A Gracious Plenty

  “Huh,” I say. “I’ve hit a snake before and it just lay flat.”

  But Marcus isn’t listening to us anyway. He’s pointing to another little head stuck up in the water, like the snake I’d pointed out, but on the other side of the boat.

  “That one’s not a snake,” I tell him. “That’s a turtle. And they’re hard to tell apart when they’re swimming, but if you’ll look at the way they move, if you’ll look really good, you’ll see that snakes do more of a wiggle. They skim over water, while turtles are bobbers. But turtles are much faster in the water than they are on land.”

  We look at some turtles sitting on a log, sunning, and a big one plops off for us, splashing fine. Then Marcus cocks his head and listens, and I can only wonder which sound has caught his ear. He begins imitating toads, calling back to them so clearly that there could be a toad in the boat.

  “Sounds,” I say. “He likes sounds.”

  Lucy takes the paddle and slaps it on the water. “This is what it sounds like to spank, and the sound that comes right after is the sound of a splash.”

  “This is what it sounds like to breathe,” I tell him, and Lucy leans his ear up to my chest. I cannot feel him, but I can see the recognition in his eyes. I breathe deep and let him hear that air moving in and out.

  “And this is what it sounds like to wait,” Lucy says, and puts his ear next to her chest.

  “This is what it sounds like to burn,” I say, and I sizzle for him, szzzzzz.

  “This is what it sounds like to blow up,” Lucy says, and goes k-Pwoooooww.

  Marcus rasps from deep in his throat, “Ahhow, ahhow.”

  “That’s the sound of cancer of the larynx,” I laugh. “Or emphysema.”

  Marcus keeps doing it, his face distorting so much, he begins to purple.

  “Or the sound of gasping,” Lucy says. “Is he strangling on something?”

  But we don’t get much further than that, because Leonard shows up, pushing his way between branches and clodding down to the bank, calling out, “Finch? Finch!”

  “Shit,” Lucy says, and I notice that Marcus has begun to cry, though I’m not sure exactly when he started. I’m glad that he’s at least found air again. His coloring’s coming back—though it was never all that good.

  “I’ll ignore him,” I tell Lucy. “I’d rather be with you.”

  “Like it’s that easy,” she answers. “The bastard. And Marcus was doing so well.”

  And I paddle the boat around a bend, hoping that Leonard can’t see.

  “Finch!” he hollers out over the water. “Who’re you talking to? Come on to shore. I gotta speak with you about this letter you sent Lois Armour.”

  “That wasn’t me,” I claim. “It was my secretary.”

  “What letter?” Lucy asks.

  “I’m sorry, but I’ve got no choice,” Leonard shouts. “Come on, now.”

  “What letter?” Lucy asks again.

  And I can’t keep up with both worlds at the same time. They’re speaking to me, but saying different things, and it’s too much. Just seeing both worlds crosses my eyes, back and forth. It spins in my head, and I begin to understand how difficult it is when realities overlap. It makes sense why truths exclude each other.

  I only have one mouth.

  “I forgot to tell you,” I say to Lucy. “I invited your mother to visit like you asked.”

  “I’m coming,” I call to Leonard, who has already waded out to the top of his boots.

  “Go see what he wants,” Lucy says. “We’ll be watching.” And then she dives overboard, with the screaming Marcus beneath her arm. They don’t even splash when they enter the water, but I can still hear Marcus, muted and miserable beneath me.

  I paddle my way back toward Leonard but stop short of shore. He wades out midway to his knees and says, “Come on in. Toss me the rope.”

  But I say, “No. I haven’t even caught a mess for supper. Whatcha want?”

  “I wanna talk to you,” he says.

  “Thank you for the flowers,” I tell him, and as I say it, I feel a thump directly beneath my boat, as if an alligator’s smacked the underside with its tail. But there’s no real reason for an alligator to care one way or another about the flowers Leonard sent.

  “You’re welcome,” he says. “I’m glad you liked them. Throw me your rope.”

  “No,” I say. “I don’t believe I want to.” And without even paddling, I feel my boat backing up. And I know it’s Lucy and Marcus moving me out to the center of the river.

  “Then I’ll have to come get you,” Leonard says, and he goes under, swimming beneath dark water. Water ripples all around.

  I can hear Marcus screaming and Lucy cussing, distantly, and I know that all three of them are down there together.

  But the closer Leonard gets to me, the farther away Marcus swims. And Lucy has to chase him, of course. She’d have a hard time explaining it to the Mediator if Marcus got lost.

  I see Lucy and the screaming baby surfacing and making their way to the bank, dripping and scowling, just as Leonard comes up beside the boat.

  He nearly tips me over climbing in. I have to reach my hand out to tug him and then lean backward, pulling him toward me.

  “Now come on, Finch,” he says, dripping everywhere, water pouring in streams behind his ears. “Truth is, I gotta take you to jail. You violated the terms of your restraining order. Either give me the paddle or take this craft to shore. You’re under arrest.”

  “I ain’t going to jail,” I tell him. “I’m going fishing. I happen to have an extra pole, and you’re welcome to join me.”

  Leonard’s breathing hard. He wipes the water from beneath his chins. He’s had a new haircut, a buzz, and with his hair so short, it doesn’t look as dark. He’s out of shape, and drenched and heavy. The front end of the boat’s sunk so much lower that I’m lifted up like a queen in the back, like somebody able to walk on water.

  “Please don’t make me charge you with resisting arrest.”

  “I’m not making you charge me with anything,” I say.

  “Why’d you send that letter?”

  “I sent one to everybody with a relative buried here. Didn’t you get the one I sent on your brother Marcus’s behalf?” And I have to stifle the screaming I hear from the bank. I pick up a pole and adjust the hook and cork.

  “Probably went to Daddy,” Leonard answers. “I don’t know nothing about it.”

  “I see,” I tell him, and bait his line, then hand the pole to him. “You done much fishing?”

  “No,” he tells me. “Finch—”

  “You mean your daddy never took you fishing?”

  “My daddy never took me nowhere, and you know it. He didn’t want to be seen with me ’cause I was a crybaby.”

  I like his passion, so I leave him alone.

  “You know all that. Why’re you trying to rub it in?” he asks.

  “I ain’t rubbing nothing in,” I tell him. “I just figured I ought to know how much fishing experience you’ve had. I didn’t expect to get a confession about your relationship with your daddy. You volunteered all that.”

  “Oh,” he says.

  “See here,” I tell him. “Here’s all you got to know.” And in my mind, I think of him a little bit the way I think about baby Marcus. He’s not so awful—just annoying. He needs some teaching. That’s all.

  “Here’s your first lesson in fishing,” I tell him. “Fish won’t bite when the moon’s full. They’ll just nibble at the bait, but they won’t pull the cork under. That’s okay, though. We’re under a new moon, so we should be able to catch a mess. Throw your line right there in that grass bed.”

  “Finch,” he tries to interrupt.…

  But I don’t let him. “That’s good. Make sure the line went down. Yeah. Now, today we’re fishing for brim. Brim bite the heads off crickets first. And they won’t bite at a cricket after the head is gone. You can forget it if the head’s gone.”

  And then the cork goe
s under and the line starts singing, and I clap my hands for Leonard and tell him to pull it in.

  But he’s too slow. He loses the fish, and, of course, it got his bait—the head anyway.

  “Give it here,” I tell him, and I stick another cricket on his hook. “Try it again.”

  “Finch, that piece of paper you signed was like a contract,” Leonard tries to explain. I reckon he thinks I’m simple. “We had faith in you to uphold your end of the deal, and you didn’t.” He speaks to me, but he stares at the orange cork, bobbing there at the end of the line.

  He gets another bite, and loses the fish again.

  “Hand me the hook,” I say, pretending to be put out.

  “I can bait my own hook,” he says. And he does. It takes him a while and he loses a cricket, but he does manage to get one on.

  But by the time he’s done it, I’ve paddled us down beyond the grass bed, to a place with a hollowed-out tree and lots of stumps.

  “Throw it up near that tree,” I tell him. “Not too high, now. There’s a nest of hornets in that limb.”

  He looks up at the buzzing hornets and cuts his eyes. “Are you trying to kill me? What’d you move me for? I had a fish waiting for me back there.”

  “No, you didn’t,” I tell him. “You ran him off, spanking at the water and jerking your pole like you did. And you ran off all his brothers and sisters, too. Brim are nervous, scared fish. When you hook one, you have to pull it around to the other side of the boat to keep from scaring the other ones. You have to make it look like the caught fish is just swimming away. It’s kind of like lying,” I tell him. “You tell a lie, you got to pull it off for the entire crowd. You any good at lying?”

  “Not as good as you are,” he says.

  “I’m a lot of things, but I ain’t a liar,” I tell him. “And I didn’t never put my name on that piece of paper y’all gave me to sign.”

  But he doesn’t believe me. He says he saw that signed piece of paper—like signing and signing my name are the same things.

  Between the two of us, we catch a mess of fish pretty quick. Not counting the ones we throw back, we take home eight.

  Except we don’t really take them home. We put them in my cooler and stick the cooler in Leonard’s backseat. On the way to the police station, he stops for a bag of ice to keep them from rotting, and he gets us both a Coca-Cola. I tap the bag on the ground a couple of times to break up the large chunks and then dump the ice over the still-floundering fish.

  When I get back in the car, Leonard reads me my rights and offers me some peanuts.

  IT’S LATE IN the afternoon by the time we get to the police station, and then there are complications. As soon as I arrive, Leonard gets summoned outside, and I can’t see him because the door is made of smoky glass. Problem number two: I don’t have a lawyer. The soft-faced boy who’s doing all the paperwork says I’m going to need one.

  “Get Leonard for me,” I tell him.

  “Leonard ain’t no lawyer, and he’s got another assignment anyway,” the young man says. “There’s a car wreck over on Highway Nine.”

  “I ain’t got no lawyer,” I tell him. “And I don’t believe you about that wreck, either. Leonard didn’t say he was going to any wreck.”

  “It just happened, Miss Nobles. He’s really gone. Now look here. This is a list of lawyers with their phone numbers. You need to just pick one and call.”

  “I don’t want to pay for no lawyer,” I tell him. “I ain’t done nothing wrong.”

  “You harassed Ms. Lois Armour,” he tells me. He’s too young to listen. He ought not be allowed to carry a gun.

  “I’ll represent myself,” I tell him. “You show me the evidence.”

  “We have your signature,” he reminds me. He was the boy that got my signature in the first place.

  “Show me,” I say.

  But the records office is already closed. Closed until eight o’clock tomorrow morning.

  “You mean I’m stuck here all night?”

  “Yep,” he answers. “You were stuck here all night anyway.”

  “Get me the judge,” I tell him. “I wanna talk to the judge.”

  “Do you see any judge here?” he asks. “If you want counsel, call a lawyer.”

  “Get Leonard,” I say. “He’ll post my bond.”

  “Lady, you don’t know much about the law, do you? We got rules here. Rules we follow. Leonard can’t bail you out because your bail ain’t been set,” the boy tells me. “The arresting officer ain’t allowed to post bond anyway—especially not when the officer is a single man and the criminal is a pretty lady,” and he darts his eyes away from me when he says that—’cause he knows I’m a far stretch from pretty. “And besides that, he’s at the wreck. You deaf or something?”

  “What kind of police department are you running?” I ask him.

  “A damned good one,” he tells me, puffing his chest like a rooster.

  “I’d like to see your handbook of the law,” I say, but he just laughs.

  He takes my picture and rolls my fingers over a piece of cardboard, but he doesn’t put me in special clothes or anything fancy. He puts me in a big cell all by myself, with my pick of cots.

  “You don’t have no other prisoners?”

  “No other women,” he tells me. “We got a man on the other side.”

  My cell is right beside the desk where I checked in. “It’ll give you something to look at,” the boy-faced officer says.

  “What if I have to use the bathroom?”

  “Pull the curtain.”

  So I sit in my cell, twiddling my thumbs and picking at a mole on my wrist. The officer calls out to me periodically, “You okay in there, Miss Nobles?”

  “Fine,” I say. “Thank you for caring.”

  “You get ready to confess, you just let me know.”

  “Okay,” I say. “But don’t get your hopes up.”

  “You get ready to call a lawyer, just say the word. You get a free phone call, you know.”

  “Alrighty.”

  I sit in there for a long time, feeling kind of bad because I didn’t feed the cats. I try to remember whether or not they had any food left in their bowls from yesterday, but I doubt it. Woe to the birds and mice, to the bugs that live in the ivy.

  Then a different police officer brings me some supper, and it’s not as bad as you might think. He brings me candied yams and some rice with gravy and a piece of meat—I can’t tell what kind—and a cup of watery tea. And I eat it, ’cause all I’ve had is a pack of Nabs and a handful of peanuts since breakfast.

  My hands still smell like fish, and my fingers stick a little when I press them together. It’s hot in the jail, and that does nothing for the smell. The smell of food and armpit hovers in the air, and I think they ought to get an exhaust fan to make it more pleasant.

  Then Leonard comes back, and he brings me a cheeseburger and some french fries. I’m kind of glad to see him, but also miffed that he left me that way, wreck or no wreck.

  “I was gonna try to fry up them fish,” he says. “But the accident took me too long. I didn’t want you to get stuck eating mystery meat.” He pulls up a chair and sits backward in it, leaning his fat belly against the backing, and he eats his supper with me, chewing and talking at the same time. “Phillips says you don’t want a lawyer. I got to advise you to get one, Finch. A judge ain’t gonna be kind to you. He’s gonna feel real sorry for Lois Armour.”

  “Who would you recommend?” I ask.

  “T. J. Wilson?” he suggests.

  “I don’t know of him,” I say. “I’d rather have somebody I know of.”

  “Wilson’s good,” he tells me.

  “Mmmm, I don’t know. I just like the idea of having a lawyer from my own community.”

  “Ain’t no lawyers in our community.”

  “There’s one,” I say.

  Leonard thinks for a second, then jumps up and moves his face right to the bars, leaning in a little, so that his nose actua
lly goes through, so he’s just inches from my face. “No,” he says, and I can see a bit of lettuce wedged between his front two teeth. “Father’s in retirement. And besides that, damn it, he hardly practiced law at all. Once he became an elected official, he only tried four or five cases. He hasn’t been in a courtroom in twenty years.”

  “I think that’s who I want,” I tell him. “Can you get me his number?”

  “He might not even be licensed anymore. He’s not well, Finch,” Leonard insists.

  He clings to the bars, and I study his fingers, stained yellow with mustard.

  “Mother just came home from the hospital, and Father’s got her to take care of. He’s an old man. He’s half-senile already,” he pleads. Then adds, “What have I done to you, damn it?”

  “You got me arrested. That’s one thing,” I say. “And then—”

  “Oh no,” he interrupts. “You did that to yourself. I’ve been as kind to you as I can be.” He’s red-faced and puffing, with sweat stains arcing halfway down his shirt. “Business is business, and arresting you was my business. Letting you have your afternoon fishing and bringing you something good to eat so you wouldn’t have to eat the jailhouse food, that was something else,” and he throws me an apple pie, still warm in its red container, and walks away. “Phillips, get her the telephone,” he says, and he slams the door.

  Phillips looks at me, and I look at Phillips.

  “I musta said the wrong thing,” I tell him.

  “I reckon you did,” he answers. “You want the phone?”

  “Not yet,” I say. “I was half-teasing—about calling his father, I mean.”

  “Leonard ain’t the teasing kind,” Phillips tells me. “He walks around here half the time like he’s lost his best friend. Yeah, Leonard wears his britches too tight for sure.”

  “Well,” I answer, “he’s had a hard row to hoe. Even when we were little, his father didn’t think much of him.”

  “You and Leonard the same age?” he asks me, like he can’t believe it. And I know it’s ’cause I look so much older, with my wadded-up face.

  “Yeah.”

  “Say then, maybe you can tell me what happened to Leonard when he was seven years old.”

  “What are you talking about?”