by Joe Schwartz
The next day, she came in wearing enough layers for snow removal. Call it woman’s intuition or simply the experience of living with bad men for far too long, but it was clear to me. Cindy’s eyes that had danced with the light of life were now nothing more than extinguished remains. When Edgar deliberately bumped into her, I thought she might scream.
Before the supervisor could speak, I insisted that I was in terrible need of a helper, probably for all week, and that Cindy suited my purposes. Edgar almost objected, then saw how serious I was.
I let Cindy sit in my truck all week, bringing extra cigarettes for her and in general letting her be. Sometimes I would look over and she would be crying or praying or screaming with the windows rolled up. Sometimes I think it was all three at once.
At the end of the week, her hours completed, she surprised me. Arms wide open, she covered me whole and hugged me with more compassion than I have ever felt. She whispered in my ear, “Thank you.” I cried all the way home thinking about it.
***
July Fourth was on a Monday that year. The supervisor had left the week prior for a mission trip, and the shop was ours to do with as we pleased. It was decided the Friday prior to the holiday that we needed a break. After the necessities of trash, bathrooms, and general appearances were performed, we would have an old-fashioned pig roast. We invited all the other area units and by lunch the maintenance yard looked like a convention.
I deliberately stayed sober, enjoying the company, listening to stories I had heard many times before, but mostly to keep a watch on Edgar. He had consumed most of the two thirty-packs of beer I had brought in before they had a chance to get cold in the ice chest. I waited with a cat’s dedication to catch a mouse for him.
Round about five o’clock, all that remained of the pig was gristle and bone. By tomorrow morning, even that would be lost to the raccoons. The men’s car keys jingled with drunken delight as they tried to unlock and start their personal and company vehicles alike. Some would stay on the back roads and hopefully get home without killing anybody. Most would crawl into the driver’s seat, turn on the radio, and sleep it off here. I had kept myself busy cleaning up paper plates and aluminum cans, waiting until I was certain everyone was either passed out or gone.
Edgar was comatose, sitting at a picnic table, beer still in hand, and with his head lolled back as if deeply interested in astronomy. I came over to him with a fresh beer, the top already open and woke him.
“Edgar!” I yelled and shook him until his eyes opened.
Disorientated he asked, “Wha’…what ja’ want?”
“The party ain’t over ‘til it’s over,” I said as I put his arm over my back and raised him upright. I set the new beer to his lips. It was like nursing a newborn calf. Nothing much required of me except to let nature take its course.
He belched in my face before he yelled, “Party!”
Without any resistance I led him to my car, taking particular care to fasten his seat belt.
“Safety first,” I said to him as he looked questioningly about my concerned actions. It was our company motto. A mantra that we said aloud to each other anytime we had to follow an asinine rule in flagrant disregard for common sense.
Drunkenly, he repeated after me. “Safety first,” and promptly fell asleep.
I drove slow and cautious to the rat hole trailer park where he lived. It was common knowledge among the meth set that this place was paradise.
As I unloaded him from the car into the trailer, he popped in and out of consciousness. Finally able to deposit him on to the couch, I went back to get my purse from the trunk. When I came back in, I was shocked to see him sitting up, fully awake, and holding a fresh beer. The kind that was triple the size of a normal can, what my ex called the breakfast of champions.
The can fell to the floor with a thunk, spraying the beer across the arm of the couch. He laughed, giving a half-hearted salute to his fallen comrade. When he looked up at me clutching my purse, his laughter stopped, and that damned smile grew on his face like mold. Edgar loosened the top of his blue jeans and unzipped his fly, exposing himself to me.
“C’mon baby,” he said. “If ya didn’t want this, ya wouldn’t be here.”
“Is that what you told Cindy.”
I reached in my purse and pulled out the gun.
In a moment he was up. He lunged for me, but his open pants considerably slowed his attack. On his knees, he looked up at me, laughing again as he looked straight into the Beretta’s barrel.
“Stupid cunt,” he cursed me as I pulled the trigger over and over again.
***
I stared into the twelve pairs of eyes as I finished my story. I couldn’t read them. Some were emotionless, some full of empathy, but most were in shock.
I saw Cindy sitting in the gallery, crying quietly into a tissue. Next to her my two boys with my ex. He had been awarded temporary custody pending the outcome of this trial.
Now that I had said everything I could remember, his honor excused me from the stand. I watched the seven women and five men leave to deliberate my judgment, to decide, as I had, on the merit of another human being’s intentions. Regardless their decision, I had no regrets.
###
Good Intentions
I push my way through the double glass doors of Bailey, Taylor, Shipman, Shipman, and Davis. The sign is erroneous, and I make a mental note, as I have every morning for the last nine months, to have the first Shipman removed.
Marvin is currently in the federal slam serving an eight-year sentence. Due to the nature of his crime, he spends twenty-three hours of every day in ‘protective custody.’ That’s code for solitary confinement with television. His amazing mind for jurisprudence trapped, useless and dormant, by the futility that is prison life.
I remember when the feds broke into our offices like boot-heel Nazi thugs. Their automatic weapons drawn as they generally terrorized the shit out of middle-aged secretaries whom hadn’t so much as jaywalked in their whole lives.
The leader, a guy dressed in a pin-stripped Brooks Brothers’ suit that fit him well fifty pounds ago, handed out the search warrants. He had the foresight to make sure there were enough copies for each of the partners, the associates, and even interns. The warrant was more seizure more than search. They wanted computers, every one Marvin was known to have used at any time, whether at work, home, or otherwise. By the time they left, the only computer that remained belonged to the file clerk.
Marvin was a pedophile. Not the kind grabbing kids from school bus stops, but without guys like him, shit like this would cease to exist. He was charged with the purchase, possession, and distribution of pornographic images of a minor under the age of ten years. To be more succinct: kiddie porn.
His wife of twenty years divorced him before he was sentenced. She took her fifty percent, as prescribed by law, and the court took the remainder to be held in a slush fund called the ‘victims reimbursement program.’ I suspected it was the cost of doing business. A tax levied upon the offender, guaranteeing his life outside of bars to be so miserable that if he didn’t kill himself, he certainly wouldn’t be of any significant trouble in the future.
I loved my brother, in spite of what he had done, and faithfully represented him. I was able to get him a plea-bargain, that saved him fifteen years, with the usual caveats. He could never practice law again. He would have to register as a sex offender. He would have to surrender his passport. He couldn’t be stopped, standing, or otherwise, within fifteen hundred feet of any school. All standard and reasonable clauses, that was always demanded and completely pointless toward rehabilitation. I wished we could have opted for castration. That, at least, would have been a reasonable solution for everyone involved.
“Morning, Warren,” my secretary chimed.
My voice percolated inside my throat. The normal grunt sounds I used to communicate my thoughts when words seemed too troublesome.
She handed me a stack of pink notes, mostly missed
calls from clients. One in particular though struck me odd enough to find my voice.
“What in the hell does he want?” I asked myself.
“The call was collect,” she said. “I couldn’t accept.”
Before I could look up from the handwritten script, her fingers were a blur. The plastic keys beneath her glossy red fingernails clacked away at the body of a letter. The small black letters formed on the monitor like stitches in a blanket. I wondered if she even read what she was given to type any longer?
I sat down at my desk and put the note to the side. It could wait. I concentrated on the first rule of law: deal with the paying customers before even thinking about a pro bono client’s problems.
After a busy morning of answering client’s stupid questions, or as it is sometimes called ‘practicing psychiatry without a license,’ I finally had time to return my attention to the odd note.
I dialed the number. A ring-tone buzzed through my end of the extension, as if I were making an overseas call and not simple long distance to an isolated, if not forgotten, patch of Missouri farmland called Sikeston.
It took fifteen minutes before I could be connected to the highly controlled extension. I could almost see the plain, beige phone, reminiscent of a rotary, sans the dial. When the automated message played to remind me all conversations would be recorded and reviewed for content, is when I quit daydreaming.
“I was beginning to think you wouldn’t call me back,” Marvin said cheerfully through the static. You would think I was calling him at his summer place in the Ozarks.
“I’m your attorney,” I remind us both. “It’s my duty.”
“How’s Mary?” he asked disregarding my official tone.
“She’s fine,” I say not willing to engage in small talk at three dollars a minute.
I wait for him to speak. In the background I can clearly hear the sounds of dozen thirteen-inch televisions. It sounds weird, the mixture of news, cartoons, and talk shows. The humdrumity of passing time without hope it would go any faster.
After a full minute, Marvin spoke. “I’ve got a good one here.”
My shock is impossible to disguise. “What the hell are you talking about?”
A ‘good one’ is an unofficial term for a case not listed in any legal text. It means you’ve found a case that is winnable and consequently a decent payday. The idea that my brother was still hound dogging for clients gave me a momentary elation. It quickly dissipated when I rationalized he was probably losing his mind.
Without my responding, he elaborated. “ A young guy, lives across the hall from me. I’ve thoroughly interviewed him,” he said like he was talking to me from the extension in his old office and not from cell block fourteen. “I am completely convinced he is innocent. Unfortunately, my current situation offers certain restrictions.”
“No shit,” I blurted. “Jesus, Marvin, everyone there is innocent, ask them.” My frustration was diluted by my compassion. To keep from losing his sanity he set up shop in a four by eight foot room of concrete and metal bars. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he had somehow had a sign made by the convicts pronouncing him:
Marvin Shipman
Convicted Pervert, Former Attorney at Law
“This boy is different. He doesn’t belong here, Warren.”
“What’s your proof?”
“I can’t talk about that on the phone.”
“You have got to be…” I dropped off in mid-sentence when something occurred to me. “You don’t expect me to come all the way down there, to talk to him myself?”
“Of course I do,” he said. “How else will you be able to sign him up?”
The idea of the three and a half-hour drive did not thrill me. To see my brother, I had no problem. I had made it a point to see his time served in the state. His rotting away in some cell a thousand miles from home was not an idea I found comfortable. With the Thanksgiving holiday rolling around things would be slow. It would be a perfect time to make the trek.
“All right,” I said, “I’ll come take your client’s statement.”
Marvin was nobody’s fool. He was locked up because he had grown sloppy in his habit, like all junkies eventually do, not because he was stupid.
“Look asshole,” he attacked me, “I can remember plenty of times I pulled your ass out of the fire. No questions asked. You needed help and I delivered. Should I go into the details of four August, nineteen eighty-eight.”
The son of a bitch, I thought, he was prepared to trump my ass with the blackmail card from the beginning.
“Marvin---”
“I would hate to bring to light how on that night, a certain attorney and an underage drinking partner---”
“Enough!” I shouted. I’m sure whoever was listening to this conversation was having a good laugh. It’s not often a con has this much control over his lawyer. “I can be there Thursday morning. Is that good enough?”
“That’s Thanksgiving.”
“It’ll give your client a reason to be thankful.”
“What about Mary?” he asked.
“Let it go, Marvin,” I said hanging up the phone.
***
I left the office early Wednesday afternoon and wished my secretary a happy holiday. In kind she did the same. We exchanged a platonic hug, then I went home to pack.
The house was quiet. I still wasn’t accustomed to living alone. Mary had left a year ago last week. My advocacy for Marvin in court, fighting the good fight, pissed her off to the core.
“How can you do this?” she would morosely ask.
Every night of the trial, it was the same thing.
“He’s my brother.”
“He’s a monster and a purveyor of filth. The lowest kind of human being imaginable. Why do you have to do it? There must be somebody else.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Do you realize all the neighbors know? The things they say. Your name, our name, on the front page everyday, airing our dirty laundry.”
“I don’t give a damn, Mary. He’s always been there for me and now it’s my turn.”
That usually shut her up.
Her arguments with me eventually became unilateral warfare with a bottle of Absolute. Before the trial was over, she had quit talking to me.
The night she wrapped her BMW around a light pole downtown, I had to pull an all nighter. Like a coward, I sent my senior associate to post her bond. At the time it made sense. She knew work always came first. By the time I came home to shave and change into my power suit, a blue Italian job that had cost me more than my first new car, she was gone.
The emptiness of our home didn’t affect me until after Marvin’s trial. The crystal was still in the cabinet, and the maid service took care of housework. Her scent, though, was gone.
My overnight bag packed, I stopped and stared into the walk-in closet. The room built to hold our clothes was hardly smaller than our first apartment in college. With her half empty, it looked much bigger.
As I prepared to leave, certain the coffeepot timer was off and windows were locked, I noticed the answering machine. The number one flashed, warning me, a message waited to be heard. I pushed the play button. Instantly I recognized Mary’s voice.
“Warren, are you home? Please pick up if you’re there.” Pausing momentarily, she continued as if I was listening. “Mother wanted me to call and wish you a happy Thanksgiving. She insists on your coming up for dinner Thursday. I’ve tried to explain how busy you are, that it is hard for you to get away. Still…” She stopped again. I could tell she was trying to choose her words. “Look, I don’t give a rat’s ass one way or the other. Come if you want or don’t, but do, please call Mother. This is all very confusing for her, and believe it or not Warren, she loves you and I…” catching herself in mid-sentence, she edited her usual farewell salutation to me, “hope you are doing well.”
“I hope you are doing well too,” I said aloud, trying the words out for myself. Nothing could ever replace
‘I love you,’ but it was nice. I played the message again, then erased it.
***
I drove eighty miles an hour on cruise control as soon as I passed the county limits. The straight road offered no challenges and the passing farmland no distraction. By the time I made it to Sikeston, it was dark. From the highway you could see the Wal-Mart sign and the faint square shape of the prison.
The motel was the best the town had to offer. Better than a commercial chain, but by no means a real hotel. I was fairly sure the middle-aged woman who checked me in, swiped my Visa card, and explained to me how to make long-distance calls would be the same person in the morning making my bed, cleaning my toilet, and inspecting my room for its’ overall tidiness.
She was nice enough, saying the prison would have amended hours for the holiday. An hour earlier than normal, friends and family would be let in to see the incarcerated.
“What about attorneys?” I asked trying to make a joke.
“A visitor is a visitor, I guess.” she said.
I found my room easily enough and slid my key into the gold-plated lock. The solid thump of the dead bolt retreated inside the steel door. What they lacked in amenities they certainly made up for in security. Possibly it was the idea that less than two miles away rapists, murderers, and pedophiles were kept behind bars. Maybe the doors, the locks, and the better-than-average security cameras in the manager’s office and on the parking lot gave visitors peace of mind. I thought it all was smoke and mirrors. What better deterrent is there to crime than having a federal penal institution in your backyard?
After I unpacked, I undressed and lay down nude under the clean sheet. The last thing I thought before falling asleep, regardless the bullshit reason my brother had called me down here was that it would be nice to see him.
