A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [96]
At that point the judge allowed Rafferty the opportunity to ask Robbie questions only on the subject of his ability to understand the oath and answer the questions truthfully. Rafferty leaned against his desk and briefly fired away at the boy. I think even a six-year-old child would have sensed Rafferty’s need to display his superior intelligence. Rafferty spoke coolly, in no way attempting to soften his revulsion.
When Susan Dirks resumed her questioning she stood a few feet from the Mackessys. Her arms were folded over her flat chest. She had one foot out in front of her, her toe pointing up, her spike heel dug into the short nap of the carpet. “Can you tell us some of the things that you like to do best, your favorite things?”
“Nintendo. I ride my bike. My dad got me a G.I. Joe.” He listed his pleasures flatly, as if they didn’t really matter to him.
“Do you pretend with your G.I. Joe, Robbie?”
He sank down into Carol Mackessy for a minute. She held him around his middle and rested her chin on top of his head. “Yeah,” he said.
“Does your G.I. Joe, say, fight battles?”
He sat up straight all of a sudden, under his mother’s chin, making her head snap back. “I pretend that he’s fighting bad guys, like niggers and them and—” He was coming alive, looking past Mrs. Dirks for the first time. He pointed his finger and began moving it in an arc, spraying the benches, emptying his full magazine. “Ba bam, ba bam, ba bam, he wipes ’em out, blows up buildings—guts splatter, ugh, he got me—”
To the court reporter Rafferty said, “For the record, the witness is holding his hands in front of him, pointing his finger as if it were a gun, and moving it from his left to the right.”
Both Mrs. Dirks and Mrs. Mackessy had not been prepared for Robbie’s display. Mrs. Dirks had unfolded her arms and was holding her hands out in front of her like a choral director. Rafferty objected that the D.A. was signaling the witness. In any case it was not a gesture that Robbie understood. Mrs. Mackessy was trying to cope with her unexpected whiplash. She had had to quell her flash of anger. With her forearm and a balled fist she had pulled him hard into her belly.
“I see,” Susan said to Robbie. “You imagine all of that.”
“Yeah, but it ain’t real, no way. It ain’t even real on TV. It’s like they made up these pictures at a TV station and beam ’em into your house. It’s just pictures somebody drew.”
“When people get shot on television are they really dead, Robbie?”
“It’s people on there falling over. They get rich to do it.”
“So you pretend sometimes, and you watch TV, and then there are real-life times—”
“It’s real when you’re alive.”
“Did you ever tell a lie, a little lie to your mom or dad?”
“I try not to,” he said.
She must have smiled at him. You could hear a warmth in her response. “We all try not to tell lies. It’s hard sometimes though, isn’t it?”
“Uh huh,” he said, without moving his eyes from her feet.
“How do you feel if you tell your mom a little lie?”
“I took some candy once and she found out.”
“Did you lie at first about the candy?”
His nod was like an old man’s, an almost imperceptible downward movement of his jaw.
“How did you feel when you told the lie?”
“Real bad. After she—afterward I said I was sorry.”
“How do you know that you’re not to lie, Robbie? Who teaches you that sort of thing?”
“My mom. You can tell when someone’s telling you a true story and when it’s a lie. I learned that.”
“How can you tell?”
“A lie is real strange, like you can’t believe it, like you’d say, ‘Yeah, right.’ ”
It was hard to imagine Emma, in another year, being so forthcoming. Alice made the comment at one of our visits that Robbie was clearly a remarkable child, someone who understood, even at six, that being in the public eye made his life a story, that there was value in the story.
“What happens to you when you lie, Robbie?”
He moved his eyes from her foot to the floor of the witness box. “She gets mad.”
“People who lie get punished, don’t