by Odie Lindsey
“You was a dishwasher or shitter attendant?”
Doc paused.
“What I thought,” Hare said. “Doc, I got a little granddaughter can’t even go to school without a camera stuck in her face. Without kids callin’ her a racist, or some shit. Tell me she ain’t gonna be messed up?”
“Well.”
“Thing is, I’ve already seen this show, with my own kids. It was heartbreaking enough. But my granddaughter, man? She idn’t yet eight, and the rest of her life’s already written. She gone.” Hare paused, and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Retrial, my ass. I didn’t kill nobody the first time, and I am not guilty now. It’s just that they won’t let the memories die. They cain’t.”
“You’re still here,” the guard said. “You the memory.”
Hare slipped his arms from the cell grate and turned back to the bunk, limping like a clipped dog. “I guess so.”
“It is so,” Doc said, wondering if Hare had any idea of how the murder had played out among Jessica’s kin, casting them away, scattering them like seeds through the South and Midwest, a few lost forever.
The old man was lank as a ghost and halfway to being one, and Doc needed him to know.
3
Hare listened to the approach of footsteps in the empty corridor. Over the many days and rounds of his rotating guards, he’d grown able to discern the rhythm of each man’s stride in boot soles, and the corresponding clacks of their utility belts.
“Hey, Doc,” he called out. “How you?”
Sure enough, Doc walked into the frame of the cell, newly on shift. The young man sat on the metal folding chair, thumped a newspaper against his knee, but said nothing.
“Might as well come on out and tell,” Hare coaxed. “We are way past the Code of Silence. It’ll be a long-ass shift if you suddenly decide to stop talkin’.”
Doc glanced around, as if anyone else were on the bloc. “Look, I ain’t gonna bullshit you. Reporters are all over me when I leave here at night. Say there’s good money for insider details about you.”
“See there,” Hare said. “I told you. How many times I told you? It’s all spectacle, Doc. Everybody wants to wring somethin’ outta me. A dollar, a rating. Hell, who cares about the truth, anyway?” He paced the cell, his flip-flops dragging the floor. “You know, Doc, the local affiliate won’t pay.”
“Come again?”
“You heard me,” Hare said. “Local networks won’t pay shit, ’cause they can’t. National media can get away with ‘appearance fees’ and the like. Point here is . . . well, we’re in the fourth quarter now. If you talk to some reporter, it won’t change a damn thing about what’s gonna happen with me. Know what I mean?”
“Don’t be mistaken, old man. I do not need your approval. For anything.”
Hare nodded, and glanced to his feet. “My bad. I know you only need to think about you and yours. What’d Miss Jessica say about all this, anyway?”
“She said my ass had better take advantage, and make a buck off of you.”
“And you said?”
“Told her to mind her business.”
Hare tittered. “You did not.”
Doc looked down the hallway and, despite himself, smiled. “Well. Okay, I’m lyin’. I told her that if anythin’ got out about me leakin’ to the press, I’d lose my job.”
“What I thought.” Hare replied. “And she said?”
“She said I was a chickenshit. That it wouldn’t hurt to take a little bit back from you.”
“Head on her shoulders. Fire in her heart. That’s the kind of woman you got to hold on to—if you can.”
Doc raised his eyebrows. “Your wife acts the same, huh?”
“Hell, no!” Hare cackled. “But the first one did, for sure.”
“And then you quit her for that?”
“Buddy, she ran off and left me on her own. As did the next one, and the next. And my kids did, too. Hell, last time I heard, one of my boys even took on his mama’s maiden name. Friar.” Hare strung out the syllables. “Sounds like a hen to me. You believe that? Friar?”
“Well.”
Hare looked back to the floor. “Now, my boy from that first marriage? Sonny? Of all my kids, Sonny was the only one with faith in me. Who knew the truth. He was gonna—”
A buzzer pierced the hallway, and the PA belted instruction. The block froze for a count-off, which was awkward on their corridor, since there was only one inmate to count. When the procedure was completed, Doc stepped close to the cell and shoved the newspaper through the bars.
“I ’preciate you.” Hare nodded. He sat on the bunk and laid the newspaper across his thighs. The top fold was defined by another headline about the coming trial. He scanned the weathered black-and-white photo of his younger self, waving from the steps of the courthouse all those decades ago. On the periphery stood a crowd that included Mr. Wallis and his crew, stoic, self-poised. Hare had grown so tired of this syndicated story line. This picture had eclipsed his entire life to date, and he knew it would likely outlive him.
He flipped the paper over and considered the bottom half. The photo of the downed pilot snatched his breath. The man was middle-aged, and textbook middle management, his picture an obvious crop from a sales-type pamphlet or event. Gazing into the pilot’s eyes, which were worn and weathered by anonymity, Hare felt leached of ambition, or hate, or anything, save loss. A second photo detailed the wreckage of the crash and the pilot’s critical condition. A medical team declined to issue odds of the man’s recovery, confirming only that he was too unstable for LifeFlight transport to Memphis.
“My lord,” Hare said. “What a waste.”
“Hey?” Doc asked. “Inmate? I’m talkin’ to you!”
The old man’s breathing grew as quick and crackled as a trash fire. He looked at Doc, confused, almost childlike. “How’d you do that? How’d you know that this was . . .”
“I’m callin’ the medic,” Doc said. “Hang on.”
Hare’s hands quaked, so he clasped them together. “No, no. I’m all right,” he said. “Just had a little spell, you know?”
“You sure?”
Hare nodded and cleared his throat, then set the paper down. “Listen to me. Make somethin’ out of this nothin’. Talk to a reporter and get paid.” He lay down on the bunk and stared at the ceiling. “Everybody leaks. You know that. Just remember: no local papers. You deserve better than you got, Doc. Miss Jessica more than that, I think.” He sniffed. “You’ll be all right.”
“No,” Doc said. “I won’t.”
***
DOC PARKED himself in a large leather chair in the corner of the re-fangled Pitchlynn coffee shop. He hadn’t yet decompressed from his shift and wasn’t ready to go home. So it was either this place, or a bar.
The coffee shop, renovated as the Grandiflora Roasting Co., was yet another broadcast of new, national Pitchlynn. Its fair-trade brew was now too pricey for Doc, and way too strong. There were no longer waitresses or chitchat, let alone a counter and swivel stools. Instead, he was surrounded by screen-bound obsessives, beneath a gale force of air-conditioning from an overhead, exposed duct. The place sold weakly ironic T-shirts, local wall art, and thawed tiramisu. Every minute or so, the sound of a milk steamer scoured the ambience.
Doc picked up a discarded newspaper from the table beside him, the same edition he’d passed off to Hare.
PLANE MAN IN COMA
IN NORTH MISSISSIPPI COUNTY HOSPITAL
Rescue teams had spent days scouring the furlongs of national forest for the wreckage. In the interim, the heat trauma the pilot had surely suffered would, at best, cause permanent damage. A quote from a medical first responder indicated cardiac and cerebral edema, and likely kidney failure. The plane man’s organs had surely inflamed, and were shutting down. On the top fold of the paper was that old photo of Hare.
As of late, the reporters had prickled Doc like sweat bees, their relentless come-ons and questions steering him toward cheap conclusions a
bout who, how, and what he was supposed to feel about Hare. The lot of them had brought unwavering judgment, and condescension so thick that in some ways it was like a smokescreen, an easy out. A stamp. A label. An Us-Them, period. And though Doc didn’t want to, and though he hated himself for doing so, this uniform disavowal had made him wonder, well, maybe?
“Maybe,” Doc said aloud, then withered from guilt. Maybe Hare hadn’t killed Gabe. What if it weren’t so simple. What if . . .
He wiped his hand over his mouth and stared around the room. Even this new-fashioned coffee shop provoked a what-should-have-been for Doc. It marked the investment of folks who were born with a dollar, or who owned a speck of dirt. Investments he could have had. Or, no, opportunities that Jessica should have been given, and which might have in turn been provided to his children. Instead, as it was, Pitchlynn was moving forward without them, again.
Doc put the paper down and stepped outside to call Jess. Though she knew his habits, and knew that now and again he needed to burn off a bit of post-work anxiety, on this night she asked him to come on home. She’d had a long, long day at the hospital, one of those shifts where you cleaned up more after physician than patient.
“I got you,” he said.
In the background, Doc heard his kids raising Cain, until Jessica threatened to unplug the television. They fell silent as if in shock, and Jess giggled into the phone. She told Doc she’d keep his supper warmed up. Said she loved him, but that she was overdue for a spot of wine, alongside a British police procedural (a show she’d grown fond of, care of the third-tier cable channels their basic package provided). So, yes, he should please get his ass home, pronto.
4
The Plane Man’s memory skittered atop time, from five years old to forty-five, twenty-five to seventeen . . .
To being a high school tailback, eighteen years old in ’78, ready to take up an offer from the Bear. He had traveled down to Tuscaloosa from Chicago. Rode a bus all the way down South, a Crimson Tide booster having paid the fare. (The prospect’s mama couldn’t afford a Greyhound, let alone a flight.) The university was made up of huge oaks, red bricks, and white columns. It was a wonderland removed from ice and industry.
He’d thought about seeking out the others then, his daddy and all, just across the state line. He had overheard trickles of phone conversations between his mother and her people back in Mississippi. Heard her insistence that she had to keep running from authorities, and mostly keep hiding from her husband. She’d complained that the man had even made him a whole new family.
In Chicago, Sonny was an outcast, alone; in Mississippi he had siblings. Yet he was not strong enough to seek them out that first time back. It was all he could do to take in Tuscaloosa, to try to impress Coach Bryant, the Bear.
At the end of the recruiting trip he was returned to Chicago, to Austin High and his senior year, intent on playing for ’Bama in fall semester. He vowed to make his name on the Crimson Tide, and he knew that his father and new kin would come sit in the stands on game day. A reconciliation of sorts, a reunion, he would show them that he mattered. Together, they’d suture up the loneliness.
The toss sweep, wishbone, was his play, so simple in execution. A stupid play, really. And yet in a stupid scrimmage, some stupid sophomore lineman had thrown him down well after the whistle had blown. A textbook dial-up, the toss sweep, right; he’d hit the gap and got smashed after the play was blown dead, when his body was unbraced. He had broken his stupid fall with his stupid hand, as he had a thousand times. Only this time, Sonny’s ulna had snapped. It spiked out from his forearm like a sundial gnomon.
At first he’d been entranced by the alien injury. He did not understood then that his season was over, or that his scholarship would be rescinded. Rather, he had giggled in the delirium, showcasing the bone spike to his gathering teammates . . . before dropping to his backside, screaming.
That pain was now amplified in his split femur, in the Cessna.
“Wasn’t even a game,” he whispered. “Just a scrimmage. No real yardage.”
Having lost his spot with the Crimson Tide, he was recast as a juco tackle dummy in Moline. He’d spent the decades that followed gnawing on life in Chicago—until the day he heard the news of the coming Hare Hobbs retrial.
He now hung in the north Mississippi canopy, in a dated Cessna 152, a twin-seater prop bought on an adrenalized whim, and at the expense of everything owned or saved or credited; a prop mangled, its plexiglass windshield webbed by cracks, and hammocking him. Its wings were snapped like bones.
He only wanted to help his daddy. He had flown down to testify about the man in the chair. Forty-five years later, and Hare Hobbs’s innocence had all come down to a man in a chair.
In the boiler-pot fuselage, Sonny was bound to the trickling death of his legs. His sweat glands and bowels having long been evacuated, sharp bursts of white light were now stitched to his pain. He was kept alive, barely, by pill-balls of wet map, his thoughts a queer bricolage of family and football, of Bird Clan Chickasaw and an Indian Head knife, and a ladder-back chair on a porch on Wallis Farm.
Five years old to forty-five, ten to seventeen, his memory slid atop time. He had no idea where the chair had ended up. No idea—nor would he ever learn—that it had been passed off to a thrift store at the edge of Pitchlynn, Mississippi. He would never know that it now existed under a pile of donated, unhung clothes at Annie’s Re-Do, a weakly Christian alternative to the heavily Christian Salvation Army. A thrift store housed in a corrugated metal office building, next to the corrugated metal VFW building and a relocated, corrugated CME church.
Back in Chicago, Sonny would picture the chair while gauging the ergonomic plasticities at an office supply chain, or when deciphering knife-scar graffiti on a bus bench. He had checked out from the Harold Washington Library every single book about chair-making, weaving, baskets, Indians, the lot of it.
The man in the chair was the defining image of his childhood, and of Hare’s innocence. He had flown down like a dove in command of this revelation.
The Plane Man, Edward Isaac Hobbs, called Ed or Eddie or Hobbs now, but who was still called Sonny by his mama, was prone to spill into obsession while sitting or watching television at home. Slatted ladder-back interlocking rounds, air-dried, air-tightened. Hand-mortised basket-type river cane—rushes?—woven into herringbone twill. River cane or rushes, as had been picked up from . . . Indians? Basket rushes traded . . . with Indians? Chickasaw, maybe? Bird Clan? Acorn finials. This is how the chair was made. My own family made this. They crafted it, like a story.
In a ladder-back rocker, handmade by lathe and chisel, the old man had passed out cold. I saw it.
Though in the movies . . . in movies, the Indians never use chairs.
His mother was still sharp, though her body had wilted. In Chicago, he would go to her apartment on weekends, the one he had been raised in after leaving Mississippi, a rental in West Garfield, the middle floor of a weather-shorn bricked affair, an icon of neglect amid icons of neglect, architectural colossi that had long ago been chopped into multi-units; Sonny would sit with her and visit as she cooked biscuits and grits, and the whole southern business he’d grown up with. Lots of smoky, cheap bacon that required her to flap a dish towel at the fire alarm (or, in winter, required him to stand on a kitchen chair to pop the nine-volt out of the device). Mississippi was all over that house: in the bacon, the biscuits, the drawl, even the tick of the wall clock. In the near-buried stories of the families that lived around them; the relatives left behind, subject to a sometimes vacation north.
Any narrative that had occurred within the frame of the state’s boundary itself was almost unbearable to Sylvia. She and Sonny would sit together on Sundays in patterned-upholstered recliners across from the flat-screen television he’d given her, talking now and again over a gently dated movie on a gently censored cable channel, he forever brimming to ask her about the chair. About Wallis Farm, and Hare, his daddy.
Until one day, in that small kitchen in West Garfield, the breakfast cooking, cable flick on in the background, he tried to provoke her confession:
“And the chair, Mama?”
She ignored him, or just didn’t understand.
“That family chair? The slatted ladder-back?” he continued, having just seen his daddy’s photo in the Tribune, having only just learned that his elderly father was now back on trial. “Daddy’s chair, on Wallis Farm? Where did it come from? Where was it last?”
She crushed the bacon with an iron press shaped like a hog, the sizzle spit pricking her fingers. She did not reply to the question, but rather hummed an old favorite, a Ferlin Husky tune, “Wings of a Dove.”
“C’mon,” he continued. “At least tell me whose family made that chair. Was it an Indian, maybe? The seat was like a cane-type of weaving. And what do you think happened to it?”
His mama had shrugged, her eyes on the skillet. “Who knows? Ever’body’s kin made them things at one point or another. Way, way back, they made everythin’ and used everythin’. That chair wasn’t special.” She had shaken her head, mocking him. “Just some old yeoman-y chair, Sonny. Nothin’ more. Let it go.”
He was angry, because she was wrong. The chair was special. It was a forged family history, dragged along from god knows where. His father had told him this. It was one of those things he could remember. One of the few facts he still believed.
But also, this: it was an alibi. Emancipatory.
“Well then,” he’d muttered. “Tell me about Gabe.”
Sylvia left the room before he could repeat the question. Smoke billowed from the skillet like a ghost in her wake. After a minute, he went and shoved the jammy kitchen window open, and a knife of frozen air slashed Sonny at his gut.
5
It was well past midnight but Doc was awake. Jessica slept beside him, her skin patterned by the silhouette of lace curtains and the dim porch light. He had long ago grown used to his wife’s tiny cries—wails of disorientation, forever coupled to her sleep—but he could never get over his inability to heal her.