Rough Justice

by Brad Smith

  Kate listened absently, thinking about Browning, how he’d moved about the courtroom, the confidence in his step and his voice. How relaxed he was, like an actor playing a role he’d played a thousand times before. ‘Grant said that he’ll be coming after us.’

  Frances reached out to push Kate’s hair away from her face. ‘He’s not God,’ she said. ‘He can babble away from here until doomsday but he can’t alter the truth.’

  ‘No,’ Kate agreed.

  ‘Still, what drives a guy like that?’ Frances wondered. ‘He has to know that he’s defending a creep. What makes him want to do that?’

  ‘The chance to strut his stuff?’ Kate suggested.

  ‘Story I heard, he’s making a million flat for this,’ David said.

  ‘Flat or round, doesn’t make it right,’ Frances said.

  THREE

  Carl got a room at the Riverview Motel out on the highway. The motel had once been on the outskirts of Talbotville but now, with subdivisions spreading like moss, it would be considered part of the town proper. He unpacked his clothes and stowed his tools in the small closet and then took a shower. Shaving in front of the cloudy bathroom mirror, he took a long look at himself, something he never did. But he wondered what he might look like to her. If he would be what she remembered, or if she bothered to remember him at all.

  He got dressed and lay down on the bed and turned the TV on. He watched the Tigers and the White Sox until Chicago scored five runs in the seventh inning to take a four-run lead. He flipped through the channels for a bit and then he shut the set off and left.

  Archer’s was still in business on Locke Street. The sign was the original, faded and shabby, a red and white plastic image of the name itself with an arrow running through it from left to right. Carl parked in the lot out back and walked around to enter through the front door.

  He drew some looks, the stranger arriving. A few of recognition. Carl didn’t stare but he didn’t look away either. Willard Jones was pulling draft behind the bar. The last Carl had seen of him, back in Carl’s serious drinking days, Willard had been pulling draft at the Queens Hotel across town. When he saw Carl he extended his hand.

  ‘Lookit here,’ Willard said. ‘Where you been, man?’

  ‘Over in Dundurn. I figured you’d retire at the Queens.’

  ‘I bought half of this place eight years ago. Me and Chuck Donaldson.’

  ‘Making any money?’

  ‘Not that I’ve noticed. What are you drinking?’

  ‘Draft will do.’

  Carl looked around the room while Willard drew the beer. Most of the people who had been staring earlier had gone back to their drinks. There were two couples in the corner, though, who were still watching him. One of the men – a stout, red-faced guy with a stringy mustache – was enthusiastically telling the other three a story. Carl had the feeling he was the subject of the story.

  ‘On the house,’ Willard said.

  ‘Thanks, Willard.’

  ‘So what’re you doing over in Dundurn?’

  ‘Security systems. Mostly commercial stuff, video surveillance, alarms.’

  ‘Good future in that stuff,’ Willard said.

  ‘That’s what they say.’

  He and Willard talked a bit until Willard moved away to serve someone else. The party in the corner was still quite interested in his presence, it seemed. Carl was certain he knew the fat guy with the mustache, the guy doing most of the talking. The ball game was on the set above the bar. Since Carl had left the motel the Tigers had scored a half dozen times and now led eight to six. The White Sox manager looked as if he was inclined to break something.

  Carl drank two glasses of beer and talked on and off to Willard, mostly about nothing. Strange, when two people don’t see each other for years, that they have nothing to talk about. Carl thought it would be the other way around. He was just about to leave when the front door opened and Rufus Canfield shuffled in, wearing a tie and an ancient brown corduroy sports coat and walking with a cane. He looked like shit, Carl thought, but even when Rufus had been young and relatively healthy, he’d looked like some thinly disguised version of shit.

  Coming out of the sunlight, Rufus blinked a few times, looking around irritably, as if he was entering the place against his will. When he saw Carl, though, he smiled slowly and made his way over. He switched the cane to his left hand and offered his right before taking the stool beside Carl.

  ‘I’ve been thinking I might see your face.’

  ‘How are you, Rufus?’

  ‘You have eyes, don’t you, man? I’m about half crippled, getting old, getting bloody cantankerous.’ He got Willard’s attention and held up two fingers. ‘It’s the cantankerous part that surprises me. I was always a pretty cheerful fellow.’

  ‘What happened to your leg?’ Carl asked.

  ‘I got hit by a car. You believe that? A fucking dog gets hit by a car. Broke my shinbone and destroyed my knee. Three operations later and the medical establishment says it has done all it can do for me. Still able to sit up and take nourishment though.’ This he said as the beer arrived and he took a drink, the foam congregating in his bushy mustache. His reddish hair was still as thick and untamed as a bramble bush. His eyes were hound dog sad, though, and he had red veins on his cheeks and nose. He smiled at Carl again and nodded, as if agreeing about something.

  ‘How’s business?’ Carl asked.

  ‘Business,’ Rufus said. ‘I lost my mind a few years ago and bought the local newspaper, the weekly.’

  ‘The Trib?’

  ‘Yes, sir. You have the honor of drinking with the managing editor.’ Rufus had more beer. ‘You also have the honor of drinking with the copy boy. And the cub reporter. The janitor too.’

  ‘Getting crowded in here,’ Carl said. ‘So you’re not practicing?’

  ‘I suppose I am,’ Rufus said. ‘To an extent. Wills and real estate, that’s about it.’

  ‘No criminal stuff?’

  ‘Not really.’ Rufus laughed. ‘With the paper, I suspect there would be a conflict of interest if I was to report on a case I was trying. But the situation hasn’t come up.’

  Carl took a drink, looking at himself and Rufus in the mirror behind the bar. ‘Did defending me hurt your reputation?’

  ‘Getting disbarred for two years hurt my reputation,’ Rufus said. ‘Had nothing to do with you. Christ, it’s not like I got you off.’

  ‘Disbarred for what?’

  ‘I had a pal who owned a funeral home, over in Chichester. He was taking pre-paids – money from people who pay in advance for funeral arrangements. Old people, mostly. The money’s held in trust. My friend was living beyond his means and he began dipping into these accounts. Well, these people started to expire, as people do. And oops … there was no money to bury them. A good fellow, he just fucked up. I tried to help him out and in doing so, I too fucked up. He went to jail for a year and I got disbarred.’

  ‘I never heard about it,’ Carl said.

  ‘Well, it wasn’t much of a crime,’ Rufus said. ‘And until recently you probably didn’t follow the Talbotville news anyway. Put it this way – Miles Browning wasn’t in town for the trial. But he is now, and so are you.’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Have you spoken to her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you intend to,’ Rufus said. ‘That’s why you’re here.’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘Were you at the courthouse today?’

  ‘No. I stayed away.’

  ‘Then why are you here?’

  ‘I haven’t quite figured that part out yet.’

  Rufus gestured to their seedy surroundings. ‘So you’ve come here to do your figuring?’

  ‘Good a place as any. Is that why you’re here, Rufus?’

  ‘I’m about done figuring. I’ve lost faith in it, like so many things.’

  Carl looked in the mirror again. ‘Your past is the one thing in this life you can’t change.’

>   ‘That’s rather profound.’

  ‘I stole it.’

  Rufus drank again. The glass was nearly empty already. He looked down the bar where Willard was in conversation with a waitress. ‘Maybe you should talk to Frances,’ he said. ‘I know the two of them are close.’

  ‘Where would I find Frances?’

  ‘She’s running the family farm. I guess you wouldn’t know that.’

  ‘Frances is running the farm?’ Carl repeated. ‘Now that surprises me.’

  ‘She’s not just running it,’ Rufus said. ‘She’s turned it into a growing concern, pardon the pun. Vanguard magazine did a profile on her last year, even put her on the cover, sitting on a tractor, looking somewhat sporty and earthy at the same time. Woman’s gone green on us, Carl. Raises organic vegetables and free range chickens and, I don’t know, all that wonderful stuff that’s supposed to make us live longer. I’m inclined to agree with Mr Marx on that subject.’

  ‘Karl?’

  ‘Groucho. In his dotage, he was being fed steamed succotash or something and he said that he didn’t know if such fare was going to make him live longer, but he knew it was going to seem longer.’

  Carl laughed, and when he did he stumbled into eye contact with the fat man in the mustache again. The man was on his feet, making his way to the washrooms in the rear.

  ‘Who is that guy?’ Carl asked.

  Rufus turned. ‘Harold Sikes. Why?’

  ‘I seem to hold some sort of fascination for him.’

  Rufus finally caught Willard’s eye. Carl put a ten on the bar. His round.

  ‘He’s a volunteer firefighter,’ Rufus said. ‘He’s also a lazy lout who’s been running his father’s farm into the ground for years. But he would have been there that night. He would have been fifty or sixty pounds lighter then. No smarter.’

  Rufus reached for the fresh beer and drank. Carl was falling behind but he wasn’t going to try to drink with Rufus Canfield. After a moment Harold Sikes came out of the back and walked directly to the bar and took up a space maybe ten feet from them. Carl could see now that he was drunk, all puffed up in the process. He tapped a thick forefinger on the bar.

  ‘Shot of Wild Turkey,’ he demanded. He gave Carl a sideways glance as he waited for the bourbon. ‘My buddy Red Walton drank Wild Turkey.’

  Carl turned to Rufus, who was watching Sikes warily. Willard delivered the shot to the fat man.

  ‘To Red Walton!’ Sikes said. ‘My buddy. He deserved better than he got.’ He slammed back the drink and then swaggered past the two men where they sat at the bar, his shoulder just clipping Carl’s back. He went back to his table and sat down, wearing the smug stupid grin of an eight-year-old who’d just jumped off a roof and landed unhurt. Carl could hear him telling the others what he’d just done, even though they had watched him do it.

  ‘That’ll give old Harold something to brag about for the next month or so,’ Rufus said.

  ‘Good for old Harold.’ Carl put it out of his mind. ‘You been following the trial, Rufus?’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘What do you think? Are they going to convict him?’

  ‘You get what you pay for in this life, Carl,’ Rufus said. ‘Sometimes you get more than you bargain for, but you nearly always get what you pay for. The Mayor’s paying Miles Browning a lot of money to get him an acquittal. Grant’s a competent man from what I know of him, but he might be out of his depth on this one.’

  ‘Will Browning put him on the stand?’

  ‘The Mayor? Absolutely not.’

  When Rufus switched to rye, Carl decided it was time to make a move. He wasn’t interested in getting drunk and Harold Sikes was growing louder and braver by the minute. Carl didn’t need any aggravation from that corner either.

  It was still daylight when he walked outside and got into his truck. He drove through the main drag, saw that half the stores he knew as a kid were gone. There had been butcher shops, mercantiles, hardware stores. Some stood empty now, others housed dollar stores and bulk food shops.

  He drove on, heading north, toward the old place. On the outskirts of town both sides of the highway were bordered by large box stores, the reason the downtown core was dying. Out here the parking lots were three-quarters full.

  In the face of such progress he doubted the old house would still be there but it was, apparently still beyond the reach of the creeping commercial sprawl. But not for long, he knew. The place was a small brick bungalow, a hundred yards or so from the highway, the lot backing on to Millard’s Creek. Carl slowed by the drive and then pulled over on to the shoulder of the road. There was a mini-van parked by the house, and an older Buick angled on the lawn, the grass grown up around the rockers. Someone had decided to paint the brick exterior of the house a dull purple. The vegetable garden out back was sprouting weeds three feet high. The woodshed where Carl had built his first Harley was gone.

  The house looked too small for a family of five. Of course, it hadn’t seemed that way when Carl was growing up. He and his older brother shared a bedroom in the basement, while his parents and his sister had the other two bedrooms on the main floor. Laurie was now living in Montreal and called him every Christmas. His brother stopped talking to him when Carl went to jail, but Carl knew from Laurie that he was living in Nashville, where he had tried to break into the music business and now was working as a school custodian.

  The last time Carl had been at the house was the day of his father’s funeral. The old man had retired a half year earlier, after working for the town for thirty-four years. It took him exactly six months to drink himself to death. He had actually begun the exercise two years before that, when Carl’s mother was killed, but the act of going to work every day had delayed the inevitable.

  Carl’s mother had been hit by a drunk driver while walking home from town on a summer afternoon. The driver, who claimed the sun was in his eyes, was from Rose City, where he owned a large furniture and appliance store. The police charged him with impaired driving and motor manslaughter, and the case dragged on for nearly two years until a judge dismissed the charges, ruling that the man had been denied the right to a speedy trial. Carl’s father died convinced that somebody had been paid off. Carl was inclined to believe it as well.

  Carl himself went to jail a few months later. Other than a few random nights in the local lockup, he had somehow avoided the place during his younger years. He knew guys who did time back then and some of them wore it like a badge, like it was an accomplishment. The facility at Auburn had held none of that for Carl; the place was neither romantic nor scary, nor anything other than boring. He was in a unit with other guys roughly his age, away from the kids who were brawling every other day, and he passed his days playing cards, or ping-pong, or working whatever jobs became available, in the laundry or the wood shop or the kitchen. He kept his own counsel, and he kept out of trouble. When he got early release, he couldn’t say that he had gained any great insight from being there. All that he knew was that he didn’t plan to return.

  With a last look at the house, he pulled out and continued on, toward the river in the distance. He drove across the bridge and followed the winding river south, past the abandoned saw mill, still standing but at a significant lean. There was a new church on a rise just past the mill. The sign read The Faith Jubilee Worship Center. The place was enormous, with a paved parking lot the size of a football field and impressive landscaping that climbed three tiers toward the back of the property, a cacophony of flowers and rocks and fountains suggesting the Promised Land itself. A stone Jesus was standing in the center of the garden, his arms outstretched to worshipers and financial contributors alike.

  Carl wasn’t sure what he was even doing there. Too much time had passed. And it had always been about time. Taking time. Making time. In Carl’s case, serving time. Whoever said that time heals all wounds didn’t know what they were talking about. Time does nothing of the sort; it merely dulls the memory. Until there’s nothing left. Carl w
ouldn’t call that healing.

  The sun was setting on his right as he approached the farm. Looking ahead, he saw a blue Land Rover pulling out from the property. As it neared, the vehicle drifted across the center line toward him. Carl slowed down; he could see the driver behind the wheel, gawking over at the river as he drove. Glancing back to the road, he suddenly realized his error and jerked the wheel violently to the right. The vehicle fishtailed and then straightened. The man, who was bearded and wearing sunglasses, gave Carl an apologetic little wave as they met on the road.

  A little farther along Carl spotted a woman walking and soon he saw that it was Frances, moving up from the river bank with a Border Collie at her heels. As he drew closer he could see she was dressed in khaki shorts and a light t-shirt. Her hair was long but pulled back at the neck and tucked beneath a felt hat, possibly a man’s fedora. Her father had favored Biltmore snap brims. She wore wellies on her feet and her stride was long-legged and fluid as she came up the hill. She carried a bundle of flowers in her hand, and she pulled away its leaves, discarding them as she walked.

  The farmhouse was on a rise, as were most along the river valley. The place was of red brick, its construction dating back to the 1870s. There was a wooden veranda along the front and down the south side, the railings and spindles and newel posts freshly painted white. A solid bank barn was behind the house to the left, with a machine shed alongside. Beyond that, on a gravel drive, was a building of recent construction, a warehouse of red ribbed steel with a green roof. The barn was maybe eighty feet long and across the gable, in block letters, were the words RIVER VALLEY FARM.

  He arrived at the driveway in advance of her and so he drove in, stopping there, the engine idling. She’d been watching his approach and now she came up on him, speaking sharply to the dog, which had begun to bark. She wasn’t smiling as he rolled the window down, but she wasn’t frowning either. If she was surprised to see him, she wasn’t letting on.