on returning to my office from my plea hearing in circuit court I spot through the glass doors a woman I assume is Lucy Cunningham standing at Julia’s desk. Dade has her identical copper coloring, her handsome face. I see Julia’s lips move, and the woman turns to look at me as I push open the glass. She nods, unsmiling, before I can call her name. Not exactly pretty (though she may have been as a girl), she is a tall, striking woman with a full, sorrowful face. Whom does she remind me of?
Coretta Scott King, the widow of the slain civil rights leader, whom, I realize, I’ve never observed to smile in all the years of seeing her on television.
“Mr. Page,” she says quietly, with more dignity than usually heard in our waiting room, “I’m Mrs. Cunningham, Dade’s mother.”
She offers her hand. My immediate impression is that this sophisticated woman is not a likely candidate for wife of a black store owner in the rural Delta. She’s wearing a red-and-white-striped knit tunic over a matching red skirt and four-inch heels. She is my height and looks to be about my age. Her hand, soft to the touch, offsets some of her severity, and yet, such is her presence, that even Julia, unoccupied behind her desk, falls silent as I greet my client’s mother and escort her back to my office.
“Would you like some coffee?” I ask as she sits down across from me.
“No, thank you,” she says, studying my diplomas be hind my head.
“What else have you learned about Dade’s case?”
So much for small talk. I pull out my notes and for a solid hour we discuss her son. She questions me closely about what I have learned about Robin Perry. Women, if Lucy Cunningham is any guide, are ruthlessly cynical about each other. We men only think that we pursue women. Judging by her manner and questions, Mrs. Cunningham knows better, or perhaps she simply knows how the female sex reacts to her son. Are black women, I wonder, more suspicious than their white counterparts?
Rosa, I remember now, thought so. Black women were “in the bottom of the barrel,” my wife uttered once in that quaint way she had of translating English into Spanish and then rendering it back into the American idiom.
“I wonder if Dade sat down by her in that communications class,” she muses, in a soft bottom-land accent that is rich as the silt from the Mississippi River, “or whether she picked him out.”
I make some notes of my own.
“I’ll ask him,” I say, more impressed with her than her husband. Roy, in the few minutes I spent with him, seemed angry and bitter.
Lucy Cunningham is far more subtle and determined.
“He probably didn’t notice,” she says dryly.
“Until this happened, he was pretty full of himself.”
I nod, glad that she has a more realistic view of her son than her husband.
“It’s easy to see why he would have been,” I say, wondering what it would be like to be the object of all that attention.
“He’s movie-star handsome and a Razorback, to boot. Heady stuff for anybody in this state.”
Lucy Cunningham sighs and seems to look past me at the wall.
“Except for the one or two who are good enough for the pros,” she says, her voice soft and re signed, “it’s mainly a waste. They don’t go to Fayetteville to get a degree; they’re there to win games for the greater glory of the people who run this state.”
There is no bitterness in her voice. That’s just the way things are, her tone implies. I disagree. Sports is the only unifying force in Arkansas, the only successful enterprise black and white males share.
“Didn’t your husband follow the Razorbacks before Dade went to Fayetteville?” I ask, smiling, to let her know I take issue with her but don’t want a fight.
“As long as we win for you,” she rebukes me.
“We all get along together until something like this comes up.
Roy knows that. Do you think Nolan Richardson has any illusions about why whites think he’s become a good basketball coach in the last few years?”
“He’s very successful now,” I concede, hoping I haven’t alienated her. A white man’s naivete is par for the course.
“After his first couple of seasons, they said he was a good recruiter, but a bad coach,” she lectures me.
“If he starts losing again, they’ll say the same thing, meaning, he’s dumb. We know what most white people think about us.”
I blink at the bluntness of this woman, but I realize she must consider me different from the average white. Still, I am uncomfortable with the way this conversation is going and point to the front page of the Democrat-Gazette.
“A lot of people are supporting what Coach Carter did yesterday.” An informal survey by the paper showed more support than I anticipated. There was the expected grumbling by some women’s groups and some others, but no official word by the university that anyone had filed a complaint with the All-University Judiciary Board, the school’s internal mechanism for dealing with this kind of case, according to the paper. Predictably, some feminists were outraged, calling Carter “a Neanderthal who should be fired. Carter’s actions condoned violence against women, etc.” etc.
Mrs. Cunningham has been making notes in a three ring binder notebook and taps the blue plastic cover against her lap.
“But a lot of people are upset by it, too. I hope it was a good idea to try to keep him on the team.”
I reassure her that it was.
“The best way to ensure Dade gets a fair shake at the trial is not to let anyone shift the burden of proof onto him beforehand. I know you don’t know me, but I want you to trust me on this.”
She says, unsmiling, “I know very well who you are, but you don’t have the slightest idea who I am, do you?”
Puzzled, I squint at this woman as if her identity will become apparent if I continue to stare at her. There is nothing about her that is familiar, but my memory for faces is so bad I could have easily met her in the past. Yet, someone with her direct manner and striking appearance would be hard to forget.
“I meet new people almost every day,” I say, as if this fact were a decent excuse.
“I’m from Bear Creek,” she says abruptly.
“Believe it or not, you and I have the same grandfather.”
“I beg your pardon?” I exclaim. Suddenly, ancient gossip, never substantiated, and fervently denied by my mother in a long forgotten conversation when I was six teen, spews up in my brain like mud dredged from a canal. Bobby Don Hyslip had called me a nigger-lover one broiling summer night at the Dairy Delight, and I had made the mistake of listening to him. Bobby Don, whose alcoholic father was a fixture at the Bear Creek city jail, had never liked me because he claimed that my father, a schizophrenic and alcoholic, had always received special treatment from the powers than ran the town until he died when I was fourteen. Bobby Don was absolutely correct.
His daddy. Barney, was a worthless river rat who fathered kids all over town and never worked two days straight at his job at the sawmill, while my father was a respectable druggist who owned his own business for twenty years until his illnesses got the best of him.
“You’re always actin’ so superior. You know your granddaddy knocked up a nigger bitch!” he had yelled out of his beat-up Ford.
“You got high-yeller cousins runnin’ all over Bear Creek.”
With that, he had peeled out in the gravel. That night when I got home I had confronted my mother who swore there wasn’t a word of truth in the story. I didn’t believe it then and don’t believe it now.
Lucy Cunningham’s face softens.
“I’ve known who you were since I was a little girl. Your daddy owned a drugstore on Main Street before he got sick and hung himself in the state hospital.”
This casual account of my father’s death, though correct, irritates me by its presumptuousness. Since he owned the only drugstore in Bear Creek, it does not surprise me she knows a little of my history. My paternal grandfather had been a small-town entrepreneur, owning a service station, the first car wash, a diner, and now that I remember it, according to my sister Marty, for a short while he owned a liquor store and the movie theater in the black section of Bear Creek. His proprietorship of the latter two enterprises was hardly proof he had a sexual relationship with a black woman.
“Did you hear that growing up?” I ask. Granddaddy Page died from a heart attack when I was about ten.
Lucy Cunningham gives me a knowing smile, but her voice is less intense.
“Many times.”
When I was growing up in Bear Creek, gossip was its major form of recreation, and racial segregation was hardly a barrier to its transmittal. It sounds like the kind of crap Barney Hyslip would make up and repeat endlessly at his occasional job at the sawmill. I have no intention of dignifying that kind of talk.
“How did you get my name?” I ask, my voice stiff.
Lucy leans back in her chair, apparently regarding me with satisfaction.
“When you represented that black psychologist charged with murder, I saw your picture in the paper and realized who you were,” she says, folding her arms across her breasts.
“James told me you lived right down the street from him and had been married to a South American woman darker than me.”
Is she insinuating that a predilection for black women runs in my family? Of my childhood in Bear Creek I re call only selected vignettes, few having to do with my grandparents. Everything was subservient to my father’s growing paranoia that the Communists were taking over the country and his eventual hospitalization and suicide.
“Rosa was truly a remarkable woman,” I say, determined not to sound defensive. I don’t feel comfortable with Lucy Cunningham. Why has she brought up the rumor about my grandfather?
“Gloria told me your wife was beautiful,” Lucy Cunningham acknowledges.
“She liked her a lot.”
“Rosa never met a stranger,” I say, forcing a smile.
There is no hostility in her voice. Probably, she sees this wild story as a bond rather than as a barrier. I don’t know.
I am guilty only of ignorance and the arrogance that comes with being white. They knew us; they had to know us. As a child before the civil rights era, I had no need to know more than the first names of the men who cut our grass and the women who ironed my family’s clothes.
“Gloria says you haven’t been much of a neighbor since she died,” Lucy observes.
“How come you haven’t moved out?”
“No need to.” I shrug, embarrassed to admit the reason is financial.
“Except for the sounds of gunfire coming from the housing development a few blocks away, it’s a quiet neighborhood.”
Abruptly she stands up. It is as if I had said that except for stomach cancer, I feel pretty good.
“I hope you can help my son,” she says, extending her hand to me.
I take it and gently squeeze her dry palm against my sweaty one. For the last few minutes this woman has had me totally off-balance. I’m glad this interview is over.
“I’ll do everything I can.”
As I step inside the waiting room after the elevator door shuts, Julia remarks, “Did your wife look like that?”
Never ceasing to be amazed by what comes out of her mouth, I gawk at her. There is no sarcasm in her voice.
God only knows what Julia knows about me. Usually, she seems so self-absorbed that I’m surprised when she can remember my name.
“She was darker and a lot prettier,” I say, daring her to make a smartass remark.
Popping a pastel jelly bean into her mouth, Julia says, “You know who she reminded me of?”
“Coretta Scott King,” I answer, again thinking of the bruised sadness in her eyes. Her past has probably left some scars. She wouldn’t have made that crack about my grandfather if it hadn’t.
“Yeah,” Julia says, with what could almost be termed respect in her voice. A first.
“Her husband was supposed to be so great,” she says bitterly, “and he was off screwing all those white women and was so dumb he didn’t even know the FBI was listening. But did she ever act in public like it bothered her? Hell, no. That’s real class. I bet she gave him shit in private.”
There are no other persons in the waiting room. I lean against the wooden counter that separates Julia from the public. Julia, in her twenties, can’t have any personal memories of the civil rights movement.
“I’ve never exactly thought of you as a liberal,” I say, glancing at her skirt as it creeps up her legs. If it rides up much further, I’ll be able to see her belly button.
Following my gaze, she tugs ineffectually at the fabric.
“You guys don’t know anything but what I want you to,” she replies softly.
“All you got is an idea based on what I look and sound like here between eight and five and that’s all.”
My face reddens at my own condescension. She is right, of course. We take her for granted. Her life is probably much richer than my own. I have assumed it was superficial, a soap opera unworthy of my attention except for idle speculation between me and Clan about her sex life.
“That’s true,” I mumble, and return to my office to make a rare call to my sister Marty.
“Come out tonight and Herbert will cook some steaks.
I’m real busy now,” she says loudly into the phone when I ask her if she has time for some questions about Bear Creek. In the background I can hear the sound of women’s voices. Marty owns a used-clothing store in Hutto, a town on the western edge of Blackwell County.
“How’s Herbert?” I ask, wondering what it must be like to have married four times. Marty has said she would keep on going down the aisle until she got it right.
“He’s the kindest man I’ve ever known. If he leaves me, I’ll kill him.” She whispers, “On top of being such a real sweetheart, he’s great in bed, too.”
I feel myself blushing. Is this my unhappy sister Marty? Her life in the last few years has sounded like daytime TV: serial divorces, eating binges, and hot-check charges.
“What time?” I ask, afraid to encourage her.
“About seven,” she says.
“Bring a bottle of red if you want.”
I tell her I will, and before I can put the phone down, Julia appears in my doorway.
“Can you see a walk-in?
This guy looks like he’s got some dough, but I don’t think he’s gonna come back if you don’t see him now.
He’s kind of excited.”
I try to schedule everyone for an appointment, but sometimes it doesn’t work.
“What’s his problem?”
“I don’t know,” Julia replies, clearly uninterested, as she checks her inch-long nails.
“Something about a landlord tenant problem.”
“Sure, I’ll be right out,” I say, hoping the man is the property manager for a corporation that owns half the real estate in Blackwell County. Barton has inspired me.
As long as I don’t have to try to read an abstract, I’ll be okay.
When I get out to the waiting room two minutes later, my potential client is pacing the floor. A short, compact, balding man wearing a plaid sports coat and dark slacks, he looks up and says, “Mr. Page? I’m Gordon Dyson.”
“Nice to meet you,” I say as we shake hands. I escort him back to my office, thinking this guy looks familiar.
Maybe I’ve seen him running at the track. He declines my offer of a cup of coffee and perches on the edge of the chair across from my desk.
“What can I do for you?”
He sighs so heavily that I think he is going to confess he has been embezzling from a bank. Instead, he says in an anguished voice: “I can’t get rid of my son. He won’t leave.”
Dyson looks about my age, maybe a year or two older.
“What do you mean, he won’t leave?”
“He’s twenty-three,” Dyson says, rubbing his head, which is a little too big for his body.
“I paid for his college education, gave him a nice used car, but he came home after he graduated from Duke and now he won’t move out.”
Duke! That must have cost a bundle. At his height, I doubt if the son was on a basketball scholarship. I doodle on my legal pad.
“Is he working?”
“He’s a waiter,” Dyson says, his voice resigned.
“I’ve paid close to a hundred thousand dollars for his education, and he’s a waiter at Brandy’s.”
Brandy’s is a relatively new restaurant in Blackwell County. The night I went there with Clan they never quite got around to serving dinner. The waiters wear bow ties and white shirts. By the time the bill comes, you realize you’ve paid thirty bucks for hors d’oeuvres. It’s hard to justify leaving a big tip when all you’ve eaten is snack food.
“What does your wife say?”
Dyson looks down at the floor.
“She says she knows it’s time for him to leave, but every time I’m ready to go to the mat over this, he makes her cry and she backs down.”
“What’s wrong with kids today?” I say philosophically, wondering if Sarah will turn out this way. She seems independent now, but when she graduates I may have to scrape her off the wall to get her out of the house.
Dyson, still looking down, is, I notice, slightly humpbacked.
He looks as if it is from carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders.
Almost inaudibly, he says, “We’ve spoiled him so bad that he can’t imagine life without a house, an automobile, TV, stereo, a computer, new clothes. The idea that my son might have to start his life without a new automobile paralyzes him. He couldn’t get out of bed for a week after we had that discussion.”
Suddenly, I know where I’ve seen that hump. Dyson’s a cop! Or used to be. I haven’t seen him around in a couple of years.
“Can’t you just pull a gun on him?” I say, only half-joking.
“Surround the house and starve him out?”
Dyson gives me a sour smile, as if he has tried that al ready.
“He doesn’t take me seriously since I quit the force and started my own security business. The more money I make, the worse he gets. I should have waited until he got out of college.”
“What’s his name?” I ask, reaching for a law book on the shelf behind me.
Dyson gives an embarrassed laugh, then says, “His Christian name is Gordon Jr.; his friends call him “Gucci.”
” I can’t repress a chuckle as I flip through a volume of the index to the Arkansas statutes.
“Does he pay any rent?”
“He was supposed to pay a hundred a month,” Dyson says, “but that didn’t last. He owes fifteen hundred if I wanted to count it.”
I locate the Unlawful Detainer Statutes.
“Does your wife ever go on any trips by herself?”
“Sometimes,” he says.
“The business won’t let me get away.”
I run my finger down the page until I find the language I’m looking for.
“Why don’t you surprise her with a trip to New Zealand next month? It should be spring down there. She’ll love it. While she’s gone, we’ll evict him.
We only have to give him three days’ notice. We’ll have him out before he knows what’s hit him.”
Dyson smiles for the first time.
“Won’t I need my wife’s approval?” he asks.
“Her name’s on the deed.”
I put a paper clip on the page so I won’t have to look it up again.
“I’ll send you a power of attorney for her to sign before she goes,” I tell him.
“She won’t suspect a thing if you play your cards right.”
Dyson brings a finger to his lips and begins to chew on a nail.
“What’s your fee?”
If he can afford to send his wife to New Zealand, he can afford to pay me.
“A thousand if he contests it, and I have to make two court appearances. Five hundred if he doesn’t show up and moves out without any hassle.”
He nods. Money is no object, his expression says. I get a few more details and walk him to the elevators. He will call me the moment his wife steps on the plane. As we shake hands, I ask, “Why don’t you just hire your son?”
Dyson’s face darkens.
“I wouldn’t pay that kid to take out the trash.”
“I see.” Confident he will call me, I wait politely until he gets on the elevator and the door closes in my face.
There is nothing like faith in the younger generation.
At the appointed hour I arrive at my sister’s house bearing a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon and am greeted by Herbert, a short, thin, virtually hairless guy in his fifties. An electrician by training, Herbert now owns his own contracting business and builds homes all over Blackwell County.
“Movin’ a lot of paper these days?” Herbert asks, inspecting the wine as he pumps my hand. He is dressed in cowboy boots, denim jeans the color of sawdust, and a sweatshirt with a picture of Ross Perot on the front of it.
“I wish I had invented the fax machine,” I say, taking his question to heart. From my one other visit with him (city hall on their wedding day six months ago), I know he views lawyers as an unnecessary evil. Fixed overhead, he calls us.
“If your profession would agree to be deported,” he says, leading me through the living room into the kitchen, “business activity would jump overnight by fifty percent in the United States, and we’d have the Japanese and Germans on their knees begging for mercy in five years.”
I look around my sister’s living room, which is as big as an airport terminal. Marty’s passion for plants has been indulged to the limit. I feel as if I’m in a green house. The water bill alone must be the size of my mort gage. In the kitchen Marty greets me with a rare hug.
“What do you hear from Sarah?” she asks, pecking me on the cheek.
“I was just up there,” I say gloomily, handing her the wine.
“She isn’t lacking for male attention.”
“If I looked like her,” Marty says, glancing at her husband, who has come in behind me, “I probably would have gotten married five more times before I met the right guy.”
Herbert beams as if Michelle Pfeiffer had told him she wanted to run away with him. True love. It took her only fifty years to find it.
“Sweetness, why don’t you go put the meat on the grill while I visit with my brother for a few minutes? He looks too serious for this to be purely a social call.”
With a beatific smile on his face, Herbert takes the plate of meat and disappears out the kitchen door to the backyard.
“Herbert must worship you,” I say, amazed that a grown man would allow himself to be called “sweetness” in front of another living human being.
“He does,” Marty says happily.
“God knows why.
When I met him I was a hundred pounds overweight, drank too much, and felt sorry for myself twenty-three out of every twenty-four hours. Now look at me!”
I do. Relaxed and calm, Marty hasn’t looked this good since she was a senior in high school. I hope Amy will do for me what Sweetness has done for her. With her short dyed-blond hair cut in a pageboy, Marty, who is two years older than I am, looks almost pretty. Her blue eyes, not as deep-set as my own, along with a small nose and generous mouth are her best features. She is flat-chested, like our mother, and is wearing a man’s blue workshirt (Herbert’s, I presume) and a pair of Bermuda shorts that reveal a decent pair of legs.
“Fantastic,” I concede.
“What’s his secret?”
“Unconditional love,” Marty says, opening her refrigerator
“I thought only dogs and newborn babies got it. I have no idea why he loves me so.”
I lean against the kitchen counter and take the Miller Lite she hands me. Determined to lay Lucy Cunningham’s comment to rest, I blurt, “Speaking of love, do you remember any stories about our paternal grandfather having fathered a child with a black woman in Bear Creek?”
Marty takes her own beer and sits down at the kitchen table. A solid oak, it came from a tree off land owned by my more reputable maternal grandfather, who was a physician.
“So that’s what this visit is about, huh?”
I sit down across from her, taking a “tiddy,” as Marty has long called the rubber container that fits over aluminum cans to keep them cold. I sum up for her the context of Lucy Cunningham’s visit and our brief conversation on the subject.
“Do you know what she’s talking about?”
Marty, in the manner of older sisters, used to get an expression on her face that was half grimace, half sneer, whenever I said something particularly stupid. Forty years later it reappears.
“What utter, pathetic crap!” she says, and pauses to sip at her beer.
“She saw in the paper you represented that psychologist, remembered some old gossip, and thought to herself, have I got a white man by the tail! I bet you a dime to a doughnut they haven’t paid you a fifth of what this case is worth. Am I right?”
I twist my own can in my hands.
“That isn’t all that un usual.”
“Don’t you see?” Marty shouts, though I am less than three feet away.
“She’s guilting you, Gideon! They want you to work for nothing, and that’s how they’re doing it.
You owe us, whitey. Hell, that’s all they’ve been saying for the last four decades! Do yourself a favor, okay?
Don’t get sucked back into all that shit that’s going on over there. The best thing you and I ever did was to get the hell out of eastern Arkansas and never to go back.
Your problem is that you’ve always let yourself get messed up with this race crap. Listen, our childhoods have taken us both thirty years to get over. That’ll never change. You can go over there a million times and never straighten things out. Just be glad you’re free, and stay out of there.”
The anguish in my sister’s voice is real.
“Did you ever hear talk about Granddaddy Page?” I ask, wondering why I never asked her. Actually, now that I think about it, we weren’t around each other much in those days. She worked at Silver Dollar City in Branson, Missouri, during the summers while she was in college, and since I spent the school year at a Catholic boarding school in western Arkansas, by the time I saw her at Thanksgiving I must already have buried it.
Her mouth dry after her speech, Marty swallows a mouthful of beer and wipes her lips with the back of her hand.
“Among a hundred million other pieces of crap, yes, I heard it. When I told Mother, she said he owned some rent houses over in nigger town. One day he went over to collect the rent and stayed more than five minutes and that was enough to get the talk started. All of a sudden he’s some nigger’s daddy. God, Gideon, for a lawyer, you’re so naive!”
I remember why I do not get along with my sister: she has all the sensitivity of a tree frog. Most educated people in central Arkansas are civilized enough not to refer to African-Americans as “niggers.” Marty prides herself on being politically incorrect at all times.
“Mother always tried to keep things from me,” I say, my voice suddenly bitter. I’m angry, but I don’t know why. Perhaps I’m mad at my mother. She never told me Daddy wouldn’t get well again. Marty always knew things I didn’t.
Marty puts down her beer can.
“She coped as best she could. Bear Creek wasn’t exactly a picnic for her with Daddy the way he was and you acting like such a snot.”
As my sister busies herself with making a salad, I ponder what she has said. In fact, she is mostly correct. I was on my way to becoming a small-town punk after my father’s suicide at the state hospital. The monks and brothers at Subiaco Academy chewed at me night and day the first year until I began to straighten up, and I actually began to like the place by the time I was a senior. Marty, I conclude, is probably right on this, too, but I don’t have to fall for it. Lucy Cunningham is trying to get something for nothing. Considering how poor eastern Arkansas is, it is understandable. Growing weary of my sister’s name calling I say, “I take it you don’t call the blacks who shop in your store ‘niggers.”
” Marty points at me with her knife.
“Don’t start that phony liberal crap with me,” she says, her voice immediately warming to the subject.
“If they didn’t act like niggers, I wouldn’t use the term, but good God, why are they so self-destructive? How many of the men support their children? Where are their families? All these damn gangs and senseless shootings they don’t care whether they live or die anymore. Blackwell County has as high a murder rate as New York City, did you read that?”
“Things seem to be getting worse,” I admit, draining the last of my beer. There was an article this week in the Democrat-Gazette about school bus drivers and the anarchy that reigns before the kids even get to the classroom.
The violence, intimidation, and profanity were shocking, and the article, without mentioning the ethnicity of the students, left no doubt about their race. One poor driver lost it fifteen minutes into her route and headed straight to a police station.
“Worse?” she chuckles bitterly, spearing an onion.
“They’re committing suicide. You know, desegregation was the worst thing that ever happened to them. Schools have been fully integrated for a quarter of a century, and they’re still not catching up. Of course, they blame it on whites. They blame every problem they have on racism, and all whites want to do is to get their kids a halfway de cent education and keep their children from being mugged. Even some of the blacks who have money send their kids to white private schools. They hate niggers, too” Despite myself, I laugh, irritated that I am doing so. I say soberly, “A lot of the motivation by whites to get away is just plain discrimination, and you know it.”
Marty again jabs the knife at me.
“Why shouldn’t we be able to discriminate against people who turn the schools into a battle zone? You know the schools weren’t like this when it was only white kids. Below a certain economic level, it’s a whole different culture. Jesus, Gideon, if two come in my store and start jib bering that nigger talk, I can’t understand ‘em.”
I crush my beer can in frustration. It is hard to argue with the substance of what she is saying. At a bus stop I pass every day downtown I can’t pick up half of what is said by the blacks.
“I hope you don’t talk this way around Sarah,” I say, willing to score a point any way I can.
“You seem to forget she is part black.”
Marty finally puts down the knife and replaces it with a peeler and goes to work on a cucumber the size of a base ball bat. Her zest for her work makes me glad she isn’t a urologist.
“It’s not race or color, damn it, and you know it. I’m talking about intelligence and character. Remember the Chinese families we had in Bear Creek. They were smart and they worked their butts off. Henry Quon was vice-president of my senior class and editor of the annual. Mary Yee was captain of the cheerleaders the year before I graduated. Tommy Ting was a year behind you and he was the smartest one of them all. They didn’t ask for a damn thing. Their families worked night and day in those junky stores they owned selling to niggers. I guess they still are. The point is, slavery was the biggest mistake this country ever made. We should never have brought a damn one of them over here, and you know it.”
I cannot resist smirking at this final leap of logic but realize it is pointless to respond. I don’t understand either why blacks haven’t made more progress in the last thirty years. Is everything the fault of whites? She is right about the Chinese families in Bear Creek. The adults kept to themselves, and their children starred in whatever activities were available. I don’t remember that they dated, but, hell, maybe they were afraid they would bring their race down by mixing with us. I flip the empty can into the box Marty has marked for recycling. She doesn’t seem the type.
“So your solution,” I say mockingly, “is to run away from them, huh?”
Marty makes a face that suggests I have been working too long around lead-based paint.
“In this country that’s all you can do anymore. Even the black teenagers carry guns in Blackwell County. If any white public official dared to suggest aloud in public that blacks might be the cause of their own problems, it’d start a race war. This state’s become so damn “PC,” you’d think we were living on a college campus on the East Coast. No white person can say what we think without being called a racist. Hell, it’s easier just to move. Don’t tell me you wouldn’t get out of your neighborhood if you could afford it. Compared to that housing project just east of you Somalia looks like a vacation spa. I’m surprised you haven’t been killed by a stray bullet.”
“Needle Park,” she means.
“It’s not so bad,” I lie. Actu ally, it is. A person drives through the streets of the Blackwell County Housing Authority at his own peril.
Gang warfare, arson, drugs, drive-by shootings, and theft are regular occurrences. A high percentage of the units are boarded up because of the rampant vandalism and pilfering. It is Marty’s strongest argument that something is terribly wrong in the black community.
“Don’t bullshit me,” she snorts, opening her refrigerator and handing me another beer.
“I read the papers. That place is a hellhole if there ever was one. The kids can’t even play outside because of all the shit that’s going on.”
“It’s poverty,” I respond.
“The blacks in my neighbor hood don’t act like that. They’re just as middle class as they can be.”
“I didn’t say every black person is a nigger,” Marty says, washing off a handful of raw carrots.
“But tell me the truth. Ever since Rosa died, you don’t have a thing in common with them, do you?”
“I don’t really have the time to socialize much since being out in private practice,” I say, once more puzzling over the reason why I don’t interact more with my neighbors.
When I returned from the Peace Corps, I had every intention in the world of living out my ideals. After all, I had spent two years in a nearly color-blind society on the northern coast of Columbia. Spanish, Indian, and African blood came together in that area of South America like tributaries forming one giant river.
“That’s crap, too,” my sister says benignly.
“With Sarah off at school, you probably just sit in the house and drink.”
Damn. Has she been peeking in the window?
“Neither of us has led exactly model lives,” I say, more than ready to shift the spotlight off myself.
“You can say that again,” she says, with a big grin on her face.
“But the difference is that I’ve finally got my shit together.”
“And I’m happy for you,” I say sincerely.
“It looks like you’ve got a good fit.”
As if on cue. Sweetness comes in with the meat, and as he passes in front of me, she pinches him on the butt. He laughs, delighted at the attention she gives him. Though Marty and I are not on the same wavelength and probably never will be, I am pleased for her. True love has been a rare animal in her life and is worth a celebration.
We get through the meal arguing politics. Sweetness can’t stand the Clintons. Bill is an opportunistic career politician who can’t keep his pants zipped; Hillary is a ball busting feminist. Since Sweetness’s construction company has benefited mightily by low interest rates and his wife runs a prosperous business, it is hard to take him too seriously. Perot, I point out, sounds like a Peeping Tom with all his investigations of employees and enemies.
“I’d rather have a President who does it,” I say loyally, “than one who pays people to dig up the dirt on the rest of us.”
Marty laughs at me. Politics has never been my game.
I figure we get the government we deserve and usually let it go at that. I drive home, not sorry I came. For all her harshness, Marty makes sense. If I’m smart, I’ll forget Lucy Cunningham ever said a word about my grandfather.
Saturday the Democrat-Gazette is still carrying Coach Carter’s decision and the reaction to it as page-one news.
With Woogie at my feet beneath the kitchen table, I read the paper over a cup of coffee. I had hoped the furor would die down, but as one reporter noted, the women’s groups on campus have found a cause to rally around this year. A new group, WAR (Women Against Rape), has sprung up overnight. Their leader, Paula Crawford, a law student from Rogers, is a long-haired, willowy blonde whose picture reminds me of Gloria Steinem. She claims that the university, by its inaction, “is sending a message to women on campus that they are third-class citizens.” The article says over a hundred women attended.
Other reactions on campus seemed divided.
Though several faculty members who were willing to be interviewed
professed to be outraged by Carter’s decision, some students, typically males, thought Dade should be allowed to remain on the team until he was found guilty of a crime. The leader of the African American group on campus was reported saying that if Robin Perry were black, no one would be paying any attention, a fact, he claimed, which showed that “racism is alive and well on the University of Arkansas campus.”
My eyes wander back to the picture of war’s leader. She isn’t bad looking. Years ago, you used to hear more about feminists. Rosa, I recall, had mixed emotions about them.
She liked the part about equal pay, but being a devout Catholic made her uneasy about their stand on abortion. I remember that she went to a couple of meetings, but they got mad if you disagreed with them. Rosa liked men. A lot of them didn’t, she said.
While I am reading the funnies, the phone rings.
“Dad,” Sarah says, when I answer the phone in the kitchen.
“Did I wake you up?”
Instantly I think something is wrong. It is only nine o’clock. To my knowledge, Sarah hasn’t been up this early on a Saturday since she was ten years old.
“Are you okay, babe?” I say anxiously, wondering what she could want.
“I’m fine,” she says.
“I just haven’t been able to sleep very well the last couple of days. I’ve been going to some meetings that have been held by a group of women who are upset that Dade is still allowed on the team. You may have read about it. They call themselves WAR Women Against Rape.”
I pick up the front section of the paper again.
“What do you think of Paula Crawford?” I ask, squinting at her
picture.
“Do people like that still burn their bras?” I ask, hoping I can get her not to sound so serious. Her voice sounds like it did when she got on her fundamentalist kick a couple of years ago.
“Dad, they make a lot of sense,” my daughter says, “if you take the trouble to listen to them. All she does is point out that this country has a history of violence against women that has become an epidemic. I’ve never paid much attention to women who identify themselves as feminists but she really isn’t all that radical. Dad, I want you to be honest. Do you think Dade could be lying to you?”
I look out the kitchen window and see nothing but driving rain. The weather for the game in Knoxville this afternoon is supposed to be no better. Dade won’t even be able to see the ball, much less catch it, if it doesn’t clear up a little.
“Sure, he could be. That’s always a possibility. But after listening to him for two days, I’m convinced he’s not.”
“Do you realize how common date rape is?” Sarah asks.
“It happens a lot.”
“I don’t doubt it. But the problem with statistics is they don’t help you decide if a particular male at one moment in history did or didn’t commit rape. It’s like saying women don’t do as well at math as men and then making a prediction about how you’re going to do on a test.”
“That’s not the point,” Sarah says.
“A student has been accused of a violent crime, and it’s business as usual.
That’s wrong. He should at least have been suspended from the team until this is over.”
“Why?” I argue.
“Why should one student have that kind of power over another? Dade is no threat to her. All he wants to do is play football.”
“He shouldn’t be allowed to!” my daughter says emphatically
“She’s quit the cheerleading squad; it should be the other way around.”
This is interesting news. Maybe some of her col leagues will be more likely to talk to me about her if she’s no longer around.
“I think she’s overreacting,” I say unsympathetically.
“I doubt if Dade would try to assault her in front of fifty thousand people.”
“Don’t you understand. Dad?” Sarah almost shrieks.
“She feels ashamed. Everybody knows who she is. She’s been degraded and humiliated by this. Her life is going to be affected forever, and everyone else is acting as if it’s only the accused who has rights. What about her right as a student to be believed, to be taken seriously? The police believed her enough to file charges, at least.”
“The assistant prosecutor,” I correct her, and then ex plain he may have been influenced by personal considerations I add, “She’ll be taken seriously in court, and the likelihood is that because Dade is black and the jury will be white, he won’t be. Women can complain all they want to about the difficulty of proving a rape charge, but when the accused is a black male, it’s a different story.”
Despite trying to keep my voice under control, I know I am almost shouting at her.
“Besides,” I add trying to lighten things a bit, “Dade may be our kinfolk.”
As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I wish I hadn’t said anything. Sarah exclaims, “What are you talking about? How could he be?”
“He’s not at all,” I say hastily and then have to explain about Lacy Cunningham’s visit and her remark and then my mother’s denial.
“It’s the rankest kind of gossip, but once it gets started, people will repeat it for the next fifty years. I know how the President feels. If you believe what you hear, he’s gone to bed with every woman except Mother Teresa.”
“But it was Dade’s great-grandmother,” Sarah says, refusing to laugh.
“His mother ought to know whether it was true or not.”
“No, she doesn’t!” I say sharply.
“She knows gossip.
She knows what she’s been told. Just because somebody repeats a story doesn’t make it true. When are you going to learn that?”
Sarah’s voice loses some of its certainty.
“Is his great grandmother still alive?”
“I don’t think so,” I say, though I have no idea. This is a closed subject as far as I’m concerned.
Knowing I don’t want to pursue this subject, Sarah returns to the reason she called.
“If people didn’t care about winning so much, Dade would probably be off the team,” she says stubbornly.
I start to tell Sarah about what I have heard about Coach Carter and his reputation for sticking up for players, but the truth of Sarah’s remark is self-evident. The pressure to win must be factored in somewhere, whether it is acknowledged or not.
“We blow it up all out of proportion,” I concede.
“You might be right.” I do not want to alienate Sarah. Nobody is more important to me. I tell her that I will watch the game this afternoon on TV with Clan but omit telling her about my date with Amy tonight.
I don’t want to get her started on how young Amy is. We talk a few more minutes about nothing in particular, and I hang up, wishing I had warned her not to get too caught up with WAR. I don’t have anything in particular against the women’s movement, but I know women, just like men, can find reasons to feel they’ve been given a raw deal. Hell, she could have been born a Muslim woman in Bosnia. Now those women have something to complain about.
At two Clan comes over to watch the game, wearing a “Hog Hat,” a red plastic contraption complete with snout that looks ridiculous but is in great demand. He is also carrying in a cooler of beer, which he seems already to have sampled.
“Go, Hogs!” he screams as he sits the cooler down beside the couch in my den.
“Kill the bastards!
Cripple ‘em! Tear their heads off! Rah! Rah! Rah!”
I laugh, knowing Clan doesn’t really care about the game. In fact, he visibly flinches at a particularly vicious tackle. It’s the beer and comradeship he enjoys. I take a Miller Lite and tell myself to go slow. The last thing I want to do tonight is nod off at nine o’clock.
“I still can’t believe I’m taking that dependency-neglect case you ought to be doing,” I chide him as the Razorbacks kick off.
“I’ll get you back, don’t think I won’t.”
Clan plows into the cheese dip I have provided, using a tortilla chip like a road grader.
“You’re a miracle worker,” he says, grinning.
“You’ll get her off. You know as well as I do that Dade Cunningham ought to be here watching with us instead of getting his butt soaked in Knoxville.
Did you bribe Carter or what?”
As the game progresses, I tell him what has occurred. Clan may not be
much of a courtroom lawyer, but he usually displays some common sense as long as it is not related to his personal life. While we talk, the Hogs look tight as if all of them are feeling the pressure, not just Dade. Tennessee scores twice in the first quarter and would have scored again in the first half but fumbles inside the ten yard line. On offense Jay Madison, the Hogs’ quarterback, overthrows Dade twice, once for what would have been an easy touchdown. Open underneath a deep zone coverage, Dade has caught five short passes but has dropped one in a critical third-down situation.
Once he does catch it, he runs without authority, unlike the first five weeks of the season when he averaged twenty yards a reception.
As the teams come off the field at halftime, Clan mutters, “What’s the fuss all about? They couldn’t beat their way out of a paper bag.”
I open only my third beer of the day and push the “mute” button.
“They can’t even blame the weather,” I say gloomily. The rain has stopped, leaving the turf slick, which gives the offense an advantage, since it presumably knows where it is going.
“Carter might want to take advantage of the halftime and make some calls for a job in the Knoxville area,” Clan cracks.
“He bet on the wrong horse. I almost feel sorry for him. What’s he really like? He looks like he’s a hundred years old.”
I watch Carter on the screen trotting with his head down to the visitors’ dressing room. His eyes appear to be almost shut and his lips moving.
“He’s praying for a stroke,” Clan hoots, “so he won’t have to come back out on the field.”
“That or a drink,” I say, marveling at the pressure men put themselves under. No wonder we die sooner than women.
“He’s probably not a bad guy, just in over his head like the rest of us. He gave me the impression that he cares about Dade, but who knows? He’s got a lot riding on him.”
“Like you, huh?” Clan says softly. I have told him how much I would like to negotiate a pro contract for Dade.
“Like me,” I admit.
In the second half the Razorbacks play like a different team. Dade catches six passes in the third quarter alone and runs like a wild man, scoring twice, and with the second extra point the score is tied at 14 to 14. In the fourth quarter Dade takes some sickening hits as the Vols’ safety, gambling now that he isn’t going long, time after time explodes against his back just as the ball reaches him.
“He’s going to need a bone surgeon just to scrape him off the field,” Clan says, wincing after a particularly brutal tackle. Still, Dade holds onto the ball.
“What did Carter tell them at halftime?” I ask, delighted with the change in their play.
“He’s a genius, all right,” admits Clan.
“We can’t even get Julia to take her turn at making the coffee. Maybe Carter can come to the office and give a talk on motivation.”
With Tennessee leading 17 to 14 with five minutes to go, the Hogs begin their final drive from their thirty.
Double-teamed now, Dade is used as a decoy until in the final minute, he slants across the middle and catches the ball without breaking stride and reaches the three when he is crushed by two huge tacklers. After a timeout, with the entire crowd on its feet, according to the announcers, Jay Madison sends Dade, followed by three defenders, into the left corner of the end zone and then practically walks in untouched for the victory.
Clan and I yell and give each other high fives, startling Woogie, who watches from the end of the couch.
“God, this was great,” Clan says, “and I don’t even care.”
I am limp and almost hoarse from yelling at the TV screen. How odd that this should matter so much. I, and most of the rest of the state, will be happy the rest of the day. In large part, we have Dade Cunningham to thank for that. I hope people will remember it.
Totally out of character, Saturday night I bring Amy flowers.
“Why, Gideon, how nice!” she says, obviously flabbergasted but pleased as she opens the door.
“You don’t seem the type to buy a girl play pretties.”
“It’s pretty rare,” I admit.
“I’m basically cheap and unromantic but still very lovable.” I hand her the flowers and wander around her living room. Amy lives in an apartment just off the freeway. It seems inevitable that I compare her to Rainey, whose living room was filled with books. I don’t even see a bookcase, just pictures by artists I’ve never heard of. I liked Rainey’s house better, with its hardwood floors and plants. But what did books ever do for our relationship?
“I didn’t know you were into art,” I say, staring uncomprehendingly at an abstract poster.
“Still sorta, kinda, a little, I guess,” Amy says, coming up beside me.
“I got a degree in art history at college. Really dumb a rich girl’s major. My father was a retired factory worker in Jefferson County. He worked overtime at a paper mill in Pine Bluff so I could study in the East what Picasso was thinking about during his Cubist period. I’d come home from college every June, and Daddy would ask me what I’d learned. I think I gave him a little stroke every year. I didn’t have the nerve to ask him to pay for law school.”
“How’d we do it?” I say, remembering my own exhaustion during those years. Amy worked in the circuit clerk’s office during the day, and walked across the street to go to school at night.
“I didn’t do it very well,” Amy admits.
“My grades, you remember, were average.”
“Better than mine,” I point out. Amy is a good lawyer.
In fact, she was a rising star in the prosecutor’s office until she got pregnant a couple of years ago and had an abortion. Her boss, a right-to-lifer, disapproved, and Amy left shortly afterward.
At Amy’s suggestion, we drive out Damell Road to eat at the Greenhouse, a Mexican restaurant open only on the weekends. Dressed in jeans and an old Clinton-Gore T-shirt, Amy teases me as we get out of the car.
“Who is celebrity lawyer Gideon Page escorting tonight to the fashionable Greenhouse restaurant? Why it’s that cute, pixieish Amy Gilchrist! What a darling couple they make! A blend of ancient history and hot-off-the-press slut puppy. Page is taking her arm; no, he’s leaning on her. She gently touches his face; no, she’s wiping it. She murmurs sweetly into his right ear. He cups the leathery, Perot-size orifice and shouts: “What? What did you say?”
” Walking into the restaurant beside her, I laugh and nudge her with my elbow.
“Do we look that ridiculous?”
My voice is plaintive, my worst fears activated.
“If they bring a highchair for me” she snickers “try to take it in stride.”
The Greenhouse is about as plain vanilla as restaurant decor gets. With its bare concrete walls, sturdy Formicatopped tables, and iron chairs, we won’t, despite Amy’s running commentary, make it into next week’s society section of the paper, but the food, chicken enchiladas for both of us, is delicious and reasonably priced.
“I was afraid you’d want to go out to a classy joint and spend my money,” I say over bread pudding and a cup of decaf.
Amy, who is still nursing her first and only beer, shrugs.
“I knew better than that. As cheap as you are, you’d pout the rest of the evening. If I were truly liberated I’d offer to pay half, but I just talk a good game when it’s to my advantage.”
I laugh at this woman, putting me in mind of Rainey at the beginning of our relationship before she got so serious. Or maybe I was the one who got too serious. Nothing is off-limits with Amy. In the fading moments of the late June twilight we drive further out Highway 10 to Lake Maumelle and park overlooking the water, where she asks me about Rainey.
“What happened, Gideon? I thought she had you headed onto the kill floor for sure.”
Marriage as slaughterhouse. I snicker at the image. As we get out of the Blazer, I wonder how to respond.
“Every time we got close,” I say, thinking I see a sailboat in the distance, “one of us would push the self-destruct button. It wasn’t meant to be. We had our chances but wouldn’t take them. She still calls occasionally to ask about Sarah.”
Amy picks up a rock and throws it into the water.
“She’s probably still in love with you. If we start dating and I tell my friends,” she says glumly, “I’ll probably open up the paper and read you two have taken out a marriage license.”
What an imagination this woman has!
“Nope, that’s over with. Actually, Rainey liked Sarah better than me.
What she liked was to rescue me. It was easier than loving me.”
Amy turns and says primly, “I’m not much of a rescuer.”
“Well, I’m not drowning.” I kiss her then. It seems as if we have been doing it for a long time. We stand in the darkness and nibble each other until the bugs get into the act, and then we drive back to her apartment where I accept her invitation to come in for a beer.
Amy seats me at her kitchen table and opens her refrigerator.
“You’re not going to believe this,” she says.
“I forgot I was out.”
I come around behind her and look. The inside is as bare as my own. What do single people eat? She has three Diet Cokes on the bottom rack, and a jar of orange juice on the top with nothing in between.
“I cleaned out the refrigerator today in case you tried to inspect it,” she adds.
As with so many of her remarks, I don’t know whether this one is serious or not.
“I think the point is,” I say with mock solemnity, “there is supposed to be food in here, but I’ll give you an “A’ for effort. It’s really clean.”
“Whew!” she says, shutting the door and leaning back against me.
“I was afraid I wasn’t gonna pass.”
“You passed,” I concede. We resume kissing then, and after a few moments she leads me into her bedroom where we make love. Amy is as passionate as I thought she would be. She seems pleased with my efforts, too, afterward, lying back against her pillows and smiling contentedly in the soft glow of the lamp beside her bed. I think I’m going to like this woman.
At home, in my own bed, I wonder why Rainey and I never made love all those months. Too complicated for her own good, she spent a lot of time picking at life as if it were part of the DNA chain she had to unravel. Amy is more direct and so much less analytical. What did Amy and I talk about tonight? The game, the Razorbacks, her work, not much really. Rainey could get so damn moralistic I’d like to keep things with Amy simple for a while if I can. It’s a nice change.