Pleasantville

by Attica Locke

  “You saw a man?”

  “I saw a man,” Mr. Carr says, nodding. “He was pulling at her, like this.”

  He turns and for the purposes of reenactment uses Lonnie in his demonstration, pulling on her wrist and twisting the arm a little as he goes. “She wasn’t hollering or nothing, but it looked to me like they were in a struggle of some sort. At the time I didn’t think much of it, a lovers’ quarrel or something like that, something that wasn’t my business no way. Not until the cops came.”

  “And you told the detectives it was Neal Hathorne you saw?”

  “No, I said just what I told you now, and I gave a description. It was a black man, looked like it to me. Maybe your height,” he says, nodding to Jay, eyeing him, “maybe a little taller. He was bigger than the girl, that’s for sure.”

  “How’d you get from that to Neal?”

  “It was later, when they said they were going to have me to testify for the grand jury. It was a man from the D.A.’s office come around–”

  “Matt Nichols?”

  “No, it was an investigator with his office. He showed some pictures and, well, excuse my language, but hell if it didn’t look like Neal.”

  “And you’re sure it was him?”

  “I’m sure it looked like him, that’s all I said to the grand jury, all I’m willing to say if they put me on the stand again.” He sighs. “I hate to speak anything against Sunny,” he says, referring to Sam by his old nickname. “He’s a good man, but I don’t really know the young ’un, Neal, and you can’t judge a man by his last name. I got kin of mine I don’t hardly recognize, not down in their souls.” He looks out at the corner, the makeshift memorial. “I never heard of nothing like this in my day,” he says, the words rolling over the gravel in his voice. “But things is changing, even in Pleasantville.” He shakes his head. Outside, damp flower petals litter the sidewalk, ink runs on the poster board. In a pale yellow windbreaker, Arlee Delyvan comes walking down Ledwicke, cradling a small box of pink camellias clipped from her garden, headed with great purpose for the makeshift memorial. She kneels at the gathering, taking time to pick away dead leaves, to set upright a pink teddy bear with a red ribbon, its fur spiked into thorns from the rain. Magnus clears his throat. “I hate to do this, Mr. Porter, god knows it’s bad timing. But I need to tell you I’m moving on.”

  He appears vaguely ashamed, to quit on a man. But resolved, nonetheless.

  He starts with a familiar refrain. “I like you, son.”

  “For a guy who’s so well-liked, I sure am losing business left and right.”

  “It’s just we’ve waited and waited, and time you decide to step back into a courtroom, it’s over this here,” he says, gesturing with his ashy brown knuckle toward the windowpane, the memorial for the missing girl on the other side. “I don’t know if Neal did this thing they’re saying, and I guess he’s as entitled to a lawyer as anybody, but I don’t know why it had to be ours. I’m seventy-six, I’m tired of waiting for ProFerma to pay for what they did. I don’t need the moon and the stars, just something fair. They’re saying this other fella can deliver.”

  “Aguilar.”

  “I was hesitant at first, figuring Jelly Lopez is getting too big for his britches, thinking he’s running everything now. But now I just want it done.”

  “You’re right,” Jay says. “It is bad timing.”

  At the curb outside Mr. Carr’s one-story house, Lon offers to talk to the rest of the neighbors, starting with the house to the right of Mr. Carr’s. Jay is looking to the south, where Arlee is tending the memorial site. Overhead, the clouds have parted, white sunlight peeking through their cottony strands. Arlee has shed her yellow windbreaker, laying it beside her on the concrete. She looks up and sees Jay, but doesn’t say anything, not right away, her hands keeping busy, and he has a stinging, disconsolate worry that she too is angry with him. He didn’t realize until this moment how deeply he thinks of Mrs. Delyvan as more than just a client, or rather the depths of care and concern that word can hold, something, in fact, close to love. Perhaps it’s this little-known facet of practicing law that truly threatens his legal career. When it comes to love, on the other side of his wife’s death Jay is a foundling, a newborn, thin skinned and pink, sure of nothing save the sting of loss, the B side of every breath he takes. And for a man like Jay, whose cynicism is only skin deep, little more than a pose, a cover, it occurs to him that he will eventually be made to reconcile love with loss, one way or another. As he looks closer at the parade of crepe myrtles down Ledwicke, the carefully tended lawns and proud homes, lived in and loved by settlers, pioneers who, a generation before Jay, had paved the way for everything he has in his life, starting with the power of protest, the example they gracefully laid, brick by brick–and as he thinks of Arlee on her knees, caring for the memorial of a girl she didn’t know–it dawns on him that he may have kept Pleasantville on his desk not for the money, his supposed way out, but for a back way in, a way back to himself. He wants Pleasantville to survive the hits it’s taken in recent years. He wants Pleasantville to survive, whatever change is waiting around the corner. “Go on,” he tells Lonnie, speaking softly. “I’ll catch up.”

  As Lonnie starts for the house next door to Mr. Carr’s, Arlee stands slowly, pushing herself up and waving off Jay’s offer of help. “Well, aren’t you having one hell of a month, Mr. Porter?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Well, you’re doing the right thing, whether you know it or not.”

  She pulls a small handkerchief, white with a pattern of faded blue hyacinths tracing the edges, from her pants pocket and wipes a few pebbles of dirt sticking to her hands. Her pink camellias now hold a humble place at the foot of the memorial. Above them, the clouds close in again, but the smell of rain is gone, leaving behind the damp, milky, sweet scent of wet grass. Jay shoves his hands into his pockets, wishing in the cool gray air that he had on a real coat.

  “Can’t help feeling I’ve let you all down.”

  “Why? ’Cause Magnus Carr lost faith?”

  “He’s not the only one.”

  “Folks is scared, that’s all, don’t even know half of what they’re scared of, it’s just a feeling out here that the ground is unsteady, that Pleasantville, as most of us have known it, is in trouble. First, there was the whooping and hollering over the bayou development, if it’s even real, and what it might mean for us. And now this thing with Neal, the idea of a Hathorne mixed up in this,” she says, gesturing toward the marked spot where Alicia Nowell was last seen, the corners of the paper notes lifting in the breeze. “And when folks get scared, they act out, make bad choices. We’ve made that mistake before, in our first fight with ProFerma. We’d been so stunned by the freeway coming through, our first big loss as a community, that when it looked like we couldn’t keep ProFerma out, we just kind of gave in. Sam went in and negotiated a good number of jobs for the community, the best we thought we could do. But you see how that turned out in the end. Now folks is henny-pennying that the sky is falling, moving too fast out of fear. You still got plenty of clients,” she says assuredly, reaching out to pat his forearm to show her support. “You’ll do what you need to do with this trial, and then we’ll finish up what we started on the other thing.”

  “Nobody out here really thinks Neal did it, do they?”

  “They don’t know what to think.”

  “Let me ask you something,” he says, swinging wide of the question of whether she believes Neal did it, and asking, instead, “You know A.G.?”

  “What in the world are you asking about him for?”

  Jay shrugs, playing at nonchalance, mild curiosity. “There’s a story there.”

  “More than one, in fact.”

  “Start with Sam then, what you know about it. Why’d the two fall out?”

  “Oh, honey,” Arlee says, drawing out the last vowel like the opening note of a torch song. “I can’t remember a time the two of them ever got along. They’re just diff
erent, always have been. Sunny’s a moneyman, a buttoned-up banker type, likes to rub elbows with potentates. A.G., all he ever wanted was to bang a piano. It started when he wasn’t nothing but a pup, used to play in the Methodist church, funerals and weddings, and that was fine, respectable. But when he come home from Prairie View, barely one semester under his belt, saying he was through, he was going to play for a living, well, you could hear the fights all the way over to Market Street. Sam cut him off, kicked him out. It was cold, sure it was, but that’s how black folks used to do sometimes, if they thought you were walking off a cliff. They’d kick your ass before anybody else got a chance to–excuse my language, baby. There was a sense that people hadn’t worked this hard and struggled for a better way of life just so you could run off and do what you wanted to do. No, you owed something for what you got, something you had to give back. Me, I can’t understand what we struggled for if it wasn’t to let our kids cut loose a little, be free,” she says. She shakes the dirt from her handkerchief before returning it, folded, to her pocket.

  “Sam was a taskmaster, that’s for sure. But you got to understand how hard he worked for his kids, how much all of this,” she says, gesturing at the suburban vista, the streets of Pleasantville, “was for them. Axel was in the academy at that time, Ola in graduate school at TSU, and Delia was just starting medical school. And A.G.’s out in the streets, playing in juke joints every night. It just goaded Sam something awful. And Vivian, the more she stood up for A.G., the madder it made him. There’s not a soul out here who’ll tell you this, but I will. Sam and Viv, they almost broke up over A.G., twice,” she says.

  “Who is Neal’s mother?”

  “Oh, some little sorry gal he met along the way, on the road. Nine months later, she found him playing a gig halfway up to Austin and dropped that baby at the foot of the stage, least that’s the way the story made it back here.”

  Jay, surprised at the news, especially considering how close Neal and his grandfather are, asks Arlee, “And Sam just accepted him? Just like that?”

  “Of course he did. Just like he had accepted A.G.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Arlee gives him a knowing look, politely waiting for him to catch up.

  Finally she says, “Sam didn’t invent stepping out.”

  “Not his, huh?”

  “The general consensus, especially after dark, what folks have whispered about for years, is no. Allan is not a Hathorne. And Sam knew from day one.”

  “Hmmph,” Jay mutters.

  He closes his eyes, taking this in, attempting, with this new information in hand, like a freshly unfolded map to a new territory, to trace the demise of their relationship in reverse, back to its original wound, whether Sam’s or A.G.’s.

  “But they patched it up, for a little while, didn’t they?”

  “He got off the drugs, came home for a while, that’s right. And god bless him, I think he really tried to come home. He threw himself into coaching, getting involved with the kids. This was around the time we were fighting ProFerma’s plans to set up the chemical plant. And he got involved in that too.”

  Here, she sighs, reaching up to pat a few flyaway curls, wiry gray strands at her temples. The air has lifted a bit, picking up fallen leaves, rolling them across the sidewalk like marbles. Arlee shivers, crossing her arms across her chest. “But I don’t know. I guess it didn’t take,” she says. “But there were a lot of things around that time that didn’t turn out the way any of us wanted.”

  CHAPTER 21

  The first big surprise of the afternoon turns out not to be the lingering rumors about the paternity of Allan George Hathorne, not by a mile. It comes before Jay even breaches the boundaries of Pleasantville. Lonnie phoned to say she had no new information about the night Alicia disappeared, Elma Johnson and Magnus Carr being the only two neighbors who saw anything on the night in question. Plans were made to meet back at Jay’s car, which was parked a few doors down from Mr. Carr’s, on Ledwicke. After walking Ms. Delyvan back to her home on Tilgham, crossing, in the process, some ten blocks through the heart of the neighborhood, Jay doubles back, walking alone to the Land Cruiser to meet Lonnie. And that’s when he sees them. They’re in red T-shirts, every last one, even Tonya Hardaway, whose braids he recognizes at a distance of thirty yards. She’s wearing a Wolcott T-shirt, like the others, a team of block walkers she’s directing from an impromptu command center at the corner of Josie and Gellhorn. Jay halts in his tracks, pausing initially because it’s a sucker punch–the naked campaigning during an electoral injunction, which, though not expressly forbidden, seems for sure in bad taste, especially given the knowledge that it was Wolcott’s campaign that sent the dead girl into the streets of Pleasantville in the first place. It’s tacky, at best, and sinister, at worst, another bit of chicanery, the outcome of which Jay can’t divine from here. Would neighborhood residents really take to this kind of bald-faced proselytizing, in Axel Hathorne’s political backyard, no less? Curious, he watches the procession for a while, the zigzag pattern of volunteers on Josie Street, not going door-to-door, as he would have thought, but rather skip-hopping houses by some internal logic he can’t follow. Jay has never run a field campaign in his life, but what he’s witnessing here is different from any way he would ever have imagined going about it, what common sense would dictate: that you hit every door, every house, making contact with each and every voter, every potential step toward victory. Tonya can’t see him, not with her back to Ledwicke. And Jay is careful to hang back and observe what he can. Down Josie Street they go, knocking on doors, checking off street numbers and names on the small clipboards they’re carrying, returning periodically to their field director and sage, who distributes more slips of paper, directing the block walkers to specific houses and advising them to completely skip others. Jay recognizes, from his client list, some of the houses they’re canvassing.

  2002 Josie Street is Mary Melendez’s place.

  2037 is Robert Quinones and his wife, Darla.

  2052 is Linda and Betty Dobson, sisters who’ve lived together for years.

  2055 is Rutherford Tompkins, widower and retired firefighter who was home alone when the explosion happened last spring. One of the first on the scene, he established a safety zone, past which he wouldn’t allow any of his neighbors to cross, and joined firefighters from three counties battling the blaze.

  “What in the hell?” Lonnie says when she catches up to Jay, following his gaze across Ledwicke. He doesn’t know if she’s cursing the fact that Wolcott’s team, on the eve of the trial, is still campaigning, or the bizarre manner in which the block walkers appear to be going about it. Either way his answer is, “I don’t know.”

  “You want to talk to her?” she says, meaning Tonya.

  “Not here.”

  “Well, at least now we know where to find her.”

  “At Wolcott’s campaign office,” Jay says, still watching.

  The second surprise of the day is an unexpected visitor. He’s parked across the street from Jay’s office, waiting, when Jay swings by in the late afternoon. Lonnie is back on flyergate with Rolly, who, through his subcontractor, is likewise keeping tabs on A.G. at the Playboy Club and his apartment on Dowling. Eddie Mae has been working all morning to set up witness interviews, drawing a giant grid on poster board in the upstairs conference room, representing nearly every hour they have left until jury selection. Jay is returning to check in with her when he sees the late-model navy blue Mercedes sedan, a two-seater with the dealer plates still on, parked on the opposite side of Brazos from the office’s front door. The driver, early thirties and Asian, is wearing aviator sunglasses and a thickly knotted striped tie. “Can I help you with something?” Jay says, rapping on the roof of the man’s new car with his knuckles. These days, the sight of a strange car idling outside his place of business sets his teeth on edge, the muscles in his jaw twitching, on high alert. The man in the Mercedes peels off his sunglasses.

  Looking at Jay
, he expresses surprise. “I know you.”

  “I don’t think so, man.”

  “No, I mean I’ve seen you, in the newspaper.” Then, regarding him further, he asks, just to be sure, “You’re Jay Porter?”

  “Now that we’ve got that out of the way.” He crosses the car’s threshold, leaning into the open window, his face coming within inches of the driver’s, his eyes darting around the whole of the leather interior. But the car is empty, not a weapon or an alarming item in sight, nothing except a black leather briefcase on the Mercedes’s passenger seat. “You want to kindly offer me some reason why you’re sitting here, watching my front door?” he says.

  “You called me, remember?”

  “I’ve never seen you before in my life.”

  “You called about my car. It was stolen last month.”

  Jay steps back from the car door, staring at the driver.

  “The Z?”

  “The Nissan, that’s right.”

  Well, well, Jay thinks.