“Oh, shit,” I say.
It’s Steve Greggs, Cody’s nemesis. And just like that, all the confidence and good feeling of the past day is flat gone, and I start to feel that trapped animal feeling coming on.
“What?” Magnolia is concerned.
“It’s just—I know this guy. He doesn’t like me.”
Steve walks up to my window, and I roll it down. He shines his flashlight directly into my eyes, half blinding me.
I squint in the direction of the glaring light. “Hello, Officer . . . Steve,” I say, trying to sound as friendly as I can manage.
He lets out a disturbing laugh when he realizes it’s me he’s pulled over. “Well, well, well, if it isn’t our local celebrity! I saw that California plate and figured it had to be someone with the circus coming to town. But I didn’t know that I was pulling over the main attraction.”
“I don’t think I was speeding.”
“I didn’t say you were speeding.” Steve nods toward the back of the car. “You’ve got a brake light out.”
“Oh, sorry, I didn’t even know. Swear. We’ve just driven all the way from California.”
Magnolia leans over so she can talk to him. “It’s my car, officer. It’s not his fault.”
“Uh-huh.” Steve rolls his eyes at her and holds up a hand. “You just sit your butt down and shut your mouth, hon. You’re not in California anymore.”
I know he’s a born asshole and it’s in his very fiber, but I’m not going to let him be an asshole to her. “That’s unnecessary, man. Just write me the ticket, and I’ll get it fixed. I’m kind of in a hurry.”
“Naw, doesn’t work like that, big shot. I’ll decide what’s necessary. Ford, why don’t you step on out of the car?”
Now I’m beginning to get real nervous, the way this feels like it’s going. “Why?”
“Don’t make me say it twice, or I might have to cite you for being disorderly too.”
I sigh and get out as Steve stands back, one hand resting defensively on his sidearm. “Go ahead and put your hands on top of the car,” he says.
“What does this have to do with the brake light?” He’s enjoying embarrassing me. The smug look on his face sets loose a righteous anger inside me. If America had pageants for being a dickhead like they have pageants for beauty, Steve would run away with the crown.
“Do it now.”
“This is bullshit,” I say, and turn slowly, putting my hands on the car. I look down through the passenger window and can see Magnolia looking back at me, confused and worried. Steve frisks me.
“What are you looking for, Steve? I don’t have a weapon, I don’t have drugs—you know I’m here to sing in the show. You know that.”
“We’ll see about that, Buckley.” He says my last name like just pronouncing it puts a bad taste in his mouth. He throws everything in my pockets on top of the car and pulls my driver’s license out of my wallet. “Now you just sit still. Don’t you move a goddamn inch. I’m going to run you.”
Steve returns to his cruiser. I’m so angry, I can barely breathe. Magnolia climbs into the driver’s side seat to talk to me through the open window. “Why is he being such an asshole?”
“It’s my family. He wants to embarrass me. Something isn’t right. If he takes me—”
She looks astonished. This possibility had never occurred to her. “But why would he take you?”
“Whatever happens, don’t get involved.”
There’s chatter on the police radio as Steve steps out of the cruiser. In the dark I can only see him walking as a silhouette against the bright headlights from his car. He steps behind me and says, “Well, Ford, here’s your license back.”
I turn to face him and immediately I’m hit in the face with a blast of liquid. My skin feels like it’s on fire. I reach for my face as my eyes close tight against the pain. Pepper spray. Military grade. I don’t even realize I’m yelling until Steve sprays my mouth and I feel it burning my throat. Within seconds I’m on my knees vomiting, then dry heaving. Mucus starts pouring out my nose, and I really can’t inhale. I’m sure that’s Magnolia yelling, but I can’t hear much of anything besides roaring in my ears. Can’t get my breath.
Then, suddenly, my arm’s twisted behind my back, and I’m pushed facedown on the asphalt, a knee between my shoulder blades. I feel the handcuffs going on behind my back, biting into my wrist joints. When I catch my first breath, I use it to curse him.
“You bastard,” I say, wheezing.
Calmly he says, “I told you to keep your hands on the car.”
Now I can definitely hear Magnolia shouting at Steve—I think she’s out of the car. “What are you doing?” she yells. “What’s wrong with you? He didn’t do anything!”
“Get back in the car, miss. This man has a warrant for public intoxication and disturbing the peace over in Ouida County. I’m taking him in. You’re just lucky I’m not impounding the car.”
Steve pulls me up by my arms, sending a pain through my shoulder blades. I try to open my eyes, but it’s like they’re full of gritty sand. Magnolia is still yelling, “This is police brutality. I’m a witness! Police brutality, asshole!”
Then Steve’s shoving me into the backseat of the police car. I blink over and over, trying to clear my eyes. Tears pour down my cheeks, but everything is a dark blur. My feelings are a blur too. They’re a hot red blur of anger, humiliation, and worry about Magnolia, all from this one guy doing something just because he can. I hear her yell something indistinguishable to him, and he says something about “scoops” back.
Then the car shifts with Steve’s weight as he gets in. I lie back in the seat and kick the metal cage that separates us as hard as I can. “Do you feel like a big man now with your pepper spray?” I ask him. “My brother was right: you’re just a fat coward. That Ouida County thing is four years old.”
I hear the leather of Steve’s seat creak as he twists to face me. “In my car you’re nobody. In this town, you and your family don’t count for shit. Shame you’re going to miss your big show, being locked up in jail and all, but at least you’ll be with your own kind. Maybe I can get the guards to turn on a TV so you can watch yourself lose.”
He starts the cruiser, and we pull away. Blinking my eyes frantically so I can see out the window, I can barely make out Magnolia in the flashing blue lights, standing in the road next to her car.
Magnolia
51
I thought I was bad at putting on a public face, but this girl at the police desk is impressive. When I walk up to her and ask, “How can I talk to Ford Buckley?” she reads another page of her novel before slowly, slooooooowly, putting it down on top of her printer and looking up at me.
Then she doesn’t say anything.
So I give her the same eyeballs back. I’m no amateur when it comes to bitchface. I’m free to be me.
“Ford Buckley,” I repeat.
She tips her head forward like my voice is making her skull go heavy. “That kid on the TV?” she says. I don’t think her ponytail is supposed to be a side one, but the rubber band is so loose that it’s migrating to the far left.
“You guys have him in custody. And I think you should know that one of your officers pepper sprayed him, which was truly excessive force.” She looks unmoved. “Can I talk to Ford for just a second? Even through glass? Is that how it’s done? I’ve never had a conversation in jail, so I have no idea how this works.”
The receptionist suddenly looks 1 percent more interested in me. “Oh, right, you’re that girl from TV too. I didn’t recognize you because your hair’s that dirty brown now. Looked better pink. More special.”
“Thank you.”
“You should change it back.”
“I’m good, thanks.”
She looks me up and down. “Some people don’t know how to help themselves.”<
br />
I stare at her. “But you could help me.”
It’s hard to tell if she’s more annoyed with her job or with me, but she shoves her rolling chair back from the desk. “One sec,” she says, and goes through a door.
I look out the front window of the lobby. I’ve got this weird, displaced feeling of being on vacation (even the night air outside somehow looks strange and new and different from what I’m used to) except I’m at a jail. And jail is pretty much the opposite of vacation.
“Well, here’s Arkansas,” I think, admiring a couple of full trees outside because if I dwell on what’s really happened, I’m going to panic.
52
When Ford got thrown in the back of the cruiser, his eyes all swollen shut, I yelled to the officer, “But where are you taking him?”
The officer said, “To go get triple scoops in a waffle cone at Baskin Robbins.”
And I said, “Yes, thank you for the sarcasm, but I meant—” and this probably wasn’t the best thing to say to this cop because he just got in his car and started to drive away. Calling him an asshole before that probably wasn’t the best move either.
I climbed back in my car to follow them, and I swear this officer was trying to lose me because he took off faster than the speed limit. I got paranoid that if I matched him, he’d call me in for speeding because he was obviously that kind of guy. So I just tried to keep the cruiser’s lights in my sight line as it headed through Ford’s town.
I’d pictured that when we got to Calumet, Ford and I would be sightseeing together, and he’d be telling me stories about what happened where, and who Bruce of Bruce’s Country Mart and Gas is. But I was just whipping by shingled houses with lit porches and then what looked like a small diner on a corner. A sign above it read, RON AND JUDY’S, except the RON had been struck through with a line of paint, so I figured that their relationship hadn’t ended very amicably.
I lost the cruiser shortly after Judy’s. So I parked at the nearest grocery store I could find, and I ran in to get some directions. The woman at the register said, “Hi, hon,” and that calmed me down a little. It’s honestly pretty nice to get called hon when someone doesn’t mean it condescendingly.
I asked, “Do you know how to get to the nearest jail?”
She pulled off some receipt paper and started to draw a map.
On the way out of the store, I spotted a pay phone, an actual living pay phone, which was exciting because my cell had lost its charge on our trip. I wanted to call Catherine, who seemed like the person who would definitely know how to get Ford out of jail. But I didn’t have her number.
I thought about calling Lucien, whose number I do know by heart now. But it was also the middle of the night on the West Coast, and I know how important sleep is to him with the baby.
So I called my mom.
She picked up on the first ring. “Mag?” I was calling from an unknown number, so I knew she just was hoping it would be me.
“Mom. I’m so sorry.” And I meant it both for leaving without telling her and for making her feel so badly about the wall she’d put up around herself when it came to my dad. I started to feel so emotional, standing with that strange, cold receiver to my ear. I thought about how I had no idea what it was like to be her.
“Tell me you’re okay.”
“I’m okay.”
I could hear her breathe out. “Oh my God, I was so worried. Mag, I almost sent the police after you when I found your note! And there’s a motorcycle just sitting in my driveway.”
“I know, I know, I should have told you before I left town, but there was just this moment, you know? A true moment where everything felt like it made sense.” It was weird to remember that feeling while talking on a pay phone in the parking lot of a regional grocery store after seeing my boyfriend get pepper sprayed and carted off to jail. I’m in Arkansas. “And now Ford’s in trouble, and I really need you to do something for me, if we can just put all our other stuff behind us for tonight.”
I could hear my mom’s rings clicking against each other. She must have been running her fingers through her hair. “Sure, we can do that. You’re my kid,” she said. “You’re all that matters. I’m here for you.”
I was stopped for a second to hear her say that. I felt taken care of. I felt like we were in our right places: me, the kid; her, the mom.
Then I explained to her as quickly as I could about my brake light and the bad cop and the pepper spray and how much Ford really didn’t deserve to miss his chance at winning Spotlight—no one ever really deserves anything like that. Because it’s partly about talent, but it’s mostly about something you can only describe as luck.
In the background I heard Jazz say, “So true. It is a lot of luck.” My mom had me on speaker with her. But I didn’t feel put out about it.
I pictured the two of them sitting up together in Jazz’s huge condominium (I’d seen pictures in my mom’s celebrity magazines before), and it struck me that they must need each other a lot. I realized that my mom’s job in regard to Jazz was to keep her from getting too lonely. And that Jazz was doing something back for my mom, who has always just wanted to feel like she’s in the middle of things.
My mom wasn’t going to change her longing to be noticed. But Jazz could help provide that for her. I thought she could slow the accumulation of my mom’s regrets. And for that, the part of me that still can’t avoid mothering my mom was glad.
“Jazz, thank you,” I said. And then, “Mom, will you please call Catherine for me and tell her everything so she can do something to get Ford out?”
And my mom agreed to help because you can count on her to come through like that, when you really need her to.
“Mag? Before you go—I’m sorry. I’m sorry for pushing you like that.”
I felt the same. “Let’s really talk when I get back. I’ll be me, and you be you, and we’ll just try our hardest to respect that.”
She sang a couple bars of Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” to me before I heard her send a kiss and hang up the phone.
There are ways in which my mom and I will always misunderstand each other. No matter what we go through together. No matter how many times I disappoint her or she disappoints me. And that awareness is actually comforting because it means that I can’t mess up some perfect bond by being myself.
So as my mom was presumably getting ahold of Catherine, I followed the grocery store woman’s extremely clear directions to the jail, where I am now standing, waiting for the receptionist to come back through the door.
Fifteen minutes go by, and I start to wonder if she just up and went home out the back. I’ve read the poster on the wall warning about the dangers of being irresponsible with firecrackers thirty times, and I don’t think there’s anything more I can learn from it. A twentysomething guy comes in and asks if they arrested Bill again tonight. I say, honestly, “I don’t know.”
“She been gone for long?” he asks, nodding toward the desk.
“Really long. What should I do?”
“Make the phone ring. She’ll want to get it in case it’s her boyfriend, Tyler.”
The guy has a cell on him, so I find the station number on the front desk and call it. The girl literally comes running out from the back. She doesn’t even glance at us before she answers the phone.
“Hello?” she says breathlessly.
“Hi. I was wondering if you found out anything about Ford Buckley,” I say, and once she hears that my voice is coming to her in stereo, she makes eye contact. She puts down the phone.
“He’s being held, but you can’t talk to him because he hasn’t been booked.”
“When will he be booked?”
“They’ve got to come up from Ouida first and get him to take him to their county. That’s where his old warrant’s from.”
“Bill in here tonight?” asks the twentysomethin
g guy.
The girl tightens her ponytail. “Does a frog bump its ass when it hops?”
The guy takes that as his answer. He waves and walks out the front door.
“Hold on,” I say to her, “how long is that going to take?”
She shrugs and picks up her novel again. “Depends when they can get one of their guys to come up here. Sometimes it’s fast, like a couple of hours. And sometimes it’s a day.”
“But it can’t be a day! He’s got his finale performance tomorrow!” I’m wishing that I’d paid better attention during political science because I have no clue what the law actually says about holding someone for a whole day without booking him. I’m feeling very helpless.
“Well, I’m not in charge of anything here but this phone. But you can wait if you want,” the girl says, and I think this is her actually trying to be nice.
I look at the chairs in the lobby, which all have armrests so you can’t lie down across them. I’m just realizing how tired I am. There’s nothing to do but wait until either Catherine shows up or some guy from Ouida comes to take Ford.
“Listen, from what Bill’s friend said, it sounds like you have very strong feelings for Tyler.” The receptionist doesn’t disagree with me. “And I have very strong feelings for Ford, so I think you might understand this kind of thing. I plan to stay here until I know what’s happening with him. But I’m also completely exhausted, so I’m going to go lie down in my car out front.” I point to it through the glass front door so she can see which one it is. “And the only favor I’m asking of you is that if the officer comes from Ouida to take Ford to the other station, will you come knock on the window?”
Her love for Tyler is strong. She shrugs, meaning, What the hell.
“Thank you,” I say. “And I didn’t ask before because I thought we were just going to take turns being bitches to each other, but what’s your name?”
Everybody Knows Your Name Page 24