Chapter 18: Four Hundred and Twelve
The postcard came on the nineteenth of August.
Not a call. A postcard, printed on one side, addressed by machine, with a box checked in blue ink by a human being.
Your requested record is available for pickup. Balance due. Payment by cash, money order, or card.
Balance due, and then a handwritten figure in the space.
One dollar and twenty cents.
Four hundred and twelve pages at ten cents a page is forty-one dollars twenty. I had paid forty.
I stood in the front hall at Bertrand House with that postcard and did that division out loud, once.
Four hundred and twelve.
That was the first time I knew the number.
I want to write down what I did with the rest of that evening, because it was not what people expect.
I ate dinner. Baked chicken and rice, Yolanda's, Thursday.
I dried eight plates and four pans.
I went out to the porch and sat there until 9:40.
I did not tell one person in that building that my case file was sitting in a basement four blocks away with my name on a band around it.
Then I signed the book and went up and lay on the top bunk under the painted-shut window and did not sleep much.
The next morning I took my lunch hour and walked to the courthouse.
Forty-one steps down.
Bennie was not at window one. The woman at window one was about sixty and had a cardigan on in August.
I gave her the postcard. She went away for two minutes and came back carrying it with both arms.
That is the detail I have kept.
She carried it with both arms, against her front, the way you carry something that will slide if you use one.
It was in two paper bands, cross-wise, the kind with the gummed seam.
Plain white copy paper. No folder, no box, no envelope.
On top was a cover sheet with the case number, the caption, the date of reproduction, and a line that said PAGES: 412.
“One twenty,” she said.
I gave her two dollars. She gave me eighty cents.
She counted the eighty cents into my palm, dime by dime, and I stood there with four hundred and twelve pages under my left arm and eight dimes in my right hand.
“You need a bag?” she said.
“No.”
“It's going to rain.”
“It's four blocks.”
She reached under the counter and came up with a plastic grocery bag, folded flat.
She put it on the counter and did not look at me while she did it.
That is the second-kindest thing anybody did for me that year and she did it in about two seconds without saying anything.
I put the stack in the bag. It did not fit. The top three inches stood out.
Forty-one steps up.
I did not go back to the office. I had eighteen minutes left and I used them.
There is a copy shop on Calloway with a postal scale by the register, the kind where you put the thing on the plate and read the number.
I put the stack on it.
Three pounds, eleven ounces.
The kid behind the counter said, “You shipping that?”
“No. I just wanted the weight.”
He did not ask why. I have thought about that kid a few times.
Three pounds eleven ounces. Two and one eighth inches thick. Four hundred and twelve pages.
Everything the county had ever written down about the worst thing that ever happened, and it weighed less than a bag of sugar.
I walked back across Third Street and put it in the bottom drawer of the empty cabinet in the back room, because I did not want to carry it on the street twice in one day.
Then I ran two hundred and forty pages of somebody else's bond applications, and named the files, and put the folders back in the drawers in order, and clipped them.
At 1:45 I took my own file out of the cabinet and carried it home in the plastic bag.
Two and a half miles, in the rain, with my arm over the top of it.
At the house I put it in the metal locker at the foot of my bunk.
It did not fit under the dictionary, so I took the dictionary out.
It did not fit with the Bible in there either. I took the Bible out and put it on the hall table downstairs, where somebody eventually took it, which is how those move.
Four hundred and twelve pages went in flat on top of six sealed envelopes and one paralegal certificate.
I closed the locker door.
It still did not lock.
That was the twenty-second of August, a Friday, and I know it was a Friday because I paid Ivy that evening with wet money.