Read Online Gideon - 05 - Blind Judgement by Grif Stockley - Free Book Online Page A

percent black,” she tells me as if she were some big-city ward politician.
    “It took that high a percentage before they could really begin to take over.”
     
    I try not to sound snide, but I can’t help but comment, “You don’t seem quite as sympathetic to blacks as you were that summer before we went off to college.”
    It is as if I have slapped her in the face.
    “You don’t live here,” she begins automatically, but already I see color in her cheeks.
    “It’s changed; they’re violent, they use drugs…”
    “Whites do, too,” I bait her.
    “You can’t have forgotten how you used to rake the South over the coals for keeping blacks down.”
    “You’re absolutely right. I did,” she says flatly.
    “I must seem like a terrible hypocrite, don’t I?”
    She smiles, reminding me of how quickly she used to give in on the few occasions I convinced her that she was wrong. A delightful quality in anybody, but especially in a dogmatic eighteen-year-old from New Jersey. It made me respect her.
    “Thanks to you,” I say, winking at her, “I went off to save the world.
    Talk about hubris!”
    Her eyes shine with the memory of the power she had over me.
     
    “I really admired you for joining the Peace Corps. I would have written, but Dwight got jealous every time your name came up.”
    St. Dwight jealous? How nice!
    “I thought he was perfect,” I say maliciously. What an advantage the living have over the dead! Short-term, of course, but even if all you have is the last word, it’s still satisfying.
    “Every jewel has a flaw or two,” she says smugly.
    “He was pretty close to being a ten, though.”
    Every time she mentions how wonderful he was I want to puke. Why am I such a jerk? I had a good marriage. In the last few months though, thanks to a conversation with Sarah, I’ve begun to realize it wasn’t as perfect as I liked to think it was, but it was a lot better than I deserved. Yet it’s probably normal to idealize a dead spouse. It’s a hell of a lot easier to get along with a memory than the reality of someone’s day-to-day irritating habits.
    “Death’s a pisser, isn’t it?” I say, still feeling out of sorts.
    “What did Woody Alien say about it—that it was the hours that bothered him?” I laugh, knowing I am sounding needlessly cruel.
    “Who else is still around that I knew?” I ask, wondering if the entire town is in Paul’s hip pocket.
     
    “I’ve got my high school annual in the hall,” she answers and rises to get it when I nod.
    I look out the kitchen window into the backyard and notice the dark shapes of two magnificent trees, one pecan and the other a magnolia.
    How do people in places like west Texas and New Mexico stand to live without real trees? Nothing in nature is more satisfying. Could I live over here again? I don’t know. Angela returns with a dark gold book and sitting down again across from me, slides it across the table.
    “I keep forgetting you’re not in there.”
    “Thank goodness,” I say, glad I don’t have to be confronted with what thirty years has done to me.
    “You were handsome!” Angela exclaims.
    “And you’ve hardly changed.”
    “That’s silly,” I say, turning to Angela’s senior class. Actually, I am flattered beyond belief. I know she’s lying, but maybe not too much.
    “Is Gary Holt still here?” I ask, looking at a picture of a boyhood friend who went through the University of Arkansas and then returned to Bear Creek to run his father’s Ford dealership.
    Angela shakes her head.
    “Almost a year ago he sold it and moved to Memphis to become an
    Oldsmobile dealer. The day they left, Martha told me Cary didn’t want them to be the last white family in Bear Creek.”
    Damn. Gary’s family had lived in Bear Creek since it was founded after the Civil War. When people like him begin to move, you know the town is in trouble. With the aid of the yearbook I ask about others I would have graduated with, and Angela