The Ax

35

I sit in front of the Wildbury post office, Tuesday, the 17th of June, at the wheel of the Voyager, and I hold the letter in my hands. It has orbited back to me. I look at what HCE has written there, along the bottom, and the letter feels warm, heated by his hunger.

He sent it back immediately, the instant he got it. Clearly, he didn't worry about telephone numbers or anything else.

Another possible snag, I'd realized after I sent the letter, was that he might cut off the bottom part of it, the part for him to fill out, and just send that back, retaining the main body of the letter for himself — and the police. But HCE wants this job; he snapped at the bait like a trout.

Now that my gamble seems to be paying off, I can admit the other aspect of this move that I don't like. I have killed people. I've hated doing it, but I had to do it, and I did it. But I haven't been cruel to them, I haven't toyed with them. In a way, I'm toying with HCE, I'm tantalizing him with a nonexistent job interview with a nonexistent attractive woman. I'm sorry to do that, I wish there'd been some other way.

The letter got back to Wildbury yesterday, but I couldn't check the box until this afternoon, because yesterday was Billy's day in court. We had to be there, Marjorie and I, of course. We were scheduled for ten, and we arrived a few minutes early, with Billy, to find Porculey the lawyer waiting for us. His suit this time was not maroon, thank God, but a neutral gray. It was his tie that was maroon, with little white cows jumping over little white moons. He shook our hands, Marjorie's and mine, and said, "We think it will work out here," and took Billy away for a discussion with the judge.

A lot has happened in the two weeks since Billy's arrest. It turned out that Billy's partner in crime, somebody named Jim Bucklin, had been less quick-witted than we, and so had his parents. In the police car after his arrest, he'd said things that might be construed as confessions that he'd robbed that same store several times before, and apparently he'd said similar things to other detectives at the police station, and kept blabbing away until finally, the next day, he met the lawyer his parents had hired (unlike Billy's poor needy folks, the Bucklins didn't qualify for Legal Aid). That lawyer finally got Jim Bucklin to shut up.

The general feeling was that all of Bucklin's earlier loose talk would not be admissible in court, and after the lawyer arrived, Bucklin too started to claim that this burglary was his very first, so that he and Billy were at last telling the same story.

Which broke down when the police searched the Bucklin house (the same time they were searching ours) and found all that computer software.

Of course, they hadn't found any illicit software at our house. So, if finding stolen goods at Bucklin's house meant Bucklin was lying, then not finding them at Devore's house must mean Devore was telling the truth, or at least that's what Porculey was maintaining, and why he was doing his best to sever the two cases. Let Bucklin, the long-term master criminal, fend for himself, while Billy, the innocent youngster lured into a life of crime by Bucklin, faced the judge alone.

In chambers. We weren't there for it, having to sit out in the corridor, but apparently it went well. Over the assistant district attorney's ferocious objections — I saw her, from a distance, a hawklike woman in her thirties, thin and sharp-faced and ruthless — the judge did agree to separate the two cases, and to proceed in chambers with Billy's case.

By then, a jail term was no longer at issue. In fact, as Porculey later explained it to us over diner coffee, the issue had become whether or not Billy would have a felony conviction on his record. He had never been in trouble before, he was a good student in school, he had a bright future, and he came from poverty. (Ah, well.) In chambers, Porculey had suggested the possibility of a sealed indictment, and the judge had said he'd think it over.

Over that coffee, as it cooled, all of us too keyed up to add caffeine to our systems, he'd explained what a sealed indictment was, and it's an unexpected bit of mercy in the judicial system. If the defendant would plead guilty, and if the circumstances warrant giving him a second chance, the judge can choose to seal the indictment, keep it unpublished and unacted-upon, in his court, for whatever length of time he decrees; usually a year. If, in that time, the defendant is arrested for another crime, the indictment is unsealed and he faces prosecution for both the old crime and the new one. If, however, he stays clean until the term is up, the indictment is quashed as though it had never been. There is no police record; the defendant walks away pure.

Well, that's what we were hoping for, of course, and Porculey expected we'd know before the end of the day, but first the matter of Jim Bucklin had to be dealt with. We stayed away from court during that time, but apparently Bucklin's lawyer joined the assistant district attorney in struggling to keep the two cases together, and the argument was a lengthy one. He wanted his client, of course, to coast along on Billy's cleaner coattails.

But eventually the judge ruled against both the defense lawyer and the assistant district attorney, and Bucklin's case was held over alone for trial — or a plea bargain later on, more likely — and at three in the afternoon we were brought back in. Marjorie and Billy and I stood before the judge, who was a different one from that original bail hearing, in a different but similar courtroom. And again it was exactly like some religious ritual, full of arcane language, and we the penitents before the high priest.

Porculey had advised us against talking to Bucklin's parents, so we'd avoided them, though they desperately wanted to talk to us; to convince us to re-yoke our boy to their doomed son, no doubt. I was aware of them at the back of the courtroom when our session began, remorseful, resentful and reproachful. I didn't look back at them.

The judge sealed the indictment. I thought Marjorie would fall down when she understood what he'd just said, and I held tight to her arm. The judge spoke severely to Billy about his thoughtlessness — lovely word — and Billy kept his head bowed and his responses short and respectful, and soon it was over.

At twenty to four yesterday afternoon, Billy's troubles with the law were done. So long as he stays honest from now on, that is. And there isn't much doubt of that. This experience has frightened him, and he's aware of just how lucky he is. He has the vision of Jim Bucklin right in front of him, to show him how serious it might have been. And he's grateful to us, and doesn't want to let us down.

We shook hands with Porculey, and tried to express our gratitude, and our awareness that we might well have drawn a much worse attorney, and then I took Marjorie and Billy home. What a relief it was, almost as big a relief as if I'd finished all this other business and had my real job back. And what it showed me was, if you just keep going, keep determined, don't let the system grind you down, you can prevail.

I will prevail.

Well, that experience used up all of yesterday, and today was another counseling session. Today I kept my mouth shut, since I'm worried I might have exposed myself a little too much last week and I don't want to risk doing that again. Quinlan tried to probe into me two or three times, I could sense his curiosity about the direction we were heading last week, but I gave him flat answers, greeting card answers that he couldn't do a thing with. And Marjorie wanted to steer the conversation toward our roles within the marriage, which was what we were supposed to be there for anyway, so I think I did myself no damage.

When we got home, I did something I've been planning for a while, and now I think the time is right. I prepared seventeen of my resumes, my own resumes, addressed seventeen envelopes to paper mills I'd already approached in the past, plus Arcadia Processing, and I wrote a covering letter to each, saying I'm still here, I'm still available, just in case any job has opened up since you last heard from me. If the timing is right, my resume will be the most recent one in Arcadia's files, and possibly still fresh in Arcadia's personnel director's memory, when a job over there unexpectedly does become available. And since I'm sending this whole batch out, and it's a week or two before URF's death, there shouldn't be any suspicion raised.

After I mailed those resumes at my local post office, I drove on up here to Wildbury, to find HCE's answer waiting in the box. And now I sit here a minute, in the sunshine, outside the post office, and I smile at how well things are coming along.

Friday. Three days from now, I'll find HCE at last. Will I be able to deal with him immediately? Find him and just do it? Then next week URF and it's all over.

I can see the job, the work, the commute. I can feel being in that job, like a warm bath.

Friday.