by Robert Inman
“Wingfoot,” she said.
“Really?”
“When I met him he was a mess, Wilbur. Well, in some ways he had his act together. He had the nursery, or at least the part the trailer’s on now. Making a living. But the heart and soul part? A mess. Just drifting. Like he had some part of himself stashed away where he wouldn’t have to look at it.”
“You know about the West Point business.”
“Oh yeah. Anyhow, I told him right off that if he wanted me around, he’d have to be honest -- with me, with himself. I told him I wasn’t baby-sitting no broken heart.”
“And…”
“I think he’s making progress. At least I got a song out of it.”
They rode on awhile longer through the night. Peachy stuck to Highway 421, the route Will and Wingfoot had taken on the way to Brunswick County more than a week before, keeping the speed down below fifty-five so the wind wouldn’t damage the plants crammed into the back. Peachy kept switching CD’s -- Faith Hill, Reba McIntyre, some old Porter Waggoner and Johnny Cash. Will found himself paying attention to the lyrics. They made sense, he thought, not like a lot of the stuff you heard on the radio. People telling stories. He thought he might listen to the country station in Raleigh when he got home.
“And what about you, Peachy?” he asked. “You’ve got a great voice. You write good songs. Where’s it going?”
“I may be singing at Baggett’s Place the rest of my life. Or I might get a break. I’ve sent tapes, talked to some folks. There’s lots of people out there with great voices and good songs that never make it beyond places like Baggett’s. But who knows. I’d love to get a break.”
“Nashville?”
“Sure. You know,” she said, “I’d probably been better off without being Miss Greater Greenwood. I should have let Marva win the damn thing and I should have gone off to Nashville and yodeled.”
“But then,” Will said, “you wouldn’t have invented the Peachy Pump. You’ll always have that on your resume.”
“That’s true.” She did a small version of the Pump, as much as you could do in the confines of a truck cab.
“What does Wingfoot think about all that? The Nashville business?”
“He won’t say.”
“Wingfoot says you ought not to want something so bad that it messes you up if you don’t get it…or words to that effect.”
“He told you that?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, the only thing I want that bad is Wingfoot.”
Will drummed his hands on the dashboard. “I hope you get it because,” he sang badly, off-key, “I ain’t baby-sittin’ no broken heart.”
“ Stick to weather, Wilbur.”
“Yes ma’am,” he said. “I intend to.”
*****
It was almost eleven when they pulled up in front of the house on LeGrand. “Doesn’t look like anybody’s home,” Peachy said.
“Clarice is in Cincinnati at a real estate thing. She’ll be home tomorrow.”
Will climbed out, retrieved his suitcase from the back among the plants, and went around to the driver’s side window. “Thanks for the lift.”
“Sure. Enjoyed the company.”
“You staying over tonight?”
“No, I’ll drive on back. Fellow’s gonna meet me to help unload.”
“You’re quite a girl, Peachy. I’m glad Wingfoot found you. And I hope you get that break you’re looking for.”
“You too, Wilbur. If you don’t -- well, you may have a future as a tambourine player.”
She put the truck in gear and pulled away, leaving him there in the street. Will stood for a moment, watching the taillights as she turned the corner a block away. Then he stepped up on the sidewalk and looked for a moment at his house. Coming home late again, he thought, just like always.
Then he thought about where he had been, the things he had said and done the past week or so. A far country, yes. An island, yes. He had almost been a different person. Or maybe he had, just a little, been something of a person he used to be. But that was all behind him. He was back now.
TWELVE
“You can still cop a plea,” Morris deLesseps said. They were standing on the steps of the Wake County courthouse. It was almost nine o’clock, the morning warm and dry, a perfect sky overhead. A day to get your blood up.
“But you said I shouldn’t. Have you changed your mind?”
Morris held up his hands. “I’m just presenting you with the option.” He was in rumpled tweed this morning, a shapeless grayish sport coat, a windowpane-checked shirt, a nubby brown tie that looked like the result of an inept attempt at crochet. A touring cap and pipe completed the outfit. Instead of toting a briefcase, he had a stack of legal pads and manila file folders tucked underneath an arm. Morris had recently begun teaching a night class at the Chapel Hill law school and he was affecting professorial attire and demeanor. “My friend, I am here to defend your honor and good name to the best of my ability. I will stand with you before the bar of justice. We will smote the legal system hip and thigh. If possible.”
Will was casually dressed, as Morris had advised. He wore charcoal gray slacks, an open-necked blue oxford cloth shirt, loafers, and a lightweight jacket he had added as an afterthought from the front hall closet just before he left the house. It was a nice medium shade of green with a polo player stitched on the front. It was Palmer’s jacket, the kind of thing you might wear into the casual bar at Greensboro Country Club at cocktail hour.
“You don’t want to look like Will Baggett the weatherman,” Morris had said.
“Why not?”
“Because this judge is a no-nonsense sonofabitch. He dislikes everybody, especially the noteworthy. I once saw him rip the mayor to shreds in an annexation case.”
The judge was one Broderick Nettles, and as Morris told it, the Wake County legal community referred to him behind his back as “Nettlesome Nettles.” On his best days, he was barely civil to all who appeared before his district court bench -- lawyers, defendants, even the bailiff and clerk. According to Morris, he didn’t have many best days.
Will was in district court because that’s where all but the most serious traffic-related charges were heard. The officer who had filed the charges would be present in court to testify to Will’s arrogant and high-handed (as Morris put it, in his most professorial tone) behavior. The News and Observer notwithstanding, it would be Officer Pettibone’s word against Will’s. Judge Nettles would have read the paper, of course, but he would have to rule on the evidence, and that alone. He was a mean sonofagun, Morris said, but he was fair. That’s all they could ask for.
Will said, “I don’t think I ran a red light.”
“Then that’s how you shall stand. And of course there’s such a thing as honor, in whose name the late lamented Confederacy suffered grievous defeat.”
Will thought about it for a moment, then squared his shoulders. “Screw ’em.”
Morris shrugged. “All right, then. We shall go henceforth in harm’s way and hope for the best. One last piece of advice. Keep your mouth shut. Let me do the talking unless the judge asks you a direct question.”
“Hip and thigh, you say,” Will said.
“With the jawbone of an ass.”
A portly middle-aged man wearing bermuda shorts and calf-high black socks above jogging shoes labored past them up the courthouse steps, glanced at Will as he passed, then stopped and stared. “Hey, you’re that fellow on TV.” He plucked at the air with thumb and forefinger, searching for a name. “Uh…”
“Will Baggett.”
“No,” said the man, “that ain’t the one,” and kept moving.
Will stared after him.
“How soon they forget,” Morris said.
*****
The courtroom was crowded with as motley a collection of humanity as Will had ever seen in one place -- unshaven men in faded jeans and shirts that bulged over potbellies, hard-faced women with stringy hair. In one corner
was a gaggle of men in orange jumpsuits with INMATE WAKE COUNTY stenciled across the back, watched over by two beefy deputies who stood cross-armed against a nearby wall.
“Rode hard and put away wet,” Morris observed drily.
“Yeah,” said Will. “My fellow de-FEN-dants.”
The lawyers were likewise a somewhat scruffy lot, most of them in ill-fitting suits and ties that clashed with their shirts. They lounged about in the jury box, chatting idly with each other, making an occasional foray into the spectator section to confer with one defendant or another. There was another group, somewhat younger and better attired, which Morris identified as representatives of the District Attorney’s and Public Defender’s offices. They all, to Will’s estimation, seemed disturbingly nonchalant about the dispensing of justice, as if this were some sort of assembly line in which widgets were pieced together, then inspected and either passed on to the outside world or consigned to a scrap heap. It occurred to Will that it was his very first time in a courtroom. It was not what he had imagined from civics class.
He cut a quick glance at Morris, who -- having exchanged cursory pleasantries with a few of the fellow attorneys he knew -- had a faintly distasteful look on his face, as if he had smelled something rank. The aroma of the courtroom was, in fact, part unwashed flesh and part sullen attitude. Morris, he of the upper crust of Raleigh’s legal community, did not practice in a court like this, did not deal with the likes of this sad collection. He was doing it only as a favor to his longtime friend and sometime client Will Baggett.
They took seats on a bench at the front of the courtroom, two of the few empty ones left. Will’s fellow accused seemed to shrink from justice, preferring to slouch on the back rows or against the rear wall. Some of them reminded him of the crew from Christian Renovators who were well into their task of demolishing the rear of his house. Furniture from that area had been removed to the garage, flooring ripped up, walls covered with dust, the whole business sealed off from the rest of the house by huge sheets of opaque plastic. They had been at it again early this morning, but this time they didn’t wake him. He was up already, on his third cup of coffee, moving briskly about the house and girding himself for court, when they started their sawing and hammering.
Morris must have caught the look on Will’s face. “Criminal court,” he intoned somberly. “These days, about two-thirds of the docket is minor drug cases. Most of the rest are offenders of various traffic laws, ranging from driving under the influence to driving with a revoked license.”
“No murderers or rapists?”
“Those go to Superior Court. Actually, they’re a better-looking lot. Defendants and attorneys.”
Behind him, Will detected a growing buzz of conversation, and long experience told him he was being recognized. Somebody tapped him on the shoulder. He turned to see a middle-aged woman with soda bottle-thick glasses and bad teeth. She was leaning toward him. “You the weather fellow, ain’t you.”
“Yes ma’am,” he said. “How are you this morning?”
“Not worth a shit,” the woman said with a crooked grin. “They got me on possession. I told the cop I was just holding it for Percy while he went to take a leak, but I was the one that got charged. Percy got off scot free. He’s at the beach.”
“Is that so?”
“What you in here for?”
In here? It sounded like jailhouse talk. Will looked around the room. For most of these poor wretches, he thought, it probably was. God, the messes people get themselves into. “Well…”
Then there was a sudden scuffling of bodies. Everybody was standing. Will rose alongside Morris to see a uniformed bailiff emerge through a doorway behind the bench, and right on his tail, the tall, scowling, black-robed personage of Judge Broderick Nettles.
“Hear ye, hear ye,” the Bailiff intoned. “Court is in session, the General Court of Justice, District Court Division, Wake County, North Carolina, the honorable Broderick E. Nettles presiding. May God have mercy on this honorable…”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” the judge interrupted, settling himself with a rustle of cloth in his high-backed leather chair and dropping a thick stack of manila file folders on the desk in front of him with a thump. The bailiff looked up at him, shrugged, and edged off to the side of the bench. Judge Nettles glared at the stack of folders, as if contemplating the dire consequences awaiting those poor souls whose names appeared therein. Everyone in the courtroom remained standing. “Sit down,” he commanded, his voice like a lash across the crowd. Everyone sat.
“It’s not,” Morris said very quietly, “one of his best days.”
The courtroom had no windows, but by late afternoon Will could almost feel lengthening shadow stretching across the room as one woeful case after another paraded in front of Judge Broderick Nettles, many of them exiting through a side door in the custody of a deputy sheriff. Possession of controlled substance. Possession of controlled substance and paraphernalia with intent to distribute. Driving while under the influence and without valid license, fourth offense. Communicating threat with intent to do bodily harm (this, a plump, pleasant-faced woman in her sixties who wore a gardenia bloom in her hair, which Judge Nettles summarily ordered her to remove and hand to the bailiff, who held it for a moment uncertainly until the judge thundered for him to put it in a wastebasket.) Several cases were set for jury trials, which would begin the next day. The more Will saw of Judge Nettles, the more he wondered if he might not be better off with a jury. It was a possibility which Morris had raised, then dismissed as being the greater of two jeopardies. “Some folks just love to stick it to a celebrity,” he said.
One thing about Judge Nettles, Will thought: he’s dogged. He heard cases steadily until noon, took a thirty-minute recess, and then was back at it. Will barely had time to grab a sandwich and soda at the courthouse coffee shop and escape with them to an empty cubicle in the Registrar of Deeds office, away from the glad-handers who spotted him and wanted to know about the weather. A couple even asked for autographs. Nobody mentioned his sacking at Channel Seven. One man said, “I watch you every night.” No you don’t, Will started to say, but thought better of it.
Morris took the half-hour to dash to his office a block away and then joined Will in the hallway outside the courtroom. “When?” Will asked simply.
“No telling. Judge Nettles likes to jump around on the calendar. Keeps him from getting bored.”
“What if I get bored?”
“For God’s sake, don’t show it,” Morris said. “He’ll crawl your fanny if you even look like you’re not paying attention.”
It wasn’t, Will thought, as if there wasn’t anything to pay attention to. The parade of down-and-outers with their violations of North Carolina’s drug and traffic laws was sort of like being an onlooker at the scene of a bad wreck, the road littered with mangled debris and humanity. After several hours of it, the spectacle took on a wearying and depressing sameness. And Judge Broderick Nettles was letting him -- making him -- sit there and endure it. He had given absolutely no sign that he recognized Will, not even a glance in his direction. He could have called Will’s case first thing, but he didn’t. Whatever the reason, Judge Broderick Nettles let Will sit and stew and watch an endless parade of human folly while his rear end went numb and his brain atrophied and his personal attorney sat calmly at his side, running up a bill of well more than a hundred dollars an hour.
It was almost four o’clock when Will got his turn. The courtroom was almost empty now. Without its crowd of miscreants it was a stark, cold place -- harsh fluorescent lights, pale paneled walls lined with the stern visages of former judges who had dispensed justice from the Wake County courthouse, the resigned mutter of attorneys and defendants, the defeated shuffle of the convicted. The woman who had sat behind Will and Morris at the morning session had failed to reappear after lunch, thus forfeiting her bond and incurring the terrible wrath of Judge Nettles, who had a warrant issued for her arrest. The judge was so exercised by her bla
tant disregard of his authority that Will half expected him to issue a shoot-to-kill order. Will sank lower on the hard bench, filled with gloom. He glanced at Morris, who wore a bemused expression.
“State versus Baggett,” the bailiff’s voice rang out. It didn’t quite register until Morris elbowed him in the side and they both rose briskly and walked together the few paces to one of the two large tables in front of the bench. Morris motioned Will into a chair while he stood in front of another, spreading legal pad and file folder on the table in front of him. A young prosecutor -- barely out of law school, from the looks of him -- was at the other table. He and his colleagues had worked their way through a huge stack of folders as the day had progressed, and the young fellow, who had seemed full of vim and purpose at the start, was now beginning to droop a bit. Morris looked as fresh as ever.
“Who’s representing the state here?” Judge Nettles asked.
“Finley Sinclair,” the young prosecutor answered.
Morris looked over and gave him a tight smile, then gave to Will the merest hint of a wink. Young pup. I’ll have his ass for dinner.
Judge Nettles peered over his half-glasses at Morris. “Counsel for the defense?”
“Morris deLesseps, your honor.”
“It’s been a good while since you’ve appeared as counsel in criminal court, Mister deLesseps. Practicing rich folks’ law these days?”
“Mainly civil matters, your honor.”
“It’s good to see that you have not appeared today in buckskin, Mister deLesseps.”
“Upon your honor’s strict admonition,” Morris said with an absolutely straight face.
Will cut a quick glance at prosecutor Sinclair, who was making a brave effort to stifle a smile.
“Why are you cluttering up my court with this case, Mr. deLesseps?”
“My client feels he is entitled…”
Nettles waved him to silence and leafed quickly through Will’s file. “Wilbur French Baggett.” He didn’t look at Will.