Emendare, p.11
Emendare, page 11
I watched in disbelief as this loathsome creature held the beer mug up, smiled into the camera, and declared, as if it were the golden ticket to his desires, “I like beer, too.”
“Jesus, this guy,” Johnny said. “It amazes me how now being a total prick is something to brag about. Shit’s comin’ full circle. Dark times.” He took a swig of his beer.
Even drunk, Randy had a way of truth-telling. “He ain’t even got his own meme line. That other dude already claimed drunk frat boy privilege.”
I raised my eyebrows at Randy’s insight. Johnny chuckled.
“Randy’s been listening to podcasts with me while we fish.”
I shook my head and declared, “I try not to concentrate on the day-to-day. I vote when the time comes. I stand when the cause is worthy, but I can’t be invested in this stink on the daily.”
An icy voice, sharp as a razor, cut through the air, “Then why are you here, Jane?”
The abandoned beer on the bar—I’d forgotten the unaccounted for customer. Forty years had passed, but I knew the voice, the inflection, the condescension.
“Ah, here she is,” JP said, coming toward my table.
He smiled, the white of the scar showed, he reached a hand out, and took his sister’s arm.
“This is my little sister Cindy. She still lives here in Doe’s Ferry.”
The reporter asked, “Are you in the law profession, as well.”
Cindy Spencer Forster, the first girl I ever kissed, and the first person to betray me, smiled for the camera.
“No, I chose a different field of public service. I’m an ER nurse, but my husband is the sheriff, and my son will be joining the military in the fall if that counts. We’re just an all-American, law-abiding, happy family.”
Randy blew through his lips. I think he tried to whistle, but only air came out. He followed the burst of air with, “lymphaticus—the word of the day—mad, loco, crazed, brainsick.”
“Did you guys hang out with my dad?”
Johnny nodded. “Yeah, we did.”
Randy grabbed my hand and started to weep. “I stayed sober for John Doe. He was a hell of a dude, man.”
I let Randy mumble some story about his friendship with my dad while I watched Cindy. She stood on her tiptoes to whisper in JP’s ear. He saw me and blanched white for a millisecond, before recovering his jovial, good ol’ boy persona for the camera.
“Okay, then,” JP said to the film crew, “I guess that does it for B-roll of Doe’s Ferry. Shall we retire to my father’s study for the rest of the interview?”
The blonde in the power suit and too much makeup agreed it was a great idea to move things along. I wished I could ask a few questions, but it was too late to be that person now. I had my chance and blew it. The only way JP would ever pay for his arrogance and criminal behavior was if someone managed to get a confession out of him. I should know. I’ve been, for lack of a better term, stalking JP Spencer for forty years, looking for a way in and a chance to take him down.
The crowd with JP started filing out. Cindy took a swig of that hot beer on the bar, waved good-bye to Tommy Lynne, and then gave me a look that told me exactly what I needed to know. She still hated my guts, and I was the last person she wanted to see. The feeling wasn’t far from mutual, although I wasn’t investing as much energy in despising Cindy Spencer as she appeared to be in loathing me.
“Now that is what I call a ‘kiss my ass’ grin if I’ve ever seen one.”
I realized Johnny was speaking to me and that I was nodding and grinning at Cindy, just like when we were kids, and she drew a line in the proverbial sand, just moments before I wiped it out of my way and forged ahead.
I raised my glass in a silent toast. Cindy strolled with purpose out the door. Tommy Lynne brought two more beers for the men at my table.
“Johnny, that'll be the last for Mr. Pine tonight.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She turned to me. “After seeing that little display, I’d say you and Mrs. Forster have a complicated history.”
Randy started laughing and, true to form, spoke the truth. “You have to have loved someone to hate them that much.”
“We all loved her,” I said, surprising the locals. “She was our Sandy from Grease.”
Johnny nodded and smiled at me. “You remember that night she and Hains got in the fight and her drunk ass ended up in my car and all over my dick. You wouldn’t let her go alone. You were a good friend.”
“And you were a gentleman if I recall. Most guys would have tossed me out the door and enjoyed the spoils.”
Johnny nodded. “Yeah, well, that kind of drunk has never appealed to me.” Then he just laid it on the table, “None of us could ever figure why she did what she did. Rattin’ out your best friend takes some serious disconnects.”
“What makes you say she ratted me out? The feds took me out in a sting directed by US Attorney JP Spencer.”
“You don’t know, do you?”
“Don’t know what, Johnny?”
“Cindy Spencer told them to use you for the buy that night. She told them you worked for Porky and took a cut. That’s why they came for you, Jane. Cindy set you up.”
“How do you know that and I don’t,” I wanted to know.
“It’s in Porky’s file. Mom had it at the trailer. I used to read through it for fun. He took a plea, or he wouldn’t have had a chance of release. None of the stuff his lawyers dug up ever saw the light of day.”
I had my own theories as to why that undercover agent targeted me to ask, “Hey, do you know where I can find Porky Newman?” That theory still held, with the addition of further conspirators. My interrupted life, it appeared, had been a family affair.
10
Ace of spades…
“Why would she do that?”
I chunked a rock out past where I could see and heard it splash despite the steady coastal breeze.
Splish!
“I was already fighting charges for drugs that were planted on me by her fuckin’ brother. Did she hate me that much for telling her the truth? Why the hell did she do that?”
My question had been sent into the dark water beyond the ferry dock lights. I’d been repeating it since leaving the pub. I had listened as Johnny described the sting operation in detail, trying very hard not to show the emotion that now raged in my chest. I nearly lost it at the part where Cindy told the investigators I regularly dealt cocaine at the high school. She claimed it was how I managed a job, athletics, and good grades. I did handle all that without amphetamines, something Cindy would never have been capable of, not without a tutor, and a job was beneath her. I know this because I helped her through her first college math class while I was still in high school. Cindy leaned on me for emotional support, too. Then she went and made me out to be Porky’s teenage crime partner.
“What a bitch.”
Another rock flew.
Plop-sheee, it splashed into the water.
Of course, none of Cindy’s accusations came up in my case because it just wasn’t true. I had known of an anonymous informant, but never in a million years did I think it had been one of my best friends. As it turned out, she was the only eyewitness to my drug-dealing career. They couldn’t find a single person to verify her version of events. From the conversation at the pub, I learned that Porky gave up a lot of people, but he refused to take me with him. He swore I was just an innocent kid who happened to know where his van was parked. I’d hug that woman-beating, child-abusing piece of shit if he hadn’t died of a heart attack in prison.
“I appreciate your criminal code of ethics, Porky, you old bastard.”
I let a palm-sized rock fly. I waited for the ploop-sploosh sound. I would have played softball in college, but for that prison sentence. Without Porky’s testimony and no corroborating witnesses for Cindy’s tales, what made a full on sting operation come at me so hard? I had only one theory. My demise was directly related to disfiguring JP Spencer. I also wouldn’t shut up about his role and that of his father in what happened to Malachi.
Even with JP urging the prosecuting US Attorney to add trafficking to my charges, the ones that stuck were possession with intent to distribute an ounce I had never seen before and conspiracy to distribute with the trailer park drug king. I was charged for pointing at a van in the pub parking lot. I knew JP wanted me in prison so badly that he was the one who planted the ounce of pot on me. I didn’t drink or do drugs when I was a teenager, other than the occasional joint I’d pilfer from my dad’s stash. But they found an ounce and my fingerprints inside that cooler. Apparently, if the cops say it’s yours, it’s yours; at least that was the way in 1979.
It’s like Duck whispered to me on that first dark night in prison, “There’s a lot of people not guilty of what put them in here, but ain’t nobody innocent, honey.”
“Shit.”
Splush!
Hell, I was the class Valedictorian up until I was arrested and Hains took my place. I knew JP hated me and he threatened that I should forget about Malachi. I had not known that Cindy betrayed me so thoroughly, without thought to the consequences to my life. Or had she known precisely what she was doing, ridding herself of the only person who held a mirror up to her underlying ugliness? I knew more than one dark truth that the Spencer family did not want to be seen in the light.
“Let’s ruin a kid with a promising future to protect our sick as fuck family. Ahhhhh!”
I flung a smooth round stone into the wind. I barely heard the thin rock cut into the waves.
Splishhhh.
I flashed on the memory of my arrogant eighteen-year-old ass, without a lawyer and ignorant of the corruptible nature of the system, admitting to knowing Porky was a dealer and to pointing out his van. This later constituted an admission of guilt to the court. Claiming what went on in the parking lot wasn’t any of my concern turned out to be a weak defense. Because of this experience, the people I know get a metal wallet card with instructions for safely and smartly interacting with the police. At baby showers, I slip them into the box with the gift and a note that says, “Teach your children well.” My business cards say, “Shut up. Ask for a lawyer,” on the back.
“Motherfuckers!” I yelled at the darkness in front of me.
“I’ve cried into the wind here, from time to time. She often sings, but never answers my questions.”
My eyes closed and reopened, like a stage curtain coming down and up to reveal a new scene. The memory of that voice carried toxins with it. My brain struggled to handle the chemical dump the presence of the man behind that voice created. The ground shifted at my feet. I dipped my chin, closed my eyes, and took a cleansing breath, seeking a balance between fight or flight. I felt the childhood fear leave me, replaced by a mature loathing—the kind of hatred a mentally healthy person learns to shed in order to mend. I never mastered that part of healing. I’d say I’m moderately medicated and old enough to know my revenge is truth and it is best served cold with a side of overwhelming evidence.
Have I mentioned how much I dislike electric golf carts? They make no sound, especially with a stiff breeze blowing in off the water. I didn’t hear the cart approach and chastised myself for being so preoccupied in self-pity. I leaned down, picked up another rock, and tossed it as far as I could. It whistled through the air before landing in the building waves with a sploosh. A storm was brewing offshore and on.
My silence prompted the golf cart driver to speak again. “They say it’ll be noisy when this storm blows through.”
“Yep,” seemed the appropriate response, since the sky in the distance boiled with clouds backlit by flashes of lightning.
“I snuck away to have a cigar. Care to join me. I always bring an extra, in case I should stumble upon a friend out for a walk.”
I turned to see Judge Carroll J. Spencer, now retired, sitting at the helm of a personalized golf cart. The front panel read, “Here come de…” in small script, with “JUDGE” painted beneath in flowing letters large enough to read from afar. I suppose the cultural appropriation of a phrase made famous by Flip Wilson and later Sammy Davis, Jr., which originated with cult black comic Pigmeat Markham, was lost on all involved in bestowing the honor on the judge’s ride. This cluelessness, quite typical of the Spencer family, was absolutely on point with the white supremacists they indeed were.
I replied to his invitation, “I am not a smoker, nor am I your friend.”
“I’m sorry. I thought you were.”
“Then you have been mistaken, sir.”
The judge remained distinguished in his last years, dapper even. He wore a red and black velvet smoking jacket, à la Hugh Hefner, which definitely set his apart from the rest of the neighbors’ wardrobes. Dashingly elegant or not, the old judge’s affect came off more as ancient queen than Ashley from Gone With the Wind, which is what I had assumed he was going for when we were both younger. The judge played well the role of effeminate, yet straight southern gentleman found in every town and village. I always thought it ironic that the vain and arrogant Judge Spencer was also so cliché. Some men like him lived their lives as heterosexual family men and were just that. Many failed at the façade. The judge only pulled his husband and father act off because his young lovers were technically of age and his wife numbed herself with cocktails and Bridge parties.
Duck had accused me of holding the judge to a different standard between bites of a hot dog earlier in the evening.
“You judge him because he chose to keep his homosexual activities cloaked in a heterosexual veneer, which we all did if we didn’t want trouble,” she had said.
Even with marriage equality now, it wasn’t safe to openly love whom you love in many places. From the earlier interaction with Four and his cronies, I surmised Doe’s Ferry lagged behind the social revolution.
I tried to explain to the women at the dinner table, “My problem wasn’t with the judge’s sexual activities or the May-December dynamic of his chosen relationships with men; it was his misuse of power. Judge Spencer could have sucked the dick of every consenting nineteen-year-old in the county, but what he couldn’t do was use his position to intimidate young men into letting the old letch touch them.”
And now he sat in his golf cart in front of me, the antagonist of my life’s story.
“I have been mistaken often, as of late,” the old man replied to my curtness with a chuckle. “I apologize. I’ll leave you to your stone casting.”
I couldn’t stop the escaping snort of laughter. I couldn’t ignore the irony of his alluding to casting stones. “I must be careful of my glass house, is that it?”
“I’m sorry? Did you say something? I’m afraid I’ve grown quite hard of hearing.”
I shook my head. It wasn’t worth repeating. It seemed pointless to actively despise and engage with this frail old man, who didn’t seem to know to whom he was speaking.
“Hey, Papa. Escaped from Opal again?”
A young man walked up out of the shadows. I could tell by his stature and his square jaw that this was Hains the Fourth in the flesh.
“Ah, young Four. What brings you out to visit your old Papa on this stormy evening? Shouldn’t you be chasing some girl about the county?”
“Oh, you know, Papa, I let them chase me. I saw your cart and thought I’d walk you back home. Lots of strangers running around with all that’s going on with Uncle JP. You need to be more careful about wandering till this blows over.”
Four had glared at me the entire time he spoke to his grandfather. He was the product of his genetic makeup, the spawn of good and evil. This teenager who did not know me simmered with his uncle’s rage behind his father’s eyes. This boy was a cocked hammer waiting for someone to pull his trigger. It wasn’t going to be me.
I wasn’t there to martyr myself. That would be a fruitless venture anyway. Why sacrifice what’s left of my life to the cause? Hadn’t I already risked the future that should have been because I wouldn’t be silenced? The citizens of Doe’s Ferry already didn’t care that this shriveled up old man and his offspring had ruined so many lives. No one wanted history corrected. No one wanted the truth to come out.
I watched Four’s eyes slice me to pieces with his disdain. He had to know my identity and what that meant to show so much contempt. He’d never seen me, to my knowledge, but he was fixated on me with the kind of focus a cat has on a mouse in the grass. No, I didn’t want to die or go back to prison, but I did want justice for Malachi, and for Asa, and for me.
Intimidating looks be damned, I couldn’t help myself when I said, “If I remember correctly, the old judge likes it when things blow. Oh, wait. I think it might have been the other way around?”
The judge looked at me and smiled. I couldn’t believe it, until he said, “I really should wear my hearing aids out of the house. What did you say, dear?”
I spoke loudly and clearly, so he’d be sure to hear me, “I said you like to blow things.”
“Shut your filthy mouth, dyke,” Four growled.
I laughed, which is my go-to reaction when someone starts taunting me. I really don’t give a damn what is said to me or about me. The only thing that concerns me when facing an aggressor is what weapons they bring to the fight and how to counteract them, hopefully without either of us bleeding.
“It’s not the first time I called the judge there a cocksucker, isn’t that right, old man?”
Four took a step toward me, as he shouted, “I’ll kill you, bitch.”
His grandfather grabbed his arm, stopping Four from advancing on me.
The judge said, “Four, be still,” as he peered at me through his glasses, squinting my face into focus under the glow of the streetlight. “I’m not familiar with your case, but if you come by my office tomorrow, we’ll find out what’s going on and try to help you. You do that. You come on by. No need for name-calling. No, no need for that.”
