The Ax (20 page)

“Before the morning,” I say. “There’s more to be done tonight. But there is that, too, in the morning. The lawyer. Who was the lawyer, when we bought the house? Do you remember his name?”

“Amgott,” she says. “I’ll call him, if you want.”

“That might be better,” I agree. “To hear from the mother.”

I leave the car out, don’t put it in the garage, because I’m not finished tonight. “What is it, Burke?” Marjorie asks.

“Some clean-up,” I say.

She follows me through the house into Billy’s room, the room that has been so much neater lately, and I thought it was because he couldn’t afford to buy things any more. I open his closet door, and push the clothing to one side, and there it is. He’s built a bookcase in there, or a software case, three shelves of the stuff. There must be thousands of dollars there, far more than they’d need to move the charge up from petty larceny to grand larceny.

“Oh, Billy,” Marjorie says, as though she might faint.

“We have to get rid of it all,” I say. “Right now, before they come around in the morning with a search warrant.” I smile at her, trying to get her spirits up. “Finally,” I say, “a use for all those plastic bags from the supermarket you keep saving.”

We get her bag of bags from the kitchen, we load them up with the bright-colored little boxes, and we carry the full bags through the house to the side door. Neither of us is at all sleepy.

Billy
should
have these things, he should know about them and have experience of them, if he’s going to make it in the new world coming. I should be providing them, I should be making it possible for him to keep up with what he has to learn. This is my failure. Billy wasn’t wrong to do what he did, he was right. He was wrong to go to the well too often, though.

I’ll never say anything like that to him, of course. A father has responsibilities. Get him out of this mess, but don’t condone, and certainly don’t encourage.

Six shopping bags; they fill up the backseat of the Voyager. I thought I’d drive alone, but Marjorie wants to come with me, and I’m happy for the companionship.

I drive nearly thirty miles through the dark and empty land. We meet only two other cars the whole way. Almost every house is black dark. Every business is shut down tight.

My goal is a different shopping mall, a bigger one, that I noticed once on my drive to Fall City, weeks ago, when I was after Herbert Everly. This place also is shut tight, dark, deserted. I drive around the back of it, then circle the whole complex, to be certain there are no police cars or private security cars tucked away in the shadows, waiting. There are none.

Along the way, I’ve observed the dumpsters, the big green truck-sized trash receivers, out behind the various stores, and I choose the supermarket’s dumpster to stop next to. A faint unpleasant aroma rises from it, which is why I chose it. Boxes, bags, heads of ancient lettuce; so much stuff in there, not picked up on a Saturday night.

I throw the bags in, one after the other. They disappear, anonymous trash. No software shows.

When we drive back homeward, alone in the world, Marjorie holds my hand.

They’re waiting for us when we finally get to the house, the police. I’d thought they would be.

It’s three in the afternoon by now, the whole day is shot. It was impossible to find a lawyer this morning, a Sunday morning, so finally, at around ten o’clock, I called the state police to ask them where the court was, and they gave me an address and a phone number, and I called the court, and spoke with a woman who was determined to be nothing but efficient, not to permit the slightest vestige of individuality or personality to peek through. That might be a good strategy, I suppose, if you answer the phone at the courthouse for your living.

I kept explaining my problem to this woman, and she kept offering me no help at all, no guidance, nothing, and then all at once she asked me if by any chance either I or the defendant qualified to be taken on by the public defender.

That hadn’t even occurred to me. Such things don’t occur to people like me. I said, “I’ve been out of work for two years. I’ve used up my unemployment insurance. I have no income.”

“You should have said so before,” she said, being snippy.

I didn’t bother to tell her I’m not used to offering my failure as an asset, and she went on to give me another number to call.

Which I did, and this was answered by somebody who sounded like, and possibly was, a teenage girl. I told her the situation, and that the court had given me this number to call, and she took down a lot of information—or at least asked me for a lot of information— and said someone would call me soon.

Then an hour went by, in which nothing happened. Billy was supposed to be arraigned this morning, that strange word. Arraigned. It sounds like a torture. It is a torture. But they wouldn’t perform the torture until Billy was represented by counsel, so until I could find a lawyer he would remain in that pale yellow cell, or perhaps some worse cell somewhere else.

So after an hour I phoned that last number again, and this time the teenage girl calmly pointed out that it was difficult to find an attorney on a Sunday, and I said I knew that, and she said someone would call. Chastened, I hung up.

At twelve-fifteen, the phone rang. Marjorie and I were both in a state by then, not knowing what else to do, who else to call, how to get help, how to get this process
started
. We were both pacing the house, like starving lions. But then the phone did ring, at twelve-fifteen, and this was an older man, who slurred. I thought he was probably drunk.

“I’ve talked to the judge,” he said. “Do you have anything to put up as collateral for bail?”

“The house,” I told him.

“Bring the deed,” he said, “the mortgage, whatever papers you can lay your hands on. I realize it’s difficult, on a Sunday.”

“I’ll find something,” I promised.

“I’ll meet you at the courthouse,” he said. “My name’s Porculey. I’ll be in a maroon suit.”

A maroon suit? He slurs as though he’s drunk, and he’ll be in a maroon suit, and this is to be my son’s lawyer.

On the other hand, he’d already talked to the judge, and it was clear from what he’d said that bail would be set, so that was good.

There’s a folder in my filing cabinet marked HOUSE, and I just brought the whole thing with me, along with Billy’s birth certificate and Marjorie’s and my passports for identification. I didn’t want to be one piece of paper shy.

When it did happen at last, it happened with great speed. First we met with Porculey, who turned out to be a much older man than he’d sounded on the phone, at least seventy, and who, from the drooping eyelid and sagging cheek, I suspected of having suffered one or more strokes, which was why he sounded drunk. It’s true he was in a maroon suit, a horrible thing, with pinstripes, but nevertheless, while this was a wreck, it was a wreck of a once-good lawyer. And what was left was good enough for the job at hand; to get Billy out of there, out of their clutches, back home with his mother and father, where he belonged.

It was mostly like going to church, somebody else’s church. You watch the other congregants, do what they do, go along with the ritual as best you can, without understanding a bit of it, but keeping in mind always that
they
take it seriously.
They
believe in it.

Oddly, Billy looked better than he had last night, when we finally saw him, in the sunny courtroom with the pale maple wood benches and altar. I know they don’t call it the altar, where the judge and his vergers perform their sacraments, but that’s what it is.

Billy wasn’t there at first. Porculey led us to a pew near the front to wait, and then he went out, through a side door, with all our papers, to do whatever. After a while he came back into the courtroom, nodded reassuringly at us, and sat at the lawyer’s table up front, with a few other people as unprepossessing as he was.

Then Billy was brought in, unshaved, wrinkled, exhausted, but looking less destroyed, less distraught. I watched him as he was led to his place up front, saw him try to scan the room without turning his head, saw him see us, and I smiled in encouragement, and he gave me a quick scared smile back.

The ritual was mostly in English, but didn’t seem to have much literal meaning. It was all in the code of this church. Porculey and Billy briefly stood together before the judge, as though they were there to be married to one another. The judge, a disgruntled bald man whose head seemed too heavy for him to hold upright, listened and spoke and looked at papers and passed papers on to the verger at the little desk down to his right.

Then Marjorie and I were brought forward, and Marjorie wept a little, and so did Billy, which pleased the judge, who remanded our son to us in our custody, and actually did do the thing of hitting the block of wood with the gavel. Religious to the core.

Of course we weren’t done yet. Over at a side desk, I had to sign a lot of forms, and at one point I had to raise my hand and swear an oath, I’m not sure why.

Billy was no longer with us at that point, but Porculey stayed by our side. He seemed to know most of the court employees, including the judge. I would say they all liked him and were happy to see him, but didn’t take him seriously. And I would say he knew that and didn’t care, just so he could go on playing the game.

I suppose he lives for Sundays, really, when lawyers are hard to find.

When they were at last done with us, Porculey shook Marjorie’s hand and then my hand and told us which corridor to go down to collect our son— “You’ll have to show them that paper”—and promised to be in touch with us about the court date. Then he went away, carrying a very new brown briefcase that I could imagine some proud grandchild giving him for Christmas last year, and we walked down the corridor to a coldfaced man in a brown uniform who looked at our piece of paper with contempt, went away, and some time later came back to contemptuously give us our son.

Billy was silent on the drive, abashed and ashamed and afraid. We got about halfway home, all of us silent, and then I said, “Billy, it won’t surprise me if the police come around, very soon, with a search warrant.”

He was riding in the backseat, Marjorie beside me in front. His startled eyes focused on my reflection in the rearview mirror. “Warrant? Why?”

“They’d like to be able to close all those other burglaries,” I said. “They’d like to find something to show that you broke into that store before.”

Now he looked really frightened. He knuckled his head, and said, “Dad. Dad, I—listen—”

“It’s all right,” I told him. I don’t want to condone, and I don’t want to encourage, but he had to know this much. “Everything’s all right,” I told him.

“Dad, no, listen—”

He still didn’t understand, so Marjorie turned in the passenger seat and said, “Billy, it’s been taken care of. Your father took care of things.”

Then he got it, and the look he gave me was humbled and ashamed, and he said, “I’m sorry, I’m really sorry. It was so stupid, I’ll never do anything like that again, I
swear
I won’t.”

Marjorie said, “Of course you won’t. Everybody gets to make a mistake, Billy, it’s all right. It won’t happen again.”

“I know you can’t afford,” he said, and stopped, and looked away, out of the car. He was starting to cry again.

Well, that’s true. I can’t afford any of this. The lawyer will cost us
something
. This whole thing will cost money we don’t have. And time. Time I don’t have either. But you do what you have to do.

“We’ll just get through this, Billy,” I said, “and then it will be over and done with and forgotten.”

He nodded, but he didn’t try to speak, and he kept looking out the side window at the neighborhoods going by, and a little later we turned in at our driveway, and there was the police van out front. When they saw us, five uniformed policemen got out of it. Local cops, in blue.