Up Jumps the Devil

25

« ^ » Merchants in the town, and considerable planters in the country, are now beginning to have a taste for living, and some gay equipages may be seen…“Scotus Americanus,” 1773

The fog was even thicker next morning and when I carried my garment bag and overnight case out to the car, I wasn’t aware of Reese’s truck until he pulled into the drive behind me and powered down the window.

“Ma says Dwight’s arrested Billy Wall for killing Mr. Jap?”

“Yes?”

“What’s going to happen to him?”

“Don’t you ever watch Matlock or Law and Order?” I arranged my bags in the trunk so that things wouldn’t wrinkle and closed the lid. “He’ll be arraigned, the DA will present evidence to a grand jury and if they find probable cause, he’ll go to trial. Depending on how the DA decides, he could be tried for anything from involuntary manslaughter right on up to murder in the first degree.”

“But if they don’t have any real evidence, the grand jury’ll let him off, right?”

“Who knows?” I looked at him closely in the damp foggy light. “And why are you asking? I didn’t know you and Billy were particular friends.”

“We’re not. I just hate to see somebody stuck in jail for something he didn’t do.”

“Now see here, Reese.” I went around to the driver’s side so I could look straight up into his worried blue eyes. “Was there something about Saturday morning you didn’t tell me?”

“Jesus! You never quit, do you?”

He slammed the truck into reverse and roared out into the street so fast that he almost clipped Miss Sallie Anderson, who was there walking her dog, one of Hambone’s litter-mates.

The young dog gave a startled woof and Miss Sallie said, “My goodness. He must really be late for work.”

“Telephone, Deborah,” Aunt Zell called from the doorway. “It’s Isabel.” Hambone scooted past her feet and rushed over in hopes of a frolic with his sister.

Aunt Zell handed me the phone and went out to collect her dog and exchange a few words with Miss Sallie.

“Deb’rah?” came Isabel’s voice. “Now if it’s not convenient, just say so and we’ll do something else, but the fog’s so bad and the weatherman says it’s just going to get worse and I hate for Haywood to drive in it and you did say you were going to New Bern this afternoon, didn’t you? And Kinston’s right on the way, so if it’s all right with you—”

“Sure,” I said. “I have half a day of court, but I planned to leave around twelve-thirty or one o’clock if that suits you.”

“Oh good! That’ll get us there in plenty of time. Stevie can drive us over to Dobbs.”

We settled on a meeting place and as Aunt Zell and Hambone came back into the kitchen, I told her I’d be back sometime Friday, depending on when Haywood and Isabel’s plane got in. She and Uncle Ash were going to spend Thanksgiving morning picking up pecans out at his sister’s farm near Cotton Grove, then come back to Portland and Avery’s for a full-blown turkey dinner.

For some reason the zaniest cases seem to show up in pre-holiday court sessions. Wednesday started out normally enough, but shortly after morning recess, we got Marcus Sanders, black, sixty-nine, bone skinny and still spry.

Mr. Sanders was not a stranger to my court because he was bad for augmenting his small pension with shoplifted steaks and chickens from the Harris Teeter store at the north end of Main Street, about two blocks from his house.

More than once the same Harris Teeter security guard had sat in this same witness box and testified as to how he had stopped and searched Mr. Sanders “immediately outside the store” whereupon he had discovered the stolen meats “upon the suspect’s person.”

“This time, when I tried to stop Mr. Sanders, he took off like a rabbit and when I caught up to him, he was setting on his porch swing.”

(Let the record show that while the witness is at least twenty years younger, he is also quite corpulent and probably does not run like a rabbit.)

“And did you then search the defendant?” asked Tracy Johnson, who was prosecuting today.

“Yes, ma’am. He didn’t have nothing still on him, but them two packs of steaks were laying on the floor inside his screen door.”

Mr. Sanders, who was representing himself, bounced up from the defense table and said, “And you didn’t have no right. I was on my own premises.”

I cautioned him against speaking out. “You’ll get your turn.”

“No more questions from me, Your Honor,” said Tracy.

Mr. Sanders bounced back up. “When you catched up to me, where’d you find me, son?”

“On your porch.”

“On my porch,” Mr. Sanders repeated happily. “And where were them steaks?”

“Inside your screen door and fully visible.”

“But not on my person?”

“Well, no.”

The defendant turned to me triumphantly, his dark face aglow with righteous vindication. “See there, Your Honor? He says it himself!”

I seemed to be missing something in his logic. Tracy Johnson stood to elucidate.

“Your Honor, Mr. Sanders is under the impression that since he was not searched immediately outside the store and that since the steaks were not recovered from his physical person—”

“Home free?” I asked, disbelieving.

Sanders nodded vigorously. “Yes, ma’am, Your Honor. Home free!”

I almost hated to disillusion him. Since he’d spent the night in jail and since Harris Teeter had retrieved their steaks back intact, I sentenced him to time served and court costs.

After some public drunkenness in which all the defendants were well past fifty, the last case of the morning was larceny. Two nicely dressed white women: Josephine Reed, seventy-six, white-haired, fragile-looking; and Natalie Meadows, a sweet-faced twenty-one.

In Kmart or Wal-Mart, at Rose’s or Winn-Dixie, in fact, in any store where patrons use shopping carts, Mrs. Reed and Miss Meadows were a Norman Rockwell illustration of a dutiful granddaughter there to push the cart for her failing grandmother. They usually shopped at the busiest times. On this particular occasion, however, someone noticed that after they filled their cart, they didn’t bother to stop at a cash register before pushing that cart right on out to the parking lot.

Mrs. Reed used a cane and walked so slowly that store security had plenty of time to get a Dobbs police officer there before the women had fully unloaded their loot into the trunk of Mrs. Reed’s car. He searched the car and found items from four different stores: cartons of cigarettes, cosmetics, toys, appliances and dozens of boxes of cold tablets, aspirin and antacids. In all, the haul was worth almost two thousand, all destined for the flea market booth the two women rented once a month when their money ran out, according to the investigating officer.

I was all set to lecture Miss Meadows for using her grandmother as stage dressing for larceny when that young woman angrily denied any kinship.

“And I didn’t use her, okay? She came to me. Her own granddaughter was a friend of mine and when she moved to Florida last year, Jo asked me to take her place, okay?”

“Okay,” I said, and sentenced them each to jail, ten days of active time with another ninety days suspended under the usual conditions.

“Jail?” protested little Mrs. Reed, glaring at me over her bifocals. “But I’m a senior citizen.”

“Sorry,” I said. “No discounts for seniors.”

Haywood and Isabel’s son Stevie, home from college for the Thanksgiving weekend, met me in chambers after adjournment at twelve-thirty.

“You sure you don’t mind driving them?” he asked. “Gayle and I were going to Raleigh, do some Christmas shopping and maybe catch a movie, but we could wait and go tomorrow.”

I told him not to be silly and we went down to the parking lot where his parents were waiting. Isabel looked appropriately glitzy in gold stretch pants, gold purse and shoes, and a bright green, hip-length sweater ornamented with pearl drops, oversized rhinestones, and gold beading.

In his matching green sports jacket, string bolo tie, and porkpie hat, Haywood looked more massive than usual as he stood beside my sleek little Firebird.

“I don’t know, shug,” he said doubtfully. “I’m almost afraid I might break it.”

“Hey, I’ve got an idea,” said Stevie. “Deborah could drive y’all’s car and then you wouldn’t have to ride all scrunched up.”

“But how’ll you get home?” asked Isabel.

“Don’t even think about it,” I told him.

Stevie laughed and just stood there. He knows he’s my favorite nephew.

I sighed and handed over my keys. “If there’s the least little dent, the tiniest scratch, I will personally come over to Chapel Hill and bang you out with a rubber mallet.”

We transferred my things to the capacious trunk of Haywood and Isabel’s living room on wheels, a ten-year-old Mercury Grand Marquis with broad leather seats and lots of legroom, which is a real necessity since Haywood has lots of leg.

As we drove through Dobbs, Haywood and Isabel asked if I’d heard anything more about Billy Wall.

“Nothing except Dwight’s pretty sure he lied about paying Mr. Jap. They can prove he has a lot more cash than he ought to have.”

“But he ain’t said he did it?” asked Haywood.

“No. And they let him out on bond.”

“Poor boy,” said Isabel. “He’s really messed up his life, hasn’t he?”

It was hard to talk and drive, too. The fog was as bad as I could ever remember, thick and soft and cottony white. Visibility was severely limited and I couldn’t relax till we finally got off the two-lane road and onto Seventy East’s four lanes. Even then I didn’t feel comfortable enough to go faster than fifty.

“Hope they don’t cancel our plane,” Isabel said anxiously from the backseat. “Zach says Adam’s worried they may cancel his.”

“Might not be a bad thing if they did,” said Haywood. “Something’s eating on that boy. I believe he loved congregating together with us this visit, but I got the feeling his life’s real flusterated right now. You don’t know what it is, do you?”

“What do Daddy and Seth think?” I hedged.

“They think the same thing,” he answered obscurely.

“He’s probably been out in California too long,” said Isabel. “People out yonder just don’t think like we do. It’s probably messed up his judgment, don’t you reckon?”

Somehow California and its citizens got her off on the people moving into a recently built subdivision over near Robert and Doris.

“I never saw such long names as is on those new mailboxes. Half of them’s nothing but vowels and the other half’s all consonants. They need to shake ’em up in a box and start over.”

“You think maybe Adam’s got a health problem?” said Haywood.

“—and of course Doris could find fault with Jesus Christ if he came back to earth, but it bothers me, too, to see people out cutting their grass on Sunday morning. ‘Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.’ That means going to church. It don’t mean cutting grass or building garages or painting porches. Somebody needs to tell them that’s not the way we act down here.”

I resisted asking why the Sabbath injunction never seemed to include cooking a big Sunday dinner and washing up the dishes afterward. Cooking and doing dishes probably fall under the ox-in-the-ditch exemption.

“Maybe it relaxes them,” I said. “Some people like to cut grass better than play golf.”

“I just hate to see our ways changing,” said Isabel as she rummaged in her gold purse for the little notebook she uses to record their gambling wins and losses. “You see that in the paper how they’re going to plunk down a Food Lion over by the Interstate, just four miles from us? And one of them new people said she was counting the days ’cause she has to drive twelve miles to shop right now. Like twelve miles is a trip to China! How come she didn’t move to North Raleigh if she wants to live next door to a grocery store?”

“Or maybe things ain’t like they should be between him and Karen,” said Hay wood. “You know, they ain’t been back home together in a long time.”

“Nadine said one of ’em came into the Coffee Pot the other day, ordered a breakfast plate and thought that the grits were cream of wheat. Wanted to know how he was supposed to put milk on ’em and them laying there on a flat plate. Can you believe that?”

“ ’Course it might be his work. I hear tell they’s lots of people losing their jobs these days.”

“Tink Dupree told Nadine he was going to get him one of those T-shirts that say We don’t give a fig HOW they do it in New York, only he didn’t say ‘fig,’ if you know what I mean.”

A little desperately, I said, “Everybody in favor of stopping for some barbecue, raise your hand.”

My family will drop every other subject to discuss food. We were still about five miles from Goldsboro and one of the three most popular barbecue houses in eastern North Carolina and I figured it would take them that long to decide on whether they wanted to go inside for a plate or get sandwiches to go.

“Doesn’t matter to me,” I said. “Y’all are the ones catching a plane.”

More conferencing.

Their plane wasn’t due to leave till five. (“Course we’re supposed to get there and get checked in.”)

The Kinston airport was less than forty miles away. (“Say another hour at the rate we’re going?”)

“But if there’s a big crowd we might have to wait and—”

By then, I was pulling into the parking lot and the smoky aroma of grilled pork laced with vinegar and red pepper, not to mention the smell of deep-fried onion-flavored hush-puppies, decided them.

“We got plenty of time to go in and set down,” Haywood said happily.

Kinston is about a hundred miles east-southeast from the Raleigh-Durham Airport and visibility seemed to be better there. Radio reports said that RDU was canceling and/or diverting all flights. Not so at Kinston Airport

“Hell, yes, we’re going!” said a jovial white-haired man who seemed to know Haywood. He was also wearing an identical golf-green jacket. (“Money-green,” says Haywood.)

In feet, I saw four more solid green jackets and at least twenty more gold purses.

There was a festive air at this particular gate. The revelers ranged in age from mid-fifties to late seventies and came from all over eastern Carolina. Down East accents mingled with Low Country as the regulars greeted one another.

As soon as they started boarding their chartered plane, I went and called Kidd and told him to expect me within the hour.