by John Hart
I never saw him like that. For me, he was a question mark, and in some ways the most fascinating person in Rowan County. I would daydream of falling into stride so that I might ask him, What do you see, in these places that you go?
I did not hear the door open, but suddenly Barbara was behind me, and her voice made me jump.
“Honestly, Work,” she began. “How often do I have to ask you to drink your beer on the back patio? You look like white trash squatting out here for the world to see.”
“Evening, Barbara,” I said, not turning around, eyes still on my mysterious walker.
As if realizing how harsh her words had been, she softened her tone.
“Of course, honey. I’m sorry. Good evening.” I could feel her as she stepped closer, a mixture of perfume and disdain that fell around me like ashes. “What are you doing?” she asked.
I couldn’t bring myself to answer. What could I say? “Isn’t he magnificent?” I said instead, gesturing.
“Who? Him?” she asked, pointing as if with a gun.
“Yes.”
“Oh for heaven’s sake, Work. Sometimes I don’t understand you. Really, I don’t.”
I turned finally, looked up at her, and found her beautiful. “Come sit with me,” I said. “Like we used to.”
She laughed in a way that made her suddenly ugly, and I knew that hope would change nothing.
“I used to wear blue jeans, too. But now I need to make dinner.”
“Please, Barbara. Just for a minute or two.” There must have been something in my voice, for she stopped in mid-turn and came to my side. Her lips flirted with a smile, and although the flirtation was brief, it made me think of smiles that were neither so bland nor so insincere, of times not so far back when her smile could blind me. I’d loved her then, or believed I did, and never doubted the choices that I had made. Back then, she was so confident in the rightness of us, and spoke of our future with a passion that felt prophetic. She said that we would be the perfect couple, that we would have the perfect life; and I’d believed her. She’d made me her disciple, showed me the future through her eyes, and it was dazzling and bright.
That was a long time ago, but even now I could close my eyes and see a yellowed shadow of that vision. It had seemed so easy.
I brushed the resin of a southern spring from the step and patted the broken tile. She bent slowly, and when she sat, forearms on her knees, I thought I saw the old love flutter in her eyes.
“Are you okay?” she asked, and looking at her, I thought she meant it.
For an instant, my throat closed, and I felt that if I let the words out, the tears might follow. Instead, I gestured once more at the dwindling figure of my park walker and said again, “Isn’t he magnificent?”
“Oh Jesus, Work,” she said, getting back to her feet. “He’s a horrible old man, and I wish he’d stop walking past our house.” She stared at me as if at a stranger, and I had no words for her. “Damn it. Why do you have to make it so hard? Just take your beer and sit out back. Will you do that for me, please?”
As she stalked into the house, I rubbed at my face. Until then, it had never occurred to me that the man was old, and I wondered why my wife had picked up on the fact while I had not. I watched as he moved down a grassy bank to the shore of the small city lake that was the heart of the park, then faded into the playground, which seemed to grow smaller each passing year.
Inside, the house was cold. I called to Barbara, got no answer, and so moved into the kitchen for a beer that I knew better than to drink yet planned to anyway. I saw Barbara through the door to the living room, hunched over the paper, a glass of white wine untouched beside her. Rarely had I seen her so still.
“Anything in the paper?” I asked, my voice sounding small even to my own ears.
I carried my beer into the well of her silence and sat in my favorite chair. Her head was bowed; her skin shone pale as Ezra’s bones and a still darkness filled the hollows of her cheeks. When she looked up, her eyes were red and getting redder. Her lips seemed to have thinned, and for a moment she looked scared, but then her eyes softened.
“Oh, Work,” she said, tears leaking out to slide like oil down the high planes of her face. “I am so sorry.”
I saw the headline then, and felt it odd that she could cry while I could not.
That night, as I lay in bed waiting for Barbara to finish in the bathroom, I thought of the newspaper article and the things it had said and left unsaid. It portrayed my father as some kind of saint, a defender of the people and pillar of the community. This brought my mind again to truth as a concept, and the naked subjectivity of something that should be pure essence. My father would have found the article a fitting epitaph; it made me want to vomit.
I stared through the window at a night made beautiful by a waxing moon, turning away only at the sound of Barbara’s self-conscious cough. She stood transfixed, pinned between the moon and a soft spill of light from the bathroom closet. She wore something filmy that I had never seen, and her body was a ghost beneath it. She shifted under my scrutiny and her breasts moved in unison. Her legs were as long as always, yet they seemed more so tonight, and the darkness of their joining pulled my eyes down.
We’d not had sex for weeks, and I knew that she offered herself thus from a sense of duty. Strangely, that moved me, and I responded with a hard, almost painful need. I didn’t want a wife just then. No communication. No feeling. I wanted to wall myself in soft flesh and pound the reality of this day from my bones.
She took my proffered hand and slid beneath the sheets, saying nothing, as if for her, too, this remained impersonal. I kissed her hard, tasting the salt of barely dried tears. My hands moved on her and in her, and somewhere along the way, her nightclothes vanished. She trailed her hair across my chest and offered her breasts to my mouth. I bit down, heard her stifled cry, and then was lost in the rush of blood and the slap slap of wet, happy flesh.
CHAPTER 4
I’d discovered in recent years that there was often a special silence in my wife’s absence. It was as if the house itself had finally exhaled. And when I woke the next morning, I knew before opening swollen eyes that I was alone. As I lay there, five seconds into the first day of the rest of my life, I came to know that my wife no longer loved me. I didn’t know why the realization struck, but I couldn’t dispute it. It was fact, like my bones are fact.
I glanced at the bedside table, seeing nothing but the lamp and a water glass with smeared lipstick on its silvered edge. She used to leave little notes: “At the bookstore”; “Coffee with the girls”; “Love you.” But that was before the money got tight. I wondered where she’d gone, and guessed the gym, there to sweat out what remained of me from the night before. She’d study her figure in the mirror, carve a smile onto careworn cheeks, and pretend she hadn’t prostituted her life for a lukewarm marriage and a handful of shiny nickels.
I swung my feet from beneath the covers and stood. A glance at the clock showed it was almost seven. I felt the day loom and knew it would be a big one. By now, word of Ezra’s death would have spread across the county and I expected to leave a wake in the day wherever I went. I carried this thought to the bathroom, where I showered, shaved, and brushed teeth in desperate need of it. A single clean suit remained in the closet and I pulled it on without pleasure, thinking of blue jeans and flip-flops. In the kitchen, I found a half-filled pot of coffee, poured a cup, and added milk. I took my coffee outside, under a diffuse and lowering sky.
It was early for the office and court didn’t open until nine, so I went for a drive. I told myself it would be aimless, but I knew better. Roads lead somewhere; it’s just a question of choice. This road carried me out of town and across Grant’s Creek. I passed the Johnson place and saw a hand-lettered sign offering free puppies to a good home. My foot came off the gas and I slowed. For an instant, I considered it, but then I pictured Barbara’s reaction and knew that I would never stop. Yet my speed trailed away, and I kept one ey
e on the rearview mirror until the sign dwindled to a whitish speck and then was gone. Around the bend, the speed limit climbed to fifty-five and I goosed it, rolling down the windows and missing my own dog, now two years in the ground. I tried to put him out of my mind, but it was hard; he’d been a damn good dog. So I concentrated on driving. I followed the yellow line past small brick houses and developments with trendy names like Plantation Ridge and Saint John’s Wood.
“Country come to town,” my wife would say, forgetting that my father was raised white trash.
Ten miles out, I came to the faded, shot-up road sign for Stolen Farm Road. I slowed and turned, liking the feel of tires on gravel, the steering wheel that hummed under my hand. The road passed through a wall of trees and entered a place untouched.
Stolen Farm was old, like the county was old, generations in the same family, with cedars grown tall along fence lines established before the Civil War. The farm had once been huge, but things change. Time had whittled it down to ninety acres, and I knew it teetered at the brink of bankruptcy and had for years. Only Vanessa Stolen remained of the family, and she’d been considered white trash since childhood.
What right did I have to bring my troubles to this place? I knew the answer, as I always did. None whatsoever. But I was tempted. Dew was on the grass, and she’d be up with coffee on the back porch. There’d be worry on her face as she stared out over fields that could make anyone else feel young again, but she’d be naked under that old cotton shirt she wore. I wanted to go to her, because I knew that she would take me as she always had; knew that she would put my hands on her warm belly, kiss my eyes, and tell me everything would be all right. And I’d want to believe her as I so often had, but this time she’d be wrong, so very fucking wrong.
I stopped at a bend in the drive and nosed forward until I could see the house. It sagged in on itself, and I ached to see more boards on the windows of the top floor, where in the past I’d stood at night to watch the distant river. A year and half had passed since I’d last been to Stolen Farm, but I remembered her arms and how they wrapped around my naked chest.
“What are you thinking?” she’d asked, her face above my shoulder, a ghost in the window.
“About how we met,” I’d told her.
“Don’t think about such nasty things,” she’d replied. “Come to bed.”
That was the last time I’d seen her; but a light still burned on the front porch, and I knew that it did so for me.
I put the car in reverse, yet remained for a moment longer. I’d always felt Vanessa’s connection to the place. She’d never leave, I knew, and would one day be buried in the small cemetery tucked away in her woods. I thought then that it must be nice to know where you will spend eternity, and wondered if such knowledge brought peace. I thought that it might.
I turned and left, leaving, as I always did, some small piece of me behind.
Back on black pavement, the world lost its soft edge, and the drive to the office seemed harsh and full of noise. For nine years, I’d worked from a narrow shotgun office on what the locals called “lawyers’ row.” It was around the corner from the courthouse and across the street from the old Episcopal church. Other than a couple of secretaries next door, the church was the only attractive thing on the block; I knew every piece of stained glass by heart.
I parked the car and locked it. The sky above was growing darker, and I guessed the weatherman out of Charlotte might be right about a late-morning rain; it felt somehow appropriate. At the threshold of my office, I stopped and looked back at the red clay that rimmed my tires like lipstick, then went inside.
My secretary, the only one left, met me at the door with coffee and a hug that devolved into helpless sobs. For whatever reasons, she’d loved my father, and liked to imagine him on a beach somewhere, recharging just a little before storming back into her life. She told me that there had been numerous phone calls, mostly from other attorneys, sending their respects, but some from the local newspapers and even one reporter calling all the way from Raleigh. Murdered lawyers, it would appear, still had some print value. She gave me the stack of files I needed for court, mostly traffic matters and one juvenile offender, and promised that she would guard the fort.
I left the office a few minutes before nine, planning to enter court after it started and thus avoid any unnecessary encounters with well-wishers or the idle curious. So I entered the building through the magistrate’s office. The tiny waiting room, even at this time of day, was crowded with the usual reprobates and deadbeats. Two men were cuffed to the bench, their arresting officers sharing a paper and looking bored. There was a couple swearing out an assault complaint against their teenage son, as well as two men in their sixties who were bloody and torn but too tired or sober to be mad at each other anymore. I recognized at least half of them from district criminal court. They were what we in the trade called “clients for life”—in and out of the system every couple months on one minor charge or another: trespass, assault, simple possession, whatever. One of them recognized me and asked for a card. I patted empty pockets and moved on.
Out of the mag’s office, I headed into the new part of the building, where district court would be held. I passed the concession stand run by a half-blind woman named Alice, then slipped into an unobtrusive door with a small plaque that read LAWYERS ONLY. Beyond that door was another, this one with a security keypad.
I entered court from the rear and got my first nod from one of the bailiffs. It was like a signal, and suddenly every lawyer in the room was looking at me. I saw so many genuinely concerned faces that I froze momentarily. When your life is shit, it’s easy to forget just how many good people are in the world. Even the judge, an attractive older woman, stopped calendar call and invited me to the bench, where she expressed her sorrow in a quiet and remarkably tender tone. I saw for the first time that her eyes were very blue. She pressed my hand lightly with her own and I looked down in momentary embarrassment, noticing the childish doodle she’d made on her judge’s pad. She offered to continue my cases, but I declined. She patted my hand again, told me Ezra had been a great lawyer, and then asked me to take my seat.
Over the next two hours, I acted sad and negotiated pleas for clients I might never meet; then I went next door to juvenile court. My client was ten years old, charged with felony arson for burning down an abandoned trailer where older kids went to smoke pot and screw. The kid had done it, of course, but swore it was an accident. I didn’t believe him.
The assistant district attorney running court was a cocky little twerp, two years out of law school. He swaggered, and was disliked by prosecutors and the defense bar alike—an idiot who’d never figured out that juvenile court is about helping kids more than it is about conviction rates. We tried the case before an ex-prosecutor turned judge, who found the child delinquent; but, like the rest of us with half a brain, the judge believed that the kid had probably done a public service and so let him off with juvie probation, a punishment designed to straighten out the parents as much as the kid. For me, it was standard fare. The kid needed help.
The assistant DA smirked. He walked to the defense table, pulled his lips back from too-large teeth, and told me he’d heard about my father. He flicked at those teeth with a purple-bottomed tongue and observed that Ezra’s death raised as many questions as my mother’s had.
I almost decked him, but I realized just in time that he would love it. Instead, I gave him the finger. Then I saw Detective Mills; she stood in the shadows near the exit, and I realized, once I saw her, that she’d been there for some time. If I hadn’t been numb, that might have freaked me out; she was the kind of person you liked to keep track of. When I packed up my briefcase and walked to meet her, she gestured curtly.
“Outside,” she said, and I followed her.
The hall was packed with warm bodies, and the lawyers stopped and stared. Detective Mills was lead investigator. I was the son of a murdered colleague. I didn’t blame them.
�
��What’s up?” I asked her.
“Not here,” she said, seizing my arm and turning me against the flow of people, toward the stairs. We walked in silence until we turned down the corridor leading to the DA’s office.
“Douglas wants you,” she said, as if I’d asked another question.
“I guessed as much,” I responded. “Do you have any leads?”
Her face was all sharp angles, making me guess that the previous day still bothered her; but I knew the drill. If anything went wrong, Mills would catch the heat, and I guessed word was already out about my visit to the scene. It broke all the taboos. Cops did not allow defense lawyers to walk through the crime scene and possibly contaminate evidence. Mills, bright as she was and no stranger to cover-your-ass politics, had probably papered the file with testimonials from other cops as to exactly what I had and had not touched. Douglas, too, would be prominently mentioned.
Her silence was thus not surprising.
Douglas looked like he had not slept at all.
“I don’t know how the damn papers got hold of this so fast,” he said as soon as I stepped through his door, coming half out of his seat. “But you damn well better not be involved, Work.”
I just stared at him.
“Well come in,” he continued, dropping back into his chair. “Mills, close that door.”
Detective Mills closed the door and moved to stand be-hind Douglas’s right shoulder. She jammed her hands into the pockets of her jeans, pulling back her jacket to show the butt of her pistol in its shoulder holster. She leaned against the wall and stared at me as if I were a suspect.
It was an old trick, probably done out of habit, but standing there she looked every inch the bulldog she was. I watched Douglas settle back in his chair, deflating as if shot with a dart. He was good people and knew that I was, too.