The Silver Star

by Jeannette Walls

  Liz and I explained it all, how we hadn’t wanted to be a burden, so we’d gone looking for jobs and Mr. Maddox was the only one who’d give us work, how he’d set up the passbook savings accounts but now when Liz went to get her money to buy the guitar, Mr. Maddox had invested it in these T-bills and so she couldn’t have it.

  Uncle Tinsley took another deep breath and let the air out with a sigh. Now he seemed more tired than anything else. “If you’d come to me in the first place, I could have told you something like this would have happened sooner or later with Maddox. It always does. He’s a vile snake.” He stood up. “I don’t want you to ever have anything to do with him again.”

  “What about my money?” Liz asked.

  “Forget the money,” he said.

  “But it’s two hundred dollars.”

  “Write it off to experience.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  I’d been sharing Liz’s room ever since the day I’d found out about my dad. That night, when Liz turned out the lights in the bird wing, the moon was so full and bright, it cast shadows across the floor. We lay side by side in bed, staring up at the ceiling.

  “I’m going to get my money,” Liz suddenly said.

  “How?” I asked. “Uncle Tinsley told us not to have anything to do with Mr. Maddox.”

  “I don’t care,” she said. “That money’s mine. I worked for it.”

  “But Uncle Tinsley said—”

  “I don’t care what Uncle Tinsley said,” Liz went on. “What does he know? He lives shut up in this old house, eating his venison stew. He doesn’t know what it’s like to need a job. He never has.” She sat up and looked out the window. “That money’s mine. I need it. I earned it. I’m going to get it.”

  After school on Tuesday, Liz got on the blue Schwinn and rode into town to see Mr. Maddox. I expected her back in an hour or two. By dinnertime, she still hadn’t returned. I went into the kitchen, where Uncle Tinsley was opening a can of tomatoes to stretch out the stew. He dumped it into the big copper pot and gave the stew a taste. “Needs a little zing,” he said. “Where’s Liz?”

  “She had some stuff to do. She should be back soon.”

  “I see,” Uncle Tinsley said. He poured some vinegar into the pot and then ladled out the stew.

  I carried the bowls to the table. After he’d said his usual blessing and eaten a few bites, Uncle Tinsley put down his spoon. “What stuff?” he asked.

  “What stuff?”

  “You said Liz had some stuff to do. What stuff?” He was eyeing me intently.

  I looked at my spoon, trying to figure out what to say. “You know, stuff.”

  “No, I don’t know.”

  “Errands and things.”

  “Bean, you’re a terrible liar. Absolutely terrible. Your eyes are darting around all over the place. Now look at me square and tell me where Liz is.”

  I raised my eyes and felt my lower lip quivering.

  “I guess you don’t need to tell me. There are only two things I’ve asked both of you not to do since you got here. One was not to get jobs, and you went out and got them. The other was to forget the money, and the very next day, Liz goes to get it.”

  “Please don’t be mad at us, Uncle Tinsley. Liz just wanted to get her money. It was hers. And please don’t kick us out.”

  “I’m not going to kick you out, Bean,” Uncle Tinsley said. “I guess we’ll just have to wait and hear what she has to say.”

  Through the rest of dinner, Uncle Tinsley kept glancing at his watch. “It’s late,” he said at one point. “She really shouldn’t be out this late.” A couple of minutes later, he said, “I’m going to ground that girl until her hair turns white.” He added, “What she really needs is a good old-fashioned whipping.”

  We were rinsing out the bowls at the kitchen sink when we heard a knock at the door. I ran to see who it was, turning on the porch light. When I opened the door, a strange man stood there with his arm around Liz. She was crying. Her eyes were puffy and red, she had bruises on her cheek and chin, and her shirt was torn. She was looking down, holding a soft drink cup with both hands and sucking on the straw, but the drink was all gone and the ice cubes were rattling around.

  “Liz?” I said. She didn’t look up, and when I tried to hug her, she turned away.

  Uncle Tinsley had come up behind me. “What happened here?” he asked.

  “Mr. Holladay, I didn’t know she was your niece,” the man said. He was skinny, with black hair and a mustache, and he wore a blue mechanic’s jacket with the name Wayne stitched on the pocket. “What happened wasn’t right, Mr. Holladay. Wayne Clemmons, by the way.” He extended his hand and Uncle Tinsley shook it.

  “What did happen?”

  Wayne explained that he worked at a garage but also ran a one-man car service part-time, Byler not needing a lot of taxis. Jerry Maddox occasionally hired him because, although Mr. Maddox had that fancy Le Mans, he got a charge out of being driven to business meetings, like he was a big shot with a chauffeur. “Mr. Maddox said it enhances the aura.”

  “Get to the point, Wayne.”

  Wayne had been at the garage late that afternoon when Mr. Maddox drove up with this young woman. He said the carburetor on the Le Mans was acting up, but he had some meetings he needed to attend, and he wanted Wayne to drive him and the girl around. As they were getting in the car, Wayne said, Mr. Maddox pulled him aside and said the girl was a hooker and he might be getting a little backseat action between meetings.

  “Sweet Jesus,” Uncle Tinsley said.

  They started driving around town, Wayne continued, stopping at various places with him and the girl waiting in the car while Mr. Maddox went inside. As evening came on, the girl started complaining to Mr. Maddox about not getting her money, saying things like “It’s my money, I earned it.” Mr. Maddox kept telling her she’d get the money, but first she needed to do what he wanted. Wayne figured it was just a hooker and a john haggling over the fee. The argument grew more heated, with the girl getting louder and angrier. Then, in the rearview mirror, Wayne saw Mr. Maddox backhand her, and she started crying. Mr. Maddox caught Wayne’s glance. “Keep your eyes on the road,” he said. “I don’t pay you to watch, I pay you to drive.”

  By then it was dark. As Wayne drove through town, he heard the two of them struggling, the girl begging Mr. Maddox to stop and him backhanding her a couple more times. Then they came to a red light. The girl suddenly jumped out of the car. Mr. Maddox jumped out after her, but the girl ran around the car and jumped back in next to Wayne, locking the door. “Go!” she screamed.

  Wayne took off, leaving Mr. Maddox at the street corner. The girl was sobbing. Her shirt was half torn off, and she was holding it together with both hands. Wayne said he mentioned, by way of showing some sympathy, that whoring could be a rough line of work, but the girl said Tinsley Holladay was her uncle and she wanted Wayne to take her to Mayfield. That, Wayne said, was when he realized she wasn’t a hooker after all.

  “She was awful upset, Mr. Holladay,” Wayne said. “But I was in ’Nam, and I know how to deal with people losing it. So I stopped at the Park ’N Eat and got her a Coke. I think that helped calm her.” Wayne kept looking back and forth between me and Uncle Tinsley, like he wanted our reaction. His adrenaline seemed to be pumping.

  “Thank you for doing this,” Uncle Tinsley said. “I know it wasn’t easy, but you did the right thing.”

  “Mr. Maddox has got to be pretty pissed with me, but I don’t care. I’m pretty pissed with him. What he did was wrong. It was wrong—and I’ll testify to that.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I tried to hug Liz again, and this time she didn’t turn away, but her body was completely rigid. Her shoulders felt so thin and frail that it seemed I’d crush her bones if I hugged too tightly. Then she let her cup drop, the ice scattering across the floor, and collapsed in my arms. I felt that if I didn’t hold her up, she’d fall to the floor as well.

  “Thank you for all you’ve d
one, Wayne,” Uncle Tinsley said. “You’re a good man.” He was usually tight with money, but he took a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet and offered it to Wayne.

  “I couldn’t accept, sir,” Wayne said. “I didn’t do it for the money.”

  “I insist. After what happened, Maddox certainly isn’t going to pay you.”

  “Well, then, thank you very much.”

  “Thank you, Wayne,” Uncle Tinsley said. “We can handle it from here.”

  He opened the door. Wayne walked out, giving Liz and me that nod that said, I got you covered.

  I squeezed Liz again. “Liz, are you okay?”

  She shook her head.

  “What are we going to do?” I asked Uncle Tinsley.

  “Let’s get Liz cleaned up and into bed,” he said.

  “Shouldn’t we call the police first?”

  “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea,” Uncle Tinsley said.

  “We’ve got to do something,” I said.

  “I told you two to stay away from Maddox, but you wouldn’t listen, and this is where it’s gotten us.”

  “Still, we’ve got to do something,” I said. I gave Liz a gentle shake. “Don’t you think?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know,” Liz said. “I just don’t know.”

  “Don’t you want to press charges?” I asked. I kept thinking about Wayne saying he’d testify. It sounded like he thought going to the cops was a foregone conclusion.

  “I don’t know,” she said again.

  “What’s done is done,” Uncle Tinsley said. “You can’t undo it by pressing charges. It’ll only create more trouble—and more scandal.”

  “What do you want to do, Liz?”

  “I just want to take a bath.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  I ran Liz a bath. I worried I might be destroying evidence or something, but Liz really wanted that bath. She also wanted the water as hot as it could be, and she asked me to stay.

  “What happened, Liz? Did he actually—”

  “He tried to. But I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “No.”

  “Shouldn’t we go to the hospital?”

  “That’s the last thing I want to do.”

  “But you might be hurt.”

  “I don’t want anyone examining me.”

  “Are you worried about getting pregnant?”

  “No. He didn’t . . . I said I don’t want to talk about it.”

  When Liz climbed into the tub, she kept on her underwear. She didn’t explain why, but I understood.

  “You were smart, Liz,” I said. “You got away from Maddox just like we got away from that perv in New Orleans.”

  “I’m not smart,” she said. “If I was smart, I never would have gotten in the car.”

  “Don’t think about it like that. You did get away.”

  After the bath, Liz got into bed and pulled the covers up over her head, saying she wanted to be alone. I went back downstairs. Uncle Tinsley was in the living room, poking at the fire he’d built. I tried calling Mom to ask what we should do about pressing charges, but there was no answer.

  “We should go to the police,” I said.

  “That’s not a good idea,” Uncle Tinsley said.

  “Or at least talk to a lawyer.”

  “These things are best kept in the family.”

  “It’s worse than Wayne said. Liz told me Maddox tried to rape her.”

  “Oh Christ,” he said. “That poor girl.” He ran his hand through his hair. “Still, nothing you can do will undo the damage. It’ll only make things worse.”

  “But Maddox can’t get away with this.”

  “You don’t know Maddox,” he said. We may have been working for Maddox, he continued, but we didn’t understand what kind of man he really was. Maddox loved nothing better than a fight. A lot of people think a fight is over when they knock their opponent down, but people like Maddox think that’s the time to start kicking hard.

  Maddox did a lot of his fighting in the courthouse, Uncle Tinsley went on. The county clerk had a docket a mile long, listing all the cases he’d been involved in. He sued neighbors over boundary disputes. He sued doctors for malpractice. He sued dry cleaners, claiming they shrank his clothes. He sued mechanics, claiming they didn’t fix his car. He sued town officials if there was a pothole on his street. While most people saw the court as a place to seek justice, Maddox saw it as a place to take down anyone who happened to stand in his way or get on his wrong side.

  This was something Maddox had learned years ago, Uncle Tinsley said, when he was living in a boardinghouse in Rhode Island and stole some jewelry from his landlady. The police searched his room and found the jewelry, and Maddox was convicted. Then along came a civil rights lawyer who argued that the police didn’t have the right to search Maddox’s room without his permission. The case went all the way to the Rhode Island Supreme Court. Maddox won, although everyone knew he was guilty as sin. And that was when Maddox became a voracious student of the law, because he realized that guilt and innocence were incidental, that people who understood the law could also figure out how to bend the law.

  “He brags about winning that case,” Uncle Tinsley said. “He fights dirty. That’s why you don’t want to tangle with Maddox.”

  “What do we do? Pretend nothing happened?”

  Uncle Tinsley gave the burning logs a hard jab with the poker, and sparks flew up into the chimney.

  I went back up to the bird wing. Uncle Tinsley wanting to pretend nothing happened made me wonder if maybe what Mom had said about her family was true—they were all experts at pretending.

  Liz still had the covers over her head. I took my dad’s photo and his Silver Star from the cigar box that I kept in the white cradle and brought them into the bathroom to study them in the light.

  I ran my finger over the tiny silver star that was inside the bigger gold star, and I wondered what advice my dad would give me if he were around. I looked at his crooked grin and the cocky way his arms were crossed as he leaned against the doorframe, and I knew the one thing Charlie Wyatt would never do. He would never pretend nothing happened.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  The next morning, I woke up before Liz and went downstairs to make her a cup of tea. Uncle Tinsley was puttering around in the kitchen. He started talking about what a hard frost we’d had during the night, and how this time of year the birds, especially the blue jays, were always flying into windows and banging their heads on the glass. “Always startles me,” he said. “Startles them more, I expect. Sometimes they just bounce off, sometimes they hit so hard, it knocks them senseless.”

  It was clear that Uncle Tinsley wasn’t going to make any reference to what had happened with Maddox, in the hope that we would put it all behind us and get on with life. Lying in bed, I had decided during the night that Liz and I should at least see a lawyer. I didn’t know much about the police and the courts and the law, but I did know that everyone got a lawyer, even the poor black guy in To Kill a Mockingbird. I figured Uncle Tinsley knew every lawyer in town, but since he wanted us to forget the whole thing, there was no point in asking him for a recommendation or telling him about the plan. I had a classmate, Billy Corbin, whose father was a lawyer. I could look him up in the phone book.

  When I brought the cup of tea up to Liz, she was awake, lying in bed. Her face was even more swollen and bruised than the night before. “There’s no way I’m going to school,” she said.

  “You don’t have to,” I said. I passed her the cup of tea and explained my plan for the two of us to go see Billy Corbin’s dad.

  “Whatever you think,” Liz said. She sounded like she was in a daze.

  Before leaving the house, I tried calling Mom again. I was certain she would want us to press charges, since she was always going on about women standing up for their rights. With Mom, however, you never knew how she’d react. I let the phone ring a long time, but there was st
ill no answer. That made me wonder where the heck Mom was, because she wasn’t exactly an early riser.

  Instead of taking the bus to school, Liz and I walked into town. The sun was out, and it was melting the frost, though the grass was still white and stiff in places the sun hadn’t reached. We passed the emus, who were on the far side of the field pecking at the grass, but we didn’t stop to watch them.

  When we got to Holladay Avenue, I found a phone booth and asked the operator to put in a collect call to Mom. There was no answer. I thought of going over to the hill and talking to Aunt Al, but she didn’t like to give advice. Also, if she advised us to press charges and Mr. Maddox found out about it, he could make life real hard for her. Anyway, it seemed that the most important thing to do was talk to a lawyer.

  I looked up Mr. Corbin’s address in the phone book dangling from a chain. His office was over a shoe store, up a rickety flight of stairs, and his door had a frosted glass pane etched with WILLIAM T. CORBIN, ESQ., ATTORNEY AT LAW. When we knocked, there was no answer, and the door was locked.

  “We’ll just wait,” I said. We sat down at the top of the stairs. After a while a man came climbing up, carrying two big briefcases. He looked tired, with circles under his eyes, and his suit was rumpled.

  “Mr. Corbin?” I asked.

  “The one and only. Who wants to know?”

  “I’m Bean Holladay. This is my sister, Liz. We need to talk to you. About a legal matter.”

  He smiled. “Let me guess. Your mother grounded you, and you want me to appeal the ruling.”

  “It’s serious,” I said.

  He took out a key and unlocked the door. “I suspect it is.” He looked at Liz. “What happened to you?”

  “That’s what we’re here to talk about,” I said.

  Mr. Corbin’s office was a mess, with law books propped open and legal papers stacked everywhere. I took that as a good sign. Any lawyer who couldn’t afford a secretary to keep his office neat must be honest.

  Mr. Corbin had us sit in cracked leather chairs facing his desk while he shuffled some of the papers covering the surface. “Now, tell me what happened,” he said.