T. Bunn - The Great Divide

Marcus continued to stare out the back window as the pines etched more shadow-script within the sunlight. Marcus spent a long moment searching for a message before deciding the afternoon wrote its mysteries in an unreadable tongue. The air was so still he heard a clock in another room softly chime the half hour. Gloria’s repeated use of one word rang with the clock in the sun-splashed air. Mission .

Marcus turned back because he had to. Alma Hall read the furtive search for a way out in his features. She cut him off before he could speak by leaning forward and letting desperation clench her throat and rake every word raw. “Mr. Glenwood, my baby is hurting . She needs help. I can’t explain to you how I know this, but every breath I take, I hear that child crying out from the wilderness.” On any other face the gaze would have appeared drawn from the borderlands of madness. “Maybe you were brought to us for a purpose, did you ever think that? You were drawn here because you’re the man to bring my Gloria home.”

Monday morning Marcus traveled to and around Raleigh in less than fifty minutes. Where the Rocky Mount highway merged with the Raleigh Beltline, the traffic congealed, but only momentarily. Nine o’clock was a fairly safe time to be headed toward the Research Triangle Park. Techie rush hour began at six and ended at seven-thirty, both morning and evening. This portion of the Tar Heel State prided itself on running to a Silicon Valley time clock.

The Morgan and Jones law firm occupied one of the ultramodern buildings ringing the Park. The exterior was brick, slate, and mirrored glass; the interior was plush and impersonal. After an appropriate wait for someone without a fixed appointment, Marcus was led into one of the windowless interior offices assigned to associates. “Mr. Glenwood?”

“That’s right.”

“Larry Grimes. Come on in. Sorry about the mess.” A black man in suspenders and a hundred-dollar power tie hefted a pile of folders from one chair. “You take coffee?”

“No thanks.”

“Right. Hope you don’t mind if I keep packing while we talk. They only gave me until the day after tomorrow to be up and running in Charlotte.” Grimes deposited the files into a box, pulled a pen from his pocket, and scribbled on the top. “Your fax said you wanted to discuss one of my clients who’s approached you seeking representation?”

“That’s right.” The office was littered with half-filled boxes and piles of unsorted papers. Nails protruded from an empty power wall, below which rested a box crammed with plaques and photos and diplomas. “Alma and Austin Hall.”

An instant’s hesitation, then Grimes barked a single laugh. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“You remember the case, then.”

“Sure I remember them. But there’s no case. The matter is a total waste of time.”

“Alma Hall doesn’t think so.”

“Alma Hall is an emotionally distraught mother who would do anything to get her daughter back. You met the father?”

“Yes.” Marcus watched the younger attorney smooth his tie. Again. Stroking the silk with absent nervous gestures. “I couldn’t figure out his reaction.”

“What’s to figure. The man knows how to think logically.”

“I’m not sure that’s the whole picture.” Paying almost no mind to his own words. Concentrating on the attorney and his pinstriped shirt with the white collar, his alligator belt, the eyes that danced about the room. “Mr. Hall said you had refused to take their case.”

“Like I said, what case? The Hall girl was of legal age, she was known as a troublemaker, she went to China, she decided to stay for a while.”

“Troublemaker in what way?”

The attorney’s voice tightened. “Look, the claim is groundless. That’s all you need to know. The only tie-in between the girl and New Horizons is some hyped-up letter.”

Marcus nodded slowly. The man was young, polished, smooth, and under pressure. What Marcus could not figure out was where the pressure came from. “Do you handle many federal cases?”

“Some. Look, I’d love to chat, but right now I’m up to my eyeballs.”

“Could I have a copy of any relevant information you turned up?”

When the man looked ready to refuse him, Marcus rose to his feet and added, “I’m sure the Halls would deliver a formal request if I asked.”

The man’s sudden stillness brought to mind a nervous quarry. “You can’t seriously be thinking of taking this case.”

“A girl is missing and nobody seems very eager to have her found. That makes me wonder.”

“You’re wasting your time.” The shrug held the stiffness of a puppet. “But, hey, if you’re that hungry, be my guest.”

“Thank you.” Marcus handed over his card, started for the door, then was struck by a sudden thought. He turned back and hazarded a guess. “By the way, congratulations.”

Grimes froze once more. “How did you hear?”

“Oh, you know how these things get around.”

Grimes bent back over the box. “Crazy. Kedrick and Walker said I had to keep my partnership secret until their next general meeting.”

Marcus tapped on the door frame, his thoughts racing. “I’ll expect that file by the end of the week.”

Rocky Mount had a divided past and a contemporary chasm. The Tar River flowed dark and sullen through its middle, forming a divide that not even the legal joining of Nash and Edgecombe Counties could bridge. To the west lay Raleigh and wealth. All the town’s stores and most of the new investment-private and public both-also lay west of the Tar. To the east, in the area where Marcus’ grandparents had built their home some forty years earlier, sprawled a haphazard collection of enclaves. Most of them were black, poor, and bitter.

The eastern side of the Tar River was a time warp to a poorer, harsher era. While western Rocky Mount sported three new shopping centers, nine banks, and a score of new factories, the Edgecombe side remained a one-company town. New Horizons employed almost everyone who held a steady job, over four thousand people and still expanding. Soon after his arrival, Marcus had been told by a black neighbor that New Horizons and the white-run city council liked things just the way they were.

In eastern Rocky Mount, the store windows were boarded up, the roads potholed, the few shops almost empty. People shuffled down cracked sidewalks with tired resignation. This part of town bordered an Indian settlement, three communities established by former slaves, and North Carolina’s largest remaining poverty pocket. Marcus had known little of this when he returned after the accident, and he was still learning. At first the black teens who clustered on porches up and down his block had frightened him. Now they were just a part of the scene. The white citizens who continued to migrate farther and farther west referred to this end of town as Dredgecombe.

When his grandfather had built his wife’s dream house, the Edgecombe County side of Rocky Mount had been home to the sort of people never fully accepted by their more proper neighbors to the west-sawmill owners and warehouse operators and tanners and hog butchers and landowners whose wealth was built on sharecroppers’ sweat. Marcus’ grandfather had been a tobacco auctioneer until a stroke cut off his voice and mobility. Marcus had kept the place after they died, mostly because it was his last tenuous bond to a past that held little heritage and even less in the way of family ties.

He turned into his street, which softly hummed sad tales of former grandeur. Decrepit Victorian houses shyly watched his passage, sheltered behind tall oaks. He sometimes had difficulty seeing his place in its newly refurbished state. In a way, he missed how for most of the past eighteen months, returning home had meant confronting a lawn blanketed by sawdust and piles of lumber and sheets of roofing tile and construction tools. Now the roof no longer sagged, the windows did not gape, the huge sycamore no longer probed one dark limb through the third-story cupola, the stairs did not look drunk, and the veranda railing no longer missed the majority of its teeth. Marcus stopped in his drive and regretted the absence of the mind-cleansing labor that had kept him from needing to think of any future at all.