Free Gideon - 04 - Illegal Motion by Grif Stockley Page B

protest. When we sit down, she says, “You probably eat worse than I do, judging from what was in the refrigerator when I was home the last time.”
    A waiter, obviously a student, comes over to check out Sarah.
    “Would you like something to drink?” he says to me, unable to resist staring at my daughter.
    With Dade’s interview with his coach looming ahead of me, I resist ordering a beer, though I would love one.
    A sign of my less than successful coping skills now is that I drink more. Easy to recognize, but hard to do much about. The house has been too quiet with just me and Woogie. Several nights in the past year I have waked up on the couch in the den in the middle of the night after having an extra shot of bourbon I didn’t need or even want.
    “Iced tea,” I say reluctantly.
    “No beer?” Sarah asks, surprised. She orders a Coke.
    Each of us imagines the other wants alcohol. I explain that I have more work to do, but she steers the conversation away from the case and tells me about the project she’s working on for the professor who gave her a job this summer.
    “He’s writing up the results of this massive interdisciplinary study on the Arkansas Delta,” she says.
    “It’s a spin-off of the Delta Commission. You’ve heard of that, haven’t you?”
    I fiddle with my silverware, trying to concentrate.
    Some kind of economic development scheme to beef up that portion of the southern states the Mississippi runs through. No dice. The country is broke. Congress didn’t want to pay for it, and neither did the states who would supposedly benefit.
    “It didn’t really get off the ground, did it?” I ask, watching our waiter nudge another boy who looks our way.
    “It’s spawned enormous academic interest in the region,” Sarah says self-importantly, oblivious to the attention she is attracting.
    “It’s almost as if the portions of the South where slavery was the most concentrated have been punished. Parts of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana are like Third World countries. They’re desperately poor!”
    The boy brings our drinks and practically sits down at the table with us. I’ve never heard Sarah display the slightest intellectual interest in her courses. All she has cared about was the grade, not the subject matter.
    “Is the poverty a big surprise?” I comment.
    “We kidnapped people from a totally different culture and virtually turned them into farm animals until machines made them obsolete.”
    Sarah nods as if I’d said that two plus two equals four.
    “But that doesn’t explain why the Delta’s still statistically behind the rest of the country after the invention of tractors and cotton pickers and other laborsaving de vices,” she lectures me.
    “Why hasn’t the Delta prospered like the rest of the country? It’s intellectually dishonest to say that the South got behind after the Civil War and was raped during Reconstruction and never caught up. That’s a Southern myth. Besides, when one observes countries such as Germany and Japan after World War Two and Taiwan and South Korea today, it’s a radically different picture. Those countries are booming economically. But the Delta is virtually a wasteland. Why?”
    I think I’m supposed to ask. Every time I’ve mentioned Bear Creek in the last couple of years her eyes have glazed over. Small wonder: she’s heard all my boyhood stories a dozen times. Somebody, Professor Birdbath, or whatever his name is, has found a switch I didn’t know existed. I’m not sure I like it. She sounds ridiculous.
    “Observe” Germany. Can’t she and Birdbreath simply look at it? I powder my tea with two packets of Equal and say, “I give up. What’s wrong with us?”
    Sarah hasn’t even looked at the menu. She says, “The theory, being developed by Professor Beekman and others, and it’s only provisional, is that in places like the Delta, the need to control social relationships is more of a motivating factor than economic