I hesitated. “I hope I didn’t get Guthrie in trouble yesterday, asking him to take me out for clams?”
Mahlon scowled. “Worn’t your fault. He knowed better’n to take my skiff ‘thout asking.”
“That was pretty awful about Andy Bynum getting shot.”
“Yeah.” He laid aside the caulk gun and began to peel the gummy stuff from his fingers.
“I guess you’re in that Alliance he started?”
“Hell, no!” He saw my puzzlement. “Oh, they tried to sign us all up, but I ain’t never joined nothing yet and I’m sure not going to start with something that don’t give a damn about me.”
“But I thought it was to help the independent fishermen.”
He snorted. “Yeah, that’s what was said, but I ain’t never seen nothing started by the man that don’t end up with money in their pockets.”
Startled, I tried to remember if I’d ever seen Andy linger under Mahlon’s boat shed or seen Mahlon over at Andy’s. “You and Andy weren’t friends?” I asked.
“He was the man,” he said, as if that explained it all.
Well, if Andy was, I guess it did, diesel engine or no diesel engine.
Mahlon wrapped a piece of plastic around the tip of the caulk gun, secured it with a rubber band, then reached over and turned off the light bulb.
“Reckon I’d better get on in to eat,” he said, reminding me of the chowder I’d left simmering on the stove.
It was full dark but there were enough scattered lights from nearby houses to guide me the few feet down the shoreline to the main path once my eyes adjusted. I went slowly, thinking about “the man.” Not a purely local concept, of course. There was that old Ernie Ford coal miner song about owing one’s soul to the company store. And sharecroppers certainly knew about never getting out of debt to the man who bankrolled you to the tools or supplies you needed if you were going to work for him.
Andy Bynum had owned a fish house. Barbara Jean could probably tell me exactly how that made him the man.
As I headed up the path to the cottage, the maniacal cry of a migrant loon rang across the sound.
5
We are waiting by the river,
We are watching by the shore,
Only waiting for the boatman,
Soon he’ll come to bear us o’er.
Though the mist hang o’er the river,
And its billows loudly roar,
Yet we hear the song of angels,
Wafted from the other shore.
—Miss Mary P. Griffin
Tuesday’s court began slowly as we finished off the traffic violations and moved on to various misdemeanors (which I could hear) and some extra probable-cause felonies (which would have to be bucked up the next level to superior court).
Despite Mahlon’s optimistic talk, I wasn’t terribly surprised when a familiar figure came up to the defense table and signed the form waiving his rights to an attorney.
Mickey Mantle Davis.
According to the ADA, he sat accused of stealing a bicycle from the deck of the Rainmaker, a forty-footer out of Boston, currently berthed at the dock on Front Street. The state was hoping to prove probable cause to prosecute as a felony burglary.
“How do you plead?” I asked.
He stood up with a happy smile because he had just recognized me. “Not guilty, Judge, ma’am.”
Technically, I could have recused myself right then and there, but Mickey Mantle Davis would’ve had to go over to one of the piedmont or mountain districts to find a judge that hadn’t heard of him. From the time he was fourteen and buying beer with a stolen driver’s license, Guthrie’s father has been smashing up cars and smashing up boats and smashing up every second chance people still try to give him because shiftless as he is, he’s still a likeable cuss. He’d work hard for a week, then lay out drinking for two weeks; steal your portable TV on Friday night, then bring you a bushel of oysters on Saturday—a walking cliché of the good-hearted, good-timing wastrel who had so far managed to stay, if not out of trouble, at least out of a penitentiary.
Good luck to Mahlon keeping him on a trawler the whole of shrimping season.
“Call your first witness,” I told the ADA.
A Beaufort police officer took the stand and, after my recording clerk swore him in, testified how the dispatcher had radioed a description of both the bike and the thief. Within the hour, he’d seen the defendant pedaling such a bike toward the Grayden Paul drawbridge, heading for Morehead City. Upon being stopped and questioned, Mr. Davis had claimed that he’d found the bike by the side of the road and was taking it over to Morehead City to put a found ad in the Carteret County News-Times.
“No further questions,” the ADA said dryly.
“Me neither,” said Mickey Mantle.
“Call Claire Montgomery,” said the ADA.
On the bench behind him sat the three fashion plates I’d noticed at lunch the day before. Claire Montgomery was evidently the blonde ponytailed youngster. As she took the witness box, hand puppet and all, I was surprised to see that she wasn’t the eleven-or twelve-year-old I’d originally assumed, but at least nineteen or twenty. I was so busy shifting mental gears that the clerk had almost finished administering the oath before I registered that it wasn’t—strictly speaking—Claire Montgomery’s hand which lay on the Bible held up by the bailiff. Instead, her hand was inside the doll’s body and she manipulated it so that the puppet raised its right hand and touched the Bible with its left. Although the young woman’s lips moved, I assume it was the puppet’s voice that swore to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
“State your name and address,” said the ADA.
The puppet gave me a courteous nod and seemed to say, “Our name is Claire Montgomery and we live at Two-Oh-Seven—”
“Just a minute, Miss Montgomery,” I interrupted. “This is a serious court of law, not a vaudeville stage. I must ask you to put aside the doll.”
“But we saw him take our bicycle,” the puppet protested. Its long blonde ponytail flounced impatiently.
The girl looked only at the puppet, the puppet looked only at me. The girl was so still (except for her lips), the puppet so animated that for an instant, I almost started to argue with the small plastic face—the illusion was that good. Claire Montgomery might not be a ventriloquist, but she was a damn fine puppeteer.
“Nevertheless, a man is on trial here,” I said sternly. “The doll don’t bother me none,” said Mickey Mantle Davis from the defense table.
I beckoned to the ADA, who approached with studied nonchalance. When his head was close enough to mine, I whispered, “Am I the only one who sees something strange about a puppet giving testimony? What the hell’s going on?”
The ADA, Hollis Whitbread, was a nephew of “Big Ed” Whitbread back up in Widdington, and he didn’t seem to have much more smarts than his uncle. He gave a palms-up shrug and muttered. “That’s her sister and brother-in-law on the front row.”
I glanced over. Mr. and Mrs. Docksider were accompanied by a man in jeans and blue blazer who sported a neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard.
“She says the girl had some sort of trauma in childhood and ever since, she’ll only talk to strangers through the puppet. If you take the puppet away, she’ll just shut down entirely, and since she’s the only one that saw Davis take the bicycle...”
I sighed. “The puppet talks or he walks?”
“You got it, Judge.”
The puppet was a perfect witness, respectful, charming, articulate, with an eye for details. I’ve been in court when molested children used dolls to help describe what had been done to them; this was the first time I’d heard a doll testify on its own. It was, to borrow Barbara Jean Winberry’s term, just precious; and the entire courtroom, Mickey Mantle included, hung on every word as the puppet described resting in Claire Montgomery’s bunk on the Rainmaker while her young nephew napped on the bunk below. They were alone on the boat. Her sister, Catherine Llewellyn, and the rest of their party had gone ashore.