Joe

by Larry Brown

  “I’d rather, as to have him ride in my car.”

  “Listen, now. Get up from there. Get up off the ground. Ain’t nobody going to kick you.”

  “I know how you do. Get me over to the jail and you’ll whup the shit out of me. I been in jail before.”

  “Aw, no shit. Well, you fixing to be in jail again. Now you get your ass up from there and get over there in that car.”

  But he would not rise. He’d either passed out or was using a marsupial’s ruse. They braced him up under his arms. His feet lolled, boneless. They staggered beneath the assault of his body odor. Chickens dead three days in the sun had never smelled so rank. Ruined elephants on the plains of Africa paled in comparison. The cops gagged and tried to lift him. He lay limp as a hot noodle, quietly exuding a rich reek, a giddy putrefaction of something gone far past bad, a perfect example of nonviolent protest. They went across the square in the dead of night, dragging their prisoner, hapless victims themselves of circumstance, booed and hissed loudly by the students, struggling along with his unwashed wasted carcass like exhausted mules.

  City court. Wade sat on a bench with other defendants whose crimes against the town he did not know. He turned his hat in his hands idly. The windows were open in the high walls of the second-story room and the sounds of traffic on the square drifted in. A black uniformed bailiff was nodding himself to sleep in a chair beside the judge’s podium, and Wade thought about just getting up and walking out. Everybody else seemed resigned to their fates. He got up and put on his hat and went to the door. Two lawyers in the room studying their documents looked up at him and looked back down. He opened the door and peeked. An empty hall, closed rooms. He tiptoed out, his feet soundless on the rubber tiles, and closed the door softly. From somewhere came the dull clack of typewriters. A girl turned the corner with a Coke in her hand. He started to ask her how to get out of the building, but he didn’t want to arouse suspicion. When she went into an office, he looked around the corner and saw a blank wall. Halfway down the hall he opened a door and looked inside. A vacuum cleaner and dust mops. He thought about hiding in there for a while, but he knew that soon after capture was the best time for escape. He walked around the other corner and came to a bank of elevators. He punched a button and a soft little bell rang when the light came on. Sounds came to his ears of mechanical hissings deep somewhere in the entrails of the courthouse, sliding cables and turning gears. He waited. The bell chimed gently again and the doors slid open. He stepped forward. The two cops who had arrested him stepped forward to meet him.

  “Where the fuck you think you going?” one of them said.

  “I’s lookin for the bathroom.”

  He waited a long time for his case to be called. They wouldn’t let him smoke and nobody would sit close to him. The bailiff had given himself over totally to rest, mouth gaping and head back and eyes closed. Wade leaned back and listened as the judge droned on. Sally Bee Tallie, found guilty of assaulting Leroy Gaiter with a cowboy boot. She said the whole thing was her brother’s fault. Roosevelt Higginbotham, a public drunk in his own yard, which he argued unsuccessfully was not a crime. The judge slammed his gavel and fined them or sentenced them to jail or set them mowing grass and picking up litter for the good of the public. People speeding, forty-five dollars a whack. The city making money hand over fist. The public defenders doodling on papers and staring out the windows like children longing for recess. The old man sat with his elbows on his knees, watching the proceedings uneasily with slowly shifting eyes. At last he was called and he stood up. The judge was a man not thirty years old, in a double-knit suit. He studied the papers before him carefully. The cops had long since resigned their chins to the cups of their hands. The judge looked up.

  “They don’t have any address for you, Mr. Jones. Where do you live?”

  “I live out close to London Hill,” he said. “I don’t know what the address is. Ye honor.”

  Ye honor evidently didn’t like that answer. He tapped his pen menacingly on the lectern. He looked at the bailiff but seemed reluctant to call the whole court’s attention to the fact that he was asleep by waking him up. Indeed it was as if a glance at that peaceful face made him uneasy. He looked out over the room and raised his eyes until he was talking to a spot high on the rear wall.

  “You’ve got to have an address, Mr. Jones, or we’ll declare you a vagrant. You know what a vagrant is?”

  “Oh, yes sir. I ain’t no vagrant.”

  “You ever been declared a vagrant before?”

  “Well. I been declared one. Shore have. They declared I was one in Oklahoma City one time, but they never could prove it.”

  The courtroom had almost emptied, and the cops sat regarding him with their arms crossed and their faces dull with boredom. The judge nodded somberly, chewing on his lower lip.

  “Do you ever get any mail, Mr. Jones?”

  “No sir.”

  “Well, just say you did. Where would the mail come to if somebody wrote you a letter?”

  He thought and thought and at length said, “I don’t believe nobody knows where I’m at.”

  One of the cops shook his head and the other one closed his eyes. The judge put the pen in his mouth and chewed on it and opened something in front of him. He read for a few minutes. Then he wrote something down. He cleared his throat and looked down on Wade.

  “Are you on a rural route, Mr. Jones? Are there any mailboxes around your house? You do live in a house, don’t you?”

  “Oh, yes sir, I live in a house. But they ain’t no mailboxes around there nowhere. I ain’t never seen one. Sir.”

  “All right, then. You might want to remember this. Your address would be General Delivery, London Hill, Mississippi, three eight six oh five. You’re charged with public drunk and resisting arrest. How you plead?”

  “I don’t know what to do,” he said immediately. “I’m afraid if I plead guilty it’ll be a big fine, and I ain’t got no money to pay it. What if I plead not guilty?”

  “You mean, what’ll happen?”

  “Yessir. What’ll happen?”

  “Well then, we’ll have to have a trial. You’ll have to get you a lawyer and fight it.”

  “Yessir.”

  “But you’ll have to go back to jail first. Or we’d have to set your bond. Can you make bond?”

  “I don’t know. How much is bond?”

  “It’ll be about a thousand dollars. Do you know a bondsman?”

  “Naw sir,” he said sadly, keeping his head down and shaking it. “I don’t know no bondsman.”

  The bailiff jerked awake suddenly and gripped the armrests, his tipped chair slamming down hard on the boards. He glared wildly around.

  “And, too, you’ll have to pay an attorney and court costs. These two officers swore out the complaint against you. Why don’t you just plead guilty and be done with it?”

  “What’ll it cost me if I plead guilty?”

  “I can’t tell you that until I sentence you.”

  Everybody was waiting to see what he’d say. Or waiting to get the hell out of there, one.

  “What chance I got of winnin if I fight it?”

  “Not much, I’d say.”

  “It’s their word against mine.”

  “This court does not take the testimony of police officers lightly.”

  He knew they had him either way he went. But he was eating pretty good in the jail. Big plates of scrambled eggs and toast with coffee for breakfast and fried meat with two vegetables for supper.

  “I reckon I’ll plead guilty, then,” he sighed. “Bad as I hate to.”

  “Mr. Jones, this court finds you guilty and fines you four hundred and fifty dollars, payable immediately.” WHAP! went the gavel.

  The old man staggered back, almost as if a visible blow had hit him.

  “What!” he said.

  “Of course, you can always work it off for the city if you can’t pay the fine.”

  “Work it off? How long?”

/>   “Oh, we’ll round it off to about forty-five days.”

  “Do I have to stay in jail the whole time?”

  “You certainly do.”

  “I don’t guess I got no choice, then. What kinda work I’m gonna have to do?”

  “Whatever needs doing, Mr. Jones. Bailiff, you want to take this man back to the jail? And maybe get a good night’s sleep before court tomorrow?”

  They set him to pushing a lawnmower the first day. There were rolling green hills of grass in the park, and against this immense backdrop he was a tiny worker toiling with exaggerated slowness in the early morning heat, a small wretched figure stopping every few minutes to wipe the sweat from his brow. Other captured felons with long knives whacked listlessly at weeds. The whole day and forty-four others just like it stretched endlessly before him. The park was deserted, baking, barren. Sober drunks with nails mounted in mop handles speared bits of trash and deposited them in garbage sacks tied around their waists. The mower blade was sharp and the motor ran smoothly. Wade talked to himself and cursed his luck with a sullen vindictiveness. Each pass he made was about three hundred yards long. They’d have cut it with a tractor and a bush hog if they hadn’t had him, but they had him. He figured they had all kinds of things planned for him, painting curbs and hauling garbage, painting tennis courts and picnic tables. He had resolved to make his escape at the earliest opportunity, but he didn’t know where he was. There was a line of woods rimming the east side of the park where he could conceivably hole up until darkness came, but at the rate he was going it would take him two weeks to get over there.

  At midmorning the lawnmower sputtered and died. He stopped and mopped at his sweat and stood looking around him. The city trucks were parked in the shade beside the pavilion and he made his way down to them. Two black boys were sitting in the shade when he got there, smoking cigarettes. They were park employees, kids hired for the summer maybe.

  Wade rummaged around in the bed of a truck, looking for an antifreeze jug with gas. There were razorous joe-blades and green-stained weedwhackers piled up in there. He rooted among them, shoving things aside, sweat stinging his eyes. Finally he looked over at the boys.

  “Y’all know where the gas is?” he said.

  “They supposed to be some in there,” one of them said.

  He looked and looked. He found an antifreeze jug but it had antifreeze in it. He poured some out on the ground to make sure, and sure enough it was green.

  “That ain’t gas. That’s antifreeze.”

  The boys looked at each other. One of them scratched his ear. “We supposed to have some,” he said.

  “Well, you ain’t got none,” Wade told him. He looked at him with what appeared to be barely controllable rage. His face was red and droplets of sweat were swinging on his jowls. “I can’t cut the grass without no gas. By God, if I’m gonna work down here, y’all got to furnish me with some gas. I ain’t gonna buy it myself.”

  “What you think?” one of them said.

  “I don’t know,” the other one said. “I guess, run get him some.”

  “I’ll get it,” Wade said. He got in the truck and shut the door. They looked at each other.

  “He supposed to be drivin that truck?”

  He cranked it and pulled the shift down into low, popped the clutch and spun one small spurt of gravel from a rear wheel. They were without phone or radio and even though they chased him for a short distance, shouting and waving for him to come back, he was soon a small blue speck flying down the street. They stopped and stood looking after him as he disappeared from sight. They turned to each other.

  “You gonna be in trouble.”

  “Me in trouble? It’s you in trouble.”

  “It ain’t me. It’s you.”

  “They gonna put you back paintin that swimmin pool.”

  “I done painted that pool one time.”

  “You may paint it two times.”

  A few days later the old man stood in front of the liquor store for a long time with his hands in his pockets. He eyed the rows of brown bottles within, Dickel, Daniel’s, Turkey, and wetted his dry lips slowly, as if he were astonished at the taste of his own tongue. It was ten-thirty and the regular winos were briskly conducting their early-morning business, shapeless men in rumpled clothes who emerged from the front door looking neither right nor left. He stood there until one went in that he thought he could handle and then he walked down to a laundromat and waited, squatting on the cracked concrete against the bricks, idly watching the cars move about in the parking lot. He whistled a low and tuneless hymn. Next door in Shainberg’s, some women were adjusting stacks of jeans and moving over the polished floors and talking in voices that had no sound. He picked up a scrap of wood and turned it in his fingers.

  An old black man came out and turned down the alley between the stores and shuffled past with a nylon windbreaker over his arm. Wade didn’t appear to watch him shamble around the corner. He waited a few more deliberate minutes. He got up and dropped the piece of wood and stepped around the corner. There was nothing but discarded tires and mop handles and a broken compressor with one wheel missing, all piled against the back side of the building. For a moment he lost the shuffling figure. Then he looked toward the bypass and saw him in the act of halting his climb up the bank, putting one hand down, easing himself to rest on the sparse grass of a red clay hill. Wade watched. The black man put his coat down and drew his knees up and opened the bottle he had and tilted his head back. Wade started across the parking lot. With his head down he lifted his eyes and marked the man’s position, noted the stream of cars flowing past behind him, high on the hill. The parking lot ended abruptly in a choke of kudzu and honeysuckle.

  He stopped at the ditch and looked up at the man forty feet above him, lifted one hand in greeting.

  “Hey,” he said.

  The black man said nothing, didn’t look. He capped his liquor and wrapped it in his coat.

  “I’s wonderin if you could tell me how to get to Water Valley,” Wade said. “Wife’s in the hospital down there and I just now got here.”

  The old black man raised one long bony finger and pointed due south. His face was the face of stone, sullen, the eyes red and malevolent, his countenance ruined with the scars of small drunken wars. He bore small scraps, perhaps of cotton, in the dark wool of his head.

  “How far is it?” Wade said. He stepped across the ditch and stood there looking up. He had his hands in his back pockets but his eyes searched the ground. He stepped a little higher and the black man rose in a crouch. One hand rested on the ground, the other clutched his precious bundle tightly.

  “That the highway goes to it?” he called up.

  The scarred head nodded yes. Just once. Don’t come no closer.

  Wade stepped forward another five feet, grasping a sapling to aid himself. He stopped and looked behind him. A boy was changing a tire on a tiny car behind Otasco, and a freight truck was backing up to Big Star. Blue milk cartons were stacked higher than a man’s head on the dock.

  “I just wondered was I goin the right way,” he said to the ground.

  The head above him nodded again.

  “You don’t care for me comin up there, do you?”

  The man shook his head, soundless wonder etched on his face. In his troubled gaze he seemed to hold some terrible secret.

  The old man went up the bank like a mountain goat and squatted next to the drinker. The black man didn’t look at him.

  “What are you drinkin?” said Wade.

  A demented smile crept onto the face of the wino, three long yellow fangs bared in the purple gums.

  “Fightincock.”

  “You ain’t drinkin some wine, are you?”

  “I may,” he said.

  “Yeah? Why, hell. That’s all right. Lot of folks think a feller ought not drink at all.” He wasn’t looking at him. He was smiling to himself, talking to himself, looking out over the parking lot. “Little drink never hurt nobody.�
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  The black man was watching him carefully now, perhaps seeing him in a new light.

  “That right,” he mumbled.

  “Shoot,” Wade said. “I get me a little drink when I can but the old lady raises so much sand I don’t drink much around the house. I just usually get me a drink when I’m uptown like I am now.”

  “You wife in the hospital?”

  He paused for a moment, thinking. “Aw yeah. Well, yeah she is —today. I got to get off down here at Water Valley and go see about her. That’s where I was headed. What it was, I’s supposed to got paid this mornin but the feller that was supposed to paid me ain’t never showed up. I’s gonna get me a little somethin to drink and head off down here to Water Valley and see how she was doin.”