I have no idea what I want to do with my life, but at least most of the kids here don’t either. If they all did, I’d really feel stupid. After this mock trail, I don’t think I want to be a lawyer. Too many egos and silly rules. It is hard to believe you were ever in the Peace Corps or a social worker. You don’t seem the type. I’m not putting you down, but you don’t seem to care that much about other people. I mean, I know you care about me (and maybe Rainey), but really, that’s about all. You have sort of an “us against the world” attitude. I wish I had known you and Mom back when you were in the Peace Corps. I bet it was neat! Remember I ‘m going to the NCCJ Camp Sunday.
Thanks for getting my money in!
Love, Your non-legally interested daughter, Sarah
I put the letter down and grab a beer and check the freezer:
a half-empty sack of Harvest Poods crushed wheat (no cholesterol) bread, and enough ice to build an igloo. No wonder I’m eating fried chicken: I’m starving to death. It seems so hot in the house I’m tempted to sleep in the refrigerator. I might as well use it for something. I sit back down at the table and, still irritated, reread Sarah’s letter while I sip at the Miller Lite. I realize my feelings are a little hurt. You can’t spend your whole life trying to save the world, damn it. Marriage and a family change things. Sarah can go off and escape our provincialism, but somebody has to pay for it. Woogie whimpers as if he is about to. stroke out. His panting tongue, pink as a slab of bacon beginning to fry on the stove, makes me think of Rosa’s Lamaze classes. I walk into the living room and check the thermostat. Damn, no wonder he is about to go into labor. It is eighty-five in the house even though I have it set on seventy-eight. Great. Another bill. Out the back door Woogie and I go to investigate the fuse box, which is behind a holly bush underneath my bedroom window. After scratching my hands on a leaf, I open the metal container to find that the circuit breakers are still in the “on” position. Having exhausted my technological knowledge, with Woogie at my heels I go back inside to cool off with a shower.
The cold water on my back sends an exquisite shock down my spine, but tingling with the mixture of pain and pleasure, I weenie out and switch the nozzle to warm and let it gently knead my neck muscles. When I open my eyes, it is painfully obvious that the pinkish tile in the shower could stand cleaning, but if it’s not going to bother me, then I won’t bother it tonight. Alcohol, heat, and water have their own healing qualities, and I feel myself begin to relax. After a while, with a little help from (as my kindergarten teacher used to call my hand) Mr. Thumb and his four friends, I soon get myself into a pleasant state thinking about Kim Keogh. Each time I have thought about sex in the past week and a half, my musings have been accompanied by a mental picture of my prostate swelling to the size of a watermelon and then exploding.
Following my premature hospital admission, Kim, sounding hung over but anxious, called the next morning, probably to see if I had died. Relieved at the truth (she had merely slept with a middle-aged man who is beginning to deteriorate), she shyly hinted that she would like to see me again. But feeling I had received a warning, I put her off, saying I would call her. I haven’t. Why don’t I have the guts to say that I am not interested in pursuing a relationship with her? Too hard.
For once, I feel deeply ashamed. She bared more than her body. No wonder women think men are jerks. I can hear the phone ringing and grab my towel.
“Gideon, what’re you doing?” Rainey asks. She sounds happy. I have been afraid to call her since I got her out of bed to take me to the hospital.
“Right now?” I ask, looking down between my legs. A disappearing act is taking place before my very eyes.
“Not much.”
“Want to get some yogurt?” she asks, running the words together as if they were the words to a song. No longer do I allow myself to think of Rainey as I have been thinking of Kim Keogh. I always feel too morose later.
I begin to rub myself briskly with the towel as Woogie, who has come into the room to keep me company, licks my wet legs.
“I’ll pick you up in fifteen minutes.”
I slip on a pair of denim cutoffs, a T-shirt, and my running shoes, thinking that forgiveness is a wonderful thing. Like the rain, it falls on the just and the unjust. Thank God for that.
She is waiting for me on her front steps. We are dressed identically, even to our T-shirts from the Blackwell County Pepsi 10K race two years ago.
“Twinkies,” I tell her, as she slides in beside me.
She barely glances at me and says, as she buckles on her seat belt, “I don’t have a prostate.”
One of the things about Rainey I like is that I don’t have to wait long for her to slip a knife between my ribs. I smile, inordinately pleased to see this woman. Her curly red hair is cut shorter than I’ve ever seen it. In profile her face looks boyish. I resist the urge to reach over and playfully squeeze her leg as I do Sarah’s. “I kind of panicked the other night,” I apologize to her as we head west on Maple to the nearest yogurt emporium. “I think I was born without a pain threshold.”
Rainey’s laughter is refreshing as a cool breeze.
“Gideon, you’re just awful! Poor Kim Keogh. I saw her on TV tonight and she looked frazzled. You’re really great for a woman’s ego, you know that?”
I can hear Kim telling her friends: the last guy I made love to had to go to the hospital an hour later.
“I’m too old for somebody like that,” I admit, turning my head so I can see her. She is sitting so straight it makes my back ache. If I had her posture, I’d be an inch taller.
As if she is commenting on the weather, Rainey, watching the road for both of us, says offhandedly, “That’s how men your age die—a massive heart attack and—poof!—you’re gone. Think of the guilt for the poor woman.”
As we climb the hill into Blackwell County’s most exclusive area, the traffic increases as if the heat had driven even the rich into the streets tonight. The poor woman? I feel a sudden twinge in my prostate, as if it is an early-warning signal for the rest of the body.
“Surely, it doesn’t happen all that often,” I argue weakly, wondering what the statistics are.
“It sounds like a line of bull cooked up by wives who won’t put out anymore themselves but who want to scare their husbands into lifelong celibacy.”
Rainey reaches over and pats my knee.
“I’m not your wife,” she says with mock tenderness. Her hand, as light and soft as a first kiss, immediately returns to her lap.
I turn onto Bradshaw and see the lights of the section called Riverview, a yuppie heaven for central Arkansans who demand proof we have the potential to be like everybody else.
Antique shops, pricey women’s clothing stores, pretentious restaurants with snotty-sounding names (Pompidieu’s, the Lion Tamer), business offices (a favorite area of therapists, dentists, and accountants) daintily line the street. A little too cutesy for me, but Rainey, however, has decided tonight that Turbo’s has the best yogurt in town, and obligingly, I turn into the drive-through lane, which, through a stroke of blind luck, isn’t backed almost into Bradshaw this time of night.
“You might as well be my wife,” I say as we pull up to the order window.
“I read a survey recently that married people hardly ever do it after a few years. Like just a little over once a week.”
After we order (she gets her pathetic kiddie cup), Rainey says, “God, Gideon, you sound like Rosa’s been dead so long you can’t remember what it was like to be married to her.”
Rainey hands me a five-dollar bill. It’s her turn, and she has become scrupulous about paying her share since we have decided to be friends. As I get her change from the girl at the window (she looks about nine have the child-labor laws been repealed or does it just seem as if kids are quitting school in the third grade to go to work?), I think about my sex life with Rosa. Have I been romanticizing that, too? It was good, but like everything else, it became a routine. In my present state though, i
t seems wonderful. Oblivious to the ritzy Buick full of kids that has just pulled in behind me, I roll my white plastic spoon around in my medium-sized cup, mixing the chocolate syrup and the yogurt together and then digging out as big a bite as I can manage to get into my mouth. If this is going to be my only sensual pleasure in life, then I’m going to get it right now.
We drive back to her house and sit on the sweltering concrete steps with the porch light out so as not to attract bugs.
Across the road, lit by the streetlight on the corner, two small children run shrieking through one yard into another chasing each other. The leader of the two, a girl about nine with a long ponytail and short, stubby legs laughs excitedly and blasts a tin can five feet into the air without breaking stride.
“No fair! No fair!” her pursuer, a little boy of no more than seven, wails, throwing himself despondently on the high grass in front of the house as she continues around the corner.
When I was a child in Bear Creek, we played endless games of Kick the Can, and my older sister, before she became obese, was that ponytailed tomboy across the street.
Dejectedly, the boy gets up and retrieves the can and places it upright on the sidewalk. Putting his head down on his chest, he trots around the corner, still muttering to himself.
I lean back and look up at the humid sky, which is packed with misty stars. Under my now sticky T-shirt I can feel drops of sweat slipping down my sides. “My air-conditioning went out tonight,” I say glumly. “If it’s not one damn thing, it’s twenty or thirty.”
Rainey, moving toward me but not touching, titters at my hyperbole. Her laughter is like tinkling glass.
“How you do go on, Gideon,” she says lightly.
“Do you want to sleep on my couch?”
I think for a moment. How nice it would be just to glimpse the woman I have loved for over a year in her nightgown.
Underneath she would be solid, her body still firm from five days a week of Jazzercise. Yet I know I would lie awake all night listening futilely for my name. Our friendship is too delicate to carry such a weight. Maybe in five or ten years, I think irritably.
“Better not,” I mumble, not daring to look at her.
“But thanks for the offer.” Above us I can hear the whisper of a breeze in the maples that flank her house, but ground level it is hot and still. Incessantly busy locusts provide a kind of white noise around us for the now half-dozen children who occasionally come charging into view from out of the shadows across the street.
I think I hear a sigh, but she is gasping at a shooting star that flashes by us from left to right. “Look!” she says, touching my arm. For perhaps a second I trace the star which then winks out of sight.
“Incredible,” I mutter, but I am thinking of the relationship between men and women. Why are things so difficult?
I have tried as earnestly as I know how to accept the terms of friendship she has offered, but times like tonight when I can smell the heat in every living thing around me, including Rainey, it is not easy.
We talk for about an hour. She tells me that she has begun to worry that she may lose her job at the state hospital. The state is struggling to convert itself to a community-based system, and the census is way down. Her offer to loan me money becomes even more astonishing. I’m so cheap I even hate to lend Sarah money. “I probably could get a job at a community mental health center somewhere,” she says offhandedly.
The idea of Rainey moving anywhere shocks me. Ever since Rosa died, I have told myself not to expect permanence in any situation, but as usual, I am always surprised and hurt by the prospect of change. How dare anyone disrupt my life?
I scrape desperately at my empty cup.
“It won’t come to that.” Yet it might. Nothing stands still. As usual, she lets me talk about Sarah. I tell her about the letter I received tonight.
“She doesn’t want to be a lawyer, that’s for sure,” I say irritably. Since I have been in private practice by myself, I have quietly entertained the thought that someday she would go to law school and then come into practice with me.
Page & Page, Attorneys at Law.
The right side of her face pressed against her arms which cradle her drawn-up knees, Rainey looks like a sleepy child.
“Who in their right mind would?” she asks, breathing deeply in the dense air.
“Some day historians will look back and regard lawyers as the dinosaurs of our culture. All you did was eat and fight. This country better learn quickly we can’t afford you, or we all better start learning Japanese and Korean
Absently, I lick my spoon, which has long been clean, and taste nothing but plastic.
“We’re like cops: nobody likes us until you need us.”
Rainey raises her head and gazes up at the stars again.
“That’s the problem. We only think we need you because nobody trusts each other in this country. It’s everybody for themselves. That’s what is killing us as a society. There’s no sense we’re part of each other. It’s white against black; rich against poor; everybody against everybody and nobody for each other. We don’t even have large families anymore. I think it’s a pretty sterile mentality we have in the United States with all this never-ending individualism.”
I am surprised at the passion in her voice. Rainey doesn’t make many speeches; yet, I have heard this again recently.
Where? Sarah’s letter, of course. Us against society. Well, that’s how it looks to me. Yawning, I lean back on my elbows until I am almost horizontal on the concrete stoop.
“It’seas ier said than done,” I say, knowing I sound glib, but there is no quick cure for the national mind-set that is enshrined in so much patriotic nonsense.
Rainey takes my cup from my hand and places her smaller container inside it.
“You’re just scared that Sarah will go off to college and never come back.”
I nod. Scared to death.
for my first meeting with Andy in over a week I can tell him that it appears we have an expert witness. A psychologist in New Orleans has referred a colleague, who, in the spirit of the calling card of an old TV gunslinger, has implied that he “Has Electricity, Will Travel.” A series of phone calls has also produced a resume and a potential fee ($ 150 an hour, plus $300 an hour in court and travel and hotel expenses).
Dr. Kent Goza, a clinical psychologist with a private practice, in the suburbs of Jackson, Mississippi, has insisted to me that he successfully uses shock treatments to stop head banging and other self-destructive behaviors in retarded children and is sending me the research (as yet unpublished) to prove it. Once again, thank God for Mississippi.
In the main office on the grounds of the Human Development Center, I am told by the woman at the reception desk that Andy has just been called into a meeting and is not available at the moment. Even though I am still the enemy, this country woman is basically too friendly to be rude and confides, “He said to tell you he tried to call you but you had already left your office.” Separated by a dirty pane of glass (is there a fear the residents will steal a notepad or the visitor sign-in sheet?), we smile at each other for the first time. I notice her nameplate on her desk: Mattie Moss. With a name like that, she must be closer to sixty than to forty, though as it seemed to me the first time I came here, her emerald eyes appear ageless behind her indestructible-looking steel-frame glasses.
“That’s okay,” I assure her. I wasn’t looking forward to this meeting anyway.
“Is Yettie Lindsey in?”
As I say this, Yettie walks by and allows me to follow her to her office. I note that this view of her is as positively reinforcing as the front. She is wearing a pair of jeans whose snug fit would make the principal shareholders of Levi Strauss weep with happiness over the design of their product. Yettie is none too pleased to talk to me but has consented to give me ten minutes. I don’t need more than that; I just want to check in with her to make sure Jill or someone from her office hasn’t been snooping around. A male resident
, an older man of thirty, whose ears and face seem to have been at one time caught in a vise, passes me and sniggers as if he knows what I am thinking. Irritated by Yettie’s coldness (though I under stand it), I give him a jaunty salute as if to say that all men, regardless of their mental age, think with their dicks, so what’s the big deal about a normal brain?
Yettie’s office, formerly lime green, is now the color of pumpkin pie. Though I’m hardly an artist, I think I would have taken a raise instead. On the wall behind her desk is an elaborate bright yellow God’s Eye, which I apparently didn’t notice before because I was too busy concentrating on her rather well-endowed chest. For all I know, the ornament on the wall may have been nailed into place five minutes ago, but her expression, sullen as a sulking child’s, as she orders me to sit, indicates she is not in the mood to suffer a fool gladly.
I sit down in the one seat available to me: an unpadded and corroding metal folding chair and instantly wish we were conducting this chat on our feet. It is as if I can feel bits of iron working into my butt. Since she hasn’t offered me coffee (I’m not going to have trouble staying awake in this chair), I resist making a snide comment and simply ask, “How are you doing?” I find that I mean it. Her honesty last time has produced in me a sympathy for her (despite her hostility) I wouldn’t believe existed. Maybe, though, it is that she looks as delicious as a chocolate ice cream cone would taste right about now. I have gotten in the habit of walking across the street with Clan to Beaumont Drugs for ice cream at about three in the afternoon. Hunger, as Clan points out almost on a daily basis, unlike sexual desire, can be satisfied any time and in public.
“I’ve been better,” she says abruptly, though examining her fingernails as if she had all the time in the world.
“What do you want now?”
I look up at the God’s Eye instead of her blue cotton knit sweater and try to think of a believable lie, but can’t and offer the truth instead.
“I was out here to see Andy, but he’s in a meeting, and so I just thought I’d stop by to see what you think of a co-worker.”
Gideon - 02 - Probable Cause Page 20
