Southern Discomfort (3 page)

Jaime Ramiro Chavez.

My very first judgment.

I wanted to reach out and pat his wiry brown arm and assure him that he had not fallen into the hands of an unjust system. Instead I had to make do with memorizing his features. For some reason it felt crucial to me that I not let this moment and this man pass out of my memory, and I wound up concentrating so hard on the swoop of his brows and the cut of his chin that his deepset eyes shifted uneasily from me to the farmer who employed him.

Both waited stolidly.

I said to the farmer, "Are you prepared to see to it that he does go take the driving test?"

The older man nodded. "I can take him over Thursday evening."

"Very well," I said. "I'm going to suspend judgment. All charges against Mr. Chavez will be dismissed if he can bring me a valid driver's license before Friday at noon."

Relief crept over the defendant's face. Evidently he could understand more English than he wanted to admit.

"Gracias,"
he said with simple dignity.

"Call your next case," I told Cyl DeGraffenried.

She always takes a patrolman's schedule into consideration and the next ten or twelve were more traffic cases from Trooper Harrold: speeding, driving while impaired, improper passing, driving while the license was revoked. Depending on circumstances, I fined, accepted prayers for judgment, sent to drivers' refresher courses, or gave suspended jail terms.

One of the young black males was an army lieutenant who had been driving a government vehicle. "I just got back from Germany, Your Honor," he explained.

"You thought Highway Forty-Eight was an autobahn?" I asked, quirking an eyebrow.

He smiled sheepishly.

"Pay the court costs and try to stay inside this state's posted limits," I said, smiling back.

Reid's client pleaded guilty to failure to yield to an emergency vehicle and to speeding fifty-two in a thirty five zone, something I take a lot more seriously than doing eighty on an open interstate. Despite his attempt at boyish charm, I gave him a hundred-dollar fine and a thirty-day suspended sentence.

A cynical young man who was on probation for four counts of obtaining property by writing worthless checks asked me to activate his two-year sentence.

All morning Phyllis had been guiding me through the routine judgment forms. Now she handed up form AOC-CR-315—Judgment and Commitment upon Revocation of Probation—and I checked the appropriate boxes and signed on the back under "Order of Commitment."

It went against my grain, but there was nothing I could do about it. He thought it'd be easier to do a month of real time than to have a probation officer looking over his shoulder for three years. He was probably right.

By eleven, we'd disposed of thirty-one cases and I called a fifteen-minute recess.

Phyllis leaned back from her computer screen and flexed her shoulders. "You're doing good," she said.

I thought so, too, but I knew there were heavier things to come.

A quick trip to the lavatory (making sure both doors were locked), fresh lipstick, a fresh cup of coffee, and I was ready to go again at 11:17.

So was Cyl DeGraffenried. "Number sixteen on the add-on calendar, Your Honor. Lydia Marie Duncan, three counts of issuing worthless checks."

Lydia Marie Duncan. White female, approximately nineteen or twenty, and not exactly what a lot of people around here would call a credit to her race. Her lanky blonde hair was three days past needing a shampoo, the neck inside her BORN TO BE BAD T-shirt looked dirty, and her grungy bare feet were thrust into rundown flip-flops.

There to bear witness that she had indeed willfully written checks against a closed account were managers from the Dobbs IGA, the Cotton Grove Winn-Dixie, and the Dik-a-Doo Motel and Lounge out on the bypass.

Cyl finished reading the charges.

"How do you plead?" I asked.

"I need me a lawyer."

"Didn't you hear me tell everyone who wanted an attorney to come forward?" I asked sternly.

She tugged at the T-shirt that skimmed the waistline of her dirty yellow shorts. "Yes, ma'am, but all them won't here then." She gestured with her head toward the three stern-faced complainants. "I figure now I might maybe need somebody speaking for me 'fore they put me under the jail."

"Do you have a job?"

She shook her head. "I did work out at the towel factory, but I got laid off last year and now they've shut down and I ain't found nothing yet."

That factory closed completely two months ago and more people than she were out of work these days.

"Very well."

Phyllis held out the form and pointed her toward the bailiff standing by the door to my right. I told the complainants, "Sorry, folks."

They knew as well as I did that Lydia Marie Duncan would probably qualify, which meant that the case would have to be rescheduled, which meant losing another day of work and in the end, even if they got the judgments they sought, they'd probably be back in court a time or two to have those judgments enforced.

The mills of justice ground on.

Over Cyl DeGraffenried's objections, I dismissed various charges of possessing drug paraphernalia, making threats, assault with a deadly weapon, and failure to stop for a stop sign. On the other hand, I did find a twenty-nine-year-old black male guilty of trespassing. He got a six-month sentence, suspended for a year on condition that he stay off the premises of the Winn-Dixie, make twenty-four dollars restitution to the store, pay a hundred-dollar fine and costs, pay a hundred twenty-five dollars for his court-appointed counsel, and break no law for one year. This was the second time he'd stolen steaks from the same grocery store—"I get tired of chicken all the time"—and I could sympathize with the manager wanting him to stay out of his store.

Before reading the next charge, Cyl motioned to a shy-faced young woman in the audience. The witness came with head-down reluctance and sat in the chair beside Cyl with a timorous half-smile.

I knew exactly what was coming.

"Line ninety-eight. Jerry Dexter Trogden. Assault on a female."

The young man who'd been seated beside the witness swaggered forward. He had light brown hair that hung almost to his shoulders, a Fu Manchu mustache, and tattooed on his right forearm was a bright green-and-purple dragon. He signed the waiver of counsel with a flourish.

And how did he plead?

"Not guilty."

"Your Honor," said Cyl, "the prosecuting witness refuses to testify and wishes to take up the charges."

She was still a teenager and there was a stand-by-my-man look in her eye. I wondered how many more times he'd knock her around before she'd quit believing he could change.

"Are you sure this is what you really want to do?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Then I have no choice but to rule the prosecution frivolous and order you to pay court costs."

She followed that egg-sucking hound over to Phyllis's stand to pick up the papers and then out to the cashier in the hall to pay their fifty-one dollars.

It was 12:20.

"Court will be in recess till one forty-five," I said.

When court's sitting, a table is always reserved for judges at the Bright Leaf Restaurant, a half-block away on Second Street. As Ned O'Donnell and I came down the courthouse steps and headed there, the hot and muggy July day wrapped itself around us like a damp bath towel someone else had used first.

"Rough morning?" I knew that he was hearing a messy statutory rape case.

He shrugged. "I've seen worse. What about you? How do you like the view from the bench?"

I tried to look decorous. "I've seen worse."

Like me, Ned O'Donnell had grown up on a working farm and he gave me a conspiratorial grin. "Beats housing tobacco, don't it?"

"All rise," said the bailiff. "This honorable court for the County of Colleton has now resumed its sitting for the dispatch of business. God save the state and this court."

It was precisely 1:45.

The ranks had thinned considerably. Now the courtroom held less than a third of what it had this morning.

A perky black teenage girl bounced forward when Cyl called her name. First speeding violation and it was only for sixty-seven in a fifty-five zone.

"What's this contempt of court about?" I asked when she pleaded guilty. "How come you didn't go ahead and just pay the magistrate last night?"

"I might've mouthed off a little last night," she admitted sheepishly. "Might've said a bad word or two."

Mischief danced in her brown eyes and she was so engaging I couldn't help smiling back.

Gwen Utley had been last night's magistrate. She could be very nice, even sympathetic, as long as people were polite to her, but she wouldn't take rudeness from God nor curses from the devil.

"Don't pay to use cuss words in front of some magistrates," I said. "Twenty dollars for two bad words, plus court costs."

She laughed and scampered over to Phyllis.

Cyl DeGraffenried was not amused. "Lines a hundred seven, eight, and nine," she said stoically. "Franklin Ottis Webb. Speeding seventy-five in a fifty-five zone, driving while impaired, driving while his license was revoked, resisting and obstructing a public officer, giving fictitious information to that officer."

Zack Young got up from the lawyers' bench and ambled over to the defense table. "Your Honor, I represent Mr. Webb," he said. "He's suffering from Hodgkin's disease and is under a doctor's care. I'd like to ask that his case be continued."

"Your Honor," Cyl said coldly, "this is the third time Mr. Webb's case has been calendared. The state would like to move on this."

Zack pulled a piece of paper from the stack of dog-eared manila folders he had piled on the table. "I have here a doctor's certificate—"

"If he's well enough to drive and drink and then strong enough to get out and take a swing at Trooper Harrold—" Cyl began.

"Alleged, Your Honor," said Zack.

I read over the papers both were waving at me. Perry Byrd had given the last continuance, but a Raleigh doctor had scribbled a statement that he was indeed treating Webb for Hodgkin's.

"What's the state asking, Ms. DeGraffenried? Do you want me to issue a warrant for his arrest?"

She didn't like having to back down. "No, Your Honor. We just want a firm deadline."

"You've got it," I said. "I'll hold this over two weeks, Mr. Young, till—" I glanced at Phyllis.

Without missing a beat, she murmured, "Till July seventeenth."

"—till July seventeenth," I echoed. "If he's not here on that date, you'd better bring me his death certificate or sure as the sun comes up that morning, I
will
issue a warrant."

"Thank you, Your Honor," Zack said. He gathered up his messy stack of folders and ambled on out.

Zack's only a few years older than me, but he plays the good ol' country lawyer like Andy Griffith playing Matlock.

We got through some possessions of marijuana with intent to sell and some possession of drug paraphernalia, sent a klepto over to Mental Health for evaluation, and listened to a light-skinned seventeen-year-old boy explain that he really hadn't
stolen
that car, he'd just borrowed it for a few hours and he meant to fill it back up with gas and he would've, too, if that patrolman hadn't picked him up when he did.

When his aunt came forward to pay his fine, I said, "You know, ma'am, you can keep on bailing him out and paying his fines, but he's just going to keep on getting in trouble till you make him face up to things himself."

The old woman looked at her nephew, then she looked me straight in the eye and said, "You prob'ly right, Judge honey, but I love this child and I believe in him, and me and the Lord'll keep praying over him till we'll get him walking straight in the end. You'll see."

What could I say? Don't call me "Judge honey"?

It was 4:15. I ruled on a couple of motions and then recessed till the next morning.

And the evening and the morning were the first day.

"As the working level on a structure rises above the reach of men standing on the ground, temporary elevated platforms called scaffolds are erected to support the craftsmen, their tools and materials."

Wednesday was a holiday—Fourth of July picnic at the Jaycee Park, fireworks over the river. Thursday was a duplicate of Tuesday, and I figured that if all the odds and ends left over from the week's calendar could be heard by noon on Friday, it would give me at least half a day to fritter before I had to start toting barrels and lifting bales for Lu Bingham on Saturday.

Which is how I wound up at my brother Herman's on Thursday evening.

Make an X.

Nip off one of the stabilizing legs and what's left?

You got it, sugar: a lopsided Y, perpetually off-balance.

Every once in a while when my friends and I are skirmishing through yet another battle of the sexes, we speculate about what's actually on that little part of the X chromosome that we still have and men don't—besides the antidote for testosterone poison, I mean.

Toni Bledsoe, who got married again last year and really wants to make it work this time, swears it holds the gene that'll let a woman ask directions.

"When it's perfectly obvious Pete hasn't got a clue where we are, I tell him I've got to pee. RIGHT THIS MINUTE! Honey, if there's ever been a man willing to argue with a woman's bladder, I never met him. And don't want to. So he heads in at the nearest service station and while I'm inside asking for the ladies' room key, I'm also asking the clerk, 'What's the fastest way to highway whatever from here?' Then back in the car I say, 'Pete-Sweet, I bet we could make up some of the time I just lost us if we took a left at that light up yonder... '
et voilà!
He thinks I've got a great sense of direction and I don't have to watch him pout for the next hour 'cause he feels emasculated."

My sister-in-law Amy, Will's wife, mutters about being the only one in their house with the physical dexterity to put a fresh roll of toilet paper on the hanger; and K.C. Massengill, who used to work undercover for the State Bureau of Investigation, keeps wondering if that's why there's so much hurling and flatulence on
Saturday Night Live
when, presumably, all the eight-year-olds are asleep.

I myself think that extra segment gives us a more rational attitude toward tools.

Ever notice?

It's almost as if their try squares and saws and electric drills are some sort of ceremonial totems that will be profaned by secular (i.e., feminine) use unless ringed by ritual promises and protected by sacred vows. Probably goes back to the Stone Age and the first fire-hardened pointed sticks or roughly flaked rocks:
"You woman. No touch my axe."

Some men'll let a new puppy mess all over a hundred-year-old Persian rug, use a hand-embroidered guest towel to wipe it up, then get bent out of shape if you pry open a can with one of their screwdrivers or dirty up their hammers cracking black walnuts.

Uncle Ash is a sweetie about most things but he's never real happy if Aunt Zell or I take anything other than simple gardening tools from his well-stocked shed back of the house.

All the same, if I was going to labor in the vineyards of the Lord, I needed to show up with more than empty hands and a willing heart. Fortunately, my brother Herman has four truckloads of tools and he lives right here on the edge of Dobbs. He growls worse than our daddy ever did, but he's not Daddy and I don't pay him too much mind.

He was growling at Annie Sue when I drove into their backyard after supper that Thursday evening. Annie Sue was huffed up and sir-ing him in that snippy-polite way teenagers do when they want to make sure you know that the respect is only on their lips, not in their hearts.

"I told Lu Bingham I'd wire our WomenAid house and now he says I can't," she told me hotly, her Knott-blue eyes flashing in the late afternoon sunlight. "He never lets me do anything!"

"She never did a circuit box by herself and she don't have a license," said Herman. From the tone of his voice, I gathered he'd already said that more than once before I drove up.

"Reese hasn't got a license and you let him wire everything by himself."

"No, I don't and even if I did—"

"Because I heard you tell Granddaddy and Uncle Seth I know more about how electricity works than he does."

"Miss Big Ears is liable to hear something she don't want to hear, she keeps talking back to me," Herman said darkly.

He still had his work clothes on, as if he'd just come in himself. Hot, tired, dirty and probably hungry, too. There was a pinched look on his face, and I had a feeling this might not be the best time to ask him to lend me a hammer. Or for Annie Sue to goad him into saying things it might be hard to back down from. She always makes a big dramatic deal out of things and since she turned sixteen, she and Herman always seem to be bumping heads.

"Come on, honey," I said. "I bet your daddy could use a big glass of tea about now I know I sure could."

Annie Sue wanted to stay and urge, but I was already steering Herman to the lawn chairs clustered under their big pecan tree, so she headed for the back door, impatience with adults in every step.

"And bring me that pack of Tums over the sink," he called after her.

The chairs were in deep shade and it was a pleasure to sit for a while though I knew that mosquitoes would chase us once the sun was fully down. I shooed their big lazy tom from my chair, and as soon as I sat down, he jumped back in my lap like a furry rug. A hot furry rug. But I'm always a sucker for a purring cat, and I missed having one around since Aunt Zell's cat disappeared a month or so earlier.

An occasional car passed on the side street and from beyond the thick shrubbery, I heard the muffled laughter of young children splashing in their backyard pool. Nadine's gardenia bushes had almost finished blooming, yet a few creamy white blossoms hung on to perfume the air.

Cindy McGee and another teenage girl pulled up in the drive behind my car, hopped out, and called, "Hey, Mr. Herman!" before heading for the back door with the familiarity of best friends who run in and out of one another's houses a dozen times a week. They were inside only a few minutes till they were out again, carrying two summery dresses on padded hangers. Their high light voices called, —Bye, Mr. Herman!"

Herman shook his head. "Girls! How they keep up with which dress is whose is beyond me."

"You still working over at Tinker's Landing?" I asked as car doors slammed and they drove away.

He slouched down wearily in one of the wood-slatted chairs he'd built himself. "Yeah, finished up one house all except we were short two switch plates. I thought they were two-gangs, but turned out they were three and Reese didn't stock the trucks like he was supposed to."

He gave a heavy sigh. "Guess I'll have to get Annie Sue to start doing it again."

All his kids had worked there in the summers, but Annie Sue was the only one who actually liked it, a fact that seemed to be lost on my brother.

"I swear," he said, "Reese should've been the girl and her the boy."

Like me, Annie Sue was an accident of nature after Herman and Nadine thought they'd finished their family. They’d begun with twins, Reese and Denise. No surprise since twins ran in both families. Herman was one of two sets our daddy sired—he and Haywood, the "big twins," are seven and eight brothers up from me—and Nadine's grandmother was a twin, too. Edward came along two years later and that seemed to be all she wrote till he was in the second grade and Nadine got pregnant with Annie Sue.

"I thought I was having the change early," Nadine always said.

By that time, Herman had his electrician's license and his own business. Nadine had started doing the paperwork and answering the phone, so she just set up a playpen beside her desk and let Annie Sue teethe on new rubber insulators. The child was barely toddling before Herman stuck her in his truck and started taking her along to be his gofer on local jobs. Soon she was handing him a pair of wire strippers or a line tester before he even asked for it. "Best little helper I ever had," he said. "Even if she is a girl."

At the age of twelve Annie Sue rewired her bedroom with outlets every three feet and installed stereo speakers under her bed. Once when she was mad at her parents, she fixed it so that every time Nadine adjusted a stove burner, the front doorbell would ring. Nadine's not the brightest woman God ever made, so it took her two days to realize there was a connection between turning off the peas and running to answer the door when no one was there. Herman thought it was sort of funny till he went to plug in his razor and the bathroom lights went off and on in rhythmical sequence.

He switched her legs good for it, but I heard him bragging about how much aptitude those monkey tricks took and how he wished Reese or Edward showed half as much.

Reese could pull wire, but he's not really interested in the finer points. Being an electrician is just a paycheck, something that puts beer and barbecue in his belly, new radials on his Corvette, and his half the rent in his trashy girlfriend's hand—none of which meet Herman's approval.

Edward, on the other hand, had no intention of wallowing around under houses, rewiring old fuse boxes. He studied electrical engineering at State and now works with a big outfit headquartered in Charlotte where he designs lighting systems on a grand industrial scale.

Denise worked in the business every summer, too, but she never got out of the office. She still acts like she's not real sure which end of an extension cord plugs into a wall. Not that she'll ever need to know, long as there's a man around to do it for her. And not that Herman ever expected her to. She's a girl, isn't she? True to form—and confirming his second worst fear—right out of high school she married an insurance salesman a bare eight months before the baby came. (Poor Herman's worst fear is that a daughter of his would have a child and no wedding. In Dobbs, "nice" girls still don't.)

Denise now lives in Greensboro, a hundred miles away from her parents' judgmental eyes; but her near brush with scandal has made Herman twice as strict with his younger daughter and she's never been allowed off on anything less than a double date.

Annie Sue gripes loudly to anybody who'll listen that Herman doesn't trust her. She's right. He doesn't. We can tell him he's wrong till our tongues get blisters, he just can't believe she won't make dumb decisions about her life.

Annie Sue returned with a tray that held four glasses of ice and a big plastic pitcher of tea. Nadine followed.

"Hey there, Deborah. I didn't know you were out here till Annie Sue told me." She handed Herman the antacid tablets and smiled at the big cat in my lap. "Goldie ever come back?"

I returned her smile. Nadine's all right. We're not terribly close. She's seventeen years older, practically a whole generation ahead of me. Too, she's one of those Blalocks from Black Creek and more straitlaced than most of the Knotts, but that seems to suit Herman. They don't go in for public shows of affection, but their marriage has never caused much gossip in the family. Although Herman's tighter with a dollar than most of the boys, nobody ever hears Nadine complain that she doesn't have everything she needs or wants.

"No," I answered, stroking Mo-Cat (because he purrs like an electric motor all the time). Goldie, short for Goldenrod, was Aunt Zell's big yellow cat that disappeared back in May. "Aunt Zell thinks she must've been hit by a car or something. Miss Sallie's talked her into taking a puppy. Her mama dog strayed off last week, and Miss Sallie was stuck trying to hand-feed four beagle pups around the clock."

We watched Herman take two tablets and wash them down with a big swig of tea.

"Stomach still bothering you, hon?"

"You're not feeling well?" I asked him.

"I'm fine. Just a little stomach virus I can't seem to shake. It comes and goes."

My eyes met Nadine's. "It comes more than it goes," she said. "Awful cramps. He had a real bad spell Monday night after your swearing-in, but will he see a doctor? I think it's a bleeding ulcer, but he won't let me look at his stool and—"

"Oh, hey now, woman!" Herman had an old-fashioned delicacy about some things and he fumed in embarrassment. "Deb'rah sure didn't come over here to listen to us talk about something like that."

Unspoken was the sudden question of why I
had
come.

"Actually, I guess I'm here for the same thing you and Annie Sue were fussing about before," I told Herman. "I was hoping you'd let me borrow some of your tools Saturday morning. Uncle Ash is so picky and I'm supposed to work on that WomenAid house, too. What about you, Nadine?"

"Oh, I'm not doing any building, but I did say I'd help some of the other ladies with the picnic lunch."

"What sort of tools?" asked Herman cautiously.

"Just a hammer," I assured him. "Maybe a nail apron if you've got an extra."

"I reckon I could do that right now Annie Sue, you want to look in that side bin for your aunt?"

"Or I could just drive the truck over Saturday and Deborah could help me string wire."

"Annie Sue—"

Anger was tightening his jaws, but she couldn't let it alone.

"I just don't see why's it such a big deal that I don't have a license. Don't I work for you, too?"

Normally I don't get between my brothers and their children, but I thought Annie Sue was being reasonable.

Each company has to have at least one licensed electrician on staff, and the others are empowered to work under that. Sometimes though, the person who holds the license never does a lick of field work. In fact there's a company at the other end of the county that occasionally swaps work with Herman. Their holder of record is the owner's wife. He can put electricity anywhere you want it, but he couldn't pass the written examination. She could. And did.

"So are y'all furnishing any of the materials?" I asked, hoping to find some ground for compromise.