minute of dead silence, the door comes to as the chain is unhooked, and then a slender but well-built young woman dressed in faded jeans, a blue halter top, and sandals, slides through it, revealing not so much as a couch in the background.
“Let’s go for a walk,” she says, her voice pleasantly hillbilly.
With her straight dark hair the color of black shoe polish, thin lips, and an aquiline nose, Charlene Newman surely has Native American blood coursing through her veins. She leads me out of her apartment with her arms folded across her chest Indian-style, as if she were auditioning for a part in a movie that spoofs bad westerns. She is not a princess, but not a squaw either. If she would smile (assuming her teeth are good), with her high cheekbones she could be pretty.”
“What’s Leon got his self into now?” she asks. She leads me in the direction of the mountain behind the Arlington Hotel. My own jeans feel like a rubber suit in the humidity and heat.
Fall is only a week away, but it might as well be midsummer.
Though a walk might relieve some of my stiffness, I hope we aren’t going far.
Walking uphill on a wooded path past benches populated primarily by elderly retirees, many of whom are Yankees permanently escaping snow and ice, I summarize Leon’s involvement in Andy’s case, uncertain, despite the divorce, how far I can go in trying to paint Leon as a villain.
“He and his friends at the Bull Run beat me up last night pretty good,” I say, removing my sunglasses and baring the gap in my teeth. It ought to be good for something.
“All I did was sit down at the bar for a few minutes.”
A few yards off the path, Charlene points to a vacant bench, and I nod gratefully. Her voice, surely a product of the Ozarks, cracks slightly as she sighs, “When he’s had a couple, Leon’s pretty good at that.”
Though we have been walking only a few minutes, I am ready to sit. The back panels of the wooden bench, painted Astroturf green, creak as I collapse against them. Fortunately it is in the shade.
“Did he ever hit you?”
From where we are sitting, apart from a few old people with their brown canes and white heads, the predominant color is, though this is September, a lush green. The park, a sanctuary of hardy survivors, is neatly hidden from the town.
Charlene must come here to escape the bleakness of her apartment. Her unpainted lips press against teeth I still haven’t seen. Questions like this when asked by strangers are never innocent. Finally, she says, “Only when he was drinking. If I could of kept Leon from his friends, we would have done all right.”
The old phrase “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride,” flits through my head. I have never understood it, but somehow it seems to apply to Charlene Newman. If Hot Springs is Camelot, she seems destined to spend her life fishing for carp with the “gentlefolk” in the moat. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice to my left an old man who reminds me of how my father would have looked had he lived to be an old man. A Harry Truman look- alike, his eyes (unlike my father’s, whose soupy lenses were troubled by the paranoia that often accompanies schizophrenia) gleam with small-town self-satisfaction behind gold-rimmed eyeglasses.
Sure, I dropped two atomic bombs, but it was either us or them. Yet, I remind myself, I don’t need or expect a complete surrender from Charlene.
“At the probable cause hearing a few weeks ago, Leon started crying when he talked about Pam,” I say, hoping for the right note of empathy. “I think he felt guilty for turning her loose.”
Charlene squints at me as if I had asked her to do long division in her head.
“Why would he have jus’ let go of her?”
Harry, who apparently has no need at this stage of his life to be concerned with appearances, lays a forefinger against his right nostril and shoots the contents of his left onto the bench beside him, his message being, I suppose. If you don’t like it, don’t watch. Too late, I turn my head back to Charlene, but somehow not until I am reminded of the tobacco-stained brick streets freshly spotted each Saturday in my eastern Arkansas hometown of Bear Creek by fanners of both races. Poor woman. I can see the emotion in her eyes.
Like the fools most women are about men, she still cares about him. “I think your ex-husband hates blacks so much,” I say as gently as possible, “he’d do a lot of things if he thought he could get away with it, even if for a moment it meant hurting somebody he really cared about.”
Charlene’s long legs push out against the grass underneath the bench, making me fear I have offended her.
“Leon wouldn’t kill nobody,” she says, her voice stubborn, suggesting I have indicted her as well-and I have. Who wants to have married a murderer? “I don’t think Leon ever intended for a second for her to die,” I say quickly, holding her gaze to establish my own sincerity.
“I just think he let the girl go, hoping she would attack my client.”
Charlene ponders this possibility.
“How did you know,” she says, lowering her voice though we are at least a good fifteen feet from Harry, who is using a clean handkerchief to wipe the corners of his mouth, but not his nose, “Leon’s got a thing about niggers?”
Niggers. She says the word as easily as her own name.
Though not a candidate for membership in the Rainbow Coalition either, out of loyalty to my client (or is it to Rosa or even frayed values from a more idealistic time in my life?), I flinch at the word but try not to show it.
“Somebody told me,” I lie, “that he’s a member of the Trackers.”
For the first time since we’ve been seated on the bench, she won’t meet my gaze. Watching Harry stand up, she asks, slipping out of her natural twang, her voice too guarded for it to be an idle question, “Who told you that?”
Pretending indifference, I stand up and jam my hands in my pockets.
“It doesn’t matter.” For the first time it clearly occurs to me that Leon, like Yettie, knew Andy and Olivia were having an affair. As a member of the Trackers, he was enraged by it and had every reason to punish Andy.
Charlene, her voice listless, hunches her shoulders. “What do you want with me?”
I stand over her like a father reprimanding a child.
“Only to tell the truth at my client’s trial if you’re subpoenaed to testify about Leon being a member. If he admits it, you won’t even have to take the stand.”
Charlene bites her lip but doesn’t cry.
“I thought I was away from him for good.”
Marriage, I’m finding out from my divorce clients, is forever.
I look back over at Harry, who is now watching us suspiciously. I could use a good caning for upsetting this girl, his expression says.
“This won’t get him in trouble,” I say, too glibly. Lawyers tell people this all the time, when, in fact, we may be setting off an avalanche that will maim them for life.
“It’s not him,” she says, still no inflection in her voice, “I ‘m worried about.”
But it is, I think, as I watch Harry dodder toward us.
Through his thin white shirt I can see the outline of the straps of his old-fashioned ribbed undershirt, which again reminds me of my father, who fascinated me as a small boy by the painstaking way he tucked his shirt into his pants each mo ming before going off to his drugstore. All Charlene had to do was hang up, keep the chain in place, or even lie to me in a convincing manner. Humans are even worse than canines when it comes to hanging on to bad relationships.
“How long were y’all married?” I ask, curious about the amount of violence in their relationship. Maybe in private Leon was as cute as a French poodle, and she laughed her head off, but somehow I doubt it. Raised to be polite to my elders, I nod at Harry, who stares at us with the frankness that is only permitted to certain groups of our society. Disgusted, he shakes his head. Thirty years ago, he might be standing over this young woman, but he wouldn’t be making her cry.
Charlene, perhaps unnerved by such interest (or maybe just bored) stares at the ground.
“I was fourteen when he and I made it legal. I’m twenty-one now.”
Charlene, the tease. I do not ask, but I wonder how old she was when she first had sex.
“Any kids?” I ask. What other reason would a girl have for giving up her youth?
Now that Harry is past us, it is our turn to stare at him.
