He wasn’t surprised to find the house empty. They would have gone down to Cannon City to be with their son. The same journey Truax had taken a few hours earlier. Only, they would bring their child home alive. Walk him up the driveway and through the front door and into his room. Feed him and protect him and keep the harm away. Wooten would bribe the people down there to get his son free. That was how he worked. If not tonight then tomorrow. Or the next day. Whenever it happened, Truax would be here. He would stay as long as it took.
Although it had been over two days since he’d closed his eyes, he felt as alert as he had during those long nights on the wire at My Song. He noted every dappled shadow and shimmering leaf; his ears marked bird-song and wind. Nothing would come to this house without him seeing it.
Provisions weren’t a problem. That morning he’d stopped at the 7-Eleven to refill his big tartan thermos and empty the Hostess rack. Nobody seemed to mind him moving to the front of the line. They made space, some of them looking at his slick glove as they moved away. He handed the woman all the change in his pocket. She put the money into the register without counting. Not once meeting his eye.
Cars had begun coming up the Wootens’ driveway soon after Truax had taken up his position. Most appeared to be reporters, though there were also friends, coming to offer support. They would ring the bell—some even called out. One of them, a long-haired man with cowboy boots and a camera dangling from his neck, walked around back. He stepped up onto the redwood deck and peered through the kitchen’s sliding-glass door for a long while, using cupped hands to stop the glare. Then he knocked with his palm, making a noise that echoed like distant splashes. When it became clear that no one was home he left, leaving behind a cloud of breath on the window that took minutes to fade. They all went. Leaving only Truax behind. By midafternoon they’d stopped coming. The house’s shadow crept across the backyard until it joined the shade where Truax hid. He continued to hold his position. His body had settled into itself. His sidearm was on the untreated wood just a few inches to his left. The spare clip was in his pants pocket, no more bulky than a set of keys. Occasionally he’d reach into the paper bag stuffed with Ho Ho’s and Sno-Balls and Twinkies. But the moment he felt their cool cellophane the sickness swelled, causing him to leave them uneaten. Instead, he sipped lukewarm coffee from the plastic thermos cup and waited. Later he would piss it back into the thermos and then, if it was necessary, he would drink it again. The one thing he would not do was leave this position. Not until he was sure the boy would be punished.
She’d breathed spasmodically and water filled her lungs. That was how the doctor said she’d died. He wondered if there had been a moment when she woke, a brief eternity of lucidity before everything stopped. A second or two after her mind overcame the blow it had suffered. She would have tried to find the air her lungs needed but there would have been only the cold, muddy water. And then she would have known. He’d seen that happen. Men whose hearts or guts had been ripped to shreds—men who had no business being awake—suddenly blinking into startled consciousness. Just long enough to know, and take that knowledge with them. With Susan there would have been the impenetrable murk of that dirty water. The cold. There would have been fear and panic but those would have quickly given way to loneliness. That was the thing Truax couldn’t accept. The loneliness that would have been the last thing she’d known.
While Joel Wooten fled to this safe home.
Swope had said that the boy would be punished. And Truax knew that he would try to make that happen. Swope was a man of honor. But a deeper part of him knew that sometimes Swope’s law didn’t work. He had seen this in the war. Every day, at the end. Almost every hour. Times when you had to make sure for yourself that it worked. That was why he was here. In case the law didn’t work.
Sometime during the afternoon his wrist began to ache. He wished he’d remembered to bring his first aid kit. The smell was becoming rank. Though he knew the problem was more than just the smell. The infection was traveling into his body. That explained the pain. Good nerves were being assaulted. He could feel the faint fever pricks along his arm and shoulder. Sweat collecting in the valley of his spine. The bubbling acid in his guts that made eating impossible. This was how the fever had started last time. He should go to a doctor and get something for it. But that would mean abandoning his position. He’d done that once already and Joel had escaped to kill his daughter. He would not do it again. Not until he was sure the boy had been punished.
The dreams began to come in the late afternoon, providing him blessed relief from thoughts about Susan lonely in the water and Susan on that steel gurney. He never stopped watching the Wooten house as he dreamed, the images layered over reality, like a photograph that had come back wrong from the developers. Making love with Irma back in Germany that first winter, seeing her perfect snowy breasts and feeling her talcy flesh. His young daughters in his arms, their surging weak limbs entwining him. One by one, unwilled, the same dreams that had carried him through the long nights in My Song played through his mind. Breaking the shell of time and allowing him to float freely in the eternal liquid that spilled through the cracks.
The dreams vanished when the Wootens arrived home at dusk, Ardelia’s Le Sabre bouncing over the curb. Before she’d even come to a stop Truax was ready, feeling as alert as if he’d slept for ten hours. His left hand reached out instinctively for his weapon as he watched the front door open and the hall light flicker on. It was just Wooten and his wife.
No Joel. That meant nothing. This thing was still not over. He watched as the couple walked into the kitchen. They looked tired. It must be bad, having a son who is a killer. In other circumstances Truax might have even felt sorry for them. But this was different. They were his enemies now. They would try to make Joel free and Truax would stop them. Ardelia filled a copper kettle from the sink and put it on the stove. Blue flame winked beneath it. Wooten started to speak. After a few seconds she turned and said something back to him. Her words appeared to be angry. Wooten bowed his head as he listened.
John Truax, spiking fever but ready, watched them from his dark fort.
35
Ardelia turned away from the stove, her eyes as hot as its blue flame.
“So what exactly are you saying, Earl?”
“I’m saying we better come to a decision about this before they pull the rug out first thing tomorrow morning.”
She began to shake her head slowly.
“How many times do I have to tell you?” she asked. “He didn’t do it. He’s as innocent as the day he was born. That’s the only decision there is.”
“And you know that for a fact.”
“An absolute fact.”
Now Wooten shook his head.
“I wish I could be as sure as you.”
“I wish you could as well.” Ardelia’s voice was sharp. “I also wish I knew what it was about our son that makes you think he could have done this thing.”
“He’s a boy, Ardelia. A confused, unhappy boy.”
“A boy who’s never hurt so much as a flea in his entire life. And now you’re calling him a violent criminal. A killer. Why is that, Earl? What is this quality in our son that makes you believe the worst of him? For heaven’s sake, the child just looked you in the eye and said he didn’t do it.”
“He lied before,” Wooten said. “He tried to meet with her, didn’t he?”
“Oh, and everybody knows that breaking curfew to be with your sweetheart leads directly to homicide.”
They waited out an ominous spell of silence.
“It’s because he’s black, isn’t it?”
It took several seconds for Wooten to register what she’d said.
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Is it? I’ve been wracking my brain all day trying to understand where you are on this. I mean, where is all this rage and deceitfulness supposed to come from?”
“Ardelia …”
“Don’t Ardelia me. Explain to me ho
w eighteen years of careful tutelage and character building can disappear in the course of a summer’s night. What is it, Earl? Juju magic? Schizophrenia?”
Wooten said nothing.
“Which leaves one thing,” she continued. “Because he’s black.”
Wooten looked down at the big pine table separating them. There were unreadable words gouged in its surface, remnants of Joel’s homework. Wooten tried to think of a way to express the feeling he’d had ever since first seeing Joel with Susan. The wicked foreboding that was now coming true.
“I’m not saying he set out to kill the girl,” he said slowly. “I’m not even saying he wanted to hurt her. Something happened and he … lashed out.”
“Lashed out? Now when’s the last time you saw Joel lash out? I seem to remember him being about two, though perhaps you may possess knowledge to which I’m not privy.”
“This is different.”
“Why? Because there’s a white girl involved?”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Oh, it’s simple, all right. And now I suppose you’re going to start spouting all that nonsense about the evil magic between black boys and white girls those Bama kin of yours put into your thick head forty years ago.”
“Ardelia …”
“No, Earl. No sale.” She put a hand on her cocked hip. “That’s not how it works. All my life I’ve been hearing this trash about how you black men have some wild beast in you that we have to be careful to keep under lock and key. Keep the white women away else the colored boys start swinging in the trees! Well, let me ask you—where was that in my father? Or his father? Or yours? Where was it in my sweet brother Wyatt? And where the hell is it in you?”
Wooten remembered his hands on Vota’s collar. The anger he’d felt at his own son just an hour ago, so intense it took strangers to pull him away from it. He knew where it was in him. About an inch below the surface.
“Joel wouldn’t have hurt that poor child any more than you would have,” Ardelia persisted. “And if some kind of terrible accident did happen, then he would have walked right up to you, looked you in the eye and told you about it. Long before any redneck deputy showed up at our door. And then he would have waited for you to help him.” Her voice had grown terribly quiet. “Look inside yourself, Earl. Not the self a bunch of superstitious people conjured up in your fool mind but the real you. Look inside yourself and then look inside your son. Now, I ask you—is there killing there?”
Wooten looked away from his wife’s intense glare. The old copper coffeepot began to rattle behind her. Her words were so strong and right. He wasn’t so sure anymore. He wished there were some way he could see what had happened down at the lake. Some way he could peel back the misunderstanding and hostility and look into his son’s heart.
Ardelia was still talking.
“You know, doubting Joel and going down to that woman—they’re the same thing. The same damned thing. It’s like you wake up every morning and can’t believe you aren’t as weak as they told you you were. So you got to go out and prove it.”
“All right,” he said wearily. “Let’s say you’re right. Let’s say he isn’t guilty. We still have a problem.”
“What’s that?”
“Proving it.” Wooten shook his head. “The evidence is just too strong.”
“Something will turn up,” Ardelia said, her voice less confident now.
“What?” Wooten asked.
“I don’t know. I mean, for one thing, it’s pretty clear to me at least that Teddy Swope isn’t telling the whole story about what happened down there.”
“But why wouldn’t he? Why would he wreck Joel’s life? He worships him. They’re best friends.”
“Earl, please, let’s not waste our valuable time trying to get inside that boy’s head. There’s things going on in there that you and I couldn’t even guess at. He has an IQ of one seventy-seven, Earl. That’s about forty points higher than me, and I ain’t simple. I saw the results. We all stood around the teacher’s lounge with our mouths hanging open. We don’t even have the tests that can accurately measure that boy’s mind. Iowa, SAT—I don’t care. And you put that with his childish personality, well, it’s like having a nuclear reactor in a Volkswagen.”
Wooten began to see what she was driving at—that what had happened to Susan was some sort of bad accident and now Teddy was telling stories to get himself out from beneath it. But this was just a theory, little more than wishful thinking. He’d seen Joel back in his bedroom; he’d heard the words he’d said when the police came. The boy had been desperate and distraught. He’d done something wrong. Trying to pin this horrible thing on Teddy would only ensure that Joel’s life was wrecked. Wooten’s job here wasn’t to go chasing after pipe dreams and thin theories. It was to help his boy. To take the best offer the man had and run with it.
“We don’t have time,” he said.
“I’m sorry?”
“We don’t have the time to be messing around with what Teddy said or what Joel thinks. We have to decide about that plea. Tonight.”
“There’s nothing to decide. We say not guilty and fight like trapped cats.”
“And what if we lose?”
“We won’t. We can’t.”
Ardelia met his gaze defiantly. They were going round and round now. He knew she would never agree. But he also knew that she was not the one who would have to provide the final answer here. McNutt and Van Riper—it was Wooten they wanted to hear. It would have to be him. Alone. Because Joel would do what his father told him. Despite the recent friction between them, that was how it would play. It was how he’d been raised. Wooten would have to sit across from his son and tell him his only choice was to say what the man wanted him to say and then do his years. Otherwise, he would lose his life. Lose it in a slow drip of wasted days and prison bitterness that would leave him shucked and shelled by the time he was thirty.
So there was no reason to argue with Ardelia about it, no reason to let her turn him around with conjectures that might sound good even while they were nothing more than smoke and air. There was only one thing to do. Make the plea. Wooten decided that he would tell her nothing for now. Let it ride. And then, in the morning, he would drive down to Cannon City and tell his son how it had to be.
“All right,” he said.
“All right we plead not guilty or all right we send our boy to jail?”
Wooten ran his hands over his scalp.
“I don’t know. I just … don’t know.”
She shook her head.
“You amaze me, Earl Wooten. You really do.”
She began to gather her things to go out.
“Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m going back to Cannon City to sit with our boy—if they’ll let me. And then I have to pick up the twins. In the meantime I suggest you have a good hard think about how we’re going to fight this. Open up that pig head of yours and entertain the possibility that your son is telling you the truth. Just do that much for me and our twenty years together. Because if you cave in on this, on the back of everything else that has happened this week, then you and I are through. Through.”
And then she was gone, her heels clicking angrily on the polished floor as she stormed toward the front door. Though she was walking fast, it still took her a long time to cross the house Wooten had built to keep his family safe.
When she was gone he realized he was hungry. It had been almost twenty-four hours since he’d eaten. If he didn’t get something into his stomach soon the panic would come. And then it would be impossible to think at all. He walked over to the big fridge, pulling the door free of its suction strip. Cold air and cool light washed over him. He looked at the countless things inside, the half-empty pickle jars and vacuum-wrapped packets of lunch meat, the split lettuce and Tupperware containers. There was a shriveled lime on the door. Mason jars of preserves no one would ever eat. The back wall was covered with a pall of condensation. Beyond that the motor chugged, replacing es
caping frost.
The phone rang. Wooten was tempted not to answer. But it might be about Joel. He swung the door shut and went over to it.
“Mr. Wooten, this is Andy Ackerman from the Baltimore Sun. I was wondering if you might answer a few—”
He hung up. It rang again, so quickly that he knew it couldn’t be the same caller. It was a woman’s voice this time. Her age was easy to guess. Three hundred years.
“Fucking nigger. They should lynch your son for what he did to that bitch. Not that she didn’t deserve it.”
“I’m hungry,” Wooten said.
There was a moment of stupefied silence on the other end of the line. Wooten continued to hold the phone to his ear.
“Then why don’t you eat my shit, you black fuck—”
He hung up the phone and stared at it for a moment. When it didn’t ring he crossed the kitchen to the walk-in pantry, a room he’d designed large enough to hold more food than his family would ever need. He pulled the cord to the overhead bulb and looked at the rows of cans and cartons, the restaurant-sized boxes and sixty-four-ounce jars. The phone rang again. Wooten began to move toward it but then stopped. It wouldn’t be Joel. Nor McNutt. They weren’t going to call. They weren’t going to be doing anything until he decided. A sudden stab of pain moved through his guts, a vivid combination of dread and hunger that almost doubled him over. It was unexpectedly intense, like the twist of a knife. Wooten took a sharp breath but it did no good. The pain held its ground, caught in some intestinal switchback.
The phone continued to ring, echoing loudly through the kitchen. Ice dropped noisily in the freezer. The cooling kettle gave out one last desultory rattle. Wooten knew that he had to get out of here. They would not leave him alone if he stayed. They would call and they would come. His wife would keep on him to say no, everyone else to say yes. He had to get out of this house. Go somewhere he could get some thinking done. Get some food in his stomach to stop this pain.
The New City Page 43
