Brambleman

by Jonathan Grant

  As deputies retreated into the building, one cast an uncertain backward glance at Charlie. “You know what it is!” Charlie shouted. “They’re not real GBI agents!”

  “Shut up,” said Finch, slamming the door. Drew took the wheel and started the car.

  Charlie’s right side was killing him. He was sure the bastard had cracked a rib. Well, maybe not, but he’d claim so, anyway. He coughed up phlegm and spit on the back of the front seat to check it for blood. None yet, but the day was young. “Where are you taking me?” he demanded.

  “Where your lawyer can’t find you.” Finch turned to give him an oddly pleasant smile. It was evil, that face, bought and paid for by Uncle Stanley and the Cutchins’s ill-gotten gains, no doubt. Who else had the clout to keep this habeas corpus nightmare going? As if to taunt his prisoner, Drew drove by the courthouse. Charlie saw Sandra surrounded by reporters, too busy discussing his plight to notice him. Here he was, drowning, slipping under the water’s calm surface while lifeguards held a training session on the beach just a few yards away. This was not a fitting end to his contract, to be shot while in custody, especially not after he’d regained his will to live.

  He recalled Redeemer Wilson’s chilling account of such times: “If there were reporters in the town where they arrested you, they moved you to a place where no one knew you. A small town, back in the woods. That’s where they did their dirty work, things that couldn’t be proven. They’d say they gonna beat the nigger outta you, but what they meant was they gonna beat the man out of you or kill you, one.”

  Charlie thought his ordeal wasn’t going to end well, either.

  The agents took him into Cherokee County and on to Canton, passing over I-575, a spur off I-75 that ran north to merge with the Appalachian Highway near Nelson. Drew took a right turn into an industrial park. At the bottom of a hill, he pulled off the street and stopped before an electric gate. The agent produced a plastic card. The gate opened, and he stopped beside a nondescript building hidden from the street at the back of a heavily wooded lot. A few cars were parked near the front door. This was heartening to Charlie, since he had feared he would get the abandoned warehouse treatment.

  So maybe they wouldn’t kill him. Surely their prisoner-grab had been too public for that. That was a theory, anyway. And they probably were GBI agents—rogues or moonlighters, based in Forsyth County and beholden to Uncle Stanley or someone even higher up. And they were playing a game, keeping him out of public view.

  “So you want to tell me what this is about?” Charlie asked.

  “You’re being detained as a material witness to a crime—the drug-related bombing at the North Atlanta Store-All on Christmas Eve,” Finch said, pausing like he expected a confession.

  “Whatever do you mean?” Charlie’s tone was a mixture of innocence and insolence. After an awkward silence, he said, “If you really wanted to question me, you shouldn’t have taken me away from my attorney. Now you’re screwed as far as information is concerned. And furthermore, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  The agents pulled him from the car and led him into the building’s side entrance. As they tugged him down the hall, Charlie looked around for other people but saw none. Finch and Drew pushed him inside a small, windowless room near the back of the building and closed the door. When Charlie refused Drew’s command to sit on a cushioned metal chair beside a folding table, the lawman kneed him in the groin and pushed him down onto the seat. They uncuffed him, then recuffed his hands behind him so that he was fastened to the chair.

  “We need a statement,” Finch said, pressing a button on a digital recorder and placing it on the table. Charlie stared at it balefully. He knew that anything he said could be edited and then held against him. It was simply outrageous that anyone would do such a thing. He was shocked, shocked, at the very thought of doctoring information to achieve an end.

  When he was ready and able to speak, Charlie said, “Hey, don’t you need a good cop to make this dynamic work?” Finch scowled. Charlie leaned forward and spoke into the microphone: “Fuck yourselves. Thank you, I’ll be here all week. Wait! I already have been.”

  “We know you’re involved. That was your van that blew up. We can hold you till you talk.”

  Technically, the van was Susan’s, but he saw no need to point that out. Now he realized she had another reason to be pissed at him, as if she needed one.

  “Could have done this in Forsyth and saved yourself some gas. I want my attorney. I also need medical attention—” Charlie raised his voice “—more now that the man who identified himself as Finch cracked a rib and the man who identified himself as Drew kicked me in the balls! I also want to eat. I want to speak to a representative of Prisoners of Conscience and the ACLU, too. And clean clothes and a ride home. Other than that, deponent sayeth not.”

  Finch restarted the recorder, then both agents left the room. Charlie recited the only clean limerick he knew, sang a couple of lines from a Sinatra tune, and hummed for a while.

  The door opened. “Then, when I was four years old—Oh, hey.”

  Finch grabbed the device and walked out.

  A few minutes later, Drew came in and asked, “Anyone ever tell you you’re an asshole?”

  “Anyone ever tell you this interview is over?” Charlie stared straight ahead until the agent left.

  * * *

  Finch and Drew stayed away for a while, leaving Charlie to strain against his cuffs and count the holes in ceiling tiles. They didn’t feed him, but they did pipe in rap music over a speaker mounted on the wall. This made Charlie think of Demetrious. Then Demetrious dancing. That kid had all the moves.

  When Drew returned, he said, “You’re free to go.”

  “Wow. Giving up so easily? Well, this was pointless. OK by me. I need a ride back to Atlanta.”

  “We’re not taking you anywhere. Just go.”

  “I’m entitled to a free call. Where’s a phone I can use?”

  “You don’t get a phone call. You weren’t arrested.”

  “I’m a taxpayer. Let me use the phone.”

  “Just get out,” Drew growled. “That’s the deal.”

  “You’re just going to dump me out on the street in prison clothes fifty miles from home?”

  “You should have thought about that before you showed your ass.”

  “That’s one thing I haven’t done. Yet.”

  “Well, thanks for sparing.”

  Drew uncuffed Charlie. He stood up and stretched. His orange pant leg had stuck to his oozing wound, and when it pulled loose, he winced in pain. Charlie’s arms felt like logs hanging from his shoulders. He shook his hands to restore circulation. “Well, it’s been surreal,” he said, looking into the agent’s eyes and seeing emptiness there.

  At the front door, Drew gave Charlie a push to send him on his way. Despite misgivings about the agents’ motives, the newly freed man stumbled forward, squinting at the cold sun in the afternoon sky. He needed to get home, but how? The loft was nearly an hour’s drive away, and not having a car complicated things immensely. Sick, wounded, bloody, and tired, with a sticky red right hand, he coughed as he stumbled down the drive. He rubbed his goose-pimpled arms. When the gate swung open, he walked through, then up the hill toward the Canton-Forsyth highway.

  Problem: A man in a jail uniform who looked like he’d been in a knife fight would attract serious attention. How long could such a person go unnoticed?

  Not long, it turned out. A minute after Charlie reached the highway and pivoted toward the Interstate, a Canton motorcycle officer roared up and squealed to a stop beside him. The cop jumped off his Harley and pulled his gun, yelling, “Put your hands over your head!”

  Charlie complied, standing open-mouthed as two squad cars appeared and cops came out of their vehicles like they’d captured an escaped convict who’d been in a knife fight. “All right, all right,” Charlie said. “I’ll—”

  The motorcycle cop kicked Charlie in the back of the knee,
forcing him to the ground.

  “Please don’t—”

  A blow between his shoulder blades put Charlie’s face on the pavement, scraping his cheek raw. While sprawled out on the road shoulder, he was handcuffed for the third time that day. He coughed and said, “I’m not going to cause any—”

  He was kicked in the side. Then again. He looked to the west and wondered if the beating was ever going to stop. The sun grew dimmer and smaller, as if fleeing his plight. The cops shouted, sounding like dogs barking at a wild animal they’d cornered. One of them placed a gun to his head. He looked down on the asphalt and closed his eyes. This is a setup. This is how it ends.

  A car horn sounded. Charlie opened his eyes and turned his head to see a black man in a car at the stop sign. He was leaning toward the open passenger window, holding a cellphone like a camera.

  “Keep moving!” the motorcycle cop shouted. Only when he advanced on the driver did the man roll up his window and turn toward the Interstate. The cop radioed in some numbers.

  “Got a witness now,” Charlie muttered, his face stuck in roadside gravel.

  “All right, that’s enough,” said another cop. He grabbed Charlie under the shoulders and lifted him. Charlie blew grit off his lips and tried to spit the taste of oil and tar out of his mouth. The cops placed him in the back of a squad car.

  Their prisoner learned during the ride to the police station that—as he suspected—he’d been picked up following a report of an escaped prisoner. At least now he could make that phone call. Simple pleasures are the best. Charlie could hear anxiety through the static on the police radio. The cop shouted back through the partition, “Is your name Sherman?”

  Charlie smirked. “I have the right to remain silent.”

  Soon they were in front of the police station. An older man in uniform stood on the sidewalk, waving the patrol car away, as if he wanted no part of its cargo. The officer stopped anyway, got out, and opened the rear door. Charlie slid out and looked around.

  “Let him go,” the older man said.

  “Chief, he resisted—”

  “He’s free to go.”

  The officer hemmed and hawed. “Somebody with a camera—”

  “Nothing happened, right?”

  Charlie gave the older man a crooked smile and said, “Right.”

  Once uncuffed, he turned away, then glanced back at the police chief and the cop, who gestured madly and yelled at each other in the secret language of the damned. That’s right: No jail could hold him. No cops? Ha! Cops say, “No Charlie!”

  Trembling, weak with fever, hungry, nauseous, and bleeding through the sand, glass, and gravel that peppered his wounded left cheek, Charlie started the long march home. He knew he had to hide his leg wound. A quarter-mile up the street, he found a tattered black trash bag and picked it up in hopes it would keep people from paying too much attention to him. He tore off a piece and wrapped it around his pant leg to cover his wound.

  After a mile or so, he stopped at a convenience store in hopes of calling Angela or Sandra for help. But the payphone was broken, and when he asked to borrow a customer’s cellphone, the man dialed 911 while the clerk shouted, “Get out!” In hopes he’d at least get a ride to the county line, Charlie waited outside for the cops to show up, but none came. No one wanted anything to do with him. He was radioactive.

  He tried hitchhiking, but after two drivers swerved off the road and tried to hit him—or at the very least, scare the shit out of him—he gave up on that method of transportation. From then on, he kept moving, lurching up a hill and shambling back down the next, passing under the Interstate bridge and shuffling out of town on his way to Fulton County and civilization. With the sun to his back, Charlie trudged onward, wheezing his way up a long, winding incline. As he walked along the narrow shoulder of the two-lane road, Charlie tried not to think of the miles that lay before him. Just cross this desert, he told himself. Be a Kung Fu prophet.

  Near dusk, he got the Talton treatment. A flying beer bottle hit him—only this one came considerably faster than the one that Momo threw at the good professor back in 1987. Fortunately, he’d seen it coming from a red Ford pickup. Turning away and putting up his right fist kept it from hitting him full in the face. Instead, it struck a hard, glancing blow on his right temple, like a beanball. He staggered away from the road and went down as his assailant’s Rebel yell faded into the distance. He stayed down in the brown grass until the cold got to him, then stood and wobbled on his feet. He took a few shaky steps before he recovered his equilibrium and continued his march. It was colder now, and his head hurt like hell. Tears welled in his eyes. Cry all you want, but keep moving forward, he told himself.

  For several hours, he stumbled on, semi-delirious from fatigue, fever and chills, and hunger. Eventually, he reached Alpharetta in Fulton County. Traffic was sparse, it was late, and the temperature was near freezing. Suffering from hypothermia, he came to a bus stop and declared he would go no further, even though he didn’t know what time it was, or if buses were still running. His arms were numb. He leaned against the MARTA signpost and collapsed, sliding to the ground. He wrapped his arms around himself, then blew on his hands to warm them. Within seconds, lights appeared over the hill. Hissing and squealing, something stopped beside him and opened up to swallow him.

  Charlie thought he was looking into the mouth of a dragon. He stood up to address the beast as a supplicant, then realized it was a MARTA bus. Recovering his sanity, he said, “I don’t have any money. I just walked from Canton, and I need a ride the rest of the way home.”

  “I seen your picture on TV.” The driver, a stocky black woman wearing a wig, regarded him critically. “You the man wrote the book about Forsyth County.” She shuddered. “Won’t catch me goin’ up there. Everybody’s looking for you, you know.”

  “I don’t want to be found,” he said wearily. “I just want to go home.”

  “Nobody give you a ride? Well, doesn’t that say something about the way they treat us.”

  Us? She must have just made him an honorary black person.

  “Come on in,” she said.

  He faltered on his way up the steps. She reached out to steady him. “I thought you’d be cold as ice in that jail outfit, but you’re hot as fire!”

  The bus’s interior was lighted and warm. It smelled of humanity, but Charlie was the only passenger. He slumped on the seat behind the driver. “What time is it?” he asked.

  “Past midnight. I’m not supposed to be here.” She slammed the door shut. The bus rumbled forward.

  He looked out the window and soon fell asleep. The driver woke him when she pulled into the North Springs Station—the northern end of the line.

  “Train take you the rest of the way,” she said. “Pay double next time.”

  “OK.” He took a step down to the curb and turned. “Thank you.”

  “That bus driver got suspended.”

  Charlie gave her a puzzled look. “Sorry. What?”

  “The driver took out those men tryin’ to kill you. Limits to what a bus driver can do in this world, I reckon.”

  “I suppose.” Charlie paused to think about this, then saw a train’s headlight approaching from the south. He limped away as fast as he could, grateful that bus riders didn’t have to pay for transfers or pass through turnstiles at the rail station. He hustled up to the platform just as the train pulled in. A few travelers from the airport disembarked with wheeled luggage. Charlie boarded and slumped in a seat. It left on its southbound journey immediately. He had the car to himself until the train stopped at the Dunwoody station. There, a young white man in a waiter’s outfit—black slacks and vest, white shirt, and thin black tie—stepped into the car, followed by a couple of African-American teenagers. He heard cursing, but it was aimless, with no anger in it—something he could ignore.

  Charlie dozed off and woke at Five Points, one stop short of his destination. A black transit cop was staring at him. When Charlie got off at Garnett,
the cop followed him to the exit, talking into his radio. “I’m out on bond,” Charlie hollered over his shoulder as he walked into the night.

  Now only a short walk from home, Charlie felt a surge of energy as he hit the sidewalk. The homeless man who lived in the vacant lot on State Street had extinguished his barrel fire and retired to his cardboard shack for the evening. A car honked and Charlie quickened his pace, hoping to get home before another policeman spotted him. As he entered the garage on Castlegate, he saw that the bakery window had been replaced but not yet relettered. He looked for the Volvo. It took him a minute to remember that Dana had parked it somewhere else. How many days ago had that been? He couldn’t recall. He wasn’t going to look for it now, that was for sure.

  He rode the elevator up to his floor and trudged along the hall carpet, marveling at how luxurious it felt compared to the road he’d just traveled. He fumbled with his keys at the apartment door and pushed it open with his uninjured shoulder, half-expecting to see the place torn apart by evildoers, but it was just the ordinary mess. Several notes had been slipped under the door.

  After draining a half-liter bottle of water, he headed to the bathroom. After washing his hands and splashing water on his face, he went to the kitchen, but there was little to eat. He gobbled an apple and a handful of crackers. Then he took a double dose of antibiotics and painkillers, the latter more for his distressed feet and ankles than his gunshot and glass wounds.

  Charlie took a long shower to wash off the dust and caked-on blood. After he dried off, he ripped up a towel and tied strips around his wounded thigh and hand. When he’d done all he cared to do for himself, he turned out the lights and climbed into bed.