Turning to face me on the couch Paul says, “That’s no big deal. Henry makes the best barbecue in the best part of the state, and hell, yeah.
I went out there-to pick up some free barbecue. I sure wasn’t getting rich off of him.”
It occurs to me that in my cursory examination of the file I haven’t seen a statement by Paul and ask him if he gave one.
“I’d be crazy to talk to that sheriff!” he answers, looking at Dick for confirmation.
I ask Dick, bluntly, “Do you plan to call Paul?”
Defendants who refuse to testify usually have a real good reason-they are guilty.
Dick, who has begun to massage the bridge of his nose, shrugs.
“It’s way too early to worry about that.”
Paul snorts.
“Of course I’ll testify at the trial. I haven’t got anything to hide.”
His words hang in the air, though. Of course he does. Every person I know over the age of five has something in his past that can’t stand the light of day.
Dick stands up and makes a show of stretching and says he is ready to call it a night. It has been a long week, he says, and we can get together next week. We both know he wants to shut up his client. He has found out what he needed to know tonight: Class Bledsoe, if he has any beans to spill, hasn’t done so yet. I ask Paul to take two minutes to explain about the tape.
“You don’t ordinarily buy a business from a man by telling him he’s going to die soon,” I say, pushing him just a bit.
Paul’s smooth face becomes wrinkled as he frowns.
“I wasn’t threatening him. That old man wanted a fortune for that place. He was being absurd,” he says scornfully.
“Who was going to take over when he died? Connie’s a physicist in Memphis; Tommy’s a wheeler-dealer in Washington.
All I was doing was pointing out the reality of the situation. Why in the hell would I have him killed just because he was being stubborn? I wasn’t in any hurry.”
Clearly, it pissed him off that old Willie wouldn’t hand him over the keys to the plant. Whether he is acting or not, Paul cannot hide his arrogance.
For a certain breed of Southerner the feeling that the world is his oyster only increases with age; for the rest of us, the certainty that it is not accelerates at a greater pace.
“Since Clinton’s been in the White House,” Paul continues, “some Arkansans have had an inflated notion of the state’s importance. We’re talking Third World prices in the Delta. Southern Pride Meats doesn’t quite abut 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. I was probably being generous to offer a hundred thousand for it.”
“You still want it, don’t you?” I ask as Dick begins to jingle the change in his pocket. He doesn’t trust me, I don’t think.
“Not if I have to look like a murderer to do it,” he says angrily.
“You can’t imagine how much this has hurt Jill and Sean and really the whole town. Things were bad enough between blacks and whites before.
Now, it’ll really be terrible.”
I walk toward the door. As long as blacks stayed in their place, race relations were “good.”
Now that they are in control, I won’t hear that cant again. How can Dick not gag when he hears Paul open his mouth? Surely he knows better.
That old saying, I guess from the sixties, comes to mind: “If you want peace, work for justice.” If I get my way, there’ll be some justice, but Paul will get no peace-my clients tell me it is hard to sleep in prison. Dick tells me that he will walk over for the arraignment Monday afternoon, and we can get a trial date afterward. Our conversation is over, and moments later, I am let out the front door, knowing I have given away more than I have gotten.
I drive back to the Bear Creek Inn and sit on the bed while I work my way through the thick file Butterfield has had copied for me. I’m probably not fooling Paul and Dick at all. Yet who knows? To live over here, you have to wear blinders.
Dick, who was raised by a wealthy uncle after his parents were killed in an automobile accident, has always been identified with the white power structure, but somehow seems apart from it. He will serve Paul well if Paul listens to him. In thinking about the evening, I doubt seriously if Paul consulted Dick before he called me this afternoon, but Dick would never let me know it.
He would say something to Paul but not to me. I wonder what he thinks of Bear Creek. His children grown and gone, his wife dead, what keeps him here when all the other whites are beginning to leave in droves?
Perhaps he finds something here that is comfortable. I cannot imagine what it is. He is a mystery to me. Perhaps I overestimate him.
From the nightstand I pick up the yearbook Angela has loaned me and find Tommy’s picture first and then Connie’s. She was cuter than ninety-five percent of the girls in her class. I realize that despite the obvious barriers, I was oblivious to their feelings about race.
Why? I suppose in most ways we considered Tommy and Connie “white.”
During all her sermons to me about racial injustice in those years, I don’t recall Angela ever mentioning the Chinese in Bear Creek. It never occurred to me to ask Tommy how he felt about us. He seemed to like us.
The phone rings. It is Angela.
“How do you like the Bear Creek Inn?” she asks, her voice friendly.
I survey my surroundings. It is a bit unsettling that I am “home” but staying in a motel.
“The owner is cheerful. I’ve already had a meeting with Paul and Dick.”
“You did?” she asks.
“You’re certainly not wasting any time.”
“Paul called me,” I explain.
“I got to see Jill.
She’s changed a little bit since she was a high school beauty.” I flip through the yearbook as I look for Angela’s picture. Suddenly, I realize she didn’t move to town until after the class pictures were taken. When she arrived in Bear Creek, she had a terrible Yankee accent. Now, she sounds like us.
“Poor Jill,” she says, perfunctorily.
“This is terrible for her. Did you find out everything you needed to know?”
I don’t hear a lot of sympathy in Angela’s voice for Jill. Yet, who knows what slights Angela has endured in thirty years? Perhaps Paul’s arrogance has rubbed off on his wife. Though Angela made Paul sound positively wonderful yesterday, maybe she’s not as high on him as she sounded. The Taylors lose interest once you start slipping. Angela’s voice is on automatic pilot. Jealousy? Perhaps.
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