by Rob Riggan
And this time, he was coming. Sheriff Dugan, standing over there by the doors, had signaled them a little while before, just a nod, but they knew what it meant. The hearing would have been continued again for sure if Dugan hadn’t come in the door with Mary Stacy about two hours ago. Like pulling a rabbit out of a hat, it was worth waiting just for that, the attorneys trying some other case turning around in their chairs to look, knowing something had seriously changed, even if it wasn’t their case. It had suddenly grown so quiet you could hear the buzzing of a fly caught between the windows. Even the solicitor, Mr. Lamb, looked startled. But he wasn’t their solicitor anymore, thank God. They had a private one now, a chubby man in a seersucker suit with thick white hair slicked around his ears who came over from Morganton.
They had first gone to that attorney Elmore Willis, son of old Doc Willis. It had been Danny’s idea, after they’d seen him their first time in court. Willis had been defending a man and trying hard, you could see, like it really mattered, not just rattling off some words, throwing in a couple of “Your Honors” to make it sound official, then strutting a bit before putting out his hand for money. The man he was defending was poor, you could see that, too, so he couldn’t be paying much. He trusted Willis, Danny said. Because she had no opinion except that she didn’t want Mr. Lamb anymore even if they did go into more debt, she went along.
But Willis turned them down, had to, he said, though he seemed reluctant, and not before he agreed a private solicitor might be a good idea, if they could afford it, though he wouldn’t say why. “I’m really not free to comment on that,” he’d explained when she asked, but he seemed sincere. It was enough he said it, like someone was finally listening to them. He was very nice about it, something about the way he looked and listened, something inherently respectful. He said he couldn’t do it himself because he’d been socializing some with that doctor—that was how he said it, “socializing,” whatever that meant—and if he were to lose, which he wouldn’t want to do, it could be seen as a conflict. He was so nice about it she had trouble being disappointed in him, his even wanting to be around that bastard. Looking back, it was like he really wanted to take their case and wanted them to know that, like he knew somehow what they were talking about and believed them, but he just couldn’t do it. It was he who recommended the man from Morganton and even made the first call for them, and hadn’t charged them anything for his time.
But the private solicitor didn’t come cheap. So they were in debt again, and not just from legal fees and the car they had to buy, which was not even new or as good as the one that had been wrecked. They had both missed work days because the girls were having so much trouble. Their bank account was never very big after they got out of debt the first time, but it had been adequate, if they were careful. The fact was that nothing had really felt right since the shooting. They still weren’t sleeping well. She felt estranged from her surroundings, and increasingly from her friends in Damascus, too, as though she had never known them, didn’t know what was real anymore, a condition that had only grown worse with this court business. It was like after a while no one cared, or worse, like somehow she and Danny were the bad people. She’d begun to wonder if anything would ever be right again, though she hadn’t shared that worry with Danny. Not yet.
But my, someone had sure gotten word about Mary Stacy to that doctor’s attorney in a hurry! He’d stormed in just a few minutes after Dugan brought the woman in and asked the judge for an hour’s postponement so his client, the defendant, might appear, which of course the judge granted. Danny had stretched like a cat and leaned over, whispering, “Hotshot, I don’t think they expected her. Score one for Dugan.”
She’d felt this crazy desire for Danny when he did that, like he was the old Danny who could take care of her, protect her, back when she still believed in such things. She did rest her hand on his shoulder for a little bit after that.
Now she tried to imagine that young attorney Willis, who was a good-looking man and seemed gentle, going out with that woman sitting down on the bottom row, and she just couldn’t. But if Willis was “socializing” with him … He could go out with that woman. He did, no matter what Dugan said they had yet to prove. But why did he, if he had everything? The woman was young, just twenty-two, the sheriff had said. What did she do for him? Or was the question, what did she let men do to her? How awful.
She started to feel sorry for the woman again because it was plain that life was never going to get any better for her. She was probably looking at the best years of her life right now, and she looked so awkward, like she was made for some other kind of world or light. And she had two little children. Did she care for them the way Loretta cared for her own two? Loretta knew she could die now and would have lived a better life many times over than that woman ever would. Until the shooting, she’d actually known what it meant to feel blessed.
Then she caught herself. Loretta, you can’t do this! It’s just what he wants you to do! What all of them want you to do, who just don’t want to make waves.
“Ronnie Patton,” she heard Mary Stacy say, a name Loretta hadn’t heard before. The way everyone in court suddenly paid attention, it seemed important.
Danny had already taken the stand, told how the lights had popped into their rearview mirror just as they passed the turnoff for Sentry, where the Duke Power dam was, how when he looked again they had about taken his breath away, the lights—high beams, too—right on top of them, swinging wildly from side to side.
“Hang on,” he’d said quietly. Catching his tone, she had turned toward the backseat, thinking of their daughters, having to check on them, but she had to shield her eyes in the light. The driver of the vehicle behind them beeped the horn when she turned, then the lights fell back. She heard Danny sigh with relief, but in the next instant the lights roared up on them again, the horn blaring. “Some good ol’ boy’s had too much,” he said, still quietly concentrating on the road and holding his speed. “How are the girls?”
“Still asleep, the Lord knows how,” she said, trying to control the edge in her voice like she knew he was controlling his. The car was running up on them again, beeping. It dashed to the left, way across the centerline, then back onto the shoulder on the right, skidding as it climbed back onto the pavement. HONK! HONK! HONK!
The curve ahead suddenly flared white. A pickup truck wailed by in the opposite direction, just as the car behind jerked back across the centerline. But it was that horn! “I’m going to pull over and let them by,” he told her, still quietly.
“Yes,” she whispered, half twisted in her seat, one arm hanging over the back, as though she could protect her babies from what was happening.
He had just started to slow down when the car lunged by them, then dropped back in his lane, causing him to swerve onto the shoulder, which was still greasy from the thunderstorm. Stones thumped under the floorboards as the car slid sideways. Somehow Danny brought it back onto the pavement, but in an instant the other car was behind them again, honking, so close they couldn’t see its lights at all. In a long curve, the car swung out, roared ahead, then fell back beside them as tall pines and a guardrail flashed by.
“Stop!” she shouted.
“I can’t! I’m going too fast. There’s too damn much mud on the shoulder!” He was yelling, too, as he tried to steer clear of the other car thundering beside them, ducking at them as though to push them off the road for good.
For an instant, Danny told the solicitor, he had seen into the other car, had seen two, maybe three people in the backseat, women with flying blond hair, faces full of lipstick and teeth laughing hysterically, someone hunched over the steering wheel he thought he recognized. When asked, he pointed at Dr. Pemberton. Right beside Pemberton that night, sweating with drunkenness, smiling, dark, oily hair flying, was another man, and then an arm reached out holding the biggest pistol he’d ever seen, pointing it right at his face. He stood on the brake. The gun exploded.
Of course, that law
yer of Pemberton’s had gotten right up and tried to confuse Danny and the issue, demanding to know if he’d ever met the doctor before, and if not, how did he know it was him? Hadn’t he told the deputy, Mr. Trainor, that’s who it was that night? And here someone was pointing a pistol in his face, about to pull the trigger, and Danny fighting just to stay on the road and keep his family alive, and still he was clearheaded enough to think he knew who was “hunched over” the steering wheel by pictures he’d seen in the newspapers? “Really, Your Honor!”
And then Pemberton’s lawyer had pointed at the woman, Mary Stacy, sitting in the front row just beyond the bar, looking a little lost. Did Mr. Carver recognize that woman? And when Danny said no, not by his own experience, the lawyer sat down like he’d won something.
“Ronnie Patton,” Mary Stacy repeated, her voice harsh and grating, which surprised Loretta. Mary Stacy was wearing a pink dress with tiny white polka dots all over it. The dress reached only halfway down her thighs, and its material was flimsy, like a house shift. The high heels she wore were incongruous, Loretta thought; she should be wearing fluffy slippers. Except the front of the dress was low-cut, and she truly filled it. Certainly not a dress for court or church, Loretta decided, finding herself on the verge of smiling. But she repressed that thought, too, because maybe that was the only nice dress the woman owned.
It was then that Loretta comprehended something in the woman she hadn’t fully caught before, something profoundly immodest and insolent, yet somehow innocent, too. No, not innocent—she wasn’t innocent! Maybe childlike. Loretta had first become aware of this the moment the woman stood up and walked through the bar to take the stand, and sensed it was attractive somehow. Like a scent. Was that what men felt? How could a woman be childlike and dress like that? she wondered, but still she felt it was almost true. Or maybe it was just the woman’s stupidity: she didn’t know any better. Or it was instinct, something animal. Was she stupid? Her hair needed washing. Her dress was too short. Pretty as her legs and feet in those spike heels might be, her thighs weren’t pretty. They were too fleshy. Her toenails were painted. She was going to be fat someday not far off.
Shame on me! Loretta thought, then tried to remember when she’d painted her own toenails. It was the summer before she went into the ninth grade. That was the only time. It wasn’t the kind of thing for her looks, she’d decided right then. Hers was the stripped-down look, no frills, and she felt good that way.
“Would you repeat that again, please, Mrs. Stacy?” their solicitor asked, pronouncing Mrs. as “Misrus.”
“I think his name was Ronnie Patton. He had the gun and pointed it out the window. I don’t think anyone knew he had a gun. I know I didn’t!”
“And Dr. Pemberton was driving?” The question seemed matter-of-fact and innocent. The solicitor pointed to the surgeon, sitting beside his attorney at the defense table. Pemberton was wearing a nice-fitting tan summer suit and a pink shirt. He looked very striking and out of place to Loretta, not what she expected. He had gray hair at his temples and was older looking than she would have thought for a man of forty-five or so, now that she could actually see him. He seemed to be smiling, but she didn’t think he was—it was in the shape of his lips, the curl of them. He was handsome but not attractive to her. He looked coddled and untrustworthy, a user, but maybe that was just her feelings. It didn’t seem to her like he could be happy, or anyone close to him, but she didn’t know why exactly. Then she recalled nights before the girls were born, driving down the mountains from her parents’ home, stopping somewhere to lie down on moss or pine needles, Danny’s arms encircling her, the warm smell of his skin, the hair of his chest tickling her nose while they listened to the creeks and the night birds and the wind in the treetops, breathed in the lush smells of the forest and their own bodies. It was almost painful to be alive like that, so very alive! Had that doctor ever known such a feeling?
And what do I care what he knows? How out of place he looked! He seemed very calm and showed no anger. He’d come in by the east doors, Dugan’s polite nod causing the doctor to turn his back on him. He’d crossed the room to the bar, where he stopped and, like an old friend, said hello to the clerk, Marianne, who helloed back. He even looked right at Danny and herself as he passed and nodded slightly, like a gentleman, not a man who was vengeful or angry but one who contained his hurt and outrage because everyone had to know he was innocent of what had befallen this most unfortunate couple. Just like a gentleman, she’d thought, biting her lip. But she’d met those eyes in her own unflinching manner. Except for that moment at the door with Sheriff Dugan, it was hard to believe he could have been in that car in such a state and doing such a thing, that he could have been with such a woman, that he could or even should be there in that courtroom.
“Sir?” There it was again, that trace of insolence. Something had changed in Mary Stacy when she got in the witness stand. She no longer seemed lonely or awkward, causing Loretta to wonder what had captured her sympathy earlier.
“Was Dr. Pemberton driving?”
“I don’t know,” the woman replied, dropping her voice to little more than a whisper and making her eyes go big. It was very dramatic, but why? What on earth was the point? Loretta wondered. “I was very drunk.” I am very cute. Oh.
“Speak up for the court, please!”
“I don’t know!” Truculence now. There! You’ve gone and offended me! There was no awkwardness or innocence in that. In her mind’s eye, Loretta could see the two women in the car the way Danny had seen them in that instant before the gun went off, “all teeth, blond hair and laughter,” as he put it still when the rage hit him.
“You couldn’t see?”
“I was drunk, I told you!”
“Well, it was his car, now, didn’t you say that?”
“I said I thought it was. It was a Eldorado, a Eldorado Cadillac, and had these opry lights that glowed just past my head in the night.” She offered a tiny, hesitant, pointless smile.
“Where was Dr. Pemberton sitting?” The solicitor pointed at the doctor again.
“I don’t know! There was some man in the back with us, I think. And there was two up front. It began as a hoot.”
“Who was us?”
“Me and my girlfriend.”
“Would that be Miss Katy Robinson?”
“Yessir.”
“Tell me about this Ronnie Patton. Who is he?”
“Just some guy we met at Natty Moon’s.”
“Natty Moon’s?”
An Oh, come on! Everyone knows Natty Moon’s! look came over her. A pout. She’s on stage! Loretta realized, startled. This is her big moment.
“It’s a place in Pinetown.”
“A place? Do you mean by a place a drinking and gambling establishment owned by a bootlegger?”
“Objection, Your Honor! And Your Honor, may I remind the court this is a preliminary hearing, an attempt to see if there are any grounds for charges, nothing else. This is not a trial.”
“I think we all know what a place is,” the judge told the solicitor. The judge seemed interested, not bored like the last time.
“Did you see Dr. Pemberton at this place?”
“I think so.” Mary Stacy looked at the judge.
“Yes or no, Mrs. Stacy,” the solicitor said.
“Yessir!”
“This Ronnie Patton you mentioned, where’s he from, Mrs. Stacy?”
“I don’t know that! He was just a guy.” The woman’s face turned a little pinkish, as though the heat was getting to her. But she was bold, Loretta realized, riveted despite herself.
“Did anyone mention Billy Gaius Ford, Mrs. Stacy?”
“Who?”
“You know Billy Gaius Ford, don’t you, Mrs. Stacy? Didn’t you tell Sheriff Dugan that you knew him, that you once associated with him?”
Truculent again. “I didn’t really associate.” But she wasn’t afraid or really upset at all. That was obvious now to Loretta, who felt she was reading a
subscript that had nothing to do with the performance.
“Didn’t this Ronnie Patton and Billy Gaius Ford have some argument at Natty Moon’s place and step outside the building at one point?”
“They might have.”
“Didn’t this Ronnie Patton get severely beaten by Billy Gaius Ford some two years ago when you were associating or whatever it was you were doing with Mr. Ford, Mr. Ford using a tire iron on him, and didn’t Patton fail to appear in court later, so the charge of secret assault against Mr. Ford was dropped? And weren’t you and Ronnie Patton and Dr. Pemberton and whoever else was in the car looking for Billy Gaius Ford’s car that night this last April, which was a Chevrolet Monte Carlo just like Mr. Carver’s here, even to the color?”
“Your Honor!” The defense lawyer was out of his chair. “The witness already said she didn’t know if Dr. Pemberton was in the car!”
“I was drunk, I tell you,” she said, like that explained everything, her anger showing now. But it’s still not real, Loretta thought.
“This is only a determination of certain facts,” the solicitor said gently. “No one’s on trial, Mrs. Stacy.” All of a sudden, he seemed so kindly.
Loretta watched Dr. Pemberton’s attorney turn and glare at the solicitor, like he might really be upset, not just playing a game. Dugan really caught them off guard, she thought. Then she turned and looked at the sheriff, who was watching Mary Stacy, unmoved. His look surprised and impressed her, because just for an instant she thought she felt there was a subscript there, too, some kind of high-stakes game being played. But he sure looked unconcerned.