Turning to face me on the couch Paul says, “That’s no big deal. Henry makes the best barbecue in the best part of the state, and hell, yeah.
I went out there—to pick up some free barbecue. I sure wasn’t getting rich off of him.”
It occurs to me that in my cursory examination of the file I haven’t seen a statement by Paul and ask him if he gave one.
“I’d be crazy to talk to that sheriff!” he answers, looking at Dick for confirmation.
I ask Dick, bluntly, “Do you plan to call Paul?”
Defendants who refuse to testify usually have a real good reason—they are guilty.
Dick, who has begun to massage the bridge of his nose, shrugs.
“It’s way too early to worry about that.”
Paul snorts.
“Of course I’ll testify at the trial. I haven’t got anything to hide.”
His words hang in the air, though. Of course he does. Every person I know over the age of five has something in his past that can’t stand the light of day.
Dick stands up and makes a show of stretching and says he is ready to call it a night. It has been a long week, he says, and we can get together next week. We both know he wants to shut up his client. He has found out what he needed to know tonight: Class Bledsoe, if he has any beans to spill, hasn’t done so yet. I ask Paul to take two minutes to explain about the tape.
“You don’t ordinarily buy a business from a man by telling him he’s going to die soon,” I say, pushing him just a bit.
Paul’s smooth face becomes wrinkled as he frowns.
“I wasn’t threatening him. That old man wanted a fortune for that place. He was being absurd,” he says scornfully.
“Who was going to take over when he died? Connie’s a physicist in Memphis; Tommy’s a wheeler-dealer in Washington.
All I was doing was pointing out the reality of the situation. Why in the hell would I have him killed just because he was being stubborn? I wasn’t in any hurry.”
Clearly, it pissed him off that old Willie wouldn’t hand him over the keys to the plant. Whether he is acting or not, Paul cannot hide his arrogance.
For a certain breed of Southerner the feeling that the world is his oyster only increases with age; for the rest of us, the certainty that it is not accelerates at a greater pace.
“Since Clinton’s been in the White House,” Paul continues, “some Arkansans have had an inflated notion of the state’s importance. We’re talking Third World prices in the Delta. Southern Pride Meats doesn’t quite abut 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. I was probably being generous to offer a hundred thousand for it.”
“You still want it, don’t you?” I ask as Dick begins to jingle the change in his pocket. He doesn’t trust me, I don’t think.
“Not if I have to look like a murderer to do it,” he says angrily.
“You can’t imagine how much this has hurt Jill and Sean and really the whole town. Things were bad enough between blacks and whites before.
Now, it’ll really be terrible.”
I walk toward the door. As long as blacks stayed in their place, race relations were “good.”
Now that they are in control, I won’t hear that cant again. How can Dick not gag when he hears Paul open his mouth? Surely he knows better.
That old saying, I guess from the sixties, comes to mind: “If you want peace, work for justice.” If I get my way, there’ll be some justice, but Paul will get no peace—my clients tell me it is hard to sleep in prison. Dick tells me that he will walk over for the arraignment Monday afternoon, and we can get a trial date afterward. Our conversation is over, and moments later, I am let out the front door, knowing I have given away more than I have gotten.
I drive back to the Bear Creek Inn and sit on the bed while I work my way through the thick file Butterfield has had copied for me. I’m probably not fooling Paul and Dick at all. Yet who knows? To live over here, you have to wear blinders.
Dick, who was raised by a wealthy uncle after his parents were killed in an automobile accident, has always been identified with the white power structure, but somehow seems apart from it. He will serve Paul well if Paul listens to him. In thinking about the evening, I doubt seriously if Paul consulted Dick before he called me this afternoon, but Dick would never let me know it.
He would say something to Paul but not to me. I wonder what he thinks of Bear Creek. His children grown and gone, his wife dead, what keeps him here when all the other whites are beginning to leave in droves?
Perhaps he finds something here that is comfortable. I cannot imagine what it is. He is a mystery to me. Perhaps I overestimate him.
From the nightstand I pick up the yearbook Angela has loaned me and find Tommy’s picture first and then Connie’s. She was cuter than ninety-five percent of the girls in her class. I realize that despite the obvious barriers, I was oblivious to their feelings about race.
Why? I suppose in most ways we considered Tommy and Connie “white.”
During all her sermons to me about racial injustice in those years, I don’t recall Angela ever mentioning the Chinese in Bear Creek. It never occurred to me to ask Tommy how he felt about us. He seemed to like us.
The phone rings. It is Angela.
“How do you like the Bear Creek Inn?” she asks, her voice friendly.
I survey my surroundings. It is a bit unsettling that I am “home” but staying in a motel.
“The owner is cheerful. I’ve already had a meeting with Paul and Dick.”
“You did?” she asks.
“You’re certainly not wasting any time.”
“Paul called me,” I explain.
“I got to see Jill.
She’s changed a little bit since she was a high school beauty.” I flip through the yearbook as I look for Angela’s picture. Suddenly, I realize she didn’t move to town until after the class pictures were taken. When she arrived in Bear Creek, she had a terrible Yankee accent. Now, she sounds like us.
“Poor Jill,” she says, perfunctorily.
“This is terrible for her. Did you find out everything you needed to know?”
I don’t hear a lot of sympathy in Angela’s voice for Jill. Yet, who knows what slights Angela has endured in thirty years? Perhaps Paul’s arrogance has rubbed off on his wife. Though Angela made Paul sound positively wonderful yesterday, maybe she’s not as high on him as she sounded. The Taylors lose interest once you start slipping. Angela’s voice is on automatic pilot. Jealousy? Perhaps.
She has struggled and Jill never has. Jill was beautiful and married the richest man in town, Angela married a farmer who died broke. Paul’s long-running affair with Mae and his current troubles may seem like simple justice to her.
“I don’t think I learned anything. Dick hasn’t lost a step. He’s sharp and doesn’t give anything away free. Do you run into him much?”
Angela tells me that Dick is a workaholic and is usually out of town trying cases. Now that she is free, I wonder if he will hit on her. It
doesn’t sound like it. Unseen, I nod. Before we hang up, Angela tells me she is pushing back our breakfast half an hour. I realize that I was hoping she was going to invite me over tonight. I turn on the ten o’clock news and get another black newscaster out of Memphis. So much has changed, and yet nothing has.
On Highway 1 about a mile and a half from the center of downtown Bear Creek, I pull into the Cotton Boll Cafe parking lot. This place has surely seen better days. Yellow paint is peeling from the letters on the outside of the one-story wood structure, which has a definite tilt south. A gust of wind twenty miles an hour or better could give Cotton Boll patrons some anxious moments.
With its wood floor and tables it would take about five minutes to burn the place to its foundation, assuming the builders included one.
Almost deserted at half past eight on a Saturday morning, it is so lonely looking I have to wonder if I heard Angela correctly. A teenager in a ponytail behind a long green counter at the back of the room
holds up a coffee cup as I take the seat nearest the window. I nod, uncertain whether she is taking my order or saluting her first customer in a month. Without a word, the girl, who is dressed in a clean, starched yellow waitress uniform, brings an oversized mug of coffee complete with a jar of real cream, an unexpected pleasure in an age where you usually get charged a buck for a thimble-sized cup accompanied by a plastic container of ground chalk. Solemnly, she places her pad and pencil on the table by the mug, and I wonder if she is seizing this moment to announce a work stoppage when it dawns on me that she is deaf. Uncertain whether she can read lips, I write that I am waiting for someone. She nods and leaves me to stare out the window across the street at the
vacant lot where a small concrete block factory once stood. At the rate this town is going, twenty years from now, there may not even be a Bear Creek. Why doesn’t capitalism work here? Is it racist to think that blacks don’t take to free enterprise?
Is it the need to dominate and control they lack? Even as black as Bear Creek is becoming, it appeared to me yesterday during my brief drive down Main Street that most all the stores are still owned either by whites, Chinese, or Jews. Yet that might not hold true much longer.
Will Angela leave? She would if she’s smart. There is no future for her here. I sip at my coffee, certain that her choice of meeting places reflects her ambivalence about seeing me again.
How could any involvement with me do anything but hurt her? What did she say—Paul is the air we breathe?
As I begin to replay yesterday’s visits and wonder how close we were to walking back to her bedroom, Angela bursts through the door, bundled up in a purple ski jacket and gray sweats.
“I almost made it!” she says, pushing back her left sleeve to check her watch.
I stand up, my thoughts undoubtedly transparent.
Her face is rosy from the cold. It is eight-forty. I doubt if she has ever been on time in her life.
“A virtue of the dull, you used to tell me,” I respond, helping her off
with her coat. Why am I being such a gentleman? Amy would hit me if I tried to assist her. Yet, east Arkansas was part of the Old South. Manners were to be minded, whatever the circumstances. Forgotten habits have a way of reappearing.
“You used to believe everything I said,” she says lightly.
The power of sex. I can’t read Angela. Maybe she is not even conscious of the mixed signals I seem to be getting from her.
“I still do,” I admit.
When she sits down, I ask, “Is the Cotton Boll the best Bear Creek can do these days, or are you trying to hide me?”
She smiles at our waitress who is approaching us with a mug in one hand and a pot in the other.
“Wait until you see who the owner and cook is,” Angela murmurs, and says brightly, “Hi, Mckenzie!
How are you?” Our waitress nods vigorously and says something unintelligible. She pours Angela a cup and refills my mug while Angela writes something on a napkin and hands it to her. She frowns, and Angela points to me.
“How do you do?” I say, thinking I am being introduced. What must it be like not to be able to hear and speak? Given my tendency to hear only what I want to and to put my foot in my mouth, I might be better off. Lately, in the press there has been a flurry of articles about a debate
between those who want to bring the deaf into the mainstream and those who argue that the deaf have their own culture and should not be forced to adapt to the hearing world. Like religion, it is a useless argument for the true believers. Surely, it is academic in Bear Creek.
Mckenzie smiles politely and points to the Cotton Boll’s menu in front of me. It is an unadorned 8 1/2 by 11 pink piece of paper protected by plastic.
“What’s good?” I ask Angela.
Angela winks at me.
“Everything mat’s bad for you. The biscuits and gravy with sausage are sublime.”
How does anyone live past thirty over here?
“I’ll just take some toast,” I say to Mckenzie.
The girl knits her brow. Angela says, “You have to write it. She can’t read lips any better than you can.”
So she remembers, too. Embarrassed, I print out in block letters the words toast and jelly and push the paper over to Angela, who scribbles the works! and hands it to the girl.
Mckenzie gives me a look that suggests I have insulted the honor of the Cotton Boll, but turns on her heel and marches back to the kitchen.
Cautiously, I ask Angela, “How are you today?” “I’m fine,” Angela says, her voice neutral but friendly.
“Mrs. Petty thinks you’ve come back to farm.”
We both laugh at the same time. For someone who was raised in an environment so uniformly rural, I was remarkably ignorant of Bear Creek’s lifeblood and still am. I stayed in town and cruised Main Street with my friends.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Mr. Carpenter, my old junior high science teacher, doddering toward me. He must have been around my present age when he taught me, my last year in Bear Creek before I went to Subiaco. I loved ninth grade science. He made “the laws of nature,” his term for the mathematical formulas he wrote on the board, seem real. Physics, three years later at Subiaco, was just a bunch of numbers I couldn’t get to add up. Mi. Carpenter gave us the illusion the world could be comprehended if we just had the brains to do it. As an adult, I realized what a hoax he had played on us, but thanks to his passion, for years afterwards I retained a vague hope somebody would figure it out.
“Gideon Page,” he says, his eyes twinkling as he comes up to us.
“What an appreciative kid you were. You thought I was a magician, but then you were kind of dumb in science, weren’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” I say, getting to my feet, marveling that he remembers. He probably doesn’t. Mediocrity is always a safe bet, and as a lifelong teacher, he knew the odds.
“It’s good to see you, Mr. Carpenter. You were the best teacher I ever had in nineteen years of going to school.”
Rubbing his hands on a dirty apron, he beams as if I had just awarded him the Nobel Prize.
Teachers have learned to be content with praise in Arkansas.
“You know how much I liked your mother. A well-bred woman who deserved better luck. After your father died, she couldn’t do a thing with you, though, until those Catholics scared the be jesus out of you. Are you still superstitious?”
He offers his hand, and I take it.
Religious, I think he means. What a character he still is! Mr. Carpenter, a lifelong bachelor and, I suddenly realize, homosexual, lived two doors down from us. He used to quiz me about what the fathers and brothers were teaching me when I returned home for holidays and summers. He’d rail at me, “Those damn Papists were first-class truth muzzlers! Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, anybody with a brain they scared shitless.”
“When did you open a restaurant, Mr. Carpenter?”
I ask, as if I have been away at school.
“I never knew you could cook.”
The old man tugs at the St. Louis Cardinals cap that’s perched atop his
still formidable head of hair, which closely resembles cotton left too long in the fields, then tells Angela, “Gideon’s grandfather on his mother’s side knew some science. He couldn’t cure anybody—they didn’t have antibiotics then—but he was an intelligent man. Gideon got his gift for gab from his paternal grandfather. Now, there was a man who could rattle on for hours and never say a damn thing.”
Odd what people remember about me. It is apparent I was known as a talker and not much else. Was that the reality? I can’t remember, or maybe I don’t want to. I glance at Angela, but she has no intent of rescuing me.
“You’ve got a nice place here,” I flounder. This old guy has me off balance. Maybe he felt sorry for me in junior high, but now that I’m an adult I’m supposed to be able to take it.
“It’s a junk heap,” Mr. Carpenter says calmly, inspecting a knife on the table as if he were runnin
g a four-star restaurant. He adds, “I heard last night you’re here representing one of the Bledsoe boys in Willie Ting’s murder case. Now, those Ting kids were students. Connie knew more physics when she was a junior in high school than the rest of Bear Creek put together. Tommy was good in math, but when she came along, Connie liked the experiments.”
I sip at my coffee, curious about what it was like to have lived as a gay man in a small town.
He must have felt like an animal in a cage. Always vague about his itinerary, he traveled during the summers. I know he lived with his mother at least until I went away to college. To keep his job, Mr.
Carpenter had to repress his sexual urges nine months a year. Even at my age I have trouble going twenty-four hours. Why did he stay in this fish-bowl, especially after his mother died? I can’t imagine.
Fortunately, we are saved by Mckenzie.
Mr. Carpenter raises an eyebrow at my meager order.
“I would have cooked you a decent breakfast,” he sniffs.
“Come see me, Gideon. I’m closed Mondays, home during the middle of the afternoon and by nine every night. I still live where I always did.”
“Yes, sir, I’ll be sure to,” I say, wondering if he must be lonely.
From his point of view, it won’t be for my intellectual stimulation.
Maybe he wants to tell me who murdered Willie Ting.
“I’ll do that.”
After Mckenzie serves us and departs, Angela remarks, “He’s always been thought of as a curmudgeon, but I think it has been a cover to hide the fact that he’s gay.”
I am pleased by her lack of prejudice (she must still be a liberal on some things), but I wonder if the obverse is true: Did Carpenter become a caustic old man because he was forced to suppress his sexuality? When I knew him, he displayed none of the characteristics I usually associate with homosexuality. I never thought of him as creative or artistic, and
certainly he hasn’t become so, judging by the decor of the Cotton Boll. As we are eating, a total of ten customers, including a family of five, enter the restaurant. Angela nods, but no one stops to talk. They are all younger by a decade. When I comment that she does not seem to know everyone, she acknowledges, “The older I get, the less curious about younger people I become. Unless they are my children or their friends, I’m not all that interested in them.”
Gideon - 05 - Blind Judgement Page 10