Nate phones her late that night, after Aura has just returned from meeting Dean in some bar near the courthouse.
“I woke you up.”
Aura stretches under her nightshirt, her head still swirling with bourbon. She’s in her Stillwater apartment, he’s in Langston; nevertheless, her heart starts at the apparent proximity of his voice.
She closes both eyes and imagines him here, beside her, in the bed.
“What time is it?”
“Late.”
“I’m back in court tomorrow.”
“I know it.”
“It’s almost over. Will you come?”
“Absolutely.”
“I feel sick, Nate. Cancerous. Being in that courtroom? Staring at this kid, listening to what he’s done? It’s like sipping a slow poison.”
“I’m here for you.”
“You’re in Langston.”
“I’m not going anywhere is what I mean.”
“Nate?”
“I’m here.”
“Nothing.”
“Aura?”
“What?”
“I love you.”
The world might not be perfect. But there are a few perfect things in it and this beat between lovers is one of them, a not-quite-uncomfortable silence conveying everything she’d like to say: I love you too, love you and want you and need you, need you more than you can know, but give me some space because I’m not quite ready for this conversation, not tonight, not now, not over the phone. But soon.
Another trembling feline stretch.
“So we’ll pick this up after the trial.”
“Okay.”
“Nate?”
“I’m here.”
“I’m not going anywhere, either.”
• • •
It took the jury just two hours to find Billy Grimes guilty of killing Carl. Murder in the first degree. It was the third week in April, a drowsy, deaf-mute spring afternoon, and as the foreman read the jury’s verdict the courtroom assumed a sacramental sort of surreality. The experience was not unlike a wedding or a funeral.
Nate drove Aura home after and when the penalty phase got under way the next day he sat clasping Aura’s hand as the district attorney adopted the first stage evidence to prove aggravating circumstances in the case.
Considering the amount of bourbon in Carl’s lungs, a medical examiner had sworn that he must have suffered unspeakable pain while drowning.
Hoping for a big tear-jerking finish, Macy saved Aura’s impact statement for last. She held Nate’s hand, waiting to say her piece, trying all that time to breathe through the lump choking her throat. The district attorney wanted to send Opal up onto the witness stand but Aura wouldn’t hear of it.
And then it was time. There she was with her palm on the Bible swearing to tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth but still having no earthly clue what to tell, she wasn’t prepared, isn’t prepared, but it’s too late because when she’s done speaking Macy will rest his case and then Dean’s boss Paxton and pretty soon after that the men and women of the jury will be filing quietly down out of the jury box to decide whether Billy Grimes will live or die.
She hasn’t brought notes. Aura just starts talking.
“The first time I saw Carl he was just a few hours old. I was almost seven and thought he looked a little like a boiled Mr. Potato Head. I’d never seen anything so ugly. What an ugly duckling, I remember saying. Mom told me to be nice. She said all babies look like that. We brought him home from the hospital the next morning. First thing Mom showed me was how to change the nappies and swaddle him so he’d sleep. Carl liked to be swaddled tight. Mom worked at the university in Langston as a secretary of sorts. It was a good job and they were offering to give her a month of maternity leave but she wanted to go back sooner. There was a nice daycare at the university and Mom would walk over there to feed Carl every few hours, take a long lunch break and rock him to sleep. I would come after school to play with him when I could. Dad was useless, just angry and sullen and stewing around the house all the time. Carl was the opposite, a perpetual motion machine. He grew like milkweed. I remember Mom coming home from the pediatrician’s once, she’s wearing a pretty blue strapless dress and has rouged up her face because the doctor’s office is in Stillwater. But the mascara is dripping like India ink down Mom’s cheeks because she’s been crying the whole ride home. ‘That doctor says I’m not feeding him enough,’ she says, Mom’s really sobbing by now, ‘but he eats all the time! My nipples are bleeding he eats so much!’ Carl might have looked skinny but he grew so fast and so, so tall. Once he started walking it was the first thing anyone noticed about him. Their eyes would open wider, they’d sort of step back and study him a spell. ‘My Lord,’ they’d finally say, this is to Mom, ‘look how big that boy of yours is getting! Got some ball in his future,’ they’d say or, ‘Got some hoops in his future!’ It ended up being hoops for Carl. I was already playing at the junior high by then, then the high school and later at Langston University. Once he was mature enough not to embarrass me, I used to let Carl tag along to practice. He was already scissor dribbling on me by the time he was seven. This is about the time Mom died. She had pancreatic cancer and after we found out the illness progressed pretty fast, about four or five months. She didn’t do the chemotherapy, Mom said the cancer was too far advanced. She just wanted to enjoy the time we had left. Everyone was there when she died, Carl and me and Dad and our grandmother Opal, Mom kind of hiccupped or gasped and then she was gone. It just tore Carl apart. Dad couldn’t deal with it, either. One night after the funeral he left Carl and me with Opal. Never did come back to get us. So we started living with Grams. She had different ideas about leisure time. Grams said free time wasn’t free, you had to earn it and bettering yourself was the way to do that. Grams made us listen to gospel music and read the Bible or the encyclopedia. By the time he turned ten my little brother was six feet tall. I was a senior in high school, starting at shooting guard or sometimes point. Carl had already learned everything I could think to teach him and was doing it better than me. That was the year he started beating me in games of pick-up or twenty-one. He was a hellion on defense. Sharp-elbowed, stuck to you like superglue. Knew when the ref wasn’t looking so he could foul you on the sly. Carl loved to steal the ball and did it every chance that came along. He loved everything about the game but loved winning most. Liked gloating about how good he was, bragging and trash talking and especially the compliments he’d get around town. That hungry look all the girls started to give him. You were supposed to be modest in our family, Grams was always telling us that the greatest men are willing to be little, but when it came to basketball Carl saw he was the best kid in town, maybe in the county or even the state, and he wanted everyone else to see it, too. If you could have seen his face when he lost. When Carl lost I think he felt like a loser. He was afraid of losing more than he wanted to win, if that’s possible, and he spent every second of every day trying to improve himself on the court. He liked to challenge himself to some longshot goal and then obsess until he’d achieved it. He’d say things like I’m going to make fifty free throws in a row and not miss one shot . . . no cheating, no mulligans . . . then he’d do everything in his power to make it happen. Anyway, Carl was like that. He’d set a goal and one week later he’d have accomplished it. Set a harder goal, accomplish that. Set, achieve, repeat, over and over and over again. He just kept getting better. Soon there were scouts coming to Opal’s house. Billy Tubbs came to watch him play but Carl had set his sights on Oklahoma State. We’d spent our entire lives within fifteen minutes’ drive of Stillwater and going to OU would have been like betraying everyone in town. Eddie Sutton wasn’t yet at OSU but during Carl’s senior year in high school the Cowboys hired a new head coach, Leonard Hamilton, and Hamilton wanted Carl. He came by Opal’s house a few times, explained about how he was building this team from scratch and how the Pokes were done losing now that he was onboard and how Carl was going to be an integral part of them turning the team around. He’d been an assistant coach on the Kentucky squad that went to the Final Four in 1984 and when Hamilton started talking about the hype surrounding those games Carl’s eyes would get real big, you could see him seeing himself making that last clutch shot to win the national championship. In the fall of 1986 Carl moved to Stillwater and enrolled at Oklahoma State. They gave him a full ride but he had to keep his grades up to keep the scholarship and stay on the team. But the effort it took for Carl to be on that campus, the discipline it took, to study and practice and eat right and get to bed on time. You can’t imagine. If any of you remember the Cowboys in 1986? It was just a disastrous season. Carl’s first year playing college ball the Cowboys only won something like eight games. I think at first Carl thought he could singlehandedly turn the season around for the whole team. But all that losing just wore him down. He was already having trouble making his grades, first semester he was barely eligible. Hamilton got him studying with a tutor but then when winter came and the team started losing . . . and losing, and losing . . . grades and schoolwork just became a lot less important. I’ve always thought this was when he started doing drugs, partway through that first basketball season. Carl got introduced to speed or whatever it was so he could stay up and study. And at first I think it did help him. He was studying and practicing and had more energy. But you all know how these stories go. It caught up with him. Carl missed a few practices and Hamilton found out about the drugs and told him to get clean. But Carl couldn’t. And after that season was over Carl left school and never came back. He was living in Oklahoma City with some friends he’d met. I’d hear about what he was doing but just kind of hoped it was a phase. I had graduated from nursing school and was working in Stillwater by now and volunteering at this midnight basketball league. I’d have Carl come by to show the kids some things, get them inspired, you know, and sometimes it would seem like he was on the edge of snapping out of it. But he never did. He started dealing, or this is what I heard. I never knew too much about that part of his life. I didn’t want to know. Seemed like every time he came close to cleaning himself up there was this part of Carl that would sabotage it all. It was like, he failed at the only thing he loved to do and so Carl thought he didn’t deserve to succeed at anything else, ever again. He was so full of life. I wish I could make that real for you all. Make you see how alive he was. I remember there was a song Opal liked to play on the record player, some spiritual-sounding tune. She just loved it, so of course Carl had to pretend to hate it when Grams was around. But when the two of us were alone he would sing, sing like he meant it, like he was trying out for the band. The song had a refrain running through it and I can see my little brother with his eyes closed, we’re goofing around the kitchen one Sunday afternoon while Opal’s out at the grocery store or something, and Carl, he’s really putting his whole body into it, you know, his throat for example it’s working like a baby bird’s, that perfect voice booming out of him like a trumpet, the blood pumping along the big artery of his neck and he’s singing, stretching out those notes as long as he can, his whole torso moving side-to-side like Stevie Wonder’s, like a snake charmer’s, swaying and singing:
“I got wings, you got wings, all of God’s children got wings . . .”
Did she, is she really . . . singing?
“. . . when I get to Heaven gonna put on my wings, gonna fly all over God’s Heaven, Heaven, Heaven . . .”
Ignoring that whisper in her head that says quit it, Aura, stop it now, stop it right this second because nobody wants to hear this, you’re making an ass out of yourself—this is the same voice saying stay angry at your baby brother and Aura has already listened to it for far too long—Aura sings, the song ringing clear and pure and true throughout the vaulted courtroom.
“. . . everybody talkin’ bout Heaven ain’t goin’ there . . . Heaven, Heaven, Heaven . . . gonna fly all over God’s Heaven . . .”
Aura stops to catch her breath. Nate is sitting in the benches behind the bar, smiling up at her and nodding, that steadfast calming presence of his giving her the strength to go on.
“That’s how I want to remember him,” she says, “singing that song, an imperfect human cup running over with hope and laughter and joy.”
She can hear the buses groaning along the avenue outside. She looks at Bob Macy, at the jury, at the indecipherable mask of Dean Goodnight’s face.
Aura turns to Billy Grimes and addresses him directly.
“Someone told me that when I stood up here today I’d be speaking for Carl. There’s a court reporter over there, writing down every word, and I want to think this means Carl’s story will be read a hundred times over in the years to come, by lawyers and court clerks and legal assistants and Lord knows who else. I want all of those people to hear this but most of all I want the jury to hear it. Had my little brother lived to see thirty I believe he would have changed. Eventually he’d have learned that losing doesn’t make you a loser. I’m not so sure he’d want this loser here, the one you’ve found guilty of killing him, put to death. But I’ve decided I definitely don’t want that. Executing Billy Grimes doesn’t change a thing. It won’t bring Carl back. I’ve been so mad at my brother for so long. For dying like this, for finally orphaning me in this world. But it hasn’t helped. I don’t think staying angry with his killer will help anything, either. So if you all want to execute Billy Grimes, that’s fine with me. It’s your decision. But know this, know that it’s your decision . . . it’s what you want, not me. And not my little brother.”
Her eyes are dry. There is no sadness, no fear, only this lighter-than-air feeling of release or freedom.
“Billy, I forgive you for killing Carl,” Aura says. “You’ve been caught and you’ll be punished. I won’t waste another day of life worrying about it. And that’s all I came to say.”