Gideon - 05 - Blind Judgement (24 page)

From a pay phone at a Fina station, I call the jail to arrange a visit with my client, but when I get out there Bledsoe has come down with the flu. Shaking, his teeth chattering, and complaining of a savage headache, he says he has a fever that is going through the roof. He is too sick to talk, and I tell him I’ll come back next week. The jailer assures me he will be taken to the medical center in Little Rock if he gets much worse, and I head back into town and decide to drop in on my old friend John Upton. Driving through town earlier, I had noticed a light on in the office of the insurance company he owns. A Cadillac was out in front of it, and I doubt if it was his secretary’s.

I have been meaning to talk to John since I went through the yearbook with Angela. He remained a friend even after my father went crazy, and the one thing I know for sure is that I need help understanding what is going on over here.

I drive the Blazer along Main Street and then turn right on Apple and pull up behind the Cadillac. If he’s willing, John can surely give me a perspective on Paul Taylor no one else can. At one time, John’s family had more money than anyone in the county except Oscar Taylor.

Outside John’s storefront, I buy a copy of the Bear Creek Times and scan the paper before I go in.

This issue doesn’t even mention the case, and, in fact, seems to have changed little since I was a boy. All the stories on the front page are about whites. I wonder if African-Americans buy any advertising.

The longest story on the cover is about a man named Buck Canner who is moving to Harrison to work in an electrical business.

Family by family whites are leaving. An article on the back page says that farmers are required to buy crop insurance by the end of next week in order to be eligible for price supports and loans by the Farmers Home Administration. In the center of Bear Creek it is easy to forget this area is dominated by agriculture, and how little I know about it.

I suppose if Angela was going to sell her land to Cecil, she had to do it now. Planting season is just around the corner. I fold up the paper, put it under my arm, push open the door, and hear John on the phone in his office. I take a seat and wait for him to hang up.

John’s father was a farmer, and though John has always dabbled with other businesses, it is the land that has kept him here. I hear John hang up, and I go in to find him sitting behind a large clean desk with a computer on it. He looks damn good. Though he is my age, there is just

a tinge of gray in his sideburns, and I realize he is one of those people whose faces age well while the rest of us grow bigger ears, noses, and warts. Smarter than the other kids I ran around with, John, thinking as a kid he would leave east Arkansas, went to the trouble of becoming a civil engineer before ending up back home in Bear Creek. As far as I can tell, all he has to show for a difficult college major are aerial photographs in his office of enormous bridges and dams. He stands up and gives me a warm smile.

“The man with the silver tongue,” he says.

“Come back to terrorize his old home town.”

I laugh and reach across his desk to shake his hand. Slim (he was chubby and pimply all the way through high school), he is better looking now than he was as a boy.

“You were always the best shit shoveler,” I accuse him. It was true.

John could talk his way out of trouble better than anybody I ever knew.

He grins and gestures for me to sit down across from him.

“At least I didn’t go and make a profession out of it,” he says enthusiastically.

“How the hell are you, Gideon? I’ve missed you.

Are you moving back here? That’s one story I’ve heard.”

God, this place!

“How do you stand it, John?”

I ask, sincerely curious.

“I can’t take a crap here without the whole town wanting to see how much toilet paper I use.”

On his desk he has pictures of his family. As I recall, while in the army at Fort Knox John married a divorcee whose family roots were deeply embedded in the pungent soil of Kentucky Democratic politics. I pick up a photograph of his wife, who hasn’t aged as well as John, but he says proudly, “Our anniversary was yesterday.

Twenty-seven years. Can you believe that Beverly and I are pushing fifty?”

If her photograph is any guide, I can believe Beverly is, but I don’t say so. Like Paul, John could have made it anywhere, but he chose to come home and be a big fish in a pond that’s been going dry for years.

Yet what if I had married Angela and settled down in Bear Creek after college? Had it not been for having to run into the Taylors, I tell myself, I would have enjoyed it.

I have missed seeing people like John, whom I have known since the morning we met in old Mrs. Blount’s kindergarten class, then a private school in her house.

And I have missed knowing the parents and grandparents of my friends.

For better or worse, we knew who we were, where we had come from.

Perhaps, too, Angela and I could have helped to make a difference before such bitterness set in on both sides of the racial issue.

Surely Bear Creek didn’t have to be the tragedy it turned into.

We talk about his four boys, all out of state now, I note. I tell him about Sarah and show him the picture in my wallet. He whistles.

“My boys would like to meet her.”

Not if they were still living in Bear Creek. I finger a photograph of John, Jr.” now an electrical engineer for the state of Oregon, his father tells me. He looks like a carbon copy of John.

“I wouldn’t let them within a hundred yards other,” I kid him, remembering John’s deserved reputation, even in junior high, for mischief.

“Remember the time you shot an arrow at your sister? You should have been prosecuted for attempted murder.”

Even a third of a century later, John blushes.

“I wasn’t really trying to hit her,” he says, and begins to giggle.

“Jesus, we must have been nuts.”

I lean back in my chair, remembering how, bored on a hot summer’s day on Danver’s Hill, he had asked his sister Cynthia, who couldn’t have been twelve, if he could try to shoot at her with his new bow-and-arrow set. Setting a new standard for sibling stupidity, Cynthia asked only for a twenty-second lead. As I began to count, she began to run, zigzagging through the tall grass like some escaping POW. The arrow embedded itself into a tree a foot behind her.

Naturally, she couldn’t wait to tell their mother, and John talked me into taking him on as my first client. With a straight face I told Mrs. Upton, who was hysterical, that John wasn’t even going to release the arrow from the bow and certainly hadn’t been aiming at his sister, and that the arrow had landed ten feet from her, not twelve inches. The bow and remaining arrows were confiscated, but John, as usual, escaped without further punishment.

“You were nuts,” I correct him.

John says, “I’ve been wondering when you were going to come by. Can you believe they’ve charged Paul with murder? This place is crazy now.”

His initial reaction is no different from Angela’s or perhaps any white person’s over here.

Now that John has raised the subject, I ask, “Do you think Paul could possibly be dumb enough to hire somebody to kill an old Chinese man for a meat-packing plant?”

John points with his chin over my head.

“Look behind you.”

I turn and see a dozen photographs on the back wall and get up to inspect them. The pictures go all the way back to 1950. From left to right they show John’s uncle, who began a Ford dealership in Bear Creek with a “grand opening” surrounded by fifteen employees. The last picture, taken two years ago, is of his uncle with five other people.

“Is that all he has now?” I ask.

“The bookkeeper isn’t even full-time anymore,” he says.

“We own some other businesses and some investments in town, but Bear Creek isn’t the place it was when my father was alive.

The Taylors aren’t the only ones who got hurt.”

I study the photographs. It’s like looking at pictures of reunions of those “last man clubs” from World War II. There are fewer returnees almost every year. I realize that despite my conversations with Angela I have been looking at Bear Creek from the perspective of a visitor.

But it is not only a matter of the town looking shabby; John’s point is that it is disappearing economically.

Not only blacks have been losing their land; whites have, too. The agricultural base that supported them no longer exists to the same degree as it did fifty years ago.

“Things are that bad, huh?” I ask.

“Well, there’s still the one factory,” John says loyally, “and we have some retail stores, but they’re not here on the square anymore. When Paul lost a big chunk of their land, they didn’t have any choice but to look some other place to make money. It wouldn’t be easy for anybody.

But whether Paul would go so far as to kill somebody, that’s a hell of a big step.”

I come back and sit down.

“That’s kind of Angela’s position, too.” I have decided not to let John know my feelings about Paul. Though the Uptons never had the cutthroat reputation that the Taylors had, Angela’s reaction has made me cautious.

John’s blue eyes twinkle.

“I had heard through the grapevine that you’ve already called on the widow Marr.You’ve got to hand it to Angela: She looks pretty damn good after all these years. This case seems like an opportunity for you to combine business with pleasure.” He leers at me in a familiar way.

John knows my history with Angela as well as anybody.

“Angela’s still got a lot of grieving to do,” I say, “before she’ll be ready for a relationship with anybody.” I know I sound ridiculous (especially if Angela is ready for us to start going out), but I’m not ready to confess my growing obsession with “the widow Marr.” When we were kids, once he got on a subject, John would never let up.

“What happened to us, John?” I ask, wanting to change the subject from Angela.

“When we were growing up, there weren’t any murders, we weren’t afraid.

Were blacks under such control that none of what goes on today was even conceivable back then?”

John opens a drawer and pulls out a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

I put my coffee down, and he pours me a couple of fingers in a paper cup and hands it to me. He says sternly, “It’s drugs. They’re killing the black community.

You remember those billboards forty years ago that used to say, “Impeach Earl Warren’? You wouldn’t have crack cocaine within a hundred miles of Bear Creek if Eisenhower hadn’t been such an ignorant fool and appointed Earl Warren.

It was his court’s decisions on search and seizure and interrogation that have made people want to buy an arsenal to protect their homes when fifty years ago there wasn’t a locked car or house in the whole town. Hell, you don’t think the cops don’t know who brings drugs into this town?

Sure they do! But you lawyers have taken the cops’ handcuffs and shackled them to their desks and told the drug dealers they have carte blanche. And when you take away a society’s power to protect itself against the bad guys, individuals will arm themselves.”

I sip at the liquor in my cup and remember just how conservative this area of the state is.

Until this moment, I didn’t know John had ever had a political thought in his life. As an adolescent, he was as much a rebel as a future civil engineering student could be, which, granted, wasn’t much, but he didn’t sound like a future charter member of the Rush Umbaugh fan club.

John pauses and catches himself. Despite this sermon, he isn’t a preacher.

“Are you eating at Angela’s?” he asks, a grin returning to his face.

I try to hide my irritation at his assumption that Angela and I are already involved and say, “If you’re inviting me to dinner, I accept.”

I can drive home later.

He picks up the phone and dials his wife, saying, “Beverly’ll be glad to see somebody else. I’m too tame for her these days.”

I’m not sure what this means, but five minutes later with a drink in my hand I follow John to his farm, which is north of Bear Creek about five miles out of town. Two brick stories with four columns in front, his house, a mansion really, is set back from the highway a good hundred yards.

Two horses stand at a white fence staring into my headlights. Built right after World War II, John’s home is still one of the largest in the

area.

Beverly greets us at the door, and I am immediately struck by the affection between her and my old friend. Instead of just a dry peck on the mouth, she kisses him hard on the lips as if they haven’t seen each other in months. Since I was already gone when John brought her back with him, I never knew Beverly. Unlike Angela, she was born in the South. Afterwards she sizes me up like some quarter horse she might be interested in buying.

“So you’re the great Gideon, huh?” she says, her crinkled gray eyes magnified by gold-rimmed bifocals.

Taller than her husband and more muscular through the shoulders, her wrinkled face appears, despite her husband’s opinion, closer to sixty than fifty. I can smell burnt tobacco and spot a package of Camels in the front pocket of her blue work shirt, which hangs down outside a pair of baggy rust-colored pants. Though definitely not a sight for sore eyes, she exudes the warmth of a pot bellied stove going full blast.

“Your husband’s former partner in crime is probably a better way to get a handle on me,” I say, already liking this woman.

“My husband’s a boy among boys, and so are you,” she says, punching me on the shoulder lightly.

“I’m cooking. Y’all follow me,” she orders, taking my coat from me and tossing it carelessly on a small table by the door. Though the house is huge, and I am curious about it, I just get a glimpse of the combination living and dining room as we proceed directly down a hall lined with

books and family pictures.

We emerge into a kitchen that would service a small restaurant. A wooden chopping table sits in the middle of a brick floor. Against the far wall on either side of a stove hang enough pots, pans, and knives to feed all of the white population of Bear Creek. She tells John to fix us all a drink while she is cooking, and, needing no urging, he heads to a pantry at the far end of the room. Beverly points to chairs on the other side of the chopping table.