Gideon - 04 - Illegal Motion (12 page)

“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?”