polishing.
“Hold still!” she orders, her left hand on the back of my head, presumably so she can dig in better.
“I have to do this or it’ll get infected. Is this tar or what?” “They kind of rubbed my face around on the parking lot,” I admit, trying to hold my head still. I’m beginning to think she is enjoying this.
“I feel like you’re mashing a hunk of Monterey Jack through a cheese grater. You’re not exactly Florence Nightingale at this, you know.”
She pushes the rag harder against my burning face.
“Why don’t you get up and go on to the emergency room? They probably have a room now just for you. Oh, for God’s sake, Gideon, they’ve knocked out a tooth!”
I nod miserably, running my tongue to the vacant spot and tasting congealed blood.
“What am I going to tell Sarah?
She’s got a friend spending the night with her. I’ll scare them to death.”
Rainey bobs her head in agreement as she throws the washrag into the sink and picks up the bag of ice from the porcelain ledge and hands it to me.
“Now, hold this against your eye while I dab on some hydrogen peroxide,” she says opening a cabinet drawer under the sink.
“Tell her the truth:
that you’re an idiot posing as a normal human being. She’ll forgive you. We always do.”
As she rubs my face with a square cotton pad soaked with the medication, I feel my flesh is being barbecued. If smoke begins to rise from my face, I won’t be surprised. I close my eyes. Poor Rainey. She deserves better. So far this friendship business has been a one-way street. Besides looking like a lawyer from hell, I stink from sweat, tar, smoke, and alcohol, but she hasn’t even wrinkled her nose. “I’m sorry I keep showing up,” I say, as she moves the cotton around my face, “when I ‘m in trouble.”
Sure I am. Rainey doesn’t even bother to protest this lie.
Finished, she screws the cap down onto the jar containing the medicine.
“Why on earth were you fighting Leon Robinson she asks, her green eyes flashing at me.
“Isn’t he the aide who was holding Pam?”
I nod and stand up to look into the mirror. It’s not a pretty sight. My right eye, now purplish in color, is almost shut;
parts of my face now resemble raw hamburger; my neck is abraded; and, of course, a tooth is gone. What do I tell her?
She hates lawyer games. Though I have told Rainey much about this case, I have avoided mentioning my idea to argue to the jury that Leon let go of Pam because he hates blacks and he wanted her to attack Andy. Why? Because I know, like Andy, she will object.
“It’s a long story,” I say wearily.
For the first time since I’ve known her, I notice strands of gray among the red hair that has always attracted me. She is still pretty at the age of forty-one, but her face, especially under the eyes, has lines that were not there when I met her.
I am aging this woman. What can she possibly see in me, even as a friend? I sigh, looking at my own torso in the mirror. Rainey, I realize, has never even seen me shirtless, and suddenly I am embarrassed by the roll of fat around my middle and the white patch of hair sprouting from my chest, an appetizing picture when my mutilated face is thrown into the bargain.
“I’ll tell you if you’ll let me use your bathroom to take a shower.”
Without a word she opens a cabinet and hands me a clean blue towel.
“Don’t wash your face again,” she commands as she closes the door behind her, “or I’ll have to put the hydrogen peroxide back on you.” Is there a hint of malice in her voice, or am I just imagining it?
When I emerge ten minutes later, I am feeling one him dred percent better. While I was in the shower behind the curtain, she opened the door and left a man’s V-necked T-shirt on the counter for me. Where did she get this? It’s none of my business, but because it looks old, I can resist asking not that I would get an answer. When I heard the door opening, for an instant I had thought she might get in the shower with me. Wishful thinking, as usual. Instead of about sex, she’s probably thinking that it would be nice if somehow I could get a job in another state. She is waiting for me in her living room, curled up with her feet drawn up under her in her favorite chair across from the couch where in our courting days we necked like teenagers. An opened Miller Lite is sitting on the table by the couch. Underneath it is a napkin. I sit down, thinking what she would do for me if I were good to her.
“I thought you could use a beer,” Rainey says, staring at the T-shirt. It is a little large, but I’m not in a position to complain.
“Thanks,” I say, sincerely. My face feels as if it is glowing
“I’m not quite ready to go home and face my daughter yet.”
Rainey barely lifts a shoulder in reply. I know she thinks I worry too much about Sarah. She will be fine, Rainey has said, if I don’t smother her. Obviously, I’m the one who needs looking after. It isn’t Sarah who is dragging in with a black eye and a tooth knocked out. Yet I worry that she will worry. If the old man isn’t out chasing women, he’s off getting his face bashed in.
“You’re just about smooth nuts,” Rainey says, sipping at a glass of water she has picked up from the polished floor beside her chair. Her latest project, taking up the carpet in the living room and finishing the wood, has just been finished this week. She seems inexhaustible.
“Smooth nuts?” I ask. I never heard that one, but some how it fits. What was I doing in that bar by myself? For the next few minutes or so, I try to explain what I’ve been up to, but the mask of disapproval on Rainey’s face is in place be fore I get thirty seconds into my story, as I knew it would be.
“Even if you could show that Leon Robinson was the biggest racist in the entire state,” Rainey objects, cradling her empty glass in both hands between her knees, “what should it have to do with Andy’s case?”
Relevance. I sip at the beer and put it down. According to the Arkansas Uniform Rules of Evidence, relevant evidence is that evidence which tends to make a proposition at issue more or less true. “If I can make a jury believe that Leon deliberately let go of Pam I explain, “don’t you think that should have some bearing on Andy’s guilt or innocence?”
Rainey rolls the plastic container in her hands as if she were a potter.
“I guess I don’t understand criminal law.”
The alcohol and the shower have lowered my heart rate substantially. I’m beginning to feel normal again.
“I’m not sure I do either, but let me take a crack at it,” I say, leaning back against the couch. “The jury has to find at a minimum that Andy acted recklessly. I will argue that no one can reasonably believe that Andy should have anticipated that one of his assistants would deliberately release control of Pam.
The crucial act that resulted in Pam’s death was Leon’s letting go of her, not Andy’s decision to use shock.”
Rainey purses her lips and shakes her head.
“But what evidence do you have that Leon deliberately let go of her?
You told me last week you didn’t have a shred of evidence that he and Olivia Le Master cooked this up together. You said that Olivia has clammed up and might even invoke the Fifth Amendment and refuse to testify, which means she’s guilty as hell.”
I correct her.
“I said she might. Her attorney said she hasn’t decided yet.” I finish off the beer.
“But to answer your question, I don’t have any evidence except Leon and his friends don’t like me coming into their bar,” I go on, not willing to tell Rainey that my evidence is living in Hot Springs. She will be furious that I am going to try to drag someone else into this. I stand up.
“I need to go on home.
I told Sarah I’d be home by eleven.”
At the door Rainey surprises me by reaching up and brushing my lips with her own.
“Promise me you won’t do something this stupid again,” she says, her voice a quiet whisper against my ear.
