Gilstrap and the sheriff started Terry toward the steps, one holding each arm. Ralph had time to register (again) Gilstrap’s horrible plaid coat, and to wonder if the man’s wife had picked it out. If so, she must secretly hate him. Now the prisoners in the short bus – who would wait there in the day’s strengthening heat, stewing in their own sweat until the star prisoner’s arraignment was disposed of – added their voices to the auditory melee, some chanting Needle, Needle, others just yipping like dogs or howling like coyotes, pistoning their fists against the mesh covering the open windows.
Ralph turned to the Escalade and raised his open palm to it in a Stop gesture, wanting Howie and Alec Pelley to keep Marcy where she was until Terry was inside and the crowd settled down. It did no good. The streetside back door opened and then she was out, dipping one shoulder and eluding Howie Gold’s grasping hand as easily as she had slipped away from Betsy Riggins in the county jail’s lobby. As she ran to catch up with her husband, Ralph noted her low heels and a shaving cut on one calf. Her hand must have trembled, he thought. When she called Terry’s name, the cameras swung toward her. There were five in all, their lenses like glazed eyes. Someone threw a book at her. Ralph couldn’t read the title, but he knew that green jacket. Go Set a Watchman, by Harper Lee. His wife had read it for her book club. The cover came loose and one of the flaps fluttered. The book hit her shoulder and bounced off. She didn’t seem to notice.
‘Marcy!’ Ralph shouted, leaving his place by the steps. ‘Marcy, over here!’
She looked around, perhaps searching for him, perhaps not. She looked like a woman in a dream. Terry stopped, turning at the sound of his wife’s name, and resisted when Sheriff Doolin tried to continue pulling him toward the steps.
Howie reached Marcy before Ralph could. As he took her arm, a burly man in mechanic’s coveralls overturned one of the sawhorses and rushed her. ‘Did you cover up for him, you evil cunt? Did you?’
Howie was sixty, but still in good shape. And he wasn’t shy. As Ralph watched, he flexed his knees and drove a shoulder into the right side of the burly man’s midsection, knocking him aside.
‘Let me help,’ Ralph said.
‘I can take care of her,’ Howie said. His face was flushed all the way to his thinning hair. He had an arm around Marcy’s waist. ‘We don’t want your help. Just get him inside. Now! Jesus, man, what were you thinking? This is a circus!’
Ralph thought to say, It’s the sheriff’s circus, not mine, only it was at least partly his. And what about Samuels? Had he perhaps foreseen this? Even hoped for it, because of the wide news coverage it would surely garner?
He turned in time to see a man in a cowboy shirt duck around one of the crowd control cops, sprint across the sidewalk, and hock a mouthful of spit in Terry’s face. Before the guy could rush away, Ralph stuck out a foot and sent him sprawling in the street. Ralph could read the tag on his jeans: LEVI’S BOOT CUT. He could see the faded circle of a Skoal can on the right back pocket. He pointed at one of the crowd control cops. ‘Cuff that man and stick him in your cruiser.’
‘Our c-cars are all around b-back,’ the cop said. He was a county guy, and looked not much older than Ralph’s son.
‘Then stick him on the short bus!’
‘And leave these people to—’
Ralph lost the rest, because he was seeing something amazing. While Doolin and Gilstrap stared at the spectators, Terry was helping the man in the cowboy shirt to his feet. He said something to Cowboy Shirt that Ralph missed, even with his ears seemingly attuned to the whole universe. Cowboy Shirt nodded and started away, hunching one shoulder to blot a scrape on his cheek. Later, Ralph would remember this little moment in the larger play. He would consider it deeply on long nights when sleep wouldn’t come: Terry helping the guy get up with his cuffed hands even as the spit ran down his cheek. Like something out of the fucking Bible.
The spectators had become a crowd, and now the crowd teetered on the edge of mob-ism. Some of them had made it onto the twenty or so granite steps leading up to the courthouse doors in spite of the cops’ efforts to push them back. A couple of bailiffs – one male and portly, the other female and scrawny – came out and attempted to help clear them away. Some people went, but others surged into their places.
Now, God save the queen, Gilstrap and Doolin were arguing. Gilstrap wanted Terry back in the car until authority could be reasserted. Doolin wanted him inside immediately, and Ralph knew the sheriff was right.
‘Come on,’ he said to them. ‘Yune and I will take point.’
‘Draw your guns,’ Gilstrap panted. ‘That will make them clear the way.’
This, of course, was not only against protocol but insane, and both Doolin and Ralph knew it. The sheriff and the ADA began to move forward again, once more holding Terry’s arms. At least the sidewalk was clear at the base of the steps. Ralph could see flecks of mica gleaming in the cement. Those will leave afterimages once we’re inside, he thought. They’ll hang there in front of my eyes like a little constellation.
The blue bus began rocking on its springs as the gleeful inmates threw themselves from one side to the other, still chanting Needle, Needle along with the crowd outside. A car alarm began to blurt as two young men danced atop someone’s previously pristine Camaro, one on the hood and the other on the roof. Ralph saw the cameras filming the crowd, and knew exactly how the people of his town were going to look to the rest of the state when this footage aired on the six o’clock news: like hyenas. Everyone stood out in bright relief, and everyone was a grotesque. He saw the blond anchor from Channel 7 again knocked to her knees by the hypodermic sign, saw her pick herself up, saw a kind of unbelieving sneer twist her pretty face as she touched her head and looked at the drops of blood on her fingers. He saw a man with tattoos on his hands, a yellow kerchief on his head, and most of his features blanked out by what were probably old burn scars that surgeries hadn’t been able to correct. A grease fire, Ralph thought, maybe while he was drunk and trying to cook pork chops. He saw a man waving a cowboy hat as if this was the Cap City ro-day-o. He saw Howie leading Marcy toward the steps, their heads bent as if they were moving into a stiff wind, and saw a woman lean forward to give her the finger. He saw a man with a canvas newspaper sack over his shoulder and a watch cap crammed down on his head in spite of the heat of the day. He saw the portly bailiff shoved from behind and only saved from a nasty tumble when a broad-shouldered black woman grabbed him by the belt. He saw a teenage boy with his girlfriend perched on his shoulders. The girl was shaking her fists and laughing, one of her bra straps hanging down to her elbow. The strap was bright yellow. He saw a boy with a cleft lip wearing a tee-shirt with Frank Peterson’s smiling face on it. REMEMBER THE VICTIM, the shirt said. He saw waving signs. He saw open, shouting mouths, all white teeth and red satin lining. He heard someone blowing a bicycle horn: hooga-hooga-hooga. He looked at Sablo, who was now standing with his arms outstretched to hold people back, and read the SP detective’s expression: This is so fucked.
Doolin and Gilstrap finally made it to the foot of the steps with Terry between them. Howie and Marcy joined them. Howie shouted something at the assistant district attorney, something else at the sheriff. Ralph couldn’t tell what it was over the chanting, but it got them moving again. Marcy reached out to her husband. Doolin pushed her back. Now someone began shouting ‘Die, Maitland, die!’ and the crowd picked up that chant as Terry and his escorts started up the steep flight of steps.
Ralph’s gaze was drawn back to the man with the canvas newspaper sack. READ THE FLINT CITY CALL was printed on the side in fading red letters, as if the bag had been left outside in the rain. The man who was wearing a knit watch cap on a summer morning when the temperature was already in the mid-eighties. The man who was now reaching into his bag. Ralph suddenly remembered his interview with Mrs Stanhope, the old lady who had witnessed Frank Peterson getting into the white van with Terry. Are you sure it was Frank Peterson you saw? he had asked. Oh yes, she’d said, it was Frank. There are two Peterson boys, both redheads. And wasn’t that red hair Ralph saw sticking out from beneath the watch cap?