A Shotgun Wedding

I have thought and thought about a good story to start off with, pondering in my head all of the history of this place, but at lunch last week I overheard a conversation too interesting not to share.

My office sits on top of the downtown post office, a second floor perch with windows that open wide to a narrow balcony ledge on main street. It's a nice place to work and write from, as I can see people walking here and there, ducking into the shops, holding hands with their children as they stroll, or arguing with Lloyd Mathers, Confluence's one and only traffic officer, as he issues a parking ticket from his Easy-Go golf cart.

I happened to be looking out when I saw the familiar black Lincoln belonging to Judge Bexler pull into a parallel spot. The judge and I have known each other since he was appointed to his seat twelve years ago. I owed him a visit, so I grabbed my coat and went downstairs just in time to say hello. We headed across the street to Mary's for lunch.

We took our usual seats at the counter and gave our orders to June. She's a classy girl, June. Knows just what to say and when to say it. Anyway, the Judge and I always come here for a cheeseburger, so there's never much debating with a menu.

June went back to the kitchen, and Judge Bexler and I began to catch up. Bexler's a federal judge and a fly fisherman. There is an art to fly fishing. I know this only because I've seen the movie A River Runs Through It, and I use that as my visual reference any time we talk about fishing. I'm not much of a fly fisherman, but I always ask how the fish are biting.

"Too cold," he said. "River's too cold this time of year, and the fish are all sunk down."

The town, as you may or may not know, is in the shape of a V, and at its point, the Tinton River and the large creek that runs from Upper Point converge into a single, broad river. Everyone calls the latter the Upper Point River, but having seen it trickle in drought years, I can hardly think to call it more than a creek.

"When do you expect to get out there again?" I asked

"March," he said, as our cheeseburgers arrived. "Maybe March."

We talked further. His mother is in decling health. She lives up on the hill, and she is getting quite old. We bordered on a discussion involving politics, which I try to avoid with the Judge, since we belong to different parties and partisanship as of late hasn't been a civil subject nationally.

Nonetheless, we were halfway through our cheeseburgers when in through the door burst a rotund woman of maybe 30 years. I did not recognize her, which was fine, as she quickly introduced herself as Margaret Gladstone Brown.

"Judge Bexler, I have to see you!" she cried.

The Judge swiveled around in his chair. "Yes?"

"I've got to have a judge!" she continued, breathless. "The man at the courthouse said I'd find you here."

I caught a frustrated glance from Bexler. "He did?" the Judge replied. "I'll have to thank him. Now, Ms. Brown--"

"You can call me Margie," she corrected.

"Yes, Margie, if you don't mind, I'd be happy to see you in my chambers, but at the moment I'm somewhat predisposed with this gentleman," he pointed at me, "and a cheeseburger."

Tears of great substance sprang up from unseen wells, and poor Margie's lip shuddered. "Well..." she paused, stuttering over her words, "I'm...we...it's just that there's no time!"

Most males who've lived past the eighth grade have the keen sense of timing when a woman is close to bursting into sobs. The Judge, for better or worse, had little patience with these kinds of matters, as they were a common occurence in his courtroom. He turned back towards his lunch. Margie looked at me helplessly.

I decided to pipe in. "What do you mean, there's no time?"

"Ricky, my fiance," she said, wiping phlegm from the corners of her mouth, "is going to jail tonight, and we've got to be married before he goes away."

Now, I am a sucker for hearing the stories of how couples meet and court and elope, but I must admit that this was the first time I'd ever heard of such matrimony. "Ricky who?"

The Judge turned around, his eyebrows raised. "You're not talking about Ricky Whiteman, are you?"

"Yes, Judge Bexler. And I know that you're the one who's sending him away--"

"Why, woman!" the judge interrupted. "Are you sure you're wanting to marry Ricky Whiteman?"

Margie didn't say anything in response. She appeared about as taken with guilt as Rick was when the Judge sentenced him to five years for arson.

The story of Ricky Whiteman made a big splash in my local weekly, but perhaps you didn't hear about it where you live. There were passionate editorials penned by Confluence's citizens on either side of the matter of what to do with Ricky, and many coffee conversations here at Mary's brewed over whether he should be let off or locked up.

His guilt, I should point out, was never in question. His was merely a case of unfortunate and unpredictable consequence.

Ricky worked as a mailman in the tiny, two-room post office that sat off the highway ten miles north of the town limits. The office, which still carried the Confluence zip code and was always called Confluence North P.O., was one of the last points of civilization before the highway zig-zagged up and over Harold's Peak, and many of the folks who live up that way stop in to drop off their mail and talk with Zeke, the postmaster. Zeke is a funny Austrian fellow, but that is beside the point.

About seven months ago, though, Confluence had a mid-summer heat stroke. The temperature nearly baked every human who had the misfortune of working in a building without air conditioning--and there are a lot of those still left in these parts.

Well, the heat wasn't kind to critters, either. They came out of the woodwork, so to speak. The wildlife official from across the mountain had to come in and help our town vet tranquilize a bear found wandering through the village. The president of the bank called the police when he found three deer swimming in his back yard pool one morning. Mrs. Jarman, our town librarian, nearly had a heart attack when she discovered a rattlesnake cooling itself on the second rack of the biography shelves. And Confluence North P.O. had a minor infestation of skunks, which somehow crept in overnight and presented their unpleasant surprise to whomever the first person to open the post office happened to be.

Ricky Whiteman happened to catch the business end of a skunk one Monday morning last July, and having spent a considerable amount of time that evening in a lemon juice bath, he was angered beyond reproach Tuesday morning when he encountered the creatures once again.

That night, he went to his house and picked up a can of kerosene to bring back to the post office. His idea was to soak the baseboards around the heat register vents, where he suspected the skunks were gaining entrance to the office. The unpleasant fumes from the kerosene should drive them back, he thought.

And he was right. The next morning, there wasn't a skunk to be found in Confluence North P.O. Ricky propped open the doors for the rest of the day to let the place air out, but he did so with a bit of pride in his chest, pleased as he was with his ingenuity.

Thursday morning, though, as Ricky unlocked the back door to the filing room, he heard a clicking of little toenails on the opposite side of the mail counter. As he edged around the corner, his eyes had just enough time to see a flash of black tail flying vertical, and then he took a direct hit.

Ricky, now literally blinded by fury, stumbled back out of the post office, just as Zeke pulled in. "Vat on urt!?" he shouted. "Vat eez it?" Ricky, his face steaming with skunk goo, stumbled past towards his pick-up and reached for the ten-gauge shotgun he kept on the rack behind the driver's seat.

I doubt I need to explain the sheer physics of it to you, but for the sake of completion Ricky marched back into the post office, Zeke still shouting outside, stomped back around the corner where, over near the stamp machine, the offending skunk again reared its haunches to let its flagrance fly. Ricky pumped the shotgun, his teeth gritted, and pulled the trigger at point blank range, the discharge roaring through the building. He subsequently reduced the skunk into a dozen scattered bits.

Regrettably, though, rage knows few limits. And in Ricky's defense, getting skunked three times in one week will do something to a man's mind. So he pumped the shotgun and blasted away again, too close this time. The fire belching from the barrel of the weapon was just hot enough to ignite the baseboard, which had been soaked two days earlier with kerosene. Within moments, the entire wall was on fire, then the bulletin board pinned full of For Sale ads, then a bundle of Penny Savers, then three crates of mail, and finally the entire place was up in flames.

The scene following was quite a spectacle. Forty-five volunteer firemen (all 28 of Confluence's force and 17 from across the mountain) responded, as did the town's police force, whom Zeke had rightly summoned after he'd arrived to find his normally quiet colleague raging, shouting, and charging into their place of business with a Winchester.

Unfortunately for Ricky, the entire place burned to the ground, soaked in kerosene and dry as it was, and he soon found himself charged with felony arson, the destruction of United States property, mail tampering, and cruelty to animals. Since it was a federal case, Judge Bexler presided over the proceedings.

The Judge is a conscionable man, and I've never had much cause to question his reason. He was rather forgiving to Ricky, dropping the animal cruelty charge and the mail tampering charge. Jonas Parker defended him, and together they entered a guilty plea for arson. There was little else to do but send him away.

Which brings us back to the lunch counter at Mary's, where poor Margie had dissolved into a fit of weeping. She loved Ricky, she cried, and she wanted him to at least have the comfort and dignity of knowing he'd get to serve his time up at the penitentiary a married man. It'd give him something to look forward to.

Somehow, this pitiful woman inspired something I never expected. Before I knew it, the Judge, Margie, and I were climbing into the black Lincoln and driving to the town jail (I went out of sheer curiosity and because there had to be a witness). And there, in the cell next to the detox tank, Margaret Gladstone Brown and Richard Gerald Whiteman became lawfully wedded as wife and husband, she wearing a Rolling Stones t-shirt, and he in his prison orange.

It was the first wedding, I later wrote in the Confluence Spectator, I'd ever seen that actually began with a shotgun.