they could watch us.
William led us into the examining room. “Missy, we need Joe Black down here—now.” He walked her to the pay phone in the hall and gave her a dime. Hearing her words made the nightmare more real to me. She stepped back into the room and leaned close to me. “Tommy, you must say absolutely nothing to these police.”
Exactly twelve minutes later, after I had donned a green surgical shirt and again lay on the examining table, a man I had never seen before suddenly appeared in the room. He wore khaki pants, a golf shirt, deck shoes, and a crimson-colored cap with an insignia “A” on it. He was not quite five feet, six inches tall, weighed less than 140 pounds, with a horseshoe-shaped fringe of white hair wrapped around his otherwise bald head. He smelled of Old Spice and cigars. He only raised his bushy white eyebrows at me, but when he looked at my grandmother, a smile of sweet love spread across his wrinkled old face. “There’s my beautiful Brigid McCarthy.” His voice was rich and gravelly.
“Oh, Joe.” She stood unsteadily, and they hugged. “Will you help Tommy?”
“Absolutely. Son, I’m Joe Black Pell.” His eyes flicked to the open door to the hallway and then returned to me. “I need to know what happened, and I’m going to ask you a few questions. You answer ‘yes,’ ‘no,’ or ‘I don’t know.’ Once I’ve finished, some police”—he pronounced it PO-leese—“are going to ask lotta questions. Don’t say anything, not one word, ’cept for yo’ name and home address, unless I say you can answer. You follow me, son?”
I tensed and nodded.
“Did you shoot first at this man?”
I shook my head.
“So, he shot at you and you fired back in self-defense, ain’t that right? Answer out loud.”
“Yes, sir.” But Jackie was still dead even though I tried to defend him.
“Is it yo’ gun, son?”
“Well, it was Granddaddy’s gun.” He had died suddenly last August, and Bebe had given me his car to drive back to school after Christmas. After Beth and I had a passionate reunion in the backseat, she whispered to me she hadn’t found her panties. Looking for them later, I groped granddaddy’s holstered pistol strapped to the underwire of the driver’s seat. The race troubles in 1963 and 1964 must have made him think he needed a gun in his car.
“Son, that’s more than yes or no. It was in your possession, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then it was yo’ gun. Did you take that gun in that store to try to start some trouble?”
“No!”
“Did you git that gun after this fella starting shootin’ at you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Son, did you drive into Yancey County trying to stir up some trouble over civil rights?”
“No, we were just—”
Joe Black Pell was holding up both hands, palms facing me. “Yes or no, son.”
“No.”
“Brigid, I’m going to go out here and talk to these troopers. Y’all stay put till I get back, and do not answer any questions if they sneak their way past me.”
Joe Black had been gone only a minute when Mama and Daddy rushed into the examining room. She took one look at me and hugged me, pressing my face into the graying blonde of her hair. I could smell her perfume and taste her tears. “Oh, thank God. Thank God.” Then she pushed me to arms’ length and inspected my shoulder and chest. “How bad are you hurt?”
“Not much. But Jackie, my friend—he died.”
Mama pulled me tight for at least a minute. I could feel her crying.
Daddy then moved close to me. I smelled the cigarettes that Mama had been trying to get him to quit. He had aged since Christmas—his hair was grayer and there were pouches under his eyes. He was six-three, almost as tall as I was, but his shoulders looked weighted toward the ground. He was massaging the knuckles of his right hand as he studied me, his brow knotted. “You all right, Tommy?” I nodded. He gave a relieved half-smile.
He looked at Bebe. “Why is Joe Black Pell out in the waiting room?”
“Tommy needed a lawyer, and Joe Black was johnny-on-the-spot. Did you see the state troopers?”
“Mama, you know Daddy hated Pell. I’m going to call Harv Foster and get him over here.”
She shook her head and gave him a hard look. “Buddy, your daddy is dead. It doesn’t matter now what he thinks, or thought. Joe is a smart and tough lawyer, and he’s here.”
My father grimaced. “Oh, Mama, Pell is just an ambulance chaser. You know that.”
She shook her head. “I know no such thing. He’s always been a great friend to me. Tommy needs help now. It would take hours to get Harv Foster over here—that is, if he took his fat rear end to bed sober, which I doubt.” She lowered her voice. “They say the Yancey County sheriff is on his way.”
Joe Black reentered. “Hey, Buddy, how you doin’, son?” he said to my father, who only nodded as Joe Black shook his hand. The lawyer turned to Bebe and reported he had been on the phone to the state attorney general. “Richmond Flowers is calling the judge down there to ask him to release Tommy to you, Buddy, so he won’t have to spend any time in their jail. ’Course, you’ll have to make bond.”
Bebe gave Daddy an I-told-you-so nod.
The little man looked up at Daddy. “I’ll go down there with you.” He read my father’s chilly reaction. “If you want me to.”
Daddy shook his head at Bebe, who was looking at him rather than at the lawyer when she said, “Joe Black, that would be very kind. We need you to do that.”
At 4 a.m. two Yancey County deputies appeared at the hospital. When they put my hands behind my back, I felt myself step away from my own body again. They put me in the back of a patrol car. With my hands shackled behind, I had to sit leaning forward for the forty-five minute ride to the jail. The only break from the panic of losing the use of my arms was the pain shooting up my cramping back. In the Yancey County sheriff’s office, time dragged. Mama, Daddy, and I were too exhausted to talk. A clerk took my fingerprints. As dawn broke, a parade of people traipsed through, and it took a while for me to realize they were coming by to look at the boy who had shot one of their neighbors.
Buford Kyle, I overheard, was in the hospital, shot up but surviving. Maybe when he was bandaged up they would haul him in for killing Jackie, and his neighbors would have someone else to stare at. I locked my eyes on the floor.
The justice of the peace read the charge against me: assault with a deadly weapon. When I heard him say, “including the possibility of ten years in jail,” I started to shake all over. Joe Black put his hand on my shoulder.
“Ain’t no way you going to get the maximum, son,” he said in a voice only I could hear. “Listen here, don’t even think about that. We going to do ever’ damn thing to make this trouble go away.” Then he stuck his
