Erin kind of slid into it accidentally, unnoticeably. She ate lunch with Kevin almost every day, because he was friendly, non-threatening in a kind of goofy way, and never had anything else to do at lunch. She’d sit at the table with him at the Wisconsin Student Union, with their sandwiches, or whatever- sometimes he’d get french fries- and he would often share the details of this chat scene that he had joined. He’d pull out his laptop and then try not to get french fry grease on the keys as he’d answer his friends on there. “lol”, he’d say (laugh out loud). “omg,” - Oh my God. “wtf” – What the f-! Or, “tmi”- too much information.
But as Erin read over his shoulder, she noticed that he was kind of a wimp. People were lively, but he had little to say, or said it in such a wooden way that basically their social scene hopped along with him as a kind of background, watching, noticing, yet not really participating. In fact he was kind of like that in their class- they were in an English class together- and it bothered her. When he’d complain about not having any dates, or many friends, she felt like slapping him. It’s your own fault, she’d like to say. But she was patient with him. He was a nice guy. And she didn’t have that much of a social life anyway, besides this other guy, Mark, who was always calling her in her dorm room. The lunch hour would pass, often with her reading over his shoulder, drinking a slow cup of coffee. Then they’d go off to afternoon classes.
On Friday, though, something strange happened. A saucy girl known only to them as “Rose” was chatting with Kevin, and Kevin was doing his usual wimp thing. Erin grabbed the keyboard with his permission and started talking to Rose herself. In her mind she was showing Kevin how it was done: how one would flirt with a girl, and actually attract the girl; how one could be a little more aggressive, get what one wanted, be successful. She saw herself as shaking Kevin out of his doldrums, showing him something useful. She carried on a lively banter with Rose, all under Kevin’s name “Kev”- and this carried on for much of the lunch hour. They talked about classes, Wisconsin football, Halloween, drinking, driving on I-94. She was unexpectedly good at pretending to be a man- she could feel a kind of joy in acting out the aggressive male role- though it occurred to her that she had no more certainty that Rose was a woman, than Rose had that “Kev” was a man. Very quickly she was into territory where she didn’t know how Kevin would react; for example, Rose asked if she/he had ever been to Chicago. She had, but didn’t know if Kevin had. Kevin was right behind her, but at that moment he wasn’t even paying attention; he’d become engrossed in a football game on a nearby television, so she just blithely answered that he had. And he loved shooting down Lake Shore Drive in his convertible, she said. And, in fact, he’d be there in eight days, she said. Going for a Shock Monster concert. Shock Monster was a popular band at that time; this would give Rose a little jump, she was sure . Time for class, she told her; “c u” later, she said, and logged off.
But something about the chat climbed under her skin and stayed there. Something about Rose’s persistent interest, flirtatious nature, or something; she wanted to talk to her again. She met Kevin later in the weekend for a study session for the very English class that they shared. She tried to get a sense from him whether these chat friends meant anything to him; they didn’t, as far as she could tell. He had no girlfriends, but didn’t seem to care. With the exception of Erin, there wasn’t anyone he even talked to about it. He was sad, kind of pathetic. But he knew most of the answers on the English study sheet.
On Monday, after the test she looked over Kevin’s shoulder again and there were all the chat friends, Rose included. She practically jumped on the keyboard and started chatting with Rose again, inviting her into a private room where they could have more privacy. Kevin watched over her shoulder for a while, noticing perhaps the lively banter, the spirit of the conversation, but soon wandered off, even though it was his laptop. He didn’t seem to mind; he trusted her, and wasn’t going far. But in that short time the conversation got even livelier. They had very little in common, “Kev” (Erin) and Rose, yet they got along well and spoke quickly, covered a lot of ground. Rose, it turned out, would be at the Shock Monster concert also. Rose had a husband/lover who was domineering and didn’t want her to go. This guy would slap her around and get loud and mean when he was drunk, which was often, including now. But it’s only noon, Erin thought, and then she thought, she needed to save this woman from a very bad situation. She knew none of the important details- Rose’s true name, her true location, her age, her marital status- yet she was ready and willing to find her straightaway and get this guy out of the picture.
There was a garden in the story. She’d grown all these beautiful tomatoes, and squash, and a pumpkin, and spent a lot of time out there. She could see the garden from where she sat at her computer, in a small house in a small town not far from Chicago.
I need to talk to you sometime this evening, Erin told Rose, around eight (when Erin would be in her room, safely by her own computer). They set up a time. It was easy enough- she knew Kevin’s logon and password, from watching- and could do this easily, away from the noise of the Student Center. Rose agreed. At eight, the husband would be at work, apparently. At eight Erin logged on, and there was Rose- they took up where they had left off. Rose lived in terror of the man, whose name was Jeff, it appeared; he was her husband; he was now at work but was expected home later at night, around 11; he could very possibly be still drunk, or drunk again, when he arrived, as he often was these days. Rose was 19, had thought she was pregnant, but wasn’t- that’s what set Jeff off on this drunken rage- and, impulsively, Rose sent Erin her picture. She was redheaded, beautiful, but young, like Erin. Erin gulped as she looked at it; she also was 19. Her heart felt like it was in her throat. In love with a woman- this was not something she would have predicted for herself. Impulsively she blurted out the whole story to Rose. She was not “Kev” but was Erin. Erin, who had taken the computer out of Kevin’s hand, and had pretended to be Kevin not twice but three times. She sent her own picture.
Rose, oddly, did not appear to feel betrayed, or even the least bit hurt. She continued telling about life in the small house, bad marriage, drunken husband, car with persistent muffler problems, motorcycle gang in small-town bar, her life as she saw it from her keyboard. Erin told about her two boyfriends in high school; one, Roger, had felt like her life match, so perfect in every way, but apparently he had a mean streak in him, and he’d done something sadistic to her dog, so she dumped him, even as she was crying, for several days even; the next, Rob, had broken her heart, made her jaded, angry, resentful toward men, unwilling to reach out, really, to anyone, even harmless Kevin. She told Rose also about Mark, here at Wisconsin, a young business student, who was calling, even now as she chatted, calling somewhat persistently. Omg, wtf, these were flying back and forth as they discussed men, chatting back and forth rapidly, getting more and more involved in conversation. Finally, she told about the real “Kev,” who, of course, Rose at least had met, albeit online. All four of them meant nothing to her, she assured Rose, nothing. She was going to Shock Monster on Saturday in Chicago. That’s all that mattered. Rose, on her side, told of falling in love with Jeff, how she was never good enough for him, how he always compared her to another girlfriend he had, one he liked better; how she lived in fear, her poetry stained in tears and her laundry stained in blood. They poured out their hearts to each other; they told everything.
As she typed quickly on the screen, though, it went unexpectedly blank on the other end. Rose stopped, absolutely, completely. One minute the “omg”s, “lol”s, and “wtf”s were flying, the next, absolutely nothing. Erin froze in horror. The husband: she looked at her computer clock; it was past eleven. She pounded away at her screen: hello? Hello? Nothing. She was crushed. She couldn’t sleep that night. She imagined all the worst things, all the violence Rose was worried about. She waited a while, checked her Facebook, and her email. When she went to bed, she tossed and turned, and had bad dreams. In the morning, she had a hard time concentrating on her classes, and was distracted when people spoke to her.
At lunch, of course, she could look to see if Rose appeared in Kevin’s chat. She looked over his shoulder but resisted the impulse to grab the laptop again. Kevin chatted blandly to other people, but noticed her obvious agitation. At night, still no Rose; Erin went online, bought Shock Monster tickets, and planned her short trip. Her parents lived in Chicago; it wouldn’t be hard to stay there. She had an old car that ran well. It woudn’t be complicated.
Wednesday night, like Tuesday, she logged on: nothing. She’d lost interest in her classes, though there was an English test on Friday, and Kevin kept talking to her about it. She still couldn’t sleep; she took out the picture occasionally, still not believing that she was in love with a woman, a woman who accepted her completely and without reservation, and then disappeared entirely.
On Thursday though, Rose got on for just a few minutes. There she was; it was her; Erin could tell by the patterns, with the “omg”s, “lol”s, etc.; it was clearly her. But she was considerably less lively. There had been a fight, she said. Jeff crushed tomatoes all over her, threw the pumpkin through the window, cut her lip, hit her. He did some other damage also; she (Rose) was now at her mom’s house, while Jeff, as far as she could tell, was in jail or worse. She couldn’t talk. When Erin asked if she would be at the concert, she didn’t answer. “c u” later, she said, and she was off. It took all of a few minutes.
Erin went to the concert, alone, in spite of everything. The music was too loud, and pounded her eardrums. She thought about Rose, and all she knew; she tried to let go of it. Toward the end of the concert, she was near the entrance of the place, on her way out, when who did she see, but Roger, her first boyfriend ever, Roger the sadist. A dry, arrogant character, he walked right up to her and said hello. But then he said, “Rose says hello; she couldn’t come;” he said this, turned on his heels, and walked off into the crowd. This totally rattled Erin, and she practically broke down in a rage against him. But, as he was almost gone, disappearing, she would have had to run after him, and she didn’t. He had given no indication of who she was to him, or how he’d known her. Perhaps he was Jeff? Or he was Rose himself? Or, he had just known her, casually, as a friend? She never found out. She ended up just going back to Wisconsin, getting back to her life, moving on. Kevin was understanding, as usual; if he was in on it, she never learned how. “Rose,” he said, never reappeared in their chat. Years later, she found the picture she had kept, in an old box, but she threw it away. She heard from a friend that Roger had been in trouble with the law, and she wondered about that week; she was sure he was involved. But by then quite a bit more had happened to her also; she was different, and wondered how she’d ever come to fall in love with a chat partner, or feel the way she did, about someone she had never, in fact, even seen.
9-09
Monday, September 21, 2009
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
The nurse left
The nurse left work at five o'clock. I, however, arrived at the same hospital, same parking lot, shortly after; I was in the back of an ambulance, bleeding profusely, with broken ribs and punctured lungs, being held down by three or four large emergency workers who, to their credit, were doing the best they could to save my life. The nurse, a man of average build and sandy hair, looked up briefly as he crossed the lot; I could tell he was grateful to be off work, have nothing to do with this incoming call; and, in the afternoon light, I recognized that he was the man I had been tracking down for a week and a half.
The workers scrambled inside the cramped ambulance to get the tools they needed to keep me conscious until I could be seen by an emergency room doctor. They spoke quickly, and I, not from this small town in Louisiana, had a hard time understanding their accents as I drifted off into unconsciousness. I had recognized the nurse because I was a police detective, taking time off my job in Arizona to track down a man who had fled with my sick father's identity and credit cards; I remembered clearly the day when, poring over his finances, we found a slow and steady drain from this man who moved across country, first to Florida, then here to Louisiana. It was in Florida where I first saw his picture, and that's why I had recognized him; I jerked in surprise, and that was bad for me, as now the emergency workers were struggling to save my life.
The nurse turned his back and walked off, head down, into the back of the parking lot. Months later, I was to learn that this was his last day at work; he'd quit and walked out that day, somehow knowing he was being tailed, that I was on my way to catch him, even that very day. A week and a half, through Florida, to this small town, and now I was about to nab him, but, backing out of the driveway of my motel, my car was smashed into by a police car, sirens not on, but speeding through town nonetheless. And it turned out that they, too, were tailing him, in their own way; they were on to him and his crimes, in Arizona, Florida and here; they were responding to a call he himself had made, knowing that they would all be over on the west side, while he was on the east, gathering his things and making off; and, because they suspected that it was a false call, they were communicating with each other, the various police of this small town, trading notes as they sped through the town, not noticing a small car backing out of a motel parking lot. My fatal flaw was this: the reason I didn't know what they were doing, what they knew, or where they were going, was that I was on vacation. I'd ended up here entirely on my own, following my own case, working on it myself, and I wasn't inclined to work with anyone else in the process. Now, I was paying the price. Drifting off, I knew that I had seen my man, but, now physically unable to stop him, I was being held down in the back of the ambulance, about to drift into a coma that was to last another two weeks, after which he'd be long gone, of course.
The workers scrambled inside the cramped ambulance to get the tools they needed to keep me conscious until I could be seen by an emergency room doctor. They spoke quickly, and I, not from this small town in Louisiana, had a hard time understanding their accents as I drifted off into unconsciousness. I had recognized the nurse because I was a police detective, taking time off my job in Arizona to track down a man who had fled with my sick father's identity and credit cards; I remembered clearly the day when, poring over his finances, we found a slow and steady drain from this man who moved across country, first to Florida, then here to Louisiana. It was in Florida where I first saw his picture, and that's why I had recognized him; I jerked in surprise, and that was bad for me, as now the emergency workers were struggling to save my life.
The nurse turned his back and walked off, head down, into the back of the parking lot. Months later, I was to learn that this was his last day at work; he'd quit and walked out that day, somehow knowing he was being tailed, that I was on my way to catch him, even that very day. A week and a half, through Florida, to this small town, and now I was about to nab him, but, backing out of the driveway of my motel, my car was smashed into by a police car, sirens not on, but speeding through town nonetheless. And it turned out that they, too, were tailing him, in their own way; they were on to him and his crimes, in Arizona, Florida and here; they were responding to a call he himself had made, knowing that they would all be over on the west side, while he was on the east, gathering his things and making off; and, because they suspected that it was a false call, they were communicating with each other, the various police of this small town, trading notes as they sped through the town, not noticing a small car backing out of a motel parking lot. My fatal flaw was this: the reason I didn't know what they were doing, what they knew, or where they were going, was that I was on vacation. I'd ended up here entirely on my own, following my own case, working on it myself, and I wasn't inclined to work with anyone else in the process. Now, I was paying the price. Drifting off, I knew that I had seen my man, but, now physically unable to stop him, I was being held down in the back of the ambulance, about to drift into a coma that was to last another two weeks, after which he'd be long gone, of course.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
hold the pickle
I was hitchhiking from southern Indiana up into the middle of Wisconsin, so had to go up through the tollway around Chicago, but it was late at night, maybe about one, and the guy who picked me up had a look of desperation about him, a greasy headband, long stringy hair. When we came to a tollbooth, even though he was in one of the middle tollbooths of about six that had people in them, he pretended to be fishing for change, but instead took out a small gun and tried to rob the guy. He did this without saying anything to me, nothing. I was stunned. A passenger in the car, I was now complicit in a robbery.
So he’s there demanding money from this guy in the tollbooth, and the toll guy of course presses an alarm button somewhere so it's only a matter of time before there are police everywhere and either someone dies, everyone dies, or we’re all hauled off to jail. The toll guy is stalling; he's not coming forward with a whole bunch of money right away. But some guy appears in the shadows behind him and forces his way into the toll booth, starting to beat up the toll booth operator. At this point the driver, gun still in hand, gets out of the car, and starts to crawl in the toll booth window to work with the other guy. It was two against one, and they were really pummeling the toll operator. Now I had no idea if this was planned; actually I suppose it could have been, but how? This other guy just came out of nowhere; I could see no vehicle that he had been in; I couldn’t discern whether the two assailants even knew each other.
Still, I figured I was in big trouble, so I moved over, and drove off in the car. My legs were shaking and I had a hard time staying steady in the road. It was an old Buick, dark colored, large enough to fall asleep in, but I figured it was a marked car and I wanted out of it right away. I pulled into a restaurant that hung over the interstate and parked. I tried my best to wipe any trace of myself out of that car, and left the keys in it. I had a small pack and I took that with me. But I soon saw it as a burden. It was not something I wanted to be seen with as I walked around the McDonald's or whatever, that was directly above the tollway. I slipped into the first bathroom I saw. I looked into the mirror and tried to figure out how to change my appearance; first thing I did was remove my jacket and put it in the pack, and take off my hat. I considered leaving the whole bag behind, there in the bathroom, but didn't. It was really a friend's cd player that changed my mind; I felt an obligation to hang onto it, because it wasn't mine.
But, no sooner did I come out of that bathroom, than a couple of policemen came strolling up behind me, walking toward the line where you order your food. I did not want to stand in that line directly in front of these guys, so I quick slid into a booth that, fortunately, had a newspaper right there at the table. This was lucky because I could appear to be interested in the newspaper, in sitting at a table without food, just for the purpose of reading it or perhaps checking it. Holding the pack, I already knew I was identified as a traveler. My legs were still shaking. Were they looking for a single traveler with a small pack? I'd find out.
They stood in line, waiting to order their food, and glanced at me occasionally as if I were still on their radar, as if they were aware of the possibility that I was their man, but were doing nothing about it at the moment. Needless to say, my mind was racing. At any moment, they would just walk right over, and haul me off to jail; all my plans for a peaceful bucolic life in central Wisconsin would just be rent asunder. Worst of all, I couldn't just get up and walk away; hitchhiking at this moment, from this place, would be a terrible blunder. And if I walked, where would that get me? I wasn't sure a person could even get off the highway, from a place like this.
In those days the highway was right below the place; cars literally zoomed right under me, practically, out the window, as I sat there. I tried to focus on the newspaper, which was something about the Cubs maybe, or the Sox, but I couldn't. I almost threw up, I was so upset, but I put all effort into containing myself and trying to concentrate on the baseball situation.
So these two policemen start walking toward me with their trays of big macs, fries, shakes, whatever, idly gabbing to each other; I'm desperate, trying to figure out how to avoid being seen, sitting at the booth, at the same time trying to decide whether I had enough coins in my pocket for some fries, or maybe just a cup of coffee. The whole thing got kind of surreal at this point. I decided to put my head down, and pretend that I was just a traveler, tired, unable to decide what to buy; all of this was true. I didn't want to look directly at the policemen, for obvious reasons. But at the last moment, right as I was putting my head down, I saw two alarming things simultaneously: first, one of the policemen was this guy I knew in high school, back in Indiana. He was at the same time a loser and a bully, but there was no way he could be a Chicago policeman. High school was like, maybe five years behind me, but he would have taken at least twenty years to pass any policeman exam. I couldn’t believe it. Surely I was mistaken; I had only glanced at him, after all.
But, coming up from behind me was another alarming sight: two guys, one looked exactly like the guy who had just given me a ride and robbed the toll booth. The other guy could have been the one that helped him, but I had never seen that guy so well anyway.
Head totally down on in my arms, which were on the sports section, I could now see nothing except a tiny triangle out a window down to my left, which ironically went right down onto the highway. I was determined not to show my face to any of these people who were at that moment crossing each other's paths right in front of my booth. And I was aware of a scuffle of some sort. It was as if one guy had suddenly grabbed at the policemen; I was sure of it. The policemen had not made the first move. But now there was clearly a fight; somebody was hitting somebody.
Much as I didn't want to look, I would have to. But now I saw something yet more alarming, more surreal: the cars down on the tollway began to back up, hitting the brakes, red lights glowing up at me in a large pattern to show traffic backing up. These cars were heading away from the toll booth, under the McDonalds; toward O'Hare; having passed the exit for McDonald's, they were trying to go north. No luck for them. And that was Chicago for you; even at 2 am, there could still be a monster traffic jam.
Quickly I raised my head, grabbed my pack and tried to bolt from there. At least the four men, two in uniform, were embroiled in this fight; there were maybe a couple other people, either fighting or trying to stop the fight. A couple of tables were knocked over already. Some ketchup hit my face almost the minute I put my head up. As I ran for the door I slipped on some ketchup and fell on my pack, and immediately one of the guys fell on me, though accidentally; he had just been hit, and was being thrown toward the booth, and on the floor there by the booth he lost consciousness and slumped into me. I didn't recognize him; he wasn't wearing a uniform; I had no idea who he was. I wanted out. I wanted to smell the fresh spring air and run for it.
No such luck. The toll-booth gunman, the guy with the headband, was now brandishing two guns, his and the one he had just taken from one of the policemen, and was desperately shouting at everyone to sit down over by the window, the very window with red lights glowing from it. I barely looked at him, not wanting to be seen, and maneuvered around behind his partner, lying unconscious on top of me, so that the partner obstructed his view of me. The policemen, both stunned and disarmed, did as they were told. The seemed most depressed at having apparently lost a good meal, which was now scattered on the floor. They somehow lacked the serious attitude one would expect from real policemen, though I couldn't look at them very carefully either. Whether one was truly this guy from high school, I still couldn't be sure; the one I suspected was complaining loudly about having broken a wrist or something like it.
As one of them crossed in front of me, though, I took my opportunity and fled for the exit. I’d extracted myself from the unconscious perpetrator. I left my pack behind; I needed to run and run fast. I didn't care, at that moment, if the gunman saw me and shot; deep inside, I suspected that neither of the guns was real, and, as it turned out, I was right. I read about it all in the papers the following day, the best I could piece it together from various accounts. The two so-called policemen had been impostors, scamming the city, taking different restaurants for free meals in the guise of being policemen, shaking down whoever they could. The gunman, later collared by an off-duty policeman who happened to be walking by, was in fact the guy who had robbed the toll booth. This, holding people hostage in a McDonald's temporarily, was his biggest crime, this and beating the toll booth operator up; apparently the toll booth operator was in pretty bad shape, and needed hospital attention.
I myself had spent the rest of that evening literally running along some neighborhoods in the west side, overly afraid that some of the earlier evening's nightmares would catch up to me. I realized that I was a sight, ketchup smeared on my face and pants, climbing fences and sneaking down alleys, but I kept going until I was reasonably sure nobody was following me. Eventually, in the early morning hours, I got back on the highway and made it toward Wisconsin.
The accident on the highway had been caused, apparently, by an erratic truck driver who had swerved until he hit a few of the cars beside him. News reports didn't give many details about him, but something told me he was part of that whole toll booth incident: the guy who came from nowhere, at the toll booth, and started pummeling the toll booth operator. I knew in my gut that was the truck driver, not the guy at McDonald's, the guy who ended up unconscious and lying on my leg. For one thing, the guy in the fight at the toll booth was a madman, along with the gunman himself, who also had just more or less lost it, right there at the toll booth. That was a guy who could swerve his truck until it did some damage.
It occurred to me to go back after the car; there was a good chance that the gunman, however he had gotten up to McDonald's from the toll booth, had never even seen it. It drove; it had a key in it; its owner would probably be out of commission for a while, in some chicagoland jail explaining himself. A few more days, and they'd find it and haul it away, or use it for evidence. Let them, I decided. I'd taken pains to rub all my fingerprints off the steering wheel, and wasn't eager to put them back on. The Cubs-Sox game had been rained out after four. Let those dogs lie. I was just crossing into Wisconsin, hopefully for good, and the sun was rising.
5-09
So he’s there demanding money from this guy in the tollbooth, and the toll guy of course presses an alarm button somewhere so it's only a matter of time before there are police everywhere and either someone dies, everyone dies, or we’re all hauled off to jail. The toll guy is stalling; he's not coming forward with a whole bunch of money right away. But some guy appears in the shadows behind him and forces his way into the toll booth, starting to beat up the toll booth operator. At this point the driver, gun still in hand, gets out of the car, and starts to crawl in the toll booth window to work with the other guy. It was two against one, and they were really pummeling the toll operator. Now I had no idea if this was planned; actually I suppose it could have been, but how? This other guy just came out of nowhere; I could see no vehicle that he had been in; I couldn’t discern whether the two assailants even knew each other.
Still, I figured I was in big trouble, so I moved over, and drove off in the car. My legs were shaking and I had a hard time staying steady in the road. It was an old Buick, dark colored, large enough to fall asleep in, but I figured it was a marked car and I wanted out of it right away. I pulled into a restaurant that hung over the interstate and parked. I tried my best to wipe any trace of myself out of that car, and left the keys in it. I had a small pack and I took that with me. But I soon saw it as a burden. It was not something I wanted to be seen with as I walked around the McDonald's or whatever, that was directly above the tollway. I slipped into the first bathroom I saw. I looked into the mirror and tried to figure out how to change my appearance; first thing I did was remove my jacket and put it in the pack, and take off my hat. I considered leaving the whole bag behind, there in the bathroom, but didn't. It was really a friend's cd player that changed my mind; I felt an obligation to hang onto it, because it wasn't mine.
But, no sooner did I come out of that bathroom, than a couple of policemen came strolling up behind me, walking toward the line where you order your food. I did not want to stand in that line directly in front of these guys, so I quick slid into a booth that, fortunately, had a newspaper right there at the table. This was lucky because I could appear to be interested in the newspaper, in sitting at a table without food, just for the purpose of reading it or perhaps checking it. Holding the pack, I already knew I was identified as a traveler. My legs were still shaking. Were they looking for a single traveler with a small pack? I'd find out.
They stood in line, waiting to order their food, and glanced at me occasionally as if I were still on their radar, as if they were aware of the possibility that I was their man, but were doing nothing about it at the moment. Needless to say, my mind was racing. At any moment, they would just walk right over, and haul me off to jail; all my plans for a peaceful bucolic life in central Wisconsin would just be rent asunder. Worst of all, I couldn't just get up and walk away; hitchhiking at this moment, from this place, would be a terrible blunder. And if I walked, where would that get me? I wasn't sure a person could even get off the highway, from a place like this.
In those days the highway was right below the place; cars literally zoomed right under me, practically, out the window, as I sat there. I tried to focus on the newspaper, which was something about the Cubs maybe, or the Sox, but I couldn't. I almost threw up, I was so upset, but I put all effort into containing myself and trying to concentrate on the baseball situation.
So these two policemen start walking toward me with their trays of big macs, fries, shakes, whatever, idly gabbing to each other; I'm desperate, trying to figure out how to avoid being seen, sitting at the booth, at the same time trying to decide whether I had enough coins in my pocket for some fries, or maybe just a cup of coffee. The whole thing got kind of surreal at this point. I decided to put my head down, and pretend that I was just a traveler, tired, unable to decide what to buy; all of this was true. I didn't want to look directly at the policemen, for obvious reasons. But at the last moment, right as I was putting my head down, I saw two alarming things simultaneously: first, one of the policemen was this guy I knew in high school, back in Indiana. He was at the same time a loser and a bully, but there was no way he could be a Chicago policeman. High school was like, maybe five years behind me, but he would have taken at least twenty years to pass any policeman exam. I couldn’t believe it. Surely I was mistaken; I had only glanced at him, after all.
But, coming up from behind me was another alarming sight: two guys, one looked exactly like the guy who had just given me a ride and robbed the toll booth. The other guy could have been the one that helped him, but I had never seen that guy so well anyway.
Head totally down on in my arms, which were on the sports section, I could now see nothing except a tiny triangle out a window down to my left, which ironically went right down onto the highway. I was determined not to show my face to any of these people who were at that moment crossing each other's paths right in front of my booth. And I was aware of a scuffle of some sort. It was as if one guy had suddenly grabbed at the policemen; I was sure of it. The policemen had not made the first move. But now there was clearly a fight; somebody was hitting somebody.
Much as I didn't want to look, I would have to. But now I saw something yet more alarming, more surreal: the cars down on the tollway began to back up, hitting the brakes, red lights glowing up at me in a large pattern to show traffic backing up. These cars were heading away from the toll booth, under the McDonalds; toward O'Hare; having passed the exit for McDonald's, they were trying to go north. No luck for them. And that was Chicago for you; even at 2 am, there could still be a monster traffic jam.
Quickly I raised my head, grabbed my pack and tried to bolt from there. At least the four men, two in uniform, were embroiled in this fight; there were maybe a couple other people, either fighting or trying to stop the fight. A couple of tables were knocked over already. Some ketchup hit my face almost the minute I put my head up. As I ran for the door I slipped on some ketchup and fell on my pack, and immediately one of the guys fell on me, though accidentally; he had just been hit, and was being thrown toward the booth, and on the floor there by the booth he lost consciousness and slumped into me. I didn't recognize him; he wasn't wearing a uniform; I had no idea who he was. I wanted out. I wanted to smell the fresh spring air and run for it.
No such luck. The toll-booth gunman, the guy with the headband, was now brandishing two guns, his and the one he had just taken from one of the policemen, and was desperately shouting at everyone to sit down over by the window, the very window with red lights glowing from it. I barely looked at him, not wanting to be seen, and maneuvered around behind his partner, lying unconscious on top of me, so that the partner obstructed his view of me. The policemen, both stunned and disarmed, did as they were told. The seemed most depressed at having apparently lost a good meal, which was now scattered on the floor. They somehow lacked the serious attitude one would expect from real policemen, though I couldn't look at them very carefully either. Whether one was truly this guy from high school, I still couldn't be sure; the one I suspected was complaining loudly about having broken a wrist or something like it.
As one of them crossed in front of me, though, I took my opportunity and fled for the exit. I’d extracted myself from the unconscious perpetrator. I left my pack behind; I needed to run and run fast. I didn't care, at that moment, if the gunman saw me and shot; deep inside, I suspected that neither of the guns was real, and, as it turned out, I was right. I read about it all in the papers the following day, the best I could piece it together from various accounts. The two so-called policemen had been impostors, scamming the city, taking different restaurants for free meals in the guise of being policemen, shaking down whoever they could. The gunman, later collared by an off-duty policeman who happened to be walking by, was in fact the guy who had robbed the toll booth. This, holding people hostage in a McDonald's temporarily, was his biggest crime, this and beating the toll booth operator up; apparently the toll booth operator was in pretty bad shape, and needed hospital attention.
I myself had spent the rest of that evening literally running along some neighborhoods in the west side, overly afraid that some of the earlier evening's nightmares would catch up to me. I realized that I was a sight, ketchup smeared on my face and pants, climbing fences and sneaking down alleys, but I kept going until I was reasonably sure nobody was following me. Eventually, in the early morning hours, I got back on the highway and made it toward Wisconsin.
The accident on the highway had been caused, apparently, by an erratic truck driver who had swerved until he hit a few of the cars beside him. News reports didn't give many details about him, but something told me he was part of that whole toll booth incident: the guy who came from nowhere, at the toll booth, and started pummeling the toll booth operator. I knew in my gut that was the truck driver, not the guy at McDonald's, the guy who ended up unconscious and lying on my leg. For one thing, the guy in the fight at the toll booth was a madman, along with the gunman himself, who also had just more or less lost it, right there at the toll booth. That was a guy who could swerve his truck until it did some damage.
It occurred to me to go back after the car; there was a good chance that the gunman, however he had gotten up to McDonald's from the toll booth, had never even seen it. It drove; it had a key in it; its owner would probably be out of commission for a while, in some chicagoland jail explaining himself. A few more days, and they'd find it and haul it away, or use it for evidence. Let them, I decided. I'd taken pains to rub all my fingerprints off the steering wheel, and wasn't eager to put them back on. The Cubs-Sox game had been rained out after four. Let those dogs lie. I was just crossing into Wisconsin, hopefully for good, and the sun was rising.
5-09
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Come what May
Sometimes in a small town God has to reach pretty far in order to deliver people their fate, like the time he reached way over into the next county to find someone drunk enough to smash into Eloise Hurley and her beau Josh Rath on their graduation night; people get mad at me for saying God had a hand in that, but it's either that, or God leaves it to dumb chance for things to happen to people completely out of the blue, and if that were true, there would also be a lot of explaining to do. Not that I know whether God plans it all out or not, but I will say this, a good windstorm gives God a chance to knock over lots of pins at once and still play another round.
Now in the case of Eloise and Josh, they were at the top of their lives, so some people said, since it couldn't get much better for either of them, maybe God just figured that it was time to grab them now before it got any worse. That's the generous way of looking at it. The drunk, of course, lived, but he never left town; after he got out of jail he hung around for years still drinking and getting into fights with anyone who suggested he was at fault. Of course he was at fault. He'd been driving at 90 around Blind Mackey's curve and throwing a beer can out the window which some observant hiker found not long after; it had his prints all over it. Josh's mother Roseanne took it the hardest; she was often heard wailing at church or even on a Friday evening when her younger son was gone; I swear she was ready to go down to that bar and pound that drunk herself, she was so upset over the loss of Josh. The younger son, Jeremiah, did his best to stick by her side, be faithful, never do anything to upset the balance, but when he finally hit high school he got into a kind of a wild streak himself, running off with a group of friends and just being wild. One night they stole a case of whiskey from the father of one of them, who owned the liquor store, and snuck a couple of extra kids into the drive-in where they could grab a corner spot, hide in the shadows, drink the whiskey and not even watch the movies. Occasionally one of them would stumble out and use the bathroom, maybe order a coke for the way back to the car; I happened to notice this only because I was on a date which wasn't working out well and it was a terrible movie. But fate has a way of moving in and making it easier for a couple to break up, and still give them something to remember. A huge storm came up from the west, had some tornados in it, the sirens went off, and people started packing for home; this was at about 11 or midnight.
Now Jeremiah lived with Roseanne in a house not far from mine; there was a church in the area that was in the habit of putting profound messages on its sign out front on the corner, signs such as "Does God exist?" or "Prepare to meet thy maker". Sometimes I'd ride my bicycle by the sign and would actually reflect on what it said, even if it was funny, which generally only happened if the priest or whoever wrote out the sign won the powerball lottery or maybe the bingo; most times it was grave and austere, serious. This particular night, the wind was blowing all over the place, and I was driving; I was behind the car Jeremiah was in, only by virtue of dropping off my date on the other side of town after some quick words that, frankly, ensured I wouldn't see her for a while. In the rain and the driving wind I could see the car full of Jeremiah's friends up ahead, stopped, and people were frantically running around in the rain, as a tree had fallen on a small house and literally fell enough into it so that the widow Hill, a frail old 90-year-old woman, was trapped in her own living room. These drunken kids were wandering around trying to get her out, but they were so seriously drunk, I'm sure they were having a hard time. Lightning was cracking and power lines were down; I was afraid to get out of my car, because power lines now were on both sides of me, and I couldn't open either door without touching them. Not wanting to be fried, I just sat there, watched the storm, and hoped that somebody would come along who could save the widow Hill.
About then I noticed the sign, which was more or less right out my window, beyond the power line. It said, "Does God have any plan at all?" which was not as confident as usual, almost a desperate plea, as if to say, if there's a reason for all this, God, please show us. Up a few houses, Roseanne, a nervous wreck, was shouting at the drunken boys as if to get Jeremiah to come back inside quick before there was more damage, and get downstairs. But it was too late. Another huge tree fell and, this time, damaged Roseanne's house, right as she stood on the porch, and totally smashed the center driver's side of the car, which was parked in front of her house.
Miraculously, she was unharmed, and even looked a little healthier after the storm, as if losing the car and part of the house would actually make her life simpler. We didn't find this out until later, but one of her front rooms was Josh's old room, and she'd left it entirely untouched, as if Josh would come back any day now, and it still had his clothes hanging in the closet. The tree bashed in that room, closet and all, totally destroying every part of it, right down to the bed, as if to say, get on with it. Get this room out of here.
But the weirdest thing was about her car, which as you remember, was pretty smashed up, up by the steering wheel. The thing was, Jeremiah himself was in the trunk, asleep, the whole time, and though he might have woken up when the tree hit it, and I'm sure he was kind of smashed up in there, he was so drunk, he just fell back asleep. They didn't even find him until well into the next day when somebody heard faint whines from the direction of the smashed-up car's trunk. You couldn't fault Roseanne for being a little upset after the tree had destroyed her porch and front room; maybe she had even left town, or at least gone over to her sister's, but was nowhere to be found when they took him out with a crowbar, and poured some water over his head so he could take in the wreckage of his house. Poor Jeremiah; I don't think he ever took a drink after that, he was so shook up when he got out of that car. He found his mother, I think, across town at her sister's, or somewhere, and they were ok, really, once they rebuilt the house.
I myself had climbed out the back of my own car, in order to help extract the widow Hill, and after a long night of using a hammer and crowbar to take apart a closet that we were able to use to save her life, basically, I'd gone home, muddy, dirty, and exhausted, but glad to be alive, like the widow Hill too, who we took to the hospital in a Cadillac. One of the drunken kids also ended up in the hospital; he'd broken his leg in the mud trying to get the widow Hill out. Those drunken kids were of almost no help at all, they were so drunk, and everyone was mad a them for forgetting all about Jeremiah, but you couldn't much blame them for that, it was all so crazy; I know, I was there. We'd all come together a little over the saving of the widow Hill, so I tended to be forgiving of the drunks, who tried their best to sober up and be of some use in spite of everything; mostly they fetched tools for us, and one of them went to get the Cadillac, and in return we tried to make sure they didn't trip over any fallen power lines.
In fact, though, nobody even died in the storm, which caused trees and power lines to fall all over town, except for one person: the drunk. He was asleep in his car, too, not too far away, but a tree fell on his car too, and didn't have the courtesy to avoid the part he was in. He was killed instantly, presumably in his sleep. Some people, of course, would have preferred that he die a long, slow tortuous death, because of what he'd done, but others said, well, he did; after all, he wasn't really enjoying himself in his last days, anyway. And the church just took down that whole sign, in favor of a new style of decoration. Before that, I'd suspected that I was the only one who even read it, but, on reflection, I decided that they reached a point where just about whatever they wrote would not be received all that well anyway.
5-09
Now in the case of Eloise and Josh, they were at the top of their lives, so some people said, since it couldn't get much better for either of them, maybe God just figured that it was time to grab them now before it got any worse. That's the generous way of looking at it. The drunk, of course, lived, but he never left town; after he got out of jail he hung around for years still drinking and getting into fights with anyone who suggested he was at fault. Of course he was at fault. He'd been driving at 90 around Blind Mackey's curve and throwing a beer can out the window which some observant hiker found not long after; it had his prints all over it. Josh's mother Roseanne took it the hardest; she was often heard wailing at church or even on a Friday evening when her younger son was gone; I swear she was ready to go down to that bar and pound that drunk herself, she was so upset over the loss of Josh. The younger son, Jeremiah, did his best to stick by her side, be faithful, never do anything to upset the balance, but when he finally hit high school he got into a kind of a wild streak himself, running off with a group of friends and just being wild. One night they stole a case of whiskey from the father of one of them, who owned the liquor store, and snuck a couple of extra kids into the drive-in where they could grab a corner spot, hide in the shadows, drink the whiskey and not even watch the movies. Occasionally one of them would stumble out and use the bathroom, maybe order a coke for the way back to the car; I happened to notice this only because I was on a date which wasn't working out well and it was a terrible movie. But fate has a way of moving in and making it easier for a couple to break up, and still give them something to remember. A huge storm came up from the west, had some tornados in it, the sirens went off, and people started packing for home; this was at about 11 or midnight.
Now Jeremiah lived with Roseanne in a house not far from mine; there was a church in the area that was in the habit of putting profound messages on its sign out front on the corner, signs such as "Does God exist?" or "Prepare to meet thy maker". Sometimes I'd ride my bicycle by the sign and would actually reflect on what it said, even if it was funny, which generally only happened if the priest or whoever wrote out the sign won the powerball lottery or maybe the bingo; most times it was grave and austere, serious. This particular night, the wind was blowing all over the place, and I was driving; I was behind the car Jeremiah was in, only by virtue of dropping off my date on the other side of town after some quick words that, frankly, ensured I wouldn't see her for a while. In the rain and the driving wind I could see the car full of Jeremiah's friends up ahead, stopped, and people were frantically running around in the rain, as a tree had fallen on a small house and literally fell enough into it so that the widow Hill, a frail old 90-year-old woman, was trapped in her own living room. These drunken kids were wandering around trying to get her out, but they were so seriously drunk, I'm sure they were having a hard time. Lightning was cracking and power lines were down; I was afraid to get out of my car, because power lines now were on both sides of me, and I couldn't open either door without touching them. Not wanting to be fried, I just sat there, watched the storm, and hoped that somebody would come along who could save the widow Hill.
About then I noticed the sign, which was more or less right out my window, beyond the power line. It said, "Does God have any plan at all?" which was not as confident as usual, almost a desperate plea, as if to say, if there's a reason for all this, God, please show us. Up a few houses, Roseanne, a nervous wreck, was shouting at the drunken boys as if to get Jeremiah to come back inside quick before there was more damage, and get downstairs. But it was too late. Another huge tree fell and, this time, damaged Roseanne's house, right as she stood on the porch, and totally smashed the center driver's side of the car, which was parked in front of her house.
Miraculously, she was unharmed, and even looked a little healthier after the storm, as if losing the car and part of the house would actually make her life simpler. We didn't find this out until later, but one of her front rooms was Josh's old room, and she'd left it entirely untouched, as if Josh would come back any day now, and it still had his clothes hanging in the closet. The tree bashed in that room, closet and all, totally destroying every part of it, right down to the bed, as if to say, get on with it. Get this room out of here.
But the weirdest thing was about her car, which as you remember, was pretty smashed up, up by the steering wheel. The thing was, Jeremiah himself was in the trunk, asleep, the whole time, and though he might have woken up when the tree hit it, and I'm sure he was kind of smashed up in there, he was so drunk, he just fell back asleep. They didn't even find him until well into the next day when somebody heard faint whines from the direction of the smashed-up car's trunk. You couldn't fault Roseanne for being a little upset after the tree had destroyed her porch and front room; maybe she had even left town, or at least gone over to her sister's, but was nowhere to be found when they took him out with a crowbar, and poured some water over his head so he could take in the wreckage of his house. Poor Jeremiah; I don't think he ever took a drink after that, he was so shook up when he got out of that car. He found his mother, I think, across town at her sister's, or somewhere, and they were ok, really, once they rebuilt the house.
I myself had climbed out the back of my own car, in order to help extract the widow Hill, and after a long night of using a hammer and crowbar to take apart a closet that we were able to use to save her life, basically, I'd gone home, muddy, dirty, and exhausted, but glad to be alive, like the widow Hill too, who we took to the hospital in a Cadillac. One of the drunken kids also ended up in the hospital; he'd broken his leg in the mud trying to get the widow Hill out. Those drunken kids were of almost no help at all, they were so drunk, and everyone was mad a them for forgetting all about Jeremiah, but you couldn't much blame them for that, it was all so crazy; I know, I was there. We'd all come together a little over the saving of the widow Hill, so I tended to be forgiving of the drunks, who tried their best to sober up and be of some use in spite of everything; mostly they fetched tools for us, and one of them went to get the Cadillac, and in return we tried to make sure they didn't trip over any fallen power lines.
In fact, though, nobody even died in the storm, which caused trees and power lines to fall all over town, except for one person: the drunk. He was asleep in his car, too, not too far away, but a tree fell on his car too, and didn't have the courtesy to avoid the part he was in. He was killed instantly, presumably in his sleep. Some people, of course, would have preferred that he die a long, slow tortuous death, because of what he'd done, but others said, well, he did; after all, he wasn't really enjoying himself in his last days, anyway. And the church just took down that whole sign, in favor of a new style of decoration. Before that, I'd suspected that I was the only one who even read it, but, on reflection, I decided that they reached a point where just about whatever they wrote would not be received all that well anyway.
5-09
Monday, May 18, 2009
reasonable doubt
Reasonable Doubt
Even years from the events of that summer, I have a hard time believing that unrelated things can be so connected, that a town can be so small, or an area so small, that everyone is truly related to each other, or connected. I mean, I was getting a PhD in Philosophy at a university in this small area. I figured that if I went over into the next county, Joe’s Bar in Saline County to be specific, to get a beer, who would notice? Or care? I was getting away from it all, relaxing, unwinding. I did it about once a month, and almost always at the end of a term, when papers from my assistantship rolled in. I was distracted; I needed to relax. I watched the locals play pool, but I did little else.
So, one time when I was called into jury duty, and it turned out to be a Saline County murder case, I thought nothing of it. Who did I know in Saline County? I knew Al, the bartender, maybe, but barely even him, and he didn’t count; he was a bartender. We were in a large room in our own Franklin County courthouse, and they explained to us that some of us would be chosen for a jury for a Saline County murder case. A notorious bully, Big Eddie Smith, was up for murder. It didn’t take me long to figure out who Big Eddie was. The prosecution, of course, called him Edward, but one of the early guys in the jury pool said, of course I know Big Eddie, he makes moonshine out on the ledges out by the river in Saline County, he said, he deals drugs and other bad stuff, and they dismissed this guy right away and told us to disregard anything anyone had just said, which just made us remember all the more clearly.
Well that was a kind of bell right there, of course it stuck in my mind, but what was I going to do? When it was my turn I didn’t lie; I just said I didn’t know him; I was hostile to the whole system, and distracted on top of that, and I didn’t bother to hide it. I’d be a lousy juror, I was trying to tell them; I had other things to do. Would I hesitate to send a murderer to his death? Of course I would; they were always sending innocent people up for murders they didn’t commit, and maybe Big Eddie would be one of them. Much to my surprise, they chose me to be on this jury. Maybe the defense liked my hostility to the whole system. Maybe the prosecutor figured that, being an academic, I’d have no sympathy for a huge, ugly, dumb hillbilly murderer like Big Eddie.
I looked more closely at Eddie. I wasn’t quite right about that dumb part; in fact I had no idea about him, smart or dumb, and tried to tell myself to be impartial, give him a chance. The other stuff might be true, judging by his appearance, unkempt hair, big muscles beneath his jail coveralls, etc., but who knows about moonshine? People make that stuff up. They’d say it about a guy like Eddie even if it wasn’t true. And he was probably a guy that always had it, whether he made it or not. And would, no doubt, share it, even if it killed someone.
A couple of days later, we were in the routine of the trial, which turned out to be quite long; give it a few weeks, they told us. I was angry, but they wouldn’t let me bring my laptop to the trial, I had to just sit there and watch, and judge the evidence. Somebody had beaten and killed Jeff Wright in his home in the town of Dover, Saline County, on the night of Saturday, May 8, 2002. He had taken Lila Cartwheeler there on that night, and she was well known to be Big Eddie’s girl, according to one of the jurors. Lila Cartwheeler was one of the state’s witnesses; we’d see her soon. Evidence from the house included blood, DNA, photographs of the body. It looked like Big Eddie was a goner. A kitchen knife had his fingerprints all over it; that knife had been found in Jeff Wright’s body. My fellow jury members, farmers, academics, a gas-station owner, a math teacher, all agreed. He looks guilty. Why was this trial in Franklin County? No way he could get a fair trial in Saline, they said; he’s too famous.
So it was early in the trial, in the testimony of the bank official; we’d seen the bank video, in which Lila came into the bank, flirted with the teller, Jeff Wright, took a very long time, trying to make her withdrawal, or whatever, and left. Shortly after that, according to the official, Jeff Wright withdrew $5000 of his own money. This made everyone jump, especially the defense attorney, who acted like he was convinced that Big Eddie hadn’t done it, but didn’t quite know who did do it, or why. $5000? This was not an ordinary date. This would provide another motive, besides enraged-ex-boyfriend-kills-suitor. But what? A business deal gone bad? Lila as go-between in some deal between Big Eddie and Jeff Wright? In cross-examination the money seemed to have disappeared; it was cash; there was no trace of it.
It was somewhere in that movie that I realized I’d seen Lila somewhere before, perhaps in Joe’s bar, so I scraped my memory- could I have been in Dover, Saline County, the night of May 8? If I was, I couldn’t remember it. But I had a vague memory of Lila, playing pool, perhaps, in Joe’s Bar. I’d seen her before. In the courthouse, she was nowhere to be seen; the place was relatively empty of people related to the case or of spectators. Big Eddie was there, of course, sullen, passive, glaring, as if he knew he was being framed. An older woman also usually was there, in the spectators’ seats- Jeff Wright’s mother?
So next was the restaurant owner and a waiter, there to verify that, yes, Jeff Wright and Lila Cartwheeler had gone to a nice restaurant that night, gone on a date, were romantically involved perhaps, but were a young innocent couple, while this glaring brute over here in the front row plotted methodically to kill the guy. My original intention was to read and think philosophy; I’d brought my Sartre book and clutched it in my hand hoping for an opening when I could just kick back and read it. But the trial itself became riveting in its own strange and twisted way. The more the prosecutor tried to make us believe that these were two normal young people, the less I believed it. The defense attorney, grasping at straws, I thought, started asking about the $5000. Any evidence of a big deal taking place? Did you ever see a large chunk of cash being passed? These questions, of course, are in my own words. But I was thinking more or less the same way as the defense attorney. Something was fishy. I didn’t know what.
As I scraped my memory for any clues, I could remember clearly that Lila Cartwheeler was no sweet innocent thing. She was playing pool at Joe’s, and a half a dozen guys were leering at her, including myself, and she was enjoying it more than a little. Now on the night that I remembered, I had gone way out to Dover to get away from my own troubles, and wasn’t about to start up more, so I just sipped my beer and watched, perhaps between pages of Sartre. So the details might be a little fuzzy there. But one thing about my memory bothered me, and as I say, I had no clue exactly whether it was May 8 or not, my memory wasn’t helping me there. But there was a detail that I did remember. At some point some man walked into the place, walked directly up to Lila Cartwheeler, and said something private to her, in her ear. And this changed her demeanor, ever so slightly; it made her colder, less likely, I thought, to become more friendly with any of the guys there who would have jumped at the chance. I remember that turn in her demeanor; I remember the guy, too, because even in the minute or so I’d seen him, it seemed he meant more to her than the others. Yet, here, at this trial, all I could hear was how everyone knew she was Big Eddie’s girl, and how, apparently, she was breaking it off with Big Eddie to go with this Jeff guy, the victim.
So now Lila herself gets called up to the stand, and the prosecutor starts in. He of course wants to prove that she went out with Big Eddie, broke up with him legitimately, and started up with Jeff Wright as any single young woman would have the right to do. He also wants to establish how long she was in his home; how it happened that Big Eddie came there; what was Big Eddie’s DNA and blood doing all over Jeff Wright’s house; how could she imagine that Big Eddie could be furious at Jeff Wright for going out with his girl; how Big Eddie could be worked up in a rage, induced by alcohol or drugs or whatever-else she could think of; and, in general, would she help lock up this mean-looking hillbilly madman, for the benefit of the citizens of Saline County.
She was having none of it, though, and gave him very few useful details. She’d gone to Jeff Wright’s house, yes, but that was to see some art he had done, and yes, she knew that was a tired old line meant to get young women up into a guy’s apartment, but she knew Jeff pretty well, and didn’t feel nervous about that. Big Eddie, she said, was also just a friend; she had no idea why his blood and DNA were all over the murder scene, no idea why he might be angry, didn’t seem to her he’d have anything against Jeff Wright at all. In the defense attorney’s turn, he brought up the money again, but she claimed to know nothing of it at all. If Jeff Wright had withdrawn it, she didn’t know; nor did she have any idea why he would do that on the night he was taking her out to eat. She knew nothing of it.
Studying her closely, I knew she knew more than she was letting on, yet I believed her; I believed that she and Big Eddie were “just friends”- and believed that she was on a casual date with Jeff Wright. She was no innocent woman; I knew that; yet, what she said, she didn’t appear to be lying. At one point she looked right at me. I didn’t know if she recognized me from that night or not. Big Eddie glared at her. She looked back with the same impassive look. She was giving nothing away. She had no emotion toward him; not hate, vengeance, contempt, nor love. Yet also she would do nothing to get him locked up. If she knew anything, she wasn’t saying.
Finally they brought Big Eddie himself up to the stand. He took forever getting there, and his oath to tell the truth was entirely unconvincing. But once they started asking questions he opened up a little. He repeated Lila’s claim that he and Lila were just friends. Yes, he had been in Jeff Wright’s apartment; he had helped him cook dinner, and had cut himself. That’s why there was blood. That’s why his prints were on the knife.
The time of course was a question. But Jeff and Lila had been at dinner at about 6. Lila had left Jeff’s, or so she said, at about 9. Big Eddie said he got there at about 11, left at about 12, and Jeff Wright was alive and well when he left. Alive and well, that’s right, yes sir.
Now a number of suspicions came to the surface, as Big Eddie was notorious for moonshine, illegal substances, and other things. Eddie denied them all; he was in the apartment merely for dinner, and to talk to Jeff Wright; he had no business deal going whatsoever, did not come and go with any illegal substances of any kind, or have any kind of business, other than the dinner, with Jeff Wright whatsoever.
At one point they gave us a break, maybe between prosecutor and defense, and I remember being a little surprised by my jury mates. A big ornery moonshiner would come over to this gentle bank teller’s apartment, at 11 pm, just to cook? And cut himself in the process? They were angry, furious that he’d try to pass off a story like this. And then what, somebody sneaks in, and kills this nice friendly bank teller quick, the minute Big Eddie leaves? And there would be a plausible reason for this? They had no doubt he was a liar. They were ready to send him up on the spot. The judge was impatient also, as if he didn’t want to hear such tripe in his courtroom.
The defense attorney, sensing trouble here, tried to draw out Eddie’s testimony, make it seem more plausible, and show us the human side of Eddie. I myself was baffled. If he’d come to rob Wright, why did he have to use Wright’s knife? Why was there no evidence of the five grand, anywhere? A polished dealer makes people come to him, at home or another location, but doesn’t go wandering up to bank teller’s apartments; what was the story here?
But as the attorney walked us through, Big Eddie stuck with what he’d said. He seemed like a guy who had been blamed for every bad thing that had ever happened, and had merely obliged everyone by doing just about every bad thing, and was in the habit of being blamed, and when he just did something normal, he wasn’t surprised he was being blamed again. But he stuck with his story. If they were going to send him up for cutting his finger cooking onions, so be it.
In the concluding arguments the prosecutor stressed the knife: the blood, the DNA, the evidence that Big Eddie was there; Jeff Wright was killed; put two and two together, would you please. The defense came up with possibilities to make us have reasonable doubt. The judge reminded us that reasonable doubt meant that the state had to prove he was guilty, beyond a reasonable doubt.
I hung that jury on the basis of that idea. I wasn’t sure he’d done it. I couldn’t argue about the rest of his life, or his reputation, or anything else; I didn’t know him. But what I saw didn’t make sense. His own story didn’t make much sense either, I had to admit, but him just plain robbing the guy, or killing him because he’d gone out with Lila, killing him in a rage, I just couldn’t see it. And then, leaving the knife? This isn’t what a premeditated murderer would do. Actually I’ll say that people in the jury agreed with me to some extent, they just concluded that they should send him up just because who else could have done it? The evidence they saw was enough for them. They pressured me for a while, but then they gave up, willing to blame me for refusing to send him up. They didn’t feel strongly enough to get angry or really twist my arm. It was a hung jury; he was free.
Now I took my Sartre book back to Franklin County and tried to finish my PhD, but it wasn’t easy. The characters of that trial haunted me; not so much the jurors, who were all nice to me, in spite of what I’d done, but the others, in particular, Lila, Eddie, and the old woman, presumably Jeff Wright’s mother. And the other guy who kept coming to my mind was the evil man in the bar, who had whispered in Lila’s ear; a guy who had never been mentioned, as far as I knew, even once. If he was Lila’s true love, then they certainly hadn’t said it. If he had said something of any importance, and it was the same night, which I doubt, then I could only guess at what it was. I’d tried to eliminate him from my consideration during the trial, and consider Eddie’s guilt only on the basis of what I saw. But after the trial, I thought of this evil guy. I didn’t like him at all; he was a plotter, unlike Eddie. I realized, later, that I’d considered him guilty all along. I weighed whether I wasn’t influenced unfairly by knowing something I shouldn’t have. But in fact the entire jury was influenced by the reputation of Big Eddie himself, whose shadow stretched two counties and whose name rarely appeared in sentences that weren’t about crime, dealing, or other suspicious activities. Sure, I had seen something, and had decided based partly on instinct. But I also decided based on what I had heard, and I hadn’t heard enough.
Years later, I was proven right, I believe. Aspen Victor McGrath III, who had disappeared from the town of Dover around May of 2002, was found much later on Big Eddie’s land; he’d been dead for years. Big Eddie was now being arrested for some other crime, a smaller one, but one he was clearly guilty of. Eddie now confessed to killing Aspen McGrath III, but claimed also that it was McGrath that had killed Jeff Wright on that night, to the best of his belief.
I was now a cab driver in a nearby town, and I’m sure you’ll chuckle at that, me with my PhD, my Sartre book, my hung jury, I’m driving a cab around, and philosophizing. I thought, well, I realize I’m a walking cliché, but there it was, the truth is the truth, just like Lila and the art prints. So I had plenty of time to listen to the radio and hear the whole story unravel, and also to hear what random passengers said about it, if they cared to comment. In this town we were mostly going to the airport, which was a few miles out of town, and gave plenty of time to hear news reports about Big Eddie and the murder of Aspen McGrath III, whom somehow, nobody had ever missed.
But what never surfaced, really, was what Lila’s role was; Eddie wasn’t saying. He confessed to McGrath’s murder, and to various other crimes; apparently he was guilty of all of them. He claimed that McGrath’s murder had happened on the same night as Wright’s murder, that Lila was there but had no part in it, that he’d buried the body on his land, and that was the end of it. He didn’t give a reason. He didn’t end up with $5000, mysteriously. He had nothing to show for the murder; he didn’t know where Lila had gone. If the press managed to find her at about this time, they didn’t say anything either; she’d changed her name and disappeared, more or less. Maybe the police got a statement out of her, but information about her whereabouts never surfaced in radio, television or newspaper accounts.
I know this because, being a cabdriver, I could listen to radio frequently, and was able to read newspapers and watch television the rest of the time. It wasn’t that I was obsessed; but I did this kind of stuff anyway, and was interested naturally. One of my fares said that he was getting what he deserved, and had probably killed Wright too; quickly I looked in the rearview mirror to see if he had been on the jury. Occasionally I’d get a Saline County official in the cab, and have more serious discussions about what had happened; they knew little more than me, and there wasn’t much forthcoming about Big Eddie. He had a long criminal record; his enemies were vindicated now that he was guilty of McGrath’s murder and was off to jail; but, I was vindicated that, apparently, he was not guilty of the murder he had been charged with, so many years ago. As for McGrath, no family surfaced to demand justice in anger and horror; they had apparently died years ago, though he was young.
Still a couple of years later, I was in a pawn shop, when a diamond-engraved broach caught my eye. I asked to see it, but the owner reflexively objected, knowing I couldn’t afford it. Don’t ask me why I was in this shop, it’s not about my life’s downward spiral, though I must say writing has helped me out. In any case he was right, I couldn’t; however, its case had dust on it, and it glowed anyway, and shone as I looked at it in the afternoon light. What moved me to hold it in my hands, I still don’t know to this day. But, as I turned it over, and saw the engraved letters A.V.M. in the back, I rolled those letters over in my mind until I realized that I was looking at the answer to the case, in my hands. It was small enough, diamonds inlaid, clearly something Wright would have paid $5000 for, though I wasn’t an expert by any means, clearly a family heirloom of a family now gone. The pawn shop owner stared at me; perhaps nobody had touched this broach in years, though he had thought, perhaps, that it would sell quickly. I gave it back to him, and felt like washing my hands. This pawn shop was more or less in the shadow of the courthouse, but I walked the other direction, glad that my life, as destitute as it was, had never come to anything like theirs. My Sartre book, still on my end table, had notes deep inside, that I had taken from that trial. I should throw away the book, but I don’t.
5-09
Even years from the events of that summer, I have a hard time believing that unrelated things can be so connected, that a town can be so small, or an area so small, that everyone is truly related to each other, or connected. I mean, I was getting a PhD in Philosophy at a university in this small area. I figured that if I went over into the next county, Joe’s Bar in Saline County to be specific, to get a beer, who would notice? Or care? I was getting away from it all, relaxing, unwinding. I did it about once a month, and almost always at the end of a term, when papers from my assistantship rolled in. I was distracted; I needed to relax. I watched the locals play pool, but I did little else.
So, one time when I was called into jury duty, and it turned out to be a Saline County murder case, I thought nothing of it. Who did I know in Saline County? I knew Al, the bartender, maybe, but barely even him, and he didn’t count; he was a bartender. We were in a large room in our own Franklin County courthouse, and they explained to us that some of us would be chosen for a jury for a Saline County murder case. A notorious bully, Big Eddie Smith, was up for murder. It didn’t take me long to figure out who Big Eddie was. The prosecution, of course, called him Edward, but one of the early guys in the jury pool said, of course I know Big Eddie, he makes moonshine out on the ledges out by the river in Saline County, he said, he deals drugs and other bad stuff, and they dismissed this guy right away and told us to disregard anything anyone had just said, which just made us remember all the more clearly.
Well that was a kind of bell right there, of course it stuck in my mind, but what was I going to do? When it was my turn I didn’t lie; I just said I didn’t know him; I was hostile to the whole system, and distracted on top of that, and I didn’t bother to hide it. I’d be a lousy juror, I was trying to tell them; I had other things to do. Would I hesitate to send a murderer to his death? Of course I would; they were always sending innocent people up for murders they didn’t commit, and maybe Big Eddie would be one of them. Much to my surprise, they chose me to be on this jury. Maybe the defense liked my hostility to the whole system. Maybe the prosecutor figured that, being an academic, I’d have no sympathy for a huge, ugly, dumb hillbilly murderer like Big Eddie.
I looked more closely at Eddie. I wasn’t quite right about that dumb part; in fact I had no idea about him, smart or dumb, and tried to tell myself to be impartial, give him a chance. The other stuff might be true, judging by his appearance, unkempt hair, big muscles beneath his jail coveralls, etc., but who knows about moonshine? People make that stuff up. They’d say it about a guy like Eddie even if it wasn’t true. And he was probably a guy that always had it, whether he made it or not. And would, no doubt, share it, even if it killed someone.
A couple of days later, we were in the routine of the trial, which turned out to be quite long; give it a few weeks, they told us. I was angry, but they wouldn’t let me bring my laptop to the trial, I had to just sit there and watch, and judge the evidence. Somebody had beaten and killed Jeff Wright in his home in the town of Dover, Saline County, on the night of Saturday, May 8, 2002. He had taken Lila Cartwheeler there on that night, and she was well known to be Big Eddie’s girl, according to one of the jurors. Lila Cartwheeler was one of the state’s witnesses; we’d see her soon. Evidence from the house included blood, DNA, photographs of the body. It looked like Big Eddie was a goner. A kitchen knife had his fingerprints all over it; that knife had been found in Jeff Wright’s body. My fellow jury members, farmers, academics, a gas-station owner, a math teacher, all agreed. He looks guilty. Why was this trial in Franklin County? No way he could get a fair trial in Saline, they said; he’s too famous.
So it was early in the trial, in the testimony of the bank official; we’d seen the bank video, in which Lila came into the bank, flirted with the teller, Jeff Wright, took a very long time, trying to make her withdrawal, or whatever, and left. Shortly after that, according to the official, Jeff Wright withdrew $5000 of his own money. This made everyone jump, especially the defense attorney, who acted like he was convinced that Big Eddie hadn’t done it, but didn’t quite know who did do it, or why. $5000? This was not an ordinary date. This would provide another motive, besides enraged-ex-boyfriend-kills-suitor. But what? A business deal gone bad? Lila as go-between in some deal between Big Eddie and Jeff Wright? In cross-examination the money seemed to have disappeared; it was cash; there was no trace of it.
It was somewhere in that movie that I realized I’d seen Lila somewhere before, perhaps in Joe’s bar, so I scraped my memory- could I have been in Dover, Saline County, the night of May 8? If I was, I couldn’t remember it. But I had a vague memory of Lila, playing pool, perhaps, in Joe’s Bar. I’d seen her before. In the courthouse, she was nowhere to be seen; the place was relatively empty of people related to the case or of spectators. Big Eddie was there, of course, sullen, passive, glaring, as if he knew he was being framed. An older woman also usually was there, in the spectators’ seats- Jeff Wright’s mother?
So next was the restaurant owner and a waiter, there to verify that, yes, Jeff Wright and Lila Cartwheeler had gone to a nice restaurant that night, gone on a date, were romantically involved perhaps, but were a young innocent couple, while this glaring brute over here in the front row plotted methodically to kill the guy. My original intention was to read and think philosophy; I’d brought my Sartre book and clutched it in my hand hoping for an opening when I could just kick back and read it. But the trial itself became riveting in its own strange and twisted way. The more the prosecutor tried to make us believe that these were two normal young people, the less I believed it. The defense attorney, grasping at straws, I thought, started asking about the $5000. Any evidence of a big deal taking place? Did you ever see a large chunk of cash being passed? These questions, of course, are in my own words. But I was thinking more or less the same way as the defense attorney. Something was fishy. I didn’t know what.
As I scraped my memory for any clues, I could remember clearly that Lila Cartwheeler was no sweet innocent thing. She was playing pool at Joe’s, and a half a dozen guys were leering at her, including myself, and she was enjoying it more than a little. Now on the night that I remembered, I had gone way out to Dover to get away from my own troubles, and wasn’t about to start up more, so I just sipped my beer and watched, perhaps between pages of Sartre. So the details might be a little fuzzy there. But one thing about my memory bothered me, and as I say, I had no clue exactly whether it was May 8 or not, my memory wasn’t helping me there. But there was a detail that I did remember. At some point some man walked into the place, walked directly up to Lila Cartwheeler, and said something private to her, in her ear. And this changed her demeanor, ever so slightly; it made her colder, less likely, I thought, to become more friendly with any of the guys there who would have jumped at the chance. I remember that turn in her demeanor; I remember the guy, too, because even in the minute or so I’d seen him, it seemed he meant more to her than the others. Yet, here, at this trial, all I could hear was how everyone knew she was Big Eddie’s girl, and how, apparently, she was breaking it off with Big Eddie to go with this Jeff guy, the victim.
So now Lila herself gets called up to the stand, and the prosecutor starts in. He of course wants to prove that she went out with Big Eddie, broke up with him legitimately, and started up with Jeff Wright as any single young woman would have the right to do. He also wants to establish how long she was in his home; how it happened that Big Eddie came there; what was Big Eddie’s DNA and blood doing all over Jeff Wright’s house; how could she imagine that Big Eddie could be furious at Jeff Wright for going out with his girl; how Big Eddie could be worked up in a rage, induced by alcohol or drugs or whatever-else she could think of; and, in general, would she help lock up this mean-looking hillbilly madman, for the benefit of the citizens of Saline County.
She was having none of it, though, and gave him very few useful details. She’d gone to Jeff Wright’s house, yes, but that was to see some art he had done, and yes, she knew that was a tired old line meant to get young women up into a guy’s apartment, but she knew Jeff pretty well, and didn’t feel nervous about that. Big Eddie, she said, was also just a friend; she had no idea why his blood and DNA were all over the murder scene, no idea why he might be angry, didn’t seem to her he’d have anything against Jeff Wright at all. In the defense attorney’s turn, he brought up the money again, but she claimed to know nothing of it at all. If Jeff Wright had withdrawn it, she didn’t know; nor did she have any idea why he would do that on the night he was taking her out to eat. She knew nothing of it.
Studying her closely, I knew she knew more than she was letting on, yet I believed her; I believed that she and Big Eddie were “just friends”- and believed that she was on a casual date with Jeff Wright. She was no innocent woman; I knew that; yet, what she said, she didn’t appear to be lying. At one point she looked right at me. I didn’t know if she recognized me from that night or not. Big Eddie glared at her. She looked back with the same impassive look. She was giving nothing away. She had no emotion toward him; not hate, vengeance, contempt, nor love. Yet also she would do nothing to get him locked up. If she knew anything, she wasn’t saying.
Finally they brought Big Eddie himself up to the stand. He took forever getting there, and his oath to tell the truth was entirely unconvincing. But once they started asking questions he opened up a little. He repeated Lila’s claim that he and Lila were just friends. Yes, he had been in Jeff Wright’s apartment; he had helped him cook dinner, and had cut himself. That’s why there was blood. That’s why his prints were on the knife.
The time of course was a question. But Jeff and Lila had been at dinner at about 6. Lila had left Jeff’s, or so she said, at about 9. Big Eddie said he got there at about 11, left at about 12, and Jeff Wright was alive and well when he left. Alive and well, that’s right, yes sir.
Now a number of suspicions came to the surface, as Big Eddie was notorious for moonshine, illegal substances, and other things. Eddie denied them all; he was in the apartment merely for dinner, and to talk to Jeff Wright; he had no business deal going whatsoever, did not come and go with any illegal substances of any kind, or have any kind of business, other than the dinner, with Jeff Wright whatsoever.
At one point they gave us a break, maybe between prosecutor and defense, and I remember being a little surprised by my jury mates. A big ornery moonshiner would come over to this gentle bank teller’s apartment, at 11 pm, just to cook? And cut himself in the process? They were angry, furious that he’d try to pass off a story like this. And then what, somebody sneaks in, and kills this nice friendly bank teller quick, the minute Big Eddie leaves? And there would be a plausible reason for this? They had no doubt he was a liar. They were ready to send him up on the spot. The judge was impatient also, as if he didn’t want to hear such tripe in his courtroom.
The defense attorney, sensing trouble here, tried to draw out Eddie’s testimony, make it seem more plausible, and show us the human side of Eddie. I myself was baffled. If he’d come to rob Wright, why did he have to use Wright’s knife? Why was there no evidence of the five grand, anywhere? A polished dealer makes people come to him, at home or another location, but doesn’t go wandering up to bank teller’s apartments; what was the story here?
But as the attorney walked us through, Big Eddie stuck with what he’d said. He seemed like a guy who had been blamed for every bad thing that had ever happened, and had merely obliged everyone by doing just about every bad thing, and was in the habit of being blamed, and when he just did something normal, he wasn’t surprised he was being blamed again. But he stuck with his story. If they were going to send him up for cutting his finger cooking onions, so be it.
In the concluding arguments the prosecutor stressed the knife: the blood, the DNA, the evidence that Big Eddie was there; Jeff Wright was killed; put two and two together, would you please. The defense came up with possibilities to make us have reasonable doubt. The judge reminded us that reasonable doubt meant that the state had to prove he was guilty, beyond a reasonable doubt.
I hung that jury on the basis of that idea. I wasn’t sure he’d done it. I couldn’t argue about the rest of his life, or his reputation, or anything else; I didn’t know him. But what I saw didn’t make sense. His own story didn’t make much sense either, I had to admit, but him just plain robbing the guy, or killing him because he’d gone out with Lila, killing him in a rage, I just couldn’t see it. And then, leaving the knife? This isn’t what a premeditated murderer would do. Actually I’ll say that people in the jury agreed with me to some extent, they just concluded that they should send him up just because who else could have done it? The evidence they saw was enough for them. They pressured me for a while, but then they gave up, willing to blame me for refusing to send him up. They didn’t feel strongly enough to get angry or really twist my arm. It was a hung jury; he was free.
Now I took my Sartre book back to Franklin County and tried to finish my PhD, but it wasn’t easy. The characters of that trial haunted me; not so much the jurors, who were all nice to me, in spite of what I’d done, but the others, in particular, Lila, Eddie, and the old woman, presumably Jeff Wright’s mother. And the other guy who kept coming to my mind was the evil man in the bar, who had whispered in Lila’s ear; a guy who had never been mentioned, as far as I knew, even once. If he was Lila’s true love, then they certainly hadn’t said it. If he had said something of any importance, and it was the same night, which I doubt, then I could only guess at what it was. I’d tried to eliminate him from my consideration during the trial, and consider Eddie’s guilt only on the basis of what I saw. But after the trial, I thought of this evil guy. I didn’t like him at all; he was a plotter, unlike Eddie. I realized, later, that I’d considered him guilty all along. I weighed whether I wasn’t influenced unfairly by knowing something I shouldn’t have. But in fact the entire jury was influenced by the reputation of Big Eddie himself, whose shadow stretched two counties and whose name rarely appeared in sentences that weren’t about crime, dealing, or other suspicious activities. Sure, I had seen something, and had decided based partly on instinct. But I also decided based on what I had heard, and I hadn’t heard enough.
Years later, I was proven right, I believe. Aspen Victor McGrath III, who had disappeared from the town of Dover around May of 2002, was found much later on Big Eddie’s land; he’d been dead for years. Big Eddie was now being arrested for some other crime, a smaller one, but one he was clearly guilty of. Eddie now confessed to killing Aspen McGrath III, but claimed also that it was McGrath that had killed Jeff Wright on that night, to the best of his belief.
I was now a cab driver in a nearby town, and I’m sure you’ll chuckle at that, me with my PhD, my Sartre book, my hung jury, I’m driving a cab around, and philosophizing. I thought, well, I realize I’m a walking cliché, but there it was, the truth is the truth, just like Lila and the art prints. So I had plenty of time to listen to the radio and hear the whole story unravel, and also to hear what random passengers said about it, if they cared to comment. In this town we were mostly going to the airport, which was a few miles out of town, and gave plenty of time to hear news reports about Big Eddie and the murder of Aspen McGrath III, whom somehow, nobody had ever missed.
But what never surfaced, really, was what Lila’s role was; Eddie wasn’t saying. He confessed to McGrath’s murder, and to various other crimes; apparently he was guilty of all of them. He claimed that McGrath’s murder had happened on the same night as Wright’s murder, that Lila was there but had no part in it, that he’d buried the body on his land, and that was the end of it. He didn’t give a reason. He didn’t end up with $5000, mysteriously. He had nothing to show for the murder; he didn’t know where Lila had gone. If the press managed to find her at about this time, they didn’t say anything either; she’d changed her name and disappeared, more or less. Maybe the police got a statement out of her, but information about her whereabouts never surfaced in radio, television or newspaper accounts.
I know this because, being a cabdriver, I could listen to radio frequently, and was able to read newspapers and watch television the rest of the time. It wasn’t that I was obsessed; but I did this kind of stuff anyway, and was interested naturally. One of my fares said that he was getting what he deserved, and had probably killed Wright too; quickly I looked in the rearview mirror to see if he had been on the jury. Occasionally I’d get a Saline County official in the cab, and have more serious discussions about what had happened; they knew little more than me, and there wasn’t much forthcoming about Big Eddie. He had a long criminal record; his enemies were vindicated now that he was guilty of McGrath’s murder and was off to jail; but, I was vindicated that, apparently, he was not guilty of the murder he had been charged with, so many years ago. As for McGrath, no family surfaced to demand justice in anger and horror; they had apparently died years ago, though he was young.
Still a couple of years later, I was in a pawn shop, when a diamond-engraved broach caught my eye. I asked to see it, but the owner reflexively objected, knowing I couldn’t afford it. Don’t ask me why I was in this shop, it’s not about my life’s downward spiral, though I must say writing has helped me out. In any case he was right, I couldn’t; however, its case had dust on it, and it glowed anyway, and shone as I looked at it in the afternoon light. What moved me to hold it in my hands, I still don’t know to this day. But, as I turned it over, and saw the engraved letters A.V.M. in the back, I rolled those letters over in my mind until I realized that I was looking at the answer to the case, in my hands. It was small enough, diamonds inlaid, clearly something Wright would have paid $5000 for, though I wasn’t an expert by any means, clearly a family heirloom of a family now gone. The pawn shop owner stared at me; perhaps nobody had touched this broach in years, though he had thought, perhaps, that it would sell quickly. I gave it back to him, and felt like washing my hands. This pawn shop was more or less in the shadow of the courthouse, but I walked the other direction, glad that my life, as destitute as it was, had never come to anything like theirs. My Sartre book, still on my end table, had notes deep inside, that I had taken from that trial. I should throw away the book, but I don’t.
5-09
Thursday, May 7, 2009
house of bricks
Ian Parson Smith got to go to Hong Kong for his job, selling large cranes to construction companies, and having sold several to the people who made the new Hong Kong Disneyland, he got free tickets to Disneyland. He had to call Diane Wesson in Hong Kong, and her husband Wang, and invite them; they agreed and went soon after he arrived in Hong Kong, on a sultry Saturday morning.
Back in the days that Ian and Diane were a couple, the standard joke had to do with when Smith and Wesson got together, there was gunfire. They'd had a stormy relationship, and had broken up, so he wasn't mad at Wang for moving in; in fact, Wang was an old friend too. He'd met them both selling drugs up and down the West Coast, and those were days he'd prefer to forget, because they had haunted him ever since. They prevented him from having a healthy relationship with Diane; they gave him nightmares. They ate away at his subconscious even now.
The low point of his drug-dealing days was one time about seventeen years ago, when he'd sold drugs to a woman in the Mission District of San Francisco, who was neglecting a young child, who he could see in the shadows of her skirt, and he got the distinct sense that he was selling the woman the child's death. Not that he'd ever seen either of them again; he hadn't. But the child's eyes haunted him; the fact that the woman was buying the drugs instead of the food that the child needed, maybe, would haunt him for years. Eleven years ago, a little beyond those drug-running days, having survived them, he begged Wang to take him deep into China, and he did; he took him to Wang's family's home, in a small village in Szichuan, where Wang's grandparents, cousins, and extended family lived. In one cousin's house, a man, Gun, tried to get Wang to tell him where he could get some money. He needed money to build the kind of house his beautiful young wife needed. The wife, with large, beautiful eyes and a baby at her hip, looked on without understanding as Wang translated for Ian. Ian, even then, thought of Diane: the Smith-Wesson connection, here with a guy named Gun. Then, he thought of love of money, how it would lead people to all lengths. Don't tell him about your money, he felt like telling Wang. He doesn't need to know how you got it. Just give him some; there will be more where that came from.
In Hong Kong Disneyland, he got a good look at Diane, who was clearly showing her age; she wouldn't have a baby, it seemed, because something was wrong with Wang, perhaps chemical damage. It wore on her, it seemed. Ian himself couldn't give her a baby, because he couldn't get the baby of the Mission District out of his mind. How could he bring a baby into the world, when he couldn't trust himself, couldn't avoid doing such things? His entire life had been like that, a series of very poor steps, though he had at least gotten the sense to get out of the drug trade when he could, was still alive to be here at this moment. Mickeys, Snow Whites, and other Disney images danced in his vision, but they brought him memories of California: the fast life, the skyscrapers and cable cars, the money, the greed, the Benz, the high rollers, the seedy underside, the Smith and Wesson jokes, the child's eyes…
Wang was in an unusually bad mood, as if the Disney characters also reminded him of his California days, which may have been worse than Ian's, and which he also would probably prefer to forget. Diane explained to Ian why there were long lines here, such as the one they stood in, why so many of the people were from the mainland, and had different ways when it came to standing in line. Ian actually didn't mind the standing, even as sultry as the day was, on edge, so to speak, with Diane, the one woman in his life, but the chaos in the background, amongst the Disney images, was beginning to push him over the edge. A desperate need for sanity, escape, or solid ground set in, and he sensed he wouldn't get it in the ride they were waiting for. Steadily he became more unhinged.
Suddenly, a familiar woman from the crowd rushed up to Wang, and implored to him, in Mandarin, something that Ian and Diane couldn't understand. He looked closely at the woman; he'd seen her before. She was Gun's wife, the woman with the big eyes, from the small village in Szichuan. She and Wang carried on in Mandarin for some time; the line moved quite slowly. Wang got a look of desperation in his eyes, as if he'd heard bad news, which he had; he insisted, however, that the woman leave them alone for the moment, and he would deal with it later.
On the ferry back to Lantau Island, where Wang and Diane lived, Ian talked to Wang for a while while the boat chopped through rough waters, and Hong Kong, a beautiful city, shone in the distance, its lights shimmering on the harbor. Wang was a smooth guy; he spoke Cantonese and English fluently, along with Mandarin; he made money and provided for Diane, and didn't feel threatened by Ian's arrival. But the story he told clearly had shaken him up as his voice cracked as he told it. Gun, it seemed, had bought some cheap construction supplies from a guy one day, supplies that would help him make a dream house he couldn't afford otherwise. When the Szichuan earthquake came, Gun's own child was in a school; that very school had been poorly built, because the supplies had been sold out from under it. He had in fact bought his own child's death when he bought those bricks, though surely he didn't know it. His wife had now come out of China, to find Wang, for some reason related to the money for a funeral. But here the story stopped: was it the child's funeral? Or Gun's? Wang withheld a few details, such as what he, Wang, would do about it; the woman was family, after all, but Ian, his guest, was going back to California the following day.
The boat docked at Lantau Island, and they woke up Diane, who had been sleeping in the night sea breeze, out on the deck of the ferry. Up In the hills of Lantau, there was a huge Buddha statue that overlooked the area; monks rode the ferry occasionally and people came from far away, hoping to implore the Buddha for luck. The very idea of luck, though, gave Ian a bad taste, like Disneyland Chinese food, which seemed a kind of abomination. But then, at that moment, so did the idea of going back to California, where one day wealth shimmered on skyscrapers downtown, and another, an earthquake could change everything.
Back in the days that Ian and Diane were a couple, the standard joke had to do with when Smith and Wesson got together, there was gunfire. They'd had a stormy relationship, and had broken up, so he wasn't mad at Wang for moving in; in fact, Wang was an old friend too. He'd met them both selling drugs up and down the West Coast, and those were days he'd prefer to forget, because they had haunted him ever since. They prevented him from having a healthy relationship with Diane; they gave him nightmares. They ate away at his subconscious even now.
The low point of his drug-dealing days was one time about seventeen years ago, when he'd sold drugs to a woman in the Mission District of San Francisco, who was neglecting a young child, who he could see in the shadows of her skirt, and he got the distinct sense that he was selling the woman the child's death. Not that he'd ever seen either of them again; he hadn't. But the child's eyes haunted him; the fact that the woman was buying the drugs instead of the food that the child needed, maybe, would haunt him for years. Eleven years ago, a little beyond those drug-running days, having survived them, he begged Wang to take him deep into China, and he did; he took him to Wang's family's home, in a small village in Szichuan, where Wang's grandparents, cousins, and extended family lived. In one cousin's house, a man, Gun, tried to get Wang to tell him where he could get some money. He needed money to build the kind of house his beautiful young wife needed. The wife, with large, beautiful eyes and a baby at her hip, looked on without understanding as Wang translated for Ian. Ian, even then, thought of Diane: the Smith-Wesson connection, here with a guy named Gun. Then, he thought of love of money, how it would lead people to all lengths. Don't tell him about your money, he felt like telling Wang. He doesn't need to know how you got it. Just give him some; there will be more where that came from.
In Hong Kong Disneyland, he got a good look at Diane, who was clearly showing her age; she wouldn't have a baby, it seemed, because something was wrong with Wang, perhaps chemical damage. It wore on her, it seemed. Ian himself couldn't give her a baby, because he couldn't get the baby of the Mission District out of his mind. How could he bring a baby into the world, when he couldn't trust himself, couldn't avoid doing such things? His entire life had been like that, a series of very poor steps, though he had at least gotten the sense to get out of the drug trade when he could, was still alive to be here at this moment. Mickeys, Snow Whites, and other Disney images danced in his vision, but they brought him memories of California: the fast life, the skyscrapers and cable cars, the money, the greed, the Benz, the high rollers, the seedy underside, the Smith and Wesson jokes, the child's eyes…
Wang was in an unusually bad mood, as if the Disney characters also reminded him of his California days, which may have been worse than Ian's, and which he also would probably prefer to forget. Diane explained to Ian why there were long lines here, such as the one they stood in, why so many of the people were from the mainland, and had different ways when it came to standing in line. Ian actually didn't mind the standing, even as sultry as the day was, on edge, so to speak, with Diane, the one woman in his life, but the chaos in the background, amongst the Disney images, was beginning to push him over the edge. A desperate need for sanity, escape, or solid ground set in, and he sensed he wouldn't get it in the ride they were waiting for. Steadily he became more unhinged.
Suddenly, a familiar woman from the crowd rushed up to Wang, and implored to him, in Mandarin, something that Ian and Diane couldn't understand. He looked closely at the woman; he'd seen her before. She was Gun's wife, the woman with the big eyes, from the small village in Szichuan. She and Wang carried on in Mandarin for some time; the line moved quite slowly. Wang got a look of desperation in his eyes, as if he'd heard bad news, which he had; he insisted, however, that the woman leave them alone for the moment, and he would deal with it later.
On the ferry back to Lantau Island, where Wang and Diane lived, Ian talked to Wang for a while while the boat chopped through rough waters, and Hong Kong, a beautiful city, shone in the distance, its lights shimmering on the harbor. Wang was a smooth guy; he spoke Cantonese and English fluently, along with Mandarin; he made money and provided for Diane, and didn't feel threatened by Ian's arrival. But the story he told clearly had shaken him up as his voice cracked as he told it. Gun, it seemed, had bought some cheap construction supplies from a guy one day, supplies that would help him make a dream house he couldn't afford otherwise. When the Szichuan earthquake came, Gun's own child was in a school; that very school had been poorly built, because the supplies had been sold out from under it. He had in fact bought his own child's death when he bought those bricks, though surely he didn't know it. His wife had now come out of China, to find Wang, for some reason related to the money for a funeral. But here the story stopped: was it the child's funeral? Or Gun's? Wang withheld a few details, such as what he, Wang, would do about it; the woman was family, after all, but Ian, his guest, was going back to California the following day.
The boat docked at Lantau Island, and they woke up Diane, who had been sleeping in the night sea breeze, out on the deck of the ferry. Up In the hills of Lantau, there was a huge Buddha statue that overlooked the area; monks rode the ferry occasionally and people came from far away, hoping to implore the Buddha for luck. The very idea of luck, though, gave Ian a bad taste, like Disneyland Chinese food, which seemed a kind of abomination. But then, at that moment, so did the idea of going back to California, where one day wealth shimmered on skyscrapers downtown, and another, an earthquake could change everything.
Monday, February 9, 2009
Good Provider
Marjory flew home to St. Louis for her father’s funeral, depressed about him, his life and the damage he had done to her, and then to her younger sister after she’d left. Her father, Lionel Brandon McCall IV, had been abusive and incestuous, but her mother wouldn’t hear of it; mom didn’t want to face the truth, make a scene, break up the marriage, or end up alone. So she let her daughters be molested and abused? Marjory burned in knotted up anger just thinking about it. She loved her mother, but years of counseling hadn’t soothed the anger; it had only given her some distance. Her father was dead; how could she not spit on him, as she passed the casket?
Her younger sister Laurel picked her up at the airport; her niece Noel was in the back seat. The niece, about seven, had a hauntingly innocent face, yet hard, with an unspeakable sadness to it. Marjory again knotted up in anger. She had come back for Laurel’s wedding, many years ago, maybe eight; Laurel had married an angry man, abusive also no doubt, Kent Stoddard was his name. Laurel was now separated from Kent Stoddard, Marjory knew, and this had happened recently. Marjory also knew that there was a chance she, Laurel, had married the SOB because he was like her father. The feeling, in their little car, was that they were trapped in life. Laurel and Marjory were not speaking easily; the past weighed on them. Father was dead, but he had put them in the jail of their own feelings, and now even the little girl looked like death warmed over. They fell into silence and rolled into what was now mother’s driveway; she would be living alone.
Lionel Brandon McCall IV had owned a securities firm and was respected in the community. Charges that he was an incestuous molester would have been met with powerful lawyers bullying either girl; it was clear their mother would not be on their side. Neither had tried; they had kept silent until they were able to leave, and an air of bitter recrimination hung around the house now that he was gone. How could mother have done this to them? Surely she knew about it, yet she did nothing? Surely she saw her own daughters, crying and angry, leaving home way too early? Mother, ashen-faced and tearful, accepted their condolences and told them the details of the funeral, which would be held in two hours, more or less. She made coffee. The house was well-decorated with the trappings of wealth, and flowers had been arriving from friends, relatives, and colleagues nationwide, none of whom suspected Marjory and Laurel’s secret. An icy glaze remained on the sidewalk from last week’s winter storm; Lionel Brandon McCall IV had slipped on it, fell on his own back porch, and hit his head on a low retaining wall, killing himself instantly at the age of 63; at least this was the story Marjory had gotten over the phone from both Laurel and mother. The ice had remained for days, untypical of the St. Louis area, but not unheard of. The walkway and the roads were now heavily salted and had been shoveled by helpful neighbors, but slippery patches awaited in parking lots and driveways across town.
Laurel and Noel had actually been visiting when it happened, mother said; she was playing “Sorry!” with Noel on the living room floor, when Laurel came in to say that father was sprawled in the back. Marjory instantly imagined that Laurel had actually done it; Laurel was not beyond that. Pushed the old vulture while he was off-balance, and killed him. It was possible; Laurel also was clearly knotted up, held in suspended anger, not showing emotion, pretending to be mourning, when in fact, who knew what she was thinking? Marjory, the older sister, felt guilt wash over her; in leaving home, she had left poor Laurel to the same cruel fate she had suffered. She had done nothing. She could do nothing but leave. She was trapped; either way, everyone lost, it seemed, no matter what she did, and the best thing was to just get away.
The funeral was held in a central place where parking was easy in spite of the ice, and people arrived in carloads. Good words, words like “good provider,” were said about Lionel Brandon McCall IV, but Marjory was stuck on the “good provider” phrase. Her anger welled up inside of her. She almost stood up and yelled at the pastor, who was going on about rewards in the world beyond. Sitting close to her mother and sister, she still had a space next to her, on the other side, and was surprised that Noel had come to sit there at her side for part of the service. She looked into Noel’s sad eyes. Life had to win, she thought; they couldn’t stay trapped forever. They had to be rid of these terrible men, Kent Stoddard included, and find somebody who would treat them better. Somebody had to show poor Noel the way. Noel, looking straight forward, betrayed no emotion; perhaps she agreed. It was snowing outside; the snow landed on the slippery ice, where ice remained, and hid the dangerous spots.
Mother and her daughters accepted condolences in a small line after the service, and stood talking as mourners passed by, many of whom Marjory didn’t know, or barely recognized, in the case of some cousins, aunts and uncles who lived in the area. So tragic, they said, that he fell on the steps, in the ice, died so early, had many good years left, but couldn’t enjoy them. Bile rose slowly in Marjory’s throat. She kept her eye on Noel, but Noel was also clearly watching her.
A little later her opportunity came. Mother had been cornered by a man with the proclivity to talk her ear off; Noel went to the bathroom. Marjory followed her. In the bathroom she asked Noel if she was alright, and she said she was. “Sounds like a terrible accident,” Marjory said.
“It wasn’t an accident,” Noel said, straightforward, plain and simple. No emotion, no sobs, no guilt.
“You saw it happen?” Marjory asked.
“Yes,” she said. Now her eyes were fiery, defiant, enraged. She had seen her own grandfather killed, if she was to be believed. “Don’t tell anyone, please, Aunt Marjory.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Marjory answered. The girl, now a little upset, ran out of the room before she started crying. Marjory waited a minute, but followed. What to do now?
Her first thought, as she reentered the funeral home lobby, with its sober organ, was that either Laurel or Mother had to have done it deliberately, most likely Laurel. Marjory could understand a murderous rage, when one lived in the same town, when one had a daughter who visited the house, perhaps had to visit the house, to keep up relations with mother, or just to keep up. Kent Stoddard had left; as violent as he was, they relied upon him; now they had to go back home, for whatever reason, and the old man had probably gone after Noel. I’d kill him too, Marjory thought, yet seethed at the pretense of a funeral, where everyone was going on about “good provider,” and little danishes were being served.
Sounds of coffee cups on saucers and pleasant conversation filled the room when she reentered, but tears welling up made it difficult for her to concentrate, or even see clearly. She was only in town until tonight, when a late flight took her back to the west coast; her time was limited. She had to corner Laurel, and her chance came toward the end, when they were cleaning up, and Laurel stepped out back for a cigarette. Marjory followed her. Noel was inside being occupied by her grandmother, putting dishes in the sink. The back porch looked out on a busy but icy street; cars skidded at the edges where snow covered ice, and it appeared that one could drive. An early winter sun was already setting at the edges of the horizon. Marjory summoned up all her strength.
“Noel says it wasn’t an accident,” she said.
“It wasn’t,” said Laurel, looking straight at her, blowing smoke the other way. “She pushed him.”
“Noel?”
“Don’t say a word. I don’t know why I’m even telling you. Yes, she did it. She pushed him, he fell, and it killed him.”
“But…” Marjory was stunned.
“There’s something you ought to know,” Laurel continued. “Kent Stoddard was a violent bastard. But he was our protection. He kept the old man at bay. Maybe you didn’t see that. But once he left, we had a problem.”
“Laurel,” she said, “I’m so sorry.”
“Listen, Marjory. It’s over now. She had courage that we didn’t have. Yes, she’ll have to live with it. Yes, she’ll suffer guilt. But what’s the difference? Was there really a choice?”
Her voice tailed off, crying, knotted up inside. True, in a sense, the girl had just done something that maybe should have been done long ago. Laurel ground up her half-smoked cigarette in an ice patch, composed herself, and went back in; Marjory was on her plane within hours.
(2-09)
Her younger sister Laurel picked her up at the airport; her niece Noel was in the back seat. The niece, about seven, had a hauntingly innocent face, yet hard, with an unspeakable sadness to it. Marjory again knotted up in anger. She had come back for Laurel’s wedding, many years ago, maybe eight; Laurel had married an angry man, abusive also no doubt, Kent Stoddard was his name. Laurel was now separated from Kent Stoddard, Marjory knew, and this had happened recently. Marjory also knew that there was a chance she, Laurel, had married the SOB because he was like her father. The feeling, in their little car, was that they were trapped in life. Laurel and Marjory were not speaking easily; the past weighed on them. Father was dead, but he had put them in the jail of their own feelings, and now even the little girl looked like death warmed over. They fell into silence and rolled into what was now mother’s driveway; she would be living alone.
Lionel Brandon McCall IV had owned a securities firm and was respected in the community. Charges that he was an incestuous molester would have been met with powerful lawyers bullying either girl; it was clear their mother would not be on their side. Neither had tried; they had kept silent until they were able to leave, and an air of bitter recrimination hung around the house now that he was gone. How could mother have done this to them? Surely she knew about it, yet she did nothing? Surely she saw her own daughters, crying and angry, leaving home way too early? Mother, ashen-faced and tearful, accepted their condolences and told them the details of the funeral, which would be held in two hours, more or less. She made coffee. The house was well-decorated with the trappings of wealth, and flowers had been arriving from friends, relatives, and colleagues nationwide, none of whom suspected Marjory and Laurel’s secret. An icy glaze remained on the sidewalk from last week’s winter storm; Lionel Brandon McCall IV had slipped on it, fell on his own back porch, and hit his head on a low retaining wall, killing himself instantly at the age of 63; at least this was the story Marjory had gotten over the phone from both Laurel and mother. The ice had remained for days, untypical of the St. Louis area, but not unheard of. The walkway and the roads were now heavily salted and had been shoveled by helpful neighbors, but slippery patches awaited in parking lots and driveways across town.
Laurel and Noel had actually been visiting when it happened, mother said; she was playing “Sorry!” with Noel on the living room floor, when Laurel came in to say that father was sprawled in the back. Marjory instantly imagined that Laurel had actually done it; Laurel was not beyond that. Pushed the old vulture while he was off-balance, and killed him. It was possible; Laurel also was clearly knotted up, held in suspended anger, not showing emotion, pretending to be mourning, when in fact, who knew what she was thinking? Marjory, the older sister, felt guilt wash over her; in leaving home, she had left poor Laurel to the same cruel fate she had suffered. She had done nothing. She could do nothing but leave. She was trapped; either way, everyone lost, it seemed, no matter what she did, and the best thing was to just get away.
The funeral was held in a central place where parking was easy in spite of the ice, and people arrived in carloads. Good words, words like “good provider,” were said about Lionel Brandon McCall IV, but Marjory was stuck on the “good provider” phrase. Her anger welled up inside of her. She almost stood up and yelled at the pastor, who was going on about rewards in the world beyond. Sitting close to her mother and sister, she still had a space next to her, on the other side, and was surprised that Noel had come to sit there at her side for part of the service. She looked into Noel’s sad eyes. Life had to win, she thought; they couldn’t stay trapped forever. They had to be rid of these terrible men, Kent Stoddard included, and find somebody who would treat them better. Somebody had to show poor Noel the way. Noel, looking straight forward, betrayed no emotion; perhaps she agreed. It was snowing outside; the snow landed on the slippery ice, where ice remained, and hid the dangerous spots.
Mother and her daughters accepted condolences in a small line after the service, and stood talking as mourners passed by, many of whom Marjory didn’t know, or barely recognized, in the case of some cousins, aunts and uncles who lived in the area. So tragic, they said, that he fell on the steps, in the ice, died so early, had many good years left, but couldn’t enjoy them. Bile rose slowly in Marjory’s throat. She kept her eye on Noel, but Noel was also clearly watching her.
A little later her opportunity came. Mother had been cornered by a man with the proclivity to talk her ear off; Noel went to the bathroom. Marjory followed her. In the bathroom she asked Noel if she was alright, and she said she was. “Sounds like a terrible accident,” Marjory said.
“It wasn’t an accident,” Noel said, straightforward, plain and simple. No emotion, no sobs, no guilt.
“You saw it happen?” Marjory asked.
“Yes,” she said. Now her eyes were fiery, defiant, enraged. She had seen her own grandfather killed, if she was to be believed. “Don’t tell anyone, please, Aunt Marjory.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Marjory answered. The girl, now a little upset, ran out of the room before she started crying. Marjory waited a minute, but followed. What to do now?
Her first thought, as she reentered the funeral home lobby, with its sober organ, was that either Laurel or Mother had to have done it deliberately, most likely Laurel. Marjory could understand a murderous rage, when one lived in the same town, when one had a daughter who visited the house, perhaps had to visit the house, to keep up relations with mother, or just to keep up. Kent Stoddard had left; as violent as he was, they relied upon him; now they had to go back home, for whatever reason, and the old man had probably gone after Noel. I’d kill him too, Marjory thought, yet seethed at the pretense of a funeral, where everyone was going on about “good provider,” and little danishes were being served.
Sounds of coffee cups on saucers and pleasant conversation filled the room when she reentered, but tears welling up made it difficult for her to concentrate, or even see clearly. She was only in town until tonight, when a late flight took her back to the west coast; her time was limited. She had to corner Laurel, and her chance came toward the end, when they were cleaning up, and Laurel stepped out back for a cigarette. Marjory followed her. Noel was inside being occupied by her grandmother, putting dishes in the sink. The back porch looked out on a busy but icy street; cars skidded at the edges where snow covered ice, and it appeared that one could drive. An early winter sun was already setting at the edges of the horizon. Marjory summoned up all her strength.
“Noel says it wasn’t an accident,” she said.
“It wasn’t,” said Laurel, looking straight at her, blowing smoke the other way. “She pushed him.”
“Noel?”
“Don’t say a word. I don’t know why I’m even telling you. Yes, she did it. She pushed him, he fell, and it killed him.”
“But…” Marjory was stunned.
“There’s something you ought to know,” Laurel continued. “Kent Stoddard was a violent bastard. But he was our protection. He kept the old man at bay. Maybe you didn’t see that. But once he left, we had a problem.”
“Laurel,” she said, “I’m so sorry.”
“Listen, Marjory. It’s over now. She had courage that we didn’t have. Yes, she’ll have to live with it. Yes, she’ll suffer guilt. But what’s the difference? Was there really a choice?”
Her voice tailed off, crying, knotted up inside. True, in a sense, the girl had just done something that maybe should have been done long ago. Laurel ground up her half-smoked cigarette in an ice patch, composed herself, and went back in; Marjory was on her plane within hours.
(2-09)
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