The wild card was Judge Geoffrey Willard, an Arkansas district court judge sitting by designation—which meant he had been recruited to help appellate judges handle the burgeoning caseload of matters federal. He was a relatively unknown quantity because district court opinions, especially criminal dispositions, often go unpublished. He had presided over school deseg cases and some class action Title VII cases where his rulings had been conservative and well reasoned. But as near as Watson could tell, the judge’s conservative bent also included the usual tough-on-crime strain. He had been prepared to write off Judge Willard, too, until a spider and an off-label browser had brought back an obscure hit from a Little Rock Web site. It was a local bar journal article called “Hate Crime Hysteria,” by Judge Geoffrey Willard, written back in the late nineties, just after they passed the federal law providing augmented penalties for church burnings. It was a glimpse into the mind of a judge who was skeptical, one, that church burnings were racially motivated, and, two, that a federal statute outlawing hatred would discourage anyone from burning a church, when the penalties for plain arson already dealt in decades of hard time.
Then Watson decided to reread Wisconsin v. Mitchell for the—what? Twentieth time? He flipped open the cover page and thought he heard the lock turn in the front door. Or had he imagined it? He froze and listened.
Alpha? Beta? An Order of the Eagler with an explosive device? Somebody looking for Jimmy Whitlow’s lawyer? Buck? Here he’d squandered all of his energies preparing for intellectual battle in the Eighth Court of Appeals. Federal appellate law—the legal equivalent of brain surgery. How ironic if, instead, the pivotal clash took place in the swine ring, a muscle game, where ruthless violence reigned supreme. He’d spent most of his life reading and writing, speaking, talking, deploying words—a cluster of linguistic skills that would be of precious little use in a contest with Alpha and Beta.
He heard the door open in the foyer. Somebody was trying to be quiet, because he heard only a single whoosh of the door brushing free of the weather stripping. He threw off the covers—to do what? Get a toothbrush and sharpen it up real quick? Brandish a fingernail clipper?
He heard soft footsteps on the stairwell. Fuck! How many times had he resolved to get himself a nice semiautomatic weapon and keep it in a lockbox next to the bed for just this occasion? But whoever it was must have had a key, unless they’d picked the lock?
“Joe?” asked a woman’s whispering voice.
“Sandra!”
He fell on the bed and gave himself cardiac massage.
She looked down at the stacks of paper scattered around the bed and her mouth twisted into a just-as-I-thought smile.
“What are you doing here?” he said. “I mean, I’m so glad you’re here. I’m glad to see you. I … have oral arguments tomorrow, in that prisoner case.”
“I know that,” she said. “That’s why I’m here. Who put rocks all over the front porch? Was the UPS guy here? It says ‘Delivery?’ ”
“It’s a prank from … from some weird people I met,” he said.
“I’ll bet you’re meeting weird people every day,” she said and sat on the edge of the bed.
She wore an overcoat. Her hair was in French braids—his favorite arrangement. He smelled perfume and other fresh scents. Conditioner? But she didn’t seem warm or particularly forgiving. Just matter-of-fact.
“You can’t sleep,” she said bluntly. “I knew you wouldn’t be able to sleep. Remember the bar exam?”
Dark night of the soul. A seedy hotel room in Jefferson City, Missouri, the state capital, where all aspiring Missouri lawyers converge for the festival of anxiety, angst, and terror known as the bar exam. For two days, they cram and contemplate suicide. No one sleeps. Instead they lie abed and wring their withers about how their entire future and the welfare of their families will depend upon which circles they darken the next morning with a Number 2 pencil. The night of the bar exam, Sandra had hired a sitter for Sheila back in St. Louis, then had driven two hours to Jeff City so she could show up in his room at 10:00 P.M.
“Remember the night before the con law exam? Before First Amendment law? You can’t sleep,” she said again, in a level tone.
“And you won’t be able to sleep,” she said.
He looked at her eagerly, as if to say, This is a peace offering, right? Are we making up? Am I forgiven?
“I don’t want to sleep with you,” she said. “I’m still furious. Hurt. My family … And I don’t understand what you are doing with yourself. This criminal case is a big mistake. Major career error. Everybody I’ve asked about it agrees with me.”
Her voice broke, and his backbone cracked on the wheel of conscience. I should have pleaded him out! Avoided the brain scientist the instant I saw her. I knew what to do. I just didn’t do it! And then, after that, I knew what not to do, and I went ahead and did it anyway!
“You have placed this passing infatuation with criminal law above your family’s welfare. I can’t do anything about that. But, now that you’ve chosen this … course, I don’t know what to do. We’re married,” she said. “Are we getting divorced?”
“No way,” he said without hesitation. “Why? Is that what you’re thinking?”
“Never,” she said, her eyes watching his, waiting for him to blink first. “Never.”
Whew!
She glanced down at her hands and shrugged. “Unless I found out you were sleeping with somebody else. But I know you would never do that.” She tossed her head, shaking off the notion of anything so preposterous. “Never mind adultery. Just the implications of willfully exposing your entire family to disease. Your unborn children.” She shuddered. “That would certainly do it. In that case, divorce would be mandatory,” she said. “But I wouldn’t marry a creature like that.”
“Nor would I,” said Watson. Premeditated, willful disregard of my own family? Adultery? Second only to murder when prizes for original sins were being given out. Because of what? Biological programming? Neural Darwinism? Genetics, serotonin levels, ape-hierarchy politics, evolutionary psychology? I wish! God, I would give body and soul if it were true. Life would be so much easier! I am protoplasm, I could say each morning upon awakening, I will do whatever is necessary to further my own agenda and the welfare of my immediate biological family and a few close friends, like-minded alpha males and females.
“So,” she said. “My husband has decided he wants to be a criminal lawyer. Not something I planned on. Not something I understand.”
“San, I … I think it must be a law school thing. They brainwash you to think of your client first.”
“Whatever,” she said. She looked up at him suddenly. “And you can’t go back to Stern, Pale after it’s over?” Her tone was plaintive; she was pleading for one ray of hope. “Any way at all that could happen?”
Watson shook his head. “They put a bag over my head and marched me out at dawn to be shot,” he said. “I’ll join Jimmy Whitlow in prison before I go back there.”
“I understand,” she said with a sigh, undoing the buttons on her coat, and he caught a glimpse of rose-colored satin. Another teddy.
He felt nerves sprouting, blood rushing to his pelvis. Everything was going to be all right again. He was forgiven. He could start his whole life over! He searched her face for the same glad eyes that had sent him to the carpet so many times during the mad rush of infatuation that had swept over them like mental illness before they were married.
Instead, she was solemn. Glum.
“I guess I’m willing to try this criminal law business, if it means you will be home more.”
“I promise!” he said, bowing down before the queen. “You won’t be sorry. I’ll be my own boss.”
“That’s what worries me,” she said.
“No, really,” he said. “I’ll have so much more free time. You’ll see!”
“Will I?” she said, slipping out of her coat.
“As soon as this Whitlow case is over,” he said. “I pro
mise.”
“Stop talking,” she said. “Do it, and go to sleep.”
CHAPTER 26
Judgment day. He left two hours early as a precaution against systems failures—car breakdown, traffic, metropolitan dysfunction, poor health, nuclear accident, earthquake, flood, fire, war, windstorm, act of God. He arrived downtown at 7:00 A.M. Oral arguments were scheduled for 9:30.
At the Market Street exit, he saw the Old Cathedral, pink and forlorn in the morning light. Instead of just driving by it, the way he had done for over a year on his way to Stern, Pale, he pulled into the parking lot and looked up at the stone façade. He considered his motives for wanting to go inside. For what? Good luck? Maybe his brain was wistfully yearning for otherwordly consolation, some balm for his overloaded mental circuits, spiritual salve for his sore somatic markers. Maybe prayer was a vestigial ritual originally developed to ward off startle patterns and panic disorders, to enable the organism to perform under stress, thereby maximizing fitness? Prayer was probably just an instinct in extinction, like altruism, which had served its purpose in advancing the social organism called the human race, and was now being phased out to make way for—What? Neuroscience? Cyberspace? A new brand of fitness?
Inside the Old Cathedral, he crept down the nave midway to a pew, a middling location appropriate for a lukewarm Christian, neither hot nor cold, the sort that, according to Revelation, makes the Divinity want to spew them from His mouth. (“How I wish you were one or the other—hot or cold!” He could use that line on Palmquist.) His footsteps echoed in whispers from the vaults and ambulatories, arches and loggias. He felt the carved eyes of saints and fathers of the Church watching him from their alcoves, as he knelt in a wooden pew and bowed his head. Streaks of painted light slanted in from the stained glass windows. Sacred odors rose up from his childhood: cedar and rosewood; incense from smoking thuribles, beeswax, smoldering wicks, and ashes; starched soutanes, chasubles, and albs; unleavened bread; the scent of lilies and perfumed graveclothes.
Watson shrank and felt himself become a homunculus once again, a ghost in the machine. He was seven years old, renewing his baptismal vows in St. Dymphna’s Cathedral. “Father, forgive me, for I have sinned.”
A severe, bull-voiced Roman senator in vestments, his white hair parted and looking as if the Holy Spirit had perched on his head and spread its wings. “Do you renounce Satan and all his works?”
Watson’s scalp grew tight with Dante’s fear. Satan was there somewhere, but he always moved one millimeter outside the peripheries of human vision (except on special occasions, when he came out for a good laugh at, say, a lawyer trying to pray).
“Do you renounce Satan and all his works?”
A cold wind had blown through his seven-year-old skin, bringing with it the age of reason, thrilling his bones, horripilating its way up his spine. Somewhere in his monkey brain he had neural networks that still tingled with reverence and awe at the epiphenomenon called conscience.
Church. Just a nice building? God’s mausoleum? An access node where one could log on to SoulNet using dial-up networking, go to www.divinity.com looking for WebMaster God?
He had trouble remembering the procedural rules. Probably he should first be contritely sorry for the near occasion of adultery, which he would probably be able to avoid, now that Palmquist had lost interest in him and his client. But was this theologically correct? What if, instead of preparing for an inquisition on First Amendment law in the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, he had smashed the car into a bridge piling on the way downtown and was trembling in the vestibules of the afterlife, waiting to be asked ultimate questions from his Catholic youth? Why did God make me? To know, love, and serve Him.
“Mr. Watson, tell us please, what is perfect contrition and how does it differ from imperfect contrition?”
“Yes, Your Honor. Perfect contrition is sorrow for and detestation of sin with a true purpose of amendment, arising from a love of God for His own perfections. Imperfect contrition is sorrow for sin motivated by some inferior impulse, as fear of divine punishment—theophobia (fear of God), stygiophobia (fear of Hell), kenophobia (fear of voids).”
“And do you now have perfect contrition?”
“Who, me, Your Honor? Perfect contrition for what?”
“How about adultery?”
“Adul—? You mean, that hand job? Since when is heavy petting adultery? Recall, please, that I was bound, restrained, helpless at the time. If that’s adultery, then the controlling statute is fatally overbroad, and it’s a harsh universe you’re running here, don’t you think? At the very worst, I would call it quasi-adultery, for which I am now formulating quasi-contrition. I am doing the very best I can, here.”
“But you saw the woman again after that. And you wanted to commit adultery with her, didn’t you? You set out with the intent to do just that, didn’t you?”
“But I didn’t, did I? Because my brain wouldn’t let me. My well-fortified conscience disabled my manhood. Doesn’t that count for something?”
Psychomachia—the warfare of the soul. Who said: “I fear we cannot get rid of God because we still believe in grammar”? Does God play at billiards? Dice? The thunderclap of ivory planets splitting the air. The big bang followed by the whisper of white molecules colliding. Crisis theology. Pascal’s wager: If there is a God, you win; if not, you won’t know the difference. There, now he could cite specific instances when he had felt remorse, attempted prayer, and failed. If he could go to his knees, or lower, then he could ask for help in oral arguments.
He looked up at the tabernacle, a forbidden zone he’d seen during a tour of St. Dymphna’s, just before his first communion. It had small, heavy gold doors, which swung out to reveal a lustrous panne satin interior, looking a lot like the inside of a coffin, but smaller.
“During mass,” Sister Mary Vendetta had explained, “the Eucharist is offered up for us on the altar, but whenever mass is not being said, the Body of Christ is kept in the tabernacle.”
Perhaps, giddied by the gravity of the situation, young Watson had mistaken the mighty, white high altar itself for the tabernacle—the overall concept being that of a capacious mausoleum, complete with ornamental sarcophagi, and a gold coal chute (the tabernacle), where bread and wine, manna and ambrosia were passed in to sustain and nourish the Living Body of Christ, who was reclining on a divan inside the altar, being fanned by eunuchs with palms and punkahs, and nibbling on grapes dropped into His mouth by fawning slave girls. Thus his nimble seven-year-old imagination had resolved the paradox that Christ had died for his sins, His Body was in the tabernacle, but He was also alive, and would live forever and ever.
Watson could walk up there now, perhaps. Turn the small, heavy gold key in the tumblers. The doors would swing open, a small coffin would slide out on casters, like a drawer in a morgue. The chthonic glow of candles flickering off the slick black casket. He could open the hinged top half, stand on tiptoe, peer into swirling satin, and see the embalmed body of James Whitlow. Rigor mortis rictus and risus sardonicus, hands crossed on his bosom, his tattoo plainly visible in the candlelight: JESUS HATES NIGGERS.
The courtroom had the same sacred, eschatological feel. Burnished wood and timeless marble; robed, somber dignitaries gravely contemplating Justice. But the sanctity of the court of appeals was technologically enhanced. Each of the appellate judges had a monitor, a pointing device, and a recessed keyboard at his disposal. The lectern had a small readout displaying the time remaining in the practitioner’s oral argument.
It was a courtroom, all right. But the jury—the collective representative of common humanity—was nowhere in sight. One look at the panel of stern judges and Watson instantly wished he could argue to a jury instead. In the stifling formality of this star chamber, a jury trial would be a mud-wrestling melee by comparison. Instead of talking to what Myrna referred to as twelve Kmart checkout clerks, Watson would be trying to persuade three gray eminences who’d heard it all before. He managed an out-of-
body experience for a split second, during which time he saw the parade of advocates who had appeared before these judges for years. Every working day, for decades, these aging men and women had sat and heard lawyers argue their cases. Heard Mr. Stammer clash with Ms. Hedge. Counselor Canny take issue with Solicitor Spleen. Heard the neophytes’ whine and saw the sleight of the old hands. Heard them circumlocute and stall, with their “I would argue that,” or “I would respond by saying that,” instead of just arguing or saying it.
The format was more oppressively restrictive than a Spenserian stanza, but tight shoes only made the lawyers learn new dances. Alone, facing three judges with no evidence or witnesses, the veterans become masters of paralipsis and insinuation, rodomontade and heartfelt hyperbole, vainglorious oratory and rigorous rhetoric. But alas, none of it seems to matter in the end, because—that’s right—the judges have heard it all before. If the statistics gathered by the judiciary committees are accurate, appellate judges usually decide cases after reading the briefs and before oral arguments. Knowing that, a guy should be able to sleep the night before oral arguments.
He took a seat on a bench that was very like a pew without kneelers. He watched lawyers filing in. Here and there, journalists with notepads. Not a crowd, but certainly more than the usual assembly of lawyers with cases to argue. Frank Donahue swept in with Harper and a clerk in tow.
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