Grif Stockley - Illegal Motion

I hang up and suggest Dade call home from my room.

Collect, I tell him. I’m not getting enough to pay his phone bills, too.

Now it is my turn to eavesdrop. I am referred to as the “lawyer.” He looks over at me from the one chair in the room and says into the phone that “we’re going to talk.” I am reminded of my conversations with Sarah when she’s not in a mood to talk. Dade, I notice, is more respectful than my daughter, limiting his infrequent responses to “Yes, ma’am,” and “No, ma’am.” After a few moments, with a pained expression, he hands me the phone.

“She wants to say something to you.”

Expecting the accent of a poorly educated eastern Arkansas black woman, I am surprised to hear a rich contralto voice that rings with authority, though it still retains the drawl of the Delta.

“Mr. Page, what happens now? Is he out of school?”

“We’ll have to see about that,” I say.

“I wanted to talk to him first.” I haven’t even considered the possibility that the university would not want him to come back to school. I’ve only worried whether he will be kicked off the team.

“The incident happened off campus,” I continue “so ordinarily I would imagine it would be handled like any criminal matter. This might be different. I’ll just have to find out and let you know.”

“I’ve told Dade to do exactly what you say,” she in forms me, “but we expect you to consult with us. When will you be in your office again? I want to meet with you face-to-face.”

There is no give in this woman’s voice. No wonder Dade didn’t want to come home during the summer.

“Friday,” I tell her. Why are black women so much stronger than black men? If Roy Cunningham is in the house, he must be in the bathroom. I haven’t heard a peep out of him.

“Do you and your husband want to come over then?”

“One of us has to be in our store,” she says.

“I’ll see you Friday at ten. Roy has your card, doesn’t he?”

I find myself saying, “Yes, ma’am,” and grin at her son. After I hang up, I tell him, “Your mother doesn’t mince words, does she?”

Dade arches his muscular frame and yawns, showing strong white teeth. I doubt if he got any sleep last night.

“I’m surprised she let you off the phone so soon. She wanted me to go to Memphis so I’d be closer to home.”

“I’m from eastern Arkansas, too,” I tell him to let him know we have something in common. If you’re from the Delta, Memphis means more to you than Blackwell County.

Dade ignores my attempt at camaraderie.

“Did she sound mad?”

“A little,” I tell him.

“A rape charge is serious business.”

“Robin didn’t do nothin’ she didn’t want to do!” Dade shoots back, now rigid in the chair.

He must be scared to death. With the image of Rodney King’s beating by the LA cops forever embedded in the national consciousness, the literature of white justice is getting richer all the time. Why should he trust the system when he has up-to-the-minute documentation that it is still brutal beyond his worst nightmare? At this point I am just another white face who will be telling him what to do. I need to humanize myself to this kid if he is going to trust me. Probably he thinks of me as another coach. If he wants playing time, he’d better make me happy, and in this situation that means telling me what he thinks I want to hear. Convincing him that all I want to hear is the truth might not be so easy. I pull out a yellow legal pad from my briefcase and begin to make some notes, first establishing that he refused to give a formal statement to the police without a lawyer being present. Thank God for TV. He sounds so vehement that I find that I tend to believe he is innocent. I want to. Rape is too ugly a crime to pretend criminal defense work is just another way to make a living.

“Why don’t you start from the beginning and tell me when you first met Robin?” I suggest.

Instead of immediately answering, Dade bends down to tie a shoelace on his Nikes.

“How come,” he asks, obviously not yet comfortable with me, “they hired you?

Are you famous or something?”

“I’ve won some cases,” I allow, “but I’m a neighbor of your Uncle James. He introduced me to your father.”

Dade looks skeptical.

“You live on the same street?”

He knows as well as I do that there are few integrated neighborhoods anywhere in Arkansas.

“I was married to a woman darker than you are,” I explain, and give him a mini-version of my marriage to Rosa. I conclude by saying, “My daughter Sarah is a cheerleader for the junior varsity.”

“Sarah Page is your daughter?” Dade asks in amazement.

“I know who she is. Man, she’s a …” His voice trails off.

“A beautiful young woman,” I help him. What would he have said? A fox. A cunt? I know how guys talk about women. Or at least think, since some of us, anyway, have been forced to become so politically correct in our speech. As my friend Clan says, it’s still okay to want pussy, you just can’t say the word.

“Yeah,” says Dade, a smile coming to his face for the first time.

“She’s real nice.”

Her body, he must mean, since they hardly know each other. I realize I’m glad he isn’t coming to dinner with us.

Why? Racism? Or is it that I don’t want him sizing her up like a piece of meat? Yet, I’ve done the same a thou sand times when I’ve thought I wasn’t being observed.

There’s a difference though. I’ve never raped anybody.

Dade Cunningham may have. I understand now why Sarah would be uncomfortable.

“She’s a super kid.”

“Yeah,” Dade mutters, not at all expecting a dinner invitation nor perhaps even remotely desiring one unless I am going to pick up the check. What was I thinking when I mentioned it to Sarah? Most of my clients I wouldn’t trust to take out my garbage. Is it because this kid is a Razorback? Or have I gotten to be too impressed with the notoriety of defending high-visibility clients?

“What happened?” I prompt him.

He sets his jaw, and as he talks I can now hear his mother’s voice.

“Robin was in my communications class last spring. We sat next to each other and got to be friends in that class. She was okay. I’d be nervous right before I had to make a speech, and she’d talk to me, kind of calm me down. After the pros, I want to be a sports announcer like Greg Gumbel. Anyway, I started coming to class early, so Robin and I could go over stuff if I had a speech or something. It was easy for her. She talked all the time anyway. Some white girls you know are laughing at you as soon as they’re out of sight. She wasn’t like that.”

He pauses, and I ask, “Anybody in the class know y’all were working together?” I remember my own anxiety in a speech class taught by a retired Army colonel from Illinois My small-town eastern Arkansas accent sounded to me stupid and hicky. Try as I might, I couldn’t pronounce a single vowel to suit him.

“Mr. Page,” he said the last week of school, “you turn single letters into whole words.” I can imagine Dade’s embarrassment and consternation if he got an asshole like Colonel Davis. No matter how intelligent he may be, Dade has already given himself away by saying “wid” for “with,”

“chew” for “you.” Perhaps, when he really concentrates, he can sound the “s” on all his verbs, but I know from my own experience it is difficult to worry about form and sub stance at the same time.

“I don’t know,” he says.

“We’d just meet in the class room early, since it was empty. It wasn’t an everyday thing. She’d practice on me, too, when it was her turn.”

I try to form an image in my mind of the scene he has described. With his strong chin and firm mouth Dade is undeniably handsome. Throw in his coffee-with-cream six-foot-two-inch frame, his earnest manner, and status as a Razorback, and it is easy to see why even the whitest coed in the state would be interested.