Hell Bent

by William G. Tapply

  Alex looked up at him. “Why?”

  “Think about it,” he said.

  She blinked, then nodded. “I would’ve cut it for you.”

  He gave her a sarcastic smile. “Thanks, Mommy.”

  “What does your group say about accepting help?” she said. “About letting the people who love you help you?”

  He turned his head and looked at me. “She’s right. Alex is always right.”

  “I’ve usually found that to be true,” I said.

  “I’m supposed to reach out,” he said, “and allow people to reach out to me. I’m not supposed to be stoic and tough.”

  “Sounds like good advice to me.”

  “Easy to say, hard to do,” he said. “And bitterness and cynicism are negative and destructive, they tell me. I’m not sure what’s left.” He smiled. “So Brady, tell me. Why are you really here?”

  I glanced at Alex.

  “Gussie,” she said, “I know—”

  “Okay, he’s a lawyer,” said Gus. “I get the picture.” He looked at me. “You want to handle my divorce. You’re soliciting business, huh?”

  I turned to Alex. “What did you tell him?”

  She shook her head. “I’m sorry. If I told him, he wouldn’t have agreed to meet you.” She looked at Gus. “Would you?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Brady’s not soliciting your business,” she said. “It’s my idea. You’ve got to have a lawyer. Brady’s the best.”

  “You lied to me,” he said.

  “No,” said Alex. “I—”

  “You did. You know damn well I wouldn’t have come here if you told me you were hooking me up with some lawyer.”

  She nodded. “Okay, you’re right about that.” She reached across the table and put her hand on his arm. “It wasn’t really a lie. But, yeah, okay. I guess I manipulated you. You need a lawyer, and I can’t just sit back and watch you wreck your life.”

  He looked down at her hand until she removed it.

  “I’m sorry, Gussie,” Alex said. “I love you, that’s all. You’re my big brother.”

  “I don’t need a lawyer,” Gus said. “I don’t want a fucking lawyer. This is between me and Claudia.”

  “Talk to him, Brady,” said Alex. “Please.”

  I looked at Gus. “Does Claudia have a lawyer?”

  “Oh, sure. Good one, she says. Gonna take care of her.”

  “But you don’t have anybody to take care of you.”

  “Don’t need anybody. Don’t want anybody.”

  “You have kids?”

  He nodded.

  “A house? Credit cards? Bank account? Insurance? An IRA or 401(k) or something?”

  Gus waved his left hand in the air. “I know about all that. I know what you’re saying. But, see, I don’t want any of that stuff. She can have it. She deserves it. All of it. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “What about Claudia?” I said. “Does she work?”

  “She’s a CPA. Works for a company in Lexington. It’s a good job. Pays pretty well. Nice regular income, health insurance, benefits.”

  “Unlike you, huh?” I said.

  He smiled quickly. “Freelance photojournalists don’t work on salaries.”

  “Any chance of you two reconciling?” I said.

  “Not hardly.” He shook his head. “It’s over. You think she’d’ve gotten a lawyer, filed for divorce, if she thought we might reconcile?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe she’s just trying to scare you. Maybe she’d be amenable to marriage counseling.”

  He laughed. “Well,” he said, “I’m not. Trust me, Claudia’s done with me, and I don’t blame her. She can have everything, and as far as I’m concerned, she can just go ahead and get it done. She can have the house and the money and all of it.”

  “And the kids, too?” I said.

  He shrugged. “Whatever.”

  Alex leaned toward him. “You say this now,” she said, “but think about a year, five years from now.”

  “I can hardly think about tomorrow,” he said.

  “See?” said Alex. “That’s why you need a lawyer. To see into the future for you.”

  “Don’t need a lawyer,” he muttered. He looked at me. “No offense, man. I appreciate what you’re doing. Both of you. But really, I’d rather everybody just minded their own business and left me alone.”

  “I feel the same way a lot of the time,” I said. “But it just doesn’t work that way. Especially when you’re in the middle of a divorce. Listen. I’m not here because I need the business. I’m here because I like your sister, and she loves you, and she’s right about your needing representation with your divorce. Look at it this way. The best way for you to be left alone is to have a lawyer handle it for you.”

  He narrowed his eyes at me. “I thought a lawyer was so you could fight it. I don’t want to fight it.”

  “A lawyer is to steer you through it,” I said. “Handle the paperwork. Go to the meetings. Do the negotiating. Watch out for your interests. Make sure you don’t get screwed.”

  “I don’t have any interests except being left alone. I don’t care if I get screwed. I deserve to get screwed.”

  “You don’t,” said Alex. “Stop talking that way.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. He looked at me. “What were you getting at about my kids?”

  “Your wife could go for full custody,” I said. “She could deny you visitation rights. She could move to California—or Australia, for that matter—and take the kids with her.” I leaned toward him. “You have two girls, right?”

  He nodded.

  “Juno and Clea,” said Alex. “They’re eight and five. Adorable.”

  “Look,” I said to Gus. “Let me take care of this for you. I won’t do anything you don’t agree to. If you really want to get screwed, we can go for it as far as the court will allow. You can’t just do nothing, though. The system won’t allow that. It’ll be a big fat hassle for you. What do you say?”

  He stared at me for a long minute. Then he said, “What’s in it for you?”

  “Me?” I gave him a hard look. “Nothing’s in it for me, as far as I can see, except another pain-in-the-ass, neurotic, self-destructive client”—I pointed my forefinger at him—”of which I already have more than my share. I know what I’ll be getting into with you. You’ll piss and moan all the time and be late for meetings and refuse to answer the phone and lie to me and generally refuse to cooperate with me, and I’ll just end up with one more big stack of paperwork on my desk. You think I drove out here on a Saturday night because I’m hard up for clients? Believe it or not, I turn away clients if I don’t like them or if I don’t think their cases will be fun for me. You think I like you? You think another fucked-up client in a crappy divorce is going to entertain me, bring joy into my life?”

  Gus Shaw was staring at me. Then he smiled. “Okay,” he said.

  “What do you mean, okay?” I said.

  “I want you to be my lawyer, okay?”

  I shook my head. “If it wasn’t for Alex—”

  “I want you,” he said. “I do.” He looked at Alex. “I like this guy.”

  She smiled at him. “I do, too.”

  “Nobody talks to me like that anymore,” said Gus.

  “You had it coming to you,” she said.

  He turned to me. “Your job is to do what I want, right?”

  “I’m your lawyer, not your slave,” I said. “My job is to help you figure out what you want, what’s in your best interest, and then to try to get it.”

  “Even if what I want is for my wife to just have everything.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Insofar as that’s possible and it’s what you really want.”

  “And you’ll help me figure out what’s possible?”

  “Yes. And what’s in your best interest.”

  He frowned. “I guess that’s what I meant. And you are obliged to keep my secrets, I�
�m right about that, huh?”

  “What passes between us is privileged, yes,” I said. “If you’re my client, you can trust me to keep your secrets.”

  He reached his left hand across the table. “It’s a deal, then.”

  I shook his left hand with my right one. “Okay. A deal.”

  “We need to talk,” he said. “Right?”

  “We do,” I said. “First order of business, my first instruction to you as your lawyer, you’ve got to tell your wife that I’m representing you.”

  “Why?”

  “She’s got to tell her lawyer. We two lawyers will need to talk. You don’t know who her lawyer is, do you?”

  Gus shook his head.

  “I can do it,” said Alex.

  He looked at her. “Do what?”

  “Talk to Claudia.”

  “Why?”

  She shrugged. “If you … if you’re nervous about talking to Claudia.”

  “I can talk to Claudia,” he said.

  “It’s important,” I said. “Give her my name and phone numbers. Do it right away. Her lawyer will want to call me.” I handed him one of my business cards. “Don’t forget.”

  He took my card and stuck it into his shirt pocket. “I said I’d do it, for Chrissake.”

  “Okay,” I said. “The sooner the better.”

  “So when should we talk?”

  I shrugged. “We can start now, while we’re here together. Otherwise you’re going to have to trek into the city or I’m going to have to drive out here.”

  “I can’t drive,” he said. “I don’t have enough hands.”

  “So let’s get started,” I said. I turned and looked at Alex. “You can’t be here.” I stood up so she could slide out of the booth.

  Alex got up, and as she eased past me she put her mouth to my ear and whispered, “Thank you.”

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” said Gus. “I don’t like being around all these people. We can go to my place, talk there. It’s not far from here.”

  We said good-bye to Alex in the parking lot of the restaurant. She gave both of us a big sisterly hug. I thought mine was bigger than Gus’s, but no less sisterly. She said she’d be in touch with both of us, then climbed into her little Subaru SUV with the Maine plates and drove off to her room in the Best Western hotel near the prison at the rotary.

  Gus and I piled into my BMW and headed toward Concord. He said he was renting an apartment over a garage behind a big old colonial house not far from the statue of the Minuteman and the replica of the rude bridge that arched the flood where it all began on April 19, 1775.

  He directed me to a long driveway off Monument Street about a mile outside of the center of town. The garage appeared to be a refurbished carriage house. It was separated from the main house by an expanse of lawn and a screen of hemlocks. A set of wooden stairs had been built onto the outside wall. We climbed them, and Gus fished a key from his pocket and let us in.

  It was one large room with slanting walls and a dormer, with triangular windows on the ends and a couple of skylights. There was a galley kitchen with stainless-steel appliances, an alcove with a leather sofa and two leather chairs and a flat-screen television set, a table under one of the windows with a laptop computer and a telephone, a round dining table, a closed-off bathroom, and a bed behind a half-wall partition. Everything looked new and shiny.

  “Not bad,” I said to Gus. “Comfortable.”

  “Completely renovated,” he said. “I’m the first tenant. It came furnished, too. TV, microwave, everything. All I had to move was myself. Even comes with cable and Internet hookup.”

  In addition to the door from the outside stairway, there were two other doors. One was ajar, and I could see it was a small closet with some clothes hanging inside. I pointed at the other one. “Another closet?”

  Gus shook his head. “Goes downstairs to where Herb keeps his carriages.”

  “Carriages?

  Gus rolled his eyes. “Joke, man. This used to be a carriage house.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  The built-in bookshelves in one corner were empty of books. They held only a short stack of magazines, a couple of shoe boxes, a telephone directory, some folding road maps, and a clock radio. They say you can tell a lot about a person by what’s on his bookshelves.

  No pictures hung on the photojournalist’s walls. Aside from two dirty mugs and an empty plate on the coffee table and some dishes in the sink, it looked as if nobody lived here.

  “How long have you been here?” I said.

  “Since Claudia kicked me out. Last April.” He waved the back of his hand at the apartment. “Mr. and Mrs. Croyden—my landlords, Herb and Beth—they’d just finished having it fixed up around the time I needed a place. A mutual friend told me about it. Herb and Beth were happy to have me, I think. Someone who’d been over there, I mean. They lost a son.”

  “In Iraq?”

  He nodded. “Roadside bomb. Random, senseless, stupid, like everything over there. They want me to talk about it more than I want to, I think. Tell them what it’s really like. Help them make sense of it. Which I can’t. Because it doesn’t make sense.” He went over to the coffee table, piled the two empty mugs on the plate, balanced them awkwardly against his chest, and took them to the sink. “You want a Coke? Or I could make some coffee. I don’t have any booze.”

  “A Coke is fine,” I said. I went over and sat on the sofa.

  Gus came over a minute later holding two cans of Coke against his chest with his left hand. He put them on the coffee table and sat in the chair across from me. “So what do you need to know?”

  “What do you want out of this divorce?” I said.

  “Me?” He shook his head. “Nothing. It’s for Claudia, not me. I want it over and done with, is all. Like I said, I just want to be left alone.”

  “Don’t we all,” I said. “You don’t want to lose your kids, right?”

  “Of course. I would’ve thought that goes without saying.”

  “Nothing goes without saying,” I said. “That’s why you need a lawyer.”

  “I just can’t take any more hassle, you know?”

  “You want me to leave,” I said, “I’ll leave.

  “He looked at me for a minute. “No,” he said. “We need to talk.”

  FOUR

  Gus waved his hand around his little apartment. “She thought she was going to stay here, take care of me, make me all better.”

  “Alex?”

  He nodded. “Came all the way down from Maine with her suitcase and her good intentions. I told her not to come, and she came anyway.”

  “It’s a nice place,” I said. “Kinda small for two people, though.”

  “I had no idea she expected to actually stay here with me,” he said.

  I took a sip of Coke.

  “I told her I was fine,” he continued, “said she should go back to Maine. Persistent woman. Said she was staying. I said, ‘Not here, you’re not.’” He sat down in one of the empty chairs. “So now you want me to tell you my life story, huh?”

  “I’m your lawyer,” I said, “not your confessor. This is about your divorce. The main thing is, you can’t lie to me.”

  He nodded. “I just need to know one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You won’t do anything I don’t want you to do.”

  “My job,” I said, “is to make it work out the way you want. That probably won’t happen, of course. There’s always give-and-take. It’s all about compromising within the boundaries of the law. But given that, no, I won’t do anything you don’t want. I may try to change your mind about something if I think it’s not in your interest.”

  He nodded. “Fair enough, I guess. So what can I tell you?”

  “I don’t know you,” I said. “I don’t want to be blindsided by your wife’s lawyer. There can’t be any surprises. So you tell me. What do I need to know?”

  He leaned his head against the back of
his chair and looked up at the ceiling. “I’ve got PTSD. That pretty much defines me these days.”

  I nodded. “You’re getting help for it?”

  “I’ve got meds and I’ve got a support group. I’m not sure how supportive they actually are. They try. They’re keeping me going, I guess.” He held up the stump on the end of his right arm. “I had it before this happened. The traumatic stress. Had it the moment my plane touched down in that godforsaken place. That’s what nobody wants to understand.”

  “And what happened between you and your wife …?”

  Gus shook his head. “Sometimes I don’t recognize myself. It’s like I’m floating around in the sky watching myself, and I wonder who the hell that whacked-out one-handed evil-tempered guy is down there, doing things I don’t understand, things I’d never do.”

  “What did that guy do?” I said.

  He gave me a wry smile. “The one-handed guy? He lost it. He accused his wife of cheating on him. He made his kids cry. He made his wife cry. And he made himself cry, and he got the hell out of there. See? That’s not me. Ask my sister. That’s the opposite of me. Except, now I guess it is me. The one-handed part, anyway. I gotta accept that. It’s me now. It’s the new me. I’m that one-handed guy.”

  “Was she?”

  He turned his head and looked at me. “Huh?”

  “Your wife,” I said. “Was she cheating on you?”

  “I don’t know,” said Gus. “Wouldn’t blame her, huh?” He paused. “I can’t prove it, but I think she was. Is. Does it matter?”

  “For the divorce?” I shook my head. “Not really. For your, um, frame of mind? You tell me.”

  He shrugged but said nothing.

  “Did you hurt anybody?” I said.

  “Jesus,” he said. “Of course not. I didn’t touch her. Or the kids. I never …” He stood up and went over to the window. He looked outside into the darkness. “Do we have to do this?”

  “I need to know everything,” I said.

  “There’s nothing else to know.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Another time. We don’t need to talk about it now.”

  Gus came back to his chair and sat down. “It’s about all I think about,” he said. “This man who lost it in front of his family. This stranger I’ve turned into. Not a nice man. Nobody I know. But, yeah. Good. Let’s not talk about it.”