Con Law (7 page)

‘Fine,’ Professor Goldman said. ‘All in favor of Professor Bookman’s proposals, raise your hands.’

Book stuck his hand defiantly in the air and waited for reinforcements … and waited. Four other hands finally went up, all from the UT professors. But no Harvard or Yale hand. Or Columbia. Or Stanford. Or the others. Professor Goldman turned to Book with the smug look of the rich boy in grade school who always got the best toys money could buy.

‘Your propositions fail, Professor Bookman.’

Book dropped down in his chair. Institutional inertia prevailed. Fear of the future. Professors hanging on to the past. Hoping the past lasts until they retire with full benefits. The school would continue to chase Harvard and Yale in the rankings, and the students would lose. Henry Lawson would not be the new assistant dean. He would not be granted tenure. Not that year. Not any year. He was the best teacher on the faculty, but he would soon be teaching at another law school. Or perhaps at a high school.

Other professors
stood and championed their protégés. Book slumped down in his chair and felt something in his back pocket. He pulled out the envelope Nadine had given him. It was postmarked ‘Marfa, Texas,’ on April 5, four days before. He removed the letter, unfolded the single sheet, and read the handwritten note.

Book walked
down the corridor at a fast pace then stopped and stuck his head into Henry’s office. Henry looked up.

‘I’m sorry, Henry.’

‘They know I voted for Bush?’

Book nodded.

‘Damn.’

Book continued down the hall. He had secured tenure four years before, at age thirty-one. Clerking for Justice Kennedy, winning two Supreme Court cases, and making the shortlist of potential candidates for the Court does that sort of thing for a law professor. The law school would be embarrassed to have a faculty member nominated for the Supreme Court but denied tenure. Henry Lawson was not a Supreme Court candidate.

Nor was he a celebrity law professor.

Book was. After his Supreme Court clerkship, he could have taught at any law school in America. But he came home to be near his mother after she had been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. Eight years later, she still lived in the same house where she had raised her children, but she did not know her children and could not find her way home. Book entered the outer office of his suite. Myrna held pink message slips in the air.

‘Your sister called. She wants to put your mother in a home.’

‘Did you tell her, “Hell no”?’

Myrna knew not to answer. ‘And James Welch called.’

‘Who’s he?’

‘Our boss. Chairman of the Board of Regents. Appointed by the governor himself.’

‘Another billionaire alumnus wanting to fire me because he didn’t like what I said on
Face the Nation
.’

‘He doesn’t want to fire you. He wants to hire you.’

‘For what?’

‘Didn’t say. Might have something to do with his son.’

‘Who’s his son?’

‘Sophomore. Arrested for drug possession. On Sixth Street. It made the paper.’

Book took the pink slip. ‘I’ll call him from Marfa.’

‘
Marfa?
’ She groaned. ‘Oh, no, not another letter.’

Book waved
Nathan Jones’s letter in the air as he walked into his office where Nadine Honeywell still sat reading his mail. He grabbed the crash helmet off the bookshelf and held it out to her. She frowned at the helmet as if it were a bloody murder weapon.

‘What’s that
for?’

‘I’m hungry, my butt’s numb, and I think I swallowed a bug!’

It was just after eleven the next morning. Nadine Honeywell required twenty-four hours’ advance notice prior to leaving town. She wore the crash helmet, goggles over her black glasses, and number 100 sunblock on all skin exposed by her short-sleeve shirt and shorts. She sat higher in the second seat. Book wore jeans, boots, a black T-shirt, black doo-rag, and sunglasses. He glanced back at his intern; she was holding her cell phone out. He yelled over the engine noise.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Trying to text!’

‘Why?’

‘I always text when I drive!’

‘You’re not driving. You’re riding.’

‘Close enough!’

Book had installed the windshield
so they didn’t eat (all the) bugs for four hundred miles, the leather saddlebags to hold their gear, and the second seat for Nadine. He had picked her up at seven. Four hours and three hundred miles on the back of the big Harley hadn’t improved her mood.

‘There’s a rest stop up ahead. I’ll pull over. We can stretch.’

‘I’ve got a better idea. Let’s turn back!’

They had ridden west out of Austin on Highway 290 through the Hill Country then picked up Interstate 10, the ‘Cowboy Autobahn’ where the posted speed limit was eighty but the actual limit pushed one hundred. They were now deep in the parched high plains of West Texas. Other than the four-lane interstate and the wind farms—thousands of three-hundred-foot-tall turbine windmills dotted the landscape on both sides, their blades rotating as if propellers trying to push Texas eastward—the landscape remained as desolate and untouched as it had been at the beginning of time. Book steered off the highway and into the rest stop. He slowed to a stop, cut the engine, and kicked the stand down. Nadine hopped off as if she had been adrift at sea and now touched land for the first time in a year.

‘My God, you never heard of cars? With climate control and CD players?’

She yanked off the helmet and goggles, shook out her shoulder-length hair, and wiped sweat from her face. Book removed his sunglasses and the doo-rag then pulled two bottles of water from a saddlebag. He handed one bottle to his intern; she drank half.

‘I could really use a caramel frappuccino right about now, but I haven’t seen a Starbucks since we left Austin.’

‘I don’t think you’re going to find one out here, Ms. Honeywell.’

‘It’s like a desert.’

‘It is a desert. The upper reaches of the Chihuahuan Desert.’

‘What are those?’

She pointed to
the horizon where a low ridgeline with craggy peaks stood silhouetted against the blue sky.

‘Mountains.’

‘In Texas?’

Mountains in Texas. Book had ridden the Harley through much of Texas, but not this part of Texas. Of course, it took some amount of riding to cover all of Texas; the state encompassed 268,000 square miles.

‘How much longer?’ Nadine asked.

‘Couple of hours.’

‘I’m hungry.’

Book reached into a pocket of his jeans and pulled out a package of beef jerky. He handed a strip to Nadine. She took the jerky with her fingertips and held it out as if examining a dead rat.

‘You’re joking?’

‘High in protein.’

She made a face and extended the jerky his way. He took the jerky and clamped the strip between his teeth then reached into another pocket and removed a granola bar. He offered it to her.

‘Good carbs.’

She regarded the granola bar a moment then gestured at his clothing.

‘You got another pocket with hot dogs?’

‘Sorry.’

Her shoulders slumped in surrender. She set the water bottle on the bike and pulled out a bottle of Purell hand sanitizer; she squirted the gel and rubbed her hands together then took the granola bar and bit off a piece. He chewed the jerky.

‘I’m missing my Civ Proc class,’ she said.

‘You can learn rules anytime.’ Book spread his arms. ‘This is where a real lawyer works, Ms. Honeywell—in the real world. Not in an air-conditioned office on the fiftieth floor.’

‘I’m going to write wills.’

‘Why? That’s boring.’

She shrugged. ‘Not a lot of danger in estate planning.’

‘You ever meet an heir cut out of his daddy’s will?’

They came to
law school without a clue what it meant to be a lawyer. It wasn’t sitting in a fancy office poring over discovery for eight hours and billing ten. Being a lawyer was about helping people in need. Real people, not rich people. Book was determined to teach his interns that the law wasn’t found in the casebooks but out here in the world beyond the classroom. They came to him as law students; they would leave as lawyers.

‘Professor, can I ask you a question?’

He chewed the jerky and nodded.

‘Why are you doing this? You read that letter then jump onto this motorcycle and ride to the middle of a desert? And drag me along? Why? Why do you care so much about Nathan Jones?’

‘He was my student four years ago.’

‘How many students have you taught? A few thousand? What makes him so special?’

‘He was also my intern.’

‘For how long?’

‘One month.’

‘You knew him for one month four years ago, and now you’re dropping everything to help him?’

Book stared at the distant ridgeline and thought of Nathan Jones.

‘He saved my life.’

She frowned. ‘
How?
’

‘Long story. And we’ve still got a long ride.’

She regarded him for a long moment while she finished off the granola bar. Then she said, ‘Next time, get the kind with the chocolate coating.’

Book donned the doo-rag and sunglasses then swung a leg over the Harley.

‘You ready?’

‘No.’

But she bucked
herself up then strapped on the goggles, pulled on the helmet, and climbed on behind him. He started the engine, shifted into gear, and accelerated past roadside signs that read ‘Burn Ban in Effect’ and ‘Water 4 Sale’ and onto the long black ribbon of asphalt disappearing into the distant horizon.

One hundred thirty years before, Hanna Maria Strobridge saw the same distant horizon from her seat inside her husband’s private railroad car. His name was James Harvey Strobridge, and he built railroad lines for the Galveston, Harrisburg, and San Antonio Railroad. He had built the very line they rode on that day. Hanna had ridden in that private car from California to Texas; she had even been at Promontory Point in the Utah Territory for the driving of the golden spike in 1869 when the first transcontinental railroad was completed. At the time, James was the foreman for Central Pacific Railroad, which built the track eastward from California. After a moment, Hanna dropped her eyes from the horizon to her book, Feodora Dostoyevsky’s latest,
The Brothers Karamazov
. She fancied Russian novels and striped skirts.

Two hours later, the train stopped at a water depot bordered by three mountain ranges. Hanna had no idea where they were because the depot had no name. Her husband, as superintendent of railroad construction, possessed the sole and absolute authority to name every water depot and other unnamed locale within the railroad’s right-of-way. But he had no imagination for naming persons or places, so he had delegated his authority to his wife.

‘Well, Hanna, what are you gonna name this little no-count place?’

She pondered a moment and thought of the servant in her book named Martha Ignatyevna. Of course, ‘Martha’ was the English translation; in Russian, her name was—

‘Marfa.’

And so it was.

‘And that’s how
Marfa got its name,’ Book said.

From the back seat: ‘Fascinating.’

Sitting four hundred miles due west of Austin, two hundred miles southeast of El Paso, sixty miles north of the Rio Grande, and a mile above sea level, the high desert land colloquially known as
el despoblado
—‘the unpopulated’—and geologically as the Marfa Plateau is generally unfit for human occupancy. It’s not bad for cattle, if it rains. If it doesn’t, it’s not so hospitable to them either. But man’s nature drives him to settle the unsettled frontier; and so men have tried in Marfa, Texas.

From a distance, as you come down off the Chisos Mountains from the east and onto the plateau, you see the Davis Mountains to the north and the Chinati Mountains to the south; between the ranges lies a vast expanse of yellow grassland. And smack in the middle you see a small stand of trees, hunched together as if seeking safety in numbers against the relentless wind whipping across the land. The trees, planted by the first settlers, offer the only shade for a hundred miles in any direction and define the boundaries of the town of Marfa. As you come closer, you see the peach-colored cupola atop the Presidio County Courthouse peeking above the treetops as if on lookout for rampaging Indian war parties. But no savage Comanche galloping across the land on horseback threatened the peace in Marfa that day; only a Con Law professor riding a Harley with his reluctant intern perched behind him.

Book downshifted
the Harley as they entered town on San Antonio Street and rode past a Dollar General store on the north side and dilapidated adobe homes on the south; Presidio County ranked as the poorest in Texas and looked it, except for a few renovated buildings housing art galleries. He braked at the only red light in town then pointed to the blue sky where a yellow glider soared overhead in silence. Nadine pointed south at an old gas station on the corner that had been converted into a restaurant called the Pizza Foundation; her face was that of a child who had spotted Santa Claus at the mall.