by Rilla Askew
“Y’all come away from there.” She drew the kids from the window just as Arvin Holloway started bellowing through the bullhorn: GEORGIA KIRKENDALL, I GOT SOMEBODY HERE WANTS TO TALK TO YOU! Sweet stopped on the other side of the classroom. The kids stood nearby, looking expectant. She really wished they could wait for dark, but they couldn’t. She reached over to brush the hair back from Lucha’s forehead. The child shrank against her daddy. “You be a good girl, okay? Aunt Sweet will bring you some Gummi Bears next time I see you. Okay?” Lucha solemnly nodded. “Well, then,” Sweet said, looking around the room. She picked up her purse, stood on tiptoe to hug Misty, gave a quick awkward kiss on the cheek to Juanito, who ducked his head, flicked an embarrassed half smile. “Well,” Sweet said. “I guess y’all are on your own, then.” She stepped to the door, paused, raked her fingers back through her uncombed hair. “I’ll drag it out as long as I can.”
He had thought he’d come to terms with everything. He had truly believed that. The story, as he got it from the taciturn mouth of the big deputy on the drive here, had seemed convoluted, but Bob Brown had felt like he understood. His daughter was at the Cedar First Baptist Church with the preacher and the sheriff and, somehow, some kind of a Mexican stranger—a weird mishmosh, but there would be a good explanation. But when they came upon the roadblock and turned and he saw the mangle of pickups and vans and cars on the street, Brown knew, before he was hauled out of the cruiser to jeers and taunts, that he had understood nothing. And when he stood in front of Holloway and saw, behind the sheriff’s shoulder, Terry Kirkendall lurking at the edge of the crowd with his cap brim pulled low, Bob Brown realized that there was one thing, at least, he hadn’t come to terms with. The sheriff shoved the bullhorn at him, and with a clank Brown took it by the cold metal handle.
“Call her out!” Holloway ordered.
“Do what?”
“Don’t give me any bullshit.” The sheriff snatched back the megaphone. “GEORGIA KIRKENDALL, I GOT SOMEBODY HERE WANTS TO TALK TO YOU!” He slapped the horn in Brown’s hand again, and Brown lifted his shackled wrists to demonstrate that he could raise them only chest high. “Beecham, get over here!” The deputy blocked Brown’s view as he hulked in front of him fumbling with the heavy lock at his waist. Twenty minutes ago, inside the drunk tank, Darrel Beecham had apologized for clamping on the steel chain linking the handcuffs to the foot shackles. Now he growled roughly at Bob Brown to hold still. Brown leaned around, trying to see his son-in-law skulking back behind the police tape. Tee wouldn’t meet his gaze. Carl Albert stood next to him; he kept peering up into his dad’s face and then turning to look at his grandfather. The boy’s face was red, wincing, puffy with crying.
“Call her!” Holloway barked as the deputy began gathering up the heavy chain.
“What do you want me to say?”
“Tell her to send that spic out! I want to know what he done with that kid!”
“You mean Dustin.”
“Hell, yes, Dustin! Who the hell else? Call her!”
Awkwardly Brown pulled the megaphone toward his mouth, holding it several inches away so that the sound flowed around the mouthpiece more than into it, although his tinny voice could also be heard coming from the closed speaker: “Oren,” he called to his former pastor, “could you explain to me what this is about?”
And the preacher called back across the way, “Yes, sir, be glad to, Mr. Brown—” But a burst of heckling from the crowd drowned out the rest of his words, and a helicopter hovered overhead—not so low now as to blow hats off, but close enough to be loud—and some of the camera operators were angling around to get a better shot of the grizzled prisoner in his orange jumpsuit with the black words Inmate Latimer County Jail stenciled on the back.
“Put it to your mouth, man!” the sheriff ordered. “Put some goddamn spit in it!”
Brown’s sudden cooperation had little to do with the sheriff’s instructions and much to do with what he himself wanted to know. “SWEET? IT’S DAD. CAN YOU HEAR ME?” Despite itself, the crowd quieted down. One of the reporters moved out into a little cleared space to wave off the helicopter—they all wanted to catch this. “I APPRECIATE WHAT YOU’RE DOING. COME HERE AND LET ME ASK YOU A QUESTION.” No flicker of movement behind the dark double glass doors, but a quick dart of yellow on the street as Carl Albert, having twisted away from his father’s grip, ran around the barrier straight to Bob Brown. “Grandpa, Grandpa, don’t let ’em shoot her!” The boy was gasping and sniffling. “They’re not gonna shoot her, are they?” He turned and sobbed at the sheriff: “Please don’t shoot her!”
“Carl Albert!” Terry called. “Get back over here!”
“She didn’t mean to kill him! It wasn’t her fault!”
“Kill him?” Holloway’s ears pricked. “Kill who?”
“Mr. Bledsoe! It was a accident, I promise. Me and Dustin seen it!” Carl Albert turned now and pleaded across the yard to the preacher. “Tell them, Brother Oren! Tell them my mom didn’t do it!”
“Come here, son.” Terry Kirkendall was making his way around the tape. “Let’s go home.”
“Kirkendall, what the hell’s he talking about?”
“Nothing. Carl Albert, let’s go.”
“Horace is dead?” Bob Brown said.
Terry kept his eyes on his son. “Passed away this morning. At McAlester Regional.”
Brother Oren called across softly: “I’m real sorry to hear that, Tee. If there’s anything—”
“What did Sweet do?” Holloway demanded. “Speak up, man!”
“Nothing! My boy’s just got things mixed up!”
“This whole blamed family ought to be in the goddamn jail!”
“Shut up, Arvin,” Brown said. For a few seconds, in the ruddy glow of sunset, in the midst of the mostly quiet crowd, Bob Brown struggled. There stood his son-in-law not six feet away looking baffled and frightened, looking heartsick, looking weary and maybe even a little ashamed, with his cap tugged low and his grease-stained work coat unbuttoned, his ragged beard uncombed, his hand clamped on the boy’s shoulder, the same way he’d stood beside the church van at Misty Dawn’s house last summer. It all passed through Brown in a flash: Terry’s expression that day at the birthday party, his surly voice in the van on the ride home, Brown’s own shock when the sheriff told him who’d turned him in, his disbelief at that moment, his anger. The same anger that boiled up in him right now—not for what had been done to him or Jesús Garcia or even those poor people in the barn, but because of Dustin. If Tee hadn’t made that call, Dustin would not be gone. Jesus said, Forgive. Jesus said, Go the second mile, Turn the other cheek, Do unto others. As we forgive those who trespass against us, Bob Brown thought, and then, before he or anybody else knew what he was up to, he leaped across the six feet of soggy yard and took down his son-in-law.
The television cameras captured it all quite well: the elderly, bespectacled inmate on his back on the ground, with the heavy bearded fellow pulled backward on top of him, the prisoner’s clasped hands around the bearded guy’s neck, choking him with the handcuffs, and the little chunky boy dancing around, screaming, and Sheriff Arvin A. Holloway hollering at the top of his lungs words that nobody could understand while the preacher and some of the senior citizens rushed over from the glass doors and the deputies swarmed, and then the sheriff, still yelling unintelligibly, drew his pistol and aimed it, not overhead for a warning, but directly at the two men grunting and wrestling on the ground. It was only the swift thinking of Deputy Darrel Beecham that saved a worse tragedy from taking place—a truly engaging unsung hero, as young Logan Morgan recognized, shoving her cameraman’s shoulder and pointing him to shoot the scene at the very instant Beecham swatted the sheriff’s elbow straight up so that the shot went winging up over the top of the parsonage, hitting no one, thank God.
Sheriff Arvin Holloway, in a profound and horrific rage, snatched up the cracked
bullhorn from the sidewalk where Bob Brown had dropped it, and his roar, even through the broken microphone, was louder than any of his amplified bellows that had come before: “YOU PEOPLE SHUT THE HELL UP AND GET OUT OF MY WAY!”
There followed then a great hush, except for the two men coughing on the ground, and the hiccupy boy still bawling. All other eyes and lenses were turned toward Fellowship Hall, where on the narrow slab of concrete in front of the double glass doors, Georgia “Sweet” Kirkendall stood with her short auburn hair spiking straight up and dark circles beneath her eyes, a fake leather purse hanging off her shoulder, and both hands in the air.
Wednesday | February 27, 2008 | 8:00 P.M.
Cedar
By the time the calm GPS voice in the speeding Escalade guided the decidedly un-calm State Representative Monica Moorehouse and her husband over the mountains into the little town of Cedar, the night was full dark. They hadn’t come the familiar route via McAlester, which would have taken, according to Charlie, an extra forty minutes, but had relied on that serene disembodied guidance, which directed them south from I-40 over tiny two-lane highways, through dead and dying small towns, across narrow being-repaired one-lane bridges, and finally south along the winding curves and steep ridges of the Sans Bois Mountains—a drive that might have been quite lovely in daylight, Monica observed tensely, but which turned out to be, after dark, damned scary. Her hands were cramping on the steering wheel, she had a splitting headache, and the Escalade seemed to have dropped into some kind of technological black hole where Charlie’s laptop connect card could not connect, cell reception was intermittent, and, worst of all, they met several sets of headlights coming toward them on the winding curves—going the opposite direction.
When they turned off the highway at last, Monica was relieved to see a number of vehicles down the street in front of the church. She sped toward them and parked next to a giant pickup hooked to an empty stock trailer. Streetlights illuminated the broad white face of the old building and the several law enforcement officers milling about, but where were all the reporters? Where were the huge crowds her husband had described from the news feeds? She could see miles of yellow police tape, yes, and discarded soda cans and paper trash and a few hicks in ball caps perched on tailgates across the way surreptitiously sipping from silver beer cans, but where were the demonstrators, the media, the cameras and lights and tension? “What happened, Charlie? Where is everybody?”
Her husband grunted as he hit the refresh button on his laptop, to no avail. He plucked one of the BlackBerrys from a cup holder, glanced up, and pointed. “There.”
Monica leaned forward to see. Through the wide glass doors of a brightly lit prefab addition attached like a suckerfish to the side of the church she could see a handful of senior citizens seated at a long table and that fool sheriff striding back and forth in front of them. Then she spied the camera crew filming from the back of the room, “Wait!” Charlie said, punching numbers, “let me find out what’s going on!” But Monica left him still trying to connect as she shoved open the car door and climbed down.
She ducked deftly beneath the yellow tape and was at the glass doors before a deputy saw her and called out for her to halt. With a quick smile and a little wave, she slipped in to the hall, where no one paid her the least attention. The senior citizens were all glaring at the sheriff. Well, they weren’t all seniors, as Monica could see now; they were just mostly gray haired, except for the soft little round-faced woman standing by the back wall with a wriggly toddler in each arm and the workingmen seated at a second table fidgeting with their ball caps, their arms stretched out on the butcher paper. More to the point: there was only one reporter, the perky young brunette from Channel 2 and her gangly camera operator—oh, it had all taken too long! Charlie had been right. She shouldn’t have stopped by the apartment to change clothes.
At the front table a plump lady with a bad perm was wiggling her fingers in the air. “When are you going to let us go home, Arvin? My boy Leon can’t wait much longer for his supper.”
“I told you! Nobody’s going nowhere till I get some blamed answers!”
“You got your answer!” This from a skinny old lady with a wattled neck. “How many times do we have to say it? We don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Like hell!”
“Please watch your language,” a fellow said tiredly from the far end of the front table. “This is God’s house.” Monica recognized him as the pastor who’d nervously shadowed the smart-mouthed aunt at yesterday’s news conferences—but where was she? The aunt? Weren’t they supposed to have nabbed her along with the cache of illegal aliens she’d been harboring? Hard to believe, Monica thought from her position near the door: an entire family of more or less middle-class, nominally Christian white people smuggling Mexicans, with, it seemed clear, the support of their church. Likely there was a drug-running operation in the mix, too. “Sheriff!” Monica strode forward to where the camera operator could see her. “Representative Monica Moorehouse of the Eighteenth District!” She put out her hand as if they’d never met, smiled winningly, could almost feel the lens zooming in. “I’m here to offer the support of the entire Oklahoma State Legisla . . . ture . . .” The scowl the sheriff turned on her could’ve choked a toad. “If there’s any . . . assistance you need . . .”
“I don’t need assistance, lady. From you or anybody else!”
A uniformed deputy stepped into the hall. “We finished the sanctuary, Sheriff. Still can’t find any sign. It don’t look like—”
“Search it again!”
“Yes, sir.”
“And the baptistery! Did anybody check the baptistery?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, look again. Get down in the dadgum water and feel along the bottom!”
“It’s only a few feet deep, sir, you can see the bottom.”
“I don’t care! Get in there and check it! I want ever inch of that building gone over!”
“The water heater ain’t on—”
“Do it!”
The deputy withdrew. The sheriff whirled and made a chopping motion toward the back of the room. “Turn that blamed thing off! I’ll tell you when you can shoot! And what you can shoot!” He started toward the back, and the young camera operator—baffled, because it had been the sheriff who’d beckoned them to come in—squeaked, “It’s off, it’s off, I turned it off!”
“Turn out that goddamn light, too!”
“Sheriff!” the pastor said. “If you have to use profanity, let’s go over to my house. We can talk there.”
“Nobody’s going nowhere! Do you people get that?”
In fact, the people did get that—not least because Arvin Holloway had shouted it so many times. They’d been sitting here close to two hours. The first search had lasted only twenty minutes, as there were so many deputies and so few rooms in which an illegal alien might be hiding, but the subsequent searches were taking longer. The deputies had found bits of evidence in the nursery—cracker crumbs on the table, empty Styrofoam cups rimmed in the bottom with red Kool-Aid, a soiled crib blanket in the corner, a couple of soaked disposable diapers in the trash—but there was no way to tell if these telltale signs were from today or last Sunday. A raggedy blue house robe had been discovered on the floor of the nursery closet, and they’d thought at first that might be a clue, until one of the deputies remembered seeing it on a Wise Man in the Christmas play last December. Nevertheless, they bagged it along with the Styrofoam cups and the diaper and the discarded plastic cracker sleeves they’d collected for DNA testing, should there ever be enough money in the county budget to pursue such a course of action—and provided, of course, there turned out to be reasonable cause. Other than that, the diligent deputies had found no sign of an alleged quote unquote illegal Mexican.
Still, they kept looking, more and more carefully, and this last search, the third, had been dragg
ing on for almost an hour. Every empty moment that passed caused Arvin Holloway’s blood to boil more recklessly—to the point of a stroke if he wasn’t careful, he knew that, but he could not contain his fury. Not one of these blankety-blank Scotch-Irish pilgrims would admit to having seen a Mexican person, living or dead, legal or illegal, alone or accompanied, anywhere in the town of Cedar or its environs, period, ever, at all: “Don’t know what you’re talking about, Sheriff.” “Don’t have any idea what you mean.”
At this moment Bob Brown was sitting in the back of the sheriff’s cruiser, rechained and badly bruised from his fall, under arrest for aggravated assault and battery with a deadly weapon—the handcuffs—and also for resisting arrest, although he had resisted nothing when the two deputies jerked him up from the ground where his son-in-law lay coughing. Carl Albert had thudded across the yard, crying out “Mommy! Mommy!” as he flung himself at her so fiercely that the startled sheriff, flustered and furious and completely undone, swung his bullhorn on the kid, pointing it straight at him like a pistol. In the few seconds it took the sheriff to realize what he was doing and lower the bullhorn and start yelling for somebody to arrest the goddamn prisoner, Bob Brown had stood staring at his daughter. Sweet met his gaze steadily over the head of her sobbing son. She’d looked disheveled, exhausted, and . . . something else. Settled. Some kind of settled, or acceptant, or . . . it would take Brown several hours, the whole evening, in fact, to glean what his daughter’s face said: We are together in this, Daddy. I get it now. You had your reasons. I have mine.