Fruits of the Poisonous Tree

by Mayor, Archer

  Tony rolled his eyes. “He’s licking his chops. He knows damn well the case won’t come to court for a year or more, especially with Kelly acting so cagey, so he’s going around to every rubber-chicken banquet in town bragging about putting Vogel in jail in record time. He’s making hay off you, too, since your getting stabbed makes Vogel look guilty as hell. And it’s working. The press is buying it; Women for Women has said it was a job well done, although they’ve started a ‘justice watch,’ as they call it, to make sure Dunn doesn’t let Vogel off with a slap on the wrist. Jack Derby is trying his best to inject a little reality—pointing out that Dunn didn’t have anything to do with Vogel’s arrest—but that just looks like sour grapes. Dunn’s making out like a bandit in the polls. Kelly backing out of the plea process just made it sweeter.”

  “You smell a rat?”

  Brandt shook his head. “Oh, no. Tom Kelly’s a good guy, but this is a tough one for him. You built a strong case, and he’s got an asshole for a client. He’s going to have to come up with something awfully flashy to beat it. Far as I can see, it looks like Dunn’s been handed a prize bull at no cost. I think Kelly’s being secretive for his own sake, not because he has anything.”

  From across the room, my physical therapist looked up from another of her patients and gave me a stern look. I sighed and shrugged apologetically to Tony. “I better get back to it, before she has me doing laps. One last thing, though—how did the power-company guy turn out?”

  “Better than you. They pulled a bullet out less than an inch from his heart. He’s already back at work part-time, doing paperwork.”

  I shook my head at the workings of fate. “I wonder why Vogel hung around after he shot him?”

  Brandt made a face. “That much we did get out of him. Vogel thought the poor bastard had gone all the way down the Glory Hole—that he was dead and out of sight. It was going to be dark in a couple of hours. He doubted anyone would come hunting for the truck before it was due back in, so he was planning on waiting till nightfall and then hitting the road. Lucky for us.” He paused awkwardly and then smiled. “Well… lucky for some of us.”

  He rose and patted me on the shoulder, I thought a little gingerly. “Speaking of which, I know what you’re going to say, but you’ve got a Medal of Honor coming your way.”

  “Oh, please.”

  “It’s not just for you. It makes the department look good, too. We can make it very low-key—a private ceremony.”

  I made a face. “I’m really not interested, Tony.”

  He looked down at me as if I was becoming more trouble than I was worth. “All right, here’s another argument for accepting it. James Dunn is organizing an award of his own for you—some sort of ‘outstanding achievement’ plaque from the State’s Attorneys’ Association.”

  “Jesus Christ… ”

  “If you’d agree to the Medal of Honor, it would steal some of his thunder, and you could insist that both awards be given at the same time, in private. Otherwise, he might just bushwhack you with a bunch of press people and slap you with it like a subpoena, whether you like it or not.”

  I let out a deep sigh. “Let me think about it, okay?”

  He shrugged good-naturedly. “Sure—when do your doctors think you can come back to us, by the way?”

  “A few more days here, then three weeks at home with my mother and Leo. They’re only twenty minutes away, and these folks want me back in every three days for a while to check me out.”

  “Gail’ll be there, too?”

  Gail had been a constant presence since I’d come out of my coma, keeping me company, bringing me newspapers and books, watching TV with me when I became too tired to do anything else, including sleep. She was commuting from Thetford, where she’d been staying with my mother and Leo, like some career-path traveling nurse, displaying much of her old take-charge stamina and making few references to her own troubles. Tony’s question made me realize how much I’d become used to her being continually nearby.

  But distracted by that thought, and pondering the unaccustomed ripple it caused across my emotions, all I said to him was, “Yes, she will.”

  · · ·

  Tony had taken my self-assessed physical prowess as a joke. In fact, a bench press of three gerbils wasn’t far off the mark. Several days later, when I left the hospital under Gail’s supervision, I did so in a wheelchair—and not because of the hospital’s insurance requirements. I could only manage a few dozen feet before dizziness and exhaustion set me down. The septicemia had sucked my energy down to near empty. Tony may have been right about my having found the perfect diet, but I knew replacing the lost weight with muscle would be hard work, even if I was already brushing my own teeth.

  My dread was compounded by the expression I’d seen on Leo’s face as the physical therapist outlined my training regimen earlier. He’d rarely been so receptive. I knew that, bighearted to a fault, he was going to fix me up as good as new in record time—or kill me in the process.

  Which made him a co-conspirator with Gail, since she’d already told me that she’d cornered the hospital nutritionist and designed a diet for me. Notions of raw tofu and cold bean gruel filled what was left of my panicky imagination.

  Initially, I’d planned to return to Brattleboro, transfer my records, my case, and my outpatient status to Brattleboro Memorial Hospital, and recuperate at home on Spam and fruit cocktail. But that, it had been made clear early on, was out of the question. Not only did Leo use the excuse of a prolonged and long-overdue visit with our mother as a pretense to torture me—but Gail also had seemed eager to stay away from Brattleboro. I didn’t begrudge her the tactic; I also didn’t miss the irony that I felt more useful to her as an invalid than as a friend during her time of need.

  As partners, however, Leo and Gail made a distinctly odd pair. As exuberant as Gail was thoughtful, as boisterous as she was quiet, and as physical as she was cerebral, my brother—on the surface—seemed made of the very stuff Gail was not. In addition, his passion for cars from the fifties and women with short attention spans were precisely those qualities which Gail tended to view with suspicion. And yet the two of them had hit it off from the first time they’d met, some fifteen years before.

  Gail was not alone in her generous view of Leo. I think most people saw him in the same light that my mother’s generation had revered Will Rogers, he who’d never met a man he didn’t like. Leo was one of the world’s optimists. A butcher who ran his own shop far off the beaten track, just down the hill from where he’d always lived with our mother, he’d created such a reputation for honesty and goodwill that people drove dozens of miles to do business with him. To enter his shop was not only to be guaranteed good meat at fair prices, it was to have your anxieties momentarily washed away by his nonstop cheer and compassion. He greeted everyone equally, with enthusiasm and an eye for their troubles. He had an encyclopedic memory for names and, more important, remembered from visit to visit the course of people’s lives, which imbued in his customers the same trust they might have reserved for a respected psychologist. For a small-town, high-school-educated meat man, his was an impressive aura, all the more so since he was totally unaware of its effect.

  So I was tucked under the wing of these two oddly compatible friends, and driven across the Connecticut River to the Thetford farm where I’d grown up.

  It wasn’t a farm any longer, actually. The fields had been sold off to a neighbor after my father’s death. But my mother and Leo still owned the house and barn, and we all three still referred to it as “the farm.” It was located off the connector road between Thetford Hill and Thetford Center, where Leo had his shop, and despite its proximity to the new interstate, it retained for me all the isolated sweetness of my early memories. Before and during the Second World War, when I and certainly Leo were too young to enlist, we’d been the closest knit as a family—my youthful, vigorous, well-read mother, who’d injected in her sons a love of books and a respect for all people; my much-old
er father, soon slated to pass away—taciturn, hard-working, undemonstrative, and gentle; and the two of us.

  That, however, was then. Now, my mother was in a wheelchair, restricted to the ground floor and reduced to watching TV, her cherished reading victimized by failing eyesight, and Leo, for all his charm and parochial success, was running the risk of becoming an overage roué, tooling around in rough-looking vintage cars and dating women who shared his disinterest in commitment.

  That, in any case, was my dour state of mind as we drove up to the place. It was a mood that Leo, Gail, and my mother—when at last I was wheeled into the living room to greet her, wheelchair to wheelchair—worked instinctively to overcome, filling the evening with good food and chatter, almost to excess.

  When it was finally over, and Leo was putting our mother to bed, I looked over at Gail sitting on the same sofa I’d bounced on as a child, her long legs stretched out, her head tilted back against the pillows, her hands slack beside her. She looked like a loosely assembled collection of tired body parts.

  “Well, I guess that’s done.”

  She gave me a sad smile. “Was it that bad?”

  “No,” I admitted. “Maybe a little unreal.”

  “It’s a lot to deal with, Joe. You and I aren’t the only walking wounded around here.”

  I realized my sadness earlier had a secret sharer—one who’d been living here for several weeks now.

  “So what’s the bad news?” I asked fatalistically.

  She smiled to lighten my concern. “It’s nothing dramatic. Your mom’s starting to slow down a lot, and pretty suddenly. She has to go to the doctor more often, she gets tired more easily, her innards aren’t functioning as well as they used to… ‘I’m just winding down’ is how she put it to me—but I also think what happened to you sort of brought it into focus for both of them.”

  I sighed and shut my eyes momentarily. So much happening in so short a time, leaving everyone at loose ends.

  “That’s not to say she won’t live another twenty years,” Gail added hopefully, if without much conviction.

  I opened my eyes and looked at her again. “And Leo?”

  She paused, searching for the right words. “I think he’s worried he might lose the center of his universe.”

  I thought about the butcher shop, his adulating clientele, his unending string of girlfriends, the car collection in the barn—Caddies, Mustangs, Corvairs, what-have-yous, all under tarps, all used for special occasions, like a selection of suits hung in a closet. So much window dressing for what had always been Mom and Leo. I saw for the first time the fragile thread by which Leo’s life was held together. Not that my mother’s dying would destroy him—I gave his inner strength more credit than that. But Gail was right—it would break his heart, and perhaps leave him ruing some of the choices he’d made along the way.

  In that, I realized watching Gail, he wasn’t alone.

  · · ·

  Gail had moved a double bed into what my mother had proudly titled the library, knowing that few other farmhouses in the state had an entire room that could be so called. My father had catered to this one presumption and had lined the walls of an erstwhile parlor with floor-to-ceiling shelves, which my mother had eventually filled with an eclectic, much-read collection—a passion for the two of us of an evening, my father being content to watch the fire and smoke a pipe, while Leo built models and read car magazines.

  It was the heart of the house, as far as I was concerned, and I was grateful Gail had thought of it.

  I did notice, however, as I slowly and laboriously undressed, that I was not to sleep here alone. A night table by the left side of the bed had a small collection of Gail’s things, and some of her clothes were neatly piled on a nearby chair. I could tell by the wrinkled pillow next to mine that she’d been using this room for some time.

  I was pleased by that, but it made me wonder how to behave. Amid all the trauma that had befallen her, and the emotional, legal, and public uproar that had attended it—not to mention what my mishap had contributed—we’d never had a chance to get privately reacquainted. The prospect of sleeping with her, along with the sexual implications that carried, made me wary.

  I climbed under the covers, naked, as was my custom, the bed’s embrace a mixed blessing. Gail moved about the dimly lit room, busying herself with her few belongings, avoiding looking at me, and finally broke the palpable tension in the air by grabbing her pajamas and leaving for the bathroom down the hall.

  I lay on my back, my eyes on the ceiling, listening. The couch in the living room was long and wide enough to accommodate either one of us, should the need arise. There was even my old bedroom upstairs, which is where I’d thought she’d been bunking all along.

  I glanced at the small lamp by her side of the bed, wondering if it would be helpful or too suggestive to turn it off, and thought again of the upstairs bedroom. Why hadn’t she used it? Why had she instead moved in here, knowing it was the room I would occupy? Was it to get used to the idea? I imagined her lying here, as alone as I was now, considering the prospect of my eventual arrival just as I was anticipating hers. You always think these things will get easier with age.

  I didn’t hear her coming in her bare feet. The door just swung open and she was standing before me, in thin cotton pajamas, her toilet bag in her hand. She gave me an awkward smile as she crossed over to the chair she’d commandeered for her things and put the bag down.

  “You feeling okay? Dinner go down all right?”

  I watched her standing in the middle of the room, her hands by her sides. “Yes. It was great. Where’d you get the bed?”

  “Leo put it together. I think he got the frame out of the barn. I don’t know where he got the mattress. Is it comfortable enough?”

  I didn’t answer, but kept looking at her. “Gail, I’d be happy to use the sofa—”

  She stopped me with her hand, suddenly held up. “No. I did this on purpose. I need to find out if I can spend the night with a man and not feel afraid.” Her voice was tight but strong, her convictions overriding her own nervousness.

  She moved to her side of the bed and turned off the light. Gradually, my eyes adjusted to the milky moonlight that angled in through the uncurtained window. I saw her—in vague pale shadow only—quickly remove her pajamas. She slid into the bed next to me and tentatively touched my chest with her hand. Instinctively, I put my arm around her shoulders and pulled her close to me, reveling in the familiar way she nestled her head against my chest, the smell of her hair rich in my nose. She draped her leg over mine and I felt the softness of her naked breasts and stomach against me. At that, a sigh—almost a shudder—escaped her.

  “How’s it feel?” I finally whispered.

  She moved her face so her lips just touched mine. Her voice, wreathed in the sweetness of her toothpaste, was serious and thoughtful. “So far, so good.”

  I kissed her gently and gave in to the best sleep I’d had in well over a month.

  16

  IN SOME RESPECTS, I FOUND myself spending the next week groping for an elusive past. I was in search of my former well-being, the easy communication I’d once enjoyed with Gail, and the comfort I’d always assumed would be there for me in my childhood home, but whose stability now seemed threatened.

  The physical therapy set the rhythm. Leo eagerly supervised the hospital-dictated routine, but I felt driven to go beyond it, and did so in private, away from those I knew would caution me not to push too hard. There were no demands on me to rehabilitate rapidly. The calls I made to the office reassured me that all was well and progressing at its own legal snail’s pace. But despite the pleasant setting, a string of inordinately balmy days, and the colorful riot of the long-awaited fall foliage, I felt somehow under pressure, as if any regained strength might soon become a crucial advantage.

  Apparently, I wasn’t much good at keeping my anxiety under wraps. Pulling up a seat beside my mother one afternoon, no longer using a wheelchair but wobbl
y-kneed from a private workout, I was about to embark on what had become a daily ritual for the two of us—the viewing of her favorite soap operas. This time, however, she killed the sound with her remote and gave me a mother’s careful scrutiny. “Why are you pushing yourself so hard?” she asked gently.

  I wasn’t surprised she’d noticed, but I still hadn’t come up with a satisfactory answer. “I don’t know.”

  “Is it Gail?” she persisted.

  I looked at her in surprise. “What makes you think that?”

  “She’s still in a lot of pain. Maybe you think you need to be, too.”

  I was startled by the sophistication of the idea—and wondered if she might be right. Nevertheless, I made light of it, squeezing her hand. “My mother the shrink.”

  She wasn’t amused. “Have you asked her what she’s feeling? It might be easier on both of you.”

  I thought back over the week, at our initial night together, and at how, although tentatively, things seemed to be improving. “She’s doing well. She doesn’t brood on the attack as much—she seems more focused on getting on with things. She’s a strong person. I think she’s coming along.”

  “Is she sleeping at night?” my mother asked pointedly.

  “Sure—I guess so. She wasn’t at first.”

  “Then why does she nap so much?”

  A small, wiggling irritation began welling up inside me, as if I’d missed something obvious because I’d been distracted by my own concerns. “She’s been through a lot. Plus she takes care of me, helps Leo out at the store sometimes, and she’s still trying to run things in Brattleboro. It takes a toll.”

  My mother patted my forearm. “She’s still not sleeping at night, Joey. She comes in here after you fall asleep. She plays the TV, sometimes she reads, other times I imagine she just sits on the sofa and wishes she were someone else.”

  “How do you know that? Do you hear her?”

  She laughed gently. “No. I’m sleeping fine. I notice things in the morning—a magazine’s been put back on another pile, a bookmark’s been moved up a hundred pages, the blanket on the back of the sofa’s folded differently than it was when we went to bed.”