The Blue Dress
The following is based on a true story. The names and some of the relationships and circumstances have been changed, and some of it is just plain bullsh-- from the writer's overheated imagination.
Each day she wore the same dress, a faded blue jean dress. She washed and pressed it each night and, when she appeared in the courtroom each morning, she retained a Sunday-best freshness, as if the dingy courtroom were a high altar, or the nearest approximation. She with her crispness, together with a bright eager sadness behind the eyes, had few alms to give, but in her heart she gave them to the god she knew was damn well listening, even if all the others weren't.
That damn prosecutor -- Freedman -- she cringed at the irony of the name. The reporters and their snide courtesy, their steaming pencils (tho' the girl with the grey smart suit and snappy red lipstick from the TV station -- Stefanie ? she was nice). The judge. She couldn't read him; in the hallways people said Hanley was OK. Maybe it would have been better to have Johnson, the one who'd had cancer the year before; he was said to be lenient. But at least it wasn't the one with the frightening booming voice she'd heard even from the hallway.
But at any rate none of it mattered.
HE was listening and HE had to know.
It was Jimmy who had bought her the dress, for her birthday the previous July. Something in her chest twitched at the memory. He'd been good then, doing better. The job at the mall; he'd gotten a haircut, shorn his dark Yurok hair to resemble the white kids at the high school. He had his mother's face, the same smooth light brown complexion, the same morose good looks. He'd even talked of going back and getting his GED in the fall. Each week gave her half his paycheck. Then the dress. It hadn't been just a birthday gift, or so it seemed to her, but rather the first installment on a promise.
So each day in the court, when the bailiffs brought in Jimmy and the other two boys, she sat up with that bright eager sadness, and that fresh-pressed blue dress, hoping to catch his eye. Sometimes she even brought along a Teddy Bear. It was Jimmy's too, a fragment of a fairly normal and happy life when they lived in Klamath. They should've stayed there. Jimmy had loved that bear, too, and sometimes took it with him when he and Uncle Cliff went salmon fishing during the season. Uncle Cliff, a pure and proud Yurok, would often get good and drunk, and spent most of those lazy, forgotten afternoons passed out on the riverbank, and Jimmy with his Bear would explore the riverbank and the nearby forest.
Jimmy had loved Uncle Cliff √ his big beer belly full of stories about elk hunting, his jokes about the Hupa over east in the valley. Jimmy had always preferred his uncle's company to his father, a brittle, ineffectual half breed who'd managed to win his wife's love through the force of his shy, pitiful loneliness.
At the time of his murder, Uncle Cliff had been clean and sober three months, or so Linda testified. There were no drugs or alcohol in his system, said the coroner's report. It was Linda that found him, come back and found him lying on the living room floor, soaked in a pool of his own blood from the stab wound in his chest. He died before the ambulance arrived.
The boys were arrested the next day. Investigators found the car, which had unfortuitously broken down on a back road not three miles from the reservation. Inside the car was the hunting knife, along with some dried blood on the floorboard. Later when they traced the car back to that girlfriend, they came upon Jimmy at home in his room asleep. The clothes had been put in the washing machine but for some reason the machine wasn't turned on, and they found the jacket still streaked with blood. They called her at work that afternoon. By then they'd already got the other two -- the cousin George from over in Rio Dell, and that scrawny white kid, the one they called TJ. She couldn't look at the other two boys without gritting her teeth. But she tried somewhere to feel sorry too, especially for George, who throughout the trial stared straight ahead and seemed truly frightened more than than the others. He had apparently only been driving the car, and claimed he only stepped in the house a moment.
Police had found a bag of mushrooms at the time of the arrest, and it had since been determined in testimony, by the girlfriend of TJ, been 'shrooming' when they entered the house.
She couldn't think of that without some indignation. They'd been out of their minds! And if it was that girlfriend's idea, like some said, why was she free? Why was her son there?
With the heat rising at her temples, she recalled the conferences with the DA's office, the psychiatrist, even some of the reporters, trying to impress upon them this fact. Why couldn't any of them understand? How could they trust the story of a little coke head like Suzie Whitethorn? And surely they all must have been so gone that night none of their stories could be trusted. And now they had all put it on Jimmy. Even George had. They all said it was him. Bullsh--! In her mind she stifled the obscenity, conscious as with her dress to appear always composed and clean, ready with her alms. But really! Couldn't they see it was all welfare Indian lies? She and her husband, with pride, had always worked and distanced themselves from reservation life. The judge would read the psychiatrist's report, Jimmy's history of delinquency (it started, she flinched, with that move to Eureka five years before; he'd been 15 then); the fights and frequent absences from school, the shoplifting arrest. But he would also see how he'd come out of it the past year, was doing better. The manager from the Sears had even come and said he was "conscientious, a good kid."And with that the plans for school, and the blue dress. Anyone could see -- any reasonable person -- that it just couldn't be Jimmy. But none of them were reasonable. Especially the prosecutor, Freedman. "This young man took more than money from Clifford Sherman," Freedman's voice rang with Biblical authority over the courtroom. "He took his life!" The words had appeared prominently in the local paper the next day. Everyone respected Freedman, said he was the county's best prosecutor, "may even run for DA someday." The gruesome details repeated over and over, in testimony and gobbled up greedily by the gallery, which included Linda and other survivors, and a group of wide-eyed, hilarious young girls from up at Humboldt State who were assigned to the trial as part of some class. The testimony and reports, which transformed Jimmy (and the other boys) into "masked figures," the three of them bursting into Uncle Cliff"s home that rainy December night just before Christmas. As the newspaper often reported, "the young men, one of them brandishing a knife, demanded money and drugs."
Uncle Clifford, like all tribal members, had recently received $10,000, an annual cut of the reservation's casino. It was Suzie's idea, or so it was alleged, but the boys' stories had early on got mixed up, so that later it came to be Jimmy's idea all along, just like the rest. It somehow had all got pushed on him. He was too nice, too trusting. He was absorbing it all, that was nice of him, he had a good heart, but it was all wrong! He couldn't have done it like they said.
Clifford, as part of the health kick, had at Linda's advice, set up a bank account in Arcata and had put the money there. They were planning to move sometime in the next year, maybe up the road to Eugene or Portland for a new start away from drinking and tribal gossip.
The unbelievable things they all said! It all stabbed at her heart, how Jimmy and the boys had demanded the money, and Clifford had protested, offering to let them search the house. They turned the place upside down, all of them stumbling a little, getting wilder and angrier. They managed to get just the money from Clifford's wallet, about $70, and an old dimebag of marijuana lying in a cupboard. All of them stormed out -- investigators estimated the boys were there all of twenty minutes. And Jimmy stopped in the doorway, then unbelievably spun around. He was still wearing the black mask and carrying the hunting knife. He plunged the knife full tilt into Uncle Clifford's chest, and with one stroke all the summers along the river banks along the Klamath were obliterated forever.
"These young men, in the spring of their lives," so Freedman droned on. "Cut down another man in the autumn of his life, but a man who'd hoped for a new start, a clean slate. These young men --"
The defense lawyers, all shabby-suited county PDs , were all really worthless, she decided. They seemed to offer scarcely any argument at all, but instead only a handful of mealy-mouthed technical objections and platitudes about "reasonable doubt." Reasonable! As if there were anything reasonable about any of it.
Once she accosted one of the reporters from the local daily.
"When are you people going to print the truth about my son?"
The reporter was one of those rushing upstarts fresh from university. It was his first murder trial,and he was obviously impressed with his own role in the drama. He took a step back, as though in a movie.
"And what truth would that be, Miss Troman?" he asked, with a touch of supercilious embarrassment.
"That my son is innocent! He is innocent!"
The reporter had looked startled for a moment, but recovered.
"Look, I only report it the way they call it in court. Don't take it up with me, take it up with your son's attorneys."
He shrugged helplessly, spun and scuttled away, shaking his head in theatrical fury.
She watched him walk away, but her attention was taken by her husband, looking even more wasted and ineffectual than even in his grey suit. He appeared at her side with a small plastic cup of coffee, bought upstairs at the cafeteria. "Sit down, Jeannie," he whispered. "They say it'll be another hour, but they may have a verdict this morning." Throughout the proceedings, he'd behaved as though in a wild dream. Always a bit invisible in public, he could only now sit patiently with his wife and her firm belief in her son's eventual vindication.
There was a hushed excitement in the hallway, as there always was when a verdict was anticipated. The young man from the daily was back, and walked past nodding ceremoniously but with something of the air of an injured animal. She watched him a moment. He couldn't be much older than Jimmy. If he could change places with her Jimmy -- for an hour maybe. Just for an hour, to sit there under the cold, dim light, under the prosecutor's terminal rhetoric, the rapacious eyes of the gallery, the spector of a 25-to-life sentence hovering in the background. Then he would know! He would seek with his eyes that figure sitting protectively behind, the blue dress that would bend to shield him from the deafening finality of the footfalls in the corridors, the frightening metallic slam of unseen iron, the sterile odor of scrubbed cement floors, the unsatisfactory odor of judgement. Just for one hour, a half hour! He would lay there in the dark and perhaps seek in it with all the force of being the feel of that blue dress, the reminder of time before sudden awful violence had intervened in their lives, and when Uncle Clifford still lived and was not a blood-stained figure on the floor of some impossible nightmare.
An hour later it was all over. When the verdict was delivered, she didn't understand the words. She pressed forward and one of the attorneys patted her, and even then she couldn't understand. They always spoke a strange language. Jimmy had looked at her, for just a moment, when they were taking the boys out. His morose handsome face had hardly changed, had hardly shown any expression throughout the trial, and now he slipped her only a wan smile, a slight nod, and he was gone. She followed him with her eyes, and then turned and saw the reporter, in a whirl of adventure, scribbling furiously while Freedman, with a cool, scholarly air, discussed his triumph. Yes, he would press for the maximum sentence ... extraordinarily cruel nature of the crime ... obviously premeditated ... bring the deceased the peace he and his family deserve, and peace to the community. It was more of the strange language she didn't understand. The reporter brushed by. He muttered an apology and hurried out to catch up with the public defenders for a quote. Everyone was out in the hall now, talking very loudly and excitedly. A big round of applause went up by the survivors when Freedman came out into the hall, and a few, including Linda, hugged him. Their faces were ectstatic, shining with cathartic relief.
No one looked over at another figure, standing alone in the hall, with a dry, ineffectual man hovering nearby. Or rather they all looked at her and pretended not to. A blue dress, swayed by an unseen wind, its edges already fading, hinting at a remote blackness.