Jimmy

by Robert Whitlow

  Jimmy thought Daddy would get a plate of food and sit down, but he seemed more interested in talking than eating. Jimmy cut off a small bite and dipped it in the mashed potatoes until it appeared covered in warm snow.

  “We went into chambers, and Laney informed Judge Robinson that Brinson was going to take the Fifth and refuse to answer questions about the search and seizure.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Because falsifying evidence in a criminal trial can be a felony. Brinson could go to jail.”

  “Will that happen?” Mama asked in surprise.

  “I doubt it, but there may be an investigation, most likely by the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s office. If they interview Milligan and he confirms Jimmy’s testimony, Brinson will have to resign, and it could lead to an inquiry that uncovers all kinds of corruption.”

  Mama looked at Jimmy. “And to think, a conversation in the parking lot—”

  Daddy kept talking. “Without Brinson’s testimony, Laney had nothing. Next week I’ll dictate a federal civil rights action on behalf of Garner against the sheriff’s department. Before this is over, Jake Garner will be able to get as many snake tattoos as he wants, and I’ll make more than enough to compensate me for my time today. I’ve always liked Brinson, but he got carried away with his theory that Garner was a big-time drug dealer.”

  “Is he a drug dealer?” Mama asked.

  “That’s not my job to figure out.”

  “I realize the sheriff may not have followed proper procedures, but to let a man like that go free—”

  “Is the price we pay for the Bill of Rights,” Daddy responded. “The rules have to protect everyone if they’re going to protect anyone.”

  “But isn’t it important to find out the truth about Garner too?”

  “Garner looks like a hoodlum, but he dropped out of college a semester short of graduation. He’s probably a drug user, but I doubt he’s a dealer. Either way, it’s not right to trample the truth in order to get a conviction. Sheriff Brinson thought he was above the law and needed to find out that he’s not.”

  “I think Sheriff Brinson is nice,” Jimmy said. “He could have got mad at me when I turned on the siren, but he didn’t.”

  “Which is another reason why this worries me,” Mama said. “They’ve been so good to Jimmy at the sheriff’s department. Now, I feel like we’re being ungrateful for their kindness.”

  Daddy shrugged. “It’s necessary to put self-interest aside when representing a client. It’s the price I pay to be a lawyer.”

  Mama set a plate of food in front of Daddy, who took a quick bite of meat loaf.

  “Did you see Sheriff Brinson after the case was dismissed?” Mama asked.

  “We passed each other in the hall on my way out of the courthouse. He wouldn’t look me in the eye. I’m sure he’s mad and embarrassed. Maybe afraid too.”

  “Doesn’t the sheriff have a wife and two daughters?”

  “Yes, but his girls are grown and married. If he leaves Cattaloochie County, he’ll land on his feet somewhere else. If he takes to heart what happened today, he’ll be a better man in the end.”

  “And what about Jake Garner? How is he going to get better?”

  Jimmy looked up from his plate at the tone of Mama’s voice. Daddy didn’t immediately answer.

  “You have a point,” Daddy said, wiping the corner of his mouth with a napkin. “He has a second chance to make something of his life. I’ll tell him not to blow it.”

  JIMMY ENJOYED HIS FOOD TO THE LAST BITE. DADDY CLEANED his plate too, but his favorite meal consisted of fried catfish, hush puppies, and slaw. Jimmy took his plate to the kitchen sink, where he carefully held it underneath the faucet and turned on the water. He could hear Buster barking outside.

  Covered with white, brown, and black fur, Buster, a three-year-old Border collie mix, filled the space in Jimmy’s heart reserved for a four-legged friend. Jimmy had never been afraid of Buster. Other dogs, like the big black dog that lived near the school and showed its teeth when Jimmy walked by, were scary, but not Buster. He liked to lick Jimmy’s face and never tried to bite him.

  A chain-link fence enclosed the backyard. Daddy said it kept Buster from running away, but the fence was built before Buster came to live with them, and Jimmy knew it wasn’t necessary. One evening Jimmy forgot to put Buster up for the night. When Daddy went downstairs in the morning to get the paper, he found Buster sleeping on the front porch. Buster didn’t need a fence to tell him where he belonged.

  The backyard contained one enormous oak tree and several smaller trees. Squirrels lived in the big tree, and when they ran onto a limb, Buster would bark at them. Jimmy knew the dog wanted the squirrels to come down and play, but they wouldn’t. If a squirrel wanted to leave the yard, it jumped from limb to limb until it reached the fence and hopped to the ground by the sidewalk. Jimmy had watched many squirrels do this, and none of them ever fell.

  Buster could run fast. He became a blur when he chased his red rubber ball. Uncle Bart told Jimmy he should name the dog Bandit. Jimmy wasn’t sure what that meant, but when he saw the puppy, he thought of the name Buster. Jimmy knew Buster liked his name because he came running every time Jimmy called him.

  Buster lived outside except on nights when he had a bath. In the summertime, Jimmy and Mama sometimes cleaned the dog by rubbing him with a soapy brush and washing off the soap with the water hose. On bath nights, Buster got to sleep in Jimmy’s room. He would hop onto the bed and lie next to Jimmy’s feet. Buster went to sleep as fast as he ran. Jimmy could tell Buster was asleep, not just because his eyes were closed, but because of the way his side went up and down.

  “Jimmy, I’m proud of you,” Daddy said.

  Still thinking about Buster, Jimmy didn’t hear him.

  “What?” he asked.

  “You were a good boy in the courtroom today. You did a great thing for Jake Garner. I know you didn’t want to talk in front of those people, but I’m glad you did.” Daddy reached over and rubbed his head the same way Jimmy rubbed Buster’s head. “Thanks for helping me.”

  “I felt funny inside when I had to talk,” Jimmy said.

  “That’s called having butterflies in your stomach,” Mama said.

  Jimmy rubbed his stomach and smiled. “I hope they like meat loaf.”

  “And lemon meringue pie,” Mama added.

  It was Jimmy’s favorite dessert. After he ate a bite of pie, Jimmy asked Daddy a question that had worried him since he left the courthouse.

  “Why did Mr. Laney’s face get so red when he talked to me?”

  “That happens to him when he gets upset,” Daddy answered. “You had butterflies in your stomach. Steve Laney had bumblebees in his gut.”

  “Was he mad at me?”

  “Not really. He was just doing his job.”

  “He acted mad.”

  “He felt the pressure of the situation and didn’t know how to handle you as a witness. After you talked, he knew he was going to lose the case.”

  “Will he be nice to me the next time I see him?”

  “Yes.”

  Jimmy swallowed a bite of pie and thought about Mr. Laney’s red cheeks. “Does Mr. Laney get upset when he plays golf ?”

  Daddy smiled. “Yes, then we both get red in the face.”

  While they ate their pie, Daddy talked about what went on at his office while he was helping Jake Garner.

  “It’s hard to cover both places at once,” he said. “I wish I could find an aggressive young lawyer to come in with me. The phone calls back up, and one of these days I’m going to miss a good case because no one is around to take down the initial information. A hardworking associate could make a good living in a couple of years.”

  “We can pray for the right person to come along,” Mama said.

  “I could help,” Jimmy offered. “Grandpa says I’m a hard worker. I helped him clean up the messy area in his backyard and didn’t stop working to get a drink of water unti
l he did.”

  Daddy stopped his fork halfway between his plate and his mouth. “You want to work at my office?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Daddy looked at Mama. “Did you talk to him about this?”

  “No, but it might be good for Jimmy to get out of the house and go downtown for a few hours a week. You could find something for him to do, and it would give you more time together.”

  Daddy turned toward Jimmy. “I thought you didn’t like to come to my office.”

  Mama said, “Lee, be fair. You didn’t want your clients to see Jimmy and ask questions. The specialist in Atlanta told us to look for signs of independent thinking and encourage it. Most boys have a curiosity about what their fathers do at work.”

  Daddy put the food in his mouth and chewed slowly. After he swallowed, he said, “We’ll talk about it later.”

  They ate in silence. Jimmy enjoyed the sweetness and tartness in the lemon pie. He balanced the last bite on the end of his fork.

  “Mama, what day is it?”

  “Friday.”

  “So tomorrow is Saturday, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you call Deputy Askew in the morning and ask if I can help wash the police cars?”

  — Four —

  The town of Piney Grove nestled in the low-slung hills west of Atlanta within tobacco-spitting distance of the Alabama state line. Lee Mitchell and many of those living on the Georgia side of the border looked down their noses at their Alabama neighbors. He claimed that travelers crossing the state line into the central time zone should set their watches back one hundred years. Jimmy wasn’t sure what he meant.

  Regional prejudices aside, the daily routines of people living in Piney Grove more closely resembled those of their Alabama neighbors than the lifestyle of Atlanta suburbanites. The rural landscape on both sides of the border was pocked with run-down houses inhabited by slow-talking residents. Piney Grove had an Alabama counterpart twenty-five miles to the west.

  Boys in Cattaloochie County grew up scratching chigger bites after picking wild blackberries and assumed the most common type of jelly on earth came from dusky muscadines. People knew their neighbors, and if a local family bought a new car or pickup, they couldn’t expect to keep it a secret. Compared to the slow pace and simplicity of life in Piney Grove, Atlanta occupied another universe.

  The heart of Piney Grove was much the same as when Jimmy’s father walked its tree-lined streets as a twelve-year-old boy. But change pressed in from the Atlanta side of the county, and in recent years a few national chain stores had opened their doors. Lee Mitchell complained that Atlanta would eventually swallow Piney Grove. That, too, puzzled Jimmy.

  Six months out of the year, the sun beat down on any exposed red clay and baked it brickyard tough. Jimmy didn’t mind the heat. He didn’t know there were places where cool mountain breezes blew or refreshing afternoon showers fell. He and Buster played outside even if the summer sun made the air above the brown grass shimmer with heat.

  Just like his paternal grandfather and father, Jimmy attended the Piney Grove Elementary School. Jimmy couldn’t imagine Grandpa young enough to go to elementary school, but he’d shown Jimmy pictures to prove it. In one photograph Grandpa was dressed in old-fashioned clothes, standing next to the flagpole in front of the red brick building. The only difference in the school between then and now was the size of the trees along the sidewalk.

  SATURDAY MORNING DAWNED SO BRIGHT AND CLEAR THAT Jimmy had to squint his eyes against the sun shining through the window at the end of his bedroom. The sun only woke him up on Saturday or Sunday. During the week, Mama made sure he was up in time to eat a good breakfast and get ready for school.

  The first thing Jimmy did every morning was put on his glasses. He kept them in a little basket that Grandma helped him make from the straw of an old broom. Jimmy lost his glasses a lot, so Mama kept an extra pair at the house and another in her pocketbook. She bought five or six pairs of glasses every time she took him to the eye doctor. People who knew Jimmy returned his lost glasses if they found them, but sometimes they stayed lost. There was a pair of glasses at the bottom of Webb’s Pond and another pair in the woods somewhere between Max’s house and the field with the black cows in it.

  Jimmy had a bathroom next to his room. Mama and Daddy slept at the other end of the hall in a bedroom that was as large as the living room beneath it. There were two other upstairs bedrooms, but nobody stayed in them unless relatives from out of town came for a visit. One of the guest bedrooms had a big bed with a white canopy on top. The other had two small beds, each the same size as the one in Jimmy’s room. Sometimes Jimmy would take a nap in one of the beds like his.

  On one wall of Jimmy’s room were shelves for his caps. Jimmy loved caps. When he wore a cap and pulled it down over his forehead, he looked like any other boy with glasses. Without a cap, people who didn’t know him sometimes stared at him for a second or two.

  Jimmy didn’t know how many caps he had. Every time he tried to count them, he missed one that was in the closet, underneath his bed, downstairs in the den, or stuck inside another one. He didn’t wear all his caps—the ones signed by baseball and football players were only to look at and show people who visited his room. His favorite caps to wear were a white-and-red one from the University of Georgia, and a green-and-yellow one from the John Deere Company. Daddy went to the University of Georgia, and Grandpa cut his grass with a lawn mower made by the John Deere Company. When Jimmy and Grandpa went fishing, they often wore matching John Deere caps.

  On Saturdays, Jimmy could pick out his own clothes. He pulled open the drawers of his chest and selected a blue T-shirt with a big fish on it, brown shorts, white socks, and tennis shoes. However, his most important choice would be the cap of the day. After picking up several and looking at them closely, he selected a blue one from Delta Airlines. Jimmy had never flown on an airplane and didn’t know if he’d be scared or not.

  Going downstairs, he found Mama drinking coffee in the glass sunroom beside the kitchen. Unless they had guests, Mama let him wear a cap in the house if he wanted to. A Holy Bible lay open in her lap. On a little table beside her rested a notebook. She told Jimmy once that she wrote down her thoughts and prayers in it. Jimmy had looked at the pages before and saw his name in it a lot. Mama had pretty handwriting.

  “Good morning, Mama,” he said, walking over to her.

  She put her left arm around him, took off his cap with her right hand, and kissed the top of his head.

  “Good morning, sunshine,” she answered. “Why don’t you eat a bowl of cereal?”

  Mama made a hot breakfast for Jimmy and Daddy on Monday through Friday but not on Saturday. Jimmy put cereal in a bowl and poured the milk without spilling a drop. He took it to the sunroom and sat at a little table to eat.

  “Have you called Deputy Askew?” he asked. “It’s a good day to wash cars.”

  Mama closed her Holy Bible.

  “Daddy and I talked about that last night and decided you shouldn’t go to the sheriff’s office and wash cars for a while.”

  Jimmy put down his spoon.

  “Why?”

  Before Mama answered, Jimmy heard Daddy come into the kitchen.

  “Lee!” Mama called out. “Jimmy wants to know why he can’t go to the sheriff’s office and wash cars.”

  Daddy entered the sunroom with a cup of coffee in his hand. He hadn’t shaved, and his face was covered with dark stubble. He frowned. Jimmy worried. Pleasing adults was hard. He tried to do what was right but made mistakes a lot.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Whatever I—”

  “No, no,” Daddy said. “You didn’t do anything wrong. But I don’t think Sheriff Brinson wants you to come to the jail.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because of court yesterday.”

  Confused, Jimmy looked at Mama, who didn’t say anything.

  Daddy continued, “Sheriff Brinson wasn’t happy when you told about hi
s conversation with Detective Milligan.”

  “But I told the truth,” he protested.

  “And that was the right thing to do.”

  “Then why is Sheriff Brinson mad?”

  “Because what you said will get him into trouble.”

  Jimmy shook his head. “No. You said it was a mistake that Jake was in trouble, and I had to help.”

  “Yes, and you did the right thing.”

  Jimmy’s lower lip began to tremble. Saying he was sorry might not make things right. “Then why can’t I help wash cars? I like to do it! And Deputy Askew promised me a policeman’s cap!”

  Mama came over and put her arm around him. “Sometimes adults punish children wrongly. Sheriff Brinson may blame you for something he did, and until he stops being sheriff, you can’t help wash the police cars.”

  “But he doesn’t wash the cars. I help Deputy Askew.”

  Mama looked at Daddy.

  “Your mama is right,” Daddy added. “We discussed it last night after you went to bed.”

  “I shouldn’t have told what I heard!” Jimmy said. “Every time I talk I get into trouble. If I promise to do more jobs for you and Mama, can I—”

  “No arguing. You can’t go,” Daddy cut in.

  Jimmy started to say something but stopped. Daddy might get mad.

  Head down, he slowly stirred his cereal. Daddy started reading the Atlanta paper. Jimmy got an idea.

  “Would you do something with me?” he asked Daddy. “We could wash your car and Mama’s car. I could show you what I’ve learned about washing cars.”

  Daddy closed the paper and looked at his watch. “Uh, no. I’m playing golf this morning with Steve Laney, and I’ll have to pay his greens fee after what I did to him yesterday. Why don’t you go see your grandpa? The two of you always have a great time.”

  Mama walked toward the kitchen.

  “I’ll call him in a few minutes,” she said.