Unforced Error

by Michael Bowen

  “Peter,” she gushed in the process, “you’re famous!”

  “Well,” Peter said, “for twelve more hours, maybe.”

  “Becomingly modest, as usual. If we can nurse your limelight for a fortnight or so we’ll be able to make splendid use of it.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t follow,” Peter said. “Er, that is, I don’t think I’m in the picture.”

  “The Liberty Memorial Library Expansion proposal,” Klimchock said crisply. “As you know, we have a very generous pledge from Mr. John Paul Lawrence of Jackrabbit Press to get the ball rolling on our hoped-for addition filled with many, many of those wired-up computers you’re so keen about, as long as we call it the Liberty Memorial Wing. But that leaves eleven million or so to raise, half of which we can get from our chums in Washington if the State of Missouri and Jackson County and Kansas City and other private donors will chip in the rest together.”

  “Ah,” Peter said with vast relief as he reached for his checkbook. “Well, Linda and I don’t have a great deal of money set aside, but I’m sure that for a cause as worthy as this we can, er, do our modest bit.”

  “Peter, Peter, Peter,” Klimchock said, chuckling indulgently. “I wouldn’t dream of asking you and Linda to help fill up our multi-million dollar hole. Your help is wanted with the public fisc aspect of things.”

  “Not in the picture again,” Peter said.

  “We need Senator Wade Carlton on the Budget Committee to push through the state’s share, which will more or less lock up everything else. Senator Carlton is very big on what he calls majority values, by which he seems to mean grown-ups not being naughty with each other.”

  “Yes?” Peter prompted, foreboding showing unambiguously on his guileless features. Linda, meanwhile, who had yet to speak with Peter about the, ah, fling, felt her gut shrivel.

  “You do see, don’t you, darling?” Klimchock pressed. “You’re bullet-proof! There you were on television, not being naughty. It was so touching, so sweet, so majority value-ish. You’re the perfect choice to go hat in hand to Senator Carlton’s committee and read our prepared plea.”

  “But after the statement there’ll be questions,” Peter said, “that I’ll have to answer. And I’m not good at that kind of thing.”

  “But that’s just it, luv. There won’t be any questions. You’re bullet-proof. They’ll all use their time to tell you how wonderful you are and thank you for coming, and we’ll have our funding.”

  “But what,” Peter said, more to himself than to Klimchock, “if they do? Ask questions, I mean.”

  “Now don’t get disgruntled on me, Peter, dear,” Klimchock said firmly. “I need you gruntled and steady, there’s a good chap, thank you very much. It’s not just the expansion per se. We’re all teetering on the edge of a post-literate age. Literacy is assailed on all sides. Libraries are the last line of defense. We’re like the final remnant of redoubts defending Roman Britain against the illiterate Saxon hordes.”

  This simile struck Linda as an unhappy one, for she had a general impression that the first time around the Saxons had won. For Peter, though, Klimchock’s argument—her ringing appeal to the eternal sanctity of Language, of Literacy, of WORDS—was unanswerable. He murmured his dubious commitment to walk point on the funding request. And all the way home he looked both baffled and miserable.

  “I feel like my life is turning into a bad novel,” he told Linda when she tried to comfort him.

  “Almost everyone’s life is like a bad novel,” she assured him after a moment’s reflection. “If your life is like a good novel, someone writes your biography.”

  That won the first grin she’d seen on him since Klimchock’s apartment. It didn’t seem like a good time, somehow, to bring up…other things.

  Chapter 5

  “You won’t be at the encampment five minutes before someone asks you where your mule is, ” Peter warned Rep as he made a quarter-inch adjustment on Rep’s collar. “Be ready for that one.”

  “Meaning that since I’m wearing a cavalry private’s forage cap and shell coat—”

  “Shell jacket, ” Peter corrected him gently.

  “—and walking with someone who’s carrying a cavalry sword—”

  “Saber,” Peter said.

  “—they wonder why I don’t have a horse.”

  “Right,” Peter said. “For Union re-enactors, the cavalry is almost perfect. The uniforms are cooler than Union infantry uniforms and nearly as neat as the Confederate outfits. Don’t worry about this spare uniform of mine being too big for you, by the way. That makes you look more realistic. And carbines weigh less than muskets. But for some guys the horses are a real downside.”

  “That’s one way to put it, all right,” said Rep, who had never been on a horse in his life and intended to keep it that way. “Is there an answer to the mule question that won’t make me sound too green?”

  “Say something about the hottest fighting pony soldiers ever see being on foot, ” Peter said. “After all, the Battle of Gettysburg basically started when Buford got his men off their horses to block the Chambersburg Pike to Heth’s troops. Although I’m not sure I’d mention that part. A private going into the Battle of Westport wouldn’t have been likely to know that detail.”

  “The less he’d know, the better I can play the part,” Rep said. “I thought I knew the Civil War pretty well, but until I talked to you I’d never heard of the Battle of Westport.”

  “You’re in good company, ” Peter said. “It’s the largest battle ever fought on the North American continent west of the Mississippi River, but a lot of Civil War histories don’t even mention it. The trans-Mississippi theater was basically a side-show. But Westport was Kansas City’s battle, so it’s the one we’ll be doing this weekend.”

  Peter stepped back for a critical look, appraising the uniform he’d lent to Rep and then flicking nearly invisible specks from his own.

  “Ready for parade,” he said. “And don’t sweat what you don’t know. The guys are gonna have a little fun with you, but as long as you’re making an effort they’ll cut you some slack. There are only twenty-two notes in Taps, and the first time I played it at a re-enactment I got sixteen of them wrong. But they acted like I was straight out of Dan Butterfield’s brigade. Well, let’s give the ladies a look and then get on our way. We’ve got a forty-five minute drive to the encampment.”

  “Dragoons, as I live and breathe,” Melissa said a minute later as Peter and Rep descended the stairs into the Damons’ living room. Rep wondered whether the glint in her green-flecked eyes was mischief or surprise.

  “No mockery, please, Doctor Pennyworth,” Rep said. “We’re cavalry.”

  “Of very recent vintage, though,” Peter said. “Right up to the Civil War this country’s mounted soldiers actually were called dragoons.”

  “Peter has kind of a thing about words,” Linda explained, a tincture of apology coloring her voice.

  “If more of my junior faculty colleagues had a thing like that I might actually go to MLA meetings,” Melissa said. “American dragoons. I can’t wait to work that into my next discussion of Jacques Lacan.”

  “We’ll be seeing you two around eight-thirty at the encampment social Jackrabbit Press is hosting, right?” This from Rep.

  “Command performance,” Linda said, without notable enthusiasm.

  “Probably not in uniform, though,” Melissa added.

  “There actually were women who dressed as men to fight with both armies during the war,” Peter said. “There’s a great book about it: They Fought Like Demons.”

  “But that pose wouldn’t be credible in the case of present company,” interjected Rep, who made his living finding escapes from verbal traps. “Maybe you could come as a couple of nurses—say, Dorothea Dix and her little known sister.”

  “The Cyclone in Calico, right?” Melissa asked.

  “You just impressed Peter,” Linda told Melissa.

>   “Blew me away,” Peter confirmed. “Dix reorganized the Union nursing service from top to bottom, then promoted women’s education after the war.”

  “A thorough progressive,” Linda said.

  “I’m not so sure about the thorough part,” Rep said. “One of her students later said, ‘ It was in her nature to use the whip, and use it she did.’ I don’t think the comment was metaphorical.”

  “Trust you to know that particular factoid about a feminist icon,” Melissa said, offering Rep a playful swat. “We’ll see you guys later.”

  A ten-year old standing across the shaded stretch of Romany Road where Peter and Linda lived giggled as Rep and Peter stowed Peter’s saber, pistol, and bugle in the back seat of the Damons’ lemon yellow Volkswagen Beetle. Rep could see the kid’s point. Dressing up in a nineteenth-century uniform, heading off to play soldier in an elaborate combination of amateur theatrics and community pageant—he couldn’t help feeling both silly and conspicuous.

  Rep didn’t particularly like feeling silly, and he pathologically hated feeling conspicuous. His mother had disappeared from his life when he was fifteen months old because, as he had learned only much later, she’d been the getaway driver for a killer exiting the scene of an unplanned but thoroughly felonious homicide during the madness of the early ’seventies. Other people had been shooting at the car at the time, but those other people had been police officers so the law didn’t think this was much of a defense.

  Not until his freshman year in college had Rep learned that his mother had been convicted and imprisoned, and later had supposedly escaped after eight years behind bars. Much more recently he had discovered that she was still alive, living under an assumed name, and supporting herself by taking money from men (and, occasionally, women) who paid her to hit them with hairbrushes, paddles, and other objects that their psyches had invested with concupiscent significance. She was still a fugitive, which meant that on the rare occasions when he could meet her or talk to her neither could acknowledge their relationship. Understanding these major mom issues helped—but outside the tight little club of the trademark and copyright bar, where he prized the respect of his peers and the confidence of his clients, he still didn’t like making himself conspicuous.

  And then there was the question of what his sober, buttoned-down law partners back in Indianapolis would say if they saw him in this F Troop get-up. Well, actually, Rep reflected, they’d probably say, Yeah, I’d do that to go after a client. For that’s what Rep was doing. John Paul Lawrence, major library expansion donor and owner of Jackrabbit Press and several other enterprises involving print, had a hundred-thousand dollars a year in legal business that was reportedly hanging low and ripe for the plucking. Rep had partners who’d dress up in boas and bustiers for a shot at fresh billings like that.

  Rep drew his own line a bit short of bustiers. He didn’t make as much as some of his partners but, as Melissa sometimes pointed out, the difference was that he didn’t need to make any more and they did. John Paul Lawrence and Jackrabbit Press, though, offered Rep a shot at something that he found more seductive than making money: making law.

  The Civil War sesquicentennial lay only a few years in the future. Popular interest would spike upwards as the anniversary approached. Re-enactment of Civil War battles was one of the fastest growing hobbies in the country. Most re-enactors were meticulously historical, scrupulously matching collar buttons and belt buckles and shoulder patches and everything else they used to the actual uniforms and equipment of the Iron Brigade or the 55th Pennsylvania Volunteers or whatever unit they’d picked.

  Rep had learned, though, that some enthusiasts found such obsessive attention to detail a bit anal. Historical accuracy could get in the way of an infantry private wearing a gold-lined blue cloak or carrying a really neat-looking sword—in other words, of the parts of re-enactment that some guys thought were actually fun. As the sesquicentennial drew nearer and popular interest grew, Rep figured that lots of these less-history/more fun types would be flocking to the hobby.

  A casual comment from Peter a couple of months ago suggested that Lawrence figured the same thing. Prominent among the works of Women’s Fiction that Jackrabbit Press published were American historical romances. Roughly seventy percent of American historical romances, according to Linda, have Civil War settings. What if, Lawrence was wondering, Jackrabbit Press created a fictional Union Army unit—so-and-so’s Kaw River Volunteers, something like that? Suppose this unit’s uniforms and equipment were plausible but not constrained by actual facts? Suppose Jackrabbit Press threw in professional videotaping and photography to attract the more casual hobbyists?

  Okay, Rep had thought, suppose all that: so what? Well, could this unit’s name and its outfits and insignia and overall image be legally protected? For historical units the answer would be no. You can’t copyright History; you can’t trademark the Irish Brigade. Was the answer the same for fictional outfits like the one Lawrence was dreaming up? The question made Rep’s pulse race a little, for the answer wasn’t clear.

  Answering it correctly would mean a lot more to Rep than an extra twenty-thousand dollars or so at the end of his firm’s fiscal year. It would mean he’d have added something to the toolbox of ideas that copyright lawyers have to know. Along with Fair Use and the Parody Defense, his peers would need to master a doctrine catchily named by an appellate decision whose published version would have, near the top, the discreet notation, “For the Appellee: Reppert G. Pennyworth and Some-Associate-or-Other; oral argument by Mr. Pennyworth.” That was why he was riding down a leafy boulevard called Ward Parkway in Kansas City, dressed like a Union cavalry private.

  A thick tome on the Volkswagen’s dashboard interrupted these reveries by sliding toward Rep’s side of the car as Peter swung onto J.C. Nichols Parkway. Rep caught it and opened it to the title page.

  “Sherman—Fighting Prophet, written by Lloyd Lewis in 1932,” he said. “I am now officially out of my depth.”

  “Actually,” Peter said, “that book has nothing to do with re-enactment stuff. I took it out of the library last week because it hadn’t been checked out in almost ten years and the powers that be were about to have it pulped.”

  “Hard to argue with the powers that be on that one.”

  “You’re right,” Peter sighed. “It’s just that I saw that book and I thought of all those words. Thought of Lloyd Lewis typing them on a manual Royal Underwood or maybe even writing them out in longhand, one by one, decades before I was born, caring about every preposition, pondering every verb and noun. I couldn’t stand the thought of turning it all into toilet paper. I was doing the same thing you copyright lawyers do, really: protecting words.”

  “That has to be the noblest thing I’ve ever heard anyone say about copyright lawyers,” Rep said, thinking about defending words like Lite® and Breather Bags®. “We do it for money, though. You do it for love.”

  “Neurotic love,” Peter said. “God help me, though, love is the right term. When I say I love words I don’t mean just literature or poetry or luminous essays. I mean words, period. Grocery lists. Billboard advertising. I love the idea of words. There’s something magical about them.”

  “Wow,” Rep said politely.

  “I’ll give you an example. Do you know who Laurent Fabius is?”

  Confederate general? Rep wondered. Brigade commander under Braxton Bragg? Reconstruction-era governor of Louisiana? Lacking confidence in these guesses and fearing they might seem impolitic, he was about to confess ignorance when a bell from a distant undergraduate course rang faintly.

  “European politician?” Rep ventured. “French?”

  “Right,” Peter said, not terribly impressed, as if this were the type of thing you’d expect any educated American to know. “He was prime minister of France for awhile in the ’eighties, under Mitterand.”

  “I’ll take the Fifth Republic for four-hundred, Alex,” Rep said.

  “Now, he
re’s the connection. Twenty-two hundred years ago, Hannibal invaded Italy with war elephants and all that stuff. The Roman general opposing him was named Fabius. He wasn’t strong enough to beat Hannibal in a straight-up battle, so he fought a series of delaying actions, all over Italy, until he’d worn Hannibal’s forces down enough to get the upper hand.”

  “Right,” Rep said, as this was roughly the way he’d heard the story in Western Civ himself.

  “Okay. Fast forward to the late eighteen-hundreds and early nineteen-hundreds. A bunch of upper class progressives want to bring socialism to England, but they don’t want a revolution. They want to bring it about gradually. So they call themselves Fabian socialists.”

  “After Fabius the Delayer, who saved Rome from Hannibal,” Rep said.

  “Right. Now cut to 1980. Mitterand gets elected president of France on a socialist ticket. He installs a real blood-and-guts socialist as prime minister. Nationalizations. Confiscatory tax on wealth. But the economy tanks overnight. He’s going too fast. He needs a gradualist.”

  “So he cans the true believer and looks for another prime minister.”

  “Exactly. And out of the entire world of left-wing French politics, out of all those activists and intellectuals and cadres, who does he come up with to bring socialism slowly instead of fast? Laurent Fabius. It was just so perfect.”

  Uh-HUH, Rep thought as he grinned, pleasantly caught up in Peter’s evangelistic fervor.

  “That’s more than magic,” Peter said dreamily. “That’s divine. Words are the sound of God laughing.”

  They’re also temporal, Rep thought, and now and then you have to deal with the money-changers in the temple. Hoping he didn’t sound too crass after Peter’s ecstatic outburst, he ventured a question about John Paul Lawrence.

  “Is the owner of Jackrabbit Press a true believer like you, or does he just play with words for the money?”

  “He’s made a lot more money than I’ll ever have, even with thirty-thousand a year from dad’s trust fund, so he must know how to read a balance sheet,” Peter said. “But words aren’t just a commodity for him. He got the ball rolling on private money for the library expansion.”