Joe (16 page)

He tapped a cigarette out of the pack and lit it with a match, waving it slowly in his hand, dropping it on the floor. He crossed the room, sucking at the beer, and stopped to watch a game of eight ball. A thin boy dropped the ball in a corner pocket and another boy gave him a dollar. He moved on, deeper into the room.

He passed under some brick arches and out a door into an open room with no roof. He stood there and studied the stars in the heavens with the beer tilted up to his mouth. Everywhere around him loomed the walls of the old hotel. He finished the beer and set the bottle on one of the benches and opened the door at the far side of the room. He found himself on a landing above a cavernous room so packed with people and music and lights that it made his head sing for a moment. A girl sat at a card table in front of him with a cigar box full of money and a rubber stamp in her hand. He eased up to her and pulled out his green.

“How much?” he said.

She stood up and waved to somebody. Somebody waved back. She turned back around and watched him with eyes uneasy, not believing his ripped clothes, his gray whiskers, his black fingernails.

“Wait a minute,” she said. She pinched her nose and deserted her post and went down the stairs. The old man pocketed his money and stamped the back of his hand with the rubber stamp and went down the stairs behind her. He was quickly lost in the milling crowd below.

Late that night the rain fell thinly in the streets around the square, slashes of water streaming diagonally in the air above the wet sidewalks. Passing cars sprayed it up from their wheels, and the blooming taillights spread a weak red glow across the pavement as the hum of their engines quietly receded into a night no lonelier than any other. The stained marble soldier raised in tribute to a long dead and vanquished army went on with his charge, the tip of
his bayonet broken off by tree primers, his epaulets covered with pigeon droppings. Easing up to the square in uncertain caution came a junkmobile, replete with innertube strips hung from the bumpers and decals on the fenders and wired dogs’ heads wagging on the back shelf, the windows rolled tightly on the skull-bursting music screaming to be loosed from within. Untagged, uninspected, unmuffled, its gutted iron bowels hung low and scraped upon the street, unpinioned at last by rusty coat hangers, a dying shower of sparks flowing in brilliant orange bits. No tail-lights glimmered from this derelict vehicle, no red flash of brakes as it pulled to a stop. It inched forward in jerks, low on transmission fluid. The old man watched these things. Later that night he was thrown in jail.

A public drunk was reported, an inebriated senior citizen whooping out great obscenities on the county square, performing some unmetered step on the timeworn bricks. Two policemen in a dispatched cruiser picked him out, a sly sot now apparently dozing on a green bench. They threw the light on him. He tried to run. The cops left the cruiser idling in the middle of the street and took off after him. Their feet slapped loudly around the sidewalks as the old man hobbled down the steps to the street. Some drunken students from the university were going to their cars from The Rose, and they stopped to watch the fun.

But he was old and the police were young and they hemmed him up against the front of a jewelry store. He elected to make his stand against a backdrop of silver platters and bridal china, his eyes wild and red in the flashlight beams, his thin chest heaving from his exertions. The cops went closer and then suddenly stopped.

“Shit,” said one.

“Goddamn,” said the other.

They seemed loath to put their hands on him. A crowd of students had gathered by then, it being past midnight and the bars now closed, and they stood watching the feinting and dodging. One of the cops approached and the old man immediately tried to put a headlock on him. The cop flung him off like a bundle of rags and he dropped to the pavement and started moaning.

“Stop that,” the cop said. “Get up here. Here.”

The old man huddled into a wretched ball on the concrete.

“Go on and kick me, you sumbitches,” he said.

They stood watching him, unsure of how to proceed.

“Put the cuffs on him.”

“You put the cuffs on him.”

“I ain’t touching him. I ain’t putting my hands on the stinking son of a bitch.”

“What you gonna do? Walk him to the jail?”

“I’d rather, as to have him ride in my car.”

“Listen, now. Get up from there. Get up off the ground. Ain’t nobody going to kick you.”

“I know how you do. Get me over to the jail and you’ll whup the shit out of me. I been in jail before.”

“Aw, no shit. Well, you fixing to be in jail again. Now you get your ass up from there and get over there in that car.”

But he would not rise. He’d either passed out or was using a marsupial’s ruse. They braced him up under his arms. His feet lolled, boneless. They staggered beneath the assault of his body odor. Chickens dead three days in the sun had never smelled so
rank. Ruined elephants on the plains of Africa paled in comparison. The cops gagged and tried to lift him. He lay limp as a hot noodle, quietly exuding a rich reek, a giddy putrefaction of something gone far past bad, a perfect example of nonviolent protest. They went across the square in the dead of night, dragging their prisoner, hapless victims themselves of circumstance, booed and hissed loudly by the students, struggling along with his unwashed wasted carcass like exhausted mules.

City court. Wade sat on a bench with other defendants whose crimes against the town he did not know. He turned his hat in his hands idly. The windows were open in the high walls of the second-story room and the sounds of traffic on the square drifted in. A black uniformed bailiff was nodding himself to sleep in a chair beside the judge’s podium, and Wade thought about just getting up and walking out. Everybody else seemed resigned to their fates. He got up and put on his hat and went to the door. Two lawyers in the room studying their documents looked up at him and looked back down. He opened the door and peeked. An empty hall, closed rooms. He tiptoed out, his feet soundless on the rubber tiles, and closed the door softly. From somewhere came the dull clack of typewriters. A girl turned the corner with a Coke in her hand. He started to ask her how to get out of the building, but he didn’t want to arouse suspicion. When she went into an office, he looked around the corner and saw a blank wall. Halfway down the hall he opened a door and looked inside. A vacuum cleaner and dust mops. He thought about hiding in there for a while, but he knew that soon after capture was the best time for escape. He walked
around the other corner and came to a bank of elevators. He punched a button and a soft little bell rang when the light came on. Sounds came to his ears of mechanical hissings deep somewhere in the entrails of the courthouse, sliding cables and turning gears. He waited. The bell chimed gently again and the doors slid open. He stepped forward. The two cops who had arrested him stepped forward to meet him.

“Where the fuck you think you going?” one of them said.

“I’s lookin for the bathroom.”

He waited a long time for his case to be called. They wouldn’t let him smoke and nobody would sit close to him. The bailiff had given himself over totally to rest, mouth gaping and head back and eyes closed. Wade leaned back and listened as the judge droned on. Sally Bee Tallie, found guilty of assaulting Leroy Gaiter with a cowboy boot. She said the whole thing was her brother’s fault. Roosevelt Higginbotham, a public drunk in his own yard, which he argued unsuccessfully was not a crime. The judge slammed his gavel and fined them or sentenced them to jail or set them mowing grass and picking up litter for the good of the public. People speeding, forty-five dollars a whack. The city making money hand over fist. The public defenders doodling on papers and staring out the windows like children longing for recess. The old man sat with his elbows on his knees, watching the proceedings uneasily with slowly shifting eyes. At last he was called and he stood up. The judge was a man not thirty years old, in a double-knit suit. He studied the papers before him carefully. The cops had long since resigned their chins to the cups of their hands. The judge looked up.

“They don’t have any address for you, Mr. Jones. Where do you live?”

“I live out close to London Hill,” he said. “I don’t know what the address is. Ye honor.”

Ye honor evidently didn’t like that answer. He tapped his pen menacingly on the lectern. He looked at the bailiff but seemed reluctant to call the whole court’s attention to the fact that he was asleep by waking him up. Indeed it was as if a glance at that peaceful face made him uneasy. He looked out over the room and raised his eyes until he was talking to a spot high on the rear wall.

“You’ve got to have an address, Mr. Jones, or we’ll declare you a vagrant. You know what a vagrant is?”

“Oh, yes sir. I ain’t no vagrant.”

“You ever been declared a vagrant before?”

“Well. I been declared one. Shore have. They declared I was one in Oklahoma City one time, but they never could prove it.”

The courtroom had almost emptied, and the cops sat regarding him with their arms crossed and their faces dull with boredom. The judge nodded somberly, chewing on his lower lip.

“Do you ever get any mail, Mr. Jones?”

“No sir.”

“Well, just say you did. Where would the mail come to if somebody wrote you a letter?”

He thought and thought and at length said, “I don’t believe nobody knows where I’m at.”

One of the cops shook his head and the other one closed his eyes. The judge put the pen in his mouth and chewed on it and opened something in front of him. He read for a few minutes.
Then he wrote something down. He cleared his throat and looked down on Wade.

“Are you on a rural route, Mr. Jones? Are there any mailboxes around your house? You do live in a house, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes sir, I live in a house. But they ain’t no mailboxes around there nowhere. I ain’t never seen one. Sir.”

“All right, then. You might want to remember this. Your address would be General Delivery, London Hill, Mississippi, three eight six oh five. You’re charged with public drunk and resisting arrest. How you plead?”

“I don’t know what to do,” he said immediately. “I’m afraid if I plead guilty it’ll be a big fine, and I ain’t got no money to pay it. What if I plead not guilty?”

“You mean, what’ll happen?”

“Yessir. What’ll happen?”

“Well then, we’ll have to have a trial. You’ll have to get you a lawyer and fight it.”

“Yessir.”

“But you’ll have to go back to jail first. Or we’d have to set your bond. Can you make bond?”

“I don’t know. How much is bond?”

“It’ll be about a thousand dollars. Do you know a bondsman?”

“Naw sir,” he said sadly, keeping his head down and shaking it. “I don’t know no bondsman.”

The bailiff jerked awake suddenly and gripped the armrests, his tipped chair slamming down hard on the boards. He glared wildly around.

“And, too, you’ll have to pay an attorney and court costs. These
two officers swore out the complaint against you. Why don’t you just plead guilty and be done with it?”

“What’ll it cost me if I plead guilty?”

“I can’t tell you that until I sentence you.”

Everybody was waiting to see what he’d say. Or waiting to get the hell out of there, one.

“What chance I got of winnin if I fight it?”

“Not much, I’d say.”

“It’s their word against mine.”

“This court does not take the testimony of police officers lightly.”

He knew they had him either way he went. But he was eating pretty good in the jail. Big plates of scrambled eggs and toast with coffee for breakfast and fried meat with two vegetables for supper.

“I reckon I’ll plead guilty, then,” he sighed. “Bad as I hate to.”

“Mr. Jones, this court finds you guilty and fines you four hundred and fifty dollars, payable immediately.” WHAP! went the gavel.

The old man staggered back, almost as if a visible blow had hit him.

“What!” he said.

“Of course, you can always work it off for the city if you can’t pay the fine.”

“Work it off? How long?”

“Oh, we’ll round it off to about forty-five days.”

“Do I have to stay in jail the whole time?”

“You certainly do.”

“I don’t guess I got no choice, then. What kinda work I’m gonna have to do?”

“Whatever needs doing, Mr. Jones. Bailiff, you want to take this man back to the jail? And maybe get a good night’s sleep before court tomorrow?”

They set him to pushing a lawnmower the first day. There were rolling green hills of grass in the park, and against this immense backdrop he was a tiny worker toiling with exaggerated slowness in the early morning heat, a small wretched figure stopping every few minutes to wipe the sweat from his brow. Other captured felons with long knives whacked listlessly at weeds. The whole day and forty-four others just like it stretched endlessly before him. The park was deserted, baking, barren. Sober drunks with nails mounted in mop handles speared bits of trash and deposited them in garbage sacks tied around their waists. The mower blade was sharp and the motor ran smoothly. Wade talked to himself and cursed his luck with a sullen vindictiveness. Each pass he made was about three hundred yards long. They’d have cut it with a tractor and a bush hog if they hadn’t had him, but they had him. He figured they had all kinds of things planned for him, painting curbs and hauling garbage, painting tennis courts and picnic tables. He had resolved to make his escape at the earliest opportunity, but he didn’t know where he was. There was a line of woods rimming the east side of the park where he could conceivably hole up until darkness came, but at the rate he was going it would take him two weeks to get over there.