Overruled

by Hank Davis

  As the lawyers on both sides proceeded to take turns flinging webs of legalese at one another, citing past cases and arcane chapters of state law, those two words uttered by Lisa Washington echoed in Craig’s mind. Perceived need. Could these people, thought Craig, really know what he needed better than he did himself?

  * * *

  “Hand me that slip-nut driver.”

  Dad’s voice is clear and commanding, but not lacking in warmth.

  Craig obeys, scooting out from under the jacked car without bothering to wipe his hand before grasping the wrench. His father takes it from him wordlessly, points, and twists, adjusting a wing nut on the air cleaner assembly. The car is a used white Chevy Camaro Z28 that his dad bought last month, the latest in a long parade of such vintage vehicles. It’s a ’79 model, which means it came into the world one year before Craig. And yet it feels much older to his nine-year-old self: a relic of a bygone era. Its sleek lines, glossy finish, blue upholstery and ’70s instrument panel wood-grain look nothing like the dull, brown, square modern cars in which parents show up at school to pick up Craig’s classmates.

  Wing nut adjusted, Dad slips out from under the car.

  “You see that?”

  Craig nods.

  “Well, what is it?”

  “A spoil?”

  “A spoiler,” Dad says, vaguely admonishing. “Ducktail spoiler. And that?”

  This time Craig feels more confident. “Bumper.”

  “What type?”

  Craig shakes his head.

  “Listen. Pay attention. It’s a urethane bumper. Check it for cracks.”

  Craig shrugs and dismissively runs his fingers over the bumper’s surface.

  “Feels fine.”

  “Son, you’re not even trying.”

  Craig kneels, so he can examine the bumper up close, but he scrapes his knee and lets out a little yelp.

  “You forgot to pull out the mat. Safety first.”

  Something snaps in Craig. They’ve been at this for what feels like hours, trapped in this greasy, smelly garage under garish yellow lights, while other kids are playing outside in the cool, sunny afternoon. His knee hurts and he’s thirsty and he wants to be anywhere but here. “Can I go now?”

  His dad frowns. “What’s wrong?” He stoops to his son’s level. “You don’t like the car?”

  Craig considers whether this might be a trap. The truth is that he likes the car just fine. But he doesn’t want to become attached to it, doesn’t want to let himself love it. Because soon it will be replaced by another model, and he’ll have to start all over again, and what’s the point? Kind of like what happens with the women Dad has been bringing home for the last year, after he and Mom did the divorce thing.

  “I like it,” Craig says feebly. “I mean, it looks cool.”

  “This is a special one,” Craig’s dad says. “It’s pretty fucking rad. Sorry. Just rad. I know your mom wouldn’t want me talking to you that way.”

  Craig holds his expression in neutral. The slipped-out cuss word could be a genuine accident, or it could be an invitation for him to let down his guard, but he doesn’t feel at ease enough to do that just yet.

  “I mean it,” his dad says. “It’s a performance vehicle, son, first and foremost. That’s important in life—performance. No use having a lot of bells and whistles if you can’t perform. Sure, the carpets and sill plates and arm rests and power steering and AM/FM/cassette dash radio are nice, but it’s the catalytic converter, 10-bolt rear end with its 3.42 gears, the turbine-style alloy wheels, the engine—all that is what gives this beaut its famous V8 punch.”

  Craig nods and arms himself with courage. “Okay, I get it. But what was wrong with the ’67 Chevy Corvette convertible? Or the Cayuga blue 1941 Ford Coupe? Or the ’73 Chevy Corvette? You said nice things about those too.”

  His dad’s face scrunches up and explodes with laughter. “That’s my boy! You just keep rattling them off like that! I bet your friends can’t do that.”

  Craig feels himself thawing at Dad’s sudden warmth, and his lips curl into a smile. It’s true. Even Matt Rudelos, who says he’s a car freak and always asks for Hot Wheels for Christmas, doesn’t know half of what Craig knows about cars.

  “Listen, it’s a little stuffy in here,” Craig’s dad says. “I’m gonna get us some lemonades.” He wipes his brow and is gone.

  Craig stares at the jacked white car. He imagines it hovering in the air. Will cars do that one day? he wonders. He listens to his own thoughts in the afternoon silence. The garage feels a lot bigger without his dad in it.

  Maybe this isn’t so bad, he thinks.

  Dad returns. The lemonade is tasty. Craig chugs half his glass.

  “My first was a Model A Ford,” Dad says in between sips. “Did you know that? I bought it for fifty bucks before I was even old enough to drive it. What a time machine.” He chuckles.

  Craig hasn’t heard this story before. “What happened to it?”

  “Well,” Dad says. He looks away. “I sold it before I joined the Army.”

  Craig tenses up again. The Army—that was during Vietnam. His dad doesn’t like talking about Vietnam. Other dads don’t like to talk about it either.

  “Maybe one day I’ll join the Army,” Craig says.

  His dad sets down his glass of lemonade on a workbench and wraps Craig in his arms.

  Wow, Craig thinks. This is even more unusual.

  “Listen, I’m sorry if sometimes I’m a little hard on you. I just don’t want…don’t want to see you end up like I did. You can do anything you want, son.”

  He steps back and Craig sees his dad’s eyes are watery. What’s worse, his own eyes are becoming misty too.

  “I like these cars because they’re honest,” Dad says. “They don’t need to be high-tech and full of gadgets to be attractive and useful and to mean something. When I was a kid we didn’t have the money to take our car to a mechanic, so my dad taught me how to fix things. I want to do the same for you.”

  Craig’s chin bobs and he wipes his eyes. “Tell me more about that Ford.”

  Dad smiles again. “Ace car,” he says. “Classy. Primo. There really isn’t much more to tell.” Then his back straightens and his eyes settle in a serious way on Craig’s face; regretful, but full of hope. “Let’s make this our car. I’ll hold on to it. I promise. No matter what happens, we’ll hold on to it together. Okay?”

  Craig shivers a little. He wants to believe his dad so badly. He wants this to be something that belongs to them and no one else, something that will stick around. He wants more than anything to understand what it means for a car to be honest.

  “Okay,” he whispers.

  * * *

  “You say driving gives you a sense of freedom and mobility,” said one of the justices. “But is that any different than directing a self-driving car to take you wherever you want to go?”

  The justices took turns asking Craig questions. There were none of the movie theatrics of dueling trial attorneys cross-examining the witness. The whole thing felt more mundane than it had any right to be.

  “That’s not the point,” Craig said. “A car—my car, specifically—is like an extension of my body. It’s been in the family since I was nine. When I came back from the war, I thought I’d never get to drive it again.”

  They spent a few minutes grilling him on the modifications that had to be made to the Camaro so he could drive it without using his legs. As if the technical details mattered! Still, he dutifully answered their questions, focusing on how much money and effort had been invested in the process.

  “Mr. Morrison.” The chief justice paused as he scrolled down the screen projected in front of him. “It says here you underwent treatment for PTSD. Are you still taking any medication for it?”

  Craig’s eyelids fluttered. Oh God, here it comes, he thought. He’d give anything to be in motion. Instinctively, he reached forward for the familiar, comforting steering wheel of his adapted Camaro. But of c
ourse the vehicle was nowhere near this courthouse, and—depending on how things went—might not be within his reach ever again. Arms dangling awkwardly, he clenched his fists instead.

  Sweat trickles down his forehead and stings his eyes. There are distant sounds of gunfire and the air smells like acrid smoke. He looks over to Laura Flores, who is huddled behind a freestanding wall fragment, all that’s left of what used to be somebody’s house. She’s leaning against the edge of a mattress half-covered with rubble. Dirty linen sheets are pinned to the ground by rocks and chunks of plaster.

  “We should make our way to the highway,” Craig says. “There are abandoned cars there. I can hotwire any of the older models.”

  Laura wipes her brow with the back of her camouflage jacket. “Too dangerous. We stay here and wait for extraction, like Wilmore said.”

  “Wilmore’s gone.” Craig looks over at the tarp-covered body.

  “He called in our coordinates,” says Flores. “They’re gonna come get us.”

  “It’s been over two hours and by the sounds of it the fight is moving north. I think—”

  “Stop it.”

  “What?”

  “Stop thinking. It’s above your pay grade.” Flores pulls out her flask, takes a small sip and stares at it forlornly. “We’re tools of the United States Army. They tell us what to do, we do it. They tell us to wait, we wait. We don’t suddenly evolve into reasoning beings with initiative and shit. Save that for back home.”

  Howard Kim nudged Craig, interrupting the memory. Craig blinked several times, trying to find his bearings, trying to maintain a façade of competency. But he didn’t answer the question, and when the silence became awkward, Kim chimed in.

  “Mr. Morrison isn’t on any PTSD-specific medication. May I also point out that everyone who served in the turn-of-the-century wars had to be evaluated for PTSD eventually, whether they exhibited symptoms or not. This is just another stereotype perpetuated by advocacy groups with an active interest in presenting my client as an unsafe driver, whereas nothing could be further…”

  Craig tuned him out. His legal team was funded by donations from all sorts of groups: constitutionalists who advocated personal liberties as envisioned over two and a half centuries ago, lobbyists for the firms that stood to lose market share if manual driving became outlawed nationwide, lots of veteran advocacy groups. Good people and bad on each side of the argument, just like always. And Craig? A tool being used by both sides, not expected to think for himself—as Flores had said.

  Craig has been crouching behind this wall for six hours. He knows every exposed brick, every piece of sheetrock. They’ve burned themselves into his mind. His back aches, his throat is parched—they ran out of water hours ago—and the sounds of battle are barely audible.

  Flores stretches, groans. They exchange a look. “Fuck it,” she says. “Maybe they aren’t coming. You sure you can get a car running?”

  “Trust me,” he says.

  Flores gets up and peers around the corner of the wall. “If we’re going to do this, we have to go now. Only a couple of hours of daylight left.”

  Craig points at Wilmore’s body. “What about him?”

  “They’ll recover the body when they finally send the goddamn helo.”

  “Yeah, okay. Let’s go.”

  They make it about half a click away from the demolished house when Craig hears another sound, faint in the distance.

  “Helo?”

  Flores, who has been deployed a year longer than him, frowns. “No.” She looks around. “Let’s find cover.”

  They enter another abandoned house when the first bomb falls. The explosion hurts his ears. The house groans and shakes, and Craig is silently thankful that there’s no glass left in the windows.

  They huddle in the corner as the bombs land closer and closer. Later he learns that after receiving an extraction request the standard procedure is to call in an air strike and strafe the surrounding area before deploying the helos.

  But for now his entire world is the one-story house disintegrating around him and the series of sonic booms getting louder and closer. He not so much hears as sees Flores mouth “Fucking hell” before the walls cave in.

  The expression on the chief justice’s face was grim. “Mr. Kim, I asked Mr. Morrison a direct question. Is he unable to answer?”

  Howard Kim said, “My apologies. I was simply trying to proactively contextualize whatever response he provides. Of course he can speak for himself.”

  The attorney stepped closer to Craig now, deliberately and aggressively invading his personal space. It was a gesture designed to break Craig free from his trance, and it worked with all the charm of a hornet’s sting.

  “As my lawyer pointed out, I’m not taking any medication related to PTSD,” Craig said, “though I am on a pretty impressive regimen of other pills, including blood pressure meds, painkillers for my thoracic trauma and gastrointestinal injuries, and several creams for my skin condition. I also suffer from tinnitus.” Craig paused, vaguely disgusted with himself for producing the litany of ailments. He was being a good boy, though, preaching along the lines he’d been instructed to ensure he “generated maximum sympathy” for the cameras and maybe even the justices. I’d trade all the sympathy in the world for a drive in my Camaro, he thought bitterly.

  “In addition,” he continued with obvious distaste, “following that last tour, I underwent three years of physical therapy to help adapt to this chair, and two years of counseling three times a week to aid with my, uh, reintegration.”

  Craig stared down at where his legs had once been, seeing only phantoms.

  The air vibrates, the ground rumbles, and a pike of silence penetrates Craig’s brain as darkness takes him.

  When consciousness returns, Craig knows right away that something is very wrong. Sound isn’t the only missing component in his new reality: there’s no sensation beneath his knees.

  Panic flares up and he pumps his arms.

  Craig raised his arms in the courtroom; then, as though just realizing what he’d done, he lowered them slowly, avoiding everyone’s gaze.

  “I should mention,” Craig said, “that my counseling was also meant to help me overcome the loss of some of my friends, like Laura Flores.” The momentary confusion at his arm-raising was replaced by a few sympathetic nods. And then Craig thought, To hell with the script. “If she was here today, I’m sure she’d think this whole thing was ridiculous.”

  At once Howard Kim gestured for him to stop with his hand, steely gaze fixed on Craig’s face, but Craig wouldn’t stop now.

  “She once led a convoy of eighteen vehicles on what was supposed to be a one-day mission but turned into a three-day operation. Despite two insurgent attacks and heavy fire in a small village, she was able to bring the convoy to safety and complete her mission. She received the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal with a valor device. She’d look at me here, publicly embarrassing myself so I can continue to drive my crusty old car, and say, ‘Craig, get over yourself. Let it go.’”

  Howard Kim’s face was now fully flushed, and he was so tense Craig wondered if he was going to snap.

  “Mr. Craig,” one of the justices said, leaning forward with incredulity, “are you saying that you no longer wish to retain your driver’s license?”

  Craig closed his eyes. In a series of dizzyingly fleeting images, he remembered the hands of the rescue team on his shoulders, their helmeted faces uttering phrases he couldn’t decipher; Flores’ lifeless body next to his; the helicopter ride back to base; the surgeries; the plane ride back home, the endless grueling hours of physical therapy. Was he ready to render all that meaningless? To truly forgo the one pleasure left to him? His father’s words: No matter what happens, we’ll hold on to it together. Flores might have chided him for being self-centered, but surely she would have wanted to be happy, wouldn’t she? Would have wanted him to honor his father’s memory? He opened his eyes slowly.

  “No, of cour
se not, Your Honor,” Craig said, voice in a lower register than before. “I didn’t mean to imply that was the case.”

  Kim let out a breath. “I’d like to request a short recess,” he said.

  “Very well,” the justice replied. “We’ll reconvene in fifteen minutes.”

  * * *

  Craig and his dad are sitting in the hospital cafeteria, sharing a meal of flavorless sandwiches and lukewarm coffee. Craig is in a no-frills hospital wheelchair; his own motorized one, allegedly a lot nicer, is set to arrive when he’s discharged next week.

  “Talking to the insurance company is like a full-time job these days,” Dad says bitterly. “They try to get away with covering as little of my chemo as possible, and even when I get them to pay what they’re supposed to, the out-of-pocket expenses bleed me dry.”

  Craig nods and takes a swig from his paper cup to forestall an unpleasant conversation. But he can’t avoid it; Dad’s bills have been piling up since he got sick, and it’s not like he can help out much on his disability pension.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Craig finally says. “We could sell the Camaro.” He rushes to rationalize this before Dad can blow up at him. “I know it’s our special car and it always will be, but you can use the money, and it’s not like I’m going to be driving it.” The implied but unspoken argument is that Dad won’t be around to drive it for much longer, either.

  Somehow, Dad isn’t angry. There’s a twinkle of joy in his eyes instead, something Craig doesn’t recall seeing since he returned to the States.

  “About that,” Dad says. He pauses, clearly savoring the moment. “I’ve had the Camaro adapted with special hand controls. A little bit of training, and you’ll be driving it for years to come.” Dad studies Craig’s astonished face and grins.