Atty at Law

by Tim Lockette

  “Welcome to Montgomery,” Taleesa said.

  “How can he sit there and say he doesn’t have the power to do anything? He’s the most powerful person in the state. And then to turn around and make it look like we cut a deal,” I said.

  “Atty, you’re an activist,” Taleesa said. “And he’s a politician. They look like the same thing sometimes, but they’re not. You’re about changing the world, and he’s about running it. Some people speak out because they care about others, and some people speak out because they want to be heard themselves. And some people can’t tell the difference. Those are the politicians. I think you were expecting to meet an activist, and he was expecting to meet a politician. And I think he probably thought he was letting you win, at least a little.”

  “I haven’t won anything,” I said. “Dismissed in court and dissed by the governor.”

  “Oh, I don’t think you were dissed,” Taleesa said. “Look, lots of people, grown-up, powerful people like Backsley Graddoch, would love to have their picture taken with the governor. They’d hang it up on their wall. Because they’re interested in power, and being a friend of the governor will make them more powerful. So I think he thinks he gave you something big.”

  As we walked, Martinez continued to gaze at his admiral certificate.

  “Give, nothing,” he said. “I earned this. Look, it says right here: ‘For his moral courage and exemplary service to the State of Alabama . . .’ See there? I earned being an admiral.”

  “Oooh,” I said. “Mine didn’t say ‘courage.’ I wanna see.”

  Martinez drew back. “Stay away from my certificate, you ex-colonel, you. You’re not touching mine. Mine’s going up on the wall.”

  The ride back home was quiet, but I don’t really think any of us noticed. Taleesa was already thinking about an upcoming story—she mumbled a little to herself the way she does when she’s writing—and Martinez was on his phone still reading about admirals.

  “Mom,” he said, about halfway home. “Can I get a bosun’s whistle?”

  I was just quiet. Stuck. Nowhere for my mind to race to.

  Bing.

  Princess_P: You lose again. Take a look at WSFA.

  I logged on to the TV station’s website.

  MONSTER GATOR DESTROYED

  IN STRUDWICK COUNTY

  houmahatchee—The Swamp Monster is dead.

  Private alligator hunters, working under contract with Alabama Fish and Wildlife, trapped and killed an 11-foot alligator in Dead Beaver Swamp near Houmahatchee this morning, sheriff’s deputies report.

  After examining the contents of the animal’s stomach, hunters concluded that it’s the same gator that attacked a Strudwick County man last week.

  “They found a human hand still inside the gator,” said Deputy Troy Butler.

  There was a picture of a big bull gator on the back of a truck, one little gator-arm hanging limply over the tailgate, and a bunch of guys standing in the truck bed, each with one foot on the gator’s back. The story told about the “struggle” with the gator, which they apparently shot in the back of the head, and then lots of quotes from the gator hunters about how “some misguided individuals” don’t understand the dangers of aggressive gators. At first I thought they were talking about the dangers of going into the swamp at night, but then I realized all of this was aimed at me and my campaign to save the Monster.

  Princess_P: You’re a freak like your mother. High school will be hell for you. You don’t belong here. You’ll end like her.

  That made me mad.

  atticustpeale: I know who you are.

  I was bluffing, of course. It was several minutes before she wrote back.

  Princess_P: Who am I then?

  I had nothing to say. I put down the phone and let it ding, again and again. And when we got home, even though it was still light out, I went straight to bed.

  It was dark, I don’t know how many hours later. I felt the weight of someone sitting on the bed. I thought it was Taleesa, but it was Dad.

  “Atty,” he said. “I heard you went to bed early. Are you okay? Do you feel okay?”

  “I’m just tired,” I said.

  “I know things didn’t go well with the alligator case. Do you want to talk about it?”

  “I want to sleep,” I said. “I just need to sleep. For a long time.”

  “It’s almost sunrise,” Dad said. “I’m getting ready for work. Do you want breakfast?”

  “Sleep, I want to sleep,” I said. “If I can just sleep longer I’ll be fine. I’m not going to the animal shelter. I’m catching up on my sleep.”

  Dad was silent for a long time. Taleesa came to the door. “She’s almost a teenager, Paul. It’s normal.”

  And then I swirled back down into black, dreamless sleep again.

  Then came brightness, color. A voice.

  “Get up!” Someone yanked the covers right off my bed.

  It was Megg, of all people. In my bedroom, in her animal shelter uniform. It was mid-morning: the sun was squinty-bright. In the next room, on TV, I could hear cartoon superheroes trash-talking each other.

  “Get out of bed, Colonel Peale,” Megg said. “You made an agreement. You’d work for me until the end of the summer. No skipping work. It’s 10 a.m. You’re late.”

  “Everybody gets a sick day now and again,” I said.

  “Are you sick? Do you do have the flu?”

  “Not that kind of sick,” I said.

  “Are you getting your period?” she asked.

  “Lord, no,” I said. That thing! People always want to talk about that thing, about “becoming a woman” and dating boys and all that. Even after I become a woman, I intend to pretend all that isn’t happening. “Stop talking about it. You’re depressing me.”

  “Are you depressed then?” Megg said. “Is that it? Because if you are, we’ll go to the doctor right now.”

  That irked me.

  “Don’t talk to me about depression,” I said. “What do you know about it? You don’t know anything about depression.”

  “Look at me,” Megg said.

  I looked into her eyes. Her round face, her close-cropped hair. I thought about the yellowed photos in the halls of her house. A young Megg, getting married. Megg and her kids with countless dogs, dogs now buried in the back yard.

  “Okay,” I said. “I withdraw the question.”

  “Get your shoes on. It’s good that you slept in your clothes. I’ve got just one job for you today, and you can get right on it.”

  We left Martinez in front of the TV and rode to the animal shelter in silence, me still in my rumpled dress from the day before. As we walked into the shelter, one of the teenage volunteers saw me and did a half-hearted little salute. “Colonel,” she said in greeting. I tried to smile back.

  Megg led me through her office into the back rooms with tile walls and the stainless steel table, where the vet treats the dogs. That place makes me nervous.

  “I’m going to show you what I did at work this morning, while you were sleeping,” Megg said. Now I was really nervous.

  Megg pushed open a door. Another tiled room. And there, lined up on the floor, were a dozen dogs. Beagles, Labradors, a mutt that looked like a dingo. No puppies, but a couple just past the puppy stage. All lying on their sides as if asleep. All dead.

  “This is what I did this morning while you were asleep,” Megg said. “I put down all these sweet animals, because no one would take them.”

  When I finally caught my breath, I started bawling. “Why are you showing me this, Megg?” I said. “This is hateful. You’re just being mean.”

  Megg got down on her knees, held me by the shoulders, looked me in the eye.

  “Atty, this is half as many as I was putting down every month before you and your brother came to work for me,” Megg said. �
�The videos, the newspaper articles, they’ve worked. People have come from all over to adopt our dogs and cats. Look at them: for each one of the dogs that’s lying there, there’s another one that’s alive because of you. Honestly, I don’t know how I’m going to manage when the summer ends and you go back to school, and it’s coming soon.

  “Look, Atty,” she continued. “You can be sad if you want to. If you try things, you have setbacks, sometimes you even get embarrassed in public. If you feel demoralized, that’s okay. But you can’t stop doing what you do. You can’t ever decide not to go on, because someone is depending on you to do what you do, every day.”

  We sat there and cried for a long time. I don’t really know why. The gator situation wasn’t any sadder than the stuff Megg dealt with every day, and I have no idea why some things set off a crying jag and others don’t. Maybe life just has a certain amount of sadness in it, and you just have to cry from time to time to let it out.

  Whatever was going on, in a few minutes I felt better. Megg offered to take me home. Instead, I called home and asked Taleesa if she’d bring me a change of clothes.

  I had cages to clean and pets to feed.

  11

  I have a riddle for you.

  A little boy lives in a trailer outside of Hayneville. He’s poor. No cell phone, no Internet, no cable TV, no toys except a few Happy Meal rejects. One Christmas his cousin gives him some chicken wire and lumber and a baby chick inside a cardboard box. The boy works all Christmas day to put together a little chicken coop, and from then on the chicken is his best friend. He loves it, and he spends hours petting it, watching it, following it around the yard.

  One night, the boy hears cackling and growling from the chicken house. He grabs a flashlight and his dad’s .410 shotgun, and he goes out to see what’s happening. There’s a fox, a beautiful red flash of a fox, trying to get into the chicken house.

  Of course the boy shoots the fox. That’s not my riddle.

  The riddle is, why is the chicken a beloved pet, and why is the fox dead? You love your dog, so you put food in its bowl. Who loved the animal that’s in your dog’s bowl? When a baby chick pulls his first wriggling worm out of the ground, whose side should I be on?

  I can’t answer that question. But I did think about it a lot over the last few weeks of my summer at the animal shelter. Those big bags of cat food clearly say “made with real chicken,” and it bothered me that when I fed a cat, I was feeding it a chicken, just like the chicken in my riddle. Why wasn’t the chicken a pet? How would the cat live if we spared the chicken?

  It’s something you could think about on a mountaintop for years, but I didn’t have years or a mountaintop, so I threw myself into work. I put away the “Colonel Peale” dress and didn’t think about filing another legal brief. I kept the cages cleaner than they’d ever been. I organized the storeroom. I convinced Taleesa to buy me some paint, and I touched up the sign in front of the shelter, something Miss Megg told me only a county employee was allowed to do, though she wouldn’t tell if I wouldn’t.

  And of course I kept on writing profiles of pets for the Herald. The week after my meeting with the governor, one of the Braxtons put up my column with the byline “Col. Atticus Peale.” They thought it was cute. I put a stop to it.

  Thinking about my riddle was a good way to avoid that other riddle, the one that can’t be solved: seventh grade. The days were ticking down and I just didn’t want to deal with it.

  School and I just don’t get along. I’ll be honest with you: I don’t get along with the kids at school, really. I guess it all goes back to the early days, to the years of tea parties and playing princess.

  Other girls never liked playing princess with me, because I have the whole Cinderella thing figured out. I always thought it was kind of dumb that the fairy godmother gives Cinderella stuff that lasts only until midnight, and I always thought that if I were Cinderella I’d interrupt the fairy godmother—I’m bad to interrupt people—and ask to be bitten by a radioactive spider instead.

  Then I’d be Spiderella, in a beautiful spider-silk gown, swinging through the capital with the proportional strength of a spider. I’d live with my stepmom and keep my secret identity, while saving the kingdom and dating the prince at night. Martinez liked it, as long as he didn’t have to play the prince. But other girls got really tired of their tea parties being busted up by supervillains.

  Mermaids were a problem, too. I love the idea of mermaids. To be a superhero of sorts, a fish-lady, except that you have the face and hair of Peyton Vebelstadt. That’s just about perfect. But in the cartoons, all mermaids seem to do is sit around on rocks combing their hair with seashells.

  Then one day Martinez came home with an action figure, a Navy frogman, and I realized there was something better than a mermaid. I mean, what a beautiful word, “frogman.” Even though it isn’t what it sounds like. A frogman is, like, a really tough soldier guy in a wet suit with flippers, who plants bombs on the bottom of ships, and defuses bombs, and carries a cool-looking speargun.

  That gave me a new idea: frogmaids. Half-fish, half lovely girl, all adventure. Spearguns and utility vests instead of clamshell bikinis. Exploring caves, fighting polluters, having tea parties. Much better. I tried to recruit girls into my Frogmaid Corps, but none of them could handle the tough discipline involved. Peyton Vebelstadt was one of the first to drop out. Shameka Vinson was the last. She told me I was too bossy.

  I know, “bossy” is a bad word. One of our teachers tried to put a stop to it. In fifth grade, Ms. Johnson started the year with a “Ban Bossy” on her bulletin board, with biographies of women who were generals or who ran countries and so on. After about a month, she took it down and put up a billboard about speaking to each other with respect. I kind of got the feeling that I was the one to blame for that.

  “Atty’s a very smart, very capable student,” Ms. Johnson said to Taleesa at our parent-teacher conference. “But she’s also what we call a shout-out. When she knows the answer, and she knows a lot of answers, she just blurts it out before anyone else can.” Then she turned to me. “Atty, when you do this, you’re taking away the other kids’ chances to learn and—”

  “If I was good at hitting a ball, you wouldn’t tell me I was ruining the game for everybody else,” I said.

  “And that’s another thing,” Ms. Johnson said. “Interrupting people is rude. You need to find a way not to do that.”

  I’ll say this: Mrs. Johnson did listen to my comment about hitting a ball. She tried to get me into Genius Bowl, the big academic trivia contest where blurting out the answers and interrupting people are actually good things. But I didn’t join for deeply personal reasons.

  Premsyl Svoboda, my one and only ex-boyfriend, was the captain of the Genius Bowl team.

  Premsyl broke my heart. In first grade, he was a new immigrant from the Czech Republic, and he didn’t know a word of English. Our teacher paired me up with him, to guide him around the school and teach him about English words and American customs. Mrs. Frist, the first-grade teacher, said I was the natural choice, because I was from an “intelligent, cross-cultural family” and should know how to reach out to someone who speaks only Czech. Which shows how much she knows.

  I taught Premsyl everything about America. All the important rules. Nobody likes a snitch. Boyfriends come up with pet names for their girlfriends in their native language, and they always hold your hand at the lunch table. American men can take their wife’s name. (So if I’m writing “Atty Svoboda” on my notebook, he should write “Premsyl Peale” on his.)

  Mrs. Frist took Premsyl away from me. Because he asked. That’s right. My boyfriend didn’t break up with me directly, he went to the teacher and asked for permission to break up with me. And then I got in trouble for teaching Premsyl a bunch of rules about American culture that don’t really exist, though they should.

  “If an adult did some of the t
hings Atty did, she’d probably be charged with fraud,” Mrs. Frist told my dad.

  So this is what I faced, going into the seventh grade. Seventh grade, which every credible psychologist said was a meat grinder that turns confident young women into self-doubting chain-smokers.

  Peyton Vebelstadt would be there, Premsyl would be there, Shameka would be there, everybody. The cast of the sad drama of my school life so far.

  And one of them, almost certainly, was Princess P.

  Dad wasn’t having a great time, either. I knew because I read about it in the Houmahatchee Herald.

  BEFORE MURDER, LOTTERY WINNER HAD CHANGE OF HEART

  by Rickie Braxton

  The Sunday before someone shot him dead, Jefferson Davis Ambrose had a religious awakening.

  Ambrose, a local pawnshop owner, was already a member in good standing at Red Creek First Baptist. He was also known as a penny-pincher—“Heatmiser” was his nickname because he refused to turn on air-conditioning in his store—and as a hard-driving businessman. He was also, much to the chagrin of his pastor, a regular player of the Florida Lottery, known for his regular trips across the state line to pick his favorite numbers.

  But on one Sunday in May, with a lottery ticket still in his back pocket, Jeff Ambrose came down the aisle of the church when pastor Michael Jones called. Ambrose, 64, said he’d never really known salvation, and wanted to change his life.

  “He had tears streaming down his face,” Jones said. “He said that as soon as he had the money, he’d get out of the pawnshop business and devote all his time to doing the Lord’s work.”

  What followed was a bizarre chain of events that seemed to be straight out of a Hollywood movie. In that Sunday night’s Florida Lottery drawing, Ambrose’s ticket came out a winner. He wouldn’t take home the biggest Lotto jackpot, but he hit all the numbers in the Fantasy Five and was set to take home $225,000.

  Ambrose told his pastor that he’d use the money to close down his store and retire. He even had plans to return pawned items to some of his more financially troubled customers to show his change of heart.