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Back Porch
35
Vigilante
by Robert F. Weaver, Jr.
It was MAUGIE that pushed him over the edge.
MAUGIE: A vain, self-centered vanity tag on a yellow ‘72 Cadillac defiantly parked smack-dab between the plastic cobblestones reserved for the return of grocery carts in the Delchamps parking lot.
Seething, Loren could take no more. The line in the sand had been crossed. No longer, he vowed, could such arrogant disregard of the rights of ordinary, law abiding shoppers be allowed to continue. Nosir! Those holier than thou rules don’t apply to me, self-anointed parking lot deities must be stopped.
“MAUGIE,” he muttered, “you
die.” And the Fort Sumpter of his war was fired upon.
Although the battle of First MAUGIE ended in a draw when a parking lot attendant collecting carts scattered by lazy shoppers politely offered to help a senior citizen remove his grocery cart from the hood of a yellow Cadillac, the dormant seed of rebellion had sprouted. The objective was obvious. The strategy (we’ll fight it out on these lots if it takes all summer) was clear. Tactics alone, he realized stood between him and ultimate victory.
Let the long roll be sounded! Let loins be girded! The challenge beckoned, and the challenge, by the soul of Joshua, would not find him wanting.
The charge is ten counts of malicious mischief” intoned the judge. “How do you plead, Mr. Satterfield?”
“Not guilty, your honor,” came the response. “Nosir, I’m not guilty.” “Suit yourself, Mr. Satterfield,” sighed the judge. “Mr. Prosecutor,
do you wish to make an opening statement?”
The prosecutor, Mr. Antoine Thibideaux, so wished, and with trembling jowls and a countenance dark with moral outrage, proceeded to regale the jury of two housewives, two farmers, an accountant and a secretary (the charges were only misdemeanors) with his tale of a reign of terror which had swept the parking lots of the county for the past six months.
Mr. Thibideaux recounted an epidemic of deliberately flattened tires suffered by customers of Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Kroger, Delchamps and assorted drugstores and malls. One hundred and thirty-four such instances, he said, had been reported to law enforcement officials, and an additional eighty-seven victims had since come forward. The prosecutor proudly described the combined city/county task force which had been created to combat this scourge and which had nabbed the defendant, Loren Satterfield. The jurors were assured that, under all the evidence, they were certain to find the defendant guilty.
The jury, anxious to get to the juicy stuff smiled politely in the direction of Mr. Thibideaux when he huffed his way to his seat. Their eyebrows rose when old Roland McClelland, Esq., attorney for the defendant, deferred his opening statement.
The first ten witnesses for the prosecution were the ten owners of the ten automobiles targeted by the prosecutor in his charges against Loren Satterfield. Each testified that yes, he or she owned the vehicle in question; yes, the vehicle had been driven into the parking lot specified in the charge with all tires fully
inflated; yes, the vehicle was discovered to be suffering from two flat tires shortly thereafter; and no, permission had not been give to Mr. Satterfield to snip off the valve stems of the formally inflated tires.
On cross examination, Mr. McClelland elicited from such witness that yes, the Lincoln had been parked in a space for the handicapped without the requisite sticker, but the driver had been rushed; yes, the Buick had been parked in a fire lane, but it had been raining; yes, the Jaguar had been parked in the middle of two parking spaces, but who wants such a beautiful car marred by others’ doors?; etc., etc.
After ten repetitions of this litany, the jurors were beginning to study these witnesses with narrowed eyes. But did the prosecutor worry? Ha!
For his star witness, Antoine Thibideaux triumphantly summoned to the stand Deputy Conrad Meeks, who described for the jury his role in the city/county task force as well as his seventeen- grueling nights of stake-out at a Delchamps parking lot. On the seventeenth night, he said, diligence had reaped its reward. A shadowy figure with an aluminum walking cane had been observed passing in close proximity to a yellow Cadillac which had then developed a ten degree list to starboard. This, the deputy testified, gave him reasonable cause to believe the tires on the starboard side of the auto had been deprived of air pressure.
“Pretty sneaky,” he volunteered. Mr. McClelland objected. His objection was sustained, the jury was instructed to disregard, and the jury promptly disregarded the instruction to disregard. Any fool could tell the shadowy figure was pretty sneaky,