He comes over and I embrace him hard, feeling my heart well up into my throat. "We'll get through this, Billy," I murmur against his ear. He's as tall as I am, but not as husky. I say, "We'll get through it, and we'll come out the other side, and we'll be okay. We'll all be okay, my darling. It'll be okay, my love. It'll be okay, my sweetheart."
Then he cries. Well, we all do.
We're driving home, and it's not long after three in the morning, but I'm not finished yet tonight. Beside me, Marjorie says how good I was, how strong I was, and I say, "It isn't over. It's just starting. There's more to be done."
"In the morning, we have to call a lawyer."
"Before the morning," I say. "There's more to be done tonight. But there is that, too, in the morning. The lawyer. Who was the lawyer, when we bought the house? Do you remember his name?"
"Amgott," she says. "I'll call him, if you want."
"That might be better," I agree. "To hear from the mother."
I leave the car out, don't put it in the garage, because I'm not finished tonight. "What is it, Burke?" Marjorie asks.
"Some clean-up," I say.
She follows me through the house into Billy's room, the room that has been so much neater lately, and I thought it was because he couldn't afford to buy things any more. I open his closet door, and push the clothing to one side, and there it is. He's built a bookcase in there, or a software case, three shelves of the stuff. There must be thousands of dollars there, far more than they'd need to move the charge up from petty larceny to grand larceny.
"Oh, Billy," Marjorie says, as though she might faint.
"We have to get rid of it all," I say. "Right now, before they come around in the morning with a search warrant." I smile at her, trying to get her spirits up. "Finally," I say, "a use for all those plastic bags from the supermarket you keep saving."
We get her bag of bags from the kitchen, we load them up with the bright-colored little boxes, and we carry the full bags through the house to the side door. Neither of us is at all sleepy.
Billy should have these things, he should know about them and have experience of them, if he's going to make it in the new world coming. I should be providing them, I should be making it possible for him to keep up with what he has to learn. This is my failure. Billy wasn't wrong to do what he did, he was right. He was wrong to go to the well too often, though.
I'll never say anything like that to him, of course. A father has responsibilities. Get him out of this mess, but don't condone, and certainly don't encourage.
Six shopping bags; they fill up the backseat of the Voyager. I thought I'd drive alone, but Marjorie wants to come with me, and I'm happy for the companionship.
I drive nearly thirty miles through the dark and empty land. We meet only two other cars the whole way. Almost every house is black dark. Every business is shut down tight.
My goal is a different shopping mall, a bigger one, that I noticed once on my drive to Fall City, weeks ago, when I was after Herbert Everly. This place also is shut tight, dark, deserted. I drive around the back of it, then circle the whole complex, to be certain there are no police cars or private security cars tucked away in the shadows, waiting. There are none.
Along the way, I've observed the dumpsters, the big green truck-sized trash receivers, out behind the various stores, and I choose the supermarket's dumpster to stop next to. A faint unpleasant aroma rises from it, which is why I chose it. Boxes, bags, heads of ancient lettuce; so much stuff in there, not picked up on a Saturday night.
I throw the bags in, one after the other. They disappear, anonymous trash. No software shows.
When we drive back homeward, alone in the world, Marjorie holds my hand.
23
They're waiting for us when we finally get to the house, the police. I'd thought they would be.
It's three in the afternoon by now, the whole day is shot. It was impossible to find a lawyer this morning, a Sunday morning, so finally, at around ten o'clock, I called the state police to ask them where the court was, and they gave me an address and a phone number, and I called the court, and spoke with a woman who was determined to be nothing but efficient, not to permit the slightest vestige of individuality or personality to peek through. That might be a good strategy, I suppose, if you answer the phone at the courthouse for your living.
I kept explaining my problem to this woman, and she kept offering me no help at all, no guidance, nothing, and then all at once she asked me if by any chance either I or the defendant qualified to be taken on by the public defender.
That hadn't even occurred to me. Such things don't occur to people like me. I said, "I've been out of work for two years. I've used up my unemployment insurance. I have no income."
"You should have said so before," she said, being snippy.
I didn't bother to tell her I'm not used to offering my failure as an asset, and she went on to give me another number to call.
Which I did, and this was answered by somebody who sounded like, and possibly was, a teenage girl. I told her the situation, and that the court had given me this number to call, and she took down a lot of information — or at least asked me for a lot of information — and said someone would call me soon.
Then an hour went by, in which nothing happened. Billy was supposed to be arraigned this morning, that strange word. Arraigned. It sounds like a torture. It is a torture. But they wouldn't perform the torture until Billy was represented by counsel, so until I could find a lawyer he would remain in that pale yellow cell, or perhaps some worse cell somewhere else.
So after an hour I phoned that last number again, and this time the teenage girl calmly pointed out that it was difficult to find an attorney on a Sunday, and I said I knew that, and she said someone would call. Chastened, I hung up.
At twelve-fifteen, the phone rang. Marjorie and I were both in a state by then, not knowing what else to do, who else to call, how to get help, how to get this process started. We were both pacing the house, like starving lions. But then the phone did ring, at twelve-fifteen, and this was an older man, who slurred. I thought he was probably drunk.
"I've talked to the judge," he said. "Do you have anything to put up as collateral for bail?"
"The house," I told him.
"Bring the deed," he said, "the mortgage, whatever papers you can lay your hands on. I realize it's difficult, on a Sunday."
"I'll find something," I promised.
"I'll meet you at the courthouse," he said. "My name's Porculey. I'll be in a maroon suit."
A maroon suit? He slurs as though he's drunk, and he'll be in a maroon suit, and this is to be my son's lawyer.
On the other hand, he'd already talked to the judge, and it was clear from what he'd said that bail would be set, so that was good.
There's a folder in my filing cabinet marked HOUSE, and I just brought the whole thing with me, along with Billy's birth certificate and Marjorie's and my passports for identification. I didn't want to be one piece of paper shy.
When it did happen at last, it happened with great speed. First we met with Porculey, who turned out to be a much older man than he'd sounded on the phone, at least seventy, and who, from the drooping eyelid and sagging cheek, I suspected of having suffered one or more strokes, which was why he sounded drunk. It's true he was in a maroon suit, a horrible thing, with pinstripes, but nevertheless, while this was a wreck, it was a wreck of a once-good lawyer. And what was left was good enough for the job at hand; to get Billy out of there, out of their clutches, back home with his mother and father, where he belonged.
It was mostly like going to church, somebody else's church. You watch the other congregants, do what they do, go along with the ritual as best you can, without understanding a bit of it, but keeping in mind always that they take it seriously. They believe in it.