Gideon - 02 - Probable Cause (32 page)

I lean back against the Blazer and fish out my keys. I can hear the band, which has begun to play. I don’t recognize the tune, but I don’t think I’ll go back inside to find out. The front of my light blue short-sleeved shirt is dark with blood, and I realize I must look like hell. Sarah has a friend spending the night, so I can’t go home looking like this. Poor Rainey, I think, as I drive away from the Bull Run. I need a nurse, not a social worker, but what are friends for?

“Good God, what happened?” Rainey cries as she opens her screen door. The expression on her face is alarming. Is one of my eyes hanging out? My entire face feels swollen.

In the thirty-minute ride to her house I have convinced myself that I have no broken bones, though my ribs on my right side feel as if someone had been trying to separate them with a pitchfork. At least I haven’t wakened her. It is still before ten, and she is dressed in her usual summer weekend attire:

shorts and a T-shirt.

Gingerly, I let myself in, and close the door behind me.

“You’re a sight for sore eyes,” I say, pleased I can still speak.

The power of speech is about all I have left.

“Believe it or not, I was winning a fight against Leon Robinson, when his friends decided I was too tough.”

Rainey, seeing I am not in too much pain to brag, yells, “Have you gone crazy? You’re a grown man, for God’s sake!

Follow me into the bathroom!”

What does being a grown man have to do with anything?

I think as I make my way through her living room. Grown men do a lot worse to each other than this. Yet for the first time in an hour I begin to relax, knowing Rainey will take care of me. Walking behind her, I notice how nice she looks in blue short shorts. Super legs to go with such a trim ass.

Wonderful! The last thought I will have before I bleed to death will be about sex.

She snaps on the light in her bedroom.

“Take off your shirt!” she commands, opening her medicine cabinet.

“It’s about to make me sick to my stomach.”

I look in the mirror and wince. The assholes. My face looks like mincemeat. At one point it was rubbed into the blacktop of the parking lot, not a beauty tip I would recommend.

Little black pieces of tar and dirt make my grimy cheeks look like a coal miner’s. Rainey says, “I’ll get some ice for your eye—stay right here!”

Not quite feeling up to a trip, I sit down on the seat of her commode and get out of my shirt and T-shirt. Both are soaked with blood. Even my right hand aches from the one punch I threw. A lover, not a fighter, I think, looking around Rainey’s bathroom. Unlike mine, it is sparkling clean. I inspect the sink—not even a single hair. Even the soap dish in the shower gleams. Each week Sarah and I take turns cleaning the bathroom, but this weekend it will be all I can do to keep my head from rolling off into the commode because even my neck aches. The body has only so much room for seven people to beat.

Rainey, it develops, isn’t the gentle nurse of my dreams.

“Ouch!” I mutter more than once when she washes my face.

The washrag is nice and warm, but it feels as if she has decided my chin is a silver tray that needs polishing.

“Hold still!” she orders, her left hand on the back of my head, presumably so she can dig in better.

“I have to do this or it’ll get infected. Is this tar or what?” “They kind of rubbed my face around on the parking lot,” I admit, trying to hold my head still. I’m beginning to think she is enjoying this.

“I feel like you’re mashing a hunk of Monterey Jack through a cheese grater. You’re not exactly Florence Nightingale at this, you know.”

She pushes the rag harder against my burning face.

“Why don’t you get up and go on to the emergency room? They probably have a room now just for you. Oh, for God’s sake, Gideon, they’ve knocked out a tooth!”

I nod miserably, running my tongue to the vacant spot and tasting congealed blood.

“What am I going to tell Sarah?

She’s got a friend spending the night with her. I’ll scare them to death.”

Rainey bobs her head in agreement as she throws the washrag into the sink and picks up the bag of ice from the porcelain ledge and hands it to me.

“Now, hold this against your eye while I dab on some hydrogen peroxide,” she says opening a cabinet drawer under the sink.

“Tell her the truth:

that you’re an idiot posing as a normal human being. She’ll forgive you. We always do.”

As she rubs my face with a square cotton pad soaked with the medication, I feel my flesh is being barbecued. If smoke begins to rise from my face, I won’t be surprised. I close my eyes. Poor Rainey. She deserves better. So far this friendship business has been a one-way street. Besides looking like a lawyer from hell, I stink from sweat, tar, smoke, and alcohol, but she hasn’t even wrinkled her nose. “I’m sorry I keep showing up,” I say, as she moves the cotton around my face, “when I ‘m in trouble.”

Sure I am. Rainey doesn’t even bother to protest this lie.

Finished, she screws the cap down onto the jar containing the medicine.

“Why on earth were you fighting Leon Robinson she asks, her green eyes flashing at me.

“Isn’t he the aide who was holding Pam?”

I nod and stand up to look into the mirror. It’s not a pretty sight. My right eye, now purplish in color, is almost shut;

parts of my face now resemble raw hamburger; my neck is abraded; and, of course, a tooth is gone. What do I tell her?

She hates lawyer games. Though I have told Rainey much about this case, I have avoided mentioning my idea to argue to the jury that Leon let go of Pam because he hates blacks and he wanted her to attack Andy. Why? Because I know, like Andy, she will object.

“It’s a long story,” I say wearily.

For the first time since I’ve known her, I notice strands of gray among the red hair that has always attracted me. She is still pretty at the age of forty-one, but her face, especially under the eyes, has lines that were not there when I met her.

I am aging this woman. What can she possibly see in me, even as a friend? I sigh, looking at my own torso in the mirror. Rainey, I realize, has never even seen me shirtless, and suddenly I am embarrassed by the roll of fat around my middle and the white patch of hair sprouting from my chest, an appetizing picture when my mutilated face is thrown into the bargain.

“I’ll tell you if you’ll let me use your bathroom to take a shower.”

Without a word she opens a cabinet and hands me a clean blue towel.

“Don’t wash your face again,” she commands as she closes the door behind her, “or I’ll have to put the hydrogen peroxide back on you.” Is there a hint of malice in her voice, or am I just imagining it?

When I emerge ten minutes later, I am feeling one him dred percent better. While I was in the shower behind the curtain, she opened the door and left a man’s V-necked T-shirt on the counter for me. Where did she get this? It’s none of my business, but because it looks old, I can resist asking not that I would get an answer. When I heard the door opening, for an instant I had thought she might get in the shower with me. Wishful thinking, as usual. Instead of about sex, she’s probably thinking that it would be nice if somehow I could get a job in another state. She is waiting for me in her living room, curled up with her feet drawn up under her in her favorite chair across from the couch where in our courting days we necked like teenagers. An opened Miller Lite is sitting on the table by the couch. Underneath it is a napkin. I sit down, thinking what she would do for me if I were good to her.

“I thought you could use a beer,” Rainey says, staring at the T-shirt. It is a little large, but I’m not in a position to complain.

“Thanks,” I say, sincerely. My face feels as if it is glowing

“I’m not quite ready to go home and face my daughter yet.”

Rainey barely lifts a shoulder in reply. I know she thinks I worry too much about Sarah. She will be fine, Rainey has said, if I don’t smother her. Obviously, I’m the one who needs looking after. It isn’t Sarah who is dragging in with a black eye and a tooth knocked out. Yet I worry that she will worry. If the old man isn’t out chasing women, he’s off getting his face bashed in.

“You’re just about smooth nuts,” Rainey says, sipping at a glass of water she has picked up from the polished floor beside her chair. Her latest project, taking up the carpet in the living room and finishing the wood, has just been finished this week. She seems inexhaustible.

“Smooth nuts?” I ask. I never heard that one, but some how it fits. What was I doing in that bar by myself? For the next few minutes or so, I try to explain what I’ve been up to, but the mask of disapproval on Rainey’s face is in place be fore I get thirty seconds into my story, as I knew it would be.

“Even if you could show that Leon Robinson was the biggest racist in the entire state,” Rainey objects, cradling her empty glass in both hands between her knees, “what should it have to do with Andy’s case?”

Relevance. I sip at the beer and put it down. According to the Arkansas Uniform Rules of Evidence, relevant evidence is that evidence which tends to make a proposition at issue more or less true. “If I can make a jury believe that Leon deliberately let go of Pam I explain, “don’t you think that should have some bearing on Andy’s guilt or innocence?”

Rainey rolls the plastic container in her hands as if she were a potter.

“I guess I don’t understand criminal law.”

The alcohol and the shower have lowered my heart rate substantially. I’m beginning to feel normal again.

“I’m not sure I do either, but let me take a crack at it,” I say, leaning back against the couch. “The jury has to find at a minimum that Andy acted recklessly. I will argue that no one can reasonably believe that Andy should have anticipated that one of his assistants would deliberately release control of Pam.

The crucial act that resulted in Pam’s death was Leon’s letting go of her, not Andy’s decision to use shock.”

Rainey purses her lips and shakes her head.

“But what evidence do you have that Leon deliberately let go of her?

You told me last week you didn’t have a shred of evidence that he and Olivia Le Master cooked this up together. You said that Olivia has clammed up and might even invoke the Fifth Amendment and refuse to testify, which means she’s guilty as hell.”

I correct her.

“I said she might. Her attorney said she hasn’t decided yet.” I finish off the beer.

“But to answer your question, I don’t have any evidence except Leon and his friends don’t like me coming into their bar,” I go on, not willing to tell Rainey that my evidence is living in Hot Springs. She will be furious that I am going to try to drag someone else into this. I stand up.

“I need to go on home.

I told Sarah I’d be home by eleven.”

At the door Rainey surprises me by reaching up and brushing my lips with her own.

“Promise me you won’t do something this stupid again,” she says, her voice a quiet whisper against my ear.

“I promise,” I say, thinking that it has been over a year since we have kissed. Worry—the surest way to a woman’s heart. I thank her again and leave. If I didn’t know better, I would think Rainey still loves me.

At home Sarah and her friend Chris are watching a movie. Fortunately, it is dark in the house, which is lit only by the glow of the TV set. I carry my bloody clothes in a paper sack Rainey has provided me. Engrossed in some horror flick, Sarah barely speaks, and I escape to my bedroom after murmuring goodnight. Tomorrow will be soon enough for her to see my wounds. I take a couple of aspirin and sit down on my bed. Woogie, perhaps drawn by the medication, tries to lick at my face until I push him away. He is even a more inept fighter than his master and has perpetually sore ears to prove it. Before I turn off the light, I tell him, “They would have knocked every one of your teeth out.”

He turns his head away and settles down at the end of the bed as if to say he would never have gotten himself in such a mess.

The next morning every bone in my body feels as if someone has taken a hammer to it. Thank God I don’t have to get out of bed today, because I can’t move. Of course I do have to get out of bed or risk wetting it. As much as I ache, it is tempting just to say to hell with it and see if I can reach the window. I could always blame it on Woogie. As if sensing disaster, he hops down off the bed and scratches at the door.

At least he is civilized. Shamed by my own dog, I slip on some pants and creak into the bathroom. If anything, my face looks worse. Today there are streaks of yellow and green under my eye. I look forlornly at the spot where my tooth was. Even as bad as the others look, chipped and dingy, at least they are present and accounted for, and not in the parking lot of the Bull Run buried up to their roots in the tar.

Depressed, I limp into the front yard with Woogie, hoping nobody is out. Accustomed to more of a walk, Woogie contents himself with lifting his leg over my neighbor’s petunias.

What the hell. If his wife needs flowers, Jewell Patterson, a tall black man in his fifties, can bring home all he wants from patients’ rooms at the VA hospital, where he works as a registered nurse.

His brick home, the color of ginger, has three bedrooms to my two, and Jewell has a snow-white Lincoln Continental in the garage that he’ll wash this afternoon. Carol, his wife, is a schoolteacher. If we’re all outside in the yard and hear the sound of a gun being fired from the direction of Needle Park, Jewell will mutter, “Damn, those niggers!” and order Carol to go into the house. The second week in September, the morning, in contrast to last night’s humidity, is sharp and clear, a beautiful day for a walk, since Needle Park is usually quiet on a Sunday morning. Even drug dealers have to sleep some time. My bones ache too much to go further, however, and I turn around, disappointing my dog. This is what old age must be like.

“Pick up the paper and hand it to me,” I tell Woogie as I dodder up my driveway. He looks at me as if I were crazy, and I stoop in slow motion. Thank God, he can’t talk. He’d give me hell, too.