Chapter thirty

The prison grew small in the rear window: a small block of fenced-in concrete in the vast empty fields of grass around it. The inside of Marks’s Lincoln was quiet. The ride was soft. Before us the pale white clouds floated in the pale blue sky. The air was mild. I faced front and watched the road. I felt the prison following us, creeping up behind us. I turned and it was gone, lost in the Indiana plain.

I slumped back against the passenger seat. I lit a cigarette. I watched the smoke trail out the window. Marks drove silently.

“He’s got the IQ of a seven-year-old,” I blurted out finally.

Marks said: “Yup. Just about.”

“Isn’t there some kind of law against killing a man like that?”

“There are plenty of laws. I just can’t seem to convince anyone that they apply to Nathan.”

I didn’t answer him. Marks smiled gently as he drove.

“Well,” he drawled. “Go on.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“No. But you’re thinking it, all right: Maybe it’s me.” I still didn’t answer. “Well, maybe it is.” He let out a long breath, shaking his head at the windshield. “I’ve thought a hundred times about turning this over to someone else. Give ’em a chance to try the incompetent counsel plea.”

“Isn’t that what they usually do?”

“Yeah. Yeah, it is. Never works, of course, but it is what they usually do, yeah.”

I leaned my head back. My temple had begun to throb again. Every toke of the cigarette ruined me. I tossed it out the window, watched it in the passenger sideview as it bounced, sparking, back over the pavement.

“I’m sure you’ve done your best, Howard,” I said.

“Yeah, well … I guess I have.”

For a long moment he was quiet. I closed my eyes and felt the car hoisting and dropping and speeding along. My stomach began to churn again.

Howard Marks said: “Ya know, I don’t take criminal cases anymore.”

I tried to concentrate on my breathing to keep the nausea down.

“Haven’t taken a criminal case for nearly a dozen years. Real estate mostly. Sales, zoning appeals, that sort of thing.”

There was another pause. I licked my lips and put my hand on my stomach.

“But I keep on this one. I keep on this one and I can’t let it go. Know why?”

I said nothing.

“Because,” Marks said, “because I know it’s right. I guess that’s a pretty stupid reason but … The thing is … The thing is, you know, everything just … everything just gets so fuzzy after a while. Like the print on a newspaper page. It used to be clear as a bell to me. Now it’s just a mass of dark gray spread out on a mass of light gray. Right and wrong, the same thing. Used to be easy for me to tell one from another. Now, they just sort of … blur over the borders, right into wrong, wrong into right. I took on the Nathan Jersey case twenty years ago because it seemed right to me, the right thing to do, seemed that clear, as clear as you could ask for. And after all these years, with everything else blurring and running together, it still seems that way. And I guess I feel sometimes if I let go … if I let go of it, turn it over to someone else, I’ll just sort of become a blur myself, like everything else is. Because the best of me believed in this case. And if I let it go, I’m scared the best of me will be gone.”

I opened my eyes. I rolled my head on the seat until I could see him. He peered mildly through the windshield. He frowned with the corner of his mouth. He said: “Maybe Nathan Jersey is going to die on Thursday morning because I didn’t have the grit to let a better man defend him. Because I didn’t have the sand to look at life the way it is.”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t have an answer. I turned my head away from him. I stared out the window. I breathed in deeply against the rising nausea.

He drove me back to his office. I had parked outside. We stood in the driveway together beside his car. We shook hands. His damp eyes moved away from me; his lips tightened.

“We’re not gonna make it, are we?” he said.

My hands in my pockets, I lifted my shoulders.

“It’s a shame. Well …” Howard Marks took a breath and smiled a little. “You’ll call me then. About the governor, meeting with the governor.”

“I’ll call you.”

“The three of us’ll go to the capital. Say tomorrow evening.”

“Sure.”

He took a card from his billfold and handed it to me. Now he looked me directly in the eye. “And listen. I know you have to keep where you’re staying secret and all that. I understand that. But you may find that you need a friend some of these days. I’m an old fella, and I may have made a mess of things.”

I slipped the card into my pocket. “You’ll be the first person I call.”

He smiled. Slouching in his billowing sweater, he looked old and frail. I walked to my car. I did not look back at him. I could feel him standing there behind me. I could picture him with his hands half in his pockets and his sad eyes watching me go. I slid behind the wheel. I raised my hand and waved. But still I did not look back.

I drove the two blocks to the courthouse. I picked up my copy of Jersey’s trial transcript and carried it to the newspaper office. Yardley wasn’t there, so I headed for the diner. I ordered a BLT and a cup of coffee, then went into the phone booth in the back. I called home, collect.

Charlie answered. “Die a thousand deaths.”

“Uh, would you accept a collect call from Mr. North?” the operator asked him.

There was a pause. “Yeah. Yeah, okay,” he said.

“Sorry to wake you up, Charlie.”

“Hey, is that you, camarado? Where are you, man?”

“Still in Indiana.”

“Oh wow, you heed me to change some money for you or something?”

“Yeah, maybe. How’s Metropolis?”

“Big time, big time. Oh, hey, listen, I got some things to tell you.”

“Okay.”

“McGill has been trying to reach you.”

“Really?”

“He kept asking me where you were. So I didn’t tell him, like you said.”

“Okay.”

“Did I do good? Huh? Huh? Did I?”

I laughed. “Fuck you, Rose.”

“He told me to tell you he doesn’t know who the scarred man is.”

“Bullshit.”

“He says you should call him in Lima.”

“Okay,” I said.

Charlie gave me the number.

“Okay. So, like, you still don’t want anyone to know where you are?”

“Someone shot at me, man, I’m not gonna give—”

“Oh yeah, that reminds me, I also saw that scar guy.”

“What?”

“God, he looks real.”

“Where was he? When was this? Did you talk to him?”

“Oh stop, stop, please, I can hardly think.”

“Rose!”

“He was coming out of our building last night just as I was coming home.”

“Damn.”

“So I followed him.”

“Are you joking?”

“I have no sense of humor.”

“Charlie, the guy’s a fucking killer.”

“Hey, I know no fear.”

“You can’t even sit through The Wizard of frigging Oz, Charlie.”

“Oh, sure, but that’s Margaret” Hamilton, man. Who the hell is this guy?”

“All right. So where’d he go?”

“He went to Astor Place.”

“Yeah?”

“Then he got in a cab and drove away.”

“You couldn’t keep after him?”

“My legs gave out.”

I sighed as audibly as I could. “He didn’t see you, did he?”

“Maybe when I grabbed him and screamed, ‘My friend North says you’re meat.’ Other than that, I was stealth itselth.”

“Swell. How’s Angela?”

“Great. How’s Sue?”

I opened my mouth. Then I closed it. “Better,” I said. “She’s getting better.”

I hung up and went to my table. The BLT was waiting. The waitress brought me coffee when I sat down.

The trial transcript sat before me in a cardboard box. I opened the box and removed about fifty pages. I passed over the jury selection and found the prosecutor’s opening statement. I lifted my sandwich and ate, reading. I read about a page. I put the sandwich down and picked up my coffee. I read another page. That was all I read.

There are fissures in the past. I really do believe that. There are little openings that run through time, this way and that. Sometimes it’s just a slit, and you have to pry it apart, sometimes it’s a gaping hole and you can walk right into it. But once it opens for you, once you look inside it, not only the past, but the future, too, becomes clear for you.

One of those fissures opened then.

My hand jerked violently as I read the page before me. The coffee spilled on my wrist. I cursed and set down the cup, spilling more of the scalding coffee on my fingers. I wiped my hand with a napkin. I turned back to the page, afraid the fissure had closed, was no longer there.

It was still there.

I called to the waitress as I shoveled the transcript back into the box. I paid her as I fumbled with the box top, pushed it down over the pages, catching corners of them. I didn’t wait for change.

I walked to the door quickly. I walked to the car. I felt my legs moving under me. I felt the pavement shooting under my feet. I stared ahead at the car. I saw if coming closer.

I slid behind the steering wheel. For a moment I could not remember what I was supposed to do. Then I had the car started, and again I sat still, staring. Then I was moving down Main Street, heading for the highway, forcing myself to pay attention to the road until attention to the road became a routine that carried me along.

I drove slowly, though. I went down the highway slowly. Other cars ripped by me. Trucks ripped by me. I just pushed on. I turned onto the dirt road. I went over the dirt road slowly. Slowly, I went up the last hill into the bank of hickories. Then the car poked through and the valley stretched away beneath me.

The light white clouds above the hills weren’t moving. The high grass was still. The cottage was also quiet, with the dangling branches of the sycamores motionless all around.

And Susannah was there. She sat alone in the grass beside the stream. The light of the late afternoon sun caught her. It set her aglow while the grass and the stream sank into shadow.

My car came down the road. She didn’t turn at first. I watched her every minute and she didn’t turn. She was staring down at the water of the stream. She was twirling a blade of grass idly in one hand, leaning on the other, and watching the water run by. I pulled the car up in the empty drive before the cottage. She didn’t turn.

I shut off the car. I ran my fingers through my hair. I got out. I closed the door. I could still see her over the little rise before me. I could see her head, her hair glowing. She didn’t turn.

I began walking toward her. The grass grew higher around me. Soon it was up to my knees. She didn’t turn.

I could see the water now. I could see it run beside her. It burbled white over the rocks. It dipped between them and caught the. fiery sun. Still, only she seemed to glow in the light of it. Still, she didn’t turn.

I was no more than a few steps from her when she faced me. She swung around in surprise. I stopped. Her lips parted and her eyes grew wide. She climbed to her feet, watching me. Stood with her hands on her elbows, her chin sunken down in the collar of her blouse, as if she were trying to grow smaller, to escape me. She was shaking her head. She kept shaking it back and forth: No, no, no.

It was too late. It was too late. She kept shaking her head and I kept repeating silently: It’s too damned late.

I spread my hands.

“You’re not my sister,” I said.

Her lips parted even farther. “Oh!” she said. She reached for me.

I took hold of her arm and pulled her to me. We went down together into the grass.