Gravewriter (3 page)

Wisconsin ran up the middle for nine yards. “Come on,” Billy moaned to the Michigan State defense. “You're gonna get my legs broken.”

“ ‘Temporary'?” the old man said. “It sounded pretty permanent in divorce court.” He waited for Billy to answer. Billy said nothing. The old man pleaded, “Why won't you go back to work?”

Billy turned to his father. The old man stared, lips slightly parted. He wheezed through his mouth, a downcast cloud about him. Billy
looked into the old man's perfect blue eyes, hunting for some sign of the wisdom that should come with seven decades of living.

The organ music stopped downstairs; the praying began.

Billy wanted to confess.

He wanted to tell his father about the darker part of himself that Angie's crash had uncovered—it was a new perspective, exposed by Billy's pain and his guilt, or perhaps created by it. In his ever-more-violent dreams, Billy had seen how an unspeakable act could also be righteous, how sin and justice could intersect. Billy was aware that this dark perspective was pulling him down, moving him closer to action against the man he blamed for Angie's death, yet he couldn't do anything to stop himself. It was like one of Billy's credit-card and casino jags—he knew it could only end badly, yet he could not help but ride the bomb.

Wisconsin muffed the center snap and the quarterback had to fall on the fumble.

Billy imagined himself in black and white, straddling a nuke with Slim Pickens at the end of
Dr. Strangelove.
Could the old man understand any of this? Billy's father was at the same time a child and a sage.

“Pop,” he began.

“Billy! Billy!” came the cry from down the hall. “I got the mail!”

The old man's head whirled. “Take your time, boy!”

Bo pounded down the hall, carrying a brown cardboard cube about one-foot high, bound in packing tape, and half a dozen white envelopes.

“Anybody see you?” Billy asked.

The kid beamed, and shouted, “Nobody!”

The old man reached for the box. Bo pulled it away and said slyly, “Twenty-five cents?”

“Bo, stop extorting your grandfather,” Billy said. “What are you saving all that money for, anyway?”

“I'll give ya a dime,” the old man offered.

“Fifteen!” Bo countered.

“Deal,” the old man agreed. “Can you bill me?”

Bo smiled and handed him the box. The old man could expect an invoice printed in purple crayon by the end of the day. He had a hundred of them.

Blood oozed from a fresh scrape the size of a postage stamp on Bo's left elbow. The kid didn't seem to notice the wound from his adventure out the window; the sight of the boy's blood weakened Billy's knees.

The old man tore at the package like a raccoon trying to open a bag of bread.

Billy had to look away. His father's incompetence with the simplest physical task disgusted him. Billy felt shame, too, for the stroke was not the old man's fault.

“Help your grandpa,” he ordered Bo.

On third down, Wisconsin ran around the left end for no gain. Time to punt.

Together, the old man and the boy sawed the packing tape with a butter knife. They spilled Styrofoam peanuts on the floor and the old man fished out a white ceramic head with a handle. The piece seemed slightly too large to be a coffee mug. He held it to the dangling ceiling lamp for an inspection. “No chips,” he said. “A little glaze crazing around the nose. Not bad. Another treasure of the past from almighty eBay.”

“I can't believe the money you blow on junk,” Billy said. Realizing he had just set a trap for himself, he tried to sidestep. “Though I guess you earned your pension and the right to spend it.”

The old man pounced. “I could blow my dough on junk, or on the greyhounds, like you, but at least I still got the junk.”

Ouch.
Billy smiled. The stroke had taken much from the old man, but not the razor tongue.

“That's a big nose on that guy,” Bo said, reaching to feel the smooth ceramic.

“This is George Washington's head,” the old man explained. “This is a souvenir from the World's Fair in New York, way back in 1939. Put some black coffee in there for your grandpa, okay?”

Bo took the head, looked inside, and frowned. “It's dusty inside.”

“Aw, dust can't hurt an old Polack like me,” the old man said. “Go fill it.”

The old man flipped through the envelopes that had come in the mail, classifying them: “Overdue bill. Overdue bill. Junk. Junk. Hey, Billy, here's a bill that ain't overdue. Somebody has a lot of nerve, sending this. Ha!”

The Wisconsin punter hit a low line drive, which Michigan State fielded at the twenty-three-yard line, with twenty seconds left in the game. Billy held an open hand over the television, like a faith healer.

“Billy?” the old man said, sounding grave. “Did you get arrested and not tell me?”

“Mmmm!” Billy said to silence him. To the TV, he preached, “Block that guy! And that guy! Run! Cut it back! Good!”

“Because this letter is from the superior court,” the old man said. “Addressed to you.”

“Hallelujah!” Billy screamed. “He broke it! Run! Run! Yes! Score!”

Billy threw up his arms, jumped in celebration, and jammed his fingers on the yellowing stucco ceiling.
“Son of a bitch,”
he muttered. He stuffed his hands under his armpits and watched the Michigan State players pile onto their kick returner in the end zone. Billy had no joy in victory, only relief: The money he had just won from a Federal Hill bookmaker would cover his debt to a loan shark in South Providence. Michigan State had just saved Billy from another broken nose.

“Fine, fine—you won,” the old man said, not sounding too happy about it. “What about this letter from the court?”

Billy snatched the envelope and ripped it open. There was a sheet of blue paper inside.

“Aw, goddamn,” he said. “I got jury duty.”

Billy looked up, to see his father sipping from George Washington's head, and his son, with tight-lipped determination, stirring margarine into his chocolate cereal with the barrel of his toy gun.

The old man said, “You'll probably just hang around in the jury pool for a day, and then come home.”

“Probably,” Billy agreed, barely listening. He felt a quick flutter in his chest. He had never before been called to duty by the court. To sit on a jury would be good, he thought, in case one day he had to face one.

T
he frosted glass rattled in the door. From the hallway outside the law office came a muffled muttering, “I'll sue that goddamn locksmith.”

Inside the office, Carol dog-eared the page to mark her place in the ten-year-old decision from the first circuit court of appeals, and then called, “Martin? It's not locked.”

The door rattled more violently. “I'll take his house!”

“Martin?”

“His car, his boat, his wife, children—and his cocker spaniel!”

“Turn the knob to the left.”

The door burst open and Martin Smothers stumbled into the oneroom office, clutching together in one hand a McDonald's bag, a sheet of white paper, and a battered silver briefcase. The other hand still held the doorknob for balance as Martin's slippery fake-leather vegan shoes skidded on the buffed tile. With the door open, Carol could read the black stenciling on the glass:
MARTIN J. SMOTHERS, ATTORNEY AT LAW
. The letters had been painted in a curve, like a giant frown, which seemed right for the moment.

“What the hell did they do to my goddamn door?” Martin shrieked.

“They fixed it,” Carol said, but Martin didn't seem to want an answer. He blew into the office, let the door slam, slapped his briefcase and his lunch on his steel desk, and sent loose papers fluttering.

Martin Smothers was sixty years old, slim-shouldered, and potbellied, with dark, puffy bags beneath his eyes, a shiny bare forehead, and long, wiry white hair bound by a rubber band into a ponytail, which had been threaded through the back of a Providence Steam Roller cap. The 1928 National Football League champions went out of business before Smothers was born, but he liked their logo, which looked like a drunken border collie sticking out its tongue.

Martin dressed in a tan linen suit, as he did every day, in all seasons. He wore natural-fiber red suspenders and an organic silk necktie blandly colored with vegetable dye—special ordered by his wife.

“Why is it so goddamn dark in here?” he said, jerking open the blinds to reveal the vista of a brick wall five feet away.

“Lovely,” Carol cooed. “And if you look down the alley, you can see the gleaming new Dumpster. It's Caribbean blue.”

Martin wasn't listening. “Look at this letter I got,” he shouted. He had a thin voice that cracked when he raised it, like a bad cellphone connection. Why juries would trust that voice had been a mystery to Carol, until she realized that Martin's desperate voice made him sound like the underdog. And everybody roots for the underdog.

Carol reached a hand out for the letter, but Martin had decided to perform it.

“ ‘Dear Attorney Smothers,' “ Martin called out, reading dramatically from the paper. “ ‘It never fails to amaze me how low some people
of your so-called profession will stoop. Congratulations—you have sunk to a record low, either to get rich or to glorify your own ego—I don't know which.' ”

He clapped the letter between his hands and growled.

“Considering what you're paying me,” Carol deadpanned, “I'd say it's for ego.”

Holding the letter in two fists, Martin read more. “ ‘That animal Garrett Nickel got what he deserved a year ago—a death sentence on the night he escaped. Too bad it happened quickly and relatively painlessly, which is more consideration than Nickel ever gave any of his victims.' ”

“If you consider bullets and drowning to be painless,” Carol offered.

“ ‘That punk Peter Shadd, who escaped prison with Nickel and then shot him, deserves two things,'“ Martin read on, “ ‘a medal for ridding the earth of subhuman scum, and a noose. The only thing he did wrong was not turning the gun on himself after shooting his partner. Why are you trying to get him off? This was a case of scum killing scum. Shadd is a junkie, a thief, an escapee, and a killer. Why are you defending him? Why can't you just let him rot? You talk in the papers about his rights—don't you know that nobody cares about his rights?' ”

Martin crumbled the letter and hurled it with a grunt toward the open window. It sailed high, bounced off the glass, and rolled into a corner near a mousetrap baited with petrified peanut butter, an abandoned spiderweb, and a dozen other paper balls.

“How can you respond if you throw it away?” Carol asked.

“I have the return address,” Martin huffed. “Take a letter down for me. Please?”

Carol smiled. Martin had never said “please” for anything before Carol had entered law school, six months ago. With her legal pad and
a sharp no. 2 pencil, she wheeled her chair to the center of the small office, sat, and crossed her legs. She saw Martin's eyes flicker for an instant to her coffee brown thighs as she casually pulled at her skirt and flipped it down over her knee. She looked away and smiled again. Martin had been married longer than Carol had been alive. She readied the pad and pencil.

Martin rubbed his chin, looked off toward Saturn, and dictated.

“ ‘Dear Dickhead,' ” he began. “ ‘In response to your rant, there's a little document I like to refer to from time to time, known as the fucking U.S. Constitution. I suggest you read it, or'—strike that—'I suggest you have somebody
read it to you.
I hope you can understand it, though I realize it was written a long time ago on old-fashioned crinkly paper, and there has never been a sitcom or a reality TV show based on the Bill of Rights.' ”

Martin stuck his thumbs in his waistband and paced, dictating off into space. “ ‘Idiots, such as yourself, may find the Constitution an inconvenient document, especially the parts about getting a speedy and fair trial, and the right to speak your mind in the newspapers. Well, fuck you. I will defend Peter Shadd because he is
a man,
a human being, presumed innocent, with rights of equal weight, in the eyes of the court, to you or me or the goddamn
Pope'—uh,
Carol, don't put ‘goddamn' before
Pope
.' ”

“Mm-hm,” she said, scribbling.

“ ‘So in conclusion,'“ Martin said, “ ‘take a civics class and then kiss my ass.' ”

“Short and sweet,” Carol said.

“Signed ‘Martin J. Smothers,' blah, blah, blah—you know the rest.”

“Mm-hm.”

“Oh, and add a postscript. ‘When I say kiss my ass, I
don't
mean the smooth white outer regions.' ”

“Of course not.”

Martin plopped hard on his desk chair and tore open his McDonald's bag. He bit into his burger and squirted shredded lettuce onto his blotter. “Uhhhhh!” he moaned in delight.

“You sound like an addict getting a fix.”

“Read back to me what you got,” Martin said, grease shining on his chin. “Please.”

“ ‘Dear sir,'“ Carol said, reading her shorthand. “ ‘Thank you for expressing your opinion to me. What a delight it is to engage in robust debate. As a private defense attorney and a former public defender, I believe in the value of providing all citizens charged in a crime with a vigorous defense, as prescribed by the United States Constitution. Though you and I may disagree on the matter at hand, be assured that I respect your opinion and will take your comments to heart. Sincerely, Martin J. Smothers.' ”

The telephone rang on Carol's desk.

Martin grumbled, “At least you got the Constitution in there.”

Carol grinned as she stepped to the phone. “Martin Smothers, attorney at law,” she said, using her polite but icy professional voice. Her eyes turned hard to Martin. “Oh—hi, Nicki,” she said, suddenly sounding breezy.