The sound of clicking billiard balls is the first thing I hear when I enter the Bull Run, which is only ten miles from the Blackwell County Human Development Center. The Bull Run is apparently one enormous room, with enough floor space to work on a 747. To my left, all in use, are six tables surrounded by almost as many women as men, which tells me I haven’t been in one of these places in years. Most every one, fat or thin, is dressed in denim, shod in cowboy boots, and hatted in Stetsons or baseball caps. Directly in front of me is a large dance floor (the two-step and Cotton-eyed Joe obviously require more space than the postage-stamp-sized dance floors of the clubs I’ve frequented over the years) and a vacant deejay booth with so much hardware that it looks like Mission Control in Houston. In front of the pool tables are over a score of mostly empty Formica-topped tables, each with a full complement of canvas-backed chairs. It is still a half hour before nine, so the dancing, which is advertised in foot-high red script over the Bull Run front door as “The Best Country in Central Arkansas” has not yet commenced To my right a brunette with a head of hair almost down to her tiny waist is bending over a shuffleboard table as she lines up a shot. The thumb and forefinger of her right hand encircle a blue-and-silver puck. She runs the disk back and forth over the smooth blond wood, which has been made slippery by sawdust, and then it flies from her hand, hitting nothing in the process and dropping off the end of the surface into the trough that rings the wood.
“She-it!” she exclaims to her opponent, an older guy who could have posed (with a little work on his gut) as the Marlboro Man in the old TV commercial.
As I head for the bar, the jukebox by the shuffleboard table begins an old favorite from my brief country music period:
“D-I-V-O-R-C-E” by Tammy Wynette. Even her fast songs (and this isn’t one of them) seem to me slow and sad. A small plane could take off and land from the bar, and so, to avoid standing out in this still sparse crowd of about six drinkers, I plant myself on a red-cushioned stool toward the end nearer the entrance. Since it is a Saturday night, I would have figured on a bigger crowd, but there is still a little light outside, and I assume the real partying doesn’t begin until dark. Waiting for the barmaid (she has some ground to cover in this place), I am impressed by the selection of alcohol.
Besides what I’d expect in the way of whiskey and bourbon, within my sight there is gin, rum, vodka, wine, and even two liqueurs coffee and chocolate almond. Damn. Am I still in the South? But on the wall above the beer nozzles I spy a Confederate flag, and I know I’m in the right place.
The Bull Run, among other stories I’ve heard about it in the last twenty-four hours, has been rumored to be the de facto headquarters of a white-supremacist group known as the Trackers. It also is supposed to be Leon Robinson’s favorite watering hole. Remembering Yettie Lindsey’s remark to me about blacks, I decide Arkansas is a small place for whites as well. With only five days until the jury is impaneled my hopes of somehow implicating Leon Robinson in Pam Le Master’s death have come to nothing. There is no evidence that Leon has lied about his involvement, nothing to dispute his story that Pam simply jerked out of his grasp when she was shocked. Finally, Eben Crawford, who was a classmate of Dan’s in law school, phoned me yesterday and said that he has found out in bits and pieces that Leon is divorced, has no police record, is an avid turkey hunter, and likes to chase women at the Bull Run. We may not know much, but, by God, we know our neighbors’ business in the South. This would have been a snap if I had hired an investigator, but I didn’t even bring the subject up with Andy. If he knew what I was up to, he would fire me.
I order a Pabst Blue Ribbon from the barmaid, who gives me a friendly smile. Hell, if she isn’t one of the more attractive-looking women I’ve seen in a while! As far as rough places go, according to Eben, the Blue Run’s reputation is only middling, but there is already enough smoke in here to choke a horse, and the faces of women who tend bar don’t usually look this classy after a certain age. She has silky, soft blond hair and the kind of high cheekbones I ‘we seen in magazines advertising expensive perfume.
“You’re new, aren’t you?” the barmaid asks, sizing me up. She is about thirty, I would guess, and is wearing a T-shirt that says “Lobotomy Beer,” which is tucked neatly into skintight jeans.
I’m a breath away from asking the brainless question of what’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this, but manage instead, “You have on my daughter’s T-shirt.”
In the background. Tammy wails, ” The and little J-O-E will be goin’ away…. ” I wouldn’t mind a little trip with this woman. Her hands on her hips, she looks down at the front of her shirt, which swells out nicely.
“I’ll be danged if I don’t,” she drawls, grinning at me and showing a dimple in her left cheek.
“Tell her I’m sorry.”
I let some of the Pabst slip down. Cold with a nice sour bite. Until this moment, I have forgotten I used to like it.
Right now I wish I wasn’t supposed to be figuring out how to make Leon look like the worst racist this side of Mississippi.
I try not to stare at the woman, but I suspect she is used to it. With no admissible evidence to back it up, my plan has been reduced to suggesting to the jury that Leon hates blacks so much that he deliberately let go of Pam so she would attack Andy. My thinking is that if I can get a couple of blacks on the jury, at least one of them might hold out if I can obtain some evidence on this point. Is this cynical on my part? Without a doubt. I decide I’d better act before she gets too busy.
“She’ll be relieved,” I say finally, “it’s in good hands.”
The woman rolls her eyes as if this bullshit is about par for the course, but she doesn’t move away.
“I bet she will,” she says dryly. This woman has surely heard a lot of crap, but, like the smoke, it comes with the territory.
I put my mug down on a Coors pad.
“Actually, I’m looking for Charlene Newman. She ever come in here?” This morning at the Saline County Chancery clerk’s office, my plan appeared to come to a screeching halt. Leon’s ex-wife, who I hoped would be willing to talk about Leon’s racial attitudes, has resumed using her maiden name and apparently left no forwarding address after the divorce was final.
Placing both hands on the bar (no ring I notice), Blondie raises her eyebrows in mock disapproval and confides, “You can do better than Charlene.”
Fighting the urge to smile at my good luck, I feign embarrassment
“My cousin went to high school with her,” I mutter and duck my head.
“He said now that I’m divorced I ought to look her up.”
Blondie shrugs and turns to the other barmaid a few feet away, who is drying glasses and putting them on a shelf behind her.
“Hey, Betty, where’d Charlene go after she and Leon split?” Blondie calls to her.
The much older woman, whose hair is a peroxide platinum, picks up a burning cigarette from the corner of the bar and puffs on it as she contemplates. Her strong face, wrinkled by smoking and age, has an indestructible quality to it, as if nothing in the last forty years has come as a surprise. “I heard Hot Springs,” she says, exhaling, her voice a throaty contralto.
“Who wants to know?”
I remain motionless, since I don’t want to attract attention to myself, but I’d like to leap across the bar and kiss her.
Blondie nods at me with her chin.
I gulp my beer, ready to leave. I’d just as soon Leon not hear too much about this conversation if I can help it. Betty, who is wearing a pair of starched jeans and a man’s long sleeved blue work shirt, cocks her hip at me.
“Shit, he can do better than Charlene.”
I lean across the bar. This woman reminds me of women I occasionally picked up in bars after Rosa died. Big in the chest, brassy, horny.
“You don’t sound like,” I say, unable to resist opening my mouth, “Charlene’s best friend.”
Folding her arms across her breasts, Betty, friendly until now, gives me a hard stare, as if whatever signals she was putting out have suddenly been switched off.
“Charlene’s okay,” she says, her voice now scratchy and defensive.
“You old guys are something, you know it?”
Old? Thanks a lot. I turn to Blondie, but her eyes have turned cold, too. What is going on here? One minute we were getting along great, and the next I have become their worst nightmare. I turn and stare directly into the eyes of Leon Robinson.
“What are you doin’ here?” he says. It is not really so much a question as a demand. Leon is an inch or two shorter than I am, perhaps ten pounds lighter, but fifteen years younger. He is wearing a red Razorback cap jammed down over his eyes that proclaims “Woo Pig, Sooie!”
For some reason I look down at his cowboy boots, I suppose, hoping the toes aren’t reinforced by steel. I may not be on my feet much longer. Cover your balls, I think. Even if by some miracle I can take out Leon, I suspect he has a few friends here, and I don’t see any of mine. Discretion, every lawyer learns in his career, is sometimes the better part of valor. The odds of the women covering for me (assuming he hasn’t already overheard them) are abysmal, but if I want to be a good liar, I have to take a few risks in life.
“I was just visiting a friend in Benton and stopped by on my way home. Can I buy you a beer? I’d like to talk to you about the case you testified in almost two months ago,” I say, hoping I’m coming across like a friendly aluminum-siding salesman who is having more luck today than he can stand. I can feel a river of sweat pouring down my sides under my arms. The Bull Run must have air-conditioning problems, too.
Leon runs his right thumb past his nose, a gesture whose significance I can’t interpret. He puts his hands on his hips and makes a snorting sound as if he has caught the odor of fresh road kill.
“Randi, this is the son of a bitch who’s defending that nigger that killed Pam.” Although there was not much noise at the bar before, I can now hear all the way across the dance floor the sound of a cue ball kissing a break.
No more Tammy either. She and Little J-O-E have slipped out the back door.
I should throw a punch now (I ‘d like to salvage some honor if I can), but my fear that every male in here will kick me in the face is still too strong. I glance around me. The bar, which seemed fairly empty when I sat down, has attracted a nice crowd, or maybe it is that everyone just seems a little closer to me. Ever since I’ve been an adult I have owned only one weapon, and it’s suddenly stuck against the roof of my mouth. Which is Randi? The real blonde, I bet.
Blondie reaches across the bar and touches Leon’s bare arm.
“Take him outside, Leon,” she whispers.
“They’ll try to shut us down if there’s another fight in here.”
In no hurry now to leave, I pick up my mug and tilt it back as far as I can to get the last of the beer. “What’s your problem with blacks, Leon?”
Leon gives me a snotty grin and turns and crooks his finger at a man at the door. Either he wasn’t there when I came in or I was temporarily blind. By his size, I judge he can have only two possible occupations-a nose guard for the Cowboys or a bouncer.
Accepting the fact that my question will likely go unanswered for the moment, I try to remember precisely where I parked the Blazer and stride to the door with Leon and several others close behind me. Something just tells me that Leon may not be my only opponent. Don’t run, you chickenshit, I think, and manage to saunter past the doorman, who, as I pass by, helpfully takes my arm and shoves me through the door into the sweltering September night. If I can make it to the car quickly enough, maybe they will let me leave, In the few minutes I was in the bar, it has grown dark. The lights in the asphalt parking lot behind the Bull Run will win no security awards this year, but I have plenty of company as I head for the Blazer. I estimate seven men have come outside. As I stick my right hand into my pocket for my keys, Leon clouts me with a right to my jaw, sending me careening on top of the Blazer. Unable to free my hand, I roll off onto the pavement on the other side. For a moment I think of running. What prevents me is the fear that they have guns in their vehicles and I will be run down and shot.
The others are fanning out around me, so there is no escape.
If I had only Leon to fight, it might not be too bad. Furious at letting myself get pole axed without being in a position to defend myself, I come around the car and pop him directly in the nose as he lunges for me. I couldn’t hit him that square in the face if I fought him another ten years.
For perhaps three seconds Leon stops and feels his nose as if this wasn’t supposed to happen. I hope I have broken it.
Behind me, a hoarse voice commands, “Get the son of a bitch, Leon!”
I should plow into him, but I am hoping he won’t have the sense to realize how lucky my punch was. If he quits now, we’ll be even, like two small countries who have fired one missile each, and are thinking of declaring victory and announcing the end of the war. My hands are raised in the classic fighter pose, my right guarding my aching jaw, my left forward. Every boy pretends at one time to be a prize fighter, but in my case it is strictly for show. At various times Sarah and I have pretended to box. Even with my own daughter I have difficulty warding off blows before we collapse against each other laughing at the silliness of what we are doing. It is too dark to see Leon’s eyes, but I think he is afraid.
Another voice is more insistent.
“Get the fucker!” It is shrill, and I wonder if it is that of a woman, but I don’t dare take my eyes from Leon to search for the speaker. Leon’s hands are up in front of his face, but he looks as awkward and silly as I do. A coward, now, I’m convinced, he will be sure to attack if he thinks I’m not looking. The old saying pops into my head: “One’s afraid to fight, and the other is glad of it.”
Probably fearful of what will happen if he doesn’t, Leon comes for me, swinging furiously. As with Sarah, I block most of his wild blows, but a couple slip in, including a crisp chop on my right ear. In this kamikaze assault, I panic, for getting to swing at him. Instinctively, I try to wrestle him to the asphalt, hoping my weight and advantage will help me.
Caught off guard (he is no more a fighter than I am), Leon trips and I fall on top of him driving my elbow into his stomach as we go down. His head hits the parking lot with a sickening pop, and for a flash of an instant, I think I have knocked him out, but the asshole immediately tries to bite me while I pin his arms in the classic grade-school style. My last coherent thought before the others get to me is that I won.
Only when I am kicked in the balls and kidneys do I scream for help, thinking in a moment of extreme panic that I am being killed. The noise is frightening. One man is crying, “Kill the dumb shit!” and there is yelling and snarling sounds that verge on the inhuman. After three blows to my mouth with somebody’s fist, a front tooth flies out across my face, and I wonder if I will lose consciousness but don’t. A beating takes energy, and apparently it is too hot for my attackers to really enjoy it, for after a couple of minutes (though it seems much longer), they suddenly stop.
Someone says, “Let’s get the shit out of here!”
Leon bends down and whispers, “Don’t you ever come back here, you motherfuckin’ bastard! You hear me?”
I raise a hand to signal that I do, and lie panting in the dim light, feeling my entire body begin to radiate pain. I wait until I hear cars pulling out of the lot, and stagger to my feet, dazed, but deeply grateful I am alive.
I lean back against the Blazer and fish out my keys. I can hear the band, which has begun to play. I don’t recognize the tune, but I don’t think I’ll go back inside to find out. The front of my light blue short-sleeved shirt is dark with blood, and I realize I must look like hell. Sarah has a friend spending the night, so I can’t go home looking like this. Poor Rainey, I think, as I drive away from the Bull Run. I need a nurse, not a social worker, but what are friends for?
“Good God, what happened?” Rainey cries as she opens her screen door. The expression on her face is alarming. Is one of my eyes hanging out? My entire face feels swollen.
In the thirty-minute ride to her house I have convinced myself that I have no broken bones, though my ribs on my right side feel as if someone had been trying to separate them with a pitchfork. At least I haven’t wakened her. It is still before ten, and she is dressed in her usual summer weekend attire:
shorts and a T-shirt.
Gingerly, I let myself in, and close the door behind me.
“You’re a sight for sore eyes,” I say, pleased I can still speak.
The power of speech is about all I have left.
“Believe it or not, I was winning a fight against Leon Robinson, when his friends decided I was too tough.”
Rainey, seeing I am not in too much pain to brag, yells, “Have you gone crazy? You’re a grown man, for God’s sake!
Follow me into the bathroom!”
What does being a grown man have to do with anything?
I think as I make my way through her living room. Grown men do a lot worse to each other than this. Yet for the first time in an hour I begin to relax, knowing Rainey will take care of me. Walking behind her, I notice how nice she looks in blue short shorts. Super legs to go with such a trim ass.
Wonderful! The last thought I will have before I bleed to death will be about sex.
She snaps on the light in her bedroom.
“Take off your shirt!” she commands, opening her medicine cabinet.
“It’s about to make me sick to my stomach.”
I look in the mirror and wince. The assholes. My face looks like mincemeat. At one point it was rubbed into the blacktop of the parking lot, not a beauty tip I would recommend.
Little black pieces of tar and dirt make my grimy cheeks look like a coal miner’s. Rainey says, “I’ll get some ice for your eye-stay right here!”
Not quite feeling up to a trip, I sit down on the seat of her commode and get out of my shirt and T-shirt. Both are soaked with blood. Even my right hand aches from the one punch I threw. A lover, not a fighter, I think, looking around Rainey’s bathroom. Unlike mine, it is sparkling clean. I inspect the sink-not even a single hair. Even the soap dish in the shower gleams. Each week Sarah and I take turns cleaning the bathroom, but this weekend it will be all I can do to keep my head from rolling off into the commode because even my neck aches. The body has only so much room for seven people to beat.
Rainey, it develops, isn’t the gentle nurse of my dreams.
“Ouch!” I mutter more than once when she washes my face.
The washrag is nice and warm, but it feels as if she has decided my chin is a silver tray that needs polishing.
“Hold still!” she orders, her left hand on the back of my head, presumably so she can dig in better.
“I have to do this or it’ll get infected. Is this tar or what?” “They kind of rubbed my face around on the parking lot,” I admit, trying to hold my head still. I’m beginning to think she is enjoying this.
“I feel like you’re mashing a hunk of Monterey Jack through a cheese grater. You’re not exactly Florence Nightingale at this, you know.”
She pushes the rag harder against my burning face.
“Why don’t you get up and go on to the emergency room? They probably have a room now just for you. Oh, for God’s sake, Gideon, they’ve knocked out a tooth!”
I nod miserably, running my tongue to the vacant spot and tasting congealed blood.
“What am I going to tell Sarah?
She’s got a friend spending the night with her. I’ll scare them to death.”
Rainey bobs her head in agreement as she throws the washrag into the sink and picks up the bag of ice from the porcelain ledge and hands it to me.
“Now, hold this against your eye while I dab on some hydrogen peroxide,” she says opening a cabinet drawer under the sink.
“Tell her the truth:
that you’re an idiot posing as a normal human being. She’ll forgive you. We always do.”
As she rubs my face with a square cotton pad soaked with the medication, I feel my flesh is being barbecued. If smoke begins to rise from my face, I won’t be surprised. I close my eyes. Poor Rainey. She deserves better. So far this friendship business has been a one-way street. Besides looking like a lawyer from hell, I stink from sweat, tar, smoke, and alcohol, but she hasn’t even wrinkled her nose. “I’m sorry I keep showing up,” I say, as she moves the cotton around my face, “when I ‘m in trouble.”
Sure I am. Rainey doesn’t even bother to protest this lie.
Finished, she screws the cap down onto the jar containing the medicine.
“Why on earth were you fighting Leon Robinson she asks, her green eyes flashing at me.
“Isn’t he the aide who was holding Pam?”
I nod and stand up to look into the mirror. It’s not a pretty sight. My right eye, now purplish in color, is almost shut;
parts of my face now resemble raw hamburger; my neck is abraded; and, of course, a tooth is gone. What do I tell her?
She hates lawyer games. Though I have told Rainey much about this case, I have avoided mentioning my idea to argue to the jury that Leon let go of Pam because he hates blacks and he wanted her to attack Andy. Why? Because I know, like Andy, she will object.
“It’s a long story,” I say wearily.
For the first time since I’ve known her, I notice strands of gray among the red hair that has always attracted me. She is still pretty at the age of forty-one, but her face, especially under the eyes, has lines that were not there when I met her.
I am aging this woman. What can she possibly see in me, even as a friend? I sigh, looking at my own torso in the mirror. Rainey, I realize, has never even seen me shirtless, and suddenly I am embarrassed by the roll of fat around my middle and the white patch of hair sprouting from my chest, an appetizing picture when my mutilated face is thrown into the bargain.
“I’ll tell you if you’ll let me use your bathroom to take a shower.”
Without a word she opens a cabinet and hands me a clean blue towel.
“Don’t wash your face again,” she commands as she closes the door behind her, “or I’ll have to put the hydrogen peroxide back on you.” Is there a hint of malice in her voice, or am I just imagining it?
When I emerge ten minutes later, I am feeling one him dred percent better. While I was in the shower behind the curtain, she opened the door and left a man’s V-necked T-shirt on the counter for me. Where did she get this? It’s none of my business, but because it looks old, I can resist asking not that I would get an answer. When I heard the door opening, for an instant I had thought she might get in the shower with me. Wishful thinking, as usual. Instead of about sex, she’s probably thinking that it would be nice if somehow I could get a job in another state. She is waiting for me in her living room, curled up with her feet drawn up under her in her favorite chair across from the couch where in our courting days we necked like teenagers. An opened Miller Lite is sitting on the table by the couch. Underneath it is a napkin. I sit down, thinking what she would do for me if I were good to her.
“I thought you could use a beer,” Rainey says, staring at the T-shirt. It is a little large, but I’m not in a position to complain.
“Thanks,” I say, sincerely. My face feels as if it is glowing
“I’m not quite ready to go home and face my daughter yet.”
Rainey barely lifts a shoulder in reply. I know she thinks I worry too much about Sarah. She will be fine, Rainey has said, if I don’t smother her. Obviously, I’m the one who needs looking after. It isn’t Sarah who is dragging in with a black eye and a tooth knocked out. Yet I worry that she will worry. If the old man isn’t out chasing women, he’s off getting his face bashed in.
“You’re just about smooth nuts,” Rainey says, sipping at a glass of water she has picked up from the polished floor beside her chair. Her latest project, taking up the carpet in the living room and finishing the wood, has just been finished this week. She seems inexhaustible.
“Smooth nuts?” I ask. I never heard that one, but some how it fits. What was I doing in that bar by myself? For the next few minutes or so, I try to explain what I’ve been up to, but the mask of disapproval on Rainey’s face is in place be fore I get thirty seconds into my story, as I knew it would be.
“Even if you could show that Leon Robinson was the biggest racist in the entire state,” Rainey objects, cradling her empty glass in both hands between her knees, “what should it have to do with Andy’s case?”
Relevance. I sip at the beer and put it down. According to the Arkansas Uniform Rules of Evidence, relevant evidence is that evidence which tends to make a proposition at issue more or less true. “If I can make a jury believe that Leon deliberately let go of Pam I explain, “don’t you think that should have some bearing on Andy’s guilt or innocence?”
Rainey rolls the plastic container in her hands as if she were a potter.
“I guess I don’t understand criminal law.”
The alcohol and the shower have lowered my heart rate substantially. I’m beginning to feel normal again.
“I’m not sure I do either, but let me take a crack at it,” I say, leaning back against the couch. “The jury has to find at a minimum that Andy acted recklessly. I will argue that no one can reasonably believe that Andy should have anticipated that one of his assistants would deliberately release control of Pam.
The crucial act that resulted in Pam’s death was Leon’s letting go of her, not Andy’s decision to use shock.”
Rainey purses her lips and shakes her head.
“But what evidence do you have that Leon deliberately let go of her?
You told me last week you didn’t have a shred of evidence that he and Olivia Le Master cooked this up together. You said that Olivia has clammed up and might even invoke the Fifth Amendment and refuse to testify, which means she’s guilty as hell.”
I correct her.
“I said she might. Her attorney said she hasn’t decided yet.” I finish off the beer.
“But to answer your question, I don’t have any evidence except Leon and his friends don’t like me coming into their bar,” I go on, not willing to tell Rainey that my evidence is living in Hot Springs. She will be furious that I am going to try to drag someone else into this. I stand up.
“I need to go on home.
I told Sarah I’d be home by eleven.”
At the door Rainey surprises me by reaching up and brushing my lips with her own.
“Promise me you won’t do something this stupid again,” she says, her voice a quiet whisper against my ear.
“I promise,” I say, thinking that it has been over a year since we have kissed. Worry-the surest way to a woman’s heart. I thank her again and leave. If I didn’t know better, I would think Rainey still loves me.
At home Sarah and her friend Chris are watching a movie. Fortunately, it is dark in the house, which is lit only by the glow of the TV set. I carry my bloody clothes in a paper sack Rainey has provided me. Engrossed in some horror flick, Sarah barely speaks, and I escape to my bedroom after murmuring goodnight. Tomorrow will be soon enough for her to see my wounds. I take a couple of aspirin and sit down on my bed. Woogie, perhaps drawn by the medication, tries to lick at my face until I push him away. He is even a more inept fighter than his master and has perpetually sore ears to prove it. Before I turn off the light, I tell him, “They would have knocked every one of your teeth out.”
He turns his head away and settles down at the end of the bed as if to say he would never have gotten himself in such a mess.
The next morning every bone in my body feels as if someone has taken a hammer to it. Thank God I don’t have to get out of bed today, because I can’t move. Of course I do have to get out of bed or risk wetting it. As much as I ache, it is tempting just to say to hell with it and see if I can reach the window. I could always blame it on Woogie. As if sensing disaster, he hops down off the bed and scratches at the door.
At least he is civilized. Shamed by my own dog, I slip on some pants and creak into the bathroom. If anything, my face looks worse. Today there are streaks of yellow and green under my eye. I look forlornly at the spot where my tooth was. Even as bad as the others look, chipped and dingy, at least they are present and accounted for, and not in the parking lot of the Bull Run buried up to their roots in the tar.
Depressed, I limp into the front yard with Woogie, hoping nobody is out. Accustomed to more of a walk, Woogie contents himself with lifting his leg over my neighbor’s petunias.
What the hell. If his wife needs flowers, Jewell Patterson, a tall black man in his fifties, can bring home all he wants from patients’ rooms at the VA hospital, where he works as a registered nurse.
His brick home, the color of ginger, has three bedrooms to my two, and Jewell has a snow-white Lincoln Continental in the garage that he’ll wash this afternoon. Carol, his wife, is a schoolteacher. If we’re all outside in the yard and hear the sound of a gun being fired from the direction of Needle Park, Jewell will mutter, “Damn, those niggers!” and order Carol to go into the house. The second week in September, the morning, in contrast to last night’s humidity, is sharp and clear, a beautiful day for a walk, since Needle Park is usually quiet on a Sunday morning. Even drug dealers have to sleep some time. My bones ache too much to go further, however, and I turn around, disappointing my dog. This is what old age must be like.
“Pick up the paper and hand it to me,” I tell Woogie as I dodder up my driveway. He looks at me as if I were crazy, and I stoop in slow motion. Thank God, he can’t talk. He’d give me hell, too.
Normally, I would make some coffee and sit at the kitchen table and read the paper until Sarah gets up. Not today. I collapse back into bed and doze off after reading the funny papers, the last thought on my mind Margo’s underwear in Apartment 3-G.
“Dad, are you okay?”
I awake with a start. I had been dreaming about the fight and apparently was talking in my sleep. I look at my watch.
It is almost ten. I haven’t gone back to sleep in the morning since I was in high school. But I haven’t been beaten up since high school either.
“I guess,” I mutter.
“Come on in.”
“What happened?” Sarah exclaims immediately as she comes through the door. Her eyes redden as soon as she sees me. She is wearing her blue summer dress I haven’t seen since the spring, a strand of fake pearls her aunt Marty got for her at Christmas, stockings, and her white flats. Mass what else? What has prompted this? So far as I know, she hasn’t been inside a church in a couple of years. Then I remember her letter and our conversation on the way home from Conway during Governor’s School.
I put a finger to my mouth and motion for her to close the door. I assume Chris is still in the house. I feel as sheepish as if I had been caught with a woman in my bed.
“Just a little problem last night,” I say, pulling the sheet up to my chest.
“Sit down on the bed, and I’ll give you a real quick summary. Looks like you’re on your way to Mass. You look great.”
Obediently, Sarah sits on the bed, a horrified look on her face.
“Did somebody beat you up?”
God, she looks beautiful. My heart is about to burst as I realize how much she looks like her mother on our first formal date. We went to an outdoor seafood restaurant, not more than thirty yards from the beach in Cartagena. It was January, windy but still warm, and the waves crashed so loudly against the shore we almost had to put our heads next to each other to be heard.
“I was out at this redneck bar looking for some information about that case I have in four days involving the black psychologist, and a guy who obviously hates my client jumped me in the parking lot.”
“Oh!” Sarah says, jostling the bed and sending a wave of nausea through me. I shouldn’t have had that last beer at Rainey’s last night.
“Your eye looks terrible. I’m so sorry.”
I try to smile, but it probably looks like I’m wincing.
“I’m fine.” Except for the last two words, I’ve at least told some of the truth. There is no sense in trying to tell her the whole story right now.
“How come you’re going to Mass?”
Leaning forward on the bed, Sarah wails, “He knocked out your tooth!”
I lean up and pat her hand.
“It was the chipped one probably about to fall out anyway. I’ll get a fake temporary one tomorrow. It’ll look ten times better. Don’t worry.”
“Did you call the police?” she asks, tears beginning to trickle down her face, ruining her makeup. I wish she wouldn’t wear it.
I reach over and grab a tissue from the nightstand beside the bed.
“Quit this,” I say handing her the flimsy paper.
“Chris is going to think I’ve been abusing you.” Call the police? I think not. I wouldn’t be surprised if a couple weren’t there giggling as that monster at the door hustled me outside. At least he didn’t come out with me.
“Nay, calling the cops would have been sissy in that place,” I say.
“Oh,” she says, laughing in spite of herself, “where was it?”
“Go on to church,” I urge her.
“I’ll tell you more about it later. It’s no big deal.”
She looks down at the cheap Timex watch I gave her for her birthday last week. Seventeen. She’s been kissed, but I hope that’s all. A black boy from her Christians and Jews camp has called her a couple of times, but she says they’re just friends. Given who her mother was, how can I complain?
“Are you going to be okay?” she asks, pushing up from my bed.
“I can stay home. After not going for two years, it’s not like I’m trying for a perfect attendance record.”
“I’ve been a great father, haven’t I?” I say, forcing a smile. I run my tongue through the latest hole in the rapidly deteriorating dike that is my body. At least they didn’t knock out four or five.
“You’ve been a great father,” Sarah says, her voice trembling and hoarse with as much emotion as a radio evangelist’s.
Lighten up, kid, I think. It’s not as if I am trying to make a living as a prizefighter.
“Say a little prayer,” I instruct her, “that my dentist won’t enjoy fixing this too much. That’s what I’m worried about.”
I get the grin I want, and five minutes later I hear the front door slam. Woogie, pushing open the bedroom door, clicks into the room and sits on the floor looking hopefully at me.
His toenails are starting to look like bear claws. He could use a trip to the vet, but so could I. He wants to jump up on the bed, but he doesn’t deserve it. Lying flat on my stomach with my left hand under my pillow, which is down by my waist (my sleep position since Rosa died), I have to strain to see him.
“You wouldn’t have bitten a flea last night.” Disappointed I won’t let him up on the bed, he settles down on the floor. I yawn, hoping Sarah won’t retail this all over St.
Michael’s. The way gossip spreads, when I wake up Father Curtis with the earnest pop eyes and bad breath will be standing over me, administering the last rites. I can’t stop yawning Good, sleep. Blessed sleep.