Small Great Things (19 page)

I've painted Ruth as an upstanding American citizen who has been misunderstood. Just about the only thing I don't do is take out an American flag and start waving it around.

The judge turns to Ruth. “How much equity are we talking about?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“What's the value of the mortgage on your house?” I ask.

“A hundred thousand dollars,” Ruth replies.

The judge nods. “I'm going to set bail at one hundred thousand dollars. As a condition of the bail, I'll accept the house being posted. Next case?”

The white supremacist supporters in the gallery start booing. I am not sure they'd be happy with any verdict short of a public lynching. The judge calls for order and bangs his gavel. “Clear them out,” he finally says, and bailiffs begin to move through the aisles.

“What happens now?” Ruth asks.

“You're getting out.”

“Thank God. How long will it take?”

I glance up. “A couple of days.”

A bailiff takes Ruth's arm to bring her back to the holding cell. As she is being led away, that curtain behind her eyes slips, and for the first time I see panic.

It's not like it is on TV and in the movies; you don't just walk out of the courthouse free. There are papers to be procured and bondsmen to be dealt with. I know that because I'm a public defender. Most of my clients know that because they tend to be repeat offenders.

But Ruth, she's not like most of my clients.

She's not
even
one of my clients, when you get down to it.

I've been with the public defender's office now for almost four years, and I've moved out of misdemeanors. I've done so many burglary cases and criminal mischief and identity theft and bad checks that at this point, I could probably argue them in my sleep. But this is a murder case, a high-profile trial that will be plucked out of my hands as soon as the court date is set. It will go to someone in my office who has more experience than I do, or who plays golf with my boss, or who has a penis.

In the long run, I won't be Ruth's lawyer. But right now, I still am, and I can help her.

I wing a silent thank-you to the white supremacists who've created this uproar. Then I run down the central aisle of the gallery to Edison and his aunt. “Listen. You need to get a certified copy of Ruth's house deed,” I tell her sister. “And a certified copy of the tax assessment, and a copy of your sister's most recent mortgage payment, which shows what the current payoff is, and you need to bring that to the clerk's office—”

I realize that Ruth's sister is staring at me like I've suddenly started to speak Hungarian. But then again, she lives in Church Street South; she does not own her own place. This might as well be a foreign language to her.

Then I realize that Edison is writing down everything I've said on the back of a receipt from his wallet. “I'll figure it out,” he promises.

I give him my card. “This is my cell number. If you have any questions, you can call me. But I won't be the one trying your mother's case. Someone else from my office will be in touch with you after she gets out.”

This admission snaps Ruth's sister back into action. “So that's it? You put up her house to get her out of jail, so your good deed is done now? I guess since my sister's black, she obviously did the crime and you'd rather not get your hands dirty, right?”

This is ridiculous on so many levels, not the least of which is that the majority of my clients are African American. But before I can explain the hierarchy of politics in the public defender's office, Edison intercedes. “Auntie, chill out.” Then he turns to me. “I'm sorry.”

“No,” I tell him. “
I
am.”

W
HEN
I
FINALLY
get home that night, my mother is sitting with her stocking feet tucked beneath her, watching Disney Junior on television, a glass of white wine in her hand. She has had a glass of white wine every night for as long as I can remember. When I was little, she called it her medicine. Beside her on the couch is Violet, curled on her side, fast asleep. “I didn't have the heart to move her,” my mother says.

I sit down gingerly beside my daughter, take the bottle of wine that's on the coffee table, and drink from its neck. My mother's eyebrows arch. “That bad?” she asks.

“You have no idea.” I stroke Violet's hair. “You must have tired her out today.”

“Well.” My mother hesitates. “We had a little bit of a blowup at dinner.”

“Was it the fish sticks? She won't eat them since going on her Little Mermaid kick.”

“No, she ate them, and you'll be delighted to know that Ariel has left the building. In fact, that was what got her all hot and bothered. We started watching
Princess and the Frog,
and Violet informed me that she wants to be Tiana for Halloween.”

“Thank God,” I say. “She was dead set on wearing a shell bikini top a week ago, and the only way that was going to happen was if it was over her long underwear.”

My mother raises her brows. “Kennedy,” she says. “Don't you think Violet would be happier as Cinderella? Or Rapunzel? Or even that new one with the white hair who makes everything ice over?”

“Elsa?” I fill in. “Why?”

“Don't make me say it out loud, sugar,” my mother replies.

“You mean because Tiana's black?” I say. Immediately, I think of Ruth Jefferson, of the white supremacists booing in the gallery.

“I don't think Violet is making a statement about equality as much as she is about frogs. She told me she's going to ask for one as a pet for Christmas and kiss it and see what happens.”

“She's not getting a frog for Christmas. But if she wants to be Tiana for Halloween I'll buy her the costume.”

“I will
sew
her the costume,” my mother corrects. “No grandbaby of mine is going trick-or-treating in a store-bought piece of trash that would probably go up in flames if she walked past a jack-o'-lantern.” I don't fight her on this. I can't even sew a seam. I have a pair of work trousers in my closet that are hemmed with superglue.

“Terrific. I'm glad you can overcome your resistance in order to make Violet's dream come true.”

My mother lifts her chin a notch. “I did not tell you this so you could scold me, Kennedy. Just because I grew up in the South doesn't make me prejudiced.”

“Mom,” I point out. “You had a black
nanny
.”

“And I adored Beattie like she was family,” my mother says.

“Except…she wasn't.”

My mother pours more wine into her glass. “Kennedy,” she sighs. “It's just a silly costume. Not a cause.”

Suddenly I'm so incredibly tired. It's not just the pace of my job or the overwhelming number of cases I have that wears me down. It's wondering if anything I do actually makes a difference.

“Once,” my mother says, her voice soft, “when I was about Violet's age, and Beattie wasn't looking, I tried to drink out of the colored water fountain at the park. I stepped up on the cement block and turned the knob. I was expecting something extraordinary. I was expecting
rainbows
. But you know—it was just like everyone else's water.” She meets my gaze. “Violet would make the most beautiful little Cinderella.”

“Mom…”

“I'm just saying. It took how many years for Disney to give all those little black girls their own princess? You think it's right for Violet to want something they've been waiting on forever?”

“Mom!”

She lifts her hands in concession. “Fine. Tiana. Done.”

I lift the bottle of wine, tilt it up, and drink down every last drop.

A
FTER MY MOTHER
leaves, I fall asleep on the couch with Violet, and when I wake up,
The Lion King
is being aired on Disney Junior. I blink just in time to see the death of Mufasa playing out on-screen. He is being trampled by the water buffalo just as Micah walks in, pulling off the garrote of his tie with one hand. “Hey,” I say. “I didn't hear you drive up.”

“Because I am a ninja ingeniously masquerading as an ophthalmological surgeon.” He leans down and kisses me, smiles at Violet, who is softly snoring. “My day was full of glaucoma and vitreous fluid. How was yours?”

“Considerably less gross,” I say.

“Did Crazy Sharon come back?”

Crazy Sharon is a repeat offender, a stalker who has a thing for Peter Salovey, the president of Yale University. She leaves him flowers, love notes, and once, underwear. I've done six arraignments with her, and Salovey has been president only since 2013.

“No,” I say, and I tell him about Ruth, and Edison, and the skinheads in the gallery.

“Really?” Micah is most interested in the last. “Like, with suspenders and flight jackets and the boots and everything?”

“Number one, no, and number two, should I be scared that you know all that?” I move my feet on the coffee table so he can sit down opposite me. “In fact, they looked just like us. It's pretty terrifying. I mean, what if your next-door neighbor was a white supremacist and you didn't know it?”

“I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Mrs. Greenblatt is not a skinhead,” Micah says. As he talks, he gently lifts Violet into his arms.

“It's all a moot point anyway. It's too big a case for me to be assigned,” I tell him, climbing the stairs to our daughter's bedroom. And then I add, “Ruth Jefferson lives in East End.”

“Hunh,” Micah replies. He settles Vi into her bed and pulls up her covers, dropping a kiss on her forehead.

“What's that supposed to mean?” I ask, combative, even though I had the same sort of reaction.

“It's not supposed to mean
anything,
” Micah says. “It was just a response.”

“What you really mean, but you're too polite to say, is that there aren't black families in East End.”

“I guess. Maybe.”

I follow him into our room and unzip my skirt, peel off my panty hose. When I'm wearing the T-shirt and boxers I usually sleep in, I go into the bathroom to brush my teeth beside Micah. I spit, wipe my mouth on the back of my hand. “Did you know that in
The Lion King,
the hyenas—the bad guys—all speak in either black or Latino slang? And that the little cubs are told not to go where the hyenas live?”

He looks at me, amused.

“Do you realize that Scar, the villain, is darker than Mufasa?”

“Kennedy.” Micah puts his hands on my shoulders, leans down, and kisses me. “There is a
slight
chance you're overthinking this.”

That's the moment I know I'm going to move heaven and earth to be Ruth's public defender.

I
'M GUESSING THIS LAWYER'S PRETTY
decent, given how swanky his office is. The walls aren't painted, they're paneled. The glass of water his secretary gets me is a heavy crystal tumbler. Even the air smells rich, like the perfume of a lady who would normally shy away from me on a public street.

I'm wearing again today the jacket Francis and I share, and I've ironed my pants. I have a wool cap pulled low on my head, and I keep twirling my wedding ring around and around on my finger. I could pass for any ordinary Joe who wants to sue someone, instead of a guy who would normally skirt the legal system and take justice into his own hands.

Suddenly Roarke Matthews is standing in front of me. His suit is ironed with knife-edge pleats, his shoes are buffed to a high gloss. He looks like a soap opera star, except that his nose is a little off-kilter, like he broke it playing football in high school. He holds out a hand to greet me. “Mr. Bauer,” he says, “why don't you come with me?”

He leads me into an even more imposing office, this one full of black leather and chrome, and gestures to a spot on the love seat. “Let me say again how sorry I am for your loss,” Matthews says, like everyone else does these days. The words have gotten so ordinary in fact that they feel like rain; I hardly even notice them anymore. “On the phone, we talked about the possibility of filing a civil suit—”

“Whatever it's called,” I interrupt. “I just want someone to pay for this.”

“Ah,” Matthews says. “And that is why I asked you to come in here. You see, it's quite complicated.”

“What's so complicated? You sue the nurse. She's the one who did this.”

Matthews hesitates. “You could sue Ruth Jefferson,” he agrees. “But let's be realistic—she doesn't have a pot to piss in. As you know, there's a criminal prosecution under way that the State has undertaken. That means that if you file a civil suit simultaneously, Ms. Jefferson would ask for a stay of all discovery, so she couldn't incriminate herself during the pending criminal prosecution. And the fact that you've filed a civil suit against her can be used against you in cross-examination during the criminal lawsuit.”

“I don't understand.”

“The defense will make you out to be a gold digger with a grudge,” Matthews says bluntly.

I sit back, my hands on my knees. “So that's it? I don't have a case?”

“I never said that,” the lawyer replies. “I just think you've chosen the wrong target. Unlike Ms. Jefferson, the hospital
does
have deep pockets. Moreover, they have an obligation to supervise their staff, and they are responsible for the nurse's actions or inactions. That's who I would recommend filing the lawsuit against. Now, we'd still name Ruth Jefferson—you never know, right now she has nothing, but tomorrow she could win the lottery or receive an inheritance.” He raises a brow. “And then, Mr. Bauer, you might not just get justice—you might get a very handsome payout.”

I nod, imagining this. I think about being able to tell Brit how I'm going to do right by Davis. “So what do we do to get started?”

“Now?” Matthews says. “Nothing. Not until the criminal lawsuit is over. The civil suit will still be viable when it's done, and that way, it can't be used to incriminate your character.” He leans back, spreading his hands. “Come back to me when the trial's over,” Matthews says. “I'm not going anywhere.”

A
T FIRST
I
didn't believe Francis when he said that the new wave of Anglo supremacy would be a war fought not with fists but with ideas, spread subversively and anonymously through the Internet. But all the same, I was smart enough not to tell him he was a crazy old coot. For one thing, he was still one of the legends of the Movement. And more importantly, he was the father of the girl I couldn't get my mind off.

Brit Mitchum was beautiful, but in a way that knocked me off my feet. She had the softest skin I'd ever touched, and pale blue eyes that she ringed with dark eyeliner. Unlike other skinchicks, she didn't buzz her hair at the crown and let wispy bangs frame her face and the back of her neck. Instead, Brit had thick hair that spilled down to the middle of her back. Sometimes she braided it, and the braid was as thick as my wrist. I thought a lot about what it would feel like to have those curls hanging over my face like a curtain as she kissed me.

But the last thing I was going to do was make a move on a girl whose father could have my spine snapped by making a single phone call. So instead, I went to visit, often. I pretended to have a question for Francis, who liked seeing me because it gave him a chance to talk up his idea for an Anglo website. I helped him change the oil in his truck and fixed a leaky garbage disposal for him. I made myself useful, but when it came to Brit, I worshiped from afar.

So I was pretty blown away when one day she came out to a chopping block where I was splitting wood for Francis. “So,” she says, “are the rumors true?”

“What rumors?” I asked.

“They say you took down a whole motorcycle gang and that you killed your own father.”

“In that case, no,” I said.

“Then you're just a little pussy like the other guys who like to pretend they're big bad Anglos so they can bask in my daddy's glow?”

Shocked, I looked up at her, and saw her mouth twitch. I raised the ax over my head, flexed my muscles, and sent the ax hurtling into the piece of wood, which cleaved neatly. “I like to think I fall somewhere between the two extremes,” I said.

“Maybe I want to see for myself.” She took a step closer. “Next time your crew goes on the hunt.”

I laughed. “There is no way I'm taking Francis Mitchum's daughter out with my guys.”

“Why not?”

“Because you're Francis Mitchum's daughter.”

“That's not an answer.”

Hell, yes, it was, even if she couldn't see it.

“My father's been taking me out with his crew my whole life.”

Somehow I found that hard to believe. (Later I found out it was true, but he left Brit buckled into her car seat, sound asleep, in the back of his truck.) “You're not tough enough to run with my crew,” I said, just to get her off my back.

When she didn't reply, I figured that was that. I lifted the ax again, and started the downswing, only to have Brit dart, lightning-fast, into the path of the blade. Immediately I let go of the shaft, feeling the ax spin out of my hands to wedge itself deeply in the ground about six inches away from her. “Jesus fucking Christ,” I shouted. “What is
wrong
with you?”

“Not tough enough?” she replied.

“Thursday,” I told her. “After dark.”

E
VERY NIGHT,
I
hear my son cry.

The sound wakes me up, which is how I know he's a ghost. Brit never hears him, but then she is still floating in a haze of sleeping pills and Oxy left over from when I busted my knee. I get out of bed and take a piss and follow the noise, which gets louder and louder and louder, and then disappears when I reach the living room. There's no one there, just the computer screen, green and glaring at me.

I sit down on the couch and I drink a six-pack and still I can hear my boy crying.

My father-in-law gives me almost two weeks of grieving, and then starts dumping out all the beer in the house. One night, Francis comes to find me when I'm sitting on the living room couch, my head in my hands, trying to drown out the baby's sobs. I think for a minute he's going to deck me—he may be an old dude, but he could still take me—but instead, he yanks the laptop from its power cord and throws it at me. “Get even,” he says simply, and he walks back into his side of the duplex.

For a long time, I just sit there, the computer pressed up next to me, like a girl who's begging for a dance.

I can't say I reach for it. More like, it makes its way back home to me.

With the touch of a key, a webpage loads. I haven't been here since before Brit had the baby.

When Francis and I teamed up to create our website, I read manuals on coding and metadata while Francis fed me the material we would post. We called our site LONEWOLF, because that was what we all had to become.

This was no longer the eighties. We were losing our best men to the prison system. The old guard was getting too old to curb-stomp and wield nunchucks. The fresh cuts were too plugged in to get excited about a KKK rally where a bunch of ancient yahoos sat around drinking and talking about the good ol' days. They didn't want to hear an old wives' tale, like that black people stank when their hair got wet. They wanted statistics they could take back to their lefty teachers and relatives who got tangled in knots when they said
we
were the real victims of discrimination in this country.

So we gave them what they asked for.

We posted the truth: that the U.S. Census Bureau said Whites would be a minority by 2043. That 40 percent of black people who were on welfare
could
work, but didn't. That the fact that the Zionist Occupation Government was taking over our nation could be traced right to Alan Greenspan at the Federal Reserve.

Lonewolf.org quickly became something bigger than itself. We were the younger, hipper alternative. The fresh edge of rebellion.

Now, my hands move across the keyboard while I log in as the administrator. Part of the reason for running this site is the anonymity, the ability to hide behind what I believe. We are all anonymous here, and we are also all brothers. This is my army of nameless, faceless friends.

But today all that is about to change.

Many of you know me by my blog posts, and have responded with your own comments. Like me, you are a True Patriot. Like me, you wanted to follow an idea, not a person. But today, I am going to step into the light, because I want you to know me. I want you to know what
happened
to me.

My name is Turk Bauer,
I type.
And I am going to tell you the story of my son.

After I hit the post button, I watch the story of my son's short, brave life hover on the computer screen. I want to believe that if he had to die, it was for a cause. It was for
our
cause.

I do not drink that night, and I do not fall back asleep. Instead, I watch the numerical counter at the top of the header, which marks each page view.

1 reader.

6 readers.

37 readers.

409 readers.

By the time the sun comes up, more than thirteen thousand people know Davis's name.

I make coffee, and scroll through the comments section as I drink my first cup.

I'm so sorry for your loss.

Your boy was a race warrior.

Goddamned blue gum shouldn't have been allowed to work in a White hospital anyhow.

I've made a donation in your son's name to the American Freedom Party.

But one of them stops me cold:

Romans 12:19,
it read.
Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.

T
HE
T
HURSDAY AFTER
Brit dodged my ax, I had dinner with her and her father. We were well into dessert before Brit looked up, as if she'd just remembered something she needed to tell us. “I hit a nigger with my car today,” she announced.

Francis reared back in his seat. “Well, what was he doing in front of your car?”

“I have no idea. Walking, I guess. But he dented the front fender.”

“I can take a look at it,” I said. “I've done some bodywork.”

A smile played around Brit's mouth. “I bet you have.”

I turned thirty shades of red while Brit told her dad that she'd convinced me to take her to see a movie after dinner, some chick flick. Francis clapped me on the back. “Better you than me, son,” he said, and then we were in my car, about to make a night of it.