Gideon - 05 - Blind Judgement (7 page)

I wipe my mouth with a paper napkin.

“Jesus, you make Pml sound like a role model.”

Angela takes her bowl over to the sink and begins to rinse it out.

“Paul obviously isn’t a saint. I suspect you’ve probably got some woman hanging all over you, too.”

“I do,” I blurt, “but she’s practically young enough to be my daughter.”

Angela laughs at my admission, her voice booming all over her kitchen.

“Poor Gideon.

What a tragic figure you’ve become.”

I smile. She is mocking me, but it takes me back thirty years when she

used to tease me.

“You know what I mean,” I say, feeling this conversation about to turn even more awkward than it already is.

“I’m sure you haven’t started going out, but it’s not easy to find somebody you’re comfortable with.”

“I don’t expect to find a man,” she says, her voice suddenly faltering.

“Living with Dwight was so simple and easy it was like being in a different century. He was good to the boys, good to me, good to his brother and his family. He worked hard, believed in God, believed in helping others, he never cheated another man, never cheated on me. All he wanted to do was farm, but no matter how long and hard he worked, we rarely had a good year, especially in the last decade. I’m glad he died before he lost it. You know, there is something terribly wrong with this country if a man like Dwight can’t make a living growing food.”

There is a surprising amount of bitterness in her voice I have never heard before, but I suppose it is understandable. She’s lived almost two generations through not much thick and a lot of thin.

I feel a pang of jealousy toward St. Dwight. He probably never had a doubt in his life about anything, but what did it get him? Damn, the poor sucker’s only been dead three months, and I’m ready to go drive a nail into his coffin to make sure he doesn’t try to get out.

“What they say about nice guys is undoubtedly true,” I say, knowing any words of praise I could add would ring hollow. I ask again, “What do you

think you’ll do?”

“You want to buy a farm?” she asks, giving me a wintry smile.

What a ludicrous image that conjures up. I can’t really see myself taking a tractor apart. The last light bulb I tried to unscrew somehow got stuck in the socket, so I just left it for the new owners. At least I left them with a working heating system.

“Even if you don’t sell to Cecil, will you be able to make enough,” I ask, “to get your boys through school?”

From across the kitchen she eyes me suspiciously as if I’m some rich sugar daddy about to make her an offer she doesn’t want to hear.

“I’ll be all right,” she says, closing down suddenly. I feel I can trust her, but for good reason she obviously isn’t ready to go too far with me.

“Does Paul really own half the town?” I ask, deciding to ratchet down this conversation a notch or two. Though I think I understand, it is safer for the moment to talk about the present than the past. Besides, I’m here to learn about the case, not take a trip down memory lane, aren’t I?

My question pulls Angela back to the table.

She wets her lips with her tongue and swallows like a child taking medicine that isn’t as bad as she feared.

“Maybe all of it,” she says ruefully.

“After the boycott by the blacks, people who had been here for decades began to leave Bear Creek.

Oscar had brought Paul in with him by then, and they bought property downtown dirt cheap. Even though it’s been almost twenty-five years a lot of it is still just sitting there. On the other hand, Paul doesn’t seem desperate enough to kill anybody over another business. From the way he travels, he appears to have plenty of money.”

I sip my coffee, now cold, wondering not for the first time today how much time has changed Angela.

“Do other people admire Paul,” I ask, “or are they just afraid of him?”

Angela hunches her shoulders.

“To the white population he’s the air we breathe. He could raise the rents on his buildings, and close the doors on twenty businesses, black and white. The town would almost die completely, and it’s not because we don’t have some talented people here. But all the whites are, by necessity, in bed together. The blacks have unified whites like nothing else could. We’ve got the worst schools in the state, the highest rate of teen pregnancy, the highest infant mortality rate. And the blacks are not going to rest until they’ve taken over politically.”

As she talks about the political gains made by blacks recently in Bear Creek, I remember again how idealistic she was as a teenager. At eighteen Angela said that if the whites in Bear Creek would be willing

to compromise, everything would work out just fine. Doubtless, that was part of her attraction for me. She couldn’t have been more different from the local girls if she had come from Mars. If I preached that summer to her about the virtues of Catholicism, her text was the evils of Southern racism. According to her, blacks had been the victims of slavery, rape, peonage, segregation, usury, in a word or two, total economic and political exploitation, but she hadn’t even gotten warmed up. Separate wasn’t equal, and all she had to do was point to the crumbling school and the gravel streets in the Negro sections of Bear Creek. It was the denial, Angela preached, of basic political rights in a so-called democracy that should shame me the most. Free speech, the right to vote, the right to hold office, these were just empty words in Bear Creek for over half the population. The only Negro in city hall, she pointed out, pushed a broom. We had treated Negroes worse than our dogs, and because it was coming from Angela, and not the NAACP, SNCC, SCLC, or some other civil rights group, I could see for the first time in my life that every word was true. By the time I left for the University of Arkansas I had become that rare animal—a Southern liberal. I didn’t know then that things weren’t exactly wonderful for blacks in the North. It took the TV images of Louise Day Hicks and South Boston years later before it sank in how segregated things were north of the Mason-Dixon line. But no wonder we fell in love that summer! Who could have withstood all that sincerity?

“The county’s now seventy percent black,” she tells me as if she were some big-city ward politician.

“It took that high a percentage before they could really begin to take over.”

I try not to sound snide, but I can’t help but comment, “You don’t seem quite as sympathetic to blacks as you were that summer before we went off to college.”

It is as if I have slapped her in the face.

“You don’t live here,” she begins automatically, but already I see color in her cheeks.

“It’s changed; they’re violent, they use drugs…”

“Whites do, too,” I bait her.

“You can’t have forgotten how you used to rake the South over the coals for keeping blacks down.”

“You’re absolutely right. I did,” she says flatly.

“I must seem like a terrible hypocrite, don’t I?”

She smiles, reminding me of how quickly she used to give in on the few occasions I convinced her that she was wrong. A delightful quality in anybody, but especially in a dogmatic eighteen-year-old from New Jersey. It made me respect her.

“Thanks to you,” I say, winking at her, “I went off to save the world.

Talk about hubris!”

Her eyes shine with the memory of the power she had over me.

“I really admired you for joining the Peace Corps. I would have written, but Dwight got jealous every time your name came up.”

St. Dwight jealous? How nice!

“I thought he was perfect,” I say maliciously. What an advantage the living have over the dead! Short-term, of course, but even if all you have is the last word, it’s still satisfying.

“Every jewel has a flaw or two,” she says smugly.

“He was pretty close to being a ten, though.”

Every time she mentions how wonderful he was I want to puke. Why am I such a jerk? I had a good marriage. In the last few months though, thanks to a conversation with Sarah, I’ve begun to realize it wasn’t as perfect as I liked to think it was, but it was a lot better than I deserved. Yet it’s probably normal to idealize a dead spouse. It’s a hell of a lot easier to get along with a memory than the reality of someone’s day-to-day irritating habits.

“Death’s a pisser, isn’t it?” I say, still feeling out of sorts.

“What did Woody Alien say about it—that it was the hours that bothered him?” I laugh, knowing I am sounding needlessly cruel.

“Who else is still around that I knew?” I ask, wondering if the entire town is in Paul’s hip pocket.

“I’ve got my high school annual in the hall,” she answers and rises to get it when I nod.

I look out the kitchen window into the backyard and notice the dark shapes of two magnificent trees, one pecan and the other a magnolia.

How do people in places like west Texas and New Mexico stand to live without real trees? Nothing in nature is more satisfying. Could I live over here again? I don’t know. Angela returns with a dark gold book and sitting down again across from me, slides it across the table.

“I keep forgetting you’re not in there.”

“Thank goodness,” I say, glad I don’t have to be confronted with what thirty years has done to me.

“You were handsome!” Angela exclaims.

“And you’ve hardly changed.”

“That’s silly,” I say, turning to Angela’s senior class. Actually, I am flattered beyond belief. I know she’s lying, but maybe not too much.

“Is Gary Holt still here?” I ask, looking at a picture of a boyhood friend who went through the University of Arkansas and then returned to Bear Creek to run his father’s Ford dealership.

Angela shakes her head.

“Almost a year ago he sold it and moved to Memphis to become an

Oldsmobile dealer. The day they left, Martha told me Cary didn’t want them to be the last white family in Bear Creek.”

Damn. Gary’s family had lived in Bear Creek since it was founded after the Civil War. When people like him begin to move, you know the town is in trouble. With the aid of the yearbook I ask about others I would have graduated with, and Angela helpfully provides a running commentary on their whereabouts. Surprisingly, several are still in or around Bear Creek. Despite the economy, a few whom I knew fairly well have flourished: Jeff Starnes is one of only two physicians in the county; Darby Nails has a CPA business that has offices all over the Arkansas Delta, John Upton farms and owns several businesses, including an insurance agency downtown.

“If you had come to any of the class reunions,” Angela reminds me, “you’d still know everybody.”

I look at John’s picture and wonder how much information he would give me. He and I had been inseparable in junior high before I got shipped off to Subiaco. Each year I would hang out with him during the summers, though our relationship never quite recaptured its adolescent intensity.

“I always had ambivalent feelings about this place,” I confess.

“Rosa was so dark that I was afraid somebody would make a crack about her.”

“If your daughter really looks anything like her, any remark would have been out of envy,” Angela says, not denying the possibility.

“Your mother was so proud of you when you joined the Peace Corps. She thought you were going to save the world, too.”

I tell her, “She would have been delighted if you and I had gotten married even though you were a Yankee. Of course she didn’t know what we were doing in the backseat of her car.”

Angela laughs selfconsciously, and suddenly I feel a sexual charge in the room. She shifts in her seat and studies the place mat in front of her.

“I would have married you,” she says solemnly, “but you never asked.

Though it worked out for the best for us both, how come you never did?”

I look at the top of her head, now bent, and see a small but unruly patch of gray hairs. It has taken her more than a quarter of a century to ask this question, and I still don’t know the answer.

That last summer I loved her as much as I was capable of, but how much was that? My head obsessed with the sacrificial lives of the saints, and the rest of me one unrelenting sex hormone, there wasn’t a lot of room left for single-minded devotion to one girl, however idealistic her mind and rounded her ass.

“I was too young; you remember I was pretty callow back then.”

She shrugs.

“Do you realize you were the only person I ever preached to? I guess I

felt safe with you.”

Angela has begun to worry a spot on the mat with her ring finger. A modest diamond glints in the overhead kitchen light. At this moment an orange and black cat pushes through a tiny door by the kitchen window and leaps onto her lap.

She strokes its back and coos, “This is Baby Dave.”

“Hello, Baby Dave,” I say, wondering what we do now. I’m not sure what Angela needs or even wants. For reasons I do not understand I am attracted to her again as much as I was when I was eighteen. Why? Is it simply nostalgia for lost innocence?

“Am I so middle-aged crazy that I think I can capture that again? In her passionate, arrogant way, Angela embodied ideals I had never encountered. But what is delicious about her now is that there is not even a trace of self-righteousness in her. I can only conclude she is what she seems: a complex, mature, enormously appealing woman my age, and one I can understand, given enough time.

Baby Dave leans back against his owner’s diaphragm and begins to purr.

“Gideon,” Angela says, using my Christian name for the first time, “I’d very much like for us to be friends. I’m still half-crazy right now.”

I know what she means. To get through the day, you have to repress.

But sooner or later, the feelings and memories, bittersweet and painful, come at all hours of the day and night.

“I understand,” I say, truly sympathetic as she drops Baby Dave to the floor and begins to cry again.

I must not take advantage of her, but I don’t stop myself from getting up from my chair. Awkwardly, I reach down and hug her while she sobs against me. Her face against my cheek is burning hot. Knowing I shouldn’t, I kiss her.