All of this was going on in the space of one greasy double cheeseburger and two cups of coffee.
The worst part of it was that Ally had somehow gotten involved with him. Ally! Not some bimbo bitch…but Ally. I couldn’t believe it.
Not that it was unusual for women to become mixed up with guys in the joint, to fall under their “magic spell,” and to start corresponding with them, visiting them, taking them candy and cigarettes, having conjugal visits, playing mule for them and smuggling in dope where the tampon never shine, writing them letters that got steadily more exotic, steadily more intimate, steamier and increasingly dependent emotionally. It wasn’t that big a deal; there exist entire psychiatric treatises on the phenomenon; right alongside the papers about women who go stud-crazy for cops. No big deal indeed: hundreds of women every year find themselves writing to these guys, visiting these guys, building dream castles with these guys, fucking these guys, pretending that even the worst of these guys, rapists and woman-beaters and child molesters, repeat pedophiles of the lowest pustule sort, and murderers and stick-up punks who crush old ladies’ skulls for food stamps, and terrorists and bunco barons…that one sunny might-be, gonna-happen pink cloud day these demented creeps will emerge from behind the walls, get back in the wind, become upstanding nine-to-five Brooks Bros. Galahads. Every year hundreds of women marry these guys, finding themselves in a hot second snookered by the wily, duplicitous, motherfuckin’ lying greaseball addictive behavior of guys who had spent their sporadic years, their intermittent freedom on the outside, doing just that: roping people in, ripping people off, bleeding people dry, conning them into being tools, taking them for their every last cent, their happy home, their sanity, their ability to trust or love ever again.
But this wasn’t some poor illiterate naive woman-child. This was Ally. She had damned near pulled off a legal impossibility, come that close to Bizarro Jurisprudence by putting the Attorneys General of five other states in a maybe frame of mind where she’d have been able to consolidate a multiple bill of indictment across state lines! Never been done; and now, probably, never ever would be. But she could have possibly pulled off such a thing. Unless you’re a stone court-bird, you can’t know what a mountaintop that is!
So, now, here’s Ally, saying this shit to me. Ally, my best pal, stood up for me a hundred times; not some dip, but the steely-eyed Sheriff of Suicide Gulch, the over-forty, past the age of innocence, no-nonsense woman who had seen it all and come away tough but not cynical, hard but not mean.
“I think I’m in love with him.” She had said.
“I know I believe him when he says he’s innocent.” She had said.
I looked at her. No time had passed. It was still the moment the universe decided to lie down and die. And I said, “So if you’re certain this paragon of the virtues isn’t responsible for fifty-six murders—that we know about—and who the hell knows how many more we don’t know about, since he’s apparently been at it since he was twelve years old—remember the couple of nights we sat up and you told me all this shit about him, and you said it with your skin crawling, remember?—then if you’re so damned positive the guy you spent eleven weeks in court sending to the chair is innocent of butchering half the population of the planet—then why do you need me to go to Holman, drive all the way to Atmore, just to take a jaunt in this sweet peach of a guy?
“Doesn’t your ‘woman’s intuition’ tell you he’s squeaky clean? Don’t ‘true love’ walk yo’ sweet young ass down the primrose path with sufficient surefootedness?”
“Don’t be a smartass!” she said.
“Say again?” I replied, with disfuckingbelief.
“I said: don’t be such a high-verbal goddamned smart aleck!”
Now I was steamed. “No, I shouldn’t be a smartass: I should be your pony, your show dog, your little trick bag mind-reader freak! Take a drive over to Holman, Pairis; go right on into Rednecks from Hell; sit your ass down on Death Row with the rest of the niggers and have a chat with the one white boy who’s been in a cell up there for the past three years or so; sits down nicely with the king of the fucking vampires, and slide inside his garbage dump of a brain—and what a joy that’s gonna be, I can’t believe you’d ask me to do this—and read whatever piece of boiled shit in there he calls a brain, and see if he’s jerking you around. That’s what I ought to do, am I correct? Instead of being a smartass. Have I got it right? Do I properly pierce your meaning, pal?”
She stood up. She didn’t even say Screw you, Pairis!
She just slapped me as hard as she could.
She hit me a good one straight across the mouth.
I felt my upper teeth bite my lower lip. I tasted the blood. My head rang like a church bell. I thought I’d fall off the goddam stool.
When I could focus, she was just standing there, looking ashamed of herself, and disappointed, and mad as hell, and worried that she’d brained me. All of that, all at the same time. Plus, she looked as if I’d broken her choo-choo train.
“Okay,” I said wearily, and ended the word with a sigh that reached all the way back into my hip pocket. “Okay, calm down. I’ll see him. I’ll do it. Take it easy.”
She didn’t sit down. “Did I hurt you?”
“No, of course not,” I said, unable to form the smile I was trying to put on my face. “How could you possibly hurt someone by knocking his brains into his lap?”
She stood over me as I clung precariously to the counter, turned halfway around on the stool by the blow. Stood over me, the balled-up paper napkin in her fist, a look on her face that said she was nobody’s fool, that we’d known each other a long time, that she hadn’t asked this kind of favor before, that if we were buddies and I loved her, that I would see she was in deep pain, that she was conflicted, that she needed to know, really needed to know without a doubt, and in the name of God—in which she believed, though I didn’t, but either way what the hell—that I do this thing for her, that I just do it and not give her any more crap about it.
So I shrugged, and spread my hands like a man with no place to go, and I said, “How’d you get into this?”
She told me the first fifteen minutes of her tragic, heartwarming, never-to-be-ridiculed story still standing. After fifteen minutes I said, “Fer chrissakes, Ally, at least sit down! You look like a damned fool standing there with a greasy napkin in your mitt.”
A couple of teen-agers had come in. The four-star chef had finished his cigarette out back and was reassuringly in place, walking the duckboards and dishing up All-American arterial cloggage.
She picked up her elegant attaché case and without a word, with only a nod that said let’s get as far from them as we can, she and I moved to a double against the window to resume our discussion of the varieties of social suicide available to an unwary and foolhardy gentleman of the colored persuasion if he allowed himself to be swayed by a cagey and cogent, clever and concupiscent female of another color entirely.