40.
It’s the night of the murder.
Mitchell enters the bar, flush with his promotion and new life. He’s been on the job for two weeks, settling in, and he likes
it here. He’s never lived or worked in a place with mostly Black faces, and had no idea how tense he had been before. Or how
relaxed he could feel.
He takes a stool at the bar, orders a beer, grinning at the bartender. The place is starting to fill up, but there is still
an empty stool next to him. An older woman sits at the end of the bar, drinking one of those huge, hideous concoctions with
eighteen shots of cheap booze and a maraschino cherry and an umbrella on top. A handwritten sign behind the bar says limit: one all-day sipper per customer. But most of the patrons are drinking beer.
Down the bar, a man is eating a burger with fries. The bar offers food, from the grill in back, but Mitchell doesn’t have
money for that right now. He’s focusing on getting ahead so he can furnish his new apartment. He didn’t bring much from Oregon.
Life is cheaper here, though, so his dollar will go farther. He’s excited. He wants to fix up his new place so he can start
dating. He’s heard there is a vibrant gay community in Atlanta. Black men, too. It’s a new start for him.
Someone puts a coin in the jukebox and chooses a song.
Steve Winwood. Mitchell hums and sways with the music.
He can hum and sway here and no one looks twice.
He thinks of his grandfather, and feels a pang for leaving him behind.
He thinks the old man would like it here, too.
But grandfather will never leave Chinook.
He has his bone, and this thought casts a pall on Mitchell’s happiness.
“Is this stool taken?”
He turns to see a man above him, behind him, and the two of them stare at each other in shock. In recognition.
“Hey!” Mitchell blurts.
Then he apologizes. “You’re the last person I expected to see here. What are you doing in Georgia?”
The man stares at him for a long moment. He takes the stool, almost unwillingly, his own mind a churn of thoughts, and the
biggest one is He cannot tell anyone he saw me.
A few beers later, Mitchell is telling a story. He is not sure if he has told anyone this story before. The man next to him
has turned into a blur. The bar is a blur. At the end of the bar, the old lady watches with gimlet eyes, as if laughing that
he cannot hold his liquor.
In truth, Mary Baldwin doesn’t like the look of the man talking to the happy young man. He gives her a bad feeling, and she
remembers him later, and describes him in detail to the police. There was a district attorney present for the interview, a
big man who seemed very interested in what she had to say. But they never followed up. Or maybe they called her and she didn’t
answer. That is very much a possibility, too.
The odd part is, Mitchell doesn’t feel like he’s had that much to drink—he’s had a few beers before.
When he was working at the factory in Portland, sometimes he’d go out with the others.
They did fun things, like axe-throwing and bowling and billiards.
He’s looking forward to making friends like that here.
He should be tipsy by now—the hours have passed, along with the beers, and he’s gotten up to pee a couple of times, and drunk some water—but he should not be as inebriated as he suddenly feels.
He gets a strange, cold and hot feeling all over.
For a moment, he thinks, If I were a girl, I’d think I’d been doped.
But the thought passes. He cannot hold on to any thought for long.
“Anyhow, I never expected to get to know you,” he tells the man next to him.
The bartender is suddenly before him. The man next to him, he has noticed, gets quiet when the bartender comes over. It’s
like he wants others to think they are strangers. Inside his cloud of intoxication, Mitchell doesn’t like how the man is acting.
Mary Baldwin watches. When the bartender isn’t looking, she adds cheap vodka from airline bottles to her giant glass. She
gets the bottles at the neighborhood liquor store—she steals them when the clerk isn’t looking. Eventually she will stop coming
to the bar, when it becomes easier, and cheaper, to just drink handles.
“I’m cutting you off,” the bartender is saying, and the thought crosses his mind that if Mitchell were a woman, he would suggest
he sleep it off in the back room. He doesn’t like the way the young man’s eyes are moving.
“Okay.” Mitchell is having a hard time moving his lips, too. His legs feel like they are barely attached to his body. At any
moment, his soul might fly away.
“Won’t let you drive, either.”
“I live close,” Mitchell hears himself say. It sounds like a voice speaking from far away. Like the ceiling.
“You work at that factory, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Never seen someone get drunk as easy as you.”
“I can walk. Let me take a piss first.”
He usually didn’t say words like piss. He had been raised too well for that. If the ghost of his mother was watching, she was screaming at him.
Surprisingly, his legs work well enough to walk. They carry him, woodenly, to the bathroom, and he returns, having even washed
his hands. He thinks he is feeling better.
“See?” he says to the bartender, but the bartender is not there. He is down the bar, serving a large group that has just come
in, and Mitchell is talking to empty air. The people from this group will later testify at the trial, confirming that they
saw Mitchell leave the bar, but little else.
No one else is aware of Mitchell except Mary Baldwin, the cook who finished his meal hours before and is now reading the handicapping
form, and Wes Rogers, who is in the corner, scoping everyone out, as is his habit. The cook is waiting to go home until he
knows that his wife will be there, after her late shift at the local hospital. Wes is thinking about following Mitchell out
and robbing him, but something tells him that the husky young man might be strong in a fight, even if he looks shit-clobbered.
Mitchell, finding that no one is talking to him, including the man he thought he knew, leaves. He finds himself in the parking
lot, confused. It is cooling off with night, and the fresh air feels startling. His truck is suddenly before him, and he reaches,
instinctively, for his keys.
The man waits until Mitchell leaves, and, with calculated ease, finishes his own beer. Fingering something in his pocket,
he heads for the door.
No one notices him leaving—except Mary Baldwin, the cook, and Wes Rogers. All would mention this fact later in their interviews. It probably meant nothing, they all said.
A sea of eerie green, darker with night. The feeling of a warm wind rushing in his window. A flickering light in the distance.
Mitchell knows he took a wrong turn. He has driven out of Union City without even realizing it. The intoxication comes in
waves. One moment he feels he can think, and his arms and legs seem to be working fine, and then minutes later he comes to
again, aware that he has blacked out and has been driving the whole time.
He has no idea how much time has passed. It might have been minutes, hours, or days. All he knows is that the road is straight,
it is impossibly dark out, and he is lost.
He is beginning to get scared. Someplace deep inside him, a voice cries out. This is not right, it says.
There, up ahead. It is a gas station.
In his relief, he feels sweat pop out all over him. He will stop here and get help.
Betty Dubois watches the young man almost fall out of his truck. The truck is old—she is used to that—but she sees that the
plates are not local. Neither is the drunk young man, clearly. She can tell that just from the color of his skin.
She thinks that maybe the fellow is high, too—there is something beyond booze in the jerky way he leaves his truck. He walks
like he is clearing hurdles. He looks at the concrete step outside as if it is a million feet high. He makes his way up the
six inches and finds the door handle. His face is beaded with sickly-looking sweat.
She expects him to fall over, but he does not.
Instead, in a brief moment of lucidity, he makes his way to the cooler and grabs a soda. He brings it to the counter. He tries
on a grin, but it looks more like a grimace.
She smiles cautiously at him. She takes in his handsome features, paralyzed with drink.
“You okay, son?” she asks. Where she lives, people still call Black men “boy,” but this Betty refuses to do. Any man under
a certain age is “son,” any girl “darling” or “honey.”
“Fine,” he rumbles, then clears his throat. He wipes dry lips coated with a white substance. His mouth is dry, and his stomach
heaves.
“You don’t look fine.”
Now he remembers why he is here—he is scared. And drunk.
“I’m not okay,” he tells her, his eyes wide. They are screaming at her, Something is wrong, and I cannot tell you what.
“I can see that,” she says, gently.
If he were a white man, Betty would call the local police, and they would take him to the station to dry out for a few hours.
They kept an empty cell in the back for just that. Every town had its collection of drunks, and Pickleweed was no different.
But that treatment was not for men like him. To tell the truth, it wasn’t safe for a lot of the locals, either. They might
find themselves charged with all sorts of crimes and end up in the state prison, working the crops. Everyone suspected that
the cops had quotas, but no one rebelled much against it—they were too convinced that without the police, there would be lawlessness.
Betty reflected that this might be true. It was a conundrum, all right.
“Did you use drugs, son?” she asks. At one time, Betty had served on the town’s auxiliary medical unit, created because they were so far from the closest hospital.
As a trained volunteer, Betty learned how to tend to overdose victims and give insulin and B vitamin shots to alcoholics having delirium tremens.
“No.” He shakes his head, confused.
He’s just drunk, she thinks. Nothing he can’t sleep off, but she can’t let him get back behind the wheel.
She gives it some thought, and decides, smiling.
“Tell you what,” she says, pushing the soda toward him. “Take this. It’s on me. You probably need some fluids. Have a little
nap, outside, in your truck. I’ll come wake you in a few hours, when you’re feeling better. Then I’ll tell you how to get
home.”
“Union City,” he remembers.
“See? We’ll get you there.”
“You will?” His mouth feels numb.
“Sure. You just need to sleep it off. I’ll watch over you, I promise. Everything will be fine.”
He is worried, even in his stupor. He turns around, looking over the brightly lit gas station with the jar of pickled eggs
next to the ropes of jerky and the jar of pickled hot sausage, and feels a vast disturbance of spirit. You are in the wrong place, that feeling tells him. It starts in his feet and climbs up his knees.
“Am I okay, ma’am?” he asks.
“You’ll be fine,” she reassures him, again. She pats the cold counter. “Put your keys here. Come on now.”
He digs for his keys, and, forgetting she had offered him the soda for free, grabs for his wallet. He pulls it out with numb
fingers.
Betty watches him carefully lay his keys and wallet on the counter. She starts pushing the wallet back, but he has already grabbed the soda and is weaving his way back to his truck. The step is harder on the way down. He lurches to his truck, opens the driver’s side door, and crawls inside.
In a few moments, she goes to check on him, peering through the crack in the window. He is already asleep.
In the dark down the road, in the shadows, the man is watching. He has pulled over and killed his lights. He sees Betty’s
white hair and smiles.
After a bit, he opens his door.