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Show 30 through a school zone. He'd been laying for the party because usually there wouldn't have been two cars on that avenue all night, but god, what a speed trap. He stood back off the street with a stop watch and timed me from one intersection with an ardight up to the next lit intersection two blocks farther on, and him up toward the end of the next block. At that angle over that short distance a hard-of-hearing blind man could have guessed my speed with more accuracy, but he said I was guilty and I assumed I was. He must have been psychic, that cop, picking me out of the others. But several of my friends had got caught speeding and had gone up to see the chief of police, telling him they were sorry, they wouldn't do it again, and he'd torn up their tickets. A nice old guy. But on my way up the stairs of City Hall it came to me that I couldn't plead for special consideration. Who was I to subvert law and order? And even to demonstrate why my speed couldn't have been accurately measured seemed an undue challenge to authority. And unnecessary: I was on their side, wasn't I? The most I would have to do would be to slip away from school for an hour or so. I probably wouldn't even be given a warning. My innocence and uprightness would undoubtedly shine out and most likely that fat cop would have to apologize to me. Then I realized that the day I was supposed to appear came after school ended, when my father would expect me to be in the fields. I don't know how I overlooked that unless it was because in those days I felt the pressure of guilt so much and so constantly that I looked to confession not only to purge it but also, somehow, to restore me in the eyes of my father. Then he would be as affectionate and generous with me as I wanted to be with him. But as much as I desired that, I feared something else more, and I put off telling him until the very morning of the court. He didn't say much. He damped his jaw and drove me to town like a sheriff delivering his prisoner. Buck was there before us, joshing with the Chief in his office about the recent loss of his fourth tooth, stupid as usual. My father and I went on into the courtroom to wait and through the open door I saw the J.P. come into the Chief's office. He was very different from my father, short and wiry and smiling when he talked. "So you're here again, Buck?" he said, almost jolly. "Yes, sir," said Buck, "only this time it ain't my fault." "I've heard that before," said the J.P. with a grin, and they all laughed. His name was Castle and when he came on into the courtroom and nodded to my father I remembered that he was a farmer too, had a small place out east of town. He didn't smile in the courtroom. His face got tight-lipped and hardened into a grave mask, even a grim one-the same kind of man as my father in a way. He went right over to a big desk set up on a raised platform, and when he sat down behind it he wasn't short any longer, he was very much like my father. So when he said he'd take me first, that Buck didn't have anything better to do than wait anyUoioj 218 |