The Silver Star

by Jeannette Walls

  I cleared my throat. “It’s kind of complicated,” I said.

  “It usually is,” he said.

  “And awful,” Liz added. It was the first thing she’d said since we’d got to town.

  “You probably can’t tell me anything I haven’t heard before,” he said. “And if a lawyer can’t keep his mouth shut about things his clients tell him, he shouldn’t be a lawyer.”

  “What do you charge?” I asked.

  He smiled and shook his head. “Let’s not worry about that at this point. Let’s just hear what the problem is.”

  “It involves Jerry Maddox,” I said.

  Mr. Corbin raised his eyebrows. “Then I imagine it is complicated.”

  After that, the whole story came spilling out. Mr. Corbin listened quietly, his clasped hands propping up his chin.

  “Wayne told us he’ll testify,” I said.

  “What a mess,” Mr. Corbin said, almost to himself. He pinched the bridge of his nose. “So, you didn’t go to the hospital or to the police?”

  “I wanted to talk to a lawyer first.”

  “Why isn’t your uncle here with you?”

  “He wants us to forget the whole thing ever happened.”

  “And you don’t want to forget it? You want to file charges?”

  “What I want is for my uncle to blow Mr. Maddox’s brains out with his shotgun,” I said.

  “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that.”

  “That isn’t going to happen, so we came to find out what we’re supposed to do, legal-wise.”

  “It’s not really a question of what you’re supposed to do. It’s more a question of what you want to do.” Mr. Corbin picked up a paper clip and pried it apart. We had two options, he went on. One, we could press charges, which would create a big stink and a nasty trial with a lot of god-awful publicity but might result in Mr. Maddox being punished for what he allegedly did. On the other hand, there was no guarantee of that. Two, we could decide it was an incident that involved bad judgment on the part of both parties—since Liz did voluntarily get into the back of the car with Mr. Maddox—and didn’t need to be rehashed in a public courtroom with the entire town following every sordid detail.

  “What’s the right thing to do?” I asked.

  “I can’t decide that for you,” he said. “You two have to decide that. And unfortunately, you don’t have a choice between a good option and a bad option. Each option is bad in its own way.”

  “We can’t just do nothing,” I said.

  “Why not?” Mr. Corbin asked.

  “Because what Maddox did was wrong,” I said, “and because then he’ll be walking around laughing about how he got away with it.” At that point, something occurred to me. “And he might do it again.”

  “Possibly.”

  “We can’t let that happen.”

  “Do you think he’d try it again?” Liz asked.

  I had been doing most of the talking and was surprised to hear her speak up.

  Mr. Corbin shrugged. “Like I said, it’s possible.”

  “I just don’t want it to happen again,” Liz said. “I’m scared of him doing it again. I’m scared of even running into him.”

  “You could always leave town,” Mr. Corbin said. “Can’t you go stay with your mother?”

  “We tried that last summer,” I said. “It didn’t work out so well. Anyway, Maddox attacked my sister, and we’re supposed to go into hiding? That’s not right.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s an option, nonetheless.”

  “I don’t know what to do,” Liz said. “My thoughts keep jumbling up. Bean, what do you think?”

  “The thing is,” I said, “if we don’t at least file charges, it will be like nothing ever happened.”

  “Legally speaking, that’s true,” Mr. Corbin said. “If you do file charges, you can always drop them later, but bear in mind that these things sometimes develop a momentum of their own.”

  “Well,” I said, “if we don’t want to pretend it never happened and we don’t want to leave town and go into hiding, we have no choice. We have to file charges.”

  Mr. Corbin put down his paper clip. “Bean Holladay, how old are you?”

  “Twelve. I’ll be thirteen in April.”

  “You’re a little young to be making a decision like this on your own. Should you decide to proceed, you need your uncle with you from here on in.”

  “He’s going to be mad,” I said.

  “I’ll call him.” Mr. Corbin picked up the phone and dialed. “Tinsley,” he said. “Bill Corbin here.” He explained that Liz and I were in his office and that we’d decided to file charges against Jerry Maddox for the alleged assault the night before. He stopped and listened, then shook his head. “No, sir. It’s not my advice. They came to me, and I outlined their options, and they made the decision.” He listened again. Then he handed the phone to me. “He wants to talk to you.”

  “What the hell are you doing?” Uncle Tinsley asked.

  “We’re going to file charges,” I said.

  “I thought you were going to drop the whole matter.”

  “He’ll think he can try it again. And what if he does? What are we supposed to do then? Just let him? Hide from him? We can’t. So we’re filing charges.”

  There was a long pause.

  “I’ll meet you at the sheriff’s office.”

  Mr. Corbin called the sheriff’s department and told them we were coming over. When I asked him how much we owed him, Mr. Corbin said he considered it pro bono. That meant free, Liz explained.

  “So you’ll be our lawyer?” I asked. “Pro bono?”

  “If you press charges, the state’s prosecutor becomes your lawyer,” Mr. Corbin said. “You won’t need me.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  The sheriff’s department was in a low brick building with a flat roof. The deputy at the desk didn’t seem particularly happy to see us. He called in another deputy. The other guy wasn’t smiling, either. He had me wait in the lobby while he brought Liz into the back to take her statement.

  A few minutes later, Uncle Tinsley came through the door wearing one of his tweed jackets and his gray felt hat. He sat down next to me in the row of orange plastic chairs. We didn’t say anything. After a bit, he reached over and ruffled my hair.

  Liz wasn’t in the back for long.

  “How’d it go?” I asked when she came out.

  “They took some pictures, asked questions, and I answered them, okay?” she said. “Let’s go home.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  By the time we got back to Mayfield, the school day was half over. Uncle Tinsley said, given everything that had happened, we might as well just stay home and unwind. A few hours later, we heard a car roar up the driveway. I went to the window and saw Maddox’s black Le Mans screech to a stop. Doris Maddox got out, more pregnant than ever, and slammed the door behind her. Liz was up in the bird wing, but Uncle Tinsley and I went out to meet Doris, who was stalking over to the porch.

  For a moment, I genuinely believed Doris had come to apologize and try to smooth things over. She was constantly complaining about what a no-count scoundrel her husband was—always tomcatting around, had a terrible temper, picked fights right and left, lied through his teeth. I thought Doris was going to say something like “Look, what my husband did was wrong, but he does provide for me and my kids, and if you go ahead with this, it will hurt my family.”

  But as soon as I saw Doris’s face, I realized she had not come to make amends. Her mouth was tight and her eyes were all fired up.

  “What the goddamn hell do you think you’re doing?” she shouted. “How dare you? How dare you, after all we’ve done for you?”

  The deputies, she said, had come to her house and arrested her husband, taking him down to the jail, where they fingerprinted him and put him in a cell. His lawyer was arranging bail even as she spoke, and Jerry would be out by the end of the day.

  We didn’t know what we were up
against, Doris said. We had picked a fight with the wrong rhino. Her husband knew the law inside and out. He’d won countless lawsuits. He had fought a case all the way to the Supreme Court of the state of Rhode Island and had won. We would regret the day we started this. “No jury’s going to believe you lying sluts.”

  At first I was stunned, but when Doris started threatening us and accusing us of lying, I got pretty steamed myself. “Don’t you get all high and mighty,” I said. “We have an eyewitness. He’ll testify to what happened. Your husband hurt Liz, and now you’re pretending he’s a saint and talking about all you did for us?”

  “Your sister’s a whore!” Doris shouted. “My husband hired her as his personal secretary, he paid her, he trained her, he trusted her, he bought her nice clothes, and he treated her like a queen. We know the two of you were stealing from us. Your sister was drinking yesterday, and she put the moves on Jerry in the backseat of that car. When he turned her down, she made up this bullshit story. She was out to get him all along because he had your worthless uncle fired. You think you’ve got your evidence? Well, we’ve got our evidence. We have a vodka bottle with y’all’s fingerprints all over it as proof.”

  I had no idea what she was talking about, since I’d never had a drink of vodka in my life and I was pretty sure Liz hadn’t, either, but I pushed it out of my mind. “You can try to twist the facts as much as you want,” I said. “But you know your husband did this. I don’t care what a big shot he is, the truth will come out.”

  “When the truth about you two comes out,” Doris said, “you won’t be able to show your skanky faces in this town. Mark my words. My husband will destroy you!”

  Doris climbed back into the Le Mans, slammed the door, jerked the car into reverse, then gunned it down the driveway, tires spraying gravel. I watched with my hands on my hips, fighting the urge to give her the finger because I knew Uncle Tinsley would find it appalling. “She thought she could scare us, but it didn’t work, did it?”

  “This is going to be a shit storm,” Uncle Tinsley said.

  It was the first time I had heard him use a curse word.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  That evening Liz announced there was absolutely no way she would consider going to school the next day. Neither Uncle Tinsley nor I tried to talk her into it.

  The next morning, as soon as I got to the bus stop, I could tell that everyone knew. Word spread quickly in a small town like Byler. All it took was one deputy mentioning to his brother-in-law that Tinsley Holladay’s niece had filed charges against Jerry Maddox, and within hours it was the talk of the barbershop and the beauty parlor. The other kids were clearly discussing it, and when they saw me, they started shushing each other, saying things like “Here she comes,” “Dummy up,” and “Where’s the other one?”

  When I got to school, there was time before first period to go to the library, which always had a copy of the Byler Daily News. I expected Maddox’s arrest to be a big front-page story because the paper usually played up anything local, no matter how small—a horse getting stuck in a pond, someone’s toolshed catching on fire, or a farmer growing a five-pound tomato. The story wasn’t on the front page, or even the second or third page. I finally found it at the back, under a section called “Police Blotter.” The headline was “Mill Boss Charged.” The article said:

  Jerry Maddox, 43, a foreman at Holladay Textiles, has been charged with the alleged assault of a local girl, 15, whose name is being withheld because of her age. He has been released on bail. No trial date has been set.

  I was shocked. I thought the story was a big deal, certainly bigger news than a five-pound tomato, and it involved a Byler heavyweight. Sure, people were gossiping about it, but they didn’t know the real story. I’d been counting on the whole town reading in official detail exactly what had happened. I thought that was one way to punish Maddox and make sure he never did it again.

  The article didn’t even say “attempted rape,” as if the editors were afraid of spelling it out. “Assault.” What did that mean? It could mean anything or nothing. From what people were going to read in the Byler Daily News, Maddox might as well have shoved some girl who sassed him in a parking-lot argument over a fender bender.

  The rest of the day was just awful. In the halls, kids stared at me, looking away as soon as I caught their eye. Girls whispered and giggled and pointed. Guys smirked and in mocking, cheeping voices said things like “Help! Help! I’m being molested!”

  On my way to English class, I ran into Vanessa. She saw me and shook her head. “Going to the law,” she said. “Such a white thing to do.”

  “What would you do?” I asked.

  “I wouldn’t be getting into no car with Mr. Maddox in the first place,” she said. “You climb in the backseat with the boss man, you got to expect something’s going to happen. That’s just the way it is.”

  Liz decided she wasn’t going back to school the next day, either. In fact, she said, she was not leaving the house until the bruises on her face had gone away. It was Friday, the day after the article, and things in the halls at school went from bad to worse. Kids kept snickering behind my back, throwing wadded-up paper at my head, and tripping me.

  The football game that night was against the Orange Hornets. I hadn’t been much help to the pep squad that week, and Liz had hardly been in the mood to concoct any crowd-rousing rhymes or puns. At the beginning of the week, I had come up with “Orange You Scared?” but Terri Pruitt, the pep squad adviser, thought it might leave some kids scratching their heads. Still, the posters got made—the slogan was “Swat the Hornets”—and on Friday the whole school gathered in the gym for the weekly pep rally.

  When it came time for me and Vanessa to rile up the seventh-graders so our class could win the spirit stick, we walked out onto the gym floor and started pumping our fists in the air. We got no reaction from the crowd. Most of the kids sitting in the bleachers were just staring, as if they couldn’t believe I had the nerve to be out there. I kept trying to rev them up, and a few kids cheered halfheartedly, but then there was a boo, then a few more boos. Then the trash started coming—spit wads, a bag of Corn Nuts, pennies, a roll of Certs. I glanced at Vanessa. She was pushing right through it, wearing the same steely expression I’d seen on her sister’s face after she got hit with the soda cup during the football game. I tried to follow Vanessa’s example, ignoring the trash and the booing, but it only got louder and the cheering died out altogether, and I could see it was pointless to continue. I walked off the floor, leaving Vanessa to shake the spirit stick on her own.

  Terri Pruitt was standing by the door. “Are you all right, Bean?” she asked.

  I nodded. “But I think I’m quitting the pep squad.”

  She squeezed my shoulder. “It’s probably for the best,” she said.

  That afternoon, before I boarded the bus in the parking lot for the ride home, a few boys from the hill started crowding around me, shoving me with their shoulders, and saying things like “I’m Jerry Maddox. Are you scared of me?” A teacher saw what was happening but looked away. Joe Wyatt also saw what was happening, and he came over.

  “Hey, cuz, how you doing?” he said. Then he turned to the boys. “You all know she’s my cousin, don’t you?”

  The boys backed off, but they had kept me from catching my bus, so Joe offered to walk me home. “Some people are jerks,” he said.

  We walked along in silence for a while. It was a crisp November afternoon, and out of town, on the road to Mayfield, you could smell the woodsmoke drifting from the farmhouse chimneys. “If you want to talk about it all, you can,” he said. “If you don’t want to talk about it all, we can talk about chestnuts.”

  By then the last thing I wanted to do was rehash the whole mess. “Let’s talk about chestnuts,” I said.

  It was the time of the year for gathering chestnuts, Joe said. Most chestnut trees had died out during the great blight, but he knew where a few survivors were holding on up in the hills. Afte
r he gathered the chestnuts, his mom roasted them over a fire he made in an old oil drum. “Maybe tomorrow,” he said, “we should go get us some chestnuts.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Liz hadn’t set foot out of the house since going to the cops four days earlier. She’d hardly even left the bird wing and I’d been bringing up bowls of stew on the silver tray. She kept obsessing about whether filing the charges had been the right thing to do and whether the whole mess was all her fault because she’d been stupid enough to think she could get her money back if she got in the car with Mr. Maddox. She wondered whether we’d have been better off if the bandersnatches had taken us away back in Lost Lake.

  “Don’t think like that,” I said.

  “I can’t help it,” she said. “I can’t control my thoughts.” The argument going on inside her head was so heated, she said, that she felt like different voices were making the cases for and against her. One voice kept talking about Alice in Wonderland’s “Eat Me” cake, saying a slice of it would make her grow so tall that people would be scared of her. Another voice recommended Alice’s “Drink Me” bottle—a sip would make her so small, no one would notice her. She knew the voices weren’t real, but that was what they sounded like, actual voices.

  Liz and her voices had me worried. I’d kept trying to call Mom without any luck, but I figured she’d say what Liz needed was to get out of the house, breathe some fresh air, and clear her head. So on Saturday morning, I insisted that she come with me to the Wyatts’ to gather chestnuts.

  “I don’t feel like it,” Liz said. “And my face is still a mess.”

  “I don’t care,” I said. “You’ve got to get out.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Too bad. You’re getting out. You can’t stay in here forever.”

  Liz was sitting in bed in her pajamas. I started pulling her clothes out of the chest of drawers, throwing them at her, and snapping my fingers to speed her up.