“Why is it a no-go this week?” I ask.
“Mrs. Buckmueller has to take time off. I shouldn’t overshare, but since you’ll be helping her anyway . . . she took a nasty twist getting out of the truck with the book cart on Friday evening. Now her bad knee is worse.”
“She was running late,” I say.
“Yes. That job is too much for one person.” Mr. Olsen shakes his head. “She’s resting and elevating. She says she will be back next week, and she’s going to need a lot of help from . . .” He winds up a bit before he lets it go. “Library volunteers!”
chapter thirty-two
THE DOORS OF BUTLER COUNTY
We sit in the SUV outside of Mr. VanLeer’s office on Fifth Street in David City. The small car he drives went into the repair shop this morning so he needs a ride. I raise my camera, focus, and snap a picture of the door he will come out of. I’m taking photos for Mom this week. I have been to a lot of new places.
A picture of a door seems dumb. But the varnished wood and that brass handle are the sort of thing Mom sometimes talks about when she’s looking for places to rent after her release.
Mrs. Samuels is up front behind the wheel. She leans on one arm and hums to the music on the radio. Zoey is just sitting. Me too. But I am also scheming. Again.
I’m thinking about the Bucking Blue Bookmobile. If we are going to help Mrs. Buckmueller, I have to figure that means we will gather books and magazines, and maybe help load them into the truck. We’ll have our hands on every issue. VanLeer is going to stick to his guns about his Saturday plans, I’m pretty sure. But if books and magazines move in and out of Blue River two times every week . . .
I feel a tap on my forearm. I look at Zoey. She’s being very spylike and won’t quite look at me. But she whispers. “You could use the magazines”—her eyes shift side to side—“to get word to residents that you want their stories. You could send questions . . .”
My eyes pop open. “I thought the same!” I whisper back. “How did you know?”
Zoey Samuels gives me a grin and a shrug. She says, “Pictionary.”
“What was that?” Mrs. Samuels turns the radio down and looks up into her rearview mirror. She scrunches her brow. “Did you guys say something?”
Zoey calls up to the front of the car. “We’re just talking about library volunteer stuff.” She sits back, grinning. It’s not a lie.
Mrs. Samuels flicks the radio off and pulls the keys out of the ignition. “Enough of this,” she says. “Let’s go up and rescue Tom from his office.”
I’d like to touch that varnished door. So I pop right out of my seat belt. Zoey does a little moan and groan, but she follows.
The door is heavy. I pull it back and let Zoey and her mom go in ahead of me. “Thank you, Perry.” Mrs. Samuels smiles the smile that I like. She appreciates a little thing like someone holding a door open.
Inside, the stairwell walls are painted deep green. The railings are varnished like the door. A light green carpet runs up the center of the stairs. Everything curves upward. It feels fancy, but not cake-frosting fancy; more like man-in-a-suit fancy. Zoey is looking up, and she’s on a mission.
“Race you!” she says.
“Chase you,” I answer, because I can’t race her when I don’t know where the finish line is.
She launches. I’m on her heels all the way to the top stair. We zip past the receptionist. The carpet muffles our thundering feet—more so than at Blue River. Zoey hangs a right, and we sprint past frosted-glass doors with names lettered in black-and-gold paint. We reach the last one. It’s open, and Zoey claps her hand over the side jamb and swings herself to a halt. I crash up behind her. Two-kid wreck.
Thomas VanLeer looks up from a large wooden desk. At first his eyebrows are arched in surprise. Then he laughs out loud. Zoey’s mom joins us at the door, and Mr. VanLeer rises. His chair rolls backward.
“Well who is this coming up to see me?” he says. “My family? Hello-hello!” He gives Mrs. Samuels a hug. “Hey, guys,” he says to Zoey and me. “What a surprise.”
“I’ll bet you forgot that you don’t have a car today,” Mrs. Samuels says.
“Oh my gosh! I did!” He laughs. “Oh, and you’ve been waiting for me. I’m sorry. I was so involved here, I forgot the plan. Can you all give me a minute?”
“Of course. We can go find a distraction if you’re really not finished here,” Mrs. Samuels says.
“No, no. I can be done. Let me get it together.” He begins to shuffle papers. He taps them on the desk to square them into stacks, begins to pack his briefcase.
This is one kind of Thomas VanLeer. He’s happy that his wife and stepdaughter are here—in a real way. I look around the room. His desk is covered in papers, spread out so much he must need fly eyes to read them all at once. There is a bookcase behind him. I see rows of fat volumes like the ones in the law library at Blue River. The rezzes go there to look things up and to work on their cases. There is a long wooden table on one wall under a window. It’s covered in boxes and stacks of fat folders. I guess it’s true what he said. His workweek is long.
“Those are all open cases,” he says when he sees me looking.
Stories, I think to myself. Each box and each folder must be all about a person. A person in trouble. I take a dry swallow.
On the opposite wall, framed documents hang. Some plain, some fancy. Thomas VanLeer has graduated from two colleges. He has a law degree, he passed his bar exam, and he won something called a Spark Award. I read the curly font: Presented to Thomas VanLeer with gratitude from all who will pass through the Journey House Family Shelter. The next line says: When we serve our communities well, the ripple is felt throughout humanity.
“That’s the one that means the most to me,” VanLeer says. He comes over to stand beside me. “That’s the most important one.”
“In what way?” I ask.
“It was an opportunity to make a difference. I volunteered legal services to families in need.” He thinks for a second. “And that was a turning point for me. I knew I wanted to continue to make a big impact in a small place.” He gestures toward the frame on the wall. “That award changed my career path.”
For a few seconds I feel like I am listening to someone I know, someone like Mr. Rojas or Mr. Halsey. Or Mom. Mr. Thomas VanLeer is a person with plans. He’s a guy with a timeline.
“Anyway,” he says, “it’s basically the reason I ended up wanting the DA post here in Butler County. I decided this was a door I needed to go through on my way to bigger dreams.”
I look at the award and think about Thomas VanLeer. If I started to understand him, it lasted only a minute. If Butler County is his door, I can’t help thinking that he has slammed it on our fingers. Mine, Mom’s, and Warden Daugherty’s.
chapter thirty-three
BIG ED’S STORY
As soon as we make it through the Blue River bottleneck, I see Mr. Halsey. He’s bridging a deck of cards in his hands. He gives me a quick grin. Then he corrals Mr. VanLeer. He turns him toward the game tables and asks, “You play cards? What’s your favorite game, man? You play rummy?” He pats Mr. VanLeer’s back.
Mr. VanLeer is stuttering and nodding. “Ye-yes. I play rummy. Er . . . I have played rummy.” He takes double steps next to Halsey, who keeps sweeping him along. I have a funny thought that Halsey could probably palm VanLeer’s head, same way he’d palm a basketball—or a head of broccoli. Halsey collapses Mr. VanLeer into a chair. He fits his own tall self into the one opposite and begins to deal cards. Game on.
Across the common I see Mom and Big Ed. They have staked a claim and circled up three chairs in an almost-private corner. Mom waves me over with big arm circles. I grab the straps of my pack so it won’t bounce, and I sprint. For the second week in a row she does not forget; she catches me for the swing-around. For the second week in a row, we hug and talk a blue streak, trying to get everything said in the first five minutes. It’s going to be a short Saturday visit inside
the Blue River Co-ed Correctional Facility.
Big Ed is about to tell his story. Mom sits and scoots her chair forward to close our circle tighter. She is Big Ed’s support person for all things difficult. They do this for each other. Mom knows a lot of Blue River Stories. For sure, she knows Big Ed’s. I’ve heard some of it. I know what he’s in for. Manslaughter. Same as Mom.
I feel like a newspaper reporter, and maybe that’s good. I have my camera in my lap just in case I get writer’s cramp. It’s not the fanciest, but it can record for a minute at a time if I need a break. I hope I can write fast enough. I hope that card game goes long. I open my notebook to the page I started for Big Ed.
Manslaughter is the crime of killing a human being without the intention or making of a plan to do it. I got that from the dictionary.
I look up at my old friend. Part of me doesn’t want to ask him now. But another part of me thinks Big Ed wants to tell it. He offered. I say, “Start whenever you’re ready.”
Big Ed draws a slow breath. “Well, the first thing to know,” he says, “is that I loved those kids.”
He looks into the air, and it’s like he floats to a space that is away from Blue River. A different place. Another time.
“I loved every last hood-ratty one of them. They started coming into the alley behind my bodega. Hmm . . . all those hot and muggy Florida afternoons when school let out,” he says.
Florida. Now I know why Big Ed thinks of Surprise as being very snowy. I don’t talk. I keep my pencil moving. Big Ed goes on.
“They were always looking for something to do; they were athletes, with nowhere to play until they picked that alley. They’d go running, hopping, launching themselves off the walls without stopping. Free running, they called it. They could swing from the fire escape, throw handstands up on the rim of the Dumpster. Then go full twisty-flips right off my back steps. Bunch of free-range acrobats.” Big Ed smiles. “Take your breath away.
“I figured there was worse they could be up to. I put out a pair of sawhorses and some sandbags so they could set up a sturdy jump. I lugged an old futon back from the dump and padded up a rough patch of concrete in the wall there so nobody would sand an elbow off. I told Henry in the barbershop, and Lila in her consignment store, never mind they’re climbing your irons. They’re not street fighting, not getting mixed up with gangs.” Big Ed nods. “Henry and Lila came around pretty quick, and the other shop owners did too. It got so we’d watch the show out our back doors and forget to tend store!” He laughs then he coughs.
“Those kids, they’d work up a sweat then come into the bodega. Get their snacks, soda pops. We’d sit and talk in the folding chairs. Cool off in front of the fan. I loved those kids.” He says it again. “Most of them stayed good. Good kids.”
Now Big Ed shifts in his chair. He tilts his head and sighs. “Then the trouble started. Somebody smashed the lock at the back door of my shop. It happened twice. Then a third time. Then one morning I found broken glass all over the floor of my storage room, and saw the little window knocked out.
“My apartment was right there—one flight up—and there were times I thought I heard things. I listened hard, but down in Florida I had a noisy old electric fan, and it hummed from Easter to Thanksgiving. So it was easy to think my ears were playing tricks on me. But I knew my inventory. I knew things were going missing. Then my cash drawer was jimmied and robbed two times in one month. I started pulling all the money outta there at night. One morning the whole register is gone. Been yanked clean out even though there wasn’t any cash in it! I had to replace that. Those kids were still coming to play in the back, and they knew I was having troubles. I talked to them about it. But not like I ever suspected them. Not those kids. Not my kids.
“While I was so busy looking the other way I was losing money. I had trouble paying my vendors.” Big Ed leans back. He shakes his head. “I had to do something. So I broke pattern. I waited there one evening after closing. I figured I’d catch my thief in the middle of the night—if I could stay awake. Humph. I didn’t even have to wait that long. The sun wasn’t even down before I heard the squeak of the new window in the storeroom and that skinny kid dropped down. His sneakers hit the floor like he was sticking a landing. He comes strolling through my shop stuffing his pack and his pockets like he’s in his own mother’s kitchen. I can see the shape of him, and I know him. He’s one of my favorites. One of the ones I talk to all the time.” Big Ed pushes his hands into his knees. He grimaces.
“Well, my favorite becomes my least favorite, and I get it into my head that I want to correct this whole thing.” Big Ed’s finger waggles in the air. Then he clenches his hand into a fist.
“I called out his name. He turned, and there he was, grounded in the glow of the setting sun as it came in through the front window of my store. Oh, that boy swore. Then he asked me what I’m doing there! Imagine it!” Big Ed says, and he throws both hands up. “So I said, ‘You want to know why I’m here? To stop you! And you want to know why?’ And I pulled my old gun out from the drawer under my register and I told him, this is why! I slammed that gun on the counter. His eyes went wide and scared, and I thought, yes. Yes! I want him scared—so, so scared. And I banged my hand down so hard next to the gun everything jumped—matchbooks, peppermints—even the gun jumped.
“I told that boy, ‘Every shop owner for the next thirteen blocks has one of these. And the one that doesn’t know you like I know you is the one that’s going to pop a hole in you.’ I picked up that gun to stash it—get it out of the way, because I don’t even want to think about the badness—and the next thing I know, that kid is on the run, heading into the street. I ran after him. Not done making my point, is what I felt. He was young and fit and fast. I went yelling and wagging that gun in my hand—all full of righteous fight, I was.”
Big Ed stops. My hand is stiff so I pick up my camera to record. I watch him on the tiny screen. He pulls at the corners of his mouth with his thumb and forefinger. He closes his eyes. Opens them again.
“I saw the skateboarder come—little kid in a hot-orange T-shirt. He jumped the curb, landed back on his board the way they do. Then he rode it right across the path of my thief. The bigger boy, he veered to avoid the little one. He went into the street. I can still see that. And I still feel how all that fight went right out of me the second I heard the screeching of the brakes and that—thump.” He shakes his head. “My thief rolled up over the hood of that old sedan that just happened to be coming down the street. All these years, and I can’t get rid of that.” Big Ed squints. “I see the boy somersaulting through the air like he’s playing acrobat. Except there is something sick about the twist of his body.” Big Ed shakes his head. He wrings his hands. “Then that boy came crumpling down on the sidewalk with everything looking . . . all wrong.”
I watch big Ed squeeze his eyes shut. His frown is heavy. He says, “I ran to him. But all I could do was hold him while he died.”
“He died? That’s who died?” I speak before I think. I look from Big Ed to Mom, then back at Ed, and at Mom once more. She nods at me. Her eyes are large and sad and knowing. She uses a knuckle to push away a tear.
“Um-hmm,” Big Ed says. “Sure as I felt the life going out of him, I felt my own life empty out too. Yes. That fight leaves you and all you wish is that you could go back for a do-over. You want the moment just before the sedan came by, just before the little skateboarder rolled into the picture. And you want to see yourself staying inside your shop opening the candy boxes and filling up your Slim Jim bucket, and waiting for a lottery winner. You wish you could decide not to scare that kid with your damn gun. Just let him have whatever it is he wants. Even the money—because what’s money but a bunch of old greenish-gray papers and some grubby coins? Let him have them. In my dreams I have done things one hundred ways different. But the thing is . . .” Big Ed clears his throat. “You can’t rewrite your story.”
chapter thirty-four
AFTER BIG ED TELLS ME
>
“That fella Halsey, he’s a bit of a master of distraction, isn’t he?” Mr. VanLeer chuckles up into the rearview mirror. I watch the flat farmlands go by from the backseat. I’ve learned to sit behind Mr. VanLeer in the SUV. I feel less obligated to chat with anyone whose face I can’t see. “Inmates become tight with each other,” he says, in a know-it-all way. “Powerful system of doing favors,” he says. “But it’s okay. I expected that. And I don’t mind a good card game . . .” More chuckling.
I hear him. But I’m in a not-listening state. I’ve taken in about all I have room for today, and if I listen to VanLeer, it’ll be all the harder to hold on to the important stuff. Like what Big Ed said after he finished the story of how the boy died. I asked him how he got convicted of manslaughter.
“It’s not like you shot him or pushed him into the road,” I said. But Big Ed said the presence of the gun was the factor. “Menacing with a firearm,” he said. “Resulted in a death—of a child no less. I was outside my shop, so no ‘stand your ground’ defense. That’s what got me convicted. That, and the fact that I was filled with guilt and all out of fight.”
VanLeer interrupts my concentration. “I trounced him,” he says. Is it possible to hear someone looking in the rearview? I think so. I don’t look up. I’m still staring out the window, watching a dot of bright pink growing larger in the opposite lane. It’s the scooter rider again, the one I saw in the Blue River parking lot last week.
“That fella Halsey,” VanLeer says, “I beat him about like you and Zoey beat me and Mrs. Samuels at Pictionary the other night. And that’s in spite of the fact that he’s a sly player. Blue River is full of tricksters . . .”
I pull my notebook out of my pack and open it across my lap. I scan to the notes about Big Ed’s sentencing:
Asked to serve time far away from Florida.
All Rise for the Honorable Perry T. Cook Page 10
