“I try to tell him that things happen for a reason. That boy’s death…maybe that be what it took for Patrick to separate himself. He been hanging on with that boy Harrison; they family all do heroin. So…” She clasped her hands and looked down.
Inwardly, I was trying to decide if she was being crazy: Did someone have to die in order for her son to stave off a potential drug addiction? But I remembered that Patrick had told me that his uncle had killed his great-aunt during a heroin high. Given these circumstances, her thought was just utilitarian. Prison was better than addiction.
As if on cue, she said that her brother was in prison for life, out at the maximum-security prison. Patrick had been nine when he went away.
“I guess yesterday is gone,” she continued. “I can’t change it. I try to live one day at a time. I just wish I know what was gonna happen next.”
I didn’t know whether she was speaking in spiritual terms or about Patrick’s trial date.
“I’ll go see Rob,” I said.
“Who?”
“His lawyer.”
She nodded, still playing with her hands.
I said I should probably get going.
—
“GOOD NEWS: MARCUS WAS DRUNK,” Rob said. “Very drunk.” His blood alcohol level was 0.26, more than three times the legally permissible level.
It had taken more than a year for the coroner’s lab in Little Rock to send back the autopsy. (“Helena doesn’t have anyone to do the autopsy?” I asked. Rob laughed.) “How can I help?” I asked.
“Matter of fact, you could go to the police station and pick up Marcus’s record. Character assassination,” he continued. “If the victim is an undesirable, we’ll have a better case.”
Undesirable? I wondered.
Then, as an afterthought, he said, “Maybe I’ll even have you do some case research.” He winked, suggesting that case research wasn’t something public defenders in rural areas did.
At the station, where a pile of homemade DVDs titled Jesus sat in a basket, free for the taking, I got Marcus’s reports. I managed to restrain myself from reading them until I got into the car. Was Marcus a sociopath? A rapist? Did he have a record of violent felonies? I hoped that the record was bad. I began to read, struggling to make sense of the poorly written police reports. The year before, in May 2007, he was charged for contributing to the delinquency of a minor. A girl was cutting school and hiding out at his house. Ms Rowan call to the school and found that her daughter was not at school. Mr Rowan neibhor that lives next to informed Ms. Rowan that Marcus was inside the house with two other kids. Ms Rowan call the police…
In May 2008, four months before he ended up on Patrick’s porch, police were dispatched because he was drunk. On 05/06/08 unit were dispatched to 871 Chicago for a disturbance upon my arrival spoke to a Rhonda Sampson who stated her boyfriend [Marcus] Williamson was drunk and cause problems. He had already been into a fight with several unknown people. Mr. Williamson walked out of the house cursing with a bat in his right hand. He was told to drop the bad twice. Which he did not due. The report ended: Mr. Williamson had a strong odor of intoxicants coming off his breath.
On another morning that same month, at 5:02 A.M., the police were dispatched in reference to a unwanted male subject. Another disorderly. He was pepper-sprayed after trying to kick out the windows of the police car. Marcus went to county jail for a week.
The earliest charge, eight years prior, was made when he was seventeen. He had broken into a person’s house and stolen a pair of shoes and a box of cassette tapes.
In sum, his charges included second-degree reckless destruction of property; disorderly conduct; public intoxication; and resisting arrest. No infraction had been serious enough to send him to state prison.
It seemed clear that Marcus was, at worst, an alcoholic who could get aggressive. By the look of it, he was not so much dangerous as unlucky. He had been drunk on the wrong night and shown up on the wrong porch.
“So what do you think?” I asked Rob, ferrying the reports back to him the next day, hoping he would find something nefarious where I had not.
Rob was unimpressed. Swiftly, he leafed through the pages.
“I do know this name,” he said. “Williamson, Williamson…” He searched back in his memory. “Matter of fact, I defended her, the mother. Sure did. She was robbing a house with one of her sons. Police found her hiding out in the bushes.” She and another son had stolen a DVD player.
He clapped his hands, celebrating the strength of his memory.
—
BUILDING A LEGAL case was fundamentally contrary to grieving. You showed no respect for the dead. You mounted evidence of his poor character, implying that he helped cause his own demise. I found myself trying to assert Patrick’s innocence in terms of Marcus’s guilt.
“Good news,” I said the next Monday, trying to channel Rob’s ease. “Marcus was drunk.”
I knew the words came out wrong, because Patrick winced.
“We got Marcus’s autopsy,” I said hurriedly.
At the word autopsy, Patrick looked down.
“How do it…how do it look?”
He played with the edge of his notebook.
Then he blurted out, “Ms. Kuo, he just came at me, talking crazy. I kept telling him, ‘Get out of my yard, get out of my yard.’?”
“Did you think…” I hesitated. “Did you think about calling the police?”
Apparently this was an absurd question. “Naw, naw, ain’t no one call the police. The police here ain’t no police. They out smoking weed and dealing drugs. How they gonna come to your house?” He paused. “Besides, they know my daddy—they gonna think I started something.”
—
AFTER KIPP CLOSED for the winter holiday, I went to my parents’ house in Indiana. I turned twenty-eight. My brother baked me a strawberry shortcake for my birthday. My parents gave me, among other things, a card with a sizable handwritten message that had oddly encouraging words. “Do you like it?” they kept asking. Apparently they’d spent hours in an aisle dedicated to Hallmark cards, trying to find the card that matched what they wanted to say. The winner, though, had an ugly picture, so they copied the message onto scrap paper and purchased a prettier blank card.
“I love it,” I said, feeling suddenly crazy with love for them.
Satisfied, they returned to the usual topic of conversation: why I was not married.
“She’s not mysterious,” my mother said.
“She’ll spill her guts to anybody,” my dad agreed.
“I’m right here,” I said.
—
BACK AT THE county jail, the New Year had passed and the rain bucket needed emptying.
“It’s raining, ain’t it?” asked Patrick.
“Yeah.”
“Man. I be missing all of it.”
“What’ve you been up to?”
“Nothing. The food’s better on Christmas.”
“There was this MLK Day parade in Helena yesterday,” I said. It had been a cold day in Helena, with light rain. One store had put up a sign that read: CLOSED FOR MARTIN LUTHER KING AND ROBERT E. LEE’S BIRTHDAY. Twenty-five years earlier, the Arkansas state legislature had passed a law to combine both commemorative days into one state holiday.
“What’s that?”
“MLK,” I said. “Martin Luther King.”
“Oh, yeah.”
I asked, “Do you know what he did?”