“Them boys,” she calls out. “What kind of trouble they in, doctor?”
“Big trouble,” I tell her.
“They kill that man up in the mountains I saw on TV?” she asks querulously.
“The law says they did.”
“They did not kill that man,” she tells me with certainty. She hesitates. “You lawyering for them?”
I nod. She nods too, somehow reassured.
“You think they killed that man?” Her voice cracks, slides; the old lady underneath she can’t repress at this moment.
“No,” I answer. “They didn’t kill him.”
She’s the first noncombatant who’s heard the words come out of my mouth. She’s the first to ask me.
THE FIRST BEER of the day is always the best. I sit in the dark bar in a booth near the back, drinking a long-neck Budweiser that came from an old ice-cooler. They always taste better when they’re long-necked, and they’re always the coldest when they’ve been hibernating under chunks of ice floating in dark-green water.
The biker from Albuquerque sits across the table from me. His name is Gene. He’s president of the Albuquerque chapter of the Scorpions, the same national organization my clients are from. He’s six feet six, an Arnold Schwarzenegger in outlaw biker colors. He’s been Lone Wolf’s best friend since they met as teenagers in a Pittsburgh reform school.
“Lone Wolf,” I muse. “How’d he get a handle like that? Sounds kind of romantic for a one-percenter.”
“Kind of pussy, you mean?”
I half-shrug—he can say that, I don’t dare.
“Some chick laid it on him. Must’ve been reading one of them romance novels.”
“Nobody’s ever ragged him about it?” I ask.
“Fuck, yes,” Gene says. “’Till he busted this one motherfucker’s forearm up into toothpicks one time. After that nobody seemed to find it particularly strange.”
He takes a pull off his brew, regards me.
“Figure this out,” he drawls. “What kind of dumb fuck who has two prior convictions and just got off parole kills somebody and leaves the body and a witness to tell the tale?”
“The kind of dumb fuck who thinks he’s above the law,” I answer. “The kind of dumb fuck who picks up a drunk girl in front of two hundred witnesses and gang-rapes her. That kind of dumb fuck.”
“They got ’em up on a rape charge?” he asks.
“You know they don’t,” I reply testily, knowing he knows where things currently stand.
“Then they’re the dumb fucks, ’cause they messed up on the charges. Anyway, she’s a known whore and a common one at that,” he informs me, “she’d fuck a syphilitic dog in a Juárez whorehouse. I personally know seventy or eighty men who’ve fucked her and survived.”
“Are they all Scorpions?” I ask.
“Mostly,” he grins. “A few Hell’s Angels and Bandidos.”
“All prepared to testify on their behalf?”
“If it comes to that.” He leans forward, caressing his beer bottle, which is barely visible in his enormous hands. “What do you think?” he asks, suddenly serious.
“About … ?”
“What’s going to happen.”
“The verdict.”
“Yeh.” He drains his beer, walks over to the cooler, comes back with four more in one hand. He church-keys the tops off two, sets one down in front of me.
I drink in long swallows, feeling the cold going down the back of my neck. There are times when I think about cutting back, for my own good. This isn’t one of them.
“It’s going to be an uphill battle,” I tell him honestly. “I don’t know who all the state’s witnesses are yet, but they’re going to be buttoned up tighter than a nun’s asshole. If I work hard and get lucky I’ll find a crack in one of them and get inside and break it up.”
“What about your own evidence?” he asks.
“I’m developing it,” I say. “That’s why I’m here.”
“It’s going to come down to somebody’s word against somebody’s word.”
“That’s usually the way it works,” I say. “I’m sure you’re no stranger to that.”
“Not hardly. And what I also know is people like us usually come out on the short end of the stick.”
People like us. In one form or another I’ve been hearing that phrase my entire professional life. Is there some kind of secret underclass that’s never been defined sociologically? I’m not talking about the usual groups that commit the majority of violent crimes: the fatherless families, the beaten-down ethnic minorities, usually black or Hispanic, the battered inner-city rubble, the hardscrabble rural, the alcoholics, the junkies, the mentally ill. They generally have one thing in common: poverty. I’m not talking about that. It’s something else, the feeling that there’s society and then there’s you, outside of society. I was relatively poor growing up, but I never had that feeling. I felt I belonged, in or out of trouble. But there’s millions of people out there who feel they’re not part of the basic community; even if they manage to become middle-class in the economic sense they still feel estranged, apart from the rest. And if you’re not part of the group, why abide by the group’s laws? I think that most of these people believe they never had an option; it’s like fourth-generation families on relief, it’s all they’ve ever known. But others, like these bikers, choose to be apart, outside. And in the past few days, since the charges were brought against them, I’ve been wondering why.
“Why is that?” I ask Gene.
“Because in this society,” he tells me, suddenly earnest, “somebody’s got to lose. I mean this idea about winners, right, the American way, winning, winners? Well, if there’s got to be winners, if you got to have winners to make the system work, then you got to have some losers, too, right? And to Joe Mortgageholder out there, who’s been brainwashed his whole life that if you do this and this and this you’ll be a winner, people like us, who think the whole goddam thing’s a crock of shit and say so in a big loud voice, well we’re fucking losers, right? And the winners got to get the long end of the stick, right?, so people like us, designated losers, we get the short end.”
“So you admit you’re all a bunch of losers,” I say.
“Fuck you Jack.” He finishes his first new beer, drains half the second in one gulp. “You admit we’re losers. Far as we’re concerned we’re the biggest winners of all time. This thing about a jury of your peers?” he continues. “Ain’t nobody on that fucking jury’s my goddam peer. You give me a jury of my fucking peers, Jack, I’m outa there.”
It’s a novel concept. I’ll have to try it out sometime; maybe in this trial. Wonder how the legal community would react to that gambit?
“I don’t think I can sell that,” I tell him. I start on another beer. It’s comfortable in here. I’m out of the heat, I’m drinking cold long-neck Budweisers on somebody else’s tab, and I’m conversing with a person of reasonable if not high intelligence.
“You ever read Karl Marx?” I ask idly.
“Cover to cover,” he answers with a trace of a smile. “And Veblen and Hoffer and Frantz Fanon, among others. Milton Friedman, too, although I think consensually he’s pretty well discredited by now. Fucking Reagan,” he growls contemptuously, “bastard made Nixon look good.”
Jesus. I’m drinking beer with a radical socialist economic political outlaw biker with two priors and three hung juries who uses words like ‘consensually’ in everyday conversation.
“Tell me about Lone Wolf and the others,” I say.
“What do you want to know?”
“Anything I can use in their defense.”
He makes his way methodically to the cooler, comes back with another half-dozen cold ones. This is definitely going to be my last interview of the day. We toast each other with raised bottles. He leans back, thinking of what he can tell me that’ll save his friends’ lives.
“He’s done some mean shit in his life but he never killed nobody. Lone Wolf that is. None of the others ain
’t never killed nobody, either, to my knowledge.”
“That doesn’t help very much.”
“You mean was he a boy scout or something? Pulled an old lady out of a burning building, that kind of shit?”
“Wouldn’t hurt,” I say.
“He was in Nam. Field hospital in Da Nang. Won two purple hearts. Bronze star.”
Now that’s something. I jot it down to check on later. I like this guy sitting across from me but he could be jerking my chain.
“’Course they were giving medals out at the end in Nam like Hershey bars,” he informs me. “Trying to find any way they could to put a heroic face on it you know what I mean?”
“That’s still good. Juries love war heroes. What else?”
“He had a brother that was homosexual.”
“Had?”
“He’s dead. ‘Least that’s what the Wolf says. I don’t know none of the particulars. He don’t talk about it, and nobody’s ever been dumb enough to bring it up.”
The mind reels. How many doors am I going to be opening here? And this is just one of four defendants.
“That ain’t common knowledge,” Gene adds. “You best check with him about whether he wants going public on that. He ain’t going to be happy I even told you.”
“Don’t worry, I will,” I say; “check with him.” I pause. “You’re his friend, you know his mind. Has that made him more tolerant?”
He shakes his head. “The opposite,” he tells me. “He hates faggots with a passion. Not that any of us love ’em,” he adds, “but the Lone Wolf’s got a particular hair up his ass about queers. He almost killed one once he thought was hitting on him. Bought ninety days for it.”
I’m on the worst rollercoaster of my entire career. I was almost euphoric earlier, becoming more convinced of my clients’ innocence, accompanied by a growing outrage at the social forces judging them. Now I’m faced with a piece of evidence that forces me to examine the alternative: there’s no question that the killing, if not an outright homosexually oriented murder, had strong homosexual overtones.
And now his best friend tells me my client has a pathological hatred and aversion of gays. If Robertson and his boys find out about this tidbit it’ll be another brutal hurdle to overcome.
“Look,” I tell him frankly, “this is a major bitch. If this piece of information ever gets out it could help put Lone Wolf and the others on Death Row.”
He nods.
“Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you told me,” I continue, “and I will talk with him about it … but I’ve got to try and keep this quiet.”
“If anybody else asks me about this I don’t know shit, that what you’re saying?” he asks.
I drink some beer. “You ought to think about going to law school,” I tell him, half-serious. “You’d make a pretty good lawyer.” It’s really the beer talking.
“I tried it,” he answers.
“You went to law school?”
“Case Western Reserve. In Cleveland. A semester. Wasn’t for me. My last futile attempt at living the straight life.”
I look at him. Maybe it’s the beer, I don’t know. But I’ve got to ask him.
“You’re an intelligent man,” I tell him sincerely. “Why have you chosen to live this way?”
“That’s a dumb fucking question.” He starts on another beer.
“Humor me.”
“Not everybody can live the way you want ’em to,” he tells me straight-forwardly. “Or ought to. Anyway,” he adds, “you don’t really want to know.”
“I just asked, didn’t I?”
“Come on, man. Get real with me, okay? I know how the straight world works. It romanticizes men like me. Well that’s dangerous, ’cause we’re dangerous men. I mean, look … I ain’t as bad as people sometimes make me out to be, but I ain’t America’s sweetheart, either. I mean I ain’t Peter Fonda in Easy Rider, hear what I’m saying? I been in the joint myself. And you know what? Guys’re in there for a legitimate reason. They did something bad, probably violent. It’s something in their heads all the time, the violent stuff. Like if they ain’t thinking about fucking some cooze they’re thinking about kicking the shit out of some civilian, more’n likely. So what I’m saying is, man, don’t fucking romanticize any of this. It could blow up in your face.”
“I certainly don’t want that,” I say. This man does not pull his punches. “But I’m still curious … why pick a life-style that makes you a punching bag?”
“Maybe it picked me.”
“You don’t strike me as the passive type. Lone Wolf either.”
He looks at me; he pins me with his eyes.
“I’ll tell you a little story,” he says. “I went to New England last year. First time back east in fifteen years. In the fall, the leaves turning, the whole bit. Just me and the old lady, like a couple of straight tourists. No chopper, no colors. Invisible.”
He polishes off another beer. I wait. He doesn’t seem inclined to continue.
“And?” I ask finally.
“Didn’t feel right, the invisible part,” he says. “But that’s not what it’s about. We were in New Hampshire … damn beautiful place. You ever been there? In the fall, the leaves, all that good shit?”
“Once,” I reply. I went up to Winter Carnival once when I was in college. I don’t remember it well, I was drunk most of the time, like everyone else there.
“Real pretty. My old lady about creamed over it, talking about moving there and all. I told her wait until you’re ass-deep in snow for a month, then tell me about moving. Anyway, they got a slogan on the license plates in New Hampshire. It really hit home to me. You know what it says?”
I shake my head.
“‘Live Free or Die.’ That’s me, man. That’s Lone Wolf, the other bro’s. That’s what we stand for.” He looks across the table, leveling his gaze at me. “I’d eat a ton of shit for the chance to taste an ounce of freedom,” he says. “What about you?”
I HAVE TO KNOW the truth about Lone Wolf’s gay brother. So I go to the source. “I don’t talk about that shit,” he tells me harshly. “You do with me, ace,” I say. “This murder had homosexual over-tones. If you’ve got skeletons in your closet I’ve got to be prepared for them.”
He buries his head in his hands. It’s the first honest show of human emotion I’ve seen in him.
“He’s dead.” He looks up at me. “He died a long time ago.”
“How?”
He shakes his head. “It was a long time ago. Let it go, okay?”
“What about the rest of your family?”
“There is no ‘rest.’ Lone Wolf, man—that’s my name. That’s who I am.”
CLAUDIA’S SLEEPING. I hold her in my arms while I wait for Patricia to open the door. I want Patricia not to have heard my deliberately soft knock, to be on the phone in her bedroom in the back, talking long-distance to her mother, with the television going. I want to stand here like this until dawn. It’s bone-dry even at this hour, not a trace of humidity; it’s been this way all summer. Butterflies move through the hot still air in clusters, attracted by the smell of jasmine and honeysuckle. They form a halo around my baby’s head.
Patricia opens the door without making a sound, a mother’s way.
“Why did you bring her back so late?” she whispers, making sure the peevishness in her voice comes through so I don’t miss it. I may have the world by the balls (so she thinks), but she has our daughter and she doesn’t want me to forget it. “She has a swimming lesson at eight in the morning.”
“We were having fun,” I protest. “She wouldn’t leave; I had to wait until she fell asleep.”
“Okay.” She nods. She knows. She can be gracious; it’s truer to her nature.
I carry Claudia through the small house to her bedroom, lay her on the bed, gently strip off her shoes, socks, shorts. She can sleep in her T-shirt and undies. I cover her with a sheet, less for warmth than for protection, against what I don’t know. Not true; I know, mor
e than anything in the world I know this. Because I need to protect her, to feel I’m her protector, that it’s necessary. She curls into a ball on her side, her mouth slightly open.
“Would you like a cup of tea before you go?” Patricia asks. She’s sitting at her breakfast-nook table in shorts and a T-shirt, making notes on a brief. She’s taken to wearing reading glasses, tortoiseshell half-frames. It somehow enhances her sex appeal; like looking at a woman in a lingerie ad wearing glasses, the juxtaposition of sex and intelligence. It reminds me of how long it’s been since I had intelligence in my sex life.
“Do you have a beer?” I ask casually. It’s still hot enough out that I can ask for a beer without looking bad.
She shakes her head. “I don’t drink in the house anymore,” she tells me, glancing up. “I don’t like that image for Claudia.”
Has Claudia been talking to her about my drinking? I wonder. She sees me doing it but she’s never said anything about it. I think back, how much do I drink in front of her? Not counting beer, of course, it’s almost nothing; maybe a Scotch or two while I’m cooking dinner. I’m not a solitary drinker, I usually find my trouble in large groups of strangers.
“A cup of tea would be nice. Don’t bother getting up,” I say as she starts to, “I know where it is.”
“That’s okay. Let me.”
I sit at the table while she fills the kettle from the tap. Her work is spread out, the brief and her scribblings on legal pads. I glance at it: a utilities case in its fourth year of appeals. The kind of boring shit I hate. I understand why she wants to leave. I would, too, if I had to do this kind of work day in and day out. She’s right; she’s underpaid for a job that requires constant reading of this stuff. If you’re going to lose your eyesight it should at least be from reading exciting material.
“Regular or herb? I’ve got Sleepy-time, Peppermint, Earl Grey.” She holds up the boxes to me.
“Whatever.”
“Earl Grey. You’ll sleep through it anyway.”
She sets the cup down in front of me with the bag still in it, freshens her own. She’s drinking herbal tea; she’s always been a restless sleeper, caffeine would probably keep her up all night.
Against the Wind Page 10
