Neither of them moved. Then Harry said, “Listen, kid, all I ask is, don’t do nothing stupid.”
“Like what?”
“You’re young. You can make little mistakes when you’re young. Don’t start making no big ones till you’re older.”
Richie was leaning forward, his hands on the arms of the chair as if he were preparing to spring up and race away.
“You got something on your conscience, keep it there,” Harry said. “Blabbing just spreads it around like manure. I mean, don’t tell me nothing, even if I ask.”
On Monday morning Defense Counsel Donnelly asked for a postponement of two days for personal reasons. So it was Wednesday before Harry had a chance to wear the new suit he’d purchased at a thrift shop for five dollars, the fifty-cent shirt and the tie and matching handkerchief, twenty-five cents.
The coat was too small, so he kept it unbuttoned, and the pants were too large, so he hitched them up as much as possible with a belt, embossed leather, one dollar.
“You look sharp,” Owen told him. “You can get the trousers altered later.”
“Why? I don’t figure to wear them again.”
“Suit yourself... How much does the state owe you for the clothes?”
“Six seventy-five.”
Owen paid him the exact amount. “Normally we don’t allot money for this sort of thing, but this is a special situation. I want you to look like a respectable, hardworking man.”
“I am a respectable, hardworking man.”
“Certainly, of course you are. But I want the jury to see that for themselves. It’s especially important, in view of your race, for you to appear at your best, put your best face forward, as it were.”
“I only got one face,” Harry said. “You want I should bleach it?”
“I’m simply being realistic, Harry. Civil rights or no civil rights, prejudice still exists.”
“No kidding.”
“I want you, as I want all my witnesses, to look proper.”
Harry wasn’t sure what “proper” meant, but he felt there was something wrong with the whole conversation. It aggravated his resentment over the delays and increased his worry and uneasiness about Richie. The boy was too quiet. He spent hours wandering around the waterfront alone and went swimming off the sandspit at the end of the breakwater. The water was too cold for swimming, well below sixty, and Richie returned to the motel, blue-lipped and shivering and mute. Harry said to Owen, “How come there was another delay?”
“Defense counsel had to drive his wife down to a hospital in Long Beach.”
“Don’t they have hospitals here?”
“Not this particular kind.”
“What if there’s another delay, and another?”
“You put up with it the same as the rest of us.”
“The rest of you aren’t stuck in a crummy motel room.”
“Blame your friend Cully,” Owen said. “He could have saved all of us a lot of trouble.”
There was an interval of silence. Harry looked worried. “When I go in the courtroom, where will he be sitting?”
“There’s a long table in front of the judge’s seat. Cully will be at the far left with his counsel, Donnelly.”
Waiting for court to begin, Donnelly was quiet and preoccupied. Gunther sat in his usual place at the railing. He had helped Donnelly take Zan down to the hospital in Long Beach, doing the driving while Donnelly held Zan in his arms in the back seat. The doctor had given Zan a shot, and she was asleep with her head against Donnelly’s chest. At first she was light as a bird, and her fragility and helplessness brought tears to his eyes. But as the miles passed, she became heavier and heavier as if molten lead were slowly being injected into her veins, replacing her blood. His arms ached and his tears evaporated in the dry atmosphere of the air conditioner. Then he felt the sting of new tears, this time for himself, for his own helplessness and inability to carry this burden any further. The road was ending almost where it began, in the back seat of a car. Smog, he told Gunther, it was the smog; it always affected his eyes. And Gunther solemnly agreed.
At nine-fifty Cully was brought in by the deputy. In the mornings Cully usually looked bright, even cheerful, but today he was grim-faced, and he sat down in a tentative way as if he weren’t sure whether this was his place or not.
Eva Foster smiled at him, and the bailiff nodded, but Cully failed to notice. He said to Donnelly, “I got a note from the kid. It was passed along to me this morning by a guard who often goes fishing off the breakwater.”
“That’s nice.”
“Not nice. Bad. Crazy. The kid’s got the crazies.”
“Let me see it.”
The note was a single sheet of paper folded and refolded into a small rectangle. The message was printed with such intensity that the pen had stabbed the paper in several places.
Dear Cully
I guess I better keep on calling you Cully until you tell me for sure what I know all ready. I thought about this a whole lot and not just the past couple weeks and I know you are my real Dad. You and me can be a real family when we get back. I have some money to start out. The lady gave me a $100 bill so I won’t be a drag on you so don’t worry about that will you.
Harry won’t mind. He don’t like me or you much anyways.
Donnelly refolded the sheet of paper while Cully watched him anxiously.
“Well, what’s your advice? What do I do now?”
“Nothing.”
“But he thinks I’m his father.”
“And are you?”
“I told you that night in jail, I’m not. Harry’s wife is a slut; she’d go with anyone.”
“So she might have gone with you.”
“If she did, I was too drunk to remember. It doesn’t matter anyway. I’m not going to be his father. The hell with living together like a real family him and me or me and anybody else. Jeez, why does everybody think they’re entitled to a piece of me just because I’m on trial for murder? Jeez,” he said again. “That Foster dame, she wants us to be a real family, too. And you and your goddamn ranch, and my wife and her slob brother. And that crazy Pherson waiting to kill me. Now it’s the kid. The whole bloody bunch of you waiting to slice me up like a pie.”
“Lower your voice,” Donnelly said. He thought of the nursery rhyme: “Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie. / And when the pie was opened, the birds began to sing...” This pie had only one blackbird, and there would be no singing.
“I don’t want to be anybody’s husband, anybody’s father, anybody’s lover, anybody’s target practice. You’re sick, you’re all sick, coming on to me like cannibals. That’s what you are, cannibals. I’d rather go to the gas chamber than be eaten alive by a bunch of cannibals.”
“You may not have a choice,” Donnelly said. “A lot will depend on Harry.”
Harry made a better witness than Owen anticipated. He was solemn and respectful, awed by the grandeur of the courtroom with its vaulted ceiling and crystal chandeliers. To him it was like a church, and God himself in a black robe sat majestically on his throne.
He told of his short acquaintanceship with Mrs. Pherson from the time she came on board the Bewitched with Cully. The jury who’d heard it all before in one way or another looked bored until he reached the part where he’d heard a woman screaming in the middle of the night.
Owen asked him if the woman was Mrs. Pherson.
“Must of been,” Harry said. “She was the only woman on board.”
“What was the nature of her screams?”
“Nature?”
“Was she shouting words you could understand?”
“No. They were just screams.”