The One-Eyed Judge

by Ponsor, Michael;

  The day after his court hearing, Sid was sitting at the end of a table in the corner, trying to get his creamed corn down as fast as he could, when a bald-headed black inmate about his age slid in across from him. The man settled himself, then folded his hands and closed his eyes, bowing over his tray. His scalp was so wrinkled it looked as though his skull had been partly deflated.

  After finishing his prayer, the man raised his head. “Hey, little brother, what’s up?”

  At first, Sid hadn’t known how to respond to this ritual question, which had never before been put to him. Once, he’d just said, “Fine, thanks,” and gotten a puzzled look. Later, he killed time lying in his bunk imagining witty responses, like “the Dow Jones,” “your cholesterol,” or “my anxiety level.”

  Now, a couple of days later, he knew the drill. It didn’t pay to be clever. “Not much. What’s up with you?”

  “Not much. Not much.”

  Their rectangular table accommodated eight chairs, four to a side. The square of four seats on the far end was occupied, leaving the two adjoining Sid and the man across from him empty.

  Two young Hispanic inmates, who looked like they might have been brothers or cousins, approached, and one of them slid into the seat next to Sid. The second man, taller and older, hesitated, holding his tray above the last vacant seat. He noticed Sid, and his eyes narrowed. Then he looked at his partner and gave a slight shake of his head. The seated man rose, and the two walked off in search of other spots.

  The older black prisoner called after them. “Something we said?”

  The retreating men either didn’t hear or pretended not to. After a couple bites of his meatloaf, the older black inmate looked up at Sid.

  “You the professor dude, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long you gonna be in here for?”

  “Supposed to be only two or three more days.”

  “Putting you on the ankle bracelet?” The man jiggled his knees as he talked, keyed up.

  “That’s what the judge said. Home detention with electronic monitoring.”

  “Lucky boy.” The man stirred some gravy into his mashed potatoes. “Norcross?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s all right. Better than some of them other motherfuckers. Got your own house and so forth you’re putting up, too, people saying.”

  “Guess so.”

  “Must be nice to have the hard.”

  The two men ate in silence. Sid concentrated on his tray, hoping the conversation was over.

  He’d learned that “hard” meant money. Linda Ames had warned him that prisoners sometimes threatened to beat up a vulnerable inmate unless he arranged regular protection payments to a girlfriend or buddy on the outside. If this happened, she said, Sid should stall as long as possible and get in touch with her right away.

  Unfortunately, the man across from him soon resumed speaking. “People call me A.J.”

  “Uh, Sid.”

  A.J. raised his eyebrows and smiled almost shyly. “This here is a tough, tough game for old cockadoodlers like you and me, man.”

  “I know.”

  “Figured we might help each other out.”

  Sid had no idea what to say. He had, even in his short time, acquired the instinct to know that if he allied himself with the wrong person, he could make his situation worse, not better. He responded with a shrug.

  A.J. continued. “Staties caught me and my old lady body-packing up to Rutland.” He sniffed. “Took us in the ladies’ room and yanked the shit right out, man. It was ugly.” A.J.’s head was bobbing up constantly, scanning the room and then ducking down again. His knees kept jiggling.

  It was well known that heroin and cocaine flowed steadily up from Holyoke and Springfield into Vermont, where addicts would pay a 25 or 30 percent premium for their drugs. “Body-packing” was a new term for Sid, but it didn’t need much imagination to guess where A.J. and his girlfriend had been carrying their product.

  “So now I picked up this trafficking charge, and I can’t do the time, you know? The game in here is just, like I say, too tough for me.” He slurped his milk and set the glass down with a clack. “So I started talking to them boys about this and that. They open me up and send me out, but I’m taking heat, you know. People in the hood, they think I’m dry snitching, and po-po thinks I’m half stepping, holding back on him. And the pressure, man, it’s killing me, so I start using—not too much, just to take the edge off, right? Then I’m pissing in the cup, and the motherfuckers catch me waterloading and throw me in here. Close me the fuck down.”

  “Okay.” Sid understood about half of this.

  “But you got the feds on you, I hear. That right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I know shit those feds would just love to hear—good heavy shit, you know? And with the feds, man …” He reached over and prodded Sid’s shoulder. “You help them, and you get a solid gold credit card, right? Now, you just tell your lawyer— Oh-oh.” He was gazing across the room toward the doorway, where two prisoners were talking to one of the guards. “Don’t like that.” He leaned forward, dropping his voice to a whisper. “Listen up, Professor. One hand washes the other, you know? Lot of guys here have kids. Don’t like diddlers. They got plans for you. Soon. Thought it’d be the righteous thing to mention it. You remember A.J., okay?”

  “What am I supposed to do? I’m …”

  “Want my advice? Get in seg.”

  “Seg?”

  “Get yourself put in the hole.”

  “But how do I …”

  “Oh my Lord, here it comes. Quicker’n I thought. Get in the hole, friend, get in the hole and stay in the hole.”

  With a fluid twist, A.J. slid out of his chair, slunk around the adjoining table, and disappeared. At the same time, Sid felt a gathering of shadows behind him, as though a clump of trees had suddenly grown up at his back. When he turned, he found a semicircle of large men creating a screen between him and the rest of the room. The guards who normally kept an eye on things had stepped away.

  Sid said, “Hi,” but no one smiled.

  The four men at the end of his table stood up with their trays.

  “Time to bounce,” one of them said. All four moved off, not looking in Sid’s direction. One of the men, still chewing, wiped his hands on the back of his pants.

  “Well, hello again to you, Professor!” It was his cellie. Other people at nearby tables were casually moving off. No guards anywhere. The gang, maybe five or six men of various colors, edged in closer, deepening the privacy and blocking out any witnesses to whatever was about to happen.

  His cellie leaned over, put his hand on Sid’s shoulder. “These boys asked me to introduce you.” He dropped his voice, and his eyes danced back at the group gathered around him. “They thought, since the sheriff bunked us together, I must be in the kindergarten, too. Got to clear that up.” He stood and held out both hands. “So here he is, guys—the professor.”

  Sid’s heart was racing. He twisted to the side, facing the men, gripping the edges of his tray. Were they going to kill him?

  “Well,” he began. “What’s the … What’s the …” There really was no way to finish the sentence.

  A voice said, “Time to give the perfessor his lesson.”

  Sid started to get up, still holding his tray, and a heavy hand behind him shoved him down.

  He knew then it was real. The normal uproar of voices in the room continued, maybe a little louder, as though nothing was happening, but around him, the pool of silence grew closer.

  A ripple rolled over the group, some movement, and then his cellie was holding a steaming mug of coffee in each hand. The mist from the mugs was distorting the man’s face.

  “Do it,” the voice ordered, and his cellie whispered hoarsely, “Coffee break, Teach!”

&nb
sp; He stretched out his right hand and began to pour the scalding liquid onto Sid’s bald head.

  Sid ducked out from under the hand on his shoulder and spun toward his attacker, thrusting up with the tray so it caught his cellie under the tip of his nose. The man’s head snapped back, coffee and creamed corn went flying, and a spout of blood shot down his chin. When the inmate beside him lunged forward, Sid jammed the broken remnant of the tray in his face and kicked him hard in the groin. A rush of bodies followed, the table went over with a heavy bang, and Sid saw stars as a punch or club landed on the side of his head and he went down. He could feel a hand grabbing at his testicles, and he crossed his legs and put his hands over the top of his head, pressing his elbows over his face. The initial thumping hurt, but not unbearably—then they rolled him over and began kicking him, which hurt a lot more.

  The beating went on for what seemed like a long time until, just as he was losing consciousness, he heard the roar of the guards breaking through, shouting, “Don’t kill him! Don’t kill him!” There was a tremendous crash, which must have been several people going down over a table. He heard the crack of batons, people crying out in pain, and the voice of the same guard, shouting, very loud, “Goddammit! That’s enough!” And then, not so loud, “You’ll get us all fired, for Christ’s sake.” If the guards had stayed away for another couple of minutes, the mob probably would have finished him off right then and there, which, in Sid’s opinion, would have saved everyone, especially him, a lot of trouble.

  PART TWO

  MOTION PRACTICE

  14

  It was a humid late-August afternoon in Washington, DC, and Judge Norcross had gotten himself into another serious pickle. Bob Stephenson was smiling over at him, already amused at the imminent disaster.

  “Yeah, come on, Your Honor.” He gave Norcross a poke. “Show us your stuff!”

  The three months since the Dubrovnik plane crash had not been easy. All summer, Judge Norcross had been flying down to Washington every Friday to visit his nieces and give them a weekend in their own home. Lindsay and Jordan spent their weekdays with Bob and June Stephenson—old State Department friends of Ray Norcross. The arrangement was supposed to be a temporary stopgap, but it hadn’t worked out that way. Ray’s skin grafts were taking longer than expected to heal, and recurring infections continued to bar any move from the hospital in Germany.

  This particular Saturday, Norcross and the girls had come to the Stephensons’ plush home to enjoy, supposedly, a poolside barbecue. Up until now, the event had not been much fun, for a couple reasons.

  First, there were the Stephensons’ twin eleven-year-olds, Lloyd and Curtis. Typical of boys their age, they had been spending the afternoon trying to outdo each other with cannonballs that basically prevented anyone else from getting into the pool or even near it.

  One of them—Curtis, probably—was standing at the end of Norcross’s deck chair with his hands on his hips, smelling of chlorine and backing up his father’s challenge.

  “Yeah, Mr. Judge,” he said. “Put up or shut up.” The kid wasn’t smiling. In the background, the second twin crashed into the pool, screaming “Cowabunga!”

  The second problem was the girls. Lindsay was lying in a recliner well off to the side, alternately submerged in her phone or pretending to doze, waiting out the time until they could go home. Twice, she’d turned down, with no expression of thanks, Bob Stephenson’s hearty offer of a cheeseburger with all the fixin’s. Jordan, in a green swimsuit with pink rosettes on the shoulder straps, mostly stuck close to her uncle’s side, looking lost and visibly wincing at the nonstop hoots from Lloyd and Curtis to come on into the water. When their calls lured her near the pool, she was promptly drenched by a vigorous and deliberately timed cannonball.

  Like most kind parents, Bob and June Stephenson were ambivalent about discipline and gave their boys a long leash. Bob’s murmured, “Hey, watch it now,” had little effect.

  Norcross tried to comfort Jordan as she skittered back to him, saying, “It’s okay, Jordan. Cannonballs are for amateurs. I bet they couldn’t do a can opener.”

  Curtis immediately jumped on this.

  “What’s a can opener?”

  “It’s a kind of dive,” Norcross said dismissively. “It’s harder to do and much more exciting than a cannonball.”

  “Show us.”

  The other twin chimed in, yelling from the diving board, “Yeah, show us. Show us!”

  Which was when Bob leaned toward him with a glint in his eye and threw down the gauntlet. Bob was not a mean-spirited man, but he had a quality Norcross had never liked, the tendency to use teasing as a form of aggression he didn’t have to own up to. Everybody was supposed to be a good sport. His boys, unfortunately, seemed to have acquired this trait from him.

  “Yeah, come on, Your Honor. Show us your stuff.” Bob was wearing trendy black frame glasses, a tan silk sport shirt over his black trunks, and a wolfish grin.

  Back in Wisconsin, Norcross had been a good athlete, lettering in ice hockey and cross-country skiing. Over the years, he’d stayed trim. Even in his forties, he did not disgrace himself in swimming trunks. But he hadn’t been off a diving board in more than twenty years.

  “Okay, I will.”

  The girls’ eyes tracked Norcross as he stood and stripped off his Boston Red Sox T-shirt. Folding his arms behind his head, he stretched, and glared down at Curtis. “Watch and learn.”

  “Oh God,” Lindsay said. She rose from her recliner and began pacing toward the far edge of the yard, examining the grass.

  Generally speaking, Judge Norcross had less concern than most people about looking like a blockhead. There were worse things a person could do. But on this occasion, he really dreaded making a fool of himself in front of the girls.

  All summer, he had been getting regular advice about how to handle them from his old Peace Corps sweetheart, a woman named Susan O’Leary, who was a child psychiatrist, divorced now and living in a big house on Beacon Hill in Boston. She’d emailed him several helpful articles outlining things to do—and not do—with a grieving child, and they’d followed up with three in-person dinner tutorials. These evenings featured almost as much romantic nostalgia about their two years in the Highlands of Kenya as they did pointers about how to manage Lindsay and Jordan. Their meals so far had stayed within bounds—only an extralong hug at the end—but Norcross felt guilty anyway. Susan was very sweet, and Claire, he had to admit, had so far not been nearly as much help as she was.

  Even with Susan’s advice, his weekends with the girls were often hard. The littlest things sent Jordan into uncontrollable fits of sobbing, and Lindsay rarely emerged from behind her iron mask. Nevertheless, as he walked toward the diving board, Norcross was comforted to think that he might have done one or two things right with them. He’d promised Jordan that someone would always be there to take care of her. He’d shared with her his own belief that while people died, love didn’t. He’d told her that her love for her mother would never go away. Bedtimes were especially difficult, and sometimes this consolation would stop Jordan crying and send her off to sleep.

  Then, one evening after Jordan had gone to bed, Lindsay noticed a vase of purple irises he’d brought and mentioned how her mother liked flowers. Acting on a suggestion from Susan, Norcross plucked up his courage and spoke.

  “What would you say to your mom?” he asked. “If you could tell her just one thing?” When Lindsay closed her eyes and shook her head, Norcross blundered on. “If I could say anything to Faye, I’d tell her that I’ll always remember her, that in some way she’ll always be with me.”

  To his surprise Lindsay hadn’t fled the room. She’d stayed and finally said in a soft voice, “I’d tell Mom I’m sorry about our fight.” She’d looked down and scrubbed at the carpet with her toe. “That I didn’t mean the things I said.”

  She’d quickly gone off to
her bedroom after that, but she came to the foot of the stairs a while later and, without making eye contact, said, “Thank you.” It was like a gift from heaven.

  Why all this should provoke Norcross into trying to do a can opener, and probably making an ass of himself, was not clear. The concrete skirt around the pool felt very hot, almost scorching, on his bare feet. He noticed that Bob was getting out of his deck chair and, still grinning, was joining his boys nearer the pool to enjoy the spectacle. June was shouting some cheery encouragement from the kitchen window. Lindsay was at the far end of the yard, her back mostly turned to him. Jordan had both hands over her mouth, her eyes wide.

  As he mounted the step, Norcross hastily reviewed the three essential components of a decent can opener.

  First, it was essential to get maximum loft from the board. He must not—must not—be shy about taking a good high leap on the very end. He had to remember, when he came down, to keep his knees fairly stiff to maximize the impact, so that the board would fling him as high as possible straight up into the air.

  Second, as he reached the apogee of his liftoff, he needed to remember to tip backward at a slightly oblique angle, as though he were leaning onto a pillow of air behind him. If he tipped too far back, he’d risk braining himself on the board, or coming unraveled and doing a kind of backward belly flop—very painful and ridiculous. If he stayed too vertical, he’d hit the water wrong, and the result would be a swishy fizzle.

  Third, just as he reached the top, keeping his torso as erect as possible, he had to grab his right knee and then yank it fiercely against his chest in the split second before he hit the water. The result, if it worked, would be a respectable initial splash, but, much more important, a booming recoil that would send a spout of water twenty or twenty-five feet into the air.