16.
Ruby found Alonzo Pettibone living down a forgotten lane on the far side of the county, on the edge of a vast, nameless swamp.
Inhaling the air was like breathing in green.
The retired animal control officer was now in his sixties, and sitting at the edge of a mossy creek, repairing a fishing reel.
A few minutes later, Ruby was sitting on a stump nearby, explaining the reason for her visit.
A rowboat waited at the shore, with a tin bucket at the bottom.
“Join me?” he asked, and she nodded.
In moments, they were pushing off from the muddy shore, her feet firmly planted in the bottom of the rough rowboat. He carried
the reel, with green fishing line as thick as rope, and at the end was a hook that could catch a shark. The tin can was filled
with doughballs, smelling richly of old bacon grease.
He steered the boat down the brackish creek. They entered a deep swamp, flocked with hummocks of weedy land. Trees grew from
the water, as dark as darts. In the open areas, the water ran so deep she could feel it. It was like floating above space.
She looked down into the black water and thought of caves.
Pettibone carefully baited his massive hook with a doughball. He lowered the line into the deep water, and they watched it
disappear.
“Why did you bring me here?” she asked.
“Seems like the best place to talk,” he said.
“You don’t feel safe at home?”
“What is home? I thought about moving away—after it happened,” he said, and she knew exactly what he was talking about. A chill went through her, even on this sultry day.
“How come you didn’t?”
“Same thing is going to happen anywhere.”
“Did you ever tell anyone?”
“I thought of that, too—yes. I did tell. The few others like me. There were a handful of us then, not many more now. You know,
at first I wondered why they hired me. I was thinking, maybe animal control wants to make change. Maybe the powers that be
decided a Black man could do the job better. Or get shot trying.”
“What kind of cases did you get?”
“Mostly animal neglect, out here. People tie their dogs up outside. It gets too hot. Dog knocks over the bowl, old man is
inside, poor beast dies of thirst. Or they got a litter and no buyers, toss them out in the swamp. Why, some even say a skinned
puppy makes the best catfish bait. You can snag a big one with that.”
He had been counting the feet with the reel. Eventually the line stopped, and she imagined the redolent doughball on the bottom
of the deep hole, sending out feelers of scent.
“Once they got over the shock of my Black face, most people were actually nice. Of course, I knew how to do my job.” His eyes
shot her way. “I knew how to talk to the old ladies trying to sell you candles while the house reeked like dead cat. Or the
bubbas telling you they cut their dog’s tails and ears themselves with kitchen shears, cause everyone knows dogs don’t feel
no pain.”
She listened, feeling the soft air.
“You’re quiet,” he said.
“Did most of your cases go to trial?”
“No. I’d slap a fine on most people, try to talk some sense to them. They didn’t take umbrage the way they might have with a white officer. I was just Black man, harping on about pets—a loony, as far as they were concerned. They knew the score. I wasn’t a threat.”
“Was Mitchell?”
“Of course not. He was an excuse. Not a threat.”
“Tell me about that day at the courthouse, if you don’t mind.”
“Always wondered if someone would figure it out.”
“Figure out what, exactly?”
He watched the line, tugged at it experimentally.
“You going to subpoena me?”
“Probably not,” she said. “In the rare cases we can get the governor to call off an execution, the state likes to settle behind
closed doors. No one likes egg on their face. They look for a way to make it all go away.”
“You think you can get our governor to call it off?”
She didn’t lie. “No. But maybe there’s another way.”
“It’s not the governor I’m worried about.”
“The district attorney? Jerrod Tinsley?”
“Maybe. How long before your guy dies?”
“Nine days. That includes today and the day of execution.”
She had spent that day in a rush, tracking down the other officers from the dockets. You never knew, she often told herself:
Many times it was the witness she didn’t expect to who delivered. But none of them were helpful. Some were downright rude.
The officers who had interrogated Mitchell had refused to speak to her.
“What time is he slated for?”
“Morning.”
“So you don’t really got nine days.”
She smiled. “Thanks for reminding me.”
He thought for a bit, wiping a bug off his check. The line trembled just a bit, and he tugged at it gently.
“Just some little fish,” he said, scornfully.
“Was it in the conference room?” she asked.
“Yeah. I went there after I testified, while the jury was deliberating. Bad animal neglect case. You ever smell a bunch of
dead ferrets? Well, you don’t wanna. I remember sitting in there, the case so bright in my mind I could smell those animals
then, and I can now. The lady on trial, she put those critters in cages and watched them starve. She could have fed them but
didn’t—that’s what got me then and gets me now. I doubt they ever got that smell out of the walls. It was getting late—if
the jury didn’t come back soon, I was sure my case would adjourn for the day. As a matter of fact, I was getting ready to
head back down that elevator and go check in the courtroom. That’s when I heard voices, and that district attorney came in.”
The line trembled.
“Tinsley?”
“Yup. He had a man with him. In my work, I met mostly the beat cops, including those two fuckers that beat Mitchell up. I
remember seeing your client being dragged to court. The bruises had healed by then, but I could tell by the look in his eye
what they had done—and by the look in their eyes, too. Smug pricks. This guy with the DA wasn’t a cop. He was a fellow I’d
never seen before. He was wearing a courthouse security uniform, but something about it just didn’t seem right to me. I remember
that. Anyhow, Tinsley saw me sitting there, and told me to shove off. He didn’t say it in those words, but close. His eyes
went right to those exhibit boxes. I knew. I knew in that moment what he was planning to do.”
“How did you know?”
“You ever been a district attorney?”
“No.”
“Case like that, once they finish, they want the glory, not the aftermath. If they had any doubts about that evidence, they
knew better than to let it get to storage. Getting rid of it? Solves a lot of problems.”
The line trembled harder, but he did nothing. He appeared lost in thought, in memory.
“I told myself it wasn’t my business, that Mitchell’s defense attorney could handle things. I was lying to myself, and I knew
it. I left the conference room, and when I got back down to the courtroom, the jury was back. They acquitted her, by the way.
My word against hers. That was the day I figured out the real reason they’d hired me.”
She waited for him to tell her.
“They didn’t want change.”
She thought about what he had said. It was his word against Tinsley’s, and she knew who would be believed.
“Did you hear again from the district attorney?”
“Why, I sure did! How did you know, miss?” His voice was sardonic.
The line stopped trembling. Now it went taut.
Still he did nothing.
“You know, down there, right now, there’s a mile-long catfish with a doughball in his stomach. He’s starting to feel peculiar.
Soon I’ll pull the reel, and once it really goes sharp, he’ll know what pain is.”
He gave her a look. “It was a few years later, after it came out on appeal that the evidence was missing. I get this Christmas
card in the mail. Don’t say nothing on the inside. Just a picture on the front.”
He picked up the reel, and suddenly yanked. The catfish fought, but soon it came, Pettibone wrangling it from the deep, his arms trembling with its weight. It was as long as his arm, yellowish, with a short, snubbed snout, sad eyes, and a hairy chin. It looked at her like an old man facing death.
“What was the picture?”
“You’re smart, you know. You know these things just like I used to know how to talk to the old ladies. I remember thinking
he must have had to search for it. It had a picture of ferrets on the front.”
That night, Ruby and Alonzo Pettibone ate sizzling catfish, served with gritty cornbread cooked in a cast-iron pan, and iced
tea from a jar, and just before the menu went completely Georgia, he added a mound of storebought macaroni salad, saying,
sacrilegiously, that it tasted better than homemade to him.
The smoke from the fire outside drove away the bugs, and she had grown so used to the sound of cicadas that she almost no
longer heard them. He told her of his wife, now passed, and she told him about a few men she had dated, but she really didn’t
think she had it in her to be in a relationship.
“No problem with that,” he said.
“Were you and your wife happy?”
He toyed with his fish. “I can’t say we really were. She was a different woman. I always felt bad for her. The world never
quite made sense to her.” He ate a chunk of fish, pulled a bone from his mouth. “I was glad we didn’t have kids.”
The world suddenly felt like it was reaching out around them, holding them tenderly in its cupped hand. Ruby relished this
feeling. This moment in time, sitting at a fire with a man she had just met, who had caught and cooked a wild fish for her,
and the smell of it steaming up in the air, the soft, gritty, dry corn cake.
“This would be good with jam,” she said, and he laughed.
He was quiet for a bit, stirring the fire with a stick.
He returned to his plate. “I don’t go out much.
The market, the doctor. But one day I had to go all the way into Pickleweed, to the hardware store there, for some new fishing line.
I usually avoid that town, especially now that I’m out of uniform.
Anyhow, I saw this one fellow walk in. I’m pretty sure it was that same fellow.
You know that older actor in Men in Black? ”
“Tommy Lee Jones.”
“Spitting image of him. Only not so nice around the eyes.”
Ruby spent the night in Alonzo Pettibone’s cluttered living room, her back curling to fit the collapsed couch. She had spent
the night on many a couch during her cases. Mothers, most often, the very air filled with their grief, asked her to stay.
Sometimes she was invited to sleep in a missing person’s room, which she always declined to do. The energy there was too strong.
But she took a couch, not just because she often couldn’t afford a motel room—her death row cases were capped at indigent
rates—but because it was a solace to the family, to know she was working. They wanted to show her pictures. They wanted her
to feel their feelings.
They didn’t know they didn’t need to ask, she thought, as the night crawled from the swamp and she heard Alonzo Pettibone’s
sleep mutters from the bedroom through the wall. In the narrow kitchen, the remains of their supper were piled high in the
sink. His stove held a can of bacon grease, and the cast-iron pan held the crumbs of cornbread. A fish skeleton rose up in
the dark, making her think of the people she had saved—and those she had not.
In the middle of the night, unable to sleep, feeling the pokey springs of the couch, she made her way, barefoot, silently, out the unlocked front door.
Officer Pettibone understood the crucial fact about life: Locks did nothing when you were unsafe.
She stood at the edge of the swamp, breathing in the rich, fecund, living air.
Bullfrogs plopped into the water and night birds coasted among the dark trees, which merged with the black sky.
She felt the old sadness whipping up from the past, and she knew that it would always be a part of her, because a sadness
like the one she carried could not be put down. It would bowl the world over if she did. Instead, she reached with her bare
toes to touch the rowboat, moored there in the shallows. Night creatures swam out there, she knew. There were deep caves.
There were women missing, and one of them was her mother.