Gideon - 05 - Blind Judgement (13 page)

She has struggled and Jill never has. Jill was beautiful and married the richest man in town, Angela married a farmer who died broke. Paul’s long-running affair with Mae and his current troubles may seem like simple justice to her.

“I don’t think I learned anything. Dick hasn’t lost a step. He’s sharp and doesn’t give anything away free. Do you run into him much?”

Angela tells me that Dick is a workaholic and is usually out of town trying cases. Now that she is free, I wonder if he will hit on her. It

doesn’t sound like it. Unseen, I nod. Before we hang up, Angela tells me she is pushing back our breakfast half an hour. I realize that I was hoping she was going to invite me over tonight. I turn on the ten o’clock news and get another black newscaster out of Memphis. So much has changed, and yet nothing has.

On Highway 1 about a mile and a half from the center of downtown Bear Creek, I pull into the Cotton Boll Cafe parking lot. This place has surely seen better days. Yellow paint is peeling from the letters on the outside of the one-story wood structure, which has a definite tilt south. A gust of wind twenty miles an hour or better could give Cotton Boll patrons some anxious moments.

With its wood floor and tables it would take about five minutes to burn the place to its foundation, assuming the builders included one.

Almost deserted at half past eight on a Saturday morning, it is so lonely looking I have to wonder if I heard Angela correctly. A teenager in a ponytail behind a long green counter at the back of the room holds up a coffee cup as I take the seat nearest the window. I nod, uncertain whether she is taking my order or saluting her first customer in a month. Without a word, the girl, who is dressed in a clean, starched yellow waitress uniform, brings an oversized mug of coffee complete with a jar of real cream, an unexpected pleasure in an age where you usually get charged a buck for a thimble-sized cup accompanied by a plastic container of ground chalk. Solemnly, she places her pad and pencil on the table by the mug, and I wonder if she is seizing this moment to announce a work stoppage when it dawns on me that she is deaf. Uncertain whether she can read lips, I write that I am waiting for someone. She nods and leaves me to stare out the window across the street at the

vacant lot where a small concrete block factory once stood. At the rate this town is going, twenty years from now, there may not even be a Bear Creek. Why doesn’t capitalism work here? Is it racist to think that blacks don’t take to free enterprise?

Is it the need to dominate and control they lack? Even as black as Bear Creek is becoming, it appeared to me yesterday during my brief drive down Main Street that most all the stores are still owned either by whites, Chinese, or Jews. Yet that might not hold true much longer.

Will Angela leave? She would if she’s smart. There is no future for her here. I sip at my coffee, certain that her choice of meeting places reflects her ambivalence about seeing me again.

How could any involvement with me do anything but hurt her? What did she say—Paul is the air we breathe?

As I begin to replay yesterday’s visits and wonder how close we were to walking back to her bedroom, Angela bursts through the door, bundled up in a purple ski jacket and gray sweats.

“I almost made it!” she says, pushing back her left sleeve to check her watch.

I stand up, my thoughts undoubtedly transparent.

Her face is rosy from the cold. It is eight-forty. I doubt if she has ever been on time in her life.

“A virtue of the dull, you used to tell me,” I respond, helping her off

with her coat. Why am I being such a gentleman? Amy would hit me if I tried to assist her. Yet, east Arkansas was part of the Old South. Manners were to be minded, whatever the circumstances. Forgotten habits have a way of reappearing.

“You used to believe everything I said,” she says lightly.

The power of sex. I can’t read Angela. Maybe she is not even conscious of the mixed signals I seem to be getting from her.

“I still do,” I admit.

When she sits down, I ask, “Is the Cotton Boll the best Bear Creek can do these days, or are you trying to hide me?”

She smiles at our waitress who is approaching us with a mug in one hand and a pot in the other.

“Wait until you see who the owner and cook is,” Angela murmurs, and says brightly, “Hi, Mckenzie!

How are you?” Our waitress nods vigorously and says something unintelligible. She pours Angela a cup and refills my mug while Angela writes something on a napkin and hands it to her. She frowns, and Angela points to me.

“How do you do?” I say, thinking I am being introduced. What must it be like not to be able to hear and speak? Given my tendency to hear only what I want to and to put my foot in my mouth, I might be better off. Lately, in the press there has been a flurry of articles about a debate

between those who want to bring the deaf into the mainstream and those who argue that the deaf have their own culture and should not be forced to adapt to the hearing world. Like religion, it is a useless argument for the true believers. Surely, it is academic in Bear Creek.

Mckenzie smiles politely and points to the Cotton Boll’s menu in front of me. It is an unadorned 8 1/2 by 11 pink piece of paper protected by plastic.

“What’s good?” I ask Angela.

Angela winks at me.

“Everything mat’s bad for you. The biscuits and gravy with sausage are sublime.”

How does anyone live past thirty over here?

“I’ll just take some toast,” I say to Mckenzie.

The girl knits her brow. Angela says, “You have to write it. She can’t read lips any better than you can.”

So she remembers, too. Embarrassed, I print out in block letters the words toast and jelly and push the paper over to Angela, who scribbles the works! and hands it to the girl.

Mckenzie gives me a look that suggests I have insulted the honor of the Cotton Boll, but turns on her heel and marches back to the kitchen.

Cautiously, I ask Angela, “How are you today?” “I’m fine,” Angela says, her voice neutral but friendly.

“Mrs. Petty thinks you’ve come back to farm.”

We both laugh at the same time. For someone who was raised in an environment so uniformly rural, I was remarkably ignorant of Bear Creek’s lifeblood and still am. I stayed in town and cruised Main Street with my friends.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Mr. Carpenter, my old junior high science teacher, doddering toward me. He must have been around my present age when he taught me, my last year in Bear Creek before I went to Subiaco. I loved ninth grade science. He made “the laws of nature,” his term for the mathematical formulas he wrote on the board, seem real. Physics, three years later at Subiaco, was just a bunch of numbers I couldn’t get to add up. Mi. Carpenter gave us the illusion the world could be comprehended if we just had the brains to do it. As an adult, I realized what a hoax he had played on us, but thanks to his passion, for years afterwards I retained a vague hope somebody would figure it out.

“Gideon Page,” he says, his eyes twinkling as he comes up to us.

“What an appreciative kid you were. You thought I was a magician, but then you were kind of dumb in science, weren’t you?”

“Yes, sir,” I say, getting to my feet, marveling that he remembers. He probably doesn’t. Mediocrity is always a safe bet, and as a lifelong teacher, he knew the odds.

“It’s good to see you, Mr. Carpenter. You were the best teacher I ever had in nineteen years of going to school.”

Rubbing his hands on a dirty apron, he beams as if I had just awarded him the Nobel Prize.

Teachers have learned to be content with praise in Arkansas.

“You know how much I liked your mother. A well-bred woman who deserved better luck. After your father died, she couldn’t do a thing with you, though, until those Catholics scared the be jesus out of you. Are you still superstitious?”

He offers his hand, and I take it.

Religious, I think he means. What a character he still is! Mr. Carpenter, a lifelong bachelor and, I suddenly realize, homosexual, lived two doors down from us. He used to quiz me about what the fathers and brothers were teaching me when I returned home for holidays and summers. He’d rail at me, “Those damn Papists were first-class truth muzzlers! Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, anybody with a brain they scared shitless.”

“When did you open a restaurant, Mr. Carpenter?”

I ask, as if I have been away at school.

“I never knew you could cook.”

The old man tugs at the St. Louis Cardinals cap that’s perched atop his

still formidable head of hair, which closely resembles cotton left too long in the fields, then tells Angela, “Gideon’s grandfather on his mother’s side knew some science. He couldn’t cure anybody—they didn’t have antibiotics then—but he was an intelligent man. Gideon got his gift for gab from his paternal grandfather. Now, there was a man who could rattle on for hours and never say a damn thing.”

Odd what people remember about me. It is apparent I was known as a talker and not much else. Was that the reality? I can’t remember, or maybe I don’t want to. I glance at Angela, but she has no intent of rescuing me.

“You’ve got a nice place here,” I flounder. This old guy has me off balance. Maybe he felt sorry for me in junior high, but now that I’m an adult I’m supposed to be able to take it.

“It’s a junk heap,” Mr. Carpenter says calmly, inspecting a knife on the table as if he were running a four-star restaurant. He adds, “I heard last night you’re here representing one of the Bledsoe boys in Willie Ting’s murder case. Now, those Ting kids were students. Connie knew more physics when she was a junior in high school than the rest of Bear Creek put together. Tommy was good in math, but when she came along, Connie liked the experiments.”

I sip at my coffee, curious about what it was like to have lived as a gay man in a small town.

He must have felt like an animal in a cage. Always vague about his itinerary, he traveled during the summers. I know he lived with his mother at least until I went away to college. To keep his job, Mr.

Carpenter had to repress his sexual urges nine months a year. Even at my age I have trouble going twenty-four hours. Why did he stay in this fish-bowl, especially after his mother died? I can’t imagine.

Fortunately, we are saved by Mckenzie.

Mr. Carpenter raises an eyebrow at my meager order.

“I would have cooked you a decent breakfast,” he sniffs.

“Come see me, Gideon. I’m closed Mondays, home during the middle of the afternoon and by nine every night. I still live where I always did.”

“Yes, sir, I’ll be sure to,” I say, wondering if he must be lonely.

From his point of view, it won’t be for my intellectual stimulation.

Maybe he wants to tell me who murdered Willie Ting.

“I’ll do that.”

After Mckenzie serves us and departs, Angela remarks, “He’s always been thought of as a curmudgeon, but I think it has been a cover to hide the fact that he’s gay.”

I am pleased by her lack of prejudice (she must still be a liberal on some things), but I wonder if the obverse is true: Did Carpenter become a caustic old man because he was forced to suppress his sexuality? When I knew him, he displayed none of the characteristics I usually associate with homosexuality. I never thought of him as creative or artistic, and

certainly he hasn’t become so, judging by the decor of the Cotton Boll. As we are eating, a total of ten customers, including a family of five, enter the restaurant. Angela nods, but no one stops to talk. They are all younger by a decade. When I comment that she does not seem to know everyone, she acknowledges, “The older I get, the less curious about younger people I become. Unless they are my children or their friends, I’m not all that interested in them.”

I feel the same way. As we age, we begin to let go. Generation X. So what? They seem boring and self-absorbed to me. But now that Sarah’s gone, all I know about them is what is on the tube. It is hard not to feel a bond with this woman. She gets me to talk about Sarah again, which isn’t hard to do. I tell her how hard it was on Sarah after Rosa died.

“She was already insecure, and then I kind of went nuts and left her alone too much while I went prowling around for a while. I don’t know how she survived it. Maybe I should have sent her away to a girls’ boarding school, too.”

Angela frowns from behind her coffee cup.

“That’s ridiculous, Gideon, and you know it. She sounds fine. You just want somebody to brag on her besides you. I’d love to meet her sometime.

The next time she’s home from college you ought to bring her back over here with you.”

I smile at the thought. If Sarah is still in her morally indignant phase, as she was in November, she will denounce Angela as a racist. It

occurs to me that Angela was much like Sarah when she was her age.

“You might regret it,” I kid her.

“She can preach a sermon with the best of them.”

I tell Angela about our visit to Bear Creek in November and how appalled Sarah had been by old Mrs. Washington’s story.

“Granted, what my grandfather did was terrible, but Sarah doesn’t see the gray in history. It’s all black and white to her.”

Angela toys with her spoon.

“I heard that you were over here.”

I should have figured. Does nothing over here happen without the whole town knowing about it?

“Why didn’t you say something yesterday?”

Angela smiles sympathetically.

“I assumed you would tell me if you wanted to talk about it. I think I heard it at a party over Christmas,” she replies vaguely.

“Mrs. Petty isn’t the only one who likes to gossip.”

I decide to let it go and am cheered by the fact that as much as people talk over here, at some point if Paul was involved in Willie’s murder,

somebody is bound to spill the beans on him.

The next hour whizzes by. Angela likes to talk about her boys as much as I like to talk about Sarah. I try to reassure her without much success that they will settle down and graduate. Yet, as soft as the economy is and as worthless as a B.A. degree has become, the only jobs they may be qualified for are as chicken pluckers at Tyson Before we leave, Angela allows me to buy her “Deluxe” breakfast and nods approvingly as I leave a two-dollar tip for Mckenzie.