Gideon - 05 - Blind Judgement

by Grif Stockley

  Larry proves to be an entertaining dinner date.

  Open and talkative, it is easy to see why Sarah responds to him.

  “I had no clear understanding something was different about me,” he says over bread pudding and coffee after polishing off a full chicken enchilada dinner, “until I was in junior high. And then I spent the rest of high school and college trying to pretend I was normal and feeling incredibly lonely. I was like a bad magician telling a ridiculous joke while doing sleight-of-hand tricks, hoping nobody would notice what was actually going on.”

  His parents had been stalwarts of a nondenominational Bible church in Texarkana, and the minister ranked homosexuality with mass murder on the top ten sin chart. Not to fear, however.

  Homosexuals could be saved through prayer and rigorous counseling. When I ask whether he let them try, he responded quickly, “I wouldn’t have confessed to being gay in that church if they had put me on the rack.”

  As he talks, I think of old Mr. Carpenter and resolve to go by to see him when I return to Bear Creek. He has asked me every time I have seen him.

  “What was scary was that by the time I was seventeen I had gone from simple loneliness to thinking I might be some kind of monster. The day I graduated from high school I took off for San Francisco. I’ve never been back home for more than a couple of weeks.”

  His brave talk earlier of educating people that AIDS victims are just plain folks has disappeared.

  Yet who does not regress to childhood in front of their parents?

  “How’d you wind up in Fayetteville?” I ask, curious. There are gay hangouts up there, but it’s hardly San Francisco.

  While he explains that it was cheaper to go to school in Arkansas and pay in-state tuition, I glance at my daughter’s face. She has doubtlessly heard this story before, but she is hanging on his every word. Her mother was the same way. She was a sucker for victims. Yet, to this guy’s credit, he isn’t whining. This was how his life was.

  Over a final cup of coffee, he brings up his alcoholism and says that it has nothing to do with him being gay.

  “Like most people, I’ve got a hundred excuses, and none of them has ever stopped me from opening a bottle. The only thing that’s ever helped me is the twelve-step program. I’m a big believer in it. I go to an AA meeting once a week.”

  Damn. This guy lets it all hang out. These recovery groups are all the rage. The paper is full of them. Hi, I’m Gideon. I’m a human being.

  Still, if they work, who can knock them? If they work. Dan went to an overeaters anonymous group and said a couple of the guys stood out on the steps of the church during a break and ate a box of Snickers, proof that you can lie to yourself anywhere. I’ve done it every place but in the kitchen sink. I wonder if I am lying to myself about what things were like in Bear Creek. I have begun to have the feeling that my memories don’t jibe with what other people remember. The other night John looked at me as if I were making things up about the way the

  Taylors had treated my family. Yet the problem with Angela and John is that they have lived in Bear Creek so long that they probably have come to accept the Paul Taylors of this world as normal.

  Back at the house Larry declines Sarah’s invitation to come in and says he needs to get back to his hotel. I wonder if he is going out to one of Blackwell County’s drag shows. Sarah would probably like to go check it out with him, but he doesn’t ask. Probably she has already been to something similar in Fayetteville with him and wants to spare my feelings. I’m all for that.

  Inside, I putter around the house, straightening up a bit. I am not used to having Sarah home, and her habit of not taking anything back to the kitchen is already getting on my nerves. She gets the hint and folds up the pages of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette she has spread out all over the kitchen table.

  “Dad,” she says, watching me load the dishwasher, “Larry made you nervous while he was in the house, didn’t he?”

  I turn on the hot water and wash the glass he used by hand.

  “It just seemed weird,” I say, irritably.

  “Nobody understands the disease. How can you be too careful?”

  Sarah stacks the paper on top of the refrigerator.

  She can’t fold up a newspaper any better than I can.

  “I know how you feel,” she says.

  “I felt funny around him at first, but less and less as time goes on.

  With all his problems, he’s still a neat guy. I think he thought you were okay.”

  “I liked him,” I admit.

  “I don’t see how he’s sane, but he seems as normal as I do.” I have noticed that since she has been home, Sarah has been less obsessed with her own personal problems, and as a consequence, she has been in my face less. I had expected an entire lecture from her and was ready to give as good as I got. Yet the old confrontational Sarah has disappeared, or at least didn’t make the trip. Maybe she is growing up.

  “How is Amy?” she asks when we sit down in the living room.

  “You haven’t mentioned her since you told me Jessie was going to stay with her while you worked on the case in Bear Creek.”

  I lean back in the chair and listen as my stomach tries in vain to digest my dinner. I shouldn’t have tried to fit in the bread pudding.

  I realize I haven’t mentioned Amy because I feel guilty about her, and so I haven’t said anything about Angela either. Sarah has always accused me of using the women I have been involved with to help me on my cases.

  “You’ll be happy to know it looks as if Amy and I are probably history,” I say, thinking of the best spin I can put on this.

  “You always complained she was too young for me, anyway.”

  Sarah tucks her legs up beneath her on the couch.

  “I liked her because I know how much she cared about you. That made up for the age difference.”

  I don’t want to think about Amy.

  “Well, I’m dating a woman exactly my own age, and one I’ve known for over thirty years.”

  “Dad!” Sarah exclaims.

  “Who is she?”

  I feel a mild explosion in my stomach. I need to quit eating so much at night. I had enough chips and cheese dip before they brought out the food to feed an army.

  “My first girlfriend,” I say, and tell her the story of how I met Angela at the library in Bear Creek.

  She is entranced and quizzes me for the better part of thirty minutes.

  I omit a few things, including how we first made love in my mother’s Fairlane and recently in her brother-in-law’s bed.

  Nor do I tell her how much desire I feel when I am around Angela. I

  suspect that one of the reasons my daughter does not want me to date younger women is that she, understandably, does not want to be confronted with my sexuality, nor do I have any desire to be confronted by hers. I’m all for Sarah’s getting to know me as adult to adult, but there is a limit to how far I want us to be pals. Maybe when I’m old and less of a sexual being we’ll sit around in our bathrobes and tell war stories, but not quite yet.

  “She’s been through a lot,” I tell Sarah, wondering whether they’ll like each other, “but at one time she had more influence on me than anyone I’ve ever met.” “She sounds neat. Dad,” Sarah says.

  “I hope it works out if that’s what you want.”

  Do I? I pick up a dog hair from the arm of the chair, a legacy of Jessie’s that seems perpetual, and drop it into the trash can beside me.

  “We’ve really gone out only a couple of times,” I demur.

  “She’s still got a lot of grieving to do.” As I say this, I wonder.

  Angela, I’m coming to realize, is more of a mystery than I like to admit.

  The phone rings. Naturally, it is for Sarah, who tells me moments later her old friend Donna Redding is coming by to pick her up at ten and she needs to change clothes. They are going “out.” I am strangely comforted by this act of normalcy. I know better than to ask where but do anyway.
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  “I don’t know,” she says, standing up.

  “Dad, have you been by to see Dade’s grandmother?”

  I find another hair and realize it is one of Woogie not Jessie’s. Damn.

  I miss Woogie, exiled to my sister’s over a year ago after an alleged kitten-eating episode. Have we ever cleaned anything in this house? I knew this question was coming. It was at Sarah’s insistence that we drove over to Bear Creek to try to confirm the story that my grandfather had fathered a child by a black woman.

  “Dad, she might appreciate it if you went by.”

  “Well, I might,” I say, “I just haven’t had time.”

  Sarah leans back against the wall. For once she doesn’t argue with me.

  “I’m proud of you for representing a black man over there,” Sarah says.

  “I bet you’re getting some criticism for doing it.”

  I realize that Sarah has no idea, despite our visit, what my old hometown is like.

  “It’s not as if I’m suing the town on a race discrimination suit.

  White attorneys have always represented blacks in Bear Creek.”

  Sarah nods absently, perhaps thinking about her coming evening, and leaves the room. I lean back in the chair and allow myself to remember

  how delicious my lovemaking with Angela was the last time we were together. How could I tell Sarah what that feeling is like for me?

  That is the last thing either of us wants to discuss. We don’t always want the truth, just a level of comfort. Is that so bad? About ninety percent of the time truth is an overrated virtue.

  Wednesday night Angela calls to tell me that she has made it back, and I am pleased to hear a warmth in her voice that wasn’t there when she left.

  “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking,” she says after we tell each other about our past week, “and I think I’m ready to have a relationship if you’re interested. But I’d like to go slow.”

  Taking her call in the living room, I hear Sarah in the kitchen, and I whisper into the phone that this is good news indeed, and that I completely understand her feelings. She asks when I will be coming back and I tell her Saturday. Shyly, she invites me to dinner Saturday night, and I waste no time in accepting. After I hang up I stare out the window. It is amazing how some things come together after so long a time. Sarah comes in and tells me that I am smiling. I am.

  The Thursday morning after April Fools’ Day, I get a call from Melvin Butterfield that may be Doss’s only chance. In the last few weeks I have interviewed several more workers from Southern Pride and checked their alibis. If someone is framing Bledsoe, I can’t find out who it is.

  “I think it’s time for us to have a chat about some things,” he says, his voice booming in my ear as if he were in the room with me.

  Though I am busy in the office this week and had not planned to drive over until Saturday to meet with Class and have dinner with Angela, if Butterfield’s ready to offer Class a deal, I don’t want to give him time to change his mind.

  Though I have a new client coming in this afternoon, Julia can try to reschedule it for tomorrow.

  I’ve had the feeling all along that Bledsoe won’t implicate Paul until he gets a concrete offer of a reduced sentence.

  “Actually, I was planning to come over this afternoon if I could get away,” I lie glibly.

  He asks if I can be there at four. I say that I can and hang up feeling a little hope for the first time since I took the case. Granted there are many more witnesses to interview, but the law of diminishing returns has already begun to kick in:

  the more people I talk with, the less I get out of them.

  Moments later Dan charges into my office, muttering loudly, “I’ve never been so insulted in all my life.”

  “What’s happened?” I say, looking up at my friend, whose face is even glummer than usual.

  Over a beer last week after losing a case in Municipal Court to a near-deaf nursing home resident who represented herself from a

  wheelchair, Dan waxed philosophical, describing the life of the bad lawyer as one long humiliation, with death the final but not inappropriate indignity.

  First you lose, and then you die.

  “One of the women I went out with complained to the Attorney General’s office that the dating service had misrepresented me,” he says, collapsing opposite me into one of my chairs, which trembles from the impact.

  “This assistant A.G. from the Consumer Protection Division just barged her way into my office and called me part of the biggest fraud in Arkansas consumer history,” he huffs, his double chin beginning to jiggle.

  “I couldn’t believe it. This little miniskirted girl who couldn’t be more than twenty-five flashed her badge at me like she was Eliot Ness about to close up half of Chicago and said if I wouldn’t agree to testify she could practically guarantee my picture on the feature page of the Democrat-Gazette as part of her investigation. The nerve some people have. If she hadn’t been such a babe, I would have thrown her out of my office!”

  Glad to take a break, I push the papers in front of me aside and put my feet up on my desk.

  “I thought you were the victim in this dating service business,” I say, remembering his last complaint about the woman who couldn’t keep her eyes open past nine o’clock.

  Dan pats his beefy cheeks with a folded handkerchief, which this humid morning looks like a sponge. Did this woman make him cry?

  “I’m a victim,” he whines, “but this A.G. says that each of the four women I’ve been out with has complained that I lied about too many details. Hell, everybody puffs their ‘pif’ a little.

  “Personal information form,” he adds when I raise my eyebrows.

  “A little!” I exclaim.

  “You put down that you’re single.”

  “It’s the weight thing that bothers most of them,” Dan says, fluttering the fingers on his right hand as if he were a famous music conductor dismissing a critic’s carping about a few bad notes.

  “They believe you when you say your divorce is just a matter of time.

  It’s when you show up at their door at two-fifty instead of one-fifty that pisses ‘em off.”

  I whistle. That’s quite a stretch.

  “I bet you haven’t weighed one fifty since you were in junior high,” I guess, amazed at his gall.

  “Sixth grade,” Dan corrects me.

  “Trixie-that’s this girl’s name—says her office wants these matchmaking companies held to some kind of minimum truth-in-packaging standard so that singles can get their money back if they’ve been ripped off. She wants me and the women totes 9

  tify at a legislative subcommittee meeting that’s coming up next month.”

  He’s got to be kidding. Matchmakers Who Lie Too Much. Surely, it’s already been done, but we could have our own redneck version of Oprah:

  That of’ boy lied like a dog on his “pif.” Ah’d a dated him if he’d jus’ been a little bald, but he didn’t have a hair on his haid! Fearing the worst, I ask, “Do you really want that kind of publicity?”

  “No,” Dan admits.

  “But it’d be a good way to get to know Trixie better,” he says.

  “She’s cute as a button, and she wasn’t wearing a ring.”

  The species’ capacity for self-delusion knows no bounds. Dan would fall in love with a boa constrictor if it were wearing a skirt.

  “Don’t you think she’s getting to know you a little too well?

  You won’t exactly be coming off as Washingtonian in this story.”

  Dan looks hurt.

  “She could do a lot worse,” he points out.

  “At least I haven’t served any time yet. Besides, there’re some women who don’t mind fat men.”

  Or men who are married, broke, desperate, or liars.

  “Go for it,” I advise.

  “This may be the love of your life. She sounds like a female Geraldo.

  You could be on daytime TV together.”
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br />   A gleam comes into Dan’s eyes.

  “If her skirts get any shorter,” he predicts, “she’ll have to be on the Playboy Channel. She uncrossed her legs once and I swear I thought I was looking at Sharon Stone.”

  So much for Janet Reno being the next role model for our female attorneys.

  “You haven’t been sued by one of these women?” I ask suspiciously.

  Every few months Dan requires some kind of major rescue job. I had thought a failed marriage would slow him down, but it seems only to have speeded up his self-destruct button.

  “Hell, no,” Dan assures me.

  “They know I’m just a pawn. This last woman told me kind of wistfully

  that if I had a tummy tuck, she’d consider going out with me again.”

  I eye Dan’s stomach over the desk. It’s going to take more than a tuck. To get rid of that much blubber, the surgeon would have to go in there with a backhoe.

  “Are you sure this Trixie character is for real? She sounds a little eager to me.”

  Dan nods solemnly.

  “Consumer protection is big business. It’s how state attorney generals go on to being governors. It’s not just old folks who go to the polls.

  Half the country is divorced and miserable, and the other half is thinking about joining them. Singles like myself are a vulnerable part of the population and tend to vote if given a decent reason.”

  I think of one of the comic strips that Dan substitutes for artwork in his office and laugh out loud. As Pogo said, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

  At 4:15 I walk into Melvin Butterfield’s office on the second floor of the courthouse in Bear Creek, deliberately a few minutes late, but if he is annoyed, I can’t tell it. He smiles and shakes my hand and invites me to have coffee, which I decline. As chatty as last time, he gossips about the Razorbacks as if we had been teammates ourselves, telling me that the reason the Hogs will lose in the NCAA tournament this year is that this team has too many Juco players who won’t stay focused enough to play defense for an entire game. His hands parked behind his head.