Kind of Kin (34 page)

“I'll be goddamn,” Holloway said. He turned his glare on the preacher, skimming from him to the others standing with him, the powdery old ladies and emphysemic deacons, the Skoal-bitten farmboys and their chuffy short-waisted wives. He'd known most of them most his life, and it really pissed him off that they wouldn't listen to him. “I'm saying this for the last time! You people stand aside and let me talk to them witnesses or I'll sling every last one of you in jail!”

“What witnesses?” the preacher said.

“We're witnesses,” Ida Coley said.

“Go ahead on, Arvin,” T. C. Blankenship offered. “See how well you get elected next year.”

“Heavenly Father,” the preacher started, “we come now to Your Throne of Grace—”

“All right!” the sheriff exploded. “Let's just see how you folks like standing out here past suppertime when the sun goes down and the temperature drops!” If this wasn't the stubbornest, prayingest, believingest bunch of Scotch-Irish pilgrims in the county, damn it, he didn't know who was. That was when a new notion struck him—right out of the blue, but like so many of his blue notions, it was perfect. Without another word Holloway turned on his heel.

“Brother Oren,” Terry said, “would you ask her to just come back to the door and talk a minute?”

“I'm sorry, Tee. I don't think she wants to talk to you.”

“Kirkendall! Get over here!”

Terry Kirkendall looked at the sheriff, hatless and furious, standing halfway across the yard now, and beyond him, the line of deputies and local men, and beyond them his own son looking short and scared in front of the crowd of shouting, sign-wagging strangers. “Tell her . . . tell her Carl Albert needs her to quit this nonsense and come home.” He followed the sheriff back to the other side.

S
weet grabbed up the baby's lavender sweatpants as she sank to her knees on the tiled kitchen floor. She had never in her life been a knee pray-er, didn't know any Baptist who was, but in this moment she became one.
Help me God, help us,
a one-note pleading to the one Source she believed
could
help them—because she had seen for the first time what was truly happening out front. All that muffled yelling hadn't begun to tell her how many people were gathered, or how riled up they were getting. Or how ugly their expressions might be. It hadn't told her about the news vans, either, although that part didn't surprise her. Clutching the damp little sweatpants to her chest, Sweet pictured again the yelling faces on the far side of the yard, pushing forward, crowded all the way back into the street. She didn't remember ever seeing such hateful looks, not live and in person, only in old newspaper photographs or something. What worried her more, though, was what she'd seen in the features of Ida Coley and Alice Stalcup and some of the others as they lifted their chapped wrinkly cheeks to gape at the helicopter. They were tired. They were cold. They were
old.
Or in any case, the majority of the ones standing with the preacher were old, and the ones who weren't old were just kids on their cell phones, horsing around. They'd be bored soon, if they weren't bored already. It was getting late, and they'd been out there for hours. The old people couldn't hold up much longer. She should have thought to come out and look sooner. If she'd realized how bad it was getting, maybe she could have—what? She didn't know. She didn't know.
Help me, God. Help us.

When she stepped back inside the nursery, Misty Dawn rushed over. “That was the SWAT team, right?”

“No, just some nosy folks who ought to mind their own business.”

“In a helicopter?”

“It's not a SWAT team, Misty! For crying out loud.” Then she caught the look on the girl's face. Her voice softened slightly. “Did you ever hear of a SWAT team in Latimer County?” Misty Dawn shook her head. “Well, me neither. They haven't got that kind of a budget. Here.” Sweet pushed the sweatpants into her hands and went to the supply closet.

“They're still damp,” Misty said.

“They'll be dry in time.”

“In time for what?”

“We got to get ready.” Sweet gathered an armful of Pampers and the small stack of clean sheets off the closet shelf, grabbed another pastel-striped baby blanket, then she went to the crib and started pulling the sheets off the mattress.

“We're leaving?”

“We're going upstairs. Grab that box of crackers.”

“Upstairs! What for?”

“We'll hang out in one of the classrooms in the old part above the sanctuary.”

“What good's that going to do?”

“I need to be able to see what's going on.”

“See from where?”

“I don't know! A window.”

“Aunt Sweet, you are making me crazy! You keep switching plans like every two seconds!”

“I'm trying to be flexible. Let's just go upstairs and keep quiet, see what happens.”

“What for?”

“They know we're in the nursery, Misty! This is the first place they'll look!”

“Oh my God, you think they're about to bust in?”

“I don't know.”

“How about we just
go
! And that man helps us like you said!”

“We have to wait till it gets dark.”

“That's too long!”

“What choice do we have? Don't give me any grief, Misty. Here, Juanito, carry this.”

W
ell, unfortunately, Oren Dudley thought, the sheriff had a point. How
were
these old folks going to stay out here after dark? The preacher himself apparently wasn't that good a judge of what people could handle and what they couldn't. For instance, he hadn't thought that dry cough of Clyde Herrington's amounted to anything until he heard the deacon say weakly, “Preacher, I think I better set down.” He'd turned to see Clyde's face pale as pie crust, his hand on his chest, huffing like he couldn't catch his breath. “Oh my word, yes!” Oren had fumbled to open one of the glass doors so Clyde could sit inside, but before he could get it done, Clyde Herrington just sort of melted down onto the sidewalk.

The next little while had been a blur. Oren kept expecting the sheriff to rush them, but instead here came an ambulance wailing toward the church, and next thing he knew the medics were trying to get an oxygen mask on the deacon, with Clyde shaking his head and waving his hand in front of his face, wheezing, “I'm fine, leave me alone, I'm fine,” until they rolled him away on a gurney. It was right after that Oren Dudley started asking himself if he was doing the right thing—or, rather, not so much if
he
was, but if all these church members needed to be involved. So many of them were so frail, and it was nippy out, and there was already so much strife and dissension, that specially called deacon's meeting, and the awkward potluck dinner last Sunday. Kenneth Spears and them going over to the other side. Which wasn't a surprise exactly, but it was disappointing. Oh, he wished they'd had time to do that prayer walk. But he
had
prayed, he reminded himself. Considerably. On his knees all night in the bedroom. He'd asked to be led. His wife was standing by him. He'd memorized all those verses.

But then, he still expected some of them were going to want to call for a vote of confidence. Or not. Oren Dudley felt that it was increasingly possible that the one thing he'd dreaded most in his pastoring life could come to pass: he might be the catalyst that would split the church. He would hate that, he really would. He was distracted in his deliberations by Claudie Ott's skittery voice: “Brother Oren, I got to be getting home to start Leon's supper. When do you see this all being finished?”

“To tell you the truth, Miz Ott,” the preacher said, rubbing his face with his free hand, “I don't see.”

T
his was, in fact, the question on everyone's mind—when would this all be finished? Those trapped inside the church wondered, as did those linked together in front of the doors. The handful of deputies who were ready to call it a day wondered, and also those who were happy to be standing around doing nothing while they racked up more overtime. Carl Albert Kirkendall and his dad both wondered, the boy because he was hungry and he wanted to see his mom and he thought it might be almost time for
The Suite Life of Zack and Cody,
and Terry Kirkendall because—well, just because.

Vicki Dudley wondered because she wanted to put a frozen chicken pot pie in the oven for her husband's supper and those things take a while to cook. The demonstrators from Outraged Patriots wondered—they had an hour's drive back to Muskogee—and so did the seven representatives from the Latino Council of Clergymen, who would be returning to several different locations around the state. Logan Morgan and Shoshone Ballenger and the other reporters all wondered, because if there was going to be a dramatic showdown, they wished it would hurry up and get started so their live reports could make the evening news.

But there were others following the story who hoped the climax would come later, not sooner. This was true in particular for the two cable news producers in New York who were scrambling to book flights to Tulsa, and also for State Representative Monica Moorehouse, who had contacted those very producers, and who was at this moment standing outside the east door of the capitol building in Oklahoma City waiting for her husband to come pick her up. Representative Moorehouse was praying, in fact, that the standoff would last long enough for her to drop by the apartment and change clothes before making the long drive east on I-40 again.

Deputy Darrel Beecham also had reason to wonder. He was driving as fast as he could. Sheriff Holloway had called him from his post at the church's rear side door and told him to drive lickety-split back to Wilburton and pick up the prisoner. “Cuff him and shackle him good! Make sure that steel is out in the open where these reporters can see it!” The sheriff stood peering west. “Looks to me like we got an hour of good daylight left. If you value your job, Beecham, I suggest you have that son of a bitch here before the light goes, you hear?”

Wednesday | February 27, 2008 | Afternoon

Watonga Hospital

T
he little-black-one carries the food tray in one hand. She is small and quick and smiling. She talks rapidly as she places the tray on the metal table and rolls the table to fit properly for the boy sitting up in the bed. She speaks as if she knows him very well. The boy keeps his smile when she goes out again.
She calls my name Sugar. ¿Do you want the TV on, Sugar? This is the same like I call the red mare.
The red mare, Luis thinks, remembering how the boy tried to coax her with sugar. What a long time past it seems. The aide returns with a second tray of food, which she places on the small crowded table beside Luis. She blinks one eye at him, raps her knuckles on the wood as if to say, dont worry. Then she goes to the small television mounted near the ceiling and switches it on, turning the knob a few times to a program with large colorful puppets and the young ones with smiling faces. She shows the boy how to use the arrows on the side of the bed to make the sound more loud or more quiet, or to turn to another program.
Thank you,
the boy says in spanish. The little black one answers,
For nothing,
and leaves the room again.

Much later, after they both have eaten and the aide has come and retrieved the two trays, and the day has grown late, the room graying with shadows, Luis, seeing the boy asleep again, pushes the arrows on the side of the bed. He knows he will not understand the words on the television but maybe there is something that will be more interesting to look at than a program for children. He stops moving the arrow suddenly, stands very still. On the small screen is the face of the boy—much younger, yes, but without doubt it is him. In fear Luis looks to the door, which stands a little open. No one must see this!

Rapidly he closes the door, returns to the bed. He thinks to awaken the boy, to ask what the voice is saying, but the picture changes. Now, from the sky, a moving picture of the blue truck of the grandfather, in the same arroyo where Luis and the boy left it, with the hood open. No steam pours from the broken radiator now. Then another picture from above, this one of a church, like a parish church, not a cathedral; he can recognize the small, plain steeple, though it carries no cross. In the street beside the church are many automobiles and trucks and police cars with lights flashing. He can see also, standing among the vehicles, men in tan uniforms like the uniforms of those who came into the barn to take away the young people. The same color as the two uniforms of the two men that Luis sees now walking in through the hospital room door.

Wednesday | February 27, 2008 | 5:30
P.M.

First Baptist Church | Cedar

S
weet felt as if she'd been led to this upstairs corner classroom just in time to see the big deputy drive off in his cruiser. Did this mean nobody was watching the Pastor's Study door? She couldn't tell from this angle. What she could see, looking down on the street, were dozens of other deputies, the TV vans and reporters, the sign-waving strangers, all those people from town, and the astonishing number of vehicles parked in every imaginable position, including her husband's Silverado sitting cattywampus in the middle of the street. She looked for Terry and Carl Albert, but the thrusting front porch roof blocked part of her view. She couldn't see the sheriff, either, or the preacher and them guarding Fellowship Hall on the opposite side of the church, or the Masons guarding the sanctuary, or Wade Free and Floyd Ollie around at that rear side door. If they were even still back there.

What she could see very well, at the far end of the street where it intersected the highway, were the two black-and-white Highway Patrol cars parked crossways blocking the road, red lights flashing, a row of blue sawhorses set up. Behind her, in the Sunday School classroom, Misty Dawn and Juanito were fighting—not just talking fast Spanish but having a ferocious whispered argument. No mistaking it now.
What
they were arguing about, Sweet didn't know, but the
why
of it she understood acutely: just moments ago they had come to stand beside her. They had looked out the window and seen, for the first time, the roiling crowd, the hateful yelling faces, the officers in uniform rowed up in front of the pickups and cruisers, their guns.

“No, no, no!” Misty cried. “
Tu eres loco!
”

“Hush!” Sweet hurried over to where they were standing at the classroom door.

“Talk to him, Aunt Sweet! He's trying to go out there! He says he's going to give himself up!”

“Keep your voices down! Somebody might be downstairs! Juanito, sit!” Sweet maneuvered herself between the two young people and the classroom door. Misty Dawn started off on a renewed Spanish tirade. “Hush now! I mean it, Misty!”

“He thinks they'll just bus him to Mexico and he can turn right around and come back!
You
tell him! He won't listen to me! Shhh, shhh, baby, it's all right.” Lucha was whimpering, reaching up from the floor for her mother, and Misty Dawn swooped down and lifted her in her arms. “It's okay, mami.” Juanito looked at neither his wife and daughter, nor at Sweet, but held his gaze on the colorful posters featuring the ABC's of Salvation on the classroom wall. His face was young, solemn, completely unreadable.

“Both of you sit down and be quiet,” Sweet said.

They didn't sit, but they no longer argued out loud. Misty Dawn went on in a suppressed voice: “I keep trying to tell him everything's different now. He says he knows, but he
don't
know. I mean, he
ought
to know, from Enrique and them, but he just acts like it's no big deal.”

“My daughter,” Juanito said. “She is hungry. She is not able . . .” He finished in Spanish.

“He says she can't stand any more of this,” Misty said. Then she sank down in one of the metal folding chairs against the wall, pressed her face against the top of the child's head. “He's right,” she whispered. “But I can't let them. I won't!” She said a few words in Spanish, and Juanito's voice, when he answered, was extremely quiet.

“What's he saying?”

“That it's better for him to go to jail than for her to be more frightened and hungry.”

Another phrase from Juanito.

“He's afraid there might be shooting. They've got too many guns. He says something bad could happen to Lucha.”

“
Tú también.
”

“And me.”

Juanito looked directly at Sweet. Later she couldn't be sure if what he said was in English, the way she remembered it, or if Misty Dawn translated, and she just remembered it as coming from Juanito's mouth, or if it was simply his expression that told her, but she felt it clearly, what he had to say: It is necessary for me to surrender so that my daughter will be safe. It is better for her to be alive and fed and unhurt, no matter what they do with me.

“Not you,” Sweet said. Everything fell into place then. She looked at Misty. “Not him. Me.”

“What?”

“I'll let the sheriff know I'm coming out.”

“Are you kidding? No!”

“Just listen a minute! When it gets dark, I'll go downstairs where the preacher and them are standing.” She snatched up her purse from the table, began to dig for her wallet. “I'll act like I'm, you know, negotiating. I'll, I don't know, make a scene of some kind. Create a distraction.” She handed her niece a twenty and three singles—all she had left of last week's grocery money. Misty Dawn took the money without a word of thanks, shifted the baby to one arm and leaned to the side so she could stuff the bills into her jeans pocket. “While I'm doing that,” Sweet said, returning to the window, “y'all slip out through the side door like we talked about.”

“They'll see us!”

“That's why we're going to wait for dark.”

“Where do we go?”

Sweet turned to look at Misty Dawn, her beautiful, frightened face and smeared makeup, how she held her daughter so tight on her lap, and Juanito standing beside them, thin and small, his sober expression, and the child herself, the crib blanket gone now, dropped somewhere, her long brown legs dangling almost to the floor; she wasn't sucking her fingers, just staring straight ahead, unblinking, from beneath the dark thatch of matted hair. “Y'all are going to have to figure it out for yourselves,” Sweet said. “Once I walk out there, they'll take me into custody. I won't be able to help.”

“But I don't know where to go! And even if I did, how would we get there?”

“You'll have to ask the Lord, I guess. And also Wade Free, maybe, if he's still outside the Pastor's Study door.”

While Misty Dawn changed the baby's diaper and put on her little sweatpants and gathered their things, talking low to Juanito the whole time, explaining what they were doing, presumably, Sweet stood at the window. The street was relatively quiet, people milling around, unfocused. What attention was being paid was all directed toward the Fellowship Hall doors to her far left. The light was glowing amber as the sun lowered behind the church, casting long shadows behind the pickups and cars. Soon the air would turn orange, then ruddy red, then lavender and purple—then, at long last, it would be dark. How long? Sweet tried to judge. Maybe twenty minutes. Half an hour. For once in her life, Sweet was grateful for the short days in February.

A flurry of movement to her right drew her gaze along the street. Down at the highway intersection one of the troopers was waving a white cruiser around the sawhorses onto Main Street. The cruiser came along fast, navigating between the helter-skelter-parked vehicles until it nosed quickly into the one empty space directly in front of the church. Oh, wouldn't you know, Sweet thought. The big deputy returning. Holloway would send him straight back to his post at the rear side door. A stark urgency pressed on her. Maybe she should go downstairs right now? Yes, before the deputy had time to walk back around there! But no, the kids needed to wait for dark, they
had
to, it was going to be tough enough. Sweet watched the big burred fellow hoist himself from behind the steering wheel, reach for the rear door handle. A little cry popped from her mouth when she saw her daddy being helped awkwardly out of the backseat in handcuffs, his feet shackled.

“What?” Misty said, hurrying over. “Oh, no. Oh, look what they're doing! Grandpa!”

“Y'all stay back!” Sweet said, because Juanito was pushing forward now, too, holding the baby. “Don't jiggle the curtains, we don't want them looking up here!” But nobody on the street was looking up. Their eyes were all on Bob Brown—the camera operators and reporters, the townspeople, the churchgoers, the deputies, the strangers: all eyes homed on the graying rack-thin orange-clad prisoner, shackled and chained waist to ankle, being shuffled forward to where the sheriff waited with his bullhorn. “Oh my God,” Misty Dawn whispered. “Aunt Sweet, I didn't know.”

“I know. It can't be helped now.” Sweet reached up, her own heart pounding, to rub the girl's back. “But hey,” she said lightly, “this a real good distraction. I mean, right? Nobody's going to be paying attention to that back door.”

“Listen to them! Do you hear what they're saying?”

Well, Sweet did hear. She had heard it before. The words were little different to what she'd heard earlier, but the faces—they looked, Sweet thought, even uglier, even angrier. Her daddy's presence had totally revved up the demonstrators, and not just them, but also the beer drinkers and the general onlookers, some of whom—oh, this really broke Sweet's heart—were local people who'd known her daddy for years. How could the ones who knew him be so turned against him? What would change people like that?

And the others, those twisted yelling faces, she recognized them now, or rather the looks of them, where she'd seen it before—pictures from an old social studies class, a bunch of white teenagers spitting and yelling at a black girl in sunglasses walking to school. There was one face in particular in that picture, a white girl with a short bubble haircut and a shirtwaist dress, her face twisted as she screamed at the black girl's back—that face had always bothered Sweet the most because the girl looked so much like the girls in the old yearbook pictures on the walls of the ad building at Cedar High School. She looked, to be truthful, a little like Sweet herself. If she'd grown up in a different era. Different clothes, a different haircut, but that spitting girl could be kin to her. The people down below, yelling, they were the same, too—the same kind of kin.

But not all of them! Sweet told herself. What about Brother Oren and Vicki? Ida Coley, T. C. Blankenship, Wade Free . . . there were plenty other people down there, folks from this town, and this church, doing what they thought was right. But the others across the way—didn't they think what they were doing was right? And the uniformed deputies, the sheriff, they all thought they were doing right. And her daddy. Oh, Daddy. He looked terrible. He'd lost so much weight. His shoulders were slumped in a way she'd never seen before, maybe because of the shackles, how they had him handcuffed to the chains clanking down to his ankles. My God, Sweet thought, you'd think he'd murdered somebody! You'd think he was a dangerous criminal, some kind of a—what? Felon.
We're all felons, for Christ's sake
, Misty Dawn had said. Well, we are, Sweet said to herself. We are that.

“Y'all come away from there.” She drew the kids from the window just as Arvin Holloway started bellowing through the bullhorn: GEORGIA KIRKENDALL, I GOT SOMEBODY HERE WANTS TO TALK TO YOU! Sweet stopped on the other side of the classroom. The kids stood nearby, looking expectant. She really wished they could wait for dark, but they couldn't. She reached over to brush the hair back from Lucha's forehead. The child shrank against her daddy. “You be a good girl, okay? Aunt Sweet will bring you some Gummi Bears next time I see you. Okay?” Lucha solemnly nodded. “Well, then,” Sweet said, looking around the room. She picked up her purse, stood on tiptoe to hug Misty, gave a quick awkward kiss on the cheek to Juanito, who ducked his head, flicked an embarrassed half smile. “Well,” Sweet said. “I guess y'all are on your own, then.” She stepped to the door, paused, raked her fingers back through her uncombed hair. “I'll drag it out as long as I can.”

H
e had thought he'd come to terms with everything. He had truly believed that. The story, as he got it from the taciturn mouth of the big deputy on the drive here, had seemed convoluted, but Bob Brown had felt like he understood. His daughter was at the Cedar First Baptist Church with the preacher and the sheriff and, somehow, some kind of a Mexican stranger—a weird mishmosh, but there would be a good explanation. But when they came upon the roadblock and turned and he saw the mangle of pickups and vans and cars on the street, Brown knew, before he was hauled out of the cruiser to jeers and taunts, that he had understood nothing. And when he stood in front of Holloway and saw, behind the sheriff's shoulder, Terry Kirkendall lurking at the edge of the crowd with his cap brim pulled low, Bob Brown realized that there was one thing, at least, he hadn't come to terms with. The sheriff shoved the bullhorn at him, and with a clank Brown took it by the cold metal handle.

“Call her out!” Holloway ordered.

“Do what?”

“Don't give me any bullshit.” The sheriff snatched back the megaphone. “GEORGIA KIRKENDALL, I GOT SOMEBODY HERE WANTS TO TALK TO YOU!” He slapped the horn in Brown's hand again, and Brown lifted his shackled wrists to demonstrate that he could raise them only chest high. “Beecham, get over here!” The deputy blocked Brown's view as he hulked in front of him fumbling with the heavy lock at his waist. Twenty minutes ago, inside the drunk tank, Darrel Beecham had apologized for clamping on the steel chain linking the handcuffs to the foot shackles. Now he growled roughly at Bob Brown to hold still. Brown leaned around, trying to see his son-in-law skulking back behind the police tape. Tee wouldn't meet his gaze. Carl Albert stood next to him; he kept peering up into his dad's face and then turning to look at his grandfather. The boy's face was red, wincing, puffy with crying.

“Call her!” Holloway barked as the deputy began gathering up the heavy chain.

“What do you want me to say?”

“Tell her to send that spic out! I want to know what he done with that kid!”