The Blackstone Commentaries

by Rob Riggan

  But that day, Dugan had come as close as he ever did to sympathizing with that yard boss, even admiring him, because the man hadn’t budged before those Montgomery people, hadn’t cared what power they believed they had. He’d known his job, and what they thought hadn’t mattered a goddamn lick.

  Then the Montgomery men had turned to him, Charlie Dugan, and like Peter in the Bible, as he would think afterward because he had no other measure for what he’d done, he’d betrayed his heart and shamed himself the worst he’d ever done, and gone home that night sick in a way he’d never been. He’d been sick of himself and everything he had ever thought he stood for. And, God knew, he’d never been able to forget.

  XIII

  Elmore

  Elmore’s face was boiling. The sun was burning up the heavens, and he needed water, but then he would have to pee, and that meant moving. Sometime a long, long time ago, he’d awakened, stumbled into a strange bathroom with thick, furry rugs and reeking of sweet soap, peed, then flopped back into this too-soft bed that folded itself around him like a womb. He’d pulled the sheet over his head to kill the morning light and, sweating profusely, dreamed ferocious and unhappy dreams. Sheriff Dugan appeared with sharks’ teeth. When Elmore woke, he felt awash in disheartening feelings about himself and a huge inertia.

  “You getting up?” a voice said from somewhere in the morning haze—God maybe, a Southern god.

  “What in hell did I drink last night?” Elmore moaned from under the sheet.

  “Cheap whiskey, mostly Pinetown white,” the voice, male but with an edgeless, slightly cosseted drawl, said. “Boy, you can’t hold your liquor for shit.”

  “Not rotgut, Pemberton,” Elmore retorted, placing the voice. As he struggled through a fog, that bad feeling lingered, clutching him to his dreams. His father drifted up from somewhere, his mouth a gaping maw rolling laboriously from side to side like a cow’s. Listen as he might, all Elmore heard was a gurgle. That’s real sad, he thought, and in his dream he started to weep.

  “You just plan to lie there all day? Get your ass up. I’ll buy breakfast.”

  Elmore hurled the sheet back, then clamped his eyes shut against a full summer morning in the South. Sweat trickled down his raw, unshaven cheeks. “What else did I do?” he ventured finally, unable to shake that bad feeling.

  A chair scraped, then something wonderfully soft floated onto his face, its feathery lightness curling itself around his nose and filling the cavities of his closed eyes. A scent like fermented hay stung his nostrils. He plucked the object off his face and, holding it overhead, squinted at a pair of black lace bikini panties.

  Quiet laughter accompanied his examination. “Mr. Willis, your reputation did precede you but did you no justice. I wish I could write it off to your being mostly Yankee and a curiosity, as well as a lawyer and theoretically a man of means, but my, the women certainly do seem attracted. I’m positively green.”

  Something else happened, Elmore thought. There was a cat, its body all scarred. Slowly he recalled the cat crouching in weeds, baleful looking, unafraid, watching cars grind and bang down a rutted drive toward a huge Quonset hut they called Natty Moon’s, the cat’s only remaining eye showing in the glare of headlights. It was one of the nastiest-looking creatures he’d ever seen. “Now, that’d be a good cat to throw at somebody,” Martin Pemberton had said. Then Natty Moon himself—black, soft, smiling and sleek with perspiration—opened the door. “Dr. Pemberton,” he’d said with a little unctuous bow but, Elmore thought with a twinge of anger, laughing somehow, too, just not that one could prove.

  Elmore recalled a good-looking woman with long, dark hair and a way of not looking directly at a man and right through him at the same time. No makeup. Petite in a poured-tight black dress, conspicuously, disharmoniously, even ludicrously overdressed for that shit hole. Sure, there were other women, but every male psyche in that overwrought room had been tuned to her. He vaguely remembered she’d barely come to his neck—and something wet on his chest. Much later, he thought.

  Everyone there knew Pemberton, and they came to pay their respects. While not obsequious, they were acknowledging some honor or validation by his presence, which Pemberton skillfully parlayed with smiles, first names and easy banter. Pemberton hadn’t swaggered exactly, but he belonged, Elmore realized, dismayed.

  The atmosphere had been predacious. Even as Pemberton’s guest, Elmore knew at once he had no protection; despite appearances, Pemberton’s own hold on the place was precarious at best. Obviously, lawyers and the law were not sacred at all. Elmore felt that if he didn’t scrupulously weigh every gesture and word, he might die there. It was the loneliest place he’d ever been. He ought to have left quietly, but oh, no, he had to claim his manly right to survive.

  He’d played poker, which took more than all his concentration, and had lost track of time. Now and then, an almost-hysterical feminine laugh had rung out, riling the hot blood of a crowd where everyone was being noisy, yet listening and watching, too, as though waiting for the eruption of something savagely coital. Anticipation hovered in the air like smoke. Men breathed it. Women reeked of it. He’d caught Pemberton’s eye and, seeing terror there, too, started drinking hard.

  Lying on the bed now, an arm cast over his eyes, he found himself thinking about his father. Had he known that world? What had he thought? Had he been terrified? Elmore recalled the people at Natty Moon’s. Like children, they had played grownup, a puerile intelligence, but not a shred of innocence, informing the humor and sexuality and obscenities.

  His resentment at the title with which everyone did homage to Pemberton—“Doc”—had grown with the night and the alcohol. He just couldn’t believe his father, the original Doc, had been like that, though Pemberton would have it so. Elmore’s caution finally evaporated before a blind, formless and bewildering anger because, several times, looking up from the poker table where he had already lost most of his week’s earnings, he had found the woman with the long, dark hair staring right at him, laughing, it seemed, taunting him. And worse, he was certain every man there knew she was. Ordinarily he avoided women like that, with their penchant for humiliating and shaming, but suddenly he’d wanted nothing more than to smash her.

  He recalled her standing barefoot before him, not a piece of clothing on her, just a thin gold choker. Fucking her had been too easy: no exhilaration, no sense of victory. Lord, what’s happening to me?

  “She have a husband?” he asked from under his arm.

  “The Damascus fire chief.”

  “Tell me he wasn’t there.”

  “Good Lord, man, this is Blackstone County! You think we’re uncivilized? He’s off at school in Fayetteville getting more merit badges.”

  The hush of the strange house in which he’d awakened—with its cloying testament to womankind, its shadowy rooms, receptive and waiting—crept into his awareness, along with a memory of his mother’s scorn for temples of female worship. Where on earth am I? he wondered.

  “Billy Gaius Ford’s one.”

  “One what?” Elmore said.

  “When he’s not in prison, he likes to fuck that chief’s wife, too.”

  There it was, Pemberton’s specialty: the challenge-by-insult, if Elmore wanted to make it one, or guilt by association in any case, since Ford was a felon as well as an adulterer. The putdown always oblique, deniable, just like at the Trotter dinner party.

  “Didn’t I hear Billy Gaius Ford’s got a car like that one of the Carvers’ got shot up?” Elmore asked innocently. “That you were really looking for Billy that night?”

  “Who the hell gave you that idea?”

  Hearing the instant fury, a mollified Elmore lay very still under his arm. He could never like Pemberton. He certainly couldn’t trust him. But then he couldn’t trust himself anymore. That said, Pemberton was mesmerizing, like a cobra.

  Then an equally disturbing thought intruded: I have work to do, real work. I can’t keep this up. Elmore thought about his clients—n
ot too many yet, but a couple more every week. He was discovering that he cared about them. They were real people who actually needed him. He hadn’t felt that in New Haven when he went into a big firm right out of law school. When people came to him here, they weren’t posturing. But just now, he’d found himself wanting to hurt people, too. The inertia crashed back over him, sinking him deeper into the mattress. He had no bearings anymore. “Where am I, Pemberton?”

  “You are in Damascus at the home of—”

  “I know, the wife of the fire chief.”

  “No, no, Elmore! A very good friend and companion of that happily married woman you consorted with, a rather striking and well-to-do divorcée who just happens to be visiting her father in California.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “This is Damascus.”

  Dispirited, Elmore fell silent. All at once, he felt a stab of panic. “What time is it?”

  “Ten-fifteen.”

  “Oh, hell, I’ve got to get to the office!” Elmore clawed his way out of the mattress to a sitting position and stared bleakly at Pemberton sitting in front of the open blinds, silhouetted by the sunshine. He looked absurd in a delicate white wooden chair, lacy curtains blossoming around him.

  “Since when do you work on Saturday?”

  But Elmore had remembered a dog. He was running from the house still pulling on his shirt when Pemberton leaned out the door and shouted, “I’m not locking this damn place up!”

  Elmore jumped in his car and rushed downtown, parking sideways instead of nose-in in front of the Trotter Building like he was supposed to. He took the stairs two at a time all the way to the fourth floor.

  “Take the dog, Mr. Willis. He’s all I got to pay you with, and I can’t take him where I’m going, that’s a fact. I know you tried real hard, and I’d rather have this one year down at the camp than the five they was talking about.”

  “He’ll be here when you come out.”

  “No, sir, he needs a regular life—he’s that good. You’ll take care of him, I know.”

  How the hell did the man know? Elmore fumed. Why do they all presume they know me? Panting hard, he threw open his office door.

  The dog dived between Elmore’s legs and down the stairwell, Elmore thundering after him. Elmore lunged for the dog’s collar, and the two of them hurtled across South Charlotte to the courthouse lawn, where the dog promptly squatted.

  This is a good dog, Elmore thought, admiring the animal—some kind of cross between a German shepherd, a collie and God only knew what else—despite himself. Elmore leaned against a tree, the guilt he’d been feeling overwhelming now that he’d seen how hard the dog had tried. A lot harder than I did. He’d intended to go out only to dinner with Pemberton and was going to be right back to feed and walk it. At least he’d thought to leave water. He covered his eyes. I didn’t want the mutt.

  “C’mon, Phineas!” he called finally. He’d been told that was the dog’s name. To his surprise, the dog trotted right over. Then Elmore saw a woman watching them.

  “You always let your dog pull you around like that?” she said.

  First he took in her smile—made certain of it—then a peculiar wildness in her look, then finally the black hair chopped like a child’s around the hardened features, accentuating an air of defiance that this day was more playful than he remembered. He laughed. That was all he could do.

  XIV

  Elmore

  “I’m sorry my father treated you like that!” Rachel McPherson said, not sounding at all apologetic, just furious and mostly ashamed. “David was like a son to him.”

  “I gathered,” Elmore said, recalling a photo in her parents’ living room.

  She had insisted on showing Elmore a “back way” down the mountain from her parents’ house in New Hope, but the car seemed to be climbing away from Damascus.

  “David wanted to go to Vietnam and get in the fight. He dropped out of college, and he didn’t have to. They still made him a lieutenant, and in a month he was dead. Wasn’t that great?”

  Elmore didn’t reply. He was thinking this sure wasn’t the woman with whom he’d sat on the courthouse lawn for almost two hours a few days earlier, just talking like he’d never talked with any woman before, Phineas dozing nearby as though he’d been with Elmore forever. She’d asked if he recalled when they’d first met.

  “You were wearing bib overalls, and your tongue was pink,” he had replied.

  Lifting her face into a splash of sunlight, she’d laughed, a rich, easy, almost carnal sound. For an instant, the hard lines of her features softened, taking his breath away. He had never encountered grief before, but in the contrast of that moment, he’d known hers and felt the presence of the dead man she’d loved. He’d never imagined such depth of feeling and was floored by its beauty.

  “No one ever walked in that store and made friends with my father the way your father did,” she’d told him. “They became good friends.”

  “I remember. We’d just arrived in North Carolina almost that minute.”

  “Even I felt Papa’s surprise and wonder that a doctor of all people would come through the door like any other man and treat him like his equal. Not that people are unfriendly, you understand, or rude, it’s just that you sense your place. He still talks about it. A lot of people do. I bet my father would like to see you. You remind me of your father—you don’t mind my saying that, do you? He was my doctor growing up.”

  Elmore had said nothing.

  “I guess you must hear that a lot,” she’d said apologetically, watching him. “You know, I didn’t stick my tongue out to just anybody.”

  Now the talk wasn’t just about David and grief, but her father. Elmore had a bad taste from the visit, only he didn’t say so. She was having trouble enough.

  Her parents lived in a little house up on the bank behind the store her father used to run before he got the job at the power plant in Sentry. When Elmore saw it, he remembered with fondness the store with its wooden portico reaching out to the two round gas pumps with glass globes on top, the pumps rusted now from disuse.

  He wasn’t prepared for the house. It felt too small. In the living room where they took him was an old console-model TV that Rachel’s mother, a thin woman in a shapeless, almost colorless dress, hurried over to shut off. A big Bible lay on top of the TV. Two tilt-back lounge chairs were pulled up in front of the screen.

  A nearby sofa took up most of one side of the room, the wall behind it drooping with family pictures. In the middle of the room was a large kerosene heater, and on the wall behind the television was a portrait of Jesus, his eyes fixed on the heavens. The usual white Jesus, Elmore noticed, who might just as well have been a girl with a beard or a clean hippie, if he was anyone but Jesus.

  “You been in the military?” her father asked almost as soon as he settled into one of the lounge chairs and swung it around to face Elmore. Rachel’s mother, Sarah, clutched her hands to her lap.

  Elmore had never seen anyone quite like Sarah before. She had a longish face with soft, fluid lips that curled somewhere between a smile and disbelief, yet a hard face, too, etched like her husband’s. Her eyes, a serene greenish gray, seemed without hesitation or self-consciousness to probe deep into him, as though she’d found him asleep on the forest floor somewhere. In their deep stillness, they made him think of water, of eddies of memory and longing.

  “Young man, you been in the military?” Rachel’s father repeated.

  “No, sir.” He turned to the tall, wiry man dressed in green khakis and slippers. In 1948, when his father had pulled the family car into Cady’s Filling Station for the first time, Frank Cady had shown a natural reserve common in the mountains, bordering on xenophobia, Elmore now knew. But being a child then, Elmore had only sensed Cady’s gentleness. Despite all the years that had passed, he looked just like Elmore remembered, only now there was no friendliness.

  “What do you think of this war?”

  “Vietnam? It has n
ever made sense to me.” It was an honest answer, though Elmore knew he could have been a bit more diplomatic. But something about Cady, about the entire situation …

  “So you never went to the army.”

  “I would have if I’d had to, Mr. Cady, but I was deferred for my education, then got a high number in the lottery.” He kept his voice quiet and polite. Just pretend you’re in court, he reminded himself, and don’t take it personally. The fact was, he’d felt embarrassed for Rachel. Now he wasn’t certain he should have. Seeing that house and her people, he wondered who Rachel McPherson really was, and who he had thought she was.

  “Not a protestor. At least you don’t look like one. It really is like a lottery, isn’t it?” her father had said. “Only what you win is you don’t have to risk fighting for your country and getting killed. You can live in the clear, as much as any of us do, and enjoy all the benefits of living in a free country.”

  To even swallow at that moment would have been thunderous. Elmore threw a glance of disbelief at Rachel, but she couldn’t or wouldn’t look at him.

  “David there,” her father continued, not looking at anybody but pointing at a gold-framed picture on a table beside the couch, rather like a shrine—it was no longer clear whether he was talking to Elmore or his daughter—“Rachel’s late husband, he wanted to go. He volunteered.” Since there wasn’t much to say to that either, Elmore waited. Rachel’s father, his piece all said and not knowing where to go next, just stared at him. “I expect lawyering puts you right in the thick of Blackstone County, Mr. Willis. Politics, crime, business,” he declared finally.

  “So it would seem.”

  “You can get somewhere here being a lawyer. Being a doctor, you might even be able to accomplish some good.”

  “I imagine,” Elmore said, breaking into a grin that provoked a grateful smile from Rachel’s mother. Rachel, sitting bolt upright on the couch, only glared at her father, who pointedly ignored her.