Summary Trials

This story addresses alcohol abuse and LGBTQ issues.

Summary Trials

By

Karen Meyers

On the afternoon of August third, 2023, two days after I moved to my current address, I took a break from setting things up and went outside to feel the summer breeze on my skin. 

My neighbors' shrubs block my view of the uphill sidewalk until pedestrians are about twenty feet away. So, I heard a woman weeping before she walked into my sight and collapsed.

I went over and spoke to her, but she was out. She was young, teenager slender, with waist length hair, dressed in a crop top and flowery, below the belly button harem pants. I wondered whether she lived nearby. I had not yet met any of my neighbors. 

I called 911. I live one block from the county hospital, so I expected an ambulance. Instead, I got a cop.

But before anyone arrived, the young woman woke up and began walking unsteadily down the street. I didn't think she should go wandering around town in whatever condition she was in, so I chased her, asking if she needed help. She came back with me and started to cry again. 

She had been drinking. A lot. She was so upset with herself. She had kissed a girl and she was afraid her boyfriend, whom she loved so much, would break up with her over that. What would she do, what would she do?

I got out my phone and asked her if there was someone she could call. Yes, she'd like to call her mom. 

That was when the cop arrived.

Although Laurel Center, PA has only six police officers, I had never met this one. I liked him right away. "Now, I don't want you to beat yourself up about that," he said gently, when she wailed to him how drunk she was. 

He asked her age. She was 14. He asked where she had come from and she pointed to a house three doors away, on the other side of the street. The cop gave a slight eye roll in my direction. I sent one back. I had already witnessed a multi-person outdoor screaming argument at that address. There were a lot of admonitions from all sides to shut up or the cops would come, but no one listened and they did.

Which might have alarmed me, having just signed a year lease on my house, but I have moved enough times to realize how easy it is to run across the worst people in a neighborhood before you meet the nice ones. The preponderance of small but well maintained houses and manicured yards demonstrated a high degree of basic civic order. As well as let me know what would be expected of me.

Since the girl not only acted intoxicated but told us several times that she was, the cop didn't have any choice but to take her to the station. I was willing to bet he wished, as I did, that he had been too late, that she had reached her mother, that her mother had already come and taken her home. But it would have been a forlorn hope. She said her family lived about a forty-five minute drive from town and her mother might be out working the farm, away from the phone. They only had a landline, there being no cell service in that part of the county.

I wondered who brought her over here. She was a tall girl; she had probably been driving the family tractor for a couple of years. But she couldn't legally take the family car on the road. The only public transportation where we live is the free bus that takes old folks to the senior center for lunch.

The cop stopped by to talk the next day. He said he thought her family probably wanted to forget about the whole thing, but that if they decided to contest the charges, I might be called as a witness. Would I be willing to testify? Yes, I said, I would like to help her. I added that I hoped there would be consequences for the people who had gotten the poor child into this mess.

He sighed and shook his head. "That is so hard to prove," he said. "People get together and lie, there's never any evidence. But we try."

Eighteen months later, I received a subpoena to appear as a witness at a summary trial a few weeks later, concerning "Public Drunkenness and Similar Misconduct". 

In Pennsylvania (I don't know about the rest of the world), a summary trial is a trial without a jury, when the facts of the case are not in dispute.

I knew this from before. My late husband and I had a next door neighbor who, when he came home every Friday night from his gas field job, told his teenage daughter to clean off his two Akitas’ week’s worth of poop, which she allowed to accumulate on their back deck. She took to throwing the stuff over our fence into our vegetable garden. We told her to stop and she told us, no, her father had ordered her to do it. We were pretty sure he had not told her to do that exact thing, but we couldn’t manage to talk to the guy.

The dogs often got out and cruised the streets. So, we were not the only people that household annoyed. But no matter who knocked on the door, us, neighbors, police, no one ever opened it.

Most of the neighborhood thought the daughter lived alone during the week, but she lived with an aunt. The aunt was extremely reclusive. In the six months they lived there, we only saw the aunt once, standing on the deck, staring at nothing. When we said hello to her, she turned and silently went back inside. 

The daughter and/or the aunt found and destroyed the notes to the father that we and the police left. So, we had to file a complaint, which eventually resulted in the father going to court for a summary trial. My husband and I were subpoena'd, but did not have to appear, once we explained to the officer in charge that we weren't seeking revenge, we had just wanted them to clean up, for goodness sake. By then the Akitas had gone to live somewhere else.

From then on, until they all abruptly moved away a few months later, the daughter decided I was her friend. When I was working in the garden, she would come out and chat with me about her future. Sometimes she wanted to become a hairdresser, sometimes a dental hygienist. I was relieved to conclude from the latter that she must sometimes go to a dentist.

When I received this new subpoena, I immediately thought of the incident the August before last. But the case was labeled Commonwealth of Pennsylvania v. Bruce Warden. Who was Bruce Warden?

 My own name, which is a common one, was not spelled correctly on the subpoena. So, I called the courthouse to see if I had received it by mistake. "Oh, no, Karen, that was for you," said the secretary, who seemed to know me. This was not surprising. Laurel Center, our county seat and the largest town for many miles, contains only thirty-five hundred people. Not that long ago, I had several contacts with the courthouse in a short time. Getting my husband a handicapped hanger for the car, registering his death and his will, selling our house. I was in a fog for a lot of it, so people there remembered me better than I remembered them. The secretary said she couldn't discuss the case with me, though.

I wondered if, after all this time, Bruce Warden had been identified as the person under whose auspices my visitor had gotten in trouble. If so, I saw it might indeed have been tough to prove. The house up the street hosted a rotating cast of lowlives. The landlord had finally put the house up for sale to get rid of them. No one in the neighborhood knew or cared where they'd gone. 

But maybe law enforcement did. Maybe Bruce Warden specialized in underage parties. Maybe over time they accumulated a body of evidence, of which my own testimony would be a small part. 

I googled Bruce Warden. There seemed to be no one with that name within a hundred mile radius. I asked my friend Holly, who could be one of those fictional old lady detectives, except she has Gen Z level internet skills, to look for him, too, and she couldn't find him either. Maybe it was an alias? But surely they would put his legal name on the subpoena. Or was his name misspelled, too? Hence his un-googleability?

Then I wondered whether this was a case against the girl in my yard after all, whether Bruce was her father and the summons was under his name because she's a minor? Or was Bruce her own name, one of those boys' names that have become girls' names? It always takes me a while to catch up to that particular cultural shift. And maybe she doesn't have an online presence because she's still young and her parents restrict her computer use? Maybe the whole family is not online. Even landline service is sketchy in parts of Laurel County.

The cop must have asked her name when we met, but I’m bad with names. I forgot it right away. Though I thought an unusual name would have come back to me when I saw it again. Though I had to admit, my mind was not at its best that day, month or year. 

Whatever her name was, she was getting towards the age when she would be wanting a driver's license and maybe applying to colleges. She and her family might just have realized what a good idea it would be to try and get her criminal record expunged.

I pondered all this during the weeks that followed.

Coming as I do from a family that is attentive to matters of dress, I worried about what to wear. My closet contains nothing my relatives would deem court appropriate. I settled on black jeans and the elegant, if I do say so, old green velvet shirt I wear to art openings. (Yes, we have a little art center in our little town and we have art shows and the shows have openings.) I still have some ancient fashion boots, which I wore instead of sneakers. So, I was terribly overdressed. The jeans were okay, but all non-uniformed courthouse personnel were wearing Buffalo Bills sweatshirts. Lawyers and judges included. The guards were talking about the Bills being in the playoffs as I went through security. I had no idea.

So, you could definitely tell I'm Not From Here, as people often mention. If I reply something like, "Well, I'm from here now," they just give me one of those looks. I hoped my appearance would not prejudice the judge against my testimony. 

I was sent to wait in the lobby, which is paneled in dark wood, with built in benches along the back wall. Cue Perry Mason, though he'd look all wrong, too. The arresting officer from my back yard was waiting for me, partially hidden behind the Liberty Bell replica that dominates the room. 

He explained that the defendant and her parents were going to meet with him and the judge to try to work out a plea deal. If that fell through, there would be a trial. Only then would I be called on. So, at last, I knew what I was doing here. I said fine, I'll wait.

"By the way, who is Bruce Warden?" I asked.

"That's the name on her birth certificate," he said. So, after all, it was one of those repurposed names. I congratulated myself on a good guess until he added, "She's biologically male." 

My mouth fell open.

"I know," said the officer. "I talked to her for two hours and I didn't figure it out. Her mother told me."

It's not as though I had never met a trans person. I retired to Laurel Center after living in large cities for forty years. But, as I said to the cop, it's unusual around here, and he said, "Yeah, but, well, to each his own." I said I agreed with that and we sat quietly until the family walked in.

They were From Here for sure. They all wore work clothes. They must have come straight from morning chores. She had grown even taller and more willowy. She glided in like a dancer, no mean feat in barn boots. Her hair was in an elegant messy bun, and she had learned a lot about how to use makeup. Definitely more than I know. Her parents, slightly behind, watched her, every look, every step conveying as pure a love as I have ever seen.

I doubt they saw me. I am small and I was behind the Liberty Bell. They were focussed on each other. The cop got up and followed them down the hall.

Soon, he came back to tell me it was settled. She would go out with the orange vest people and pick up trash for a few weekends and be done. Everybody was signing papers now. He left in a hurry, so I never got around to asking what her real name is. 

I didn't stay to wish her well. I thought she might be just as glad never to see me again, now I had a different understanding of her embarrassment over kissing a girl. Though she might not remember that she told me that. Or that she did it. Or who I was.

Since I moved here in 2008, it seems to me that Laurel County has become more modern, more open minded. Not so much in politics, though it has become conceivable to not vote Republican. I'm talking about the way people react to each other as individuals. My gay married friends report a significant drop in people bugging them. The rural cop says, "To each his own," the way you say anything obvious. Nothing about bathrooms or school sports or hellfire. When my atheist husband was dying, our religious neighbors cooled it with the prayers, or at least with telling us about them.

Are we an anomaly, or might the academics and journalists who write about bigoted rural America be missing something in other, similar counties? None of them ever stays long, and I wonder if it's like meeting the worst people in the neighborhood first. Angry people are always eager to talk to someone, compared to calm people who are busy living their lives.

Like No-Longer-Bruce's parents, I'm guessing. Farming is hard work and most farmers nowadays have side jobs as well. Their daughter's medical treatments must be difficult to access and must cost them a lot. And don't get me wrong, there is still no shortage of people who will give them a hard time. But they also have more local allies than you might think, people who understand that all children should be brought up to thrive as themselves.