The Ax

23

They're waiting for us when we finally get to the house, the police. I'd thought they would be.

It's three in the afternoon by now, the whole day is shot. It was impossible to find a lawyer this morning, a Sunday morning, so finally, at around ten o'clock, I called the state police to ask them where the court was, and they gave me an address and a phone number, and I called the court, and spoke with a woman who was determined to be nothing but efficient, not to permit the slightest vestige of individuality or personality to peek through. That might be a good strategy, I suppose, if you answer the phone at the courthouse for your living.

I kept explaining my problem to this woman, and she kept offering me no help at all, no guidance, nothing, and then all at once she asked me if by any chance either I or the defendant qualified to be taken on by the public defender.

That hadn't even occurred to me. Such things don't occur to people like me. I said, "I've been out of work for two years. I've used up my unemployment insurance. I have no income."

"You should have said so before," she said, being snippy.

I didn't bother to tell her I'm not used to offering my failure as an asset, and she went on to give me another number to call.

Which I did, and this was answered by somebody who sounded like, and possibly was, a teenage girl. I told her the situation, and that the court had given me this number to call, and she took down a lot of information — or at least asked me for a lot of information — and said someone would call me soon.

Then an hour went by, in which nothing happened. Billy was supposed to be arraigned this morning, that strange word. Arraigned. It sounds like a torture. It is a torture. But they wouldn't perform the torture until Billy was represented by counsel, so until I could find a lawyer he would remain in that pale yellow cell, or perhaps some worse cell somewhere else.

So after an hour I phoned that last number again, and this time the teenage girl calmly pointed out that it was difficult to find an attorney on a Sunday, and I said I knew that, and she said someone would call. Chastened, I hung up.

At twelve-fifteen, the phone rang. Marjorie and I were both in a state by then, not knowing what else to do, who else to call, how to get help, how to get this process started. We were both pacing the house, like starving lions. But then the phone did ring, at twelve-fifteen, and this was an older man, who slurred. I thought he was probably drunk.

"I've talked to the judge," he said. "Do you have anything to put up as collateral for bail?"

"The house," I told him.

"Bring the deed," he said, "the mortgage, whatever papers you can lay your hands on. I realize it's difficult, on a Sunday."

"I'll find something," I promised.

"I'll meet you at the courthouse," he said. "My name's Porculey. I'll be in a maroon suit."

A maroon suit? He slurs as though he's drunk, and he'll be in a maroon suit, and this is to be my son's lawyer.

On the other hand, he'd already talked to the judge, and it was clear from what he'd said that bail would be set, so that was good.

There's a folder in my filing cabinet marked HOUSE, and I just brought the whole thing with me, along with Billy's birth certificate and Marjorie's and my passports for identification. I didn't want to be one piece of paper shy.

When it did happen at last, it happened with great speed. First we met with Porculey, who turned out to be a much older man than he'd sounded on the phone, at least seventy, and who, from the drooping eyelid and sagging cheek, I suspected of having suffered one or more strokes, which was why he sounded drunk. It's true he was in a maroon suit, a horrible thing, with pinstripes, but nevertheless, while this was a wreck, it was a wreck of a once-good lawyer. And what was left was good enough for the job at hand; to get Billy out of there, out of their clutches, back home with his mother and father, where he belonged.

It was mostly like going to church, somebody else's church. You watch the other congregants, do what they do, go along with the ritual as best you can, without understanding a bit of it, but keeping in mind always that they take it seriously. They believe in it.

Oddly, Billy looked better than he had last night, when we finally saw him, in the sunny courtroom with the pale maple wood benches and altar. I know they don't call it the altar, where the judge and his vergers perform their sacraments, but that's what it is.

Billy wasn't there at first. Porculey led us to a pew near the front to wait, and then he went out, through a side door, with all our papers, to do whatever. After a while he came back into the courtroom, nodded reassuringly at us, and sat at the lawyer's table up front, with a few other people as unprepossessing as he was.

Then Billy was brought in, unshaved, wrinkled, exhausted, but looking less destroyed, less distraught. I watched him as he was led to his place up front, saw him try to scan the room without turning his head, saw him see us, and I smiled in encouragement, and he gave me a quick scared smile back.

The ritual was mostly in English, but didn't seem to have much literal meaning. It was all in the code of this church. Porculey and Billy briefly stood together before the judge, as though they were there to be married to one another. The judge, a disgruntled bald man whose head seemed too heavy for him to hold upright, listened and spoke and looked at papers and passed papers on to the verger at the little desk down to his right.

Then Marjorie and I were brought forward, and Marjorie wept a little, and so did Billy, which pleased the judge, who remanded our son to us in our custody, and actually did do the thing of hitting the block of wood with the gavel. Religious to the core.

Of course we weren't done yet. Over at a side desk, I had to sign a lot of forms, and at one point I had to raise my hand and swear an oath, I'm not sure why.

Billy was no longer with us at that point, but Porculey stayed by our side. He seemed to know most of the court employees, including the judge. I would say they all liked him and were happy to see him, but didn't take him seriously. And I would say he knew that and didn't care, just so he could go on playing the game.

I suppose he lives for Sundays, really, when lawyers are hard to find.

When they were at last done with us, Porculey shook Marjorie's hand and then my hand and told us which corridor to go down to collect our son— "You'll have to show them that paper" — and promised to be in touch with us about the court date. Then he went away, carrying a very new brown briefcase that I could imagine some proud grandchild giving him for Christmas last year, and we walked down the corridor to a coldfaced man in a brown uniform who looked at our piece of paper with contempt, went away, and some time later came back to contemptuously give us our son.

Billy was silent on the drive, abashed and ashamed and afraid. We got about halfway home, all of us silent, and then I said, "Billy, it won't surprise me if the police come around, very soon, with a search warrant."

He was riding in the backseat, Marjorie beside me in front. His startled eyes focused on my reflection in the rearview mirror. "Warrant? Why?"

"They'd like to be able to close all those other burglaries," I said. "They'd like to find something to show that you broke into that store before."

Now he looked really frightened. He knuckled his head, and said, "Dad. Dad, I — listen—"

"It's all right," I told him. I don't want to condone, and I don't want to encourage, but he had to know this much. "Everything's all right," I told him.

"Dad, no, listen—"

He still didn't understand, so Marjorie turned in the passenger seat and said, "Billy, it's been taken care of. Your father took care of things."

Then he got it, and the look he gave me was humbled and ashamed, and he said, "I'm sorry, I'm really sorry. It was so stupid, I'll never do anything like that again, I swear I won't."

Marjorie said, "Of course you won't. Everybody gets to make a mistake, Billy, it's all right. It won't happen again."

"I know you can't afford," he said, and stopped, and looked away, out of the car. He was starting to cry again.

Well, that's true. I can't afford any of this. The lawyer will cost us something. This whole thing will cost money we don't have. And time. Time I don't have either. But you do what you have to do.

"We'll just get through this, Billy," I said, "and then it will be over and done with and forgotten."

He nodded, but he didn't try to speak, and he kept looking out the side window at the neighborhoods going by, and a little later we turned in at our driveway, and there was the police van out front. When they saw us, five uniformed policemen got out of it. Local cops, in blue.

Well, there's nothing for them to find. I did a lot of clean-up last night, even more than Marjorie knows. When we got back from that distant mall, she helped me pull the bookcase out of Billy's closet — back in there, empty, it was too suggestive — and we lugged it into the garage, where I piled it with some paint cans and old rags, so it looks as though it's been there for years. Then, while Marjorie was in the bathroom before going back to bed, I got the Luger out from the bottom drawer of my filing cabinet and put it under the backseat in the Voyager; that is, inside the seat. Under Billy, as we drove home.

And now we wait, in our living room, as the taciturn police go through our house. There's nothing for them to find. They can even paw through the folder of resumes in my office, if they want. What could it tell them? Nothing.

Sitting here, waiting, I start to think about this downsizing business again, how it affects the families, and how smug and blind I was to assume it would never affect my family. First Marjorie, and now Billy; it's bending our lives out of shape.

Betsy isn't with us, and now for the first time I have to think about her, too. She seems like such a good kid, so normal, so accepting of the change in our lives, so unaltered by it; but is that so?

We told her this morning, of course, what had happened to Billy, and she wanted to stay with us, come with us to the court, but I didn't want her along. I didn't want her to have that kind of memory of Billy in her mind, the rest of her life.

Betsy attends a community college about forty miles from here. She should drive there, but we can't afford a second car, so another student, a girl she's known since elementary school, gives her a lift every day. She'd been scheduled to go with that girl to a Drama Society meeting this afternoon. She wanted to beg off, but Marjorie and I insisted she go, and I'm glad we did. She shouldn't be here to see the police pawing through her possessions, looking for stolen goods.

All at once I remember Edward Ricks, my resume from Massachusetts. I remember how his daughter, Junie, had taken up with a much older man, a professor at her college, and how that had caused the confusion that led to me having to kill her mother as well. I felt so superior to those people at the time, with their daughter in such contrast to my daughter. I'd simply taken Junie to be an ordinary tramp, sly and vixenish.

But now I wonder. Was Junie a victim, too? If Daddy hadn't lost his job, would Junie have taken up with that other fellow, that unacceptable father substitute? What was his name… Ringer.

Was Ringer a victim, too, of downsizing?

How it spreads. And now the police, without a word, depart. May they rot in hell.