by Kia Corthron
“It could have been a lot worse.”
He takes his thumbnail and scratches at the writing on the pencil.
“You were right. With the habeas there’s finally a record of procedure. Now we can properly appeal.”
“And how many years do you think that will take.”
“Maybe not as long as you think. The outside pressure has not died down, it’s still a cause célèbre. We’re lucky there.”
A memory flashes before him of a day when the four attorneys came to the reformatory, and walking the corridor toward the visitors’ space they passed a room where two teenage colored boys were painting the walls under the suspicious eye of a seated guard. Returning from the meeting and chatting, the lawyers were abruptly rendered silent as they inadvertently glanced into the room again, one of the boys having taken off his uniform shirt in the heat which exposed numerous lashes on his lower back and apparently continuing down to his buttocks.
“I kept trying to call last night but you didn’t pick up.”
He swallows and hopes she cannot hear. “Where are you now?”
“Chicago. Remember? I flew back. The only way to go, honey.”
He grins. “Your high-powered position.”
“Yes, civil rights law is certainly the jet set. And listen. The next time you’re in my town I’m taking you out to Lutz’s for chocolate éclairs.”
“Maybe we should hold off celebrating until we see if we get the appeal.”
“What about celebrating my job?”
He sets his pencil down. “You’re right. But then that would be my treat.”
“You’re right.”
“I could have taken you out while we were down South but that would have compromised the agreement.”
“It would have. And if you’d’ve escorted me into some backwoods hogs ’n’ dogs place in Red Bank, Georgia, and called that ‘celebrating,’ you would have been looking for another lawyer to slip into cheap hotels with.”
The agreement was that no one in Red Bank, including Didi’s old friend Diana (Didi had felt a bit guilty about that), would know that Didi and Eliot had been sleeping together. There had been faint signs suggesting such a destiny in the instances when they found themselves alone, the smiles, glances, but nothing had been consummated, or even a word suggesting such until Independence Day. They had an appointment with the court clerk scheduled for the 5th, so Eliot had gotten in his car on the 3rd and arrived the afternoon of the 4th. He had met with Diana, Steven, and Didi for dinner, and afterward he and Didi had returned to the modest colored hotel. Eliot’s room was on the second floor, Didi’s on the third and top. As they were about to enter the lobby they heard the first bang, and realized everyone in the building was on the roof watching the fireworks. They went up, enjoying them together, and when the show was over they both walked down the steps to the third floor. Eliot never made it back to the second until morning. At the time it had been eight weeks since the blowup with Andi, and while this start with Didi had left him with some vague feelings of guilt, there was no regret. Rather he had felt a bit relieved, as if this finally marked some sort of closure that he and Andi had not been able to find themselves.
Naturally there was suspicion. Diana would look at them sideways. Steven made up a song: “Young Coon Lawyers in Love,” and after he had crooned it enough to commit it to collective memory, he would simply hum it whenever Didi joined their threesome. But she was expert at deflecting, and occasionally in the astonishing feat of shutting Steven up. “Oh yes of course, me and Eliot. Well I thought about making it me and you, Steven, but then I noticed how your hands and feet are disproportionately small compared to the rest of you and I thought that does not bode well.”
And Andi. With her it had gone beyond suspicion. Didi called often, and Eliot’s laughter on the phone, Andi had apparently deduced, indicated a place much deeper than colleague repartee.
A month ago Didi had interviewed with a Negro firm having a mission not unlike that of Winston Douglas, though considerably larger given its Chi-town locale. Two weeks later her future supervisor called her in Red Bank to offer the position, and given that her commitment to the children’s case had been in part what had impressed her associates-to-be, they were more than tolerant in allowing her to see the work through. Her first day would be Monday.
“Ready for it?”
“I think so. Though I imagine I will miss my old life as a cop.”
Eliot guffaws, then covers his mouth. He doesn’t want Andi to hear. Well why shouldn’t she hear? By sparing her feelings, if she does in fact have any left for him, he only confuses the fact that things are over, so he lets the laugh out, then gags himself again: Beau might complain. As loud as his own pompous ass could be, the older attorney could get surly about other noise around the office.
Since things started, Eliot had spent two weekends in Chicago. He had been surprised and somewhat disappointed to find out Didi’s apartment was no bigger than Andi’s, or his own, then was ashamed. Was he with Didi just because she was a rich girl? Well, in a manner of speaking, yes. She was smart, she was educated, she was using law as a serious conduit for civil rights. And she was fun. She could do all that vital work without being uptight, a trait he and Andi were both sorely lacking. He remembers this particular quality from the privileged students in college and law school. The ease of the wealthy.
And of course there was the other matter, the fuse that had lit all the drama that last awful afternoon: Andi’s umpteenth rejection of his offer of a weekend together in Gary. He could only interpret her reticence to fully be with him, her younger lover, as a lack of seriousness in them as a couple.
On the third Saturday in August, as they both lay on her bed naked, Didi told Eliot to go through her closet and bureau and come up with an outfit for her. She promised that whatever he’d pick out, she’d wear. He had been granted the power, then, to dress her in the silliest or the most provocative fashion, but rather than enjoy the fun of it, he was seized by a paralyzing terror that he might make a mortal miscalculation. If he chose wrong, would she secretly resent him for it? He cowered and put together an ensemble he had already seen her wear. “You have impeccable taste.” Next she picked up the underthings he had singled out and burst out laughing. “What?” he had cried. “What!” How could he have gone wrong there? Underwear is underwear! But she put on everything and refused to tell him what she had found so amusing. At a deli lunch, the guilt of cheating overcame him, and he confessed to having dressed her (except for the underclothes) as he had already seen her dress herself. His shame over the matter only enhanced her merriment. He asked again about the underwear error, but began to see the more he pressed the issue, the more she delighted in his exasperation, so finally he gave up.
The permission to search through her drawers, and the drawers in her drawers, had not made Eliot feel closer to Didi. It was very possible he was the first person she had ever asked to dress her, and it was equally possible he was the hundredth. Sharing was not satisfying, not a gift, as it had been with Andi, because Didi seemed to have no problem expounding upon intimacies with strangers, or at any rate what others would regard as intimacies. She knew little about Eliot, and he was certain she would have been open to hearing him if he had wished to talk, but since he didn’t volunteer the information she didn’t pry. It was all part of Didi’s composure, her smiling effortlessness which meant their relationship was not fraught.
They were strolling along Lake Michigan that afternoon, sometimes hand in hand, none of the clandestine measures that he and Andi had taken in Indianapolis, or that he and Didi had taken in Red Bank for that matter, and this public display of affection soothed for the moment his nagging curiosity about what Didi did in her spare time when he was not around, and with whom. A seagull alighted in front of them as Eliot had asked Didi if she had considered going into law enforcement.
She frow
ned. “A lady cop? No! Why?”
From her reaction he was tentative about continuing, but there was no turning back now. “When I went through your closet, I saw those handcuffs.” She had had to double over holding her stomach, the ache of her laughter.
Now he hears the phone ringing in the office next to him, followed by Beau’s voice loud through the wall: “Monday? Now it’s Monday?”
“I better go,” Eliot says, realizing he’d been on the line a good seven minutes.
“Alright, but first I have a little story for you. A priest, a rabbi, and a cracker judge are all sent to meet St. Peter.”
He is grinning in anticipation when there’s a knock.
“Come in.”
“Sorry to bother you. Beau needs some documents in triplicate right away and I’m out of carbon paper. Do you have any?” Andi is businesslike, unsmiling.
Her kindness this morning about the children’s case had not only been a comfort to him but also a relief to see something close to tenderness in her eyes. Their relationship had deteriorated to this chilly remoteness, more Andi’s doing than his, especially after he had begun feeling pretty gratified by his new Windy City distraction and just wished for bygones to be bygones back home.
And right now he has no time for dramatics, his mouth watering for Didi’s punch line. He indicates the file cabinet. “Go ahead and check.” As she does, he grins into the receiver. “Okay, give it to me.” Eliot is fussily organized, and alphabetically a file is marked CARBON PAPER. Andi turns to him again. “I’m sorry.”
He looks at her.
“There’s only two sheets left.”
He waves dismissively, implying for her to take them both and leave, his mind focused on following the details of the gag. Suddenly he explodes in laughter. “No, I hadn’t heard it. Our jokes are clean in Indianapolis!” Andi leaves, quietly shutting the door behind her.
Late morning, Eliot walks to the conference room and finds Andi using her fifteen-minute break to read a chapter in one of her law books. She doesn’t look up. He notices how tired she seems, dark circles. Returning with the cup of coffee he poured, he overhears Beau in Winston’s office, bellowing about some judge who put them off for months and now suddenly has set the hearing for just after the weekend.
Eliot works through lunch. He had inadvertently left his door cracked, and hears Will go out to ask Andi something. The conversation begins professionally, but then Will must have said something funny because Andi starts laughing. It continues, the murmur of their voices and her giggling and it begins to irritate Eliot, distracting him from his work. The two have developed a rather flirty relationship as of late, or perhaps it was always there but has come to flower since she and Eliot stopped seeing each other. Andi and this married man, father of five. None of Eliot’s business but what is his business is the fact that he can’t concentrate because of their frivolousness. He could just close the door but he likes Will and doesn’t want to antagonize him, nor does he want Andi to mistake the gesture as some act of jealousy on his part, so he waits out their talk which goes on a good twelve minutes. When Will finally returns to his office, Eliot allows about three more minutes, buffer time to prove he is not responding to them, before quietly closing his door.
He leaves for the hospital at one, and at 1:25, five minutes early, he stands outside the room. He tells the white police officer that he is the patient’s attorney and is permitted entrance.
The man lying on the bed is motionless but awake. He breathes heavily and even. He is covered in a sheet, his right arm on top of it, everything bandaged from his biceps to his fingertips. A handcuff is locked around the bars at the foot of the bed, the shackle attached to something under the sheet, presumably the patient’s ankle. The only visible flesh, his neck and face, is completely black and blue, and there’s an awkward shape to his head as if the side of it had been flattened. His nose and lower lip are split open, his left eye swollen completely shut, the blood vessels in his right eye bright and appearing to be on the point of bursting. But something is working behind that eye because the man has managed to fix it on Eliot.
On a chair next to the client sits a thin woman in her late forties, a careworn face. She stands. “You Mr. Campbell?”
“Yes.”
“Sam. This the lawyer.” She turns to Eliot. “I’m Petronia Daughtery, and this is my son Samuel Daughtery.”
“How do you do, Mrs. Daughtery.” According to the file this would be the proper address, though there was no clarification of a Mr. Daughtery excepting her son. Eliot shakes her hand. “How do you do, Mr. Daughtery.”
Samuel Daughtery closes his right eye, holding it for about three seconds.
“He jus acknowledgin you. Usually that means yes. He blink twice fast for no.”
“I’m sorry this happened to you, Mr. Daughtery.”
Sam Daughtery stares at his attorney.
“May I have a few moments alone with your son?”
“He jus blinked twice.”
Eliot had missed it, having turned to the mother.
“Would you prefer if your mother stayed?”
Sam Daughtery holds his right eye closed.
“Alright. Please sit down, Mrs. Daughtery.” Eliot sees another chair on the other side of the room and walks over to pick it up for himself. He tries to think what his first question will be since the intended “What happened?” is obviously not going to work.
“Mr. Daughtery. Do you understand the charges that have been brought against you? Possession of a concealed weapon? Racketeering? Resisting arrest, I am not yet asking whether you committed any of these crimes, only, do you understand the charges?”
Sam Daughtery holds his right eye closed.
“As your attorney I am here to help you as best I can. I can only do that if you are honest with me. Anything I don’t know that comes out later can only hurt us. Do you understand?”
Sam Daughtery holds his right eye closed.
“At the time of your arrest, were you in possession of a gun?”
Sam Daughtery blinks twice.
“At the time of your arrest, were you in possession of betting slips pertaining to the numbers racket?”
Sam Daughtery blinks twice.
“At the time of your arrest, did you resist the officers in any way?”
Sam Daughtery looks at his mother.
“I think he needs you to be more specific.”
“Did you hit the officers?”
Sam Daughtery blinks twice.
“Kick the officers?”
Sam Daughtery blinks twice.
“Strike the officers in any way?”
Sam Daughtery blinks twice.
“So you did not resist the officers.”
Sam Daughtery looks at his mother.
“People who was nearby tole me he said, ‘I know my rights! I get to talk to a lawyer!’” She raises her volume when she quotes her son, her eyes burning into the officer standing at the door. The officer faces away. If he hears her, he makes no indication of it.
“Is that what you said, Mr. Daughtery?”
Sam Daughtery holds his right eye closed.
“Didn’t he have a right to say that?”
“Yes, he had a right to say that. And did they reply?”
Sam Daughtery holds his right eye closed.
“I imagine they said a lot of things, Mr. Daughtery, and we can talk about that in a few days when you have healed a bit. But for now, with a simple yes or no, can you tell me what was their reply when you asked for a lawyer? When you demanded they recognize your rights?”
There is a movement, something slowly sliding under the sheet. With great effort and apparent considerable pain he pulls it out, his left arm, and lifts it, tight and strong, in reply to Eliot’s inquiry, the answer the police officers gave him when he asked
about his rights: a fist.
It’s three by the time Eliot gets back to Winston Douglas. Andi is not at her desk. Then Eliot hears Beau’s voice booming from his office, formulating a letter so Andi must be trapped in there taking dictation. Eliot shuts his office door, jotting notes regarding the information he had garnered at the hospital. Around 3:45 he jumps when Beau’s door slams open. “Andi! Get in here now!”
Eliot had never heard such a belligerent tone from Beau. He hears Andi enter his neighbor’s office, then Beau spewing a hysterical tirade wherein such phrases as “dumb secretary” and “dumb office girl” are tossed about liberally. From bits and pieces, Eliot gathers that some simple but crucial error was made and, by virtue of the carbon paper, Andi had triplicated her mistake exponentially. The rant is terrible but brief, or cut short when Andi runs crying out of Beau’s office. Eliot had never seen her cry, and he flies out of his own office. Will is already standing there, staring stunned at Beau’s open door, and Winston is in the room trying to calm Beau down. Eliot dashes to the bathroom and knocks. “Andi. Andi, are you alright?”
A silence, Andi instantly cutting off her sobs, seeming to have been caught by surprise and thus further humiliated to know that everyone has heard the incident though they would have had to have been in a coma to have missed it. Her voice is small. “Yes.” When she emerges several minutes later, she is startled to see Eliot still standing there. Her eyes are red, swollen. “I have to go to the office supply store and buy more carbon paper, we’re out.”
“I can do it. Do you want me to do it?”
From Beau’s office they hear Winston. “No, Beau, I am not firing her!”
She is instantly sobbing again. “He kept me here all night! He knew Tuesday and Thursday evenings I had class but he said he had his deadline today, I missed my exam! I flunked my exam! And now the Opal case is moved up to Monday—” She bawls fully a moment, then abruptly suppresses it. “I gotta get to the office supply store before it closes,” and she quickly walks out.
