“I hope so … I hope so,” she says. I hear the fear in her voice. It’s a hard transition. Some people never make it.
“Let me know what happens,” I tell her. A polite way of ending the conversation.
“Will,” she says, before I hang up on her: “thanks.”
“Don’t be silly,” I say. “You’d do the same for me.”
“For being there for me,” she says.
“Sure. Let me know.”
“I will.”
“Take no prisoners.”
“I’ll try.”
“Good enough,” I say.
“’Bye, Will. Thanks again.”
“’Bye.”
I cradle the receiver gently. When you share a child with someone, you are never completely divorced.
“IS THIS LAWYER ALEXANDER?”
You could cut the accent with a knife—a deep southern mountain drawl.
“Yes,” I answer, smiling to myself. This voice coming over the telephone conjures up memories of the people I spent my summers with, back in Alabama and Mississippi. I haven’t been in either of those states since I left for college more than twenty years ago, and I have no conscious expectations of ever going back. But I love the sound, the music.
“Glad I finally got ahold of you,” the voice says. “I’ve been trying two-three days now.”
There’s no complaint in his tone, just doggedness.
“Sorry about that,” I apologize, not really feeling a need to, more a politeness, since he’s being so civil about it. I already knew it wasn’t a client, Susan told me that much when she passed the message on a couple days ago, that a Willard Jenkins who she could hardly understand had called and left a message for me to call him at my convenience. I return clients’ and potential clients’ phone calls first; the rest have to wait their turn, particularly when they say there’s no emergency to it.
“I was about to call you back,” I tell him. Which is true, sooner or later.
“That’s all right,” he drawls, his voice about as slow as molasses and almost as thick. “County pays for mine, so I don’t mind dropping the dime.”
I locate the message, buried among others on my desk. An area code I don’t recognize.
He speaks again, as if reading my thought.
“I’m the sheriff down here,” he says. “In Raley. That’s in West Virginia? Near the Virginia-Kentucky line? You prob’ly never heard of it. Nobody ever has ’less they from here.”
I remember that southern inflection, ending a declarative sentence with a question mark.
“Yes?” I say.
“Anyway, this case of yours up there in New Mexico, the one with them biker fellas killed that guy and cut his dick off and so forth?” he continues. “I got this fella come in my office t’other day says he’s the one did it.”
After all this time I still feel a momentary rush of blood to my head. Maybe because I want something else to take into the courtroom with me besides Rita. Even though I know it’s going to be bullshit.
“Hello? You still there?” comes the drawl.
“Yes, yes. I’m still here,” I answer.
“Okay,” he says in his soothing voice. “Don’t want to lose you over the phone,” he adds. “Ours go out pretty reg’lar, what with the antique equipment we’ve got this neck of the woods, could be another couple days ’fore we make contact again,” he chuckles.
“I’m still here,” I repeat.
“Good,” he says. “Comforting to know somebody’s equipment’s working properly.”
By now I’d figured the crazos would have stopped coming out of the woodwork. We kept the file of phony confessions on the case, which Susan has presciently placed on the desk in front of me. There have been seventeen confessions to this crime, but none in the past year.
Why this one, the specifics of which I yet know nothing, should have given me pause to feel differently, I don’t know. But there was a definite tingle.
In all probability, however, five minutes after I’ve hung up from this call, the tingle will be gone. It’s not the first time: hope springs eternal in the human breast. Mine, anyway—occupational hazard.
“So someone came in and confessed to this crime. What did he do, just come in right off the street, or what?”
“More or less,” Sheriff Jenkins replies. “Him and this preacher friend of his, they walked in, asked could they talk to me? And then this ol’ boy just up and says ‘well, I did it.’ Meaning the crime.”
“What did he say, precisely?” I ask. “Was there anything specific?”
“It was all specific, what there was of it,” Jenkins answers. “He didn’t say all that much,” he goes on, hedging a bit, “’cause he said he wanted to tell it to you, fresh, since you’re the lawyer on the case, but he said enough to get my attention, I’ll tell you that, Mr. Alexander. I know you get these kinda confessions all the time,” he says, as if reading my thoughts, “but this fella talked some real specific stuff. I mean stuff you couldn’t know by just watching TV, you know what I mean?”
The last thing I want to do is go to nowheresville, West Virginia.
“Yes,” I say, “I know what you mean.” I reach for a pad and pencil. “First things first. What’s his name?”
His name is Scott Ray. He’s a floater. Been in Sheriff Jenkins’s area three, four months. More or less normal-looking, maybe a little on the girlish side, not bad-looking actually, I’m being told, making my notes, some of the women seemed to find him attractive enough, although most men here would think him too dandified, this is a hardworking, conservative area. In his twenties, maybe late twenties.
What happened was, Scott Ray got religion. He’s a disciple of the Reverend Reuben Hardiman. Reverend Hardiman’s got himself a reputation in these parts, Jenkins tells me. He’s a charismatic preacher, a saver of souls, a faith healer nonpareil even for the southern West Virginia area, where there’s a slew of quality faith healers and soul-savers. He’s a wild-looking so’bitch, nobody knows how old he is exactly, probably forty to fifty, lives up in the hills in the midst of his congregation, hill people, hardscrabble folks. One of these real intense preachers who would scare just about anybody into accepting the Lord to save their souls. Yes, this Hardiman’s quite an intense figure of a man.
Anyway, Scott Ray somehow wound up back in the hills where Hardiman’s church was, and he got religion. Hard. And now he wants to square himself with Jesus, and to do that he’s got to confess his sins. And the biggest sin he’s got going is that he murdered Richard Bartless in New Mexico and he can’t let some innocent men go to their deaths for a crime they didn’t commit.
“That’s the story. You think there’s anything to it?” Jenkins asks.
Fuck. One thing I do know—the tingle’s gone. I put about as much stock in religious confessions, conversions, and faith healers as I do in swamp real estate in Florida.
“I doubt it,” I admit. “I don’t put much stock in confessions of the soul.”
“Yeh,” he says, “I know what you mean. Still …”
I wait.
“Still?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he says. “It’s just sometimes … you get a feeling. You know what I mean?”
Susan books me on a flight to West Virginia, through Dallas. It’s another bullshit lead, I’m sure it is, but I’m going. I have to.
THE TOWN OF RALEY,
West Virginia, is about two hours and forty years in distance from Charleston, where my plane lands and I pick up my Avis Toyota. The drive is picturesque and hilly, wooded up-and-down crests and ridges interspersed with small towns, all of which saw better days long ago, when coal and John L. Lewis was king. It’s cold out, spring has not yet arrived, here and there patches of snow still cling to the hard-clay ground. The occasional faces I see on the streets of the towns as I pass through are pale and pinched, bundled up in layers of flannel and wool against the wet wind. Years ago, fresh out of Vietnam, before law school, I traveled through Yugoslavia and northern Greece. The faces here remind me of the peasant faces from those hills, but with less color. Nobody looks optimistic.
The town of Raley, which is also the county seat, is like the rest of the area, very hilly and drab. You’d have quite a set of legs on you if you walked these streets all your life. I stop in a local cafe for a coffee and instructions to the sheriff’s office. The men sitting in here, all older men, glance over at me. I’m sure they get visitors in here, but I don’t fit. My clothes are too good, they lay on my body too well, my skin has too much sun. I’m dressed casually, in khakis, turtleneck, a warm jacket, and running shoes, but they’re of a different quality. My Patagonia parka probably cost more than any suit of clothes you can find in the best men’s store in town. Kids here that want quality and style have to travel. And once they’re out of high school most just keep going.
Sheriff Jenkins’s office is in a small cluster of county buildings just off the main drag. An overly made-up woman deputy, probably a good half-decade younger than she looks, her tight polyester uniform pants snug against an ass more than an ax handle wide, smiles cheerfully upon hearing my name and asks how I take my coffee as she immediately ushers me into the sheriff’s office. Southern hospitality. She has a pretty face, even if she does subscribe to the Tammy Faye Bakker school of makeup.
Jenkins pumps my hand vigorously. He’s the antithesis of the prototypical southern sheriff; he’s so thin, as the saying goes if he stood sideways he’d be invisible. Tall, angular, younger than I thought he’d be. It dawns on me that I have an unconscious prejudice about southerners both in general and in particular, fueled by the media. It reminds me of the negative, knee-jerk reactions people have about lawyers.
“No trouble finding us?” Jenkins asks solicitously.
“No trouble at all.” He’s a nice guy; he wants to help however he can.
The lady deputy brings my coffee.
“I hope you like it sweet,” she says, smiling. Her voice is more country even than Jenkins’s, a combination of nasal and honey.
“Can’t get enough sweetness,” I banter, smiling back.
She blushes. She’s not used to strange men from distant parts teasing her.
There are at least four teaspoons of sugar in my coffee, and it’s lightened with condensed milk. I manage not to gag as I swallow and nod approval. She smiles again, happy that the coffee is to my liking, and leaves, closing the door.
“You got here quick,” Jenkins says. “A busy lawyer like yourself.”
“I had a hole in my schedule,” I tell him. “And this is an important case to me.” No being cool, no bullshitting.
“I can understand that.”
I look at him. There’s no guile to this man. I can trust whatever he tells me.
“What do you think about this Scott Ray?” I ask. “You’re a professional, you have a sense of when people are telling the truth and when they’re not.”
He regards me with an unwavering eye.
“I think he’s telling the truth.”
Oh, baby.
“As far as he knows it,” he qualifies.
“Meaning?”
“Religious people can be peculiar ducks, Mr. Alexander.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Especially the newly-converted. Especially,” he says, “when they’ve been exposed to a pile-driver like the Reverend Hardiman. That man could squeeze blood from a stone and then some. He’s pow’rful.”
“So what you’re telling me,” I venture, wanting to make sure the words are right, “is that this man Scott Ray truly believes he’s the killer of the man my men are on Death Row for. But it could be that he’s saying this because he’s been … let’s say, convinced …”
“You can say brainwashed,” Jenkins says. “Certainly manipulated. These preachers are sometimes not of our world. They interpret gospel real literal. Sometimes so much that what anyone else calls the truth comes out some other way.”
I nod. He may be stuck back in the woods, but he’s no rube.
“Manipulated,” I say. I’m half-thinking out loud. “All right. He’s been manipulated, or convinced, through no devious intent but out of passion to cleanse himself, to believe that he did it. Or if he didn’t, that he could have, and that it’s the same thing, and so if he confesses to even an imagined crime he’ll be cleaner when he goes to heaven.”
“That’s what the preachers tell their congregations,” Jenkins says.
“What about this Hardiman?” I ask. “What’s he like? What should I know about him? He sounds like a real character.”
Sheriff Jenkins leans back in his swivel desk chair. A smile of pure enjoyment crosses his face.
“Let’s let that be a surprise,” he says, still smiling. “A pleasant one. ’Cause there’s nothing I could tell you that would prepare you for the Reverend Hardiman. I mean there is no one in the
world
like this man.”
He laughs, a good belly guffaw.
“Damn. Hardiman.” He laughs again. “That man can flat-out
preach!
”
“Is he dangerous?”
“Oh hell no! No, not at all. He’s an honest, God-fearin’ country preacher. It’s just he’s … you’ll see.”
I don’t need any more surprises, but I have no choice. It’ll come when it comes.
“When can I meet them?” I ask.
“Tonight. They’re expecting you.”
HARDIMAN’S CHURCH
is thirty miles away, deep into the hills, over tortuous twisting roads that appear to have not been paved since the Roosevelt administration, or at least LBJ’s. My little Japanese car hits potholes so deep I’m afraid for the axles, my head on several occasions bumping against the roof, even with my seat-belt fastened. But the car holds up, a mechanical mule.
Although it’s night, there’s an almost-full moon, so I can make out details as I drive. This is backwoods America of Margaret Bourke-White lore, bare-wood clapboard houses, the paint long since cracked and blown away, many of them with no plumbing or electricity, you can tell the ones that have electricity by the TV antennas sticking up from the tarpaper roofs, old rusted-out cars up on blocks, Chevys and Mercs and some old Hudsons and Packards, too, hard soil by each dwelling that in the first genuine thaw will be planted as a kitchen garden, in most cases providing the only fresh vegetables these families will have; clothes hanging on lines, no fluorescent colors or designer labels, time stood still here from the thirties until the sixties, then stopped again when Vietnam took all the money, and none of it ever came back. Those that stay here stay because they don’t have it in them to move; all the ambition and dreams and power have been bred out of them, by location and some inbred genetic deficiency. This area reminds me of Indian reservations at home: a third-world living inside the richest nation in history. And as in a few other pockets of western countries, like northern Ireland, there are many families in regions like this one who have been sucking at the public tit for three and four generations.