Promise of Safekeeping : A Novel (9781101553954) by Lisa Dale Page B

you?”
    “I didn’t say he was
bothering
me,” Eula said.
    “Well, he’s bothering me,” Leon said. He wasn’t a big man—nor did he seem to be any older than Arlen—but his eyes had an out-of-control luster that Arlen would later come to recognize as the precursor to violence. Designs of lightning bolts had been razored into the man’s hair above his ears. His hands were oversized for his smallish frame, but he held himself like an athlete. He leaned on Arlen’s car, overly cool. “Why don’t you get on out here and talk to me?”
    Arlen didn’t hesitate. He heard Eula making excuses, saying,
This is ridiculous
, and,
Leon, you leave him alone.
But the words barely registered. The movie went on. There was some amount of posturing and posing. Arlen could still remember the unflinching hardness of Leon’s eyes. People shouted for them to shut up or fight already. The eyewitness accounts were conflicting: Some said Arlen threw the first punch. Others said not. However it began, the outcome was clear: Leon was a broken, sniveling, and bloody mess on the ground.
    By the time the police came, Arlen was sweating and so pumped full of adrenaline that he couldn’t feel his knuckles beginning to swell. But he had regained enough of his composure to know he should be embarrassed. With Eula shaking her head and looking on, a cop put handcuffs on Arlen’s wrists and pushed him against his own car. He’d broken Leon’s nose, and an ambulance was on the way to take him to the hospital. Arlen was escorted to the police station, and though the cops had to do their job, Arlen had found them to be a mostly polite bunch with a screwed-up sense of humor. They said Arlen should apply to join the force. Leon had been giving them hell for a long time.
    The next day, Eula came to the house again with a Tupperware container full of homemade tomato soup and a batch of cookies. She was sweet as sweet could be, making small talk with his mother, explaining that Arlen hadn’t started it, painting a picture of Arlen as the great defender of women, children, and small animals everywhere. Arlen wasn’t sure his mother bought it, and he didn’t care. He’d fought for what he wanted. That evening, when they sat watching the sky go dark and Eula kissed him, Arlen would have fought a thousand more battles for her to have her kiss again.
    It was only later, when he was sitting in the interrogation room at some police station in a city he didn’t know very well, that the true price of winning Eula’s affection had become clear. The detective told him:
Tell us about the guy you beat up down in Virginia two years ago.
The cops stood looking at a folder that Arlen wasn’t allowed to see, smirking at one another and saying,
You put this guy in the hospital
, and,
Really did a number on him
. Arlen hadn’t known how to defend himself. He was the stranger who had shown up in town just when the senator’s wife had turned up dead. And someone in the building where Arlen’s cousin lived swore she “recognized” Arlen from the police sketch that had been running on a perpetual loop on the local news. The cops called Arlen’s tiff withLeon a
prior
, which Arlen knew was not a good thing because to say he had a prior meant that they thought of that fight as
the crime prior to the current crime.
Slowly, the notion of being innocent until proven guilty was revealed to be untrue in countless little ways.
    Once he was firmly entrenched in prison life, Arlen thought back to the fight, to the smell of summer earth, grass, popcorn, and car exhaust. To the way Eula had looked at him when they sat together on his mother’s porch, her girl’s eyes wide with apology and pleasure too. He got to spend two years with Eula, got to make love to her for the first time and hold her afterward, got to marry her, got to move their few belongings into an empty and waiting house. And he knew if he had to choose between not having Eula or having the fight all over