Pleasantville (36 page)

“And you're sure about the time?”

“Oh, yes,” A.G. says. “We don't open the doors until nine most days, and I had just done all my rounds, checked the bathrooms,
stocked the fridge, made sure the floors were clean, and I was sitting down at the keys. I like to play a little sometimes, if ain't nobody around. You can imagine how surprised I was.”

“Why ‘surprised'?”

“I hadn't seen him since he was”–and here he holds his right hand, palm down, kind of low around his knees–“just a little thing, since he was a boy.”

“But you recognized him?”

A.G. smiles. “He's my son.”

“But this wasn't the first time you'd seen his face since he was a boy?”

“No, sir,” A.G. says, polishing his language for the courtroom. “Mama sent me some pictures here and there. And I'd followed his career, seen his picture, his name in the paper.” He looks at Neal, at the wonder he's become.

“Your mother, Vivian Hathorne?”

“Yes.”

“And your father is Sam Hathorne?”

“He raised me, yes,” A.G. says. “That's my daddy.”

“Why is it that
you
didn't raise your son, Mr. Hathorne?”

A.G. nods toward his mother, in the front row. “They offered, and I took 'em up on it. Didn't see he'd do any better with me. I used to have a problem, drugs, you know. And I was right to give him up,” he says, nodding toward his son, as if to say,
Look at him
, as if he expects Neal to stand up and thank him right here. “I could have done better by him, though, not stayed away so much.”

“And why did you?”

“Objection, Your Honor, relevance,” Nichols says. “It seems we're veering into a family drama that has little to do with Mr. Hathorne's purported purpose of providing an alleged alibi for his long-lost son,” he says, building into the objection a potential motive for A.G. to lie on the stand.

“If the court will allow it, I think the family dynamic and the history of estrangement make clear why the event was so memorable to Mr. Hathorne, and why there can be no mistake for him about when and where he saw Neal.”

“I'll allow it,” Keppler says. “Overruled.”

“Mr. Hathorne,” Jay starts in again. “Why didn't you reach out to Neal?”

“Me and Sam, we don't get along,” A.G. says. “Actually, that's a hell of a nice way of saying it. My dad and I don't exist in the same world, we just don't see eye to eye on anything. He hovers above the earth, and I'm down in it with the rest of the regular folks.” He dabs at his forehead. It's cooler in here than it was yesterday, the heating system purring softly, kindly. But A.G. is sweating.

“How long is this, since you've been estranged?”

“We fell out years ago, when he cut a deal with the chemical companies.”

In the front row, Axel's whole posture deflates, and he sinks into the pewlike bench. He looks at his mother, who has her head down still. Axel looks at Arlee, at Ruby and Jim Wainwright. Did they know this too? Did everyone know this but him? But Arlee and the other Pleasantville residents look stunned.

“Which chemical companies?”

“It was ProFerma that started it, then every Tom, Dick, and Harry started moving factories in, brewing all kinds of nasty shit you can't hardly pronounce. Once one of 'em got in, they all started setting up shop in Pleasantville's backyard. We fought it at first, we did. It kind of meant something to me the way the community came together, and it was good for me too, to keep my head up and out of trouble, channel all this stuff I got inside of me,” he says, gesturing vaguely to his gut, “to put it toward something outside of myself. Neal was a boy then,
and I was getting my act together, and I thought, ‘This is it for me.' I felt proud to be a Hathorne, like I was really one of them. Axel was busy with the police department around then, and this was something Sam and I could share, like I was finally living up to that name, what Daddy had done for people over the years.” A.G. looks down, rubbing the palms of his hands along the front of his borrowed trousers. “And then one day, he took me aside and told me to stop. The marches, the flyers we was putting out, the plan to take the ProFerma fight to city hall. He told me to stop all of it.”

“Do you know why?”

“He said people didn't really know what they wanted, let alone what they needed, that maybe there was something in this ProFerma deal after all. It was good jobs, he would tell people. He would go in and negotiate, be the hero who delivered a hundred, two hundred jobs to the community. And what he didn't tell anyone is that they were paying him to do it, cooked up some kind of ‘neighborhood relations fee,' a consultancy of some sort, and gave him five hundred thousand dollars for it. I know 'cause he offered me fifty G's of it.” He looks around the courtroom, at the jury especially, as if
he
were actually the one on trial, for failing to stand up to his father years ago. “It really hurt me that he offered the money to me and not Axel, not the girls, that he thought I, of all of them, was dirty, like I wasn't a Hathorne at all. After that, I walked out.”

At the state's table, Nichols stands.

“Your Honor, I'm going to have to object. This is just straight narrative. Mr. Hathorne's relationship with his father is totally irrelevant to the matter.”

Offended, A.G. says, “Hey, my father and I haven't spoken in twenty years over this.” He looks right at Nichols, as if the D.A. had popped his head into A.G.'s confessional. “And it ruined everything between me and my son.”

“And he's still talking, Your Honor.”

“All right, the objection is overruled, Mr. Nichols. But the witness is instructed not to speak unless a question has been posed to him, and especially not if an objection is pending. Do you understand, Mr. Hathorne?”

“Yeah, yeah, I got it,” he says, waving a hand in the air.

“Did Neal ask you about this on the night of November fifth?” Jay says.

“He didn't know what to ask. He didn't know any of it. He wanted to know why Sam was investigating me, what he was scared I might say during a campaign. And I danced around it. I know how it hurt me to find out the truth about Sam, so I was scared to get into it. We talked for about an hour or so, catching up about Neal, about my brother. I asked a lot about Mama.”

“So that means he left the Playboy Club at what time?”

“It was about ten minutes to nine,” A.G. says. “I know because I have to be off the piano when the boss lady come in, and I was checking the clock. Neal said he had to go to some party. And that was it. I looked at the Budweiser clock above the bar. It was ten minutes to nine.” He taps his finger on the railing in front of him for emphasis. And when Jay asks him if there's any way he could be mistaken about what time Neal arrived at the club and what time he left, A.G. says no, he remembers everything, the whole thing is burned into his brain. “I'll never forget it, Mr. Porter,” he says. “When my son walked in, it was a miracle.”

The jury
gets the case that afternoon, following a straightforward closing statement from Jay. Beyond the indisputable fact of Neal Hathorne's alibi, there was also just the plain weakness of the state's case, Jay said, the lack of any physical evidence tying Neal to the murder, and frankly the lack of a clear motive for Neal, on the night of his uncle's election, to go after a girl
he'd met only one time, a girl standing on a street corner clear across town.

“You know who did have a motive?” he said.

Sandy Wolcott, and so did the woman running her campaign.

Wolcott and Reese Parker both had a motive to make Neal Hathorne look guilty of
something
in the middle of a neck-and-neck campaign. “But a district attorney elected in this county should not be allowed to bring up charges on the family members of her opponent and get away with it,” he said, “else we'll see no end to this kind of trickery. And that's exactly what this is, a trick and a waste of your time and the voters' time and, most egregious, a waste of that family's time,” he said, pointing to Maxine and Mitchell Robicheaux. “They deserve justice. As does the next family out there who don't even know it's coming, the phone call after midnight, or a police officer on their front door, a trip to the morgue . . . because make no mistake, he's still out there.” He glanced at the empty seat next to Maxine, where Keith Morehead would have been sitting if he'd shown his face since Jay attacked him in the courthouse hallway. “And a
thing
like that, he will kill again, all the while Reese Parker is playing games with this election. The voters in this county, you deserve better,” he said. “My client deserves better, and most of all, Alicia Nowell deserves better than what the prosecutor has presented in this case and tried to pass off to you as truth.”

The state's rebuttal, he didn't listen to even half of it.

As far as Jay was concerned, it was over.

The jury walked out, and he left to wait it out at home.

Neal went with his uncle and his grandmother and his father, A.G. Jay patted Neal on the back and said he'd be the first to know whenever Jay heard word from the courthouse. Lonnie went to her place to write, trying to get it all down on paper: America's Tomorrow and the donors for George W. Bush, Reese
Parker's experiment in Pleasantville and the death of consolidated black voting power, which the Voting Rights Act and the tireless work of activists from Sam Hathorne to John Lewis to Dr. King to Diane Nash and James Bevel and countless others across the country had created, which people like Parker were now looking to poison from the inside. With help from Sam. He'd delivered Jay's client files to Parker in exchange for her help greasing a just-good-enough settlement from ProFerma, which just happens to also be a major donor to her PAC. Lonnie's already gotten calls from two different newspapers that are interested in the story. Sam, who had been careful to leave no paper trail, no phone records or letters or electronic mail of any kind, between himself and a Terrence Jerard Cobb, was, as Jay had heard through Lonnie, on his second interview with the Houston Police Department regarding the attempted kidnapping and the break-in at Jay's office, this time without his elder son, Axel, as an advocate. He was spending the night, on his own, in an interrogation room. Rolly was home by now, convalescing in his girl's arms. All this left Jay free to be with his kids. They had finally agreed it was time to tackle the tree.

It's Jay's job to find the box of decorations in the garage.

Ornaments, a tangle of lights, the angel from the clearance sale, it's all out here somewhere, along with his fishing gear, the three-piece dinette set from their old apartment, Ellie's first bicycle, and his son's train set, which Ben doesn't want anymore but had begged his mother not to throw away. There are some of Jay's old law school textbooks and a quilt Bernie started and never finished and on the top, top shelf just past the garage's side door, a white box with pages and pages of something Bernie was writing in her last year, which Jay is not ready to touch.

And there's Bernie's car, of course.

After he finds the Christmas stuff, in a cardboard box along the rear wall, he sets it all on the roof of his wife's Camry and
climbs inside. The air is dry in here, but without the film of dust covering everything else in the garage. It's as it always was, the leather soft and clean, the radio still set to KTSU, the carpet on the driver's side with the same mud stain under the gas pedal from the last time Bernie drove the car, the last appointment she was able to drive herself to, last September, a few days before Ellie's birthday, when it had rained and rained and rained, Bernie stumbling into the house after dark, her whole body shaking. She knew then. He can still see the haunted look on her face and knows that she knew then what was coming. But she had soldiered on. For them, he wants to believe, and it's true too, but he also knows she did it for herself. Just as he knows he's got to do this now, to beg her forgiveness. “I'm sorry, B,” he says, sitting in the same spot he's been in so many times this past year, nights he thought this was his way out, engine idling, garage door sealed shut, his way back to her. “I can't wait,” he says. “I can't sit out this life for you, Bernie.” He takes a deep breath, pulling in what's left, the last he can smell of her, Dove soap and sandalwood. “I've got the kids, I've got Christmas, I've got the next day and the one after that.” He's crying by now, the tears fat and warm, rolling down his chin as he lays his head on the steering wheel. He's got to stay. Bernie said it herself. But what's harder to admit is that he
wants
to. He asks her to forgive him for staying behind, speaking the words out loud inside his wife's car, knowing, even as he does, that he's only talking to himself.

When he
leaves the garage, lugging the box of decorations, he spots a white van parked on the street in front of his house, its rear bumper blocking part of the driveway, the words
PLEASANTVILLE METHODIST CHURCH
written beneath the back windows. He stares at the white van, his mind doing somersaults, as he turns for the house. Inside, it's quiet, a thick silence.
He hears nothing, not a single sound, even after he calls his daughter's name. “El?” he says, setting down the box on one of the couch cushions. The TV in the den is still on, a rerun of
227
playing, the canned sitcom laughter echoing through the empty room. Jay doesn't hear his son either. “Ben,” he says, turning off the TV and walking through the kitchen, where their dinner is still sitting on the table, plates of chicken bones and buttered rice, even though Jay asked Ellie to clear the dishes before he went out to the garage. He knows almost instantly that something is wrong. He walks into the living room at the front of the house.