by Curtis Bunn
“We can talk about it when I get out of here,” Paul said, “which is the reason I’m calling.”
He gave her three options of bail bondsmen from the list by the phone. He could hear Ginger’s voice in the background, and she was not singing.
“Here’s your wife,” Brenda said.
“Paul, you’re in jail?” she said.
“Yeah.”
“So why didn’t you call me? You called your mother?” she asked.
“Doesn’t feel good, does it,” Paul responded, “when something important happens and you turn to someone other than your spouse?”
“This is why I had an abortion; you can be so mean,” she said.
Paul heard Brenda’s response in the background. “Abortion? You had an abortion? Madeline, you knew about this?”
Then he heard all three of the women’s angry voices talking all over each other. It was audio confusion.
“Hey, hey, hey,” Paul said so loudly into the phone that a correctional officer came over and warned him about his volume. Ginger finally got them to stop bickering. “Can y’all do that later— after you get me out of here?”
“Well, I’ll let your mother handle that since that’s who you called,” Ginger said with attitude.
She passed the phone back to Brenda. “You OK, Vino?” she said as if she were talking to a kid.
“Ma, I’m fine,” he said. “I’m at the Napa Correction Center/County Jail. It’s not that far from the hotel. They just told me my fine is five thousand dollars, but I can bond out for five hundred. Can you work on this now so I can get out of here? Please?”
“OK, I will,” Brenda said. “But we’ve got a lot to talk about—you driving and drinking and your wife having an abortion? Really?”
“OK, I gotta go, Ma. I won’t be able to call you again, so please get me out of here now.”
And with that, he hung up and was led back to the cell, which, in those few minutes had welcomed three guests: a twenty-something young man who reeked of alcohol and the streets; an elderly man who seemed to be either drunk or mentally challenged; and a man close to fifty who laid on his back on one of the benches.
It was close to ten o’clock at night the day after Thanksgiving and Paul Wall was in the Napa jail, a place he never even considered when he planned the trip to his dream destination.
CHAPTER 14
YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT
“You can forget about getting out of here tonight,” the elderly man said. He was disheveled, with long, dirty-blond hair and thick facial hair, a sort of a filthy Santa Claus. Paul studied his face and determined there was a younger man than he first thought beneath all that hair and behind those wrinkles.
Paul was not interested in having conversation with his fellow inmates, but had to respond to the man.
“How do you know?” he said.
“How do I know?” the man responded. “You ever seen The Andy Griffith Show?”
“Andy Griffith? Yes,” Paul said.
“Well, I’m Otis from The Andy Griffith Show,” he said.
“Who’s Andy Griffith?” the younger man asked. He had tattoos of snakes and a skull and bones and other random images on his arms and shoulders and around his neck.
The man looked at Paul, who explained: “He’s an old-school actor who had a TV show before you were born. He was the sheriff in a small town called Mayberry. Otis was…he was…”
“He was the town drunk,” the older man said, “who spent a lot of his weekends in jail, so he knew how the system worked.”
“So you saying that about yourself?” the young man asked, smiling. “You’re the Napa town drunk?”
“Pretty much,” he said. “But you can call me Otis. Funny thing is, that’s actually my name.”
“You,” he went on, looking at Paul, “you don’t live here.”
“How you know that?”
“Because you have a Southeastern accent, probably from Georgia,” he said. “The way you almost sing certain words. Your accent is not as bad as could be. You’re educated. Went to college, but probably in the Northeast, didn’t you? In Virginia or Washington, D.C., or Philadelphia. That region.”
Paul looked on in astonishment. The man was right about everything.
“How could you know that?” Paul said. “I haven’t even said ten words. Haven’t been sitting here but three minutes.”
“Wait,” the young man said, “he’s right? All the stuff he said is right?”
“He’s right,” Paul answered.
“How could you know that, old man?” the kid said. “You just said you’re the town drunk. But you’re psychic, too?”
“Not psychic,” the man said. “To be psychic is to be outside human knowledge. What I do is not that.”
“How do you know these things?” Paul inquired. “I’m amazed.”
“I wasn’t always the town drunk,” he said. “I once, not that long ago, worked for a government agency that shall remain nameless. I was a profiler. My job was to study human behavior.
“For instance, I can tell by how you are sitting that you’ve never been in jail before, that you’re…put off by this whole experience.”
“I wouldn’t call this an experience,” Paul said.
“Are you kidding me? Everything is an experience,” Otis said.
“So what happened to you?” the kid said. “I mean, you’re obviously smart and had a good job. What happened? How you end up being the town drunk—no disrespect.”
“Neither of you would be here long enough for me to explain it in full,” he said. “Let’s just say that some things happened in my personal life that I didn’t—and still haven’t—handled so well.”
For Paul, that meant death. What else could eat at a man so much that he let his life disappear into dust. Having experienced losing his job and the depression it brought him, Paul could imagine how something more serious—death—could overtake a man’s psyche.
Before the conversation could continue, the man lying on the bench sprung up. “Damn, ya’ll ain’t got no respect for a man trying to get his beauty sleep,” he said. He was smiling. “I’m fucking with you. I had to get a power nap to get my head right. Been a long night and it’s still early.”
The young man laughed. “I was thinking the same thing,” he said. “What you in here for?”
The man stretched and yawned and said, “Quota. These cops gotta get their quota of arrests,” he said. “It’s the end of the month. More people end up in here the last eight, ten days of the month than any time in the month. I’m telling you some good shit.”
“That may be true,” Otis said, “but they arrested you for something.”
“Oh, yeah, they got me on some bullshit,” he said. “Said I had an open alcohol container in my car. It was a beer can from earlier in the day that I had drank.”
“But why did they stop you?” the young guy said.
“Oh, ’cause I was doing sixty-seven in a forty-five,” he answered and then laughed.
“What you want from me?” he added. “I had a lot of things working against me: I was late to this girl’s house for a little, you know; I had to piss like nobody’s business; and I don’t like driving the speed limit.”
Then he turned to Otis. “I heard you say you can tell about people based on their body language. What’s my body saying about me? I want to hear this.”
“You’re a liar,” the old man said immediately. “You lie to distract you from the truth that pains you. You lie to hide the pain.”
“What are you talking about, old man?” he said to Otis. “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“You asked me to tell me what I noticed about you,” he said.
“What have I lied about?” the guy responded.
“You lied about why you’re in here,” Otis said. “I watched you. Not one word about your arrest was true.”
“Did you lie?” the young guy asked.
The man did
not respond at first. Finally, he said, “How can you know this shit?”
“I just do,” Otis said. “It’s instinctive but it’s also a learned skill.”
“But, if you don’t mind me asking, what happened to you?” Paul asked.
Otis ran his hand through his thick beard and briefly looked away. He was not sure if he should share his story because he was not sure they would get something out of it. But then he looked at Paul again, and he knew he could take away something that might influence his life. He thought of asking Paul what bothered him. Instead, he told his story.
“When I was young and dumb, I didn’t even give the idea of marriage a thought,” he began. “I didn’t trust women, didn’t need them for more than sex and felt like most young men do: the goal in life is to get as much sex as possible.”
“That’s right. What’s wrong with that?” the young man interjected.
No one bothered to answer him. Otis went on: “Then I met Darlene Wilkinson on a blind date. My friend introduced me to her. He gave me the buzzwords that meant she was just OK: ‘nice,’ ‘sweet,’ ‘smart.’ A young man wants to hear ‘sexy,’ ‘hot,’ ‘cute.’ He didn’t give me any of that because he knew, while it mattered, in the end I was gonna need substance and heart and a good mind.
“Well, I was mesmerized by Darlene and less than two years later we were married. I had never envisioned what true love could feel like. But we had it. There probably is no such thing as a perfect person or a perfect relationship. But she was perfect for me and our relationship was perfect for us.
“Two years ago, she got pregnant. When she told me, I cried. I was overwhelmed with knowing she and I would produce something so great together: a child.”
Otis’ voice got lower and the words did not come out of his mouth so freely.
“She carried our child, a daughter, for almost nine months. I was away for work and she experienced pain and then hemorrhaging. Our neighbor rushed her to the hospital. Doctors could not figure out what was wrong for a while. I will spare you the technical details, but she had a rare condition that flared up.
“I cut my trip short to get back and be there with her. But by the time I arrived, my daughter had died.”
None of the men knew what to say, so they didn’t say anything. A pall fell over the cell.
“It was beyond devastating. My wife, who was a strong woman, could not get out of bed for a month. She literally stayed in bed all day. She didn’t eat. She hardly slept. She just cried and cried.
“You see, we had tried for years to get pregnant, but couldn’t. Doctors told us she just would not. Well, maybe eight months after they told us that—after we had considered artificial insemination and adoption—she was pregnant. It was the happiest time of our lives.
“She was a beautiful pregnant woman. And happy. No aches. No morning sickness. It was a beautiful experience for her and for me. But to lose our baby killed her spirit. She died when the baby died, except hers was a slow decline in health to where she passed from a broken heart. One night, as I held her and wiped away her tears, she fell asleep and never woke up. She died in my arms.
“So, in six months, I lost the person I was closest to in the world and the baby we talked about bringing us even closer together. So, what happened to me, you ask? A big part of me has died, too. The person I was, the life I had and thought I was going to have…it’s all gone.
“There’s no other way to put it. Others have experienced similar tragedies and they moved on, eventually. I think their ‘eventually’ just came sooner than mine. Mine will come. One day. Maybe. Hopefully. But until it does, I have to function the best way for me to function—through drinking to escape this hell that’s living in my heart.”
Otis amazed Paul again, but in a different way this time. How could he share such an emotional story in a jail cell to three strangers? And how ironic that his story had to do with his pregnant wife?
“Damn,” the youngest man said.
“Otis, man, I am really sorry to hear this,” Paul said. “I cannot even imagine.”
No one else said anything for several minutes. Paul thought about how he would react to losing Ginger and Helena and it saddened him. It scared him. Maybe he would be just as floored as Otis.
It made him realize that having Ginger and Helena was the world to him. Another child from his bloodline would have been great. But he had his wife and daughter. That was a lot to embrace, far more than Otis.
He absolutely was angry and disappointed about Ginger having an abortion. But hearing of Otis’ losses made him appreciate his family more than he ever had.
It came down to the whole “life is short” thing. Whenever there is a tragedy, people are reminded to appreciate life, that it has an expiration date, that not living it to the fullest is wasting time, that it could be worse than it is, that someone is worse off than you. Paul felt all that, and he was so moved that he wanted to hug Ginger and not strangle her.
Once he let go of his feelings of anger and disregard, he was able to feel for Ginger. Otis’ wife also was told she could not conceive, but defied the medical expectation and got pregnant. Losing her child killed her. Paul thought about how Ginger lost their baby through abortion, and how, as a mother, that had to be a gut-wrenching decision.
And this was important: The fact that she did and Paul not even sense something was wrong spoke to how disconnected he was to her. And he started to feel bad and ashamed. He understood better how hopeless Ginger felt and how, if he were not wallowing in self-pity, he might have been able to sense something with her and thereby spark a conversation that led to a different outcome.
Back at the hotel in Ginger’s room, she, Brenda and Madeline were in the throes of drama.
“I can’t believe what I just heard,” Brenda said to Ginger. “You had an abortion?”
“Now just wait a minute, Brenda,” Madeline jumped in. “You’re not going to attack my daughter, especially when it was your son who basically pushed her to this.”
“How in the hell did Paul push her to do something like that?” Brenda asked.
“By the way he treated her—or didn’t treat her,” Madeline said. They stood practically nose-to-nose, close enough for any loose spit to hit the other’s face. “He said he wanted a divorce. Why would she want to have a child with a man who wants out?”
“Why would a woman who was told she couldn’t get pregnant, actually get pregnant and then get rid of it?” Brenda said. “That was a blessing from God. He told those doctors who’s in charge and performed what the doctors considered a miracle, I’m sure. So to just get rid of it…that, I do not understand.”
“You don’t have to understand,” Madeline said. “This isn’t about you.”
“And it’s not about you, either, Mother,” Ginger said from across the room. She sat in the single chair by the window with her feet up on the ottoman. There was a calm about her that was surprising.
“You all are talking about me and my life as if I’m not here. Well, I am here and I have heard enough. I love you both. I do. And I am glad and appreciate that you all care so much about Paul and me. But this is our business, our life and we have to work it out—or not work it out. Not you.
“So, you two can talk about me all you want after I’m gone. I am going to bail my husband out of jail. And I want to do this by myself. I will catch a cab and will call you later to let you know what’s going on.”
With that she rose from the chair and walked past the ladies and out of the room.
Brenda and Madeline sat on the double beds across from each other and didn’t say a word. They shook their heads and sat there for a minute. Then Madeline said, “I’ll be honest: I didn’t agree with Ginger’s decision, either. If she had told me what she was thinking before she went to the clinic, I would have talked her out of it. And I would have called Paul. I understand why she did it. I just don’t understand how she could do it.”
“I don’t, either,” Brenda said. “Kid
s today are so emotional. I wasn’t really ready for a baby when I got pregnant with Paul. But I didn’t think about an abortion, either. I guess it’s a different time.”
“You know what?” Madeline said. “I guess we should go to the bar and have some wine until they come back.”
“Good idea,” Brenda said.
CHAPTER 15
SAY WHAT?
Before stepping out of the room, Ginger politely took the sheet of paper from Brenda listing the bail bondsmen in the area. She did not bother to look back at her mother and mother-in-law. She just kept it moving.
When she got out in the hallway, though, she breathed a sigh of relief that was so big that she got lightheaded. She gathered herself and went to the front desk, where the manager called a taxi for her.
While en route, she called Awesome Bail and gave the information about Paul’s situation. She figured that would expedite the process. But hardly is anything easy in times of trouble.
The company wanted all kinds of documents that she did not have—pay stubs, social security card, passport.
“We live in Atlanta; we’re here on vacation,” she said. “He left his wallet in the room; I have that. There are all kinds of documentation about where we live, credit cards, whatever. We’re not criminals. We are not trying to jump bail. I’m just trying to get him out.”
“Miss, there is a mandatory forty-eight hours of jail time with your first DUI charge in California,” he said. “So, even if he were to post bail, he would still have to serve two days.”
“What?” Ginger said.
“The only thing that could change that is if the judge rules the time could be converted into work service,” the man added. “But because you all live in Georgia, I don’t know if that’s a possibility.”
“Do they hold court on Saturday here?” she asked.
“You’re lucky; not all of California does, but here we do,” he said. “So, he will see a judge in the morning and will determine what happens.”
