Gideon - 05 - Blind Judgement (19 page)

“Unless you’re old, it must be terrible being a single woman in Bear Creek,” I say, sympathetically.

Angela shrugs.

“Maybe it’s the futility of the situation over here that gets us down.

East Arkansas is probably more like South Africa than anyone cares to admit, but we don’t have a Nelson Mandela to save us.”

Again, the hyperbole. Yet, in Memphis, less than an hour’s drive east, it is hard to get away from the feeling that racial problems in the Delta are as permanent as the land itself. At the Pyramid, just across the Mississippi River, the coaches and players are almost all black while the crowd is overwhelmingly white. Dan and I have just this week been to see Hoop Dreams, a documentary that follows two black Chicago youths through their high school basketball careers to college. One kid, the less talented of the two, ended up at Arkansas State after

graduating from a junior college. I left the movie more convinced than ever that big time university athletic programs are poorly disguised professional sports businesses that should pay corporate income taxes.

Both the Memphis and Arkansas coaches have recently complained loudly and publicly of racism directed against them. Their bitterness stems from some commentators’ past contentions that as coaches they are better recruiters than tacticians. White coaches such as Bobby Knight and Eddie Sutton get praised for their game plans. The implication, the black coaches contend, is that they are too dumb to be astute tacticians. Angela, chewing contentedly on a hot dog before the game begins, asks, “How hard can it be anyway? I’ve never known any coach who I wanted to do brain surgery on me.”

I laugh, glad I am here with her. Angela is an enthusiastic fan, calling the Hogs with the cheerleaders as if she had been one herself.

Our seats are a mile from the court, but Angela overrules the referees’ decisions with the confidence of the confirmed sports couch potato.

“That was a charge!” she screams, as the game winds down, punching my arm for emphasis.

“He had position!

Didn’t you see it?”

How? From this height, the players look like ants to me. It is easy to forget some of these guys are seven feet tall and weigh more than 250 pounds.

“They ought to give him a couple of foul shots just out of sympathy,” I agree.

“I wouldn’t stand still and let one of these rhinos run over me unless I were wearing a fall suit of armor.”

Angela nudges me with her shoulder.

“You would if that’s what it took to win.”

When I ran track in high school, I was never sure if I competed so hard because of a desire to win or the risk of being humiliated. The race I remember most is the Meet of Champions race in which I finished last, not the state “A” finals, the week before, which I won.

The buzzer sounds. The Razorbacks are victorious by seven points.

Though I never quite got into the game, Angela gives me a high five, irritating some Tiger fans sitting next to us. To hell with them. The next time they win they will be just as obnoxious. Angela is grinning as if she had scored the decisive points. She likes to win, too. I wonder what motivates her. As Hog fans celebrate around us, I lean over and kiss her quickly on the lips. Though she doesn’t respond, she doesn’t chastise me either, and even this chaste contact has made my blood thicken.

After the game we park near the Peabody Hotel and walk around in the damp chill on Beale Street, a historic black area because of its musicians that has been revitalized to attract tourists—one of

Memphis’s many efforts over the years to preserve its downtown. We stop at the King’s Palace restaurant and have a couple of beers and talk over a jukebox that seems mainly devoted to the blues. The game has left her in a good mood and she lets me kid her about her devotion to the Razorbacks.

“When they beat Duke for the national championship, you probably danced down Main Street wearing nothing but a Hog hat.”

“If I thought it would have helped them win, I might have,” she says, sipping a Killian’s.

“Honestly, if I’d had a dream when I was sixteen years old that I would marry a farmer and live in rural Arkansas until I was almost fifty, I would have woken up screaming I’d had the worst nightmare in history.

It shows humans can get used to anything, I guess. Until Dwight died, a few people, obviously traitors, had almost begun to think of me as a native.”

I smile, knowing how Southerners are about people who move in from north of the Mason-Dixon line. From our perspective, it takes a couple of generations for them to fit in.

“You should consider moving toward the center of the state,” I say, serious but still hoping to keep the conversation light.

“We’re more civilized over there.”

Angela places the bottle carefully on the mat in front of her.

“It looks as if I’ll be moving somewhere,” she says, her voice suddenly harsh.

“I decided to go on and sell to Cecil and Nancy. We had the papers drawn up this week and got them signed.”

Her eyes look so sad I reach across and touch her hand. This is what has been bothering her.

“Is that going to work? What will you do?” I ask, remembering her comment last week that Cecil wouldn’t be able to make the payments.

“It doesn’t matter,” Angela says brusquely, and pushes back from the table.

“You’ve never seen the farm, have you?”

“No,” I admit, not at all eager to see it now. I was hoping we could stay in Memphis, go out to eat and who knows what? There are plenty of motels between here and Bear Creek.

“I’d like to show it to you,” she says, standing up.

“You might never see it.”

“Sure,” I say, reaching for my wallet. The expression on her face is so determined there is no point in arguing with her. There are obviously some things she needs to work out before she gets around to me. I need to take my time. But, damn, she is an attractive woman.

She has combed her hair forward, making her look younger. Her breasts swell nicely under her black sweater. I wish we were staying right here. The way I feel now I wouldn’t care if she were seventy.

On the jukebox is some song about a man whose woman has betrayed him with “Backdoor Jack” after he left for work at a hospital in the early morning hours. I can relate to that. What better time than the freshest part of the day?

On the drive back, she waxes nostalgic about her father who had brought her south with him at the last moment.

“I was going to stay with my older sister in Buffalo. Gwen was married, but Dad was afraid her husband would seduce me, or one of his brothers would. They were Irish, and every one of them was extremely good-looking.

Dad didn’t trust them.”

Oddly, despite all the confidences we shared, Angela never told me this story. Muddy, barren fields skip by in a blur as I gun the Blazer up to seventy-five. When I was a child there was only one crop. The soil yielded year after year the “white gold.” Cotton was still king and admitted no rivals.

Now, after a love affair with soybeans, it has come back.

“Why did he think he could trust me?”

“He knew your mother had shipped you off to Subiaco, and I told him how religious you were. I think he figured you were too eaten up with guilt to seduce me.”

“I almost was,” I admit. Yet did I seduce her-or was it the other way around? We drive in companionable silence as I think back on that first summer I knew Angela. Mr. Butler, a stern agnostic, did seem to approve, as I recall, of my own religious fervor. I ask, “Do you think your father ever knew what was going on?”

Angela shakes her head at the psyche’s longterm capacity for denial.

“He would have had to have been in a coma not to. You radiated guilt like an atomic bomb. Typically, I convinced him that you were merely having impure thoughts. Poor Daddy. To be such a smart man, he could be such an idiot.”

Typically? Was I not the first?

“What about the blood?” I ask, forlornly, more than thirty years later.

“I thought you were a virgin!”

Angela reaches over and pats my hand, which is on the steering wheel.

“Menstrual,” she confesses “I was just starting my period that night. It came in handy for a change.”

“Damn!” I say, speeding up. My speed has dropped to forty miles an hour.

“All these years I played this tape in my head that it was the first time for both of us. How many had there been before me?” “Eight,” she says, solemnly.

“Really?” I ask, horrified.

“Men,” Angela says benignly.

“You were the second, for God’s sake! I had dated the same boy for two whole years.”

I keep my eyes on the road, knowing anything I say will sound foolish.

What difference does it make whether I was the first or the second or even the eighth so long as she did not give me a disease? Ego. The male ego. On TV the other night I saw a news clip showing how some very religious teenagers were being given gold rings by their parents for agreeing to stay virgins until they married. Guilt used to be enough, but now it takes heavy metal.

Soon Angela points to a dirt road bisecting a muddy field to my right.

“Our land, mine and the boys’, starts here on the east side of the highway.

When Dwight’s father died, his will divided the property in half.

Dwight was given the land nearest Bear Creek, except the house, which was left to him and Cecil jointly. When Dwight built the house in town, he sold his interest in the one out here to Cecil. Despite the division,

they continued to farm as if it were still all one piece of land.

I wish now Dwight could have bought Cecil out.

He’s not cut out to be a farmer. He’s okay with machines and a hard worker, but you have to be a business-person today to farm, and Cecil’s not.

Dwight got a degree in agriculture at Mississippi State, and Cecil barely got out of high school.”

A blast of wind hits the Blazer as a semi passes us from the opposite direction. A college degree apparently didn’t keep the farm out of trouble.

As she looks out over the bare fields, Angela falls silent. Land.

Since I’ve never owned anything but a single lot, I’ve never understood the attachment.

Maybe Angela is thinking of Dwight and all the work he put into it. The truth is, I don’t know why she brought me out here or what she is thinking. All I see is mud.

“Slow down and turn in to the left by that mailbox,” Angela commands, pointing almost a hundred yards up the highway.

I do as I’m told, and the road becomes gravel instead of goo, as I feared. Soon a one-story faded brick-red house behind a grove of trees comes into view. It can’t be more than twelve hundred square feet and is

almost boxlike in design. Are we visiting Cecil or what?

“Ugly, isn’t it?” Angela says, a brittle tone to her voice, which is a comment that needs no corroboration.

“I can’t imagine why anyone would want it.”

By a butane tank behind a nearby barn I spot a GM truck, whose rusty bed makes me think of those ads on TV showing the number of trucks still on the road with two hundred thousand miles on them, but there is no sign of life around the house.

“This is the old homestead, right?” I ask, assuming that Angela will tell me the purpose of this visit.

“Cecil and Nancy are in Birmingham with their children at a funeral for a couple of days,” she says, her voice betraying a hint of what sounds like contemptuousness.

“You want to go in for a while?” The expression on her face is brutally frank. We won’t be going in just to use the bathroom.

Whew! This is bizarre, but Angela apparently is not ready for me to make love at her house, and isn’t comfortable going to a motel. All I can do right now is imagine what the gossip will be if Cecil and the family show up unexpectedly an hour from now. Yet, didn’t I hope something like this would happen?

“Sure,” I say before she can change her mind, though in truth that doesn’t seem to be something I need to worry about.

I follow her into the house, astonished by her boldness. Cecil’s kitchen table is covered up with a year’s accumulation of bank statements, receipts, IRS forms and two pocket calculators. I feel ill at ease even though Angela apparently has no qualms about using her brother-in-law’s home as a try sting place. Still, the smile on Angela’s face is enough to overcome my scruples, and within two minutes we are rolling around naked in Cecil and Nancy’s bed as if it were our own. I needn’t have worried about rubbers. Angela makes me laugh by withdrawing a fistful from her purse and placing them on the nightstand by the bed.

“Don’t you think that might be about four more than we need?” I ask, more than a little intimidated by the prospect of at least seven orgasms.

The expression on my face makes her burst out laughing.

“I just grabbed up a handful from a box in the boys’ room. I’m not expecting company.”

“Good,” I say, relieved. I was beginning to think Dwight died from something other than cancer.

Her body is amazing; I run my hand over her right hip and am delighted by its suppleness.

“You don’t mind betraying your eighteen-year-old girlfriend?” she asks.

Rising to the bait, I answer, “She’s almost thirty. Actually, we broke up last week.” Aroused by long-forgotten memories and the sight of her

flesh, I add, “It wasn’t that big a deal.”

Angela buries her face into my neck.

“I bet she would disagree.”

“She might,” I allow, not wanting to argue.

Angela’s hands and mouth feel spookily familiar.

Can I really remember after so many years?

“You’re still so sexy.”

She raises her head and pretends to roll her eyes back in mock disbelief and then kisses me hard on the mouth. Yet because I am in another man’s house and bed, I am uneasy.

“I doubt if Cecil and Nancy would be too happy to see me right now,” I say.

“I called them yesterday,” Angela says, stroking my thigh with her hand.

“They won’t get back until late tonight.”

“If they knew, they’d die, wouldn’t they?” I ask. Instead of answering, Angela kisses me again and puts her hand between my legs.