“It was my own personal vote.”
“Did you have any emotional investment in that vote?”
“You ran once. I voted for you. I was emotional about you then.” She didn’t even question him about his use of the word then — she knew perfectly well why he used it. “And when I didn’t win,” she said, “you took it personally?”
“I felt bad for you.”
“But not nearly as bad as you felt for yourself?”
“Why in the hell would I feel bad for myself?”
“Having a girlfriend who couldn’t win a popularity contest — wasn’t that hard on you? Didn’t you take it personally?”
He didn’t answer. He just sat there looking at her over the bowl of spaghetti, his eyes hard as sandstone and every bit as dry.
Cynthia walks home from school, and several times in the last couple of years, Dee Ann, driving through town on her way back from a shopping trip or a visit to the library, has come across her daughter. Cynthia hunches over as she walks, her canvas backpack slung over her right shoulder, her eyes studying the sidewalk as if she’s trying to figure out the pavement’s composition. She may be thinking about her boyfriend or some piece of idle gossip she heard that day at school, or she may be trying to remember if the fourth president was James Madison or James Monroe, but her posture and the concentrated way she gazes down suggest that she’s a girl who believes she has a problem.
Whether or not this is so Dee Ann doesn’t know, because if her daughter is worried about something she’s never mentioned it. What Dee Ann does know is that whenever she’s out driving and she sees Cynthia walking home, she always stops the car, rolls her window down, and says, “Want a ride?” Cynthia always looks up and smiles, not the least bit startled, and she always says yes. She’s never once said no, like Dee Ann did to three different people that day twenty years ago, when, instead of going to her grandmother’s after school, she walked all the way from the highway to the courthouse and climbed the front steps and stood staring at the heavy oak door for several seconds before she pushed it open.
Her daddy has gained weight. His cheeks have grown round, the backs of his hands are plump. He’s not getting any exercise to speak of. On Tuesday and Wednesday nights, he tells her, the prisoners who want to keep in shape are let out of their cells, one at a time, and allowed to jog up and down three flights of stairs for ten minutes each. He says an officer sits in a straight-backed chair down in the courthouse lobby with a rifle across his lap to make sure that the prisoners don’t jog any farther.
Her daddy is sitting on the edge of his cot. He’s wearing blue denim pants and a shirt to match, and a patch on the pocket of the shirt says Loring County Jail. The shoes he has on aren’t really shoes. They look like bedroom slippers.
Downstairs, when she checked in with the jailer, Jim Wheeler heard her voice and came out of his office. While she waited for the jailer to get the right key, the sheriff asked her how she was doing.
“All right, I guess.”
“You may think I’m lying, honey,” he said, “but the day’ll come when you’ll look back on this time in your life and it won’t seem like nothing but a real bad dream.”
Sitting in a hard plastic chair, looking at her father, she already feels like she’s in a bad dream. He’s smiling at her, waiting for her to say something, but her tongue feels like it’s fused to the roof of her mouth.
The jail is air conditioned, but it’s hot in the cell, and the place smells bad. The toilet over in the corner has no lid on it. She wonders how in the name of God a person can eat in a place like this. And what kind of person could actually eat enough to gain weight?
As if he knows what she’s thinking, her father says, “You’re probably wondering how I can stand it.”
She doesn’t answer.
“I can stand it,” he says, “because I know I deserved to be locked up.”
He sits there a moment longer, then gets up off the cot and shuffles over to the window, which has three bars across it. He stands there looking out. “All my life,” he finally says, “I’ve been going in and out of all those buildings down there and I never once asked myself what they looked like from above. Now I know. There’s garbage on those roofs and bird shit. One day I saw a man sitting up there, drinking from a paper bag. Right on top of the jewelry store.”
He turns around then and walks over and lays his hand on her shoulder.
“When I was down there,” he says, “scurrying around like a chicken with its head cut off, I never gave myself enough time to think. That’s one thing I’ve had plenty of in here. And I can tell you, I’ve seen some things I was too blind to see then.”
He keeps his hand on her shoulder the whole time he’s talking. “In the last few weeks,” he says, “I asked myself how you must have felt when I told you I was too busy to play with you, how you probably felt every time you had to go to the theater by yourself and you saw all those other little girls waiting in line with their daddies and holding their hands.” He says he’s seen all the ways in which he failed them both, her and her mother, and he knows they both saw them a long time ago. He just wishes to God he had.
He takes his hand off her shoulder, goes back over to the cot, and sits down. She watches, captivated, as his eyes begin to glisten. She realizes that she’s in the presence of a man capable of anything, and for the first time she knows the answer to a question that has always baffled her: why would her momma put up with so much for so long?
The answer is that her daddy is a natural performer, and her momma was his natural audience. Her momma lived for these routines, she watched till Watching killed her.
With watery eyes, Dee Ann’s daddy looks at her, here in a stinking room in the county courthouse. “Sweetheart,” he whispers, “you don’t think I killed her, do you?”
When she speaks, her voice will be steady, it won’t crack and break. She will display no more emotion than if she were responding to a question posed by her history teacher.
“No sir,” she tells her daddy. “I don’t think you killed her. I know you did.”
In that instant the weight of his life begins to crush her.
Ten-thirty on a Saturday night in 1997. She’s standing alone in an alleyway outside the Loring County Courthouse. It’s the same alley where her father and Jim Wheeler and the deputy had their pictures taken all those years ago. Loring is the same town it was then, except now there are gangs, and gunfire is something you hear all week long, not just on Saturday night. Now people kill folks they don’t know.
Chuckie is supposedly at a deer camp with some men she’s never met. He told her he knows them from a sporting goods store in Greenville. They all started talking about deer hunting, and one of the men told Chuckie he owned a cabin over behind the levee and suggested Chuckie go hunting with them this year.
Cynthia is out with her friends — she may be at a movie or she may be in somebody’s back seat. Wherever she is, Dee Ann prays she’s having fun. She prays that Cynthia’s completely caught up in whatever she’s doing and that she won’t come along and find her momma here, standing alone in the alley beside the courthouse, gazing up through the darkness as though she hopes to read the stars.
The room reminds her of a Sunday school classroom.
It’s on the second floor of the courthouse, overlooking the alley. There’s a long wooden table in the middle of the room, and she’s sitting at one end of it in a straight-backed chair. Along both sides, in similar chairs, sit fifteen men and women who make up the grand jury. She knows several faces, three or four names. It looks as if every one of them is drinking coffee. They’ve all got styrofoam cups.