace the way it did me.

  "I guess we're going to jail then. What's his bail?" I asked Fay.

  "No bail," she said. "He's a minor. I'm going to see if I can get them to release him to me." She ran her hand over her hair, smoothing it down. At that moment she barely looked seventeen and I couldn't see the police releasing anybody to Fay.

  Down on Beale there's a police museum. It's free and open as late as any bar. People like to go there when they're drunk. It makes them feel like they're doing something wild, like they're turning themselves in. There isn't much to see, really. Framed pictures of famous policemen and dead policemen, glass cases full of badges and old guns and tin whistles, station log books saying who was brought in on what charge. You don't have to go back too far to find plenty of people brought in for the crime of being uppity, not getting off the sidewalk quick enough, having the wrong tone in their voice. Anyone who says that Memphis is bad only needs to drop by the police museum to see when Memphis was worse. I'd been there plenty of times on plenty of different occasions. It was only two blocks from where I worked. But it gave me a bad taste for police stations. If I wasn't given to the fake one, I didn't see that the real one would suit me any better.

  Fay got into the car. Old home week.

  "Which jail?" I said.

  "Shit." She leaned over and put her head against the dashboard.

  "It isn't something a person would think to ask, really. It says something good about you. Your not knowing." I was trying to be funny, but that was a washout. "We'll go to the big one," I said, not entirely sure which one was biggest. "If he isn't there, they'll be able to find him for us."

  "I'd appreciate it," she said.

  I started over to the station on Poplar since it was closest and, I figured, our best bet. I'd lived in Memphis all my life. A man can know where the police are without ever having gotten into too much trouble. The traffic was thick with people wanting to get home. She would have gotten there quicker if she'd walked.

  "That's what last night was about, wasn't it?"

  What was I going to tell her? "More or less."

  She was tired. "I guess I figured as much. Whenever I talked to him about it he'd say it used to be a problem but now it wasn't anymore. You want to believe somebody, you know, your brother."

  "Sure you do."

  "I wasn't doing him any favors, letting him slide. You, you're the one who was trying to help him."

  "I wasn't helping Carl," I said. "I just wanted him out of the bar. I wish I could tell you different."

  She shook her head. "You just don't see it. I've read articles about these things. If you really want to help somebody, you have to be tough with them." Fay pulled her legs up onto the seat and hugged her knees to her chest. "Listen, if it's all right with you, I'd like to tell them Carl works at the restaurant, that he washes dishes there or something. I think it would make things look more solid if we could tell them you're his boss too."

  "I make a point of not lying to the police."

  "It's not such a lie, really. He's there all the time. He's worked for you before, a couple of times anyway. You could just tell them that, if it came up."

  Fay knew I was going to do what she wanted and I guess I knew it too, but I didn't say anything. I figured we could all wait and see.

  The sergeant working the desk was a black guy with a nameplate that said Lowe and for the first time I thought my being along might do some good. There was a little waiting room where a couple of people who looked like they were just a step away from being on the other side of the bars were sitting in red plastic chairs. They reminded me of th
e people I'd seen in the bus station, the last time Fay and I were out looking for Carl.

  "Excuse me," Fay said, and the sergeant looked up at her and then at me. I nodded. "We're here to see about Carl Taft."

  "Prisoner?"

  Fay pulled back. "He's my brother," she said. "You're holding him." Like he was a dress she'd put on lay away months ago and finally had the money to claim.

  "Taft," the sergeant said, typing it into a computer in front of him. "He's here."

  "May I have him, please?" Her voice was respectful, serious and kind. She wasn't being too sweet. She wasn't leaning into his desk or acting tough. There were lots of different ways to talk to cops. Everybody I'd seen in my life had struck some sort of pose, but Fay, I would have to say, was a natural.

  The sergeant looked at his screen. "He's a minor," he said. "We'll have to release him to the parents."

  "Our father is dead," she said, "and our mother is out of town until next week. I'm his sister. I'm all he's got here."

  "So who is this?" he said, pointing the eraser end of a pencil at me.

  My mouth opened up to speak, but Fay was already going. "I work for him. He drove me down here. Carl, my brother, he works for him too."

  "Sort of a family thing," Sergeant Lowe said, and not in a nice way.

  But Fay took it as the description she'd been looking for. "Yes," she said. "All of us at Muddy's are close. It's a small place. It is like family."

  I was wondering what bar she was thinking of.

  "Muddy's? You work at Muddy's," he said to me.

  "I run the place."

  "Does Guy Chalfont still own Muddy's? Is Guy still alive?"

  "He's in Florida now. I get a postcard every once in a while. He sold out, probably ten years ago now. A doctor bought the place."

  "A doctor." Sergeant Lowe shook his head. "Christ, I'm sorry to hear that."

  "It's fine," I said. "He never comes by. The place is running same as always." I started to say, You should come by sometime, but I didn't want to look like I was offering anything. I wouldn't offer anything to get Carl out of jail.

  "I should get down there. Twenty years ago I had a beat on Beale. I got so sick of the place." He stopped himself and looked up at Fay. "You know this kid had cocaine. That's no small thing. You get into coke, you're talking about a felony. That's bad. You don't want a felony. Tell your brother he'd be a lot better off with pot if he was looking to get into trouble."

  "Yessir," Fay said.

  "You'd have to be eighteen before we could even think about releasing him to you. I'd rather have his mother. I don't like turning kids over to kids. Are you sure your mother isn't home?"

  "Not until next week," Fay said.

  "No other family?"

  "We just moved here from east Tennessee a few months ago. Coalfield," she offered.

  "Coalfield. Jesus Christ. Who thinks the names of these places up?" He tapped a couple of keys on the computer, but the screen was facing away from us. "This boy has no priors. Nothing in Coalfield, right?"

  "No, sir."

  "Of course not, nice boy like this. And you, you're eighteen?"

  Fay nodded.

  "I'd have to see some identification before I believed that."

  This was where things were going to start to unravel. I didn't see any way around it. Fay reached into her purse and pulled out her wallet. I wondered how much trouble I would have saved myself if I had asked to see some ID on the day she came in looking for a job, saying she was twenty.

  The sergeant took her whole wallet and looked at her driver's license. "Well, happy birthday, Elizabeth Fay Taft."

  "Thank you," she said.

  I stared at her, at the side of her face, the line of her nose. Eighteen. Elizabeth. A birthday spent in a bar and a police station without anybody knowing it.

  "You're cutting this one pretty close, you know." He shook his head. "That brother of yours got it all figured out, doesn't he. Hell of a kid, bringing his sister down here on her birthday."

  "May I have him, then?"

  He looked at us for a minute. He knew there was something dead wrong with the picture, but a line was starting to form behind us. A pregnant woman with a baby, a man who looked to be about ninety-five. You wouldn't want to keep either of them standing too long.

  "It costs a lot of money to keep a kid," he said. "Kids have all sorts of rights, you wouldn't believe it. Even kids like this one. I don't see any way to hold him until Mama comes home." He took out a piece of paper and fed it through the typewriter. "What this says is young Carl Taft is cited back. That means he comes back here next week with his mother and talks to the investigator. I don't care if that means you have to drive up to Coaltown and get her yourself. Next week it's Mama, not you. Understand?"

  "Yessir."

  "And you," he said to me. "I still haven't figured out where you fit into all of this. But you would be well advised to keep these children out of here."

  "I'll do my best," I said, though all I could think of was washing my hands of the whole thing.

  The sergeant picked up the phone. "Bring down Carl Taft," he said. "Tell him his sister's here." He looked back at us. "You two have a seat," he said, pointing over towards the plastic chairs with his pencil.

  Fay and I sat down to wait while the pregnant woman moved up to the desk to tell her story.

  Where they were keeping Carl that it took so long to find him, I could only guess. We sat there for an hour, each of us with plenty to say and neither of us willing to say a word of it there. Police stations can make some people feel like they're in church. Everything has to be silent and respectful.

  Maybe I expected Carl to look different, thinner, if that was possible, a little messed up. But they hadn't held him long enough. As soon as I saw him come through the doors carrying the manila envelope full of his possessions, I knew we'd made a mistake by not leaving him in overnight. He hadn't been there long enough to get scared. He'd only been there long enough to get mad.

  The first words out of his mouth were for me. "What's he doing here?"

  "Keep your voice down," Fay said. The sergeant looked up and she waved to him.

  "Don't forget what I told you," Sergeant Lowe said.

  She nodded and pushed Carl ahead of her out the door.

  "You come back to see if you can't steal something else from me?"

  We got in the car. Fay in the front seat, Carl in back.

  "Where'd you leave your car?" I said to him while I backed out of the space.

  "You want the car now?"

  I hit the brakes and they both lurched forward on their seats. I looked at him. I just looked. That was plenty.

  "What happened?" Fay said.

  "It was bullshit," Carl said. "Total bullshit violation of my civil rights." His voice was softer now. "I was just standing there and this cop shook me down and said he found coke on me."

  "Back up," Fay said.

  "I was standing there."

  "Where?"

  "The zoo," he said. "The car's at the zoo. One of those faggy bicycle cops goes by."

  "And you said something?"

  "I didn't say anything. Maybe I said, nice bike or something. I can't even remember. Well, the next thing I know this guy is right up in my face. What's your problem, he says. I don't like your face, he says. So I said something back. I'm not going to stand there and take it from some cop who doesn't even get his own car, for Christ's sake."

  "Jesus," I said.

  "So this cop, and I know this has got to be against the law, he slams me up against the wall with all sorts of people around and he starts going through my pockets. Everybody is so interested in what I have in my pockets these days. He finds a pack of cigarettes that some guy had given me and he rips them open and there's a little bit of tin foil in the bottom of the pack with some blow. I don't know if he put it there himself or what, but it wasn't mine."

  "It wasn't yours?" Fay said.

  "Some guy gave me those cigar
ettes. I asked to bum one and he said I could keep the pack. I didn't look in the pack. You think I take apart every pack of cigarettes I get to make sure there's no coke laying around in the bottom? How was I supposed to know?"

  "And you told this to the cop?" I said.

  "Sure that's what I told him. It was the truth."

  I felt truly ashamed for Carl just then, more for how stupid he was becoming than any bad thing he had ever done. I didn't say anything else. I just drove.

  "That's my car, up there," he said, pointing.

  I pulled up next to the gold LeSabre with the bashed-in front. I wanted to think of him getting in and driving away, doing all the idiotic things he was destined to do someplace far from here, and then maybe coming back, years later, when he could be the person his father had known.

  "You should thank him," Fay said. "If it wasn't for him they wouldn't have let you out."

  "They had to let me out," Carl said. "I'm a minor." He slammed the door and then stuck his head inside Fay's window. "Come on."

  "I'm going back to work," she said, and rolled the window up.

  I watched him standing there in my rearview mirror, cursing to himself. He wouldn't be thinking about what he had done to his sister or what he would tell his mother. He would be worrying about having lost the coke he had left. He would be worrying about dealers who didn't like stories. Carl's luck was going bad and if I'd been in possession of any sympathy just then I would have been worried about him myself. He was playing in a league that flossed their teeth with skinny boys like him.

  Fay and I drove along for a while without saying anything. The traffic hadn't gotten any better, so half the time we were just sitting there, not even moving. We were both worn out, exhausted. Carl had that effect on people.

  "It's not that he's a bad person," Fay said, touching the space between her breasts. "Inside. I know that's a stupid thing to say. Oh, he's acting like a complete idiot, but on the inside. But with Carl, it's true. I knew him before all this. You can still see how it is with Carl, can't you?"

  "Sure," I said, and really, it was true. I've met bad people and I've met people who just fell off the track. Carl fell, which means you can get mad at him and tired of him, but you don't so much blame him.