Kind of Kin (35 page)

“You mean Dustin.”

“Hell, yes, Dustin! Who the hell else? Call her!”

Awkwardly Brown pulled the megaphone toward his mouth, holding it several inches away so that the sound flowed around the mouthpiece more than into it, although his tinny voice could also be heard coming from the closed speaker: “Oren,” he called to his former pastor, “could you explain to me what this is about?”

And the preacher called back across the way, “Yes, sir, be glad to, Mr. Brown—” But a burst of heckling from the crowd drowned out the rest of his words, and a helicopter hovered overhead—not so low now as to blow hats off, but close enough to be loud—and some of the camera operators were angling around to get a better shot of the grizzled prisoner in his orange jumpsuit with the black words
Inmate Latimer County Jail
stenciled on the back.

“Put it to your mouth, man!” the sheriff ordered. “Put some goddamn spit in it!”

Brown's sudden cooperation had little to do with the sheriff's instructions and much to do with what he himself wanted to know. “SWEET? IT'S DAD. CAN YOU HEAR ME?” Despite itself, the crowd quieted down. One of the reporters moved out into a little cleared space to wave off the helicopter—they all wanted to catch this. “I APPRECIATE WHAT YOU'RE DOING. COME HERE AND LET ME ASK YOU A QUESTION.” No flicker of movement behind the dark double glass doors, but a quick dart of yellow on the street as Carl Albert, having twisted away from his father's grip, ran around the barrier straight to Bob Brown. “Grandpa, Grandpa, don't let 'em shoot her!” The boy was gasping and sniffling. “They're not gonna shoot her, are they?” He turned and sobbed at the sheriff: “Please don't shoot her!”

“Carl Albert!” Terry called. “Get back over here!”

“She didn't mean to kill him! It wasn't her fault!”

“Kill him?” Holloway's ears pricked. “Kill who?”

“Mr. Bledsoe! It was a accident, I promise. Me and Dustin seen it!” Carl Albert turned now and pleaded across the yard to the preacher. “Tell them, Brother Oren! Tell them my mom didn't do it!”

“Come here, son.” Terry Kirkendall was making his way around the tape. “Let's go home.”

“Kirkendall, what the hell's he talking about?”

“Nothing. Carl Albert, let's go.”

“Horace is dead?” Bob Brown said.

Terry kept his eyes on his son. “Passed away this morning. At McAlester Regional.”

Brother Oren called across softly: “I'm real sorry to hear that, Tee. If there's anything—”

“What did Sweet do?” Holloway demanded. “Speak up, man!”

“Nothing! My boy's just got things mixed up!”

“This whole blamed family ought to be in the goddamn jail!”

“Shut up, Arvin,” Brown said. For a few seconds, in the ruddy glow of sunset, in the midst of the mostly quiet crowd, Bob Brown struggled. There stood his son-in-law not six feet away looking baffled and frightened, looking heartsick, looking weary and maybe even a little ashamed, with his cap tugged low and his grease-stained work coat unbuttoned, his ragged beard uncombed, his hand clamped on the boy's shoulder, the same way he'd stood beside the church van at Misty Dawn's house last summer. It all passed through Brown in a flash: Terry's expression that day at the birthday party, his surly voice in the van on the ride home, Brown's own shock when the sheriff told him who'd turned him in, his disbelief at that moment, his anger. The same anger that boiled up in him right now—not for what had been done to him or Jesús Garcia or even those poor people in the barn, but because of Dustin. If Tee hadn't made that call, Dustin would not be gone. Jesus said, Forgive. Jesus said, Go the second mile, Turn the other cheek, Do unto others.
As we forgive those who trespass against us,
Bob Brown thought, and then, before he or anybody else knew what he was up to, he leaped across the six feet of soggy yard and took down his son-in-law.

The television cameras captured it all quite well: the elderly, bespectacled inmate on his back on the ground, with the heavy bearded fellow pulled backward on top of him, the prisoner's clasped hands around the bearded guy's neck, choking him with the handcuffs, and the little chunky boy dancing around, screaming, and Sheriff Arvin A. Holloway hollering at the top of his lungs words that nobody could understand while the preacher and some of the senior citizens rushed over from the glass doors and the deputies swarmed, and then the sheriff, still yelling unintelligibly, drew his pistol and aimed it, not overhead for a warning, but directly at the two men grunting and wrestling on the ground. It was only the swift thinking of Deputy Darrel Beecham that saved a worse tragedy from taking place—a truly engaging unsung hero, as young Logan Morgan recognized, shoving her cameraman's shoulder and pointing him to shoot the scene at the very instant Beecham swatted the sheriff's elbow straight up so that the shot went winging up over the top of the parsonage, hitting no one, thank God.

Sheriff Arvin Holloway, in a profound and horrific rage, snatched up the cracked bullhorn from the sidewalk where Bob Brown had dropped it, and his roar, even through the broken microphone, was louder than any of his amplified bellows that had come before: “YOU PEOPLE SHUT THE HELL UP AND GET OUT OF MY WAY!”

There followed then a great hush, except for the two men coughing on the ground, and the hiccupy boy still bawling. All other eyes and lenses were turned toward Fellowship Hall, where on the narrow slab of concrete in front of the double glass doors, Georgia “Sweet” Kirkendall stood with her short auburn hair spiking straight up and dark circles beneath her eyes, a fake leather purse hanging off her shoulder, and both hands in the air.

Wednesday | February 27, 2008 | 8:00
P.M.

Cedar

B
y the time the calm GPS voice in the speeding Escalade guided the decidedly un-calm State Representative Monica Moorehouse and her husband over the mountains into the little town of Cedar, the night was full dark. They hadn't come the familiar route via McAlester, which would have taken, according to Charlie, an extra forty minutes, but had relied on that serene disembodied guidance, which directed them south from I-40 over tiny two-lane highways, through dead and dying small towns, across narrow being-repaired one-lane bridges, and finally south along the winding curves and steep ridges of the Sans Bois Mountains—a drive that might have been quite lovely in daylight, Monica observed tensely, but which turned out to be, after dark, damned scary. Her hands were cramping on the steering wheel, she had a splitting headache, and the Escalade seemed to have dropped into some kind of technological black hole where Charlie's laptop connect card could not connect, cell reception was intermittent, and, worst of all, they met several sets of headlights coming toward them on the winding curves—going the opposite direction.

When they turned off the highway at last, Monica was relieved to see a number of vehicles down the street in front of the church. She sped toward them and parked next to a giant pickup hooked to an empty stock trailer. Streetlights illuminated the broad white face of the old building and the several law enforcement officers milling about, but where were all the reporters? Where were the huge crowds her husband had described from the news feeds? She could see miles of yellow police tape, yes, and discarded soda cans and paper trash and a few hicks in ball caps perched on tailgates across the way surreptitiously sipping from silver beer cans, but where were the demonstrators, the media, the cameras and lights and tension? “What happened, Charlie? Where is everybody?”

Her husband grunted as he hit the refresh button on his laptop, to no avail. He plucked one of the BlackBerrys from a cup holder, glanced up, and pointed. “There.”

Monica leaned forward to see. Through the wide glass doors of a brightly lit prefab addition attached like a suckerfish to the side of the church she could see a handful of senior citizens seated at a long table and that fool sheriff striding back and forth in front of them. Then she spied the camera crew filming from the back of the room, “Wait!” Charlie said, punching numbers, “let me find out what's going on!” But Monica left him still trying to connect as she shoved open the car door and climbed down.

She ducked deftly beneath the yellow tape and was at the glass doors before a deputy saw her and called out for her to halt. With a quick smile and a little wave, she slipped in to the hall, where no one paid her the least attention. The senior citizens were all glaring at the sheriff. Well, they weren't all seniors, as Monica could see now; they were just mostly gray haired, except for the soft little round-faced woman standing by the back wall with a wriggly toddler in each arm and the workingmen seated at a second table fidgeting with their ball caps, their arms stretched out on the butcher paper. More to the point: there was only one reporter, the perky young brunette from Channel 2 and her gangly camera operator—oh, it had all taken too long! Charlie had been right. She shouldn't have stopped by the apartment to change clothes.

At the front table a plump lady with a bad perm was wiggling her fingers in the air. “When are you going to let us go home, Arvin? My boy Leon can't wait much longer for his supper.”

“I told you! Nobody's going nowhere till I get some blamed answers!”

“You got your answer!” This from a skinny old lady with a wattled neck. “How many times do we have to say it? We don't know what you're talking about.”

“Like hell!”

“Please watch your language,” a fellow said tiredly from the far end of the front table. “This is God's house.” Monica recognized him as the pastor who'd nervously shadowed the smart-mouthed aunt at yesterday's news conferences—but where was she? The aunt? Weren't they supposed to have nabbed her along with the cache of illegal aliens she'd been harboring? Hard to believe, Monica thought from her position near the door: an entire family of more or less middle-class, nominally Christian white people smuggling Mexicans, with, it seemed clear, the support of their church. Likely there was a drug-running operation in the mix, too. “Sheriff!” Monica strode forward to where the camera operator could see her. “Representative Monica Moorehouse of the Eighteenth District!” She put out her hand as if they'd never met, smiled winningly, could almost feel the lens zooming in. “I'm here to offer the support of the entire Oklahoma State Legisla . . . ture . . .” The scowl the sheriff turned on her could've choked a toad. “If there's any . . . assistance you need . . .”

“I don't need
assistance,
lady. From you or anybody else!”

A uniformed deputy stepped into the hall. “We finished the sanctuary, Sheriff. Still can't find any sign. It don't look like—”

“Search it again!”

“Yes, sir.”

“And the baptistery! Did anybody check the baptistery?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, look again. Get down in the dadgum water and feel along the bottom!”

“It's only a few feet deep, sir, you can see the bottom.”

“I don't care! Get in there and check it! I want ever inch of that building gone over!”

“The water heater ain't on—”

“Do it!”

The deputy withdrew. The sheriff whirled and made a chopping motion toward the back of the room. “Turn that blamed thing off! I'll tell you when you can shoot! And
what
you can shoot!” He started toward the back, and the young camera operator—baffled, because it had been the sheriff who'd beckoned them to come in—squeaked, “It's off, it's off, I turned it off!”

“Turn out that goddamn light, too!”

“Sheriff!” the pastor said. “If you have to use profanity, let's go over to my house. We can talk there.”

“Nobody's going nowhere! Do you people get that?”

I
n fact, the people did get that—not least because Arvin Holloway had shouted it so many times. They'd been sitting here close to two hours. The first search had lasted only twenty minutes, as there were so many deputies and so few rooms in which an illegal alien might be hiding, but the subsequent searches were taking longer. The deputies had found bits of evidence in the nursery—cracker crumbs on the table, empty Styrofoam cups rimmed in the bottom with red Kool-Aid, a soiled crib blanket in the corner, a couple of soaked disposable diapers in the trash—but there was no way to tell if these telltale signs were from today or last Sunday. A raggedy blue house robe had been discovered on the floor of the nursery closet, and they'd thought at first that might be a clue, until one of the deputies remembered seeing it on a Wise Man in the Christmas play last December. Nevertheless, they bagged it along with the Styrofoam cups and the diaper and the discarded plastic cracker sleeves they'd collected for DNA testing, should there ever be enough money in the county budget to pursue such a course of action—and provided, of course, there turned out to be reasonable cause. Other than that, the diligent deputies had found no sign of an alleged quote unquote illegal Mexican.

Still, they kept looking, more and more carefully, and this last search, the third, had been dragging on for almost an hour. Every empty moment that passed caused Arvin Holloway's blood to boil more recklessly—to the point of a stroke if he wasn't careful, he knew that, but he could not contain his fury. Not one of these blankety-blank Scotch-Irish pilgrims would admit to having seen a Mexican person, living or dead, legal or illegal, alone or accompanied, anywhere in the town of Cedar or its environs, period, ever, at all: “Don't know what you're talking about, Sheriff.” “Don't have any idea what you mean.”

At this moment Bob Brown was sitting in the back of the sheriff's cruiser, rechained and badly bruised from his fall, under arrest for aggravated assault and battery with a deadly weapon—the handcuffs—and also for resisting arrest, although he had resisted nothing when the two deputies jerked him up from the ground where his son-in-law lay coughing. Carl Albert had thudded across the yard, crying out “Mommy! Mommy!” as he flung himself at her so fiercely that the startled sheriff, flustered and furious and completely undone, swung his bullhorn on the kid, pointing it straight at him like a pistol. In the few seconds it took the sheriff to realize what he was doing and lower the bullhorn and start yelling for somebody to arrest the goddamn prisoner, Bob Brown had stood staring at his daughter. Sweet met his gaze steadily over the head of her sobbing son. She'd looked disheveled, exhausted, and . . . something else. Settled. Some kind of settled, or acceptant, or . . . it would take Brown several hours, the whole evening, in fact, to glean what his daughter's face said:
We are together in this, Daddy. I get it now. You had your reasons. I have mine.

Sweet herself was shivering in the backseat of Deputy Darrel Beecham's cruiser. She wasn't chained, but she was handcuffed, and she was most definitely under arrest—for the crime of harboring undocumented aliens in furtherance of their illegal presence in the state of Oklahoma, a felony, as the deputy rattled off when he took her into custody. She had the right to remain silent. She had the right to speak to an attorney. If she couldn't afford an attorney, one would be appointed . . .

And so it was left to the pastor and his wife to bear witness to what the citizen Christians of Cedar were doing—an even smaller group now than had originally stood at the church doors, since the less stalwart of the rebels had made their excuses and signed their court appearance tickets and gone home to supper a couple of hours ago. Floyd Ollie, dragged forth from the rear side door, sat alone under guard in the church sanctuary. The teenagers who had once stood with the pastor were all gone now, too, because Vicki Dudley, at the sound of gunfire winging over her rooftop, had raced down her front steps and across the yard and pushed the four Youth for Christ kids into Fellowship Hall away from potential stray bullets. While the sheriff was arresting everybody she motioned through the glass doors for the kids to slip out through the old part of the church, and then she'd hurried home to get her boys. Therefore, the ones sitting now at the long tables were those who faithfully believed they had reason to be here—beyond just the fact, of course, that the sheriff wouldn't let them leave.

Of this resolute remainder, the only Christians who had directly bald-face lied to the sheriff were the four elderly Women's Missionary Union ladies. Claudie Ott had no trouble prevaricating, prone as she was to exaggeration and embellishment when telling a story, and Ida Coley had certainly felt no compunction about narrowing her eyes at that fool blowhard sheriff and saying, “You are so full of it, Arvin. I never in my life saw a Mexican man in this church.” The other two women, Alice Stalcup and Edith Martin, had, early on, sat at the front table wavering and quavering, hemming and hawing, cutting their eyes at each other and jumping nervously every time the sheriff shouted, until Oren Dudley had at length braced himself to hear the beans come spilling out of their two quivery mouths.

But the beans did not spill.

Later, Brother Oren would come to believe that that brilliant white light suddenly flooding the room in the precise moments when Mrs. Stalcup and Mrs. Martin were finding it so hard to lie was like the Light of the World visited in a great beneficent flood upon them. Yes, he understood that its actual nonmetaphoric source was the portable LED light the Channel 2 cameraman had switched on, but the light had burst forth at just the right moment, and wasn't that, Brother Oren asked himself, just exactly like the workings of the Holy Spirit? “Ask and ye shall receive,” the Word said, and he and several others had most definitely been asking. The two women, startled, had looked around, met Ida Coley's firm gaze, and at once their quivery mouths firmed up to match hers. When the sheriff bellowed at them again, they repeated what had become the evening's stock answer: “We don't know what you're talking about.”

Thus the investigation had begun with the people standing in solidarity—or, more accurately, sitting—and so it continued. The people were weary, they were hungry, their bodies were sore, but they were determined. They sat up straight in the folding chairs, even the oldest folks whose backs were naturally humped. The WMU ladies led a rousing chorus of “Onward Christian Soldiers” until the sheriff made them quit. Floyd Ollie had been brought in to explain to the sheriff in his own words how Wade Free had been called out on a gas line explosion near Bokoshe, and the Masons, seated in a taciturn row at the second table, murmured their corroboration. Each time an officer returned from the search to admit they'd found nothing, the resolve of the people was strengthened; they made their backs straighter, they smiled, forgot their hunger, repeated their stock phrase, and up to this point, the Channel 2 team had been recording it all.

The other news teams had hurriedly packed up and left forty minutes ago, but Logan Morgan and her cameraman had elected to stay. She still held out hope that the church searches would produce aliens, or, failing that, that the sheriff might yet explode and do something newsworthy. At the very least she planned to get an exclusive interview with the big deputy for tomorrow's
Good Morning Oklahoma
. She observed the deputy standing near the kitchen, legs akimbo, hands clasped behind. That footage of him knocking the sheriff's pistol skyward was some of her finest work. Unfortunately, it had come too late to make the evening news.

In fact, for Logan Morgan, the end of the standoff had turned out to be a disappointment. No shootout, no actual Mexicans, and the little that did happen had happened too late in the day. Her best captured images—the disheveled aunt with her hands in the air, the deputy striking the sheriff's gun—would have to wait for the lower-rated ten o'clock report. The 10:00
P.M.
and morning news shows were fine, but it was the 5:00 and 6:00
P.M.
spots that, professionally, made all the difference. The question Logan Morgan kept asking herself was this: Would the story still have legs tomorrow at five?