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  “She liked her a lot.”

  “Rosa never met a stranger,” I say, forcing a smile.

  There is no hostility in her voice. Probably, she sees this wild story as a bond rather than as a barrier. I don’t know.

  I am guilty only of ignorance and the arrogance that comes with being white. They knew us; they had to know us. As a child before the civil rights era, I had no need to know more than the first names of the men who cut our grass and the women who ironed my family’s clothes.

  “Gloria says you haven’t been much of a neighbor since she died,” Lucy observes.

  “How come you haven’t moved out?”

  “No need to.” I shrug, embarrassed to admit the reason is financial.

  “Except for the sounds of gunfire coming from the housing development a few blocks away, it’s a quiet neighborhood.”

  Abruptly she stands up. It is as if I had said that except for stomach cancer, I feel pretty good.

  “I hope you can help my son,” she says, extending her hand to me.

  I take it and gently squeeze her dry palm against my sweaty one. For the last few minutes this woman has had me totally off-balance. I’m glad this interview is over.

  “I’ll do everything I can.”

  As I step inside the waiting room after the elevator door shuts, Julia remarks, “Did your wife look like that?”

  Never ceasing to be amazed by what comes out of her mouth, I gawk at her. There is no sarcasm in her voice.

  God only knows what Julia knows about me. Usually, she seems so self-absorbed that I’m surprised when she can remember my name.

  “She was darker and a lot prettier,” I say, daring her to make a smartass remark.

  Popping a pastel jelly bean into her mouth, Julia says, “You know who she reminded me of?”

  “Coretta Scott King,” I answer, again thinking of the bruised sadness in her eyes. Her past has probably left some scars. She wouldn’t have made that crack about my grandfather if it hadn’t.

  “Yeah,” Julia says, with what could almost be termed respect in her voice. A first.

  “Her husband was supposed to be so great,” she says bitterly, “and he was off screwing all those white women and was so dumb he didn’t even know the FBI was listening. But did she ever act in public like it bothered her? Hell, no. That’s real class. I bet she gave him shit in private.”

  There are no other persons in the waiting room. I lean against the wooden counter that separates Julia from the public. Julia, in her twenties, can’t have any personal memories of the civil rights movement.

  “I’ve never exactly thought of you as a liberal,” I say, glancing at her skirt as it creeps up her legs. If it rides up much further, I’ll be able to see her belly button.

  Following my gaze, she tugs ineffectually at the fabric.

  “You guys don’t know anything but what I want you to,” she replies softly.

  “All you got is an idea based on what I look and sound like here between eight and five and that’s all.”

  My face reddens at my own condescension. She is right, of course. We take her for granted. Her life is probably much richer than my own. I have assumed it was superficial, a soap opera unworthy of my attention except for idle speculation between me and Clan about her sex life.

  “That’s true,” I mumble, and return to my office to make a rare call to my sister Marty.

  “Come out tonight and Herbert will cook some steaks.

  I’m real busy now,” she says loudly into the phone when I ask her if she has time for some questions about Bear Creek. In the background I can hear the sound of women’s voices. Marty owns a used-clothing store in Hutto, a town on the western edge of Blackwell County.

  “How’s Herbert?” I ask, wondering what it must be like to have married four times. Marty has said she would keep on going down the aisle until she got it right.

  “He’s the kindest man I’ve ever known. If he leaves me, I’ll kill him.” She whispers, “On top of being such a real sweetheart, he’s great in bed, too.”

  I feel myself blushing. Is this my unhappy sister Marty? Her life in the last few years has sounded like daytime TV: serial divorces, eating binges, and hot-check charges.

  “What time?” I ask, afraid to encourage her.

  “About seven,” she says.

  “Bring a bottle of red if you want.”

  I tell her I will, and before I can put the phone down, Julia appears in my doorway.

  “Can you see a walk-in?

  This guy looks like he’s got some dough, but I don’t think he’s gonna come back if you don’t see him now.

  He’s kind of excited.”

  I try to schedule everyone for an appointment, but sometimes it doesn’t work.

  “What’s his problem?”

  “I don’t know,” Julia replies, clearly uninterested, as she checks her inch-long nails.

  “Something about a landlord tenant problem.”

  “Sure, I’ll be right out,” I say, hoping the man is the property manager for a corporation that owns half the real estate in Blackwell County. Barton has inspired me.

  As long as I don’t have to try to read an abstract, I’ll be okay.

  When I get out to the waiting room two minutes later, my potential client is pacing the floor. A short, compact, balding man wearing a plaid sports coat and dark slacks, he looks up and says, “Mr. Page? I’m Gordon Dyson.”

  “Nice to meet you,” I say as we shake hands. I escort him back to my office, thinking this guy looks familiar.

  Maybe I’ve seen him running at the track. He declines my offer of a cup of coffee and perches on the edge of the chair across from my desk.

  “What can I do for you?”

  He sighs so heavily that I think he is going to confess he has been embezzling from a bank. Instead, he says in an anguished voice: “I can’t get rid of my son. He won’t leave.”

  Dyson looks about my age, maybe a year or two older.

  “What do you mean, he won’t leave?”

  “He’s twenty-three,” Dyson says, rubbing his head, which is a little too big for his body.

  “I paid for his college education, gave him a nice used car, but he came home after he graduated from Duke and now he won’t move out.”

  Duke! That must have cost a bundle. At his height, I doubt if the son was on a basketball scholarship. I doodle on my legal pad.

  “Is he working?”

  “He’s a waiter,” Dyson says, his voice resigned.

  “I’ve paid close to a hundred thousand dollars for his education, and he’s a waiter at Brandy’s.”

  Brandy’s is a relatively new restaurant in Blackwell County. The night I went there with Clan they never quite got around to serving dinner. The waiters wear bow ties and white shirts. By the time the bill comes, you realize you’ve paid thirty bucks for hors d’oeuvres. It’s hard to justify leaving a big tip when all you’ve eaten is snack food.

  “What does your wife say?”

  Dyson looks down at the floor.

  “She says she knows it’s time for him to leave, but every time I’m ready to go to the mat over this, he makes her cry and she backs down.”

  “What’s wrong with kids today?” I say philosophically, wondering if Sarah will turn out this way. She seems independent now, but when she graduates I may have to scrape her off the wall to get her out of the house.

  Dyson, still looking down, is, I notice, slightly humpbacked.

  He looks as if it is from carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders.

  Almost inaudibly, he says, “We’ve spoiled him so bad that he can’t imagine life without a house, an automobile, TV, stereo, a computer, new clothes. The idea that my son might have to start his life without a new automobile paralyzes him. He couldn’t get out of bed for a week after we had that discussion.”

  Suddenly, I know where I’ve seen that hump. Dyson’s a cop! Or used to be. I haven’t seen him around in a couple of years.


  “Can’t you just pull a gun on him?” I say, only half-joking.

  “Surround the house and starve him out?”

  Dyson gives me a sour smile, as if he has tried that al ready.

  “He doesn’t take me seriously since I quit the force and started my own security business. The more money I make, the worse he gets. I should have waited until he got out of college.”

  “What’s his name?” I ask, reaching for a law book on the shelf behind me.

  Dyson gives an embarrassed laugh, then says, “His Christian name is Gordon Jr.; his friends call him “Gucci.”

  ” I can’t repress a chuckle as I flip through a volume of the index to the Arkansas statutes.

  “Does he pay any rent?”

  “He was supposed to pay a hundred a month,” Dyson says, “but that didn’t last. He owes fifteen hundred if I wanted to count it.”

  I locate the Unlawful Detainer Statutes.

  “Does your wife ever go on any trips by herself?”

  “Sometimes,” he says.

  “The business won’t let me get away.”

  I run my finger down the page until I find the language I’m looking for.

  “Why don’t you surprise her with a trip to New Zealand next month? It should be spring down there. She’ll love it. While she’s gone, we’ll evict him.

  We only have to give him three days’ notice. We’ll have him out before he knows what’s hit him.”

  Dyson smiles for the first time.

  “Won’t I need my wife’s approval?” he asks.

  “Her name’s on the deed.”

  I put a paper clip on the page so I won’t have to look it up again.

  “I’ll send you a power of attorney for her to sign before she goes,” I tell him.

  “She won’t suspect a thing if you play your cards right.”

  Dyson brings a finger to his lips and begins to chew on a nail.

  “What’s your fee?”

  If he can afford to send his wife to New Zealand, he can afford to pay me.

  “A thousand if he contests it, and I have to make two court appearances. Five hundred if he doesn’t show up and moves out without any hassle.”

  He nods. Money is no object, his expression says. I get a few more details and walk him to the elevators. He will call me the moment his wife steps on the plane. As we shake hands, I ask, “Why don’t you just hire your son?”

  Dyson’s face darkens.

  “I wouldn’t pay that kid to take out the trash.”

  “I see.” Confident he will call me, I wait politely until he gets on the elevator and the door closes in my face.

  There is nothing like faith in the younger generation.

  At the appointed hour I arrive at my sister’s house bearing a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon and am greeted by Herbert, a short, thin, virtually hairless guy in his fifties. An electrician by training, Herbert now owns his own contracting business and builds homes all over Blackwell County.

  “Movin’ a lot of paper these days?” Herbert asks, inspecting the wine as he pumps my hand. He is dressed in cowboy boots, denim jeans the color of sawdust, and a sweatshirt with a picture of Ross Perot on the front of it.

  “I wish I had invented the fax machine,” I say, taking his question to heart. From my one other visit with him (city hall on their wedding day six months ago), I know he views lawyers as an unnecessary evil. Fixed overhead, he calls us.

  “If your profession would agree to be deported,” he says, leading me through the living room into the kitchen, “business activity would jump overnight by fifty percent in the United States, and we’d have the Japanese and Germans on their knees begging for mercy in five years.”

  I look around my sister’s living room, which is as big as an airport terminal. Marty’s passion for plants has been indulged to the limit. I feel as if I’m in a green house. The water bill alone must be the size of my mort gage. In the kitchen Marty greets me with a rare hug.

  “What do you hear from Sarah?” she asks, pecking me on the cheek.

  “I was just up there,” I say gloomily, handing her the wine.

  “She isn’t lacking for male attention.”

  “If I looked like her,” Marty says, glancing at her husband, who has come in behind me, “I probably would have gotten married five more times before I met the right guy.”

  Herbert beams as if Michelle Pfeiffer had told him she wanted to run away with him. True love. It took her only fifty years to find it.

  “Sweetness, why don’t you go put the meat on the grill while I visit with my brother for a few minutes? He looks too serious for this to be purely a social call.”

  With a beatific smile on his face, Herbert takes the plate of meat and disappears out the kitchen door to the backyard.

  “Herbert must worship you,” I say, amazed that a grown man would allow himself to be called “sweetness” in front of another living human being.

  “He does,” Marty says happily.

  “God knows why.

  When I met him I was a hundred pounds overweight, drank too much, and felt sorry for myself twenty-three out of every twenty-four hours. Now look at me!”

  I do. Relaxed and calm, Marty hasn’t looked this good since she was a senior in high school. I hope Amy will do for me what Sweetness has done for her. With her short dyed-blond hair cut in a pageboy, Marty, who is two years older than I am, looks almost pretty. Her blue eyes, not as deep-set as my own, along with a small nose and generous mouth are her best features. She is flat-chested, like our mother, and is wearing a man’s blue workshirt (Herbert’s, I presume) and a pair of Bermuda shorts that reveal a decent pair of legs.

  “Fantastic,” I concede.

  “What’s his secret?”

  “Unconditional love,” Marty says, opening her refrigerator

  “I thought only dogs and newborn babies got it. I have no idea why he loves me so.”

  I lean against the kitchen counter and take the Miller Lite she hands me. Determined to lay Lucy Cunningham’s comment to rest, I blurt, “Speaking of love, do you remember any stories about our paternal grandfather having fathered a child with a black woman in Bear Creek?”

  Marty takes her own beer and sits down at the kitchen table. A solid oak, it came from a tree off land owned by my more reputable maternal grandfather, who was a physician.

  “So that’s what this visit is about, huh?”

  I sit down across from her, taking a “tiddy,” as Marty has long called the rubber container that fits over aluminum cans to keep them cold. I sum up for her the context of Lucy Cunningham’s visit and our brief conversation on the subject.

  “Do you know what she’s talking about?”

  Marty, in the manner of older sisters, used to get an expression on her face that was half grimace, half sneer, whenever I said something particularly stupid. Forty years later it reappears.

  “What utter, pathetic crap!” she says, and pauses to sip at her beer.

  “She saw in the paper you represented that psychologist, remembered some old gossip, and thought to herself, have I got a white man by the tail! I bet you a dime to a doughnut they haven’t paid you a fifth of what this case is worth. Am I right?”

  I twist my own can in my hands.

  “That isn’t all that un usual.”

  “Don’t you see?” Marty shouts, though I am less than three feet away.

  “She’s guilting you, Gideon! They want you to work for nothing, and that’s how they’re doing it.

  You owe us, whitey. Hell, that’s all they’ve been saying for the last four decades! Do yourself a favor, okay?

  Don’t get sucked back into all that shit that’s going on over there. The best thing you and I ever did was to get the hell out of eastern Arkansas and never to go back.

  Your problem is that you’ve always let yourself get messed up with this race crap. Listen, our childhoods have taken us both thirty years to get over. That’ll never change. You can go ov
er there a million times and never straighten things out. Just be glad you’re free, and stay out of there.”

  The anguish in my sister’s voice is real.

  “Did you ever hear talk about Granddaddy Page?” I ask, wondering why I never asked her. Actually, now that I think about it, we weren’t around each other much in those days. She worked at Silver Dollar City in Branson, Missouri, during the summers while she was in college, and since I spent the school year at a Catholic boarding school in western Arkansas, by the time I saw her at Thanksgiving I must already have buried it.

  Her mouth dry after her speech, Marty swallows a mouthful of beer and wipes her lips with the back of her hand.

  “Among a hundred million other pieces of crap, yes, I heard it. When I told Mother, she said he owned some rent houses over in nigger town. One day he went over to collect the rent and stayed more than five minutes and that was enough to get the talk started. All of a sudden he’s some nigger’s daddy. God, Gideon, for a lawyer, you’re so naive!”

  I remember why I do not get along with my sister: she has all the sensitivity of a tree frog. Most educated people in central Arkansas are civilized enough not to refer to African-Americans as “niggers.” Marty prides herself on being politically incorrect at all times.

  “Mother always tried to keep things from me,” I say, my voice suddenly bitter. I’m angry, but I don’t know why. Perhaps I’m mad at my mother. She never told me Daddy wouldn’t get well again. Marty always knew things I didn’t.

  Marty puts down her beer can.

  “She coped as best she could. Bear Creek wasn’t exactly a picnic for her with Daddy the way he was and you acting like such a snot.”

  As my sister busies herself with making a salad, I ponder what she has said. In fact, she is mostly correct. I was on my way to becoming a small-town punk after my father’s suicide at the state hospital. The monks and brothers at Subiaco Academy chewed at me night and day the first year until I began to straighten up, and I actually began to like the place by the time I was a senior. Marty, I conclude, is probably right on this, too, but I don’t have to fall for it. Lucy Cunningham is trying to get something for nothing. Considering how poor eastern Arkansas is, it is understandable. Growing weary of my sister’s name calling I say, “I take it you don’t call the blacks who shop in your store ‘niggers.”