Sophomores

by Sean Desmond

  Judge Sam did a quick tally of the jury, rubbed the rheum from one eye, and started in.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, as you can see, we are missing our defendant this morning. His whereabouts are known: he is at Baylor Medical.”

  Blackburn returned to his table and started packing up his suitcase. Whiteside smiled wearily at the jury.

  “Our trial is suspended until we know more about the medical condition of Reverend Raleigh and he is once again, in the judgment of this court, ready to stand trial.”

  Judge Sam leaned back in his chair, which accidentally knocked his gavel off its block. He did not bother to replace it there.

  “Now, I know this is difficult to avoid, but I ask you not to talk to any media that has been malingering around this courtroom or the Crowley building. I ask that if you see or hear anything about this trial or Reverend Raleigh, whether it’s TV, radio, or newspaper—please, turn the page, turn off that channel, stay off KRLD or WBAP for a while.”

  What a shit show. Anne had thought about reporting her encounter with Raleigh in the elevator, but the news of the morning made it seem so inconsequential.

  “Seriously, folks, this is an unexpected hiatus in our efforts here, which this court”—the judge glowered at Whiteside—“will do its best not to turn into a lengthy delay. Sergeant Redman is going to check everyone’s phone number and contact information, and we will keep you posted.”

  Judge Sam scowled with annoyance. He’s worried they’re going to have to start over. He stood and, in his long black robe, loomed wraithlike over the bench. “Thank you again for your service. I apologize for this interruption. And please remember: keep all aspects of this trial to yourself, do not discuss it, and if you do hear something about this trial in passing—throw it out. I know you will do your best to stay fair and impartial. Okay, thank you, folks, dismissed.”

  * * *

  Anne got back to her car and immediately turned on KRLD. It was at the top of the news bulletin: Standing Raleigh had attempted to commit suicide. An empty prescription bottle had been found. Anne pulled out of the parking garage. The rain had started spitting down, and the scrum of cameramen and reporters scampered under the shallow overhang of the courthouse for cover. KRLD went on to report that today had been slated for the defense’s final witness, Lucy Goodfellow, Raleigh’s purported mistress, to come to the stand.

  But now Raleigh was in the hospital. Unconscious but alive. Just like his wife.

  The report ended with a sound-bite interview of a man who only would identify himself as a “servant of the Lord.” Since day one of the trial he had stood in front of the Crowley building with a giant wooden cross wreathed with a crown of thorns. He was not alone, and the crowd of trial watchers had been growing steadily. Last week, Dallas police had moved them across Commerce Street.

  “We pray for Peggy and for justice.” The man had a thick Texas drawl. “And now, one thing is clear: Standing Raleigh is guilty as sin.”

  As crazy as this yahoo sounds, Anne shook her head, I can’t disagree.

  The rain kept slashing at the road, and Anne found herself once again siphoned along Lemmon Avenue as it ran east of Love Field. A puke-orange Southwest plane was taxiing in. Goddamn airlines. Over the course of the past week, Anne had put herself through all the stations of the cross that accompanied the news of what they were calling Pat’s early retirement. He’d come home in the middle of the night, too drunk to explain. When he sobered up the next morning, she got some version of the story and felt the hollowing grief of someone whose fears had finally been realized.

  After Pat told her, Anne didn’t go volcanic. Instead she folded inward and started counting and saving money. She clipped more coupons. She lowered the thermostat and disputed the water bill. She moved the CDs to Forestwood National for a quarter-point-higher return. She started gluing Green Stamps in the S & H book and buying month-old Wonder bread at the Hostess Thrift Store off Webb Chapel. No more Smirnoff; they were relegated to Wolfschmidt in the plastic bottle, which the Goody Goody in Addison had for a dollar cheaper. She prayed rosary decades that nothing major would break. Like the wipers on the Zephyr, for example; she would endure a world of half-working things. They had until February before the severance ran out, and plenty of savings behind that, but she pauperized them within a week. She would send Dan down the alley to collect bottles and cans from neighbors’ trash. She canceled the Morning News subscription but needed the coupons, so she would go on morning walks to steal papers from the driveways of folks on vacation. All of this frugality didn’t make Anne, or anyone, feel better. It was just her response, her way of drawing a circle around what she could control. The real problems lay in shallow graves and on unseen trip wires, and so she would be driving on a rainy day, see the burnt-orange tailfin of the Southwest 737, and the tears would come.

  The rain had sputtered to a stop as Anne pulled the car onto Crown Shore. It was just past noon, and the sun was creeping out of murky storm clouds. Pat’s Cougar was parked at the top of the driveway, the garage door open. This was one of Anne’s assignments for Pat—clear all the crap out of the garage, all the unopened boxes from the Bronx, and figure out what was worth selling. That was right, a garage sale in December. Pat promised to talk to the Peñas, the Phillipses, and the Callahans and try to get their part of the block to go in with them and place an ad in the Greensheet.

  Anne helloed through the door. The house replied with silence. She dropped her purse on the kitchen table and made her way to the TV room in the back.

  There was Pat laid out on the couch.

  Her first thought was that he was dead, but then she heard the snoring. She stood over him and smelled a familiar sour odor. She reached under the cushion and pulled the empty fifth of vodka out from under his arm. She held the bottle by the neck and pictured breaking it over his head, the shards exploding over the pillows, his scalp blooming with blood. It would ruin the couch, Anne thought.

  “Pat!”

  No response.

  “Pat!”

  Out cold. She dropped the bottle on the floor in disgust and then shut the door to the TV room, sealing him off like the airlock on a submarine.

  * * *

  Anne changed out of her nice Juror Number Six clothes and put on Dan’s outgrown St. Rita’s sweats. It was lunchtime but she wasn’t hungry, so she made tea and scratched margarine across an English muffin. Even with the door to the back room closed she could hear Pat’s snoring, and she stared at the carriage driver on the Thomas’ bag with his black whip and she felt her anger galloping along. He’s sick, and I can’t even bring myself to pray for him. She had to get out of that house.

  Anne went out the front door and into the open maw of the garage to retrieve her gardening gloves and pail of tools. She dragged them around to the backyard and the small plot between the apricot trees and the forsythia where she kept her garden.

  Since moving from the Bronx, the garden was her oft-foiled effort at being a Texan. This was her sixth attempt. She had started with the now-embarrassing rookie notion she could grow anything she wanted in the subtropical climate. First time around was something out of Exodus—the tomatoes became a Disney park for aphids, the cucumbers suffocated by leaf spot, and the rosebush caught witch’s broom and blistered in the heat. The next season, she became obsessed with Texas perennials. This required a class at the arboretum and dozens of trips to Wolfe Nurseries. Pat started calling his wife Lady Bird when for two glorious weeks after the spring rain, the garden looked like a pasture blooming off I-35. The backyard exploded with an impressionist palette of bluebonnets, spire sage, snapdragons, pokeweed, four-nerve daisies, skullcaps, and purple obedient plant. But by Mother’s Day it was already past peak, the heat kicked in, and the flowers broiled and browned by summer. Then Anne went in a minimal direction with a desert garden. She scraped off a half foot of topsoil and bought two hundred pounds of pea grave
l, planted a sword yucca, a couple bearded cacti, and pipe vine. It was hard to tell what was soaking in through the pebbles and she overwatered, rotting this Sonoran tableau at its roots.

  So she scaled back her ambitions and now as a veteran gardener she planted 80 percent things that would survive a nuclear holocaust—lots of bulbs, impatiens, milkweed, honeysuckle, caladiums, and lily grass. The other 20 percent were experiments—rock rose, basil and mint, and pink azaleas. The azaleas fell to gall and canker, but the garden held up well until frost, and everything grew like weeds, because frankly, that’s what grew best.

  In her attempts to earn her green thumb, Anne became a devoted listener to Neil Sperry’s Texas Gardening radio show. Mr. Sperry was a becalming presence on Saturday mornings in the Malone house. He had a voice like a soaker hose and took calls on KRLD for a couple of hours, gently assuring folks of the importance of the right fertilizers—boy, did he like fertilizer—and mulching the thin topsoils of white-rock Dallas. One time she even called in, and Dan listened on delay in the other room as Anne in North Dallas asked whether she should replant the little alien plantlets that were going apeshit on her hanging spider plant. It was really a BS question; she just felt a menopausal need to call Neil Sperry and tell him how much she liked his show.

  Across the alley, the willow in the Schraeders’ backyard shrugged like the coat of a mastodon. Out of it came a mourning cloak butterfly as big as Anne’s hand, drifting across the yard, alighting on the forsythia, and then fluttering over to the shade and settling on the gas meter. Anne wrinkled her itching nose—she was allergic to all these plants but year after year pushed through—and scoured her face with the back of her gardening glove. She stepped toward the house and studied the butterfly, its brown wings fringed with pale corn-silk edges. Of all the things that go into something so delicate . . . As she drew nearer, the iridescent dots of blue glimmered as if they had been painted by hand. It was ridiculously Mesozoic in size as it laid out its wings flat against the silver pipe. It too looked annoyed in its attempts to overwinter, like its nymph driven mad by the gods. Anne studied its dark chocolate wings and could make out the thick fur on its thorax.

  And in that moment, she thought of Ronan Carroll—their dinners downtown after lectures, their walks in Westchester where he held her close. Anne had all these things to say to him, to her husband. But then nothing. The early-afternoon sky was now a clear blue, the apricot trees in the backyard shimmering in the sun, the world bright and awake, indifferent to her disappointment. She stepped too close and up the butterfly went, floating on the breeze again and carried back to the willow tree.

  And just then she felt a bite and looked down at her sandals. She had been standing less than a foot from a fire ant mound. She hopped back and felt another bright little pinch on her ankle. She pulled off her sandals and scanned below her knees for ants. Her ankle started to throb and a red welt was forming. Anne wanted to scream as she paced the yard barefoot as a savage, returning finally to the fire ant mound. The rain had flattened out its churn of earth and left it hidden under tendrils of Bermuda grass.

  Goddamn it.

  Anne marched into the house, put on sneakers, and pulled the twelve-quart stockpot out of the kitchen cabinet. She filled it to the lip with water and then set it on the biggest coil on the electric stove. I should have seen this coming, all of it. She stood there watching it, trying not to cry, the coil refusing to glow. He was sick, and I knew it. She scratched her ankle and went to the bathroom for calamine. It didn’t help—she had itched it into a weeping rash—and she could hear Pat snoring again. She returned to the kitchen, the coil now a coke-fire orange, and stood over the pot.

  Lord, I’m not ready for whatever fresh hell this is.

  As she stood there, her face flushed, waiting and watching for a pot of water to boil, Anne thought of her father, whose temper and trigger she had inherited. At night, he would escape into his radio plays.

  “The security of mankind is guaranteed by the balance of nature. The law of the jungle is implacable.”

  It had been five minutes, and the water was still cold to her touch. Anne had to be very quiet if she wanted to stay up and listen.

  “You don’t understand. These are army ants. An elemental force. An act of God. Ants, nothing but ants.”

  And Anne would stare at her father rapt in listening, a strange look in his eye, clouded and tired, and she made a wishful connection: He’s just like Leiningen versus the ants, stubbornness parading as resolution. Bless him or curse him for his anger and his fight. Despite the ants, despite everything, he won’t give up. So what if you’re driven mad by it? Anne spotted bubbles forming on the sides of the pot. Like her father, she would endure.

  “I always knew the ants would come.”

  A bubble floated to the top of the pot. She scratched her ankle again as it bled. She stood there sweating, upset at how long this was taking. She considered how much gas she had left in the can for the mower.

  “They had me covered, and were devouring me. I couldn’t die like that.”

  And finally, despite her vigil, the pot came to a boil. Anne slid open the screen door and put on oven mitts. She lifted the pot and carried it to the backyard. Her ankle itched fiercely.

  Anne poured the boiling water over the dark hem of the mound. At first the water pooled at the top, scattering thousands, the ants pulling together in small rafts of survival. But the steady boiling cascade broke the surface tension and the mound became a red blanket of death. Still Anne poured slowly and carefully. As the gospel according to Neil Sperry had taught her, the water had to work down deep in order to scald the queen.

  [ DECEMBER 26 ]

  Dear Screwtape,

  Great news, uncle—we’ve got him back. This junior tempter just earned his horns as a series of distractions I set in our prey’s path led to him breaking the Sabbath and cursing the day.

  First, I left a five dollar bill on the ground in the parking lot of the diner where our candidate has his weekend bacon and eggs. This filled him with superstition that today was a lucky day and the Enemy was shining down on him. Your advice about focusing on his fanaticism for the Redskins was heeded—he went to the game instead of services—and working with Scabtree, the devil that runs that accursed Washington team . . .

  Dan Malone paused and stared at the green hull of the Remington Quiet-Riter, his fingers poised like cat paws over the keys. It was the day after Christmas, and he was trying to write Wormwood’s reply as a journal entry—typing it up to paste in the notebook like real correspondence. The Screwtape Letters was his theology teacher Father Payne’s recommendation; writing every day (Rule number four: your journal is your life-force) was Mr. Oglesby’s.

  Now tomorrow I will feed on the anguish and bewilderment of his hungover soul.

  Dan stopped again and thought about this. The tack is all wrong here. Whatever affection Wormwood has for his uncle, it never overcomes his selfishness. Oglesby had warned him about this: Think like your antagonist, Malone. Negative capability is the key to this class, it will be the key to the Game, and it is the key to unlocking literature. But Dan got lost in the double reversal: What would they teach a sophomore at the Tempters’ Training College? How to create enough distraction that you miss the point of life entirely?

  I know he is a deplorable milksop who will want to apologize in the morning, but I’m planning a work crisis where our candidate has to figure out who to fire from the airplane factory.

  Dan ripped the piece of typing paper from the carriage. A draft nonetheless. Then another thought hit him, and he fed a new sheet in.

  Idea: Write it from an angel’s perspective, like Michael or Gabriel, intercepting the messages and decoding them, and then reporting on all of this Upstairs (to St. Peter??) . . .

  Dan stood up and went to the window. The sky was a slate line and held the quiet disappointment
of the day after Christmas. The lit-up reindeer on the Peñas’ front lawn now seemed gaudy and gloomy. Dan put The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan in his Sanyo cassette player. He had found the tape in the Nice Price bin at Musicland and it felt like a sign. He fast-forwarded the A side to the seventh song. A response to Screwtape was fine, but he wanted to write something inspired. He grabbed his journal and pen with its chewed cap, and sat there on the edge of the bed waiting for this to happen.

  The guitar starts with a strum, and then it’s driving, looping, repeating—a basic Vedic circle of sound—and just as Dan gets used to it, there’s a chord change and the song opens up and explodes.

  I’ve stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains,

  I’ve walked and I’ve crawled on six crooked highways . . .

  Dan listens closely. The verses haunt him, and he tries to wrap his head around each image. He pictures each democratic vista—the highways, the forests, the oceans, and the graveyard—the song cataloging and expanding at a dizzying rate. He thinks for a second—the mouth of a graveyard—and then scribbles in his journal:

  Teeth crooked like an old cemetery.

  He can picture it, like a jack-o’-lantern, or his grandmother’s lower jaw without dentures. Okay, a line. Not bad. He falls back into Dylan’s incantations. Each line assaults him—wild wolves, a highway of diamonds—like the roar of a wave that could drown the whole Dan. It is intensely overwhelming and infuriatingly beautiful. Dan closes his eyes, soaring along with each line, his blue Scripto tapping manically.

  How do you write like that? he wondered.

  Dan opened his eyes and retrieved Robert Shelton’s No Direction Home off his dresser and flipped to the chapter on Freewheelin’. He liked how ridiculously serious the biography was, calling Dylan Orpheus a lot, which seemed very serious indeed.