I pulled the ragtop off the road and stashed it behind a copse of hardwoods.
The rest of the trip would be on foot.
“You mean her Negro boyfriend?”
“Yes, McCain, I mean her Negro boyfriend. His name is David Leeds.”
We were in her courthouse office. This was about an hour before I left for the cabin. Thunder booming. Rain slashing the mullioned windows. And Her Honor, perched on the edge of her desk, shooting rubber bands at me and hitting me every other time or so.
She had a small box of the damned things on one side of her, and on the other side she had a snifter of brandy. Someday, years from now, when I was dying from a terminal illness and nothing mattered anymore, I’d find the courage to tell her about an organization called AA.
She tamped herself another smoke from her blue packet of Gauloise cigarettes. She was a good-looking woman in her early sixties. She escaped to New York whenever possible and that showed in the cut of the designer suits she favored and the faintly snotty way she dealt with plebeians such as me.
“Do a lot of people know about it?”
“They stay in Iowa City most of the time, thank God. He’s in school there. But it’s bound to get around. That’s the first problem.”
“Well, she’s what, twenty, twenty-one? It’s sort of up to her, isn’t it?”
“Why don’t you just call me a bigot and get it over with?”
I smiled. “I was saving that for later, Judge.”
“The fact is, I’m not a bigot at all. I merely want to see Senator Williams get reelected. And since he’s a Republican, I’m sure you’re more than happy about his daughter seeing a Negro.”
She hooked another rubber band to her thumb and finger and let fly. It struck my small Irish nose and bounced off.
“I’ve never met Leeds. But I guess he’s very bright. He’s in law school, I understand.”
“He’s a Negro. A very handsome young man of twenty-one, I’m told, but a Negro nonetheless. And I say that with no prejudice whatsoever. You’ll remember that it was my party, the Republicans, that freed the slaves.”
“Oh, I already knew you weren’t a bigot. You have a Negro gardener, a Negro horse groomer, and a Negro maid.”
“I know you’re being sarcastic, McCain, but that’s just because your party didn’t free the slaves.”
There were several hundred arguments that came to mind but they’d be lost on her.
“So what we have,” I said, “is a semipopular Republican senator in a tight reelection race this coming fall who doesn’t want it known that his innocent young white daughter is dating a Negro.”
She eased off the edge of her desk and walked over to one of the long windows, where she looked out at the wind-lashed summer trees. The rain tormented the glass. She held her elbow in the palm of her right hand and smoked with her left. I saw a watery portrait of her in the dark pane.
“You know what people see on television every night on the news, McCain. All these civil rights marches. All these threats those people make. Everything was fine a few years ago. I just don’t know what happened. Anyway, most people are already stirred up by everything they see on the evening news. And if it were to be known that their beloved senator — and he is beloved no matter what you say, McCain — if they knew that the daughter of their beloved senator — a very beautiful young girl who has had every advantage a wealthy father could possibly have given her — if they knew that she threw everything away, including propriety and moral values... well, how could they ever vote for him?”
Now I got up, grabbed a bunch of her rubber bands, and walked over by the window. I began firing them at her from the side.
“So let me understand this, Judge. When you see all those impoverished people who haven’t been able to vote or find decent jobs or send their kids to decent schools or do anything about all the police brutality generation after generation — it irritates you?”
She picked a rubber band from her hair and said, “Nobody has the right to break the law and march in the streets without a permit.”
I couldn’t keep the bitterness out of my laughter. “I’m glad you weren’t one of Lincoln’s advisers. He never would’ve gotten rid of slavery. And if you shoot one more rubber band at me, I’ll start charging you a buck for every time you hit me.”
She was mad and so was I. Most of the time our arguments had to do with her snobbery. She was, to her credit, able to rise above most of her prejudices in her courtroom. But when she wasn’t in her judicial robes, she reverted to the coddled, cuddled old-money imperialist she usually was.
The arguments rarely got personal. This one was different. How could you see the shacks the marchers lived in, the degradation they had to put up with every day of their lives, and not in some way share their grief? How could you possibly watch the freedom marchers and not see how righteous they were in their simple but profound demands?
Who gave a shit about parade permits?
“But that isn’t all, McCain.”
“Oh?”
“Pick up the gray envelope on my desk.”
I did so. There were photos inside of Lucy Williams and her boyfriend. Not dirty photos. If Lucy Williams and David Leeds had both been white or both been black, there’d have been no problem. Walking across the U of Iowa campus, his arm around her. Sitting on the same side of a restaurant booth. Her sitting on the handlebars while he was pedaling.
Innocent pictures. Two clean-cut, nice-looking young people in love.
“I see what you’re talking about. Some people’ll be offended by these, but they’re really innocuous.”
“These were sent to the party office in Des Moines. Imagine if they made it into a newspaper.” Then she said: “You once had a client named Richie Neville.”
Maybe I was as slow as the judge frequently accused me of being. I didn’t connect Neville to the photos until I remembered that he was a photographer now. When I’d represented him as a teenager he’d been nothing more than a harmless, garden-variety punk who’d gotten in juvie trouble in Chicago and had been shipped out here by his parents to live with his overly devout aunt.
“You’re kind of jumping to conclusions, aren’t you?”
“The senator’s wife said she is sure she saw him two or three times driving past their house.”
“How does she even know him?”
“He did yard work for them a few times. And now he’s a photographer.”
“Well, gosh, let’s go lynch him then, since we’ve got such solid evidence against him.”
“You’re being ridiculous as usual, McCain. But I’ll bet we could learn a lot by getting into his darkroom.”
“You’re ordering me to break the law?”
She had such a serene smile. “I’m not ordering you to do anything, McCain.” The smile grew richer, deeper. “I’m just saying that if somebody were to be in the vicinity of Mr. Neville’s cabin...”
The river sparkled in the moonlight. The rain had ended and all the foliage gleamed. Above me a raccoon was placing calls to other raccoons in a loud and endearing voice. The pines on both sides of the small, tidy cabin smelled sweet as a summer morning.
The raccoon was still jabbering as I surveyed the place. The exterior of the cabin was brown-painted sheets of plywood. A large window had been cut into the front of it, exposing the darkened interior.
Somebody, probably during one of Richie’s notorious parties, had torn the door off the outhouse. Nobody was sitting in there reading Playboy in the dark.
Night birds and the sad solemn cry of an owl. The raccoon had fallen into a peeved silence. Screw them if they didn’t want to answer back.