by Owen Thomas
Etus leaves his table in a huff to stand before my father. His hands are on his hips.
Turn it up! Turn it up! Turn it up!
“Mr. Johns, will you confirm for the record that you have absolutely no independent knowledge regarding what your son did or did not…”
Can you hear me now?! Is it fixed?!
Etus’ words are lost in the sudden ricochet of sound that seems to smash through the high narrow band of windows. The courtroom drops into startled silence, listening to the crowd respond with ferocious approval. Ben looks as though someone has fired a bullet into the ceiling.
Archoni clears his throat. “I apologize to you all for the poor timing and location of this hearing. It was not …”
But he cannot finish before he is cut off.
As I was saying… I am not the mother … or sister … or grandmother… or girlfriend of any soldier deployed in Iraq. I have no dead to bury. But I am a mother. And I am a citizen of this country!
I look in astonishment at Dad. He is smiling.
“Mom?! Mom!” It is Ben now, his voice an octave higher.
I turn to see him on his feet, half-eaten orange wedges in each hand. He is bouncing excitedly. I stand to calm him and reach in his direction, but he has already turned his back. He is trying to step over Chuck North’s legs to get to the aisle. He stumbles, leaving part of the orange in Chuck’s lap. He tries again.
I tell all of you that I am appalled at what I see and what I have done. I tell the President of the United States, my president, a man for whom I have voted, that I am appalled at what I see and what I have done.
“Ben. Ben!”
I am still whispering when I should be shouting. He is too focused on getting out. He keeps at it, lifting up his leg as if trying to take a flight of stairs five steps at a time. Chuck’s face is something volcanic. He has had enough. Enough of this hearing. Enough of me and Glenda and my father. Enough of whatever has happened to him in the past twenty-four hours. Enough of Ben.
North seizes him by the shoulders and bodily tosses him into the aisle by shoving him past his legs. Ben lands on his front, knocking his head against the base of the bench on the other side of the aisle. The orange in his hand is a pulpy dripping mess.
There is a moment of stillness. I can see the detonation in my head – the brilliant flash and the first bloom of dust – before I feel its concussive force.
Then, there is no more thinking. No doubting. No fearing. I am over the wall on top of the colossus that is Chuck North before I know what is happening. He is surprised and recoils. I would punch him if I could, for that is clearly where this impulse is headed, but I cannot move my arm. Glenda has caught my wrist and is trying to pull me backwards over the wall. My father is shouting. The Judge is shouting. Chuck does not wait for another opportunity. He connects hard to my stomach and then catches me on the side of the head as I am doubling over. The pain is like electricity tracing my jaw line.
I am conscious of a tugging match between Chuck and Glenda, each pulling one of my arms. Chuck is loudly asserting himself as a police officer. I feel the cuffs go on the wrist over which he has dominion. He wrenches the other arm free from Glenda and cuffs the other wrist.
“You’re making one great big ass fuck of a mistake here Chuck,” she says.
“See you in court, counsel.” He spins me around and pushes me into the aisle.
Judge Archoni is on his feet yelling for North to stop. North resists, pulling me towards the exit. But then he stops and turns. I look for Ben. He is standing, terrified, with my father who has pulled him back behind the gate. Etus and Robertson are standing frozen, mouths agape.
“I will have calm in this courtroom! Officer North, you will release…”
“Referee Archoni,” says North, pointing at him. “You are not a sitting judge. You have no authority or jurisdiction over criminal matters. You are a hearing officer. You are appointed by school districts to resolve termination disputes. I am a sworn police officer who has been physically assaulted before your eyes. This man is under lawful arrest and in my custody until he is booked.”
What do I see, Mr. President? I will tell you what I see!
He spins me around and pushes me up the aisle and through the doors, pushing them open with my head, into the hallway. It is quiet and empty.
“Officer North, to which station are you taking him?” It is the Columbus Dispatch reporter running along beside us. She is trying to write on her pad as she runs.
“Fuck off,” says North under his breath, seeming calmer now that he is back in control. He speeds up and pulls harder at my arm headed toward the elevator.
I can hear people spilling out into the hallway behind us.
“We’re right behind you David,” shouts my father, a long ways away.
The reporter is still right with us. The elevator doors open. She tries to follow. North pops her in the breastbone to keep her out.
“Hey!” she drawls in protest.
“Take the next one,” says North. “I’m taking him to central booking. Direct your questions to the Duty Sergeant.”
“Can I at least get a quote? Does this have anything to do with Brittany Kline?”
North punches the button to close the doors.
But they close slowly.
As the opening narrows to a slit of light, squeezing the reporter from view, there is just enough time for me to recognize the shit-kickers she is wearing. And the smudge of grime on the toe.
It looks like a bat.
CHAPTER 77 – Susan
“I’m not a criminal. Do I look like a criminal?”
“Ma’am…”
“Don’t call me ma’am.”
“Ma’am, I want you to sit back down in that chair or I’ll put the silver bracelets back on. Am I clear?”
“Fine. Do I look like a criminal, Officer Delacore?”
“Mrs. Johns. You look to me an awful lot like someone who led roughly five hundred people up South High Street creating a public traffic hazard.”
“What makes you think I was a leader?”
“Nothing really. Except that you were in the lead. And everyone around you seemed to do whatever the hell you told them to do.”
“We had a permit.”
“Not to do that you didn’t. Where’s the… here. You see this permit? You see what it says right there?”
“Yes.”
“Does that say that you had the city’s approval to march up South High, snarling traffic for fifteen blocks?”
“No.”
“No. It does not. Your approved route was from right here to the Plaza and back again. Okay? That’s it. You see anything on this piece of paper that says anything about a march up South High?”
“No.”
“No. You put people in danger today, Mrs. Johns.”
“I put people in danger? I did? In danger?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“What danger? Were any of us actually in the street?”
“That’s not the point.”
“We were all on the sidewalk, weren’t we?”
“Most of you were, yes, but that is not the point.”
“I…”
“Wait… hold on. Just let me explain. When you get that many people parading up the street… okay?... with the signs and the banners and the megaphones… you become a traffic nuisance. Okay? People stop paying attention to the road and they start paying attention to you. They rubberneck and they ride their brakes and they miss the traffic lights and everything slows down. And then that effect gets magnified for blocks.”
“Hmm. So you’re saying that for a few minutes, people on South High stopped focusing so much on the hundred feet of pavement directly in front of them and they put down their cell phones and they turned down their radios and they started paying attention to the world around them?”
“Look, don’t start with me about the war. You and I are not about Iraq right now, Mrs. Johns. Right now, you and I are a
ll about obeying the laws of the City of Columbus. Okay? I don’t want to hear about the war right now. Do that on your own time.”
“I was doing that on my own time. I…”
“What I… Mrs. Johns? Ma’am? I need you to turn around so we can…”
“That’s… Hollis? Hollis!”
“Ma’am?”
“That’s my husband.”
“Which one?”
“There… he just went through those the doors… and Benny!”
“Was your husband marching with you today? Did he help you organize…”
“No. I … I don’t know how he even knew to come here. He’s got nothing to do with this.”
“Well, the sooner we get you processed, the sooner you can go home.”
“If you knew Hollis … well, this isn’t really his thing. I mean, the very idea of him carrying a sign and marching and being in the middle of all of this hullabaloo. It’s just not … him.”
“Well, he must have been nearby, keeping an eye on you.”
“Yes. Hollis is never too far away.”
“Needs to work on his timing though.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that stepping in to handle your bail is fine, but if he had stepped in a little sooner, he might have stopped you from doing any of this.”
CHAPTER 78 – Hollis
Hollis sat downstairs in the study. He was leaning forward, on the edge of his leather chair, elbows on his knees, twirling a severed limb in his comparatively giant fingers. He pondered the tiny tree on his desk. It looked battered and misshapen and cleaved of its once delicate symmetry. Its glossy ceramic pot was chipped, leaving a chalky white, semi-circular thumbprint on the rim.
He had seen the little tree there on the floor, laying on its side, smashed up between the desk and the wall, when he had bent down to pick up his cell phone. He had had intended to toss the phone on his desk but missed, and not just by a little bit, but by a mile, so that it ricocheted off the arm of the chair, hit the floor, and seemed to skitter for the nearest and darkest corner of the room like a mouse. The phone might have tumbled out of reach had it not been stopped by the severed limb of the bonsai that, in a fit of angry impulsivity, Hollis had hacked from the trunk.
He stared ruefully at the thing, wishing he had not acted so rashly. He reached out and slowly rotated the planter, sliding it over the desk on its little felt feet, fingering the white thumbprint on its lip like he was examining a cut on the forehead of a child.
What a mess he had made.
And why again, exactly?
He had been angry with Susan. Angry for calling him a doppelganger. Angry at her new assertiveness and her new independence. He had been angry at her indifference over whether he had been unfaithful and angrier still at her doubts that Bethany – Lynnette; he still needed to correct himself – would have been sexually interested in someone three times her age. And the emotional consequence of that anger had been that he had suddenly, urgently, resolved to sleep with Beth… Lynnette … as soon as humanly possible. And the physical consequence of that emotional resolution was that he had brutally hacked up his bonsai and then backhanded it off the desk and stormed out of the study and the house for Beth’s … Lynnette’s hotel.
What had he been thinking?
Looking back, it all seemed … well, insane is what it seemed. It seemed like he had temporarily lost his mind. He felt like one of those Parkinson’s patients who have an adverse reaction to their dopa drugs and wake up one morning with a hangover, a $100,000 gambling debt and a bad case of Chlamydia.
Upstairs, the front door closed. Hollis raised his head and listened.
He and Ben had parted company with David at the police station. David had wanted to talk to his lawyer and then he had said he was going home. He had promised to come by the house with his long-overdue explanation, but not until tomorrow.
If it wasn’t David closing the door, then it could only be one person. Unless Ben had taken to leaving the house without telling him – an act as unlikely as it was forbidden – then it had to be Susan.
Sure enough, the muffled sounds of reunion soon thudded down through the floorboards and the ceiling above him. The old house creaked and groaned with the weight of them. They danced and chanted something he did not understand and then Ben’s excited voice used the words David and Police and Courtroom and Tackle.
There followed a pregnant silence. The whole house listened. Hollis imagined that it was the first opportunity that Susan had had amid the excitement of her return to notice the blooming contusion on Ben’s forehead.
“Hollis?!”
There was alarm and consternation in her tone. Part exclamatory, part interrogative. Questions that demanded answers. She was searching for him. He closed his eyes and let the sound of her sink into his soil.
“Hollis?!”
How was it possible that she was his wife? How was it possible that her voice, the voice of everything he loved, was searching for him? Him. Still.
He heard her moving, her footsteps receding. She was headed upstairs to the bedroom, with Ben in tow still chattering away.
Hollis refocused his attention on the mangled tree, turning it some more on the desk. He opened the desk drawer and extracted the leather pouch that held the pruning tools. He set the pouch on the desk next to the cell phone. He opened the pouch, but then stopped. Thinking better of it.
He leaned back in the chair and waited.
After fifteen minutes or so, Susan was in the doorway.
“I’ve been calling,” she said, leaning up against the doorway, arms crossed.
“I heard. I didn’t want to yell. Long day. Bad headache.”
“What happened to Ben?”
“Ben’s fine.”
“What happened to Ben? He’s not fine. He has a bruise.”
“Yes. He does have a bruise. And it will look much worse by tomorrow. But he’s fine. He tripped and knocked his head on a chair.”
“He tripped.”
“MmmHmm.”
The truth, Hollis knew, would come out eventually. Probably later that night when Susan fully debriefed Ben. Certainly by tomorrow when David came over.
But not now.
He did not have the energy to wrestle Susan to the ground when she learned the truth; specifically, when she learned that Ben had been forcibly shoved by a police detective and that that shove had immediately preceded the same detective punching her other son in the gut and on the side of the face. David would have some interesting bruising of his own. Susan would react as any good mother would.
But not now. He did not want drama. He was too tired. He needed sleep. Pending that, he just wanted to look at her. Susan. His wife.
“Tripped where?”
“The courthouse.”
“Why was Ben at the courthouse?”
“David had a hearing.”
“What kind of hearing?”
“Oh… a hearing.”
“Hollis. Don’t do this.”
“He wants to explain it all to you himself. He’s coming over.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Well, I’m calling him. Now.”
“Okay. But his phones don’t work.”
“Why don’t his phones work?”
“He said he’d explain it all tomorrow.”
Susan rolled her eyes and sighed in exasperation.
“I know,” said Hollis calmly.
“Is he okay?”
“David’s fine.”
“So then Ben tripped at David’s hearing.”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“He was excited. He tripped.”
“Why was he excited?”
“He was excited to hear your voice.”
“My voice?”
“Your voice.”
There was an empty beat or two as she figured it out. He waited.
“He could hear me? You could hear me?”
“Everyone could hear you.”
“In the … this … hearing? David’s hearing?”
“Yes.”
“Was there a judge?”
“Yes.”
“The judge could…”
“Everyone could hear you, Sweetie.”
He saw the endearment take her by surprise and he felt a pang in his heart that she should feel any surprise at an endearment. He wanted to say them over and over. His heart whispered them through the bars of its boney cage. Sweetheart. My love. My darling. My wife. But the self has a kind of muscle memory. He held onto control.
“I saw you and Ben at the police station,” she said. “Has David been arrested? Is that what the hearing was about?”
“David’s fine. He’s at home. He’ll be over tomorrow to explain.”
“But you were there.”
“I was there.”
“Hollis, why won’t you just…”
“Because it’s David’s story. David needs to tell it. I promised him he could.”
“Well…” she held out her hands almost as if to provide some demonstration of the absurdity of what he was saying. He smiled. She let her hands drop to her sides.
“And why were you at the police station?” he asked.
Susan re-crossed her arms again and seemed to consider her words as if they had been laid out on the carpet before her.
“I was arrested,” she said, looking at him defiantly. “Violation of a protest permit. Creating a public nuisance. Obstruction of a municipal roadway.”
Hollis pursed his lips and nodded.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Me? Yeah. I’m fine. I have a rap sheet now,” she said with a little defiance.
Hollis knew she would not want to sound like she was accounting to him for her actions. And he understood the significance of her arrest. She would be proud of having committed herself to her cause to the point of being arrested and booked. He saw that her thumb was still black with ink and he knew that she was not quite ready to wash it clean. That sort of pride in herself had been a very long time in coming.
