Cherry (30 page)

I know, she says in a voice that’s clearing, as if she’s washed her face and had a long gulp of clear water.

And I’m way more likely to blow something up than Michael.

Tell that to the pigs, Meredith says.

But you’re picturing some witness stand to rush onto. How you’ll plead tearily to the judge till the bailiff unlatches Michael’s handcuffs, and he briefly rubs his wrists before sweeping you into his arms. In this way, you take the seeds of cold fact to grow the scenario you need to focus on. (In retrospect, in light of Michael’s plight, such self-absorption will boggle your mind.)

You know who else got picked up? you say.

No, she says, then goes quiet. If she was grieving when she called, now she’s neatly packaged that up and backed off it. The flat tone of her voice is reassuring to you. (How stupid this comfort level is doesn’t hit you till decades later.)

Are you all right? you ask, knowing she’ll say nothing but sure. Which is a relief, a button she can press to return your world to normal. That Meredith’s world may well have spun irreversibly past that point may never enter into it. (In those years if you were fine, everyone you cared about was fine by extension.) In the background, you hear Mrs. Bright’s call.

I gotta go. Aunt Wilhemina’s here, she says.

Where are y’all going?

Could you find out if there’s a study sheet for chemistry? Talk to Stacy. I guess we’ll be at the courthouse. Root around in my locker if you need to.

You manage to blurt out, Tell Michael I say hey—before the dial tone starts moaning at you.

You wish you could boast of having hurried to the courthouse to stand by Meredith. Or that you fried up a chicken for when they got back. Wrote a note. Offered to drive somebody somewhere. You didn’t. Such a thing would never have occurred to you, and Meredith would never have asked. If her hair was on fire, as the saying goes, she wouldn’t ask for a glass of water. Such requests were beyond her ken. Neither did you expect from your parents basic showing up at track meets or school plays. The one time Lecia dared ask for such a thing (back when she had the lead in ninth grade), Mother vanished into a three-day binge. The not-asking reflected the great powerlessness you were all mired in.

In fact, Meredith’s placid guise of bearing up remarkably well means you’re losing her.

You put the phone in its notched cradle and see that your mother has managed to noodle the TV into some watchable form. But the local news is long past. It’s just fat old Gus Remus poking at the greaseboard weather map with a stick. Your mother is staring at you in a way that makes you want to run. Finally you say, What? What is it? Why are you looking at me?

Her hazel eyes are bright with tears. She says, Reckon they’re gonna pick you up. I mean, should we hide you or something?

Oh for chrissake, Mother. Come here, you say. When you hug her, she feels oddly pliable in your hands. She draws back to look at you with that abstracted expression she brings to her sculpture. She tucks a strand of hair behind your ear, pinching a caress along your jawline like it’s clay she’s shaping. But she’s not shaping you anymore. She long ago asked you to shape yourself, occasionally tossing out a shard of worry for you to dismiss.

From the first, you handle Michael’s arrest as you handled most
troubling events—you ignore it. Meredith helps by vanishing into appointments with the court-appointed attorney, or spending hours at the central library checking out books to bring up to the jail. While none of your close pals get indicted in that first round, plenty of peripherals you’d smoked joints with made the arrest muster.

Somebody must have fingered Doonie and his cohorts though, for in subsequent weeks a patrol car emerging from behind a billboard or hedgerow with siren flailing becomes common, as do elaborate car searches. Once two fairly clueless Bubba-type cops pull a carload of you over, then need help from the longhairs in unbolting the backseat so they can survey the floor with a magnifying glass in search of a pot seed or crumb of indictable substance while all of you stand around making Sherlock Holmes jokes under your breath. You hear about but never see pot-sniffing dogs used to search cars, though Doonie claims to carry a flip-top can of Alpo to steer hounds off the dope.

No one knows anymore where Donnie’s stash is, but he’s cocky enough to tell the cops as they pry the hubcaps off his tires, You got the right guy, officer, just the wrong day.

One night you’re all bouncing along the beach road toward home in Doonie’s packed Torino when a siren starts rotating red through the back window. You turn around and can almost feel the red blade’s swipe across your throat. You’ve been stoned all weekend, so you have the vague sense of your body’s having melted down entirely, leaving only your head afloat on your neck stem like an ungripped balloon. Everyone pats around to see who’s holding, but it’s Sunday night. Everything that could be smoked or snorted or eaten has been.

Doonie pulls over. The brakes take hold, and you feel your bodies start to fly forward through the car hull, then you snap back as if from rubber bands on your backs. Four or five flashlights beam in, bobbing like unfettered suns to obscure the dark cop shapes that hulk behind them, but on their shirt pockets and collars, brass stars and badges flicker and gleam.

You’re rousted out into the night damp, all silent, all straining to give off the acquiescent affability of the law-abiding teen. IDs are
asked for and agreeably proferred. A cop’s sausage-fingered hand is beaming a flashlight into the eyes of the photo on your driver’s license. Doonie’s talking so fast he must be concealing a random tab of acid in his pocket or something. But Lord he can talk. (Before he’s twenty-one, he’ll hawk for a strip club, then briefly open a car lot called S&M Motors with the unlikely motto, “If we can’t spank you, no thank you.”)
How fast was I going, sir? Gosh, if I don’t get my geometry done tonight Mama’s gonna ground me. I know she’s making some of that good cream gravy right now. Does your mamma always cook a chicken after church?…

Despite his repartee, you all get jacked up alongside the Torino. Somebody jokes about a body-cavity search, and the cops seem to consider this—a prospect that sets you alternately giggling like a fiend, then trying not to fall to your knees and beg mercy. While you’re spread-eagled alongside the car like this, limbs starting to shake, a few cops talking football sluggishly pat you all down.

The mood shifts radically when—from thirty or so yards behind you—a patrol car hurtles fast to a dusty stop. Out leaps this scrawny uniformed guy, yelling something indecipherable. The dazzling headlights you look back into still swirl with hallucinated star galaxies, but there appears to be in his hand a raised pistol, held aloft like a talisman. Somebody in your lineup hollers, Hit the dirt (later nobody would ’fess to it), so you all dive down onto the sand-gritty road.

It turns out this kind of massive synchronized movement from a line of prospective felons jogs the average small-town peace officer into unholstering his weapon. The noise of metal whipped fast from soft leather conjures the gunfight scene from some movie about the O.K. Corral. You can actually sense the blind muzzles fix on your skull and spinal column—dozens of empty little zero imprints. You squirm in the sandy shoulder like a slug, hands still pressed obediently to your head, eyes squeezed shut. (Some superstitious creature inside still believes if you can’t see them, you’re officially not there.) An interval ten thousand years long snails by, until the cops start reholstering their weapons, going,
Aw hell,
and
Goddamn, Leon.

Turns out this Leon held up nothing more explosive than a tiny
whisk broom he’d been sent to Kmart for, the better to sweep up the Torino’s carpet nap. Which he does on his knees while everybody but you sits on the car hood devouring tiny square hamburgers from White Castle the cops ultimately fetch and pass around as compensation for how their pal scared you all sick. You say you’re vegetarian, but in truth, your hands have begun to shake as if palsied. You fear if you touch the bag it will rattle loud enough to reignite suspicion. You’re fighting to hold this tremble in check when some fellow ambles over and shoves his hat back with an index finger to ask, Aren’t you Pete Karr’s daughter? Baby, lemme bring you home. Your daddy’ll kick my ass if he thinks I let you sit around out here with these sorry old boys.

Thus you walk away, not looking back at your compadres to give any it’s-okay-I’ll-get-bail sign. You’ve been differentiated from them and are glad for the patrol car ride home—a trip marked by your near constant uttering of the word
sir.
Your daddy isn’t home (thank God), but you promise the officer you’ll say hey and let’s get after them bass sometime soon.

You retell Meredith this adventure on the phone or at lunch with amusement. But she’s not the audience she once was—absorbed partly by her extremely whacky boyfriend (whom you mostly ignore, perhaps hoping he’ll vanish so you can reclaim her full attention). Or she waits for disclosures and judge’s rulings, for lawyer’s vacations to end and calendars to clear so Michael can be exonerated and come home.

Talk of his arrest seems to weave and circle through school via low whispers and pointed looks. The two times someone openly flings these mentions at her, the only shift in her stoical bearing is that she flushes crimson.

For a while in civics class, the coarse, tobacco-spitting Mr. Wright makes daily cracks about her brother the jailbird, till a kind guidance counselor gets her transferred out. Then during some mock trial for another civics class, this born-again Christian girl playing prosecutor and thus interviewing Meredith as a possible juror says, It’s common knowledge you have a brother in prison. Do you think you could be an
impartial juror? At which Meredith just returns to her seat in silence. No response. Nobody says a word, teacher included.

Later that same week, this prosecutor girl is flouncing through the lunch line, when Meredith says—quietly but with great force—
Bitch!
And the aforementioned counselor, who overhears this exchange, leans in to whisper, Good for you, Meredith. I didn’t know you had it in you. (Only in Leechfield could this kind of frontal attack draw kudos from educational authorities.)

Mostly you manage to believe Michael’s fine, for in every Texan’s mind there sleeps some genetically wired pathway that makes running afoul of the law okay. Justified in a lot of cases. In local parlance, some people just need shooting, and fistfighting to the point of arrest is an accepted sport with unofficial rankings known countywide. Everybody knows who all the badasses in town are, your daddy being one of them.

What with the civil rights movement, certain arrests hit the moral high ground. Your mother had marched with Dr. King in Selma, Alabama and just missed going to jail. The Jesuit Berrigan Brothers destroyed federal draft records, and the paper carried daily drawings of the Chicago Seven (or was it Eight?), who’d prompted riots to disrupt the Democratic convention. You could buy T-shirts in Houston with pictures of Bobby Seale bound and gagged during the proceedings. For these activists, jail was a plausible if undesirable interruption in an implausible world.

But as months drag by, some cloud of truth about Michael’s fate condenses inside you. The Brights remain stranded the way each family of an arrested boy seems to be. They’re entirely alone in watching Michael’s legal fate unfold. He warrants no audience, no potluck supper, no rally. No fiery lawyer will fly down to take up his cause pro bono, as Gregory Peck did in the movie of
To Kill a Mockingbird.

Even knowing this, you fail to go to the trial. You couldn’t, for part of you wants to disbelieve there is a trial, or a jail into which you and your pals might conceivably be thrown.

Maybe that’s why the verdicts so deeply shock, leaving you in a state
of cold, inadequate fury, because the boys who couldn’t make bail become those who pull prison terms. These are, of course, boys from the poorest families—those whose parents couldn’t pull off a second mortgage or sell the extra car. The direct correlation between income and jail seems so blatant and grotesque you can’t believe it doesn’t make headlines. Part of you keeps waiting to uncover some other mysterious variable to explain the discrepancy. But when Michael’s roommate walks with probation while Michael gets two four-year sentences—one for the bullshit conspiracy stuff, one for possession of a quantity of marijuana that, a few years later, wouldn’t constitute a felony—you knew it was all about what Doonie called the Dough-Re-Mi.

Meredith tells you about the trial with less animation than one reporting live from the courthouse steps, though her cheeks flush in patches, and she speaks in a taut, breathless voice, as if she’s been slapped.

Some short time after this, she leans over a peach-colored cafeteria tray saying, I think it’s time for you to corrupt me. Which delights you. A sleepover is scheduled, but first she wants to sacrifice her maidenhood—as you jokingly call it—to her now ever-present boyfriend, Dan (who ironically enough was busted with her brother but managed to make bail and thus probation).

Dan’s possessed of a child’s abiding sweetness in a tall and storklike frame. (John Cleese of Monty Python will later evoke Dan.) But his psychedelic antics, which can drive you into giggling fits when stoned, also strike you as bizarre—bizarre being a hard bell to ding in your current crowd. This especially worries you since he and Meredith plan to marry just one year hence, after she’s aced being a college freshman.

Dan likes to grab the pet parakeet in his fist and kiss it. The frantic bird will wrench its head to escape while Meredith yells at Dan to leave it alone, the bird doesn’t like it. But Dan will just keep repeating in a falsetto
Baby loves Daddy, Daddy loves baby.
You’ve also seen him spend hours gluing empty paper towel rolls together so he can force the panicked parakeet to scuttle through as he coaxes from the far end saying
Come to Daddy, my little tube turd.

This isn’t just some act, for comparable oddities go down even when Dan feels unwatched. At a birthday party once, he went back for a second cake helping to find only an empty cake stand. He snatched up the empty doily and wadded the whole paper into his mouth to suck the last icing from it. Noticing the sudden quiet, he spit the wad into his palm, shrieked as if it surprised him, and tossed it up where it stuck to the ceiling and held fast. Then he innocently looked around as if nothing untoward had happened.