“You feel sorry for them?” one of the guys asked.
“One used to come in for omelets. This lawyer. He was sweet to me.”
“Probably hoped you had a daughter.”
She shrugged as if maybe the man was right, which of course he was. Stop being so naïve, Allen wanted to tell her. Only fools trust sweet. You’ll get yourself hurt.
He chewed his toast, and the news moved on to the continuing saga of Michael Vick, en route to US District Court for sentencing.
“These Falcons, their time is up,” said one of the men.
“Their time was up years ago,” the waitress said. She drifted over and refilled Allen’s coffee. “You look wistful, mister. Penny for your thoughts.”
“Just eager to get back on the road.”
“Where you headed, all by yourself?”
“All over the place,” he said, wondering if they were flirting like normal people. He wasn’t sure; still, even in the wake of the fire, the chance felt good. “I’ve only ever been to two of the fifty states. Figure it’s time to see the country.”
7.
Alone in his office after Jeremy left, Stephen pulled up records of Jeremy’s 2001 statutory rape case on LexisNexis for the second time. He read more closely than before. Mid-trial the kid had fired his expensive lawyer and pled nolo contendere. Stephen didn’t get it. Why didn’t Jeremy want people to like him? If a protective order was still in place from back then, it was permanent. To break it would commit a new crime, which Jeremy surely knew, which meant he was lying to Stephen, scoping out details for Act Two in the strange performance piece playing out in the addiction recovery rooms of Greater Atlanta.
Cancel the show by phoning ahead to the Fisher household, thought Stephen — but he was no rat. He only wanted to teach the boy a lesson.
He screen-captured eighteen-year-old Jeremy’s mug shot and saved it with his other pictures, then drove downtown to defend a woman accused of stealing a purse. She didn’t show. The court ruled against her, in favor of a department store that had spent more money prosecuting her than the purse had cost. Who cared? Not Stephen. Nothing was at stake; she was just another broke woman. He went to Vickery’s for martinis, one two three four. In the parking lot afterward, the flags of America and Georgia rippled in the wind. On a truck bumper a third flag announced Power of Pride, although pride was a sin. Cover it with one that said Sin of Pride, he thought, driving away.
On the radio some woman was interviewing a theologian. “Do you consider Muhammad to have been a pacifist like Jesus?”
“I do not consider Jesus to have been a pacifist,” the theologian answered. “Jesus drove out the money changers with a cord whip and said, What I offer is the sword.”
Before getting on the highway Stephen bought a six-pack of Heineken. He drank one on I-75 and then another on Glade Road before he arrived home. Home. He needed a new word for the place. Then again, Jeremy had said the evictions were real.
He ought to be happy about it, but as he climbed the hill, he didn’t want to believe it.
Ignoring the eternal campfire, where the guys sat talking to a stranger, Stephen fetched a towel from the line. He undressed under the oak and righted the upended jug with the holes in it. After tying the dangling rope to the bottleneck he pulled it until the jug hung above him. He looped it around a branch. Water was spilling out, muddying the dirt. He opened another beer. It was about fifty out, maybe the last day before spring when a shower would feel bearable. Humming a tune, he scrubbed himself. A bird chirped. As it flew away, Stephen turned to see Bruce running off with his clothes and his towel.
Dripping dry, he devised a hateful lie to tell the D.A. about Bruce. About everyone. Then he stalked naked to his tent and found the clothes baskets gone too.
Behind him he heard giggling, and backed out to find Allen, Travis, Gus, Bruce, and the bucktoothed stranger all gathered there. He cupped his hands over his cock, and they laughed harder.
“It don’t bother us,” Bruce said. “Be naked. Don’t you like to?”
“Or we’re too old to be naked in front of,” Gus said, causing more eruptions.
Letting his hands fall, Stephen stood there as casually as he could. He wanted his demeanor to convey that he still had friends in high places, and that those high-placed friends would come fuck everybody up.
“Dude, your clothes is under the sycamore,” Bruce said. “We were just having fun.”
Bending to pick up a tree branch, Stephen focused in on Bruce’s pouty eyes.
“I mean, how about a laugh?”
“Keep the clothes. You’re right, I like being naked.”
“So you opened those curtains on purpose.”
“The bus came each day at seven and three,” Stephen said, and right away the offenders’ trance was as rapt as any angry jury’s.
He had them. “There was a girl named Piper with coppery hair and a blue backpack,” he said, thinking maybe he understood what Jeremy had been doing at meetings. He’d been proving people’s sheer gall to believe.
“And?”
“And this,” he said, swinging the tree branch like a bat toward Bruce’s head. But it was so rotten that it broke in midair.
“I’m not one of you,” he said, while Bruce laughed. “What I just said was a lie.”
“It’s the truth according to Georgia.”
“I’m leaving Georgia.”
“If you don’t know reciprocity, you’re a shitty lawyer.”
“That’s only with bordering states,” he said, a bigger lie than the high-placed friends or the bus. He’d had the friends; the bus had come at the hours he’d named, even if there was no Piper, no girl, no boy, no one but Seamus.
They left him alone to pull on his pajamas, but he was too drunk to be alone. He carried a beer to the fire, where the others were talking about some quarry.
So Jeremy had been telling the truth.
He sat down opposite Gus, who turned and said, “Look, dude,” cutting his bucktoothed twin off midsentence. “Most days you won’t even talk to us.”
“I was framed by a judge. You’re rapists.”
“How do you know I wasn’t framed?”
“Were you framed?”
“Why should I tell you?”
Stephen tried to think of a clever answer. None came. He thought of replying that there was a bathhouse called the Downtown Men’s Club, where after Seamus died he took to sitting in the pitch-black darkroom. With nothing left to live for, you were free to go where you wanted and pursue hard dreams. Seamus had jumped without even trying — unless his hard dream had been sobriety — but Stephen was ready to try. Even after posting bail, he kept it up. After a month he knew the regulars by the feel of their bodies. Sometimes in the locker room he saw faces, too, like the corporate lawyer’s who’d beaten him in a suit over swing sets. Baxter Philpotts. About once a week Baxter sucked Stephen off in the darkroom and didn’t know. One day Baxter showed up with the judge assigned to Stephen’s case, a round redhead named Harold Hawkins. They were soaking in the hot tub when they saw Stephen passing by. The judge pursed his lips, and Stephen smiled. The slightest smile back might have meant join us, but neither man gave up that gesture, and Stephen was left to wonder upon conviction if the encounter was his true crime.
“Are you gonna answer?”
“I forget the question, but I imagine the answer is I don’t care,” he was saying when he heard footsteps. Good, he thought, having chosen what to tell Jeremy. Forget Alaska. You’re on the no-fly list and if you drive they won’t issue a passport. Then he would sit back and watch Jeremy grapple with never going north. It would serve as punishment not only for portraying Stephen in the meetings but for being young, for having a future.