Scott Pratt - An Innocent Client

I was beginning to think I was going insane. I’d been half-jokingly telling myself I was nuts for years, but with everything that had happened over the late spring and summer, beginning with Sarah’s release from jail and subsequent return, I’d found myself falling deeper and deeper into a mental abyss. No sleep. No appetite. No exercise. Nothing seemed to give me pleasure any more, not even music. My attitude was becoming more and more fatalistic and hopeless. I had no enthusiasm, and no particular interest in anything, including sex. It was as though I’d become a passionless robot, simply existing from day to day without feeling.

I went back out to the car and sat in the passenger seat for a while. I closed my eyes a few times, but I couldn’t doze. I finally wrote Caroline a note, got out of the car, and started walking home. It was at least seven miles and my legs felt like lead, but I thought the exercise might help and it would give me some time to try to sort things out. At first, I tried to force myself to think pleasant thoughts. I envisioned Jack hitting home runs, Lilly dancing across the stage, Caroline’s jubilation when I brought her a quarter of a million dollars in a gym bag…

But after only a few minutes of walking, my mind began to flash images that were much more sinister, the same images I was seeing when I tried to go to sleep night after night. Johnny Wayne Neal being gagged and dragged out of the courtroom. The bubbles rising in the headlights of my truck the night Junior Tester pushed me into the lake. The look in Tester’s eyes when he said I’d taken his daddy from him. The fantasy of clubbing him to death. The bruise on Angel Christian’s face in the photograph. David Bowers’s blood on my shirt. Maynard’s smirk, and the terrible image of his tongue sticking out of his mouth. My mother, wearing a diaper and lying helpless in a hospital bed with spittle running down her chin. And finally, Sarah. Always Sarah, when she was young and innocent. “Get him off of me, Joey. He’s hurting me.”

By the time Caroline rolled up next to me and pushed the passenger door open about two miles from home, I’d reached an entirely new level of self-loathing. I hated myself for putting Sarah in jail and for not being able to break through with Ma. I hated myself for helping monsters like Maynard Bush and Randall Finch and Billy Dockery and a long list of others. I was a whore, a pathetic excuse for a human being.

“I love you, Joe,” Caroline said as soon as I got into the car. Caroline is intuitive, especially when it comes to dealing with me. I knew what she was trying to do, but the words bounced off of me like a rubber ball off concrete. I didn’t feel a thing.

“Did you hear me? I said I love you.”

“I know.”

“Do you know how much your children love you? Jack worships the ground you walk on. Lilly thinks you’re the greatest man who ever lived.”

“Please, Caroline, don’t. Not right now. I’m in no mood to be patronized.”

“What are you thinking? What’s wrong with you?”

“You don’t want to know what I’m thinking.”

“You’re mother just died, baby. You’re grieving.”

“My mother and I weren’t even close. All those years, all that time together. I grew up in her house. She raised me, Caroline, and I can’t remember a single meaningful conversation between us. Do you know what I was thinking a little while ago? In four years of high school, I played in over forty football games, over a hundred basketball games and over a hundred baseball games, and she never came to a single one. She never saw me play. Not once.”

“You’ve been through a lot in the past few months,” she said. “We’ve all been through a lot.”

We rode the rest of the way home in silence. Jack distracted me for a couple of hours by taking me out to his old high school baseball field. I didn’t hear her say anything, but I felt sure it was at Caroline’s suggestion. I’d bought a pitching machine a couple of years earlier, and I fed balls into the machine while Jack pounded them over the fence. Watching him hit a baseball was a truly beautiful thing to me. He was so quick, so powerful, so fluid. He was so much better than I ever was, and watching him gave me more pleasure than I’d had in months. The sun and the exercise felt good, and by the time we got back to the house, I was feeling a little better.

But then the night came, and with it, another bout of sleepless self-flagellation. We drove to the cemetery at eleven the next morning. I felt like a dead man walking when we climbed the hill to the gravesite. It was overcast and drizzling rain. There was a crowd of people there. I sensed their presence, but I couldn’t really see them. It was as though they were all standing in a bank of thick fog.

And then I caught a glimpse of Sarah. Caroline had called the sheriff’s department and made arrangements for them to bring her to the funeral. She arrived in the back of a cruiser, wearing an orange jail jumpsuit and handcuffs and shackles. The deputy who brought her up wouldn’t let her under the tent with Caroline, Lilly, Jack, and me, so she ended up having to stand outside with the others in the rain.

Caroline had contacted Ma’s best friend, a woman named Katie Lowe, to give the eulogy. I sat there, not really listening, until she began to talk about Elizabeth’s children. I heard some things about my mother that I hadn’t known before, things that Ma had told Katie about Sarah and me. One of them was that Ma had been so proud of me when I graduated from law school that she cried. I’d never seen my mother cry, and I’d never heard her say a word about being proud of me.

When the service was over, the deputy took Sarah by the arm and led her straight back down the hill. I watched as she climbed awkwardly into the back seat of the cruiser. I felt tears forming in my eyes as the cruiser pulled away and I turned to Ma’s casket. I put my palms on it and stood there, not knowing what to say or do, embarrassed to be showing weakness in front of my children. I stood there until the crowd had dispersed and then, for some reason I didn’t understand, I felt the impulse to bend down and kiss her casket. I’d kissed her at the nursing home, but not until she was too far gone to feel it. When I kissed her casket, I realized that I hadn’t ever given her a meaningful kiss. The thought made it almost impossible to keep from breaking down.

I leaned against the casket with my shoulders shaking and tried to compose myself. She’s gone and you’re still here, I said to myself. She’s gone and you’re still here. You’re alive. You have people who love you. Stop feeling sorry for yourself…

Stop feeling sorry for yourself. It was a phrase I’d heard many times, straight from my mother’s mouth, and as I stood there leaning against her casket, I knew I had try. The same people who loved me also depended on me for strength and support. I couldn’t let them down.

“Goodbye, Ma,” I whispered. “I’m sorry.”

I took a deep breath, straightened up, wiped the tears from my face with the back of my hand, and lifted my chin. I put one arm around Caroline and the other around Lilly, and nodded to Jack.

Together, the four of us walked back down the hill toward the car in the drizzling rain, and went back to our lives.

July 24

6:15 a.m.

Agent Landers woke up in a foul mood, knowing he had to spend the next few days in a courtroom on a case he might lose, even with Dillard’s sister’s testimony. Just as he was starting to get in the shower, his cell phone rang. Who calls at six-fifteen in the morning? The caller ID said the number was blocked. What was the point in a caller ID if the person on the other end could block it? Cell phone company morons.