Brambleman (49 page)

“Could have done this in Forsyth and saved
yourself some gas. I want my attorney. I also need medical
attention—” Charlie raised his voice “—more now that the man who
identified himself as Finch cracked a rib and the man who
identified himself as Drew kicked me in the balls! I also want to
eat. I want to speak to a representative of Prisoners of Conscience
and the ACLU, too. And clean clothes and a ride home. Other than
that, deponent sayeth not.”

Finch restarted the recorder, then both
agents left the room. Charlie recited the only clean limerick he
knew, sang a couple of lines from a Sinatra tune, and hummed for a
while.

The door opened. “Then, when I was four years
old—Oh, hey.”

Finch grabbed the device and walked out.

A few minutes later, Drew came in and asked,
“Anyone ever tell you you’re an asshole?”

“Anyone ever tell you this interview is
over?” Charlie stared straight ahead until the agent left.

* * *

Finch and Drew stayed away for a while,
leaving Charlie to strain against his cuffs and count the holes in
ceiling tiles. They didn’t feed him, but they did pipe in rap music
over a speaker mounted on the wall. This made Charlie think of
Demetrious. Then Demetrious dancing. That kid had all the
moves.

When Drew returned, he said, “You’re free to
go.”

“Wow. Giving up so easily? Well, this was
pointless. OK by me. I need a ride back to Atlanta.”

“We’re not taking you anywhere. Just go.”

“I’m entitled to a free call. Where’s a phone
I can use?”

“You don’t get a phone call. You weren’t
arrested.”

“I’m a taxpayer. Let me use the phone.”

“Just get out,” Drew growled. “That’s the
deal.”

“You’re just going to dump me out on the
street in prison clothes fifty miles from home?”

“You should have thought about that before
you showed your ass.”

“That’s one thing I haven’t done. Yet.”

“Well, thanks for sparing.”

Drew uncuffed Charlie. He stood up and
stretched. His orange pant leg had stuck to his oozing wound, and
when it pulled loose, he winced in pain. Charlie’s arms felt like
logs hanging from his shoulders. He shook his hands to restore
circulation. “Well, it’s been surreal,” he said, looking into the
agent’s eyes and seeing emptiness there.

At the front door, Drew gave Charlie a push
to send him on his way. Despite misgivings about the agents’
motives, the newly freed man stumbled forward, squinting at the
cold sun in the afternoon sky. He needed to get home, but how? The
loft was nearly an hour’s drive away, and not having a car
complicated things immensely. Sick, wounded, bloody, and tired,
with a sticky red right hand, he coughed as he stumbled down the
drive. He rubbed his goose-pimpled arms. When the gate swung open,
he walked through, then up the hill toward the Canton-Forsyth
highway.

Problem: A man in a jail uniform who looked
like he’d been in a knife fight would attract serious attention.
How long could such a person go unnoticed?

Not long, it turned out. A minute after
Charlie reached the highway and pivoted toward the Interstate, a
Canton motorcycle officer roared up and squealed to a stop beside
him. The cop jumped off his Harley and pulled his gun, yelling,
“Put your hands over your head!”

Charlie complied, standing open-mouthed as
two squad cars appeared and cops came out of their vehicles like
they’d captured an escaped convict who’d been in a knife fight.
“All right, all right,” Charlie said. “I’ll—”

The motorcycle cop kicked Charlie in the back
of the knee, forcing him to the ground.

“Please don’t—”

A blow between his shoulder blades put
Charlie’s face on the pavement, scraping his cheek raw. While
sprawled out on the road shoulder, he was handcuffed for the third
time that day. He coughed and said, “I’m not going to cause
any—”

He was kicked in the side. Then again. He
looked to the west and wondered if the beating was ever going to
stop. The sun grew dimmer and smaller, as if fleeing his plight.
The cops shouted, sounding like dogs barking at a wild animal
they’d cornered. One of them placed a gun to his head. He looked
down on the asphalt and closed his eyes.
This is a setup. This
is how it ends
.

A car horn sounded. Charlie opened his eyes
and turned his head to see a black man in a car at the stop sign.
He was leaning toward the open passenger window, holding a
cellphone like a camera.

“Keep moving!” the motorcycle cop shouted.
Only when he advanced on the driver did the man roll up his window
and turn toward the Interstate. The cop radioed in some
numbers.

“Got a witness now,” Charlie muttered, his
face stuck in roadside gravel.

“All right, that’s enough,” said another cop.
He grabbed Charlie under the shoulders and lifted him. Charlie blew
grit off his lips and tried to spit the taste of oil and tar out of
his mouth. The cops placed him in the back of a squad car.

Their prisoner learned during the ride to the
police station that—as he suspected—he’d been picked up following a
report of an escaped prisoner. At least now he could make that
phone call.
Simple pleasures are the best
. Charlie could
hear anxiety through the static on the police radio. The cop
shouted back through the partition, “Is your name Sherman?”

Charlie smirked. “I have the right to remain
silent.”

Soon they were in front of the police
station. An older man in uniform stood on the sidewalk, waving the
patrol car away, as if he wanted no part of its cargo. The officer
stopped anyway, got out, and opened the rear door. Charlie slid out
and looked around.

“Let him go,” the older man said.

“Chief, he resisted—”

“He’s free to go.”

The officer hemmed and hawed. “Somebody with
a camera—”

“Nothing happened, right?”

Charlie gave the older man a crooked smile
and said, “Right.”

Once uncuffed, he turned away, then glanced
back at the police chief and the cop, who gestured madly and yelled
at each other in the secret language of the damned. That’s right:
No jail could hold him.
No cops
?
Ha
!
Cops say, “No
Charlie
!”

Trembling, weak with fever, hungry, nauseous,
and bleeding through the sand, glass, and gravel that peppered his
wounded left cheek, Charlie started the long march home. He knew he
had to hide his leg wound. A quarter-mile up the street, he found a
tattered black trash bag and picked it up in hopes it would keep
people from paying too much attention to him. He tore off a piece
and wrapped it around his pant leg to cover his wound.

After a mile or so, he stopped at a
convenience store in hopes of calling Angela or Sandra for help.
But the payphone was broken, and when he asked to borrow a
customer’s cellphone, the man dialed 911 while the clerk shouted,
“Get out!” In hopes he’d at least get a ride to the county line,
Charlie waited outside for the cops to show up, but none came. No
one wanted anything to do with him. He was radioactive.

He tried hitchhiking, but after two drivers
swerved off the road and tried to hit him—or at the very least,
scare the shit out of him—he gave up on that method of
transportation. From then on, he kept moving, lurching up a hill
and shambling back down the next, passing under the Interstate
bridge and shuffling out of town on his way to Fulton County and
civilization. With the sun to his back, Charlie trudged onward,
wheezing his way up a long, winding incline. As he walked along the
narrow shoulder of the two-lane road, Charlie tried not to think of
the miles that lay before him.
Just cross this desert
, he
told himself.
Be a Kung Fu prophet
.

Near dusk, he got the Talton treatment. A
flying beer bottle hit him—only this one came considerably faster
than the one that Momo threw at the good professor back in 1987.
Fortunately, he’d seen it coming from a red Ford pickup. Turning
away and putting up his right fist kept it from hitting him full in
the face. Instead, it struck a hard, glancing blow on his right
temple, like a beanball. He staggered away from the road and went
down as his assailant’s Rebel yell faded into the distance. He
stayed down in the brown grass until the cold got to him, then
stood and wobbled on his feet. He took a few shaky steps before he
recovered his equilibrium and continued his march. It was colder
now, and his head hurt like hell. Tears welled in his eyes.
Cry
all you want, but keep moving forward
, he told himself.

For several hours, he stumbled on,
semi-delirious from fatigue, fever and chills, and hunger.
Eventually, he reached Alpharetta in Fulton County. Traffic was
sparse, it was late, and the temperature was near freezing.
Suffering from hypothermia, he came to a bus stop and declared he
would go no further, even though he didn’t know what time it was,
or if buses were still running. His arms were numb. He leaned
against the MARTA signpost and collapsed, sliding to the ground. He
wrapped his arms around himself, then blew on his hands to warm
them. Within seconds, lights appeared over the hill. Hissing and
squealing, something stopped beside him and opened up to swallow
him.

Charlie thought he was looking into the mouth
of a dragon. He stood up to address the beast as a supplicant, then
realized it was a MARTA bus. Recovering his sanity, he said, “I
don’t have any money. I just walked from Canton, and I need a ride
the rest of the way home.”

“I seen your picture on TV.” The driver, a
stocky black woman wearing a wig, regarded him critically. “You the
man wrote the book about Forsyth County.” She shuddered. “Won’t
catch me goin’ up there. Everybody’s looking for you, you
know.”

“I don’t want to be found,” he said wearily.
“I just want to go home.”

“Nobody give you a ride? Well, doesn’t that
say something about the way they treat us.”

Us
? She must have just made him an
honorary black person.

“Come on in,” she said.

He faltered on his way up the steps. She
reached out to steady him. “I thought you’d be cold as ice in that
jail outfit, but you’re hot as fire!”

The bus’s interior was lighted and warm. It
smelled of humanity, but Charlie was the only passenger. He slumped
on the seat behind the driver. “What time is it?” he asked.

“Past midnight. I’m not supposed to be here.”
She slammed the door shut. The bus rumbled forward.

He looked out the window and soon fell
asleep. The driver woke him when she pulled into the North Springs
Station—the northern end of the line.

“Train take you the rest of the way,” she
said. “Pay double next time.”

“OK.” He took a step down to the curb and
turned. “Thank you.”

“That bus driver got suspended.”

Charlie gave her a puzzled look. “Sorry.
What?”

“The driver took out those men tryin’ to kill
you. Limits to what a bus driver can do in this world, I
reckon.”

“I suppose.” Charlie paused to think about
this, then saw a train’s headlight approaching from the south. He
limped away as fast as he could, grateful that bus riders didn’t
have to pay for transfers or pass through turnstiles at the rail
station. He hustled up to the platform just as the train pulled in.
A few travelers from the airport disembarked with wheeled luggage.
Charlie boarded and slumped in a seat. It left on its southbound
journey immediately. He had the car to himself until the train
stopped at the Dunwoody station. There, a young white man in a
waiter’s outfit—black slacks and vest, white shirt, and thin black
tie—stepped into the car, followed by a couple of African-American
teenagers. He heard cursing, but it was aimless, with no anger in
it—something he could ignore.

Charlie dozed off and woke at Five Points,
one stop short of his destination. A black transit cop was staring
at him. When Charlie got off at Garnett, the cop followed him to
the exit, talking into his radio. “I’m out on bond,” Charlie
hollered over his shoulder as he walked into the night.

Now only a short walk from home, Charlie felt
a surge of energy as he hit the sidewalk. The homeless man who
lived in the vacant lot on State Street had extinguished his barrel
fire and retired to his cardboard shack for the evening. A car
honked and Charlie quickened his pace, hoping to get home before
another policeman spotted him. As he entered the garage on
Castlegate, he saw that the bakery window had been replaced but not
yet relettered. He looked for the Volvo. It took him a minute to
remember that Dana had parked it somewhere else. How many days ago
had that been? He couldn’t recall. He wasn’t going to look for it
now, that was for sure.

He rode the elevator up to his floor and
trudged along the hall carpet, marveling at how luxurious it felt
compared to the road he’d just traveled. He fumbled with his keys
at the apartment door and pushed it open with his uninjured
shoulder, half-expecting to see the place torn apart by evildoers,
but it was just the ordinary mess. Several notes had been slipped
under the door.

After draining a half-liter bottle of water,
he headed to the bathroom. After washing his hands and splashing
water on his face, he went to the kitchen, but there was little to
eat. He gobbled an apple and a handful of crackers. Then he took a
double dose of antibiotics and painkillers, the latter more for his
distressed feet and ankles than his gunshot and glass wounds.

Charlie took a long shower to wash off the
dust and caked-on blood. After he dried off, he ripped up a towel
and tied strips around his wounded thigh and hand. When he’d done
all he cared to do for himself, he turned out the lights and
climbed into bed.

“No cops,” Charlie murmured sleepily as a
freight train rumbled by. “I get it now.”