a tinge of gray in his sideburns, and I realize he is one of those people whose faces age well while the rest of us grow bigger ears, noses, and warts. Smarter than the other kids I ran around with, John, thinking as a kid he would leave east Arkansas, went to the trouble of becoming a civil engineer before ending up back home in Bear Creek. As far as I can tell, all he has to show for a difficult college major are aerial photographs in his office of enormous bridges and dams. He stands up and gives me a warm smile.
“The man with the silver tongue,” he says.
“Come back to terrorize his old home town.”
I laugh and reach across his desk to shake his hand. Slim (he was chubby and pimply all the way through high school), he is better looking now than he was as a boy.
“You were always the best shit shoveler,” I accuse him. It was true.
John could talk his way out of trouble better than anybody I ever knew.
He grins and gestures for me to sit down across from him.
“At least I didn’t go and make a profession out of it,” he says enthusiastically.
“How the hell are you, Gideon? I’ve missed you.
Are you moving back here? That’s one story I’ve heard.”
God, this place!
“How do you stand it, John?”
I ask, sincerely curious.
“I can’t take a crap here without the whole town wanting to see how much toilet paper I use.”
On his desk he has pictures of his family. As I recall, while in the army at Fort Knox John married a divorcee whose family roots were deeply embedded in the pungent soil of Kentucky Democratic politics. I pick up a photograph of his wife, who hasn’t aged as well as John, but he says proudly, “Our anniversary was yesterday.
Twenty-seven years. Can you believe that Beverly and I are pushing fifty?”
If her photograph is any guide, I can believe Beverly is, but I don’t say so. Like Paul, John could have made it anywhere, but he chose to come home and be a big fish in a pond that’s been going dry for years.
Yet what if I had married Angela and settled down in Bear Creek after college? Had it not been for having to run into the Taylors, I tell myself, I would have enjoyed it.
I have missed seeing people like John, whom I have known since the morning we met in old Mrs. Blount’s kindergarten class, then a private school in her house.
And I have missed knowing the parents and grandparents of my friends.
For better or worse, we knew who we were, where we had come from.
Perhaps, too, Angela and I could have helped to make a difference before such bitterness set in on both sides of the racial issue.
Surely Bear Creek didn’t have to be the tragedy it turned into.
We talk about his four boys, all out of state now, I note. I tell him about Sarah and show him the picture in my wallet. He whistles.
“My boys would like to meet her.”
Not if they were still living in Bear Creek. I finger a photograph of John, Jr.” now an electrical engineer for the state of Oregon, his father tells me. He looks like a carbon copy of John.
“I wouldn’t let them within a hundred yards other,” I kid him, remembering John’s deserved reputation, even in junior high, for mischief.
“Remember the time you shot an arrow at your sister? You should have been prosecuted for attempted murder.”
Even a third of a century later, John blushes.
“I wasn’t really trying to hit her,” he says, and begins to giggle.
“Jesus, we must have been nuts.”
I lean back in my chair, remembering how, bored on a hot summer’s day on Danver’s Hill, he had asked his sister Cynthia, who couldn’t have been twelve, if he could try to shoot at her with his new bow-and-arrow set. Setting a new standard for sibling stupidity, Cynthia asked only for a twenty-second lead. As I began to count, she began to run, zigzagging through the tall grass like some escaping POW. The arrow embedded itself into a tree a foot behind her.
Naturally, she couldn’t wait to tell their mother, and John talked me into taking him on as my first client. With a straight face I told Mrs. Upton, who was hysterical, that John wasn’t even going to release the arrow from the bow and certainly hadn’t been aiming at his sister, and that the arrow had landed ten feet from her, not twelve inches. The bow and remaining arrows were confiscated, but John, as usual, escaped without further punishment.
“You were nuts,” I correct him.
John says, “I’ve been wondering when you were going to come by. Can you believe they’ve charged Paul with murder? This place is crazy now.”
His initial reaction is no different from Angela’s or perhaps any white person’s over here.
Now that John has raised the subject, I ask, “Do you think Paul could possibly be dumb enough to hire somebody to kill an old Chinese man for a meat-packing plant?”
John points with his chin over my head.
“Look behind you.”
I turn and see a dozen photographs on the back wall and get up to inspect them. The pictures go all the way back to 1950. From left to right they show John’s uncle, who began a Ford dealership in Bear Creek with a “grand opening” surrounded by fifteen employees. The last picture, taken two years ago, is of his uncle with five other people.
“Is that all he has now?” I ask.
“The bookkeeper isn’t even full-time anymore,” he says.
“We own some other businesses and some investments in town, but Bear Creek isn’t the place it was when my father was alive.
The Taylors aren’t the only ones who got hurt.”
I study the photographs. It’s like looking at pictures of reunions of those “last man clubs” from World War II. There are fewer returnees almost every year. I realize that despite my conversations with Angela I have been looking at Bear Creek from the perspective of a visitor.
But it is not only a matter of the town looking shabby; John’s point is that it is disappearing economically.
Not only blacks have been losing their land; whites have, too. The agricultural base that supported them no longer exists to the same degree as it did fifty years ago.
“Things are that bad, huh?” I ask.
“Well, there’s still the one factory,” John says loyally, “and we have some retail stores, but they’re not here on the square anymore. When Paul lost a big chunk of their land, they didn’t have any choice but to look some other place to make money. It wouldn’t be easy for anybody.
But whether Paul would go so far as to kill somebody, that’s a hell of a big step.”
I come back and sit down.
“That’s kind of Angela’s position, too.” I have decided not to let John know my feelings about Paul. Though the Uptons never had the cutthroat reputation that the Taylors had, Angela’s reaction has made me cautious.
John’s blue eyes twinkle.
“I had heard through the grapevine that you’ve already called on the widow Marr.You’ve got to hand it to Angela: She looks pretty damn good after all these years. This case seems like an opportunity for you to combine business with pleasure.” He leers at me in a familiar way.
John knows my history with Angela as well as anybody.
“Angela’s still got a lot of grieving to do,” I say, “before she’ll be ready for a relationship with anybody.” I know I sound ridiculous (especially if Angela is ready for us to start going out), but I’m not ready to confess my growing obsession with “the widow Marr.” When we were kids, once he got on a subject, John would never let up.
“What happened to us, John?” I ask, wanting to change the subject from Angela.
“When we were growing up, there weren’t any murders, we weren’t afraid.
Were blacks under such control that none of what goes on today was even conceivable back then?”
John opens a drawer and pulls out a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s.
I put my coffee down, and he pours me a couple of fi
ngers in a paper cup and hands it to me. He says sternly, “It’s drugs. They’re killing the black community.
You remember those billboards forty years ago that used to say, “Impeach Earl Warren’? You wouldn’t have crack cocaine within a hundred miles of Bear Creek if Eisenhower hadn’t been such an ignorant fool and appointed Earl Warren.
It was his court’s decisions on search and seizure and interrogation that have made people want to buy an arsenal to protect their homes when fifty years ago there wasn’t a locked car or house in the whole town. Hell, you don’t think the cops don’t know who brings drugs into this town?
Sure they do! But you lawyers have taken the cops’ handcuffs and shackled them to their desks and told the drug dealers they have carte blanche. And when you take away a society’s power to protect itself against the bad guys, individuals will arm themselves.”
I sip at the liquor in my cup and remember just how conservative this area of the state is.
Until this moment, I didn’t know John had ever had a political thought in his life. As an adolescent, he was as much a rebel as a future civil engineering student could be, which, granted, wasn’t much, but he didn’t sound like a future charter member of the Rush Umbaugh fan club.
John pauses and catches himself. Despite this sermon, he isn’t a preacher.
“Are you eating at Angela’s?” he asks, a grin returning to his face.
I try to hide my irritation at his assumption that Angela and I are already involved and say, “If you’re inviting me to dinner, I accept.”
I can drive home later.
He picks up the phone and dials his wife, saying, “Beverly’ll be glad to see somebody else. I’m too tame for her these days.”
I’m not sure what this means, but five minutes later with a drink in my hand I follow John to his farm, which is north of Bear Creek about five miles out of town. Two brick stories with four columns in front, his house, a mansion really, is set back from the highway a good hundred yards.
Two horses stand at a white fence staring into my headlights. Built right after World War II, John’s home is still one of the largest in the area.
Beverly greets us at the door, and I am immediately struck by the affection between her and my old friend. Instead of just a dry peck on the mouth, she kisses him hard on the lips as if they haven’t seen each other in months. Since I was already gone when John brought her back with him, I never knew Beverly. Unlike Angela, she was born in the South. Afterwards she sizes me up like some quarter horse she might be interested in buying.
“So you’re the great Gideon, huh?” she says, her crinkled gray eyes magnified by gold-rimmed bifocals.
Taller than her husband and more muscular through the shoulders, her wrinkled face appears, despite her husband’s opinion, closer to sixty than fifty. I can smell burnt tobacco and spot a package of Camels in the front pocket of her blue work shirt, which hangs down outside a pair of baggy rust-colored pants. Though definitely not a sight for sore eyes, she exudes the warmth of a pot bellied stove going full blast.
“Your husband’s former partner in crime is probably a better way to get a handle on me,” I say, already liking this woman.
“My husband’s a boy among boys, and so are you,” she says, punching me on the shoulder lightly.
“I’m cooking. Y’all follow me,” she orders, taking my coat from me and tossing it carelessly on a small table by the door. Though the house is huge, and I am curious about it, I just get a glimpse of the combination living and dining room as we proceed directly down a hall lined with
books and family pictures.
We emerge into a kitchen that would service a small restaurant. A wooden chopping table sits in the middle of a brick floor. Against the far wall on either side of a stove hang enough pots, pans, and knives to feed all of the white population of Bear Creek. She tells John to fix us all a drink while she is cooking, and, needing no urging, he heads to a pantry at the far end of the room. Beverly points to chairs on the other side of the chopping table.
“So you defend people accused of committing crimes,” she says, winking at me as she begins to sprinkle flour on some kind of meat, I’m not sure what.
I take a seat and lean wearily against the table, already feeling defensive. If she is as conservative as her husband, it will be a long night. I look over at John, who is holding up another bottle of Jack Daniel’s. I hold up a thumb to indicate my approval and say to Beverly, “And others who haven’t gotten caught.”
She laughs, and scratches the end of her nose, turning it white.
“Criminals are the price of a free society, John is such a wuss that he’d be more than happy to turn this country into a worse police state than it already is. He’s scared to death some escapee from Brickeys will someday stop in and rob and kill us.”
I take a glass from John and watch him drop an ounce of liquor into it.
“Like the poor, they’ll always be with us, huh?” I ask, afraid I am
about to hear another diatribe against the federal government.
John, however, steers the conversation around to more personal topics, and instead of talking about her own boys, over venison, mashed potatoes, and vegetables served in the kitchen on the chopping block, she asks me about Sarah, and I come to life, glad to talk about a subject that to me, at least, is inexhaustibly rich. During my description of her personality, I let slip her latest crusade, which, I fear, is a mistake, given their conservatism; yet Beverly is more supportive than I could have hoped, telling me that she is convinced no one chooses to be gay. Why would anyone be that masochistic?
“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
Blind Judgement g-5 Page 19
