Emendare, p.3
Emendare, page 3
“Put that clerk at Swann’s on the payroll. She’s the source of the detail, not your boy.”
“Oh, so you met my confidential informant.” Hains laughed. “She’s as nosy as they come. Her radar pinged because you gave that guy directions to the marina. That’s a local kind of thing to do.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t because she saw the name when I opened my wallet to get out some cash?”
Hains chuckled. “You’re too smart to have let that happen unplanned. I figured you wanted to see who would come looking.”
“Now, why would I do that?” I smiled to myself, knowing he was absolutely right. “Is everyone’s hypervigilance because of Judge Spencer’s pending nomination to the Supreme Court? Were you waiting for me, Hains? Are you here to have me state my business?”
Hains chuckled. “Your business is no concern of mine until you break the law. Promise you’ll be a good girl?”
“Commitment and I have an on again off again relationship, so I’m going to keep my options open. Besides, I have ‘Rebel Without Cause’ tattooed on my ass. Omitting the ‘a’ was purposeful.”
“Wow, it’s like a time warp. Jane Doe, sarcastic to the point of arrogance, living on the edge of the blade, tilting at windmills, you haven’t changed.” He paused to consider his tactics and settled on a different approach. “I was right there with you most of the time, so I can’t say much. I know we survived more often than we had a right to.”
“Some of us didn’t.”
My flatly delivered cynicism directed at his attempt at levity resulted in what felt like backing up to our respective corners. Hains needed to reassess his opponent. The pause gave me a chance to slow my heart rate and swallow the adrenaline. Don’t show your hand.
The leather of his utility belt creaked when he sat beside me on the picnic table. Clouds floated by on the surface of his polished black boots. Ironed to a razor’s edge crispness, the crease of his pants stood perfectly straight up to his bent knee. He used to smell like his father’s Old Spice. Today, he’d chosen for his scent—a hint of birch, pineapple, and musk—a signature blend of an expensive men’s cologne. It went well with his underlying bouquet of tea tree soap, leather, and gun oil.
I made my living reading people. Hygiene could tell you a lot about a person. Expensive products hinted at disposable cash. Knowing real money from the cheap knock-off was essential to my success as a…well, they don’t really have a name for what I am. We’ll get to the details in a bit. My nose was telling me the Sheriff was either making some cash on the side, or he was still the same guy women were willing to spoil for his attention. Growing up, it was like watching the virgins bring offerings to the prince.
Next to the words “ladies’ man” in the dictionary should be a picture of Hains Lawton Forster, III, with emphasis on the plural nature of ladies. The secret of his conquests lay not in his natural charmer status, but in the size of his penis, or so I’ve been told. According to Malachi, Hains’s dick acquired legendary locker room status at age twelve, when the county boys began playing sports in middle school and had to start taking showers together. Mali swore the rumored measurements were not exaggerations. I’d never cared to find out. Cindy, however, declared Hains’s penis her property in high school. I was already gone when they married and really didn’t give a damn what happened to either of them by then.
Hains eventually let out a disarming chuckle, a tactic he had used to defuse confrontation since we were in diapers together. It seemed almost reflexive this time, meant to cover emotions brought on by my presence and the memories I awoke within him.
In his warm baritone, he said softly, “No, some of us didn’t make it, that is true. I don’t know if it’s because I’m closing in on sixty or a longing for simpler times, but I think of our little gang often. You were all part of the happiest days of my life. I miss us, together, taking on the world. I’ve missed you, Jane.”
“That’s surprising. The last thing I remember you saying to me before today was ‘Fuck you, Jane Doe,’ when I called you a coward. Have your feelings on the issue changed?”
“We were kids stuck in a mess created by adults. Our parents made decisions for us. I’m sure we all said things we wish we hadn’t. My therapist says you have to let go of the past and live in the now.”
I turned to see that time had been very kind to Hains Forster. He had grown sexier with age, more distinguished, with a little gray in his closely cropped beard and a bit of salt and pepper at the edges of his hatband. He made eye contact with me and grinned. His blue eyes still sparkled with mischief, just as they had when we were too young to know all the shitty stuff life would dump on us.
“Are you fucking your therapist?”
“She’s not my type. I think she plays on your team.”
“My team? Are you assuming I’m a lesbian because I was never all over your legendary dick.”
Hains shook his head, chuckling again. “No, not because of your lack of interest in me sexually. I saw you and that girl from the campground. Her name was Mary, I think.”
“Maria.”
“Yeah, Maria. That’s her. I saw you two in the boathouse one night, the summer before our senior year.”
What he might have seen flashed through my mind. It was my turn to chuckle. “Oh, that summer.”
“Yeah, you were ‘unavailable,’” Hains made air quotes, “for most of July. Then she left, and you were miserable.”
I studied his expression, remembering that I had loved him before I hated him. We had all loved each other. We were more than childhood friends. Malachi, Hains, Cindy, and me, we formed some kind of love quadrangle. Doodie seemed to love the idea of us as a whole. The five of us swore loyalty to the end. The end came sooner than we expected.
I smiled involuntarily. I couldn’t help it. Hains hid a gentle strength behind a swaggering grin. My weakness would always be for the wholesome athletic type, the boy or girl next door. I studied myself as much as I studied others. In Hains, I recognized the source of my lifelong infatuation with lean athletic muscle and clean-cut handsomeness.
I acknowledged his good deed all those years ago. “You never said anything. You could have tormented me with that information.”
Hains turned to look out over the water. “You were hurting enough.”
We sat quietly for another moment. I’m sure his thoughts raced, as did mine, through our childhood bonds.
Finally, I said, “Well, I’ve given up women at least five times since that summer, so your assumption is informed, but incorrect. I’m not a lesbian or any other pigeonholed label. I’m not a single dot on the sexuality spectrum. For the most part, at this stage of the game, I lean toward stable humans with jobs. Body parts are less important than a lack of drama and a paycheck.”
He nodded, “What’s that they say? ‘There are no wrong holes if you love someone.’ That’s what my fourteen-year-old grandson says anyway.”
“Wow, a teenaged grandson. You’re old, Hains.”
“You forget I started on my eighteenth birthday. Our first was conceived the day I became old enough to be held legally responsible for her.”
“How convenient for Cindy.”
“Hey,” he warned me with a frown.
“I see Cindy is still off-limits for criticism.”
Hains stiffened. “Cindy is my wife.”
This response came so quickly, I knew it was reflexive and one he’d repeated to the point of muscle memory. He forgot I knew this rehearsed tone. We sat together for twelve grades. I knew him better than he knew himself. I had known he’d marry Cindy if she got pregnant. She did too. That’s what pissed me off.
He continued defending his wife. “It took both of us to make that baby. Our daughter wasn’t planned, but I’ve never regretted having her in my life.”
“Shit happens. Just because it worked out, doesn’t make it less shitty.”
“Okay, I’ll give you that. Her name is Emily, by the way. She is a nurse, like Cindy, with kids of her own. We have a son too. He’s nineteen, a bit of a wild child and tempered like his mother.”
“I read about him in the paper last year. How in the hell did y’all get those charges dropped? I love how sexual assault is just boys being boys. ‘Athletic hazing’ I think they called it. I hope the younger boy is okay.”
“You of all people should know how things can be blown out of proportion.”
“I didn’t fuck a kid in the ass with a broomstick.”
“Let’s just drop it, okay?”
I couldn’t without saying, “From what I saw, he’s JP with your build. Basically my worst nightmare. And you can stop blaming yourself. You had a fifty-fifty chance of hatching a bad seed.”
Hains decided to ignore my digs, another of his social tactics. He said, “I love my kids and grandkids, Jane. It wasn’t a bad life.”
“That sounded final. I think we have a bit to go, don’t you?”
“Yeah, I was just saying…anyway, I love my children, even when they aren’t likable.”
I noted he didn’t say he loved Cindy, but I let it go. We sat in silence for a second or two.
Hains seemed to let the ‘what ifs’ settle down in his brain, before asking, “So, you haven’t set foot in Doe’s Ferry since 1979, what finally brought you back?”
“Do I have to answer that question?”
“You didn’t come home when your father died in 2000. With your history, you can see why this sudden appearance would concern me.”
“My history? Which part? The part where we were cradle to grave friends, all of us, or the part where one of us died, three of us lied, and one of us went to prison.”
“I’m assuming that means this isn’t a nostalgic trip home.”
“No point in pretending I’ve made peace with the total fucking-over I received in that courthouse at the hands of men covering their own asses.”
Hains turned to look at me, really look at me. I stared ahead at nothing, as I learned to do when a corrections officer had me against a wall.
“I went to see you. The prison officials wouldn’t let me in. My name wasn’t on your list.”
“There were no names on my list.”
Hains chuckled. I wondered if he knew this mechanism had gone from charmingly disarming to an anxiety tell. Maybe it always had been. He tried his concerned tone next, another interview technique. I had trusted Hains with my life at one time. Now, even if I wanted to, I couldn't. My game plan involved trusting no one.
“How much time did you do?”
“I did the whole five. Got out in ’84.”
“Five years is a long time to go without seeing anyone who cared about you. Why the whole five? No time off for good behavior?”
I turned to look him in the eye, before I said, “To get time off for good behavior, I would have had to be good. Also, they required that I show remorse for a crime I did not commit.”
“Come on, Jane. You were guilty.”
“Your father caused it by turning a blind eye.” I paused the appropriate amount of time for effect, before adding, “And you had done exactly what I did on multiple occasions. So, don’t play innocent with me.”
“You got caught by the feds. You can’t blame my dad for that.”
“Who planted that pot on me? And who sent them to a little bar in the middle of nowhere looking for drug traffickers, Hains?”
“I don’t know, and my dad is dead. So we can’t ask him.”
“I was set up and the people that should have helped me lied or looked the other way. Nobody wanted to know the truth.”
Hains tried more therapy crap. “Maybe we all told the truth as we saw it.”
“Bull shit! Every one of you told the story that had the least negative consequences coming home to roost.”
“Are we talking about you or Malachi, Jane?”
“It’s the same thing, Hains. That’s been my contention all along. I went to prison because I wouldn’t accept all the lies. I couldn’t turn my back on a friend and so my friends turned their backs on me.”
Hains turned to look past me toward the courthouse. He seemed to desire my ire return to smoldering ash from raging red coal. I followed his gaze, watching as the parking lot lights blinked on. Streetlights lining the old road filled the late dusk gloom with an amber halogen glow, as the mist rolled ashore.
The light fixtures outside the ferry dock restrooms buzzed to life. The one by the women’s entrance began to strobe slightly. The fluttering light reflected in the gold badge on Hains’s hat. My head started to hurt. I closed my eyes and rubbed my left temple. When I opened them again, I realized too late that Hains was looking at me.
He decided to steer the topic away from my incarceration. I couldn’t blame him. I wouldn’t want to talk to me about fucking me over either.
“So, where’ve you been since you got out?”
“Anywhere but here. I see the apple didn’t fall too far from the badge. From the next Roger Staubach to Andy Griffith. How does that happen?”
“My freshman year at State I took a hit during a mop-up preseason appearance, broke a vertebra and pretty much ended my hopes of an NFL career, or college for that matter. Another hit like that and I wouldn’t be walking they said. I had it fused, and that was that. I had a wife and child to support. I couldn’t join the military with pins in my back. I got an associate degree in criminal justice and took a job in the department. I ran for Sheriff after my dad died. Been in office for twenty years now.”
“Bet that screwed Cindy’s plans of leaving here and never looking back.”
He glanced over at the home where, as it turns out, he had spent his entire life. The lights were on in almost every room. Silhouettes of people moved behind the closed blinds.
“We even live in the old house. This was the last place she thought we’d be, across the street from her parents, back in Doe’s Ferry for a life sentence.”
“Whoa, that’s a bit poetic. Try not comparing your comfortable, if not ideal, life to one in a penitentiary. I assure you your burdens were easier to bear.”
“Everybody’s got their own version of prison.”
“Damn. When did you become so deep? Are you sure you aren’t fucking that therapist?”
“I’m positive. Blame it on podcasts and long drives up and down these country roads. I’ve evolved. Besides, I told you I’m not her type. I should introduce you two. How long you going to be here?” He waited for an answer.
“Nice try and no thanks.”
He grinned. “Are you going to tell me why you’re here, or are you going to make me figure it out on my own?”
I had a decision to make. Up until I was eighteen, Hains would have been the first person I reached out to in a situation like this. He was our white hat hero, the guy we counted on to lead us out of danger. I wondered who Hains had become. Was he anymore estranged from the man he thought he would be than I was from the dreams of my childhood? Was he contemplating the same thing about me? I decided to dodge his question with one of my own.
“Do you remember when we went looking for a virgin?”
4
We need a virgin…
“Y’all are forgettin’ I can’t swim if it’s over my head,” Malachi said, with his toes dangling in the water beneath the boathouse.
Hains chuckled. “You ain’t swimmin’ if you can still touch the bottom. That’s wadin’. I don’t know why you’re so scared of deep water. It’s the same water in the shallow part.”
“The water don’t scare me. It’s the drowning that does.”
The courthouse kids had a fort in the thicket between the salvage yard and the back of the church. Our tree house was in the patch of woods behind Doodie’s parents’ place, overlooking a shallow canal where we went frog gigging. But we practically lived in my boathouse.
Abandoned by the adults in my family, the boathouse became our headquarters when we were old enough to turn the knob on the weathered gray door. Here we shared and kept each other’s secrets, plotted our adventures, and hid from the outside world when necessary. This was where we sliced our fingers and mingled our blood, three blood brothers and a sister. Cindy said the ceremony was unsanitary and refused to be blooded.
At the moment, Malachi had the floor. “And my daddy said if I kissed a white girl, the white man would set a dog after me. So that ain’t happenin’ either.”
Malachi’s father, William, drove a truck and wasn’t around much. I was glad, because he was mean and when he was drunk he was meaner.
I had heard him tell Malachi, “Civil Rights ain’t going to stop them from throwing niggas off bridges ‘round here. You might look more pleasin’ to them white folks with your creamy skin, but mess with their women and you is black as me.”
My family treated Malachi like the family he was. I ran in and out of Aunt Bertie and Uncle William’s house following behind their son. I wasn’t really their niece, but that was what I always called Malachi’s parents. We were rarely apart, except church, where believing or not, I was forced to go. I could go to Malachi’s church and did on occasion. The raucous gospel sounds made my heart sing. I loved going to church with Mali because it felt like a party. He couldn’t come to mine, even if it was across the street from his house. The church was where I first experienced racism.
I figured I didn’t count as the “white folks” Uncle William complained about. I thought my family different from other racists in the south. When Malachi, Hains, and I found the white hood and some old Klan papers in a box in my attic, I knew the history I had imagined for the Doe family had been blindly misinformed. My two friends and I vowed never to speak of what we’d found. We also promised to change things when we were old enough. Currently, we had more important matters to deal with.
