“FOB. Got it.”
“FOB. That’s correct, Your Honor. Because at that point, what you need to do is, you want to ensure that the pipe’s shaft isn’t bent. You need to ensure you have a straight shaft.”
“I take it you don’t want a bent shaft, counselor?”
“That’s correct, Your Honor. And to make sure you don’t have a bent shaft, what you need to do is, you need to slide a pig through that pipe prior to delivery. To ensure that the pig doesn’t drift.”
“So you don’t want a drifting pig either, Mr. Lomax?” the judge said.
“No, Your Honor, you do not want a drifting pig.”
“No bent shaft and no drifting pig. OK, I get it.”
“Because if you have a pig that drifts, well, that pipe is not suitable for its end use.”
“Which is what, Mr. Lomax?”
“Fracking.”
Lomax continued.
“Your Honor, now, if that pig does not drift, and that shaft is bent, then the pipe lacks the requisite tolerances for the energy industry. And the energy industry, as you are aware, Your Honor, is all about tolerances.”
“Thank you, Mr. Beasley,” the judge said.
“Lomax, Your Honor.”
“Of course.”
The judge resumed scribbling with his looping hand.
“I’m Beasley,” defense counsel informed the judge.
“Of course you are too,” the judge said, still focused on his scribbling.
There was another long pause as the judge pondered next steps. He slapped his bench.
“Now counsel, I’m not going to allow this matter to go to trial. No reason to. If we put our minds to it, I think we can settle this case today. What do you say?”
“Your Honor, the Oriental defendants will sit on any settlement recommendation you make,” Lomax insisted.
The judge rubbed his beard and Lomax and Beasley tapped themselves, the latter his Rolex, the former his skull. Or was it the other way around? I couldn’t tell anymore. Bomax and Leasley. The Lorax and Mr. Bigglesworth. Their lower torsos stretched beneath the tables and fused. Soon they would exit the courtroom atop one pair of legs, arguing with the court and themselves and talking to clients on individual mobile phones, walking as one but facing and snapping in opposite directions.
Outside, ten stories below, a Chinese man hoisted a red Chinese flag up a length of pole atop a Chinatown tenement. I checked my phone. Nothing from Fleeger. I remembered to panic.
“Collectively, counselors, you are going to spend two hundred grand to try this case,” the judge said. I half-expected him to lean back in that chair and for his clerk to insert a saliva ejector into his mouth. “And then there will be appeals, and then this painfully simple matter will drag on for years. So, I’m going to put this pipe case out of its misery today. The parties will settle this matter for $450,000. Given the reports, and the clear damage to the pipe, and the cost of litigation, I think that’s a fair sum. What do you say?”
The judge knitted his hands behind his head. His eyelids fluttered.
“Mr. Beasley, will your client agree to settle for that amount?”
“I will communicate your recommendation to my client, Your Honor.”
“And what if they don’t accept your recommendation, Your Honor?” Lomax asked the judge. “Then what? What then?”
“Then I want you to fuck him, Mr. Lomax,” the judge replied. “Any way you can.”
The judge knocked his gavel against the bench and resumed writing with his looping hand as the counselors rose from their tables, packed their litigation bags, and stretched their lower backs. Celeste entered the courtroom, palm against the big wooden door to keep it quiet. I didn’t know she would be here. Did Robert tell me she would be here? Did she tell me she would be here? My volcano resumed spewing muddy lava as I recalled last night. Potato skins. Horse. Merlot. I capped the dread with a cone. Unsure of what I knew or what I forgot. Because there was no time for it. I checked my phone again. Still no message from Robert. I texted him again. “Celeste is here.” If the response was not immediate then the response was not forthcoming.
Celeste gave the judge a little wave and he sat up and smiled at her and then she rolled her eyes at me either because of last night’s festivities or today’s hangover and looked around and mouthed: “Where’s Robert?”
She wore a different black dress than yesterday but the same quatrefoil. I motioned there was space next to me for her to sit. She ignored my gesture and took a seat two pews ahead. This was a power play, I thought, somewhat juvenile under the circumstances. Now she and I were playing a game as well. She removed a file from her bag and reviewed its contents while crisscrossing her legs, considerably thicker in today’s shorter dress. A plump drop of sweat detached from my left armpit and splattered against my ribs. The judge exited the courtroom and his clerk descended the bench, spoke to Celeste. The two looked in my direction, Celeste pointed, and the clerk approached, now standing above me.
“Are you from Kilgore?” he asked.
I told him yes.
“We’re beginning.”
“OK.”
“The judge wants to discuss this matter in chambers.”
I hoisted my swish bag over my shoulder and followed the clerk up a small flight of stairs. My insides buzzed with fear at the thought of falling apart in McKenzie’s chambers. Celeste preceded me up the stairs. I wanted to bite the back of her thighs.
“Stephen, where is Robert?”
“We got it covered.”
“Oh dear, this is a catastrophe. Stephen, should I call him? Or did you call him? Do you think we should proceed? What do you think, Stephen? Can you handle this alone?”
“I think I got it.”
“You think you got it?”
We passed behind the judge’s bench and I surveyed his looping notes. A massive, intricate doodle of squares and circles stretching almost from wall to wall.
“Yup.”
7
PLUSH AND WAINSCOTED, THE judge’s chambers reinforced the popular perception that the law was noble and dignified. Clerks and secretaries engaged in focused, diligent effort assembling rulings and proposed orders from Redwelds, the Redwelds stocked with tidy folders, the tidy folders flagged with 3M color tabs. It’s not what the words say, they taught us in law school, it’s what they do. Single roses, framed photographs of bald eagles in flight, Vaseline Intensive Care, tiny firkins of mint-green Listerine. Skin care and oral hygiene the basis for a CVS or Duane Reade on every corner of the city. Metropolis of halitosis and dry skin. We followed the clerk across the embossed emerald carpet: Lazlis, followed by Celeste, then me. Add a platter of tuna fish sandwiches and small bottles of Canada Dry and old men in white towels watching golf on a flat screen and you’d have a country club clubhouse. Whatever you do, be first class.
I followed the clerk and Celeste into the jury room, where Thomas sat alone behind the large wooden conference table, picking at a callous on his hands. My slop tanks churned and bubbled but the contents remained under pressure beneath an innocuous blanket of inert gas, staunch and firm against self-sabotage. A task made more difficult, but not impossible, by the residue of last night’s alcohol still percolating through my system.
I studied Thomas. Platinum-blue eyes and a round face, like that new moon emoji, but the gay biker version with a walrussy handlebar mustache. Bolero-cut Carhartt, work jeans, strong hands webbed with capillaries. I couldn’t discern how he had entered McKenzie’s chambers without me spotting him in the courtroom.
“Still no Robert?” Lazlis asked.
“Food poisoning,” I lied, shaking the phone.
Thomas pointed his thumbnail at Lazlis. It was blackened.
“Hazards of the honey-do list,” he said. He rolled his head backward, looked up at the ceiling, and returned to the horizontal cervical plane. Up and down. He did this again and again. Soft pack of Marlboros stuffed inside the workman jacket’s breast pocket. Haboobs
and rotating helicopter blades had embedded his skin with sand and dust, giving him a grainy, orange complexion.
“I see,” Lazlis replied.
“But she said she’d leave if I didn’t start acting like a man. Taking care of my husbandly responsibilities.”
“I understand,” Lazlis added. Failing to endeavor interest in what his client had to say as he unpacked his litigation bag.
“She said there was no point living with a man if she didn’t get anything out of it. So then I did this.”
He pointed at his blackened thumbnail, at rest on the table, as if it was an inanimate object. Something found in the woods. A rural Pennsylvania scarab.
“Did what?” Lazlis asked.
“Smacked it with a hammer.”
“Ouch,” Lazlis replied. “On purpose?”
“Why else?”
Thomas did it again, this neck roll, as if to crack his cervical spine and relieve some internal pressure where his head fastened to his body. I remembered another former word of the day: withers. The highest part of a horse’s back, behind the neck.
“Of course,” his lawyer replied.
“But she wanted the photos hung on the wall and it just had to be done yesterday. I tried to tell her.”
“Tell her what?” Lazlis asked.
“That I can’t hit a nail straight anymore. Not with these shaky hands.”
He raised his hands for Lazlis to observe their instability. The frequency of the shakiness was too high; it seemed like an act. Lazlis nodded that he understood and Thomas resumed rolling his head, like an insatiable birdie, rocking back and forth. Celeste indicated that she wanted to talk and I followed her to an opposite corner of the room.
“Why does he keep doing that thing with his head?”
“Looks like some kind of tic,” I replied.
“It’s bloody distracting.”
“Maybe that’s the point.”
“Maybe.”
She huffed her annoyance and we took our seats across the broad wooden table from Lazlis and Thomas and I removed my notes and memoranda from the bag at my feet. I didn’t know what I would say. Yet I was uncommonly calm. As if the anticipation of the event was more fraught with peril than the event itself and now that I was at the point of commencement I could feel it, this event but also myself: competent but also present, almost monolithic. Through the nylon of Celeste’s dusky stockings the veins in her left thigh outlined a constellation. Of Paul Bunyan, with an axe over his shoulder and his loyal Ox at his side.
“Ah yes,” the judge said again upon entering the room, robe now unbuttoned down the front to reveal a yellow dress shirt and red tie, his dutiful clerk in tow. “Another disability claim by another wounded American hero. Clearly outside the scope of my original jurisdiction per Article 3 of the US Constitution. But I digress. Celeste, it is so good to see you.”
He patted the table where he could almost reach her hand.
“Good to see you too, Judge,” she said.
“How’s that rich husband of yours? Still flying around the world making gobs of money?”
My instincts were correct, my mental chart from the night before accurate.
“He’s good. Thank you.”
The judge growled. A meow growl. Like a tiger cub. We all looked at one another, to confirm that we correctly heard that, except for Thomas, who was again looking at the ceiling.
“Now guys,” the judge said. “Talk to me on a first-name basis. Mr. Thomas?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Pleasure to meet you.”
“Pleasure to meet you too, sir.”
“I understand you were involved in an incident downstairs with the marshals.”
“I wouldn’t call it an incident, Your Honor,” Lazlis added. “It was more of a misunderstanding.”
“Well, counselor, it was enough of a misunderstanding that the marshals felt compelled to escort your client up here through the prisoners’ elevator. That doesn’t happen every day. Not in civil matters. Criminal matters, of course, they use the elevator all the time. It’s a fact. But another fact is that I just want you and your client to know that the marshals are right on the other side of that door.” The judge pointed at the door and looked at Thomas. “Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir,” Thomas replied.
“Good. And now I’m sure you also understand why I can’t allow you to carry your knife into my chambers. Not that I have anything against you. Or your knife, for that matter. After all, you’re an American hero. But I’ve got people here I’m responsible for. Good people. And it’s protocol. And if there is one thing we enforce around here these days it’s protocol. I’m sure you understand protocol, correct?”
“Yes, sir,” Thomas said. His tic, for the moment, had ceased. Celeste sipped from her to-go cup, the little mantra dangling from the string of her yogi teabag imploring us to live for one another. The judge surveyed the room.
“Where’s Mr. Fleeger? Isn’t he counsel of record for WorldScore?”
Everyone looked at me.
“He’s ill,” I said.
“And you are?”
“Stephen Harker, Your Honor.”
“Also from Killmore?”
The judge winked.
“Kilgore, Your Honor. And yes.”
“Just fucking with you, buddy,” the judge said.
Lazlis laughed out loud. For a moment I thought he would give the judge a high five. Celeste studied me, lips pinched in pensive observation.
“And you, Mr. Lazlis, any objection to proceeding without counsel of record present?”
“No, Your Honor. I have no objection to proceeding without counsel of record present.” Lazlis said, shaking his head, struggling to contain another laugh.
Thomas leaned in his chair toward Lazlis and whispered.
“Your Honor, my client has a request.”
“Which is?”
“The jalousies, Your Honor.”
“What about them?”
“The sunlight is bothering my client’s eyes.” The sky outside was slate gray, all direct light absorbed and softened by late-winter cloud cover. On the other side of which the sun now revved its internal juices to launch a galactic wad of radiation at planet Earth. “Mr. Thomas would like the jalousies adjusted.”
“Adjust the jalousies?” the judge asked.
“If possible, Your Honor,” Lazlis replied.
“Well, OK.”
The judge motioned for the clerk to adjust the jalousies, thereby darkening the room with shadow. Thomas was doing this on purpose, I thought, to plumb the depths of our accommodation while exerting influence within the group.
“Let’s get started,” the judge said. “Mr. Lazlis, how about you first?”
“Your Honor, I represent Major Mike Thomas, the individual sitting here to my right.”
“Air Force service number six seven six eight three four four. Now WorldScore claim number fifteen slash one two two seven eight six nine.”
“Thank you, Mr. Thomas,” the judge said. “Very helpful. Did you get that down?” the judge asked the clerk.
The clerk nodded and Lazlis continued.
“Now as you will have seen in my submission, Your Honor, Mr. Thomas has served this country faithfully, first in the Air Force and then after 9/11 as a military pilot in and out of Iraq and Afghanistan. After faithfully serving this country, my client accepted an offer of employment from a private company called FreedomQuest, which company entered contracts with the US Department of Defense, pursuant to which Mr. Thomas provided the US government with vital military support functions in and around Kabul. I don’t want to get too involved in the details right now, Your Honor, but essentially we’re here today to move the court to order FreedomQuest’s workers’ compensation carrier, WorldScore, to pay Thomas the statutorily prescribed compensation benefits to which he is entitled on account of the injuries he suffered in Kabul. Now as you are likely aware, Your Honor, federal law mandates WorldScore
to maintain Mr. Thomas’s living standards and to treat his injuries while we litigate their permanence and loss of use. However, WorldScore has not made a benefits payment to my client, nor authorized a doctor’s visit, as required under federal law, for over a year. To be frank, he’s in a tough spot, and the tougher that spot gets, the more I feel he’s being pushed into a corner to accept less than he is entitled to under federal law.”
“What are we talking about here?” the judge asked me. “Maintenance and cure? Is that what your client allegedly owes this man?”
“Similar, Your Honor,” I said. “Though those are maritime law terms that apply to seafarers. Thomas, under the law, is more akin to an injured longshoreman.”
Lazlis tapped his fingers on the table. Thomas resumed his tic. Celeste cooled her tea with a tiny glistening mouth. I continued.
“This is essentially a federal workers’ compensation matter that should be resolved administratively by the Department of Labor under federal statutes. Which shield companies such as FreedomQuest from facing tort litigation in federal and state court for injuries that their employees allegedly suffer working overseas in war zones.”
“But he’s a soldier,” the judge said.
“He was. But then he became an employee with a private company.”
“Didn’t you hear the man?” The judge pointed at Lazlis.
“Your Honor, he may have been a soldier,” I replied.
“Once a soldier always a soldier.”
“Yes, Your Honor, that is true, perhaps. But the capacity in which he is suing FreedomQuest and their insurer WorldScore is as a private employee claiming certain benefits pursuant to a private employment contract.”
“Well, then he’s an employee and a soldier.” The judge looked at Thomas. “Did you carry a firearm, sir, while deployed to Afghanistan?”
“Affirmative.”
“Did you discharge that firearm at the enemy?”
All the Beautiful People We Once Knew Page 6
