The Legal Limit

by Martin Clark

  Honoring his end of the coram vobis deal, Mason stepped down as commonwealth’s attorney. So the resignation wouldn’t appear forced or too terribly suspicious, he waited until January to inform everyone he’d had a bellyful of public life and needed a respite and was missing his daughter’s best years. “Enough is enough,” he would say whenever kindly people encouraged him to stay on. The most difficult part of the arrangement was persuading Custis to take over the gig—he steadfastly claimed he was “happy to be Kevin Eubanks forever.” Eventually Mason told him a pointed truth, told him he calculated a portion of the reluctance was tied to a fear of being exposed, a desire to stay modest and gray and removed from the spotlight. “I’ve capitulated to Herman Dylan to save your queer ass,” he pushed, “and you’re going to repay me by taking the job and making Judge Moore happy. Step up to the plate, or I’ll spread the cowboy pics myself. If you’re planning to be gay, you need to do it with a little less timidity.”

  Custis relented and accepted the appointment from the court, became the commonwealth’s attorney on March 1, 2004, and one early April weekend at the Château Morrisette wine and jazz festival, Mason and Shoni saw him with a stranger, a slim black man with chic, trendy spectacles and a navy turtleneck. Custis introduced him as Alton, and they visited for a while and Mason invited them to stop by the farm for a nightcap if they were inclined. Not long afterward, Custis’s friend appeared to watch him in a local production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and everyone was thrilled with the play and several people got the sense of who this new fellow was, especially with Custis bounding around in his stage makeup. “I’ll be damned,” some remarked, while others confided it was no surprise.

  Custis began to relax, quit sawing himself in half and driving away from his home so frequently, and he brought his partner to Stuart more often, but there were some places they knew to skip, some boundaries they didn’t chance, and they never so much as dared to sit too close in public, were always just two guys together, the rest left to your imagination. They even persuaded Inez to travel with them to D.C. for an Al Green concert, and she had three glasses of wine and became tipsy before the show, stood between the men and bumped her hips against theirs in rhythm to the up-tempo numbers.

  Mason, meanwhile, hired Larry Cowley, the finest carpenter in the county, to refurbish an old barbershop with hardwood floors and intricate crown molding, and he hung out a shingle there and started a private practice. “From one kinda clip joint to another,” Larry ribbed him. The first time he had to appear opposite Custis in general district court, Mason woke up early and slipped on his wing tips using the elaborate shoehorn his friend had given him, sitting in an old Windsor chair and grinning like an idiot as each stocking foot eased down the steel. He completed the routine by buffing the leather with the whirling black cone of a chrome-plated machine he’d purchased on eBay, and his shiny, spiffy shoes set a tone right off, just as Custis had promised they would.

  That morning, when Judge Greenwalt commented he didn’t know who looked the more uncomfortable in the courtroom, Custis winked and said, “I taught the boy everything he knows, but you don’t really think I showed him my whole bag of tricks, do you?” And then they had at it, taking almost an hour to try a shoplifting case. “Don’t let my sharp-as-hell, machine-buffed, pimping shoes blind you,” Mason whispered as they were walking toward the bench to argue over an exhibit.

  By May, the effects of Leonard Stallings and his indictment were waning, and Mason was back to enjoying his porch and rocking chair in the evenings, briefly joined by Grace on the first truly seasonable night of spring, the weather now mild enough that the oil furnace barely fired at all, another cyclical rebirth pouring into the countryside, leaves and bushes and flowers arriving as promised, the dead, scarred world perking up and gaining pace.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  “Why the hell not?” Custis declared. “Might as well put in an appearance—I’m sure they’ll be sportin’ free punch and peanuts and the sampler platter from Sam’s Club.” So both Custis and Mason attended the spring groundbreaking for Chip-Tech at the Patrick County Industrial Park, and all grades of politicians and pooh-bahs showed up to claim credit for the coup and the jobs and the boon to the local economy, and one naïve, self-important speaker lauded Herman Dylan and foolishly proclaimed how much he looked forward to a long and prosperous relationship between the county and the company. “Yeah,” Mason whispered to Custis, “a long and prosperous five or six years.”

  “Reminds me of a celebrity wedding,” Custis said. “Where a ‘lifetime of devotion’ lasts about as long as a mediocre sitcom.”

  Ian Hudgens was there, and he couldn’t resist a zinger, a private joke, and in his dull prepared remarks, he noted he wanted to recognize not only Mason Hunt from the Tobacco Commission, but also someone else whose behind-the-scenes involvement had been invaluable, and the smug little weasel asked Custis to stand and the unwitting audience clapped and cheered, the loudest applause of the event, and when all the speeches were done, people crowded around and thanked Custis. Finally, men in suits and women in dresses and heels grabbed brand-spanking-new shovels and posed in a semicircle and Gail Harding snapped a bunch of pictures for the paper.

  Herman Dylan had his grant money, Patrick County had its plant, Custis Norman had his reputation and Mason Hunt had his friendship. Yielding to Dylan had been a simple choice for Mason, though he told “The Iceman,” after they’d struck a bargain, that by Patrick County standards, his embalmed, blackmailing ass did in fact need a Porsche. A whole damn fleet of them.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  “Grace?” Mason shouted her name, and he shouted it louder when he spied the breakfast dishes still in the sink and a black fly buzzing the festering scraps and the cranberry juice sitting on the counter, the lid off. Home from work on a June evening, he dropped his briefcase beside the kitchen table, went to the pantry and shook out a handful of almonds, still irritated. He could see Mo Jenkins out in the pasture, burning brush at the far end. Grace’s music was playing, something folky and ethereal he didn’t recognize. There were two messages on the machine: a call from his mother about her balky oven and a stream of badly mumbled gibberish from a boy looking for Grace who didn’t leave his name. Mason yelled for her again at the top of the stairs and obediently knocked prior to entering her room, always careful of her privacy, though the knock was sharp and he barely waited before pushing open the door.

  She was lying there flat on her back underneath a comforter she’d pulled nearly to her chin, pale throughout her face and neck, crying, so limp her arm tumbled off the mattress and bent unnaturally, contrary to the muscles and tendons. Mason hurried in and slid onto the bed and took her hand, correcting the bowed arm. He asked her what was wrong. “Tell me,” he said. “It’s okay. Did something happen at school? Why’re you so upset?”

  She sobbed and sniffed and then the bawling spread and jerked her shoulders and convulsed her belly like she was on the verge of vomiting. Mason touched her cheek and smoothed her hair. Acoustic music played, a flute prominent. Her screen saver flashed a head shot of her and her girlfriends, smiles and braces and goofy delight. “It’s okay,” he said. She caught her breath for an instant and, red-eyed and trembling, told him she was pregnant.

  “You?” Mason asked, waylaid. “Seriously? You?”

  “Please, please, please, a million pleases, please don’t be mad. And please don’t tell Grandma Sadie.” She wiped snot on her bare arm. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she wailed.

  “You’re not even sixteen, not till September,” Mason blurted. He stood and rubbed his temples with the heels of his hands. He walked in an erratic circle. He thought about Allison, wishing once more she were there to help him. “So who’s the father?” he suddenly asked, the moment the question formed in his mind.

  She rolled onto her stomach and burrowed up in a pillow, continued crying.

  “How in Christ’s name did you let t
his happen? Is there just no end with you, Grace? Do you have any idea how hard I’ve struggled to take care of you? Worried myself sick? And this is the thanks I get.” He kicked a stuffed animal that had spilled from the bed, sending it against the wall. “Dammit.” He pressed his temples again. “So who’s the father? At least I hope it’s not some Goth creep or that Burton kid with the earring.”

  “You promised me I could tell you anything,” she wept, the words curbed by the pillow.

  “I did, yeah. I sure did. But as best I can remember, I didn’t tell you to get pregnant. Being able to talk to me doesn’t give you immunity from irresponsible behavior. You can’t do as you want and then tell me about it and expect me to…to…simply forget it.” He sat on the corner of the mattress. “Stop stalling,” he said.

  She turned sideways so she was able to see him. “Are you gonna tell Grandma?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re the only person I have to help me and you’re just bein’ hateful.”

  Mason couldn’t keep still. He stood and snatched her desk chair, turned it backward, straddled it and sat with his forearms balanced on the top wooden slat. “I’m not being hateful.”

  “I’m so, so sorry,” she said.

  “I’m sure you are.”

  “I know you must hate me,” she sobbed.

  “I don’t hate you. You’re my daughter and the center of my world. I love you, and that’s not easy to say right this moment.” He stood. “And I’m going to help you figure this out, and yes, I’m glad you told me. You can count on me. But you can also count on living in a gulag for the rest of the year.” He stared down at her. “So who’s the father, Grace?”

  “Alex,” she said meekly.

  “The Spanish kid? The boy who did the math project with you?”

  “He’s not Spanish,” she said, suddenly more composed. “He’s Filipino. Why do you have to be such an awful redneck?”

  “Me? How am I a redneck? I’m not the one fifteen and pregnant, looking at welfare checks and GED classes.”

  “He’s smart and sweet. I suppose you’d rather me be with some dumb jock.”

  “I’d rather you be worried about the prom and learning to drive a car,” he said, “instead of all this.” He sighed. “I swear, no matter how you sweat and calculate and bust your butt, it’s impossible…impossible to…” He quit on the thought and became distracted, pensive. He sat on her bed again, but his movements were different, gentle and accommodating, the lathered, bootless energy missing. The three pixilated girls held their smiles, declining sunlight silvered the dust and a cobweb strand in the windowsill, an upturned twig with its solitary shriveled leaf rested in a gutter, a ribbon of smoke from Mo Jenkins’s fire curled past the window and dissolved as it went skyward. Thousands of pieces, thousands of arrangements and combinations. “But okay,” he said, the words mild, tame.

  “Okay what?” she asked, sensing the shift in him.

  A series of images strung themselves together in his mind: a frail man standing behind a storm door, his gaze off-kilter, the door’s metal scrolls, loops and curlicues running the length of his body like a strange exoskeleton; a roach squirting across a drawer bottom when he was a boy, still living with Curt; the weighted nose of a balsa-wood plane he and Gates had put together and sent sailing across their yard; baby Grace fascinated by her mother’s painting, mesmerized by the colors and shapes filling in the canvas; trotting around third base at James Madison, Sadie Grace glowing in the stands. There was a gap in the music and the room fell silent between tracks, and a sliver of reasoning took root: then and there he accepted that pell-mell came in infinite variety, from grim to sublime, wrecking ball to salvation, and while he’d always understood he couldn’t resist either a sovereign with a Calvinist compass or a gale of random bumps and dips, sitting alone with his pregnant daughter, he recognized—damn—he wasn’t even wise enough to distinguish blessing from curse, sweets from poison, gold from flashy pyrite.

  “I’m fairly confident,” he said in a humbled voice, “that we never understand as much as we think we do.” He held her hand in both of his. “You and I will stick together. Come what may.”

  She looked at him, anxious now, unnerved how he’d so suddenly gone sci-fi on her, all hushed and restrained, like there was a monster in him or a zombie’s power gaining sway, and he caught her expression and deciphered it, read her doubt exactly. He assured her he was just fine, and still plenty angry, adding that her punishment was beginning immediately. Then he ceremoniously unplugged her computer monitor and hauled it with him as he left to underscore the point.

  Later, hunkered down in his wooden rocker, the porch dark except for some inside light filtering through the windows, contemplating the blank computer screen he’d stupidly deposited on the fieldstone, nothing but empty, inert glass framed by plastic, he phoned Custis on the cordless. “I have a question,” he announced, assuming Custis would recognize his voice and probably had caller ID anyway.

  “Yeah? Really? ’Bout what?”

  “I’m thinking…well, maybe, I’m convinced…Do you believe it’s difficult to be sure, early on, about the true nature of things? The repercussions…” He stopped. Froze.

  “Mace?”

  “Sorry.” He was silent again. A moth, mostly silhouette, fluttered against the disconnected monitor. A TV or radio was chattering on Custis’s side of the conversation.

  “Hello?”

  “I need to, uh, tell you something. In confidence.”

  “Absolutely,” Custis said.

  “But not now, I guess. Probably some other time.”

  “What the hell’s wrong with you, huh? You been samplin’ the methadone clinic? Watchin’ Cannonball Run? You gonna make me drive over there?”

  “Nah. I’m okay. Just learning new shit, Custis. Getting schooled. Again. Sorry to bother you.”

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  The man in his mid-twenties was sitting at a food-court table on the second floor of Tanglewood Mall in Roanoke, Virginia, an hour’s distance from Patrick County. He was wearing Wrangler jeans, tennis shoes, no belt and a long-sleeve shirt. He’d shaved, but his hair could’ve used attention. He was compact, intense, fit, and he was eating a slice of cheese pizza, using a plastic fork at first, then his fingers. He was gruff when the dandified man in a suit—a young guy with creases and starch and a peculiar accent—approached him.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt your meal,” the stranger said. “But I wondered if I might have a few minutes with you?”

  “Don’t need no credit card. Don’t need a time-share. Don’t need my family’s picture taken. Don’t need any more religion.”

  The stranger laughed, a deep, husky, robust ha-ha-ha. “Good for you. Me either. I agree.” He offered to shake. “I’m Dallas Ackerman,” he announced, though it was a lie, the name an alias he’d created weeks ago. “And you’re Mr. Thompson, correct? Mr. Wayne Thompson, Jr.?”

  Thompson slowly, skeptically accepted his hand. “Yeah. Do I know you?”

  The man took a seat. He and Ian Hudgens had arrived in Roanoke the day before and followed Thompson until he was alone. Hudgens was keeping watch from another table, dressed casually, piddling around with a plate of lo mein. “You don’t, but you’ll soon be glad you do.”

  “How’d you get my name?” Thompson demanded. By trade he was a welder, and the kind of man who had little tolerance for nonsense and tomfoolery, especially today. He pushed away the pizza remains and greasy paper plate. The question he’d just put to Dallas Ackerman translated as “you better not be fucking with me.”

  “Great, yes, I’d have the same response,” Ackerman said confidently. “We got your name from a life insurance policy.”

  “Oh, damn. I left that off my list. No need for you to waste your breath. I ain’t interested in the slightest.”

  “I’m not a salesman, Mr. Thompson. No, no, not at all. I’m here to give you money.”

  “Sure,” Thompson said sa
rcastically. “There’s a first.”

  “Seriously, Mr. Thompson, I represent Apex-Continental Insurance. Your father, the late Mr. Wayne Thompson, Sr., purchased one of our products years ago. A delayed-benefit, whole-life policy that recently matured. You’re the beneficiary.”

  “Let me guess—he left the cash in a Nigerian bank, and all I have to do is give you a grand so some evil king will release my money. I mean, come on, man, me and you are in a mall and outta the blue you hit me up and expect me to think you’re the real deal? What kinda company hunts you down on Saturday afternoon and…Hey, how would you even know what I look like?”

  “We very much believe in the personal touch, Mr. Thompson. A company hallmark. We phoned your house and your wife said you were here”—this much was true, although they were staring right at him when they dialed the number—“and we obtained your photo from the division of motor vehicles. We have a plane to catch, so we decided to see if we could locate you and save time. Three hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money—you can best bet we do our homework before turning it over.”

  “Say again? You’re gonna give me three hundred thousand dollars?”

  “We already have. It was wired into an account yesterday morning. I’m merely here to carry the good news.”