The Legal Limit Read online

  “So you don’t dispute that money and drugs changed hands?” Cardwell asked. “The commonwealth’s case is accurate?”

  “As far as it goes, yeah.” Gates’s face contracted. The single-syllable “yeah” leaked the first hint of deceit.

  Cardwell was a savvy lawyer. He waited, didn’t rush, allowed a confident silence before asking the tough, obvious question, and he posed it with a mixture of disbelief and astonishment that perfectly mirrored the sentiments of every juror. “What in the world were you thinking, Mr. Hunt? Can you tell these ladies and gentlemen what caused you to do what we all agree you did? Why were you swapping cocaine for money? Why in tarnation are you fighting this?”

  “Sure. Yes, sir. Like I said, I don’t dispute what’s been proved so far—it’s just not the whole story.”

  “Okay,” Cardwell replied. “You tell us the parts that have been omitted.”

  Gates bored in on the jury, but his set jaw and earnest eyes were too aggressive, too dramatic, and when he spoke, he was antsy, pushy, a grifter with a valise and shiny shoes. “Here’s what’s not being told. See, Barry, or Agent Simpson—I’m not sure which to call him—gave me the drugs. Gave ’em to me days before the arrest to hold as collateral. We were close friends, and I ran into him one evening at the Old Dominion, and he tells me how he’s up against it, in a jam because his kid’s sick and needs medical care and begs me to let him borrow a thousand dollars. Well, I’d sold my Corvette to Clyde Turner—”

  “Mr. Turner is here and prepared to testify, correct?” Cardwell interjected, helping as much as he was able.

  “Right. And he’ll confirm what I’m sayin’. So, you know, gee, he’s a friend and he’s down on his luck, so I loan him the money but, like anybody else, friend or not, I need to make sure I’m protected, so I asked for some collateral.”

  A juror in a coat and tie, the assistant manager of an oil company, was the first to anticipate the remainder of Gates’s defense, and his expression soured. He folded his arms across his chest and tipped back in his seat, began gazing at the ceiling.

  “What collateral did you receive?” the lawyer asked.

  “I know this sounds horrible, and I know I never should’ve done it but, well, all he had, or so he claimed, was this cocaine. I mean, I asked about car titles or jewelry or guns or whatever, but he said he was broke and in hock and was plannin’ to sell the drugs to help with his situation but needed the cash right then, pronto. So, stupid me, I took his coke and kept it, and a few days later he phoned and said he could repay me. We met at the fairgrounds, and I swear to every single person here today, I thought I was only returning his property and bein’ repaid. It was dumb on my part, but I was only tryin’ to help a friend. I realize I made a horrible mistake, and I apologize to the court and the citizens of our fine county and the police.”

  “This was a setup?” Cardwell emphasized.

  “Yes, sir. I was entrapped. I wasn’t in the habit of selling drugs.”

  Observing from the front row, Mason saw the commonwealth’s attorney smile and whisper something to the detective beside him. Cardwell grimaced—his mouth twitched and his eyes nearly shut—before regaining his composure. He asked a couple more questions and sat down, buttoning his jacket once he’d settled in his chair.

  The commonwealth’s attorney, a tenacious lawyer named Tony Black, asked for a conference with the judge, and when court was called back into session, the jury soon learned—since Gates had carelessly introduced the subject, opening the evidentiary door—that he was indeed a drug dealer, and a relatively active one to boot. After Gates was eviscerated on cross-examination, and after a comically uncomfortable appearance by Clyde Turner, the defense rested, and Black was then allowed to present evidence of Gates’s several other drug transactions, lining up baggie corners of coke on the railing in front of the jury box as he ticked off dates and places. To make matters worse, he’d managed to provoke Gates with his questions on cross, had gotten him riled and flustered, and Gates sat slumped and glowering during closing arguments, a pissy, ill-tempered churl misbehaving in front of the very people who were deciding his fate.

  While they were waiting for the jury to return, the sheriff was kind enough to permit Gates a taste of liberty. He sat—shackled at the ankles—with Mason on the blustery courthouse porch and worked on a cigarette, the smoke reinforced by the winter air when he exhaled, a deputy watching him from a distance. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said to Mason between drags. “But if there was one lie standin’ between you and jail, you’d damn sure tell it.”

  Mason checked to make sure the policeman wasn’t within earshot before he answered. “Yeah, well, I think I’d be more careful in selecting my material. The whole thing had the ring of an eight-year-old’s sandbox fantasy, kind of made up on the fly—‘then Superman and the Hulk find a secret potion that makes them invisible and they enlist Batman and his rocket ship so they can travel to outer space to fight the Klingons.’ That’s how it came off.”

  Gates laughed, a raucous, unchecked burst of pure amusement that caught Mason by surprise. “Well,” he said, giddy and frazzled, nothing left to lose, “I gave it a try. But I’m afraid you’re probably right. Thanks for bein’ with me and puttin’ up with my shit. You take care of Mom.” He tossed the cigarette onto the concrete and extinguished it with his heel. “You’re okay with me, right? I don’t want this to get us sideways with each other—we’ve been brothers too long for that.”

  “I’m fine,” Mason said. “I just hate that you’re in this mess.”

  “Not your fault, despite what I might’ve said when I was pissed off. Nobody could ask for a better brother. I appreciate it. And tell your beautiful wife I’m sorry I’ve kept you so tied up.”

  “Yeah.” Much of Mason’s aggravation had lifted. He leaned into his brother so their shoulders touched, bumped his knee with a fist. “Let’s hope for the best. Who knows what a jury’ll do.”

  “I’m ready to go inside,” Gates hollered to the officer.

  The jury sentenced him to a total of forty-four years, and as they filed back in to hear their verdict announced, every last one of them stared right at Gates, determined that he would see their mettle and what they thought of his lying and low behavior. Gates cursed when he heard the number, cursed out loud, and he vowed the men and women responsible for his sentence would most certainly pay a price when he was released, shouted it to them while the bailiff was clicking the cuffs around his wrists.

  Gary Shelor raised dairy cattle and lived on a farm that had been in his family for generations. The foreman of the panel, he stepped away from the jury area and stood in front of Gates after they’d been threatened: “I wish you would come looking for me. One-oh-seven Harrell Ridge Road’s where I’m at. I’ll be waitin’.” Almost every juror acknowledged Sadie Grace as they walked past her, and Justine Hiatt stopped and knelt and patted her on the arm.

  “I’m sorry, honey,” she said. “We just done what we thought was right. It isn’t your fault your son sold drugs.”

  “I know,” Sadie answered, weeping and gagging breaths, her hands trembling. “But why’d you have to take his whole life? It ain’t as if he murdered someone.”

  Chapter Four

  There’s a meanness in certain men that is bestial and set apart. It’s not the trite, commonplace variety born of an insult or a mouthy challenge, not the slap or fist or hasty knife that has its genesis in carousing and brown liquor and not the kind found in bullies, boyfriends who puncture their exes’ car tires or the boss who trifles with employees for sport. Some men, as they say in Patrick County, are just plumb mean, mean without reason, mean without provocation. Gates and Mason’s father, Curt Hunt, was such a man.

  Curt was tall and stout like his sons, handsome in a commanding way, black-haired, dark-eyed, rawboned. Three years older than Sadie Grace, he married her the October following her graduation from high school. She was enrolled in college, studying to be a nurse, barely ni
neteen, away from home for the first time, and she wound up pregnant, steadfastly refusing to accept her condition until she was a full month late, praying and cutting deals with the Good Lord right up to the moment the infirmary doctor gave her the news. It was 1956. Belly-sick and clutching three white carnations, she discovered herself at the courthouse in Dobson, North Carolina, with her parents and a girlfriend, the ceremony, as it were, conducted by a skinny old clerk who switched her names around when he asked if she intended to take Curt as her lawfully wedded husband. They’d dated for over a year, so it wasn’t the end of the world, but she confided to her happy-go-lucky aunt that she would miss school and the fun people and the life that was more seasoned and vital than the one she’d catch in Patrick County, a toddler on her jutted hip.

  Curt never hit Sadie Grace. Instead, he raved and cursed and destroyed doors, plates and furniture to the point she almost wished he’d go ahead and be done with it, her tiptoeing dread as painful as any beating he could possibly deliver. They’d been married three months when he first showed himself, and the worst of it was how the outbursts would always catch her cold, their sneaky cat’s feet. A year into the marriage, sitting at the dinner table, Gates napping in a playpen, eating the beans and weenies she’d prepared prior to leaving for a third-shift night at the plant, Sadie Grace inquired of Curt, who was saturating a slice of loaf bread in his buttermilk, whether he’d remembered to pay the light bill while he was in town. Curt stood and took his chair with both hands and broke it to pieces, first slamming it against the table—glasses shattering, the silverware airborne with each concussion—before finishing it off on the counter. Not content to quit there, he took a leg spindle and whipped it against the fridge until the wood finally splintered, the destruction, from beginning to end, steady and calculated rather than crazed. Then he snatched his coat and the car keys and stayed gone for two incommunicado days, stranding his wife and child since they owned only the single straight-shift Chevrolet.

  And yet Sadie Grace stayed. She stayed because she didn’t know what else to do, because she was afraid, because she was embarrassed, because she had no money and a dead-end job, because she was responsible for a baby boy, because it was an era before activists, vigils, shelters, Hollywood ribbons and laws worth a damn and because she became conditioned to violence in the same fashion a sideshow freak learns to tolerate the sharp point of a nail or some Holy Rollers become immune, bite by bite, to a rattlesnake’s venom. She worked at the plant, tended to Gates, cleaned their shotgun shack of a house and kept her distance from Curt, always on edge, never taking a whole breath. The best she had day to day was a phone call with her mama on the semiprivate line or a trip to buy groceries, where she might run into a friend and chat for a few moments without worrying about what kind of wrath a word or a pause between sentences could incite. Even her dull job became a sanctuary of sorts, the back and forth of the looms and the clacking of machines a monotonous comfort.

  Sex was a forced march. Curt would arrive home from his job as a diesel mechanic, carrying his silver thermos and rounded lunch pail, his shirttail neither tucked nor all the way loose, and tap her away from the stove or washing machine with a blunt “let’s go,” undoing his trousers as he spoke. For a couple years, she actually found a measure of hope in his demands. When he ordered her to take off her clothes, she understood exactly what he wanted, she felt odd relief he was still interested and she believed she could somehow tame him, screw the mercurial cruelty right out of him and fix their troubles. Nothing changed, though, except that Mason was born in 1960, three years after his brother. Sadie Grace told the doctor to make certain Mason would be the last.

  Gates and Mason, even as youngsters, did not enjoy the same safety from Curt’s physical side that their mother did. As soon as they were upright, smacks, wallops, kicks, spankings and belt lashings came from their blind sides, helter-skelter. Who knew when or why. Six months would pass quietly, calm—Curt would chuckle at Red Skelton’s black-and-white skits, repair a broken bicycle chain, cook venison steaks and quiz the boys about their schooling, rewarding them with a slingshot or Silly Putty or a single-blade pocketknife if their marks were satisfactory. Then he’d erupt twice in a week. Out of nowhere, Gates received a hellacious beating for taking a SunDrop cola from the fridge, despite getting permission from his mother. Another time, Curt chased him down and flogged him with the butt end of a fishing rod for no discernible reason; Curt just shot him a look and the boy ran and it was innate almost, the tug of feral instinct for the father to catch his son and flail away. Not surprisingly, the boys learned to scatter when Curt would cant his head and curl his lips and demand to know “what you lookin’ at?”

  It was Gates, growing and gangly, who rebelled first, trying to fight back. Curt would light into him, and Gates would kick and bite and claw and launch impotent punches that his father easily blocked, often catching the boy’s wrist and wrenching it until he took a knee. Young Gates became a furious, angry kid whose resistance and wild rushes made Curt that much worse, and Curt would frequently subdue him with a chokehold and taunt him: “You wanna hit me, boy? Hit me now—come on, let’s see you do somethin’.” During these melees his voice was always battened down, his words deliberate, pointed. Curt Hunt never took a drink of alcohol, never lost his temper in the sense he simply flew hot after reaching his limit and never seemed shamed by his violence.

  For a while, Sadie Grace would stand nearby and beg him to leave the children alone, but it didn’t take long before she was jumping in and wrapping herself around an arm or a leg, protecting her sons. Finally, she hit the bastard. It was summer of 1964, and Gates was seven, wearing a bathing suit and no shirt, no shoes, in the yard rolling a beach ball to Mason, and their father arrived home from his job, called hello to both his sons, and as best everyone could tell, grew angry because they weren’t inside the instant supper was ready forty-five minutes later.

  He stalked through the door and gave the top of Gates’s head a good whack, and Gates told him he was a shitpot, kicking him in the calf to underscore the elementary-school profanity. Curt went straight to the choke hold, trapping the boy’s windpipe in the crook of his arm and heaving him off the ground. Gates began sputtering and his eyes bulged and his face filled with blood and he pedaled the air with his naked feet. Sadie Grace came up from behind and whopped her husband in the rib cage with a cast-iron skillet, the warm grease splattering her hand and staining his blue shirt. He released Gates, ate his meal alone and warned Sadie Grace he’d kill her in her sleep if she ever got between him and his sons again. Then, pretty as you please, he tinkered in his shed, listened to the radio, ate a molasses biscuit and climbed into bed without washing up, his grimy boots and white socks discarded by the toilet. “Night, y’all” was all he had to say as he passed his family, timid on the sofa.

  Sadie Grace took to stashing the boys at her mother’s more and more, telling Curt they wanted to spend time with their grandma. The brothers slept in a tiny room on pallets made of quilts and cheap fuzzy blankets, in a house that smelled of analgesic rubs and musty clothes, while Sadie Grace stayed with Curt and made excuses and told lies and fell on her sword and watched the madman she’d married go from Jekyll to Hyde at the drop of a hat. Sex was rape for her by now. Curt would lead her to bed and roll her over and pound away, and it got so intolerable she’d half-puke, the acid burning her throat and seeping into her nose so that she had to cram it back down with a sick swallow and packed-in air.

  Gates and Mason pricked their fingers and made pacts and swore all kinds of oaths, and they shuttled between their home and their grandma’s and watched their mother do all she could to defend them when the pitched battles were fought, clinging to Curt’s waist or leg, hitting him with a double fist, pushing, shoving, whatever it took to free them or keep the torment to a minimum. Curt would just shuck her off or hold her at arm’s length and continue punishing his sons. It was Gates who got the brunt of it, and by the time he was ten, he never fa
iled to take a sacrificial stand in front of Mason and suffer a backhand or an ass whipping in an effort to stick the bull’s neck with a few lances or give the younger boy a running start. By rights, many of Gates’s welts and bruises were not his own.

  There came a day when the two brothers together—Gates at fourteen and sinewy, Mason on the cusp of adolescence—could give Curt a run for his money, and whether it was coincidence or not none of them ever knew, but on a glorious day in 1971, Curt Hunt didn’t come home from work, simply up and left. He didn’t even stop for his clothes or tools or arrowhead collection, hitting the road with a woman who kept the books at the garage. He never returned, and rumor had it they’d moved to South Carolina. No cards, no letters, no child support, no visits, no phone calls, no explanation. Dead gone. Mason’s classmates catcalled him and raked him with taunts, and he pummeled the bejesus out of one of the Fain kids after the little snot announced in the school cafeteria that Sadie Grace was now a prostitute, an eleven-year-old’s mixed-up dig that was dumb and inaccurate but to-the-marrow hurtful.

  Without Curt’s check, the family went from making ends meet to free lunches and blocks of gooey government cheese, though Sadie Grace signed up for welfare reluctantly and as a last resort and would drive to Mount Airy when she needed groceries so her friends and people she knew wouldn’t see her redeeming food-stamp coupons for canned beets and value packs of hamburger. She took in sewing on the side for extra cash, the boys received used clothes and hand-me-down shoes from the better-off families at the big Baptist church in Stuart, and the county kept a concerned eye on the Hunt boys, watching them with a generosity that was never condescending or meddlesome. When Sadie Grace honestly reported her seamstress earnings to Mrs. Tatum at the welfare office, they weren’t recorded for the state, and the family carried a steep tab at the drugstore, toward which Sadie was allowed to pay five dollars a month, an installment schedule that made it possible for her to keep her pride but had a negligible effect on her debt.