Twenty-seven years. Can you believe that Beverly and I are pushing fifty?”
If her photograph is any guide, I can believe Beverly is, but I don’t say so. Like Paul, John could have made it anywhere, but he chose to come home and be a big fish in a pond that’s been going dry for years.
Yet what if I had married Angela and settled down in Bear Creek after college? Had it not been for having to run into the Taylors, I tell myself, I would have enjoyed it.
I have missed seeing people like John, whom I have known since the morning we met in old Mrs. Blount’s kindergarten class, then a private school in her house.
And I have missed knowing the parents and grandparents of my friends.
For better or worse, we knew who we were, where we had come from.
Perhaps, too, Angela and I could have helped to make a difference before such bitterness set in on both sides of the racial issue.
Surely Bear Creek didn’t have to be the tragedy it turned into.
We talk about his four boys, all out of state now, I note. I tell him about Sarah and show him the picture in my wallet. He whistles.
“My boys would like to meet her.”
Not if they were still living in Bear Creek. I finger a photograph of John, Jr.” now an electrical engineer for the state of Oregon, his father tells me. He looks like a carbon copy of John.
“I wouldn’t let them within a hundred yards other,” I kid him, remembering John’s deserved reputation, even in junior high, for mischief.
“Remember the time you shot an arrow at your sister? You should have been prosecuted for attempted murder.”
Even a third of a century later, John blushes.
“I wasn’t really trying to hit her,” he says, and begins to giggle.
“Jesus, we must have been nuts.”
I lean back in my chair, remembering how, bored on a hot summer’s day on Danver’s Hill, he had asked his sister Cynthia, who couldn’t have been twelve, if he could try to shoot at her with his new bow-and-arrow set. Setting a new standard for sibling stupidity, Cynthia asked only for a twenty-second lead. As I began to count, she began to run, zigzagging through the tall grass like some escaping POW. The arrow embedded itself into a tree a foot behind her.
Naturally, she couldn’t wait to tell their mother, and John talked me into taking him on as my first client. With a straight face I told Mrs. Upton, who was hysterical, that John wasn’t even going to release the arrow from the bow and certainly hadn’t been aiming at his sister, and that the arrow had landed ten feet from her, not twelve inches. The bow and remaining arrows were confiscated, but John, as usual, escaped without further punishment.
“You were nuts,” I correct him.
John says, “I’ve been wondering when you were going to come by. Can you believe they’ve charged Paul with murder? This place is crazy now.”
His initial reaction is no different from Angela’s or perhaps any white person’s over here.
Now that John has raised the subject, I ask, “Do you think Paul could possibly be dumb enough to hire somebody to kill an old Chinese man for a meat-packing plant?”
John points with his chin over my head.
“Look behind you.”
I turn and see a dozen photographs on the back wall and get up to inspect them. The pictures go all the way back to 1950. From left to right they show John’s uncle, who began a Ford dealership in Bear Creek with a “grand opening” surrounded by fifteen employees. The last picture, taken two years ago, is of his uncle with five other people.
“Is that all he has now?” I ask.
“The bookkeeper isn’t even full-time anymore,” he says.
“We own some other businesses and some investments in town, but Bear Creek isn’t the place it was when my father was alive.
The Taylors aren’t the only ones who got hurt.”
I study the photographs. It’s like looking at pictures of reunions of those “last man clubs” from World War II. There are fewer returnees almost every year. I realize that despite my conversations with Angela I have been looking at Bear Creek from the perspective of a visitor.
But it is not only a matter of the town looking shabby; John’s point is that it is disappearing economically.
Not only blacks have been losing their land; whites have, too. The agricultural base that supported them no longer exists to the same degree as it did fifty years ago.
“Things are that bad, huh?” I ask.
“Well, there’s still the one factory,” John says loyally, “and we have some retail stores, but they’re not here on the square anymore. When Paul lost a big chunk of their land, they didn’t have any choice but to look some other place to make money. It wouldn’t be easy for anybody.
But whether Paul would go so far as to kill somebody, that’s a hell of a big step.”
I come back and sit down.
“That’s kind of Angela’s position, too.” I have decided not to let John know my feelings about Paul. Though the Uptons never had the cutthroat reputation that the Taylors had, Angela’s reaction has made me cautious.
John’s blue eyes twinkle.
“I had heard through the grapevine that you’ve already called on the widow Marr.You’ve got to hand it to Angela: She looks pretty damn good after all these years. This case seems like an opportunity for you to combine business with pleasure.” He leers at me in a familiar way.
John knows my history with Angela as well as anybody.
“Angela’s still got a lot of grieving to do,” I say, “before she’ll be ready for a relationship with anybody.” I know I sound ridiculous (especially if Angela is ready for us to start going out), but I’m not ready to confess my growing obsession with “the widow Marr.” When we were kids, once he got on a subject, John would never let up.
“What happened to us, John?” I ask, wanting to change the subject from Angela.
“When we were growing up, there weren’t any murders, we weren’t afraid.
Were blacks under such control that none of what goes on today was even conceivable back then?”
John opens a drawer and pulls out a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s.
I put my coffee down, and he pours me a couple of fingers in a paper cup and hands it to me. He says sternly, “It’s drugs. They’re killing the black community.
You remember those billboards forty years ago that used to say, “Impeach Earl Warren’? You wouldn’t have crack cocaine within a hundred miles of Bear Creek if Eisenhower hadn’t been such an ignorant fool and appointed Earl Warren.
It was his court’s decisions on search and seizure and interrogation that have made people want to buy an arsenal to protect their homes when fifty years ago there wasn’t a locked car or house in the whole town. Hell, you don’t think the cops don’t know who brings drugs into this town?
Sure they do! But you lawyers have taken the cops’ handcuffs and shackled them to their desks and told the drug dealers they have carte blanche. And when you take away a society’s power to protect itself against the bad guys, individuals will arm themselves.”
I sip at the liquor in my cup and remember just how conservative this area of the state is.
Until this moment, I didn’t know John had ever had a political thought in his life. As an adolescent, he was as much a rebel as a future civil engineering student could be, which, granted, wasn’t much, but he didn’t sound like a future charter member of the Rush Umbaugh fan club.
John pauses and catches himself. Despite this sermon, he isn’t a preacher.
“Are you eating at Angela’s?” he asks, a grin returning to his face.
I try to hide my irritation at his assumption that Angela and I are already involved and say, “If you’re inviting me to dinner, I accept.”
I can drive home later.
He picks up the phone and dials his wife, saying, “Beverly’ll be glad to see somebody else. I’m too tame for her these days.”