Gideon - 05 - Blind Judgement

by Grif Stockley

  “She must be a wonderfully compassionate young woman. Most kids her age can’t think about anyone but themselves for more than a minute. You must be very proud of her.”

  “I am,” I gush, noting that John hasn’t said anything. Because of the way we were raised over here, I can guess his attitude.

  “She’s a lot like Rosa.”

  John instructs me to bring out Sarah’s picture, and Beverly, like her husband, is properly impressed.

  “She’s gorgeous! I’m glad we didn’t have a girl. I would have been jealous from the day this child was born!”

  The conversation moves from her boys (she doesn’t want any of the four of them coming back to east Arkansas) to the topic I’ve wanted to discuss since I walked in the door, Willie Ting’s murder.

  “This thing has stunk since day one,” Beverly declares, slicing off a piece of sourdough bread and offering it to me.

  “Believe you me, the fix is in all the way round on this one. Johnson and Butterfield have been paid off big time. This is a capital murder case, and Paul is walking around town like he was given a parking ticket. It doesn’t matter what color the law is. It’s still business as usual around here.”

  I take the bread and tear off a corner to sop up some gravy. How does someone like Beverly become so totally disillusioned that the only explanation for events is that the system is totally and unredeemably crooked? I’m willing to concede that a year ago, with white officeholders in power, Paul perhaps wouldn’t have been charged based on the evidence so far, but the mere fact that the prosecutor recommended bail and the judge accepted his recommendation doesn’t automatically mean they were bought off. Yet it is consistent with her survivalist mentality.

  While I eat, Beverly and John argue whether Paul was involved. Beverly has no doubt, and John concedes that he could be, though he thinks that the charges against Paul could simply be a payback for his family’s long history of domination over here.

  “Hell, Beverly, his family owned slaves,” he says, a little drunk since he has forgotten to eat.

  “For all you know, Oscar Taylor’s grandfather used to whip Butterfield’s grandfather twenty times a day. They may say they’re not interested in

  revenge, but that’s bullshit.”

  Beverly helps herself to more wine.

  “Your family owned slaves, too,” she reminds her husband.

  “If Butterfield hated him so much, why did he recommend any bond at all?”

  “John’s family wasn’t mean like the Taylors,” I interject, interested in both points of view.

  “You don’t know,” Beverly says.

  “They couldn’t have been too wonderful, or they wouldn’t have owned slaves at all.”

  The truth is, I don’t know, but I do know the Taylors.

  “It wasn’t just the way they treated blacks; it’s how they treated everybody.” For her benefit I explain about the two incidents involving my family, concluding, “Paul and Oscar were cutthroat in everything they did over there. It’s finally caught up with Paul.”

  John gives me a quizzical look.

  “I never knew that stuff or I had forgotten it.”

  “Shit, yes!” I exclaim.

  “Not only did Oscar foreclose on the pharmacy when he didn’t have to, Paul got my mother’s farm she inherited from my grandfather.”

  Instead of agreeing with me as I expected, John looks puzzled as if he doesn’t know what I’m talking about. It pisses me that he doesn’t remember, but maybe I expect too much. If it had happened to the Uptons, he damn well would have recalled all of this. Meanwhile, Beverly continues to argue with him.

  “Niggers have been taking money from whites so long over here they probably didn’t even blink when Paul offered them a bundle.”

  “Beverly’s more cynical than me,” John says amiably.

  “I’ve known Butterfield’s people for years, and remember when he used to climb poles in this area for Southwestern Bell, when there was such a thing. He’s an ambitious nigger, I’ll give him that. I could see him stealing an election like any other politician, but I’ll be damned if I think he cares about the money.”

  Beverly, across the table from him, rolls her eyes at her husband.

  “Because his family used to have some money, John forgets that ninety-nine percent of the human race can be bought. Bonner and Butterfield aren’t the Kennedys, honey.

  They’re just high-pocketed country niggers on the make.”

  John chews patiently but gives me a wink as if to say his wife can’t help but believe that nothing is as it seems. Every murder involves a

  giant conspiracy that, if she but had enough time to unravel, would implicate Pope John, Boris Yeltsin, and Madonna.

  “Don’t patronize me, buddy boy,” Beverly warns her husband.

  “I know that little smirk. You think you know all these people because you grew up with them. You have no idea what’s going on.”

  John shrugs, apparently not wanting to incur his wife’s are. Beverly looks as if she could be a mean drunk.

  “That’s for damn sure,” he says, his tone still friendly.

  “Do you really think Paul is involved in this?” I encourage Beverly, who is chewing vigorously on a piece of meat she has cut for herself.

  The deer tastes disappointingly like chicken. It doesn’t have the gamy distinct flavor that I remember from my childhood. Maybe it is the way it has been cooked.

  “Of course he is!” Beverly says.

  “Everyone’s heard about the tape. Why else did Willie tape him if he wasn’t afraid of Paul? Just like you say, nobody’s ever crossed the Taylors And when they started going down economically, Paul couldn’t stand the fact that an old Chinese man had, outside our one factory, the only decent business in town. He had him killed and now he’s bought off a nigger sheriff, judge, and prosecutor, the way people have been buying them off for years. What else is new?”

  Beverly’s face is flushed, but I’m not sure whether it is from liquor or from anger. Hell may have no fury like a woman scorned, but the way she looks I doubt if she was ever in the running for Paul’s affections.

  Perhaps she has been jealous for her husband’s sake. The Taylors have been top dogs here for years, and Beverly, for one, is glad to see them get their due.

  Perhaps to change the subject, John turns to his wife.

  “I’ve heard that Gideon here has been calling on the widow Marr. She would have married him, but he broke her heart by joining the Peace Corps.”

  Beverly rolls her eyes at her husband.

  “John’s told me that at least twice, but since it’s usually after a pint of bourbon he never remembers. I admire Angela, and I’m sorry I’ve never gotten to know her as much as I would have liked. For all those years she was so involved with their farm.

  What is she going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” I say too quickly, but not wanting to betray what I think was told to me in confidence.

  For all I know, she may have told the entire town that Cecil wants to buy her half of the farm, but she seemed too angry about it for me to feel comfortable enough to gossip about it.

  “Angela and I are just friends,” I add, hoping I’m not blushing. If my face is as florid as Beverly’s, I look like as big a fool as I sound.

  John leans his elbows on the table and snickers, “And I’m the ghost of John Lennon.”

  Beverly laughs, but defends me.

  “Dwight’s body isn’t even cold,” she scolds her husband.

  “You just know how a man would react, not a woman. Men can barely wait for the funeral to be over before they’re trying to get in another woman’s pants.”

  Knowing me too well, John scoffs, “It’s cold enough. He was sick for years.”

  I say nothing. If I start talking about Angela, I may not be able to shut up. There is much I want to know about the past thirty years, but Rome wasn’t built in a day, and I like both John and Beverly too much to let them think
I accepted this invitation just to grill them for more information about the principals in the case. There will be plenty of time for that, I hope. I switch to coffee, hoping to sober up for the drive home. Beverly pumps me for anecdotes about John. She doesn’t even know he tried to shoot his sister, and I delight her with stories he either has forgotten or told her so long ago neither of them remember. One Halloween John broke into the nursing home and hid all the bed pans that weren’t in use.

  “I thought he was going to jail for that.”

  Far from being apologetic for the implicit cruelty in his behavior, John concludes the evening with a joke. Licking at his glass for the last drop of the amaretto Beverly produced and I couldn’t resist, he tells the story about the old man in the nursing home who went around on his birthday asking his fellow residents to guess how old he was. ““You’re seventy-three,” says the first man he asks.

  “No, I’m seventy-eight!” the old man cackles.

  Then he hobbles a little further down the hall and asks an old woman in a wheelchair, “It’s my birthday. Guess how old I am.” The old woman peers over her bifocals at him and tells him to unzip his pants. He does, and she takes his old shriveled penis into her hands and begins to rub it as she looks from his member to his face and back again.

  “Seventy-eight!” she says finally.

  “How did you know?” the old man marvels.” Delighted that we haven’t yelled out the punch line, John grins at us and says in an old woman’s voice, ‘“Well, I heard you tell that old man down there.”” I stand up, and take my leave, dimly aware that there is a moral here somewhere.

  Women, I think the message is, know what they’re doing.

  Instead of trying to drive all the way back to Blackwell County, I head for the Bear Creek Inn and check in. I’ll drive home tomorrow morning.

  Poor women. They never quit trying to change us. When they do, that’s when we’ll need to worry. Betty gives me a wistful look as she takes my

  money, but the last thing I need is to accept her invitation to watch television. Inside room number nine, I begin to think about Angela and wish there was a way to call her. I feel as if I have a crowbar in my pants, but it is probably because I have to piss so bad.

  I go to bed with the room spinning, my last thought that once again I am in a motel room in my hometown.

  Hung over, I arrive home at ten the next morning and find an urgent-sounding message on my machine from Tommy Ting. I sit down in my recliner in the living room and dial his number, wishing I’d had more sense than to keep drinking with John last night.

  “Connie is worried,” Tommy says, without preliminaries, “that you’re going to argue that our mother killed our father!”

  I look across the street into the park where I was going to walk Jessie. Damn, I wish Amy would bring her back. I miss her.

  “No jury would buy that for two seconds,” I say, not really answering the question.

  “Anybody just looking at her will know how ludicrous that is. She’s so frail she can hardly lift a tea cup. Now, I can’t take responsibility for what Dickerson might do.”

  “Will you talk to him and convince him not to make that argument?”

  Tommy presses me.

  “It would kill her!”

  Tommy doesn’t know what he is asking, but I don’t want to piss him off.

  On the whole, I am getting some good information from the workers at the plant. At least Darla Tate was helpful.

  “Sure, I’ll talk about it with him. Dickerson is too smart to insult a jury’s intelligence.”

  He seems mollified, and I tell him what I have found so far.

  “I’m not at all convinced that the Mexican worker didn’t kill your father,” I tell him, thinking of the dignified expression on Alvaro Ruiz’s weathered face.

  “The sheriff doesn’t seem to consider him a suspect,” Tommy reminds me.

  “It’d be a mistake at this stage,” I insist, “to eliminate anyone.”

  Perhaps Tommy unconsciously is worried that I will try to pin the murder on another defenseless minority.

  “Anyone could have set up Class Bledsoe. Hell, Ruiz could have gotten someone to do the job for him. Class was a sitting duck.”

  We talk for a few more minutes and by the time we are finished. Tommy seems calmed down. Unlike his sister, he wants to trust me.

  Tuesday afternoon I hurry home to see Sarah, who is home for spring

  break. She has stayed in Fayetteville with a friend for the first three days, so I am anxious to see her. When I turn in the drive, there is a Subaru behind Sarah’s ancient Beetle. Perhaps one of her friends from Fayetteville has dropped by. These girls look so young to me that I wonder how any of them are taken seriously when they apply for jobs. As I go in the back door, I hope Sarah has picked up a little.

  College hasn’t made her a better housekeeper.

  Though I can tell she has matured in the last couple of years, she comes home and sometimes regresses into an adolescent who might not make it out of junior high.

  In the living room Sarah is sitting on the couch with a guy who is much too old for her. Though not bad looking in the face, this man even has a receding hairline and looks kind of flashy in a sports jacket that reminds me of the coat the Masters golf champion is presented after he wins.

  “Hi, Dad!” Sarah says brightly.

  “This is my friend Larry. He’s down here for a meeting for his company and I invited him to come by.”

  The AIDS patient! He jumps to his feet and offers his hand.

  “Larry Burdette, Mr. Page,” he says, giving me a firm grip and looking me straight in the eye like every other salesman I’ve known.

  “Your daughter talks about you all the time. It’s a pleasure to meet

  you.”

  “Nice to meet you,” I murmur, noticing he looks pretty good for someone on his last legs.

  Though I know all the literature says you can’t get AIDS except by sexual contact or through contact with their blood, I feel uneasy. A plastic glass full of water sits on the table by his chair. I need to try to remember to wash it thoroughly. I wonder if the guy has used the bathroom.

  “Dad, you want a beer?” Sarah asks, her voice too loud, since she is standing right beside me. I feel in a daze. I wasn’t expecting this guy.

  “Yeah,” I manage.

  “That’d be good.” I need something.

  “Have a seat,” I say to Larry, who is appraising me coolly. I watch Sarah disappear into the kitchen and wish she had warned me about this visit.

  When he sits back down, I take the chair opposite him.

  “Sarah says you sell computers. I can hardly turn one on, much less do anything with it. A friend of mine down the hall has one, but it just sits on his desk like a pet rock.”

  He crosses his legs.

  “In ten years they’ll be as simple to learn as driving a car.”

  “Given some of the drivers I see around here,” I say, “I don’t know if that’ll help much.” He doesn’t even look gay to me.

  He smiles as my daughter walks into the room and hands me a Miller Lite.

  “Would you like one?” I ask, wondering if Sarah has already offered.

  “I haven’t had a drink in five years,” he says, moving back his legs to let Sarah by.

  “I’m in AA.”

  Damn. AIDS. An alcoholic. If I were this guy, I’d be climbing the walls, but he seems pretty laid back. Maybe he’s on drugs.

  “After a couple of drinks,” I say, watching Sarah’s face, “alcohol has never done me any favors.”

  “Or solved a single one of my problems,” he responds amiably.

  “Which are not inconsiderable, Sarah tells me,” I say, taking a long swallow.

  “Dad!” Sarah shrieks. I wonder if she was expecting him to come by.

  She is wearing old baggy jeans and a faded Razorback sweatshirt.

  “Larry is the guy you’ve been writing me about, isn’t he?” I ask
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  innocently.

  “It’s okay, Sarah,” Larry says.

  “I don’t expect to live in a vacuum. The more people get to know us, the less afraid they’ll be.”

  Out of politeness I nod, but I wonder if the reverse is true. I’ve been nervous ever since I found out who he was.

  “How long since you’ve been diagnosed?” I ask, not really wanting to talk about this, but morbidly curious.

  “Two years,” he says.

  “It’s been quite an adjustment, but the support people like Sarah have given me has made all the difference in the world. You’ve got some daughter.”

  For an instant I feel as if I am going to cry. This poor sucker is dying, and he credits my child with helping him want to live.

  “I couldn’t agree with you more,” I say, watching Sarah blush.

  “Has she told you about her personal odyssey the last few years? She’s quite the seeker.” “No,” he says, turning to Sarah.

  “I’m afraid I’ve done most of the talking.”

  Sarah gives me a look but answers, “Oh, I just went through a period in

  high school when I was real religious and went to a fundamentalist church, and then last semester I got kind of caught up in a feminist movement on campus.”

  Larry runs his arm down the back of the sofa.

  “So I’m part of the quest, huh?” he asks, gently.

  “No!” Sarah says, her face suddenly agonized.

  “I just got involved with RAIN because it seemed the right thing to do.

  Everybody in school is so self-centered. All they talk about is themselves and parties and dating and the Razorbacks. It feels good to be a part of something more important than who got drunk last week at the Sigma Nu house.”

  By the expression on her face I know Sarah is mad at me. So be it. I am not particularly pleased with her for having set this visit up without talking to me first. I suggest that we invite Larry to go out to eat with us, and though he says he needs to work for a while, Sarah easily persuades him to come with us. At my suggestion we drive out to the Breadbox in western Blackwell County for Mexican food. I have eaten out here with Amy, and not only is it cheap, I am not likely to run into anybody I know. It is not that I think this guy will suddenly start bleeding on the dishes, but I feel uncomfortable with him. Yet, for all I know, half the staff at the Breadbox has AIDS.