She extended her right hand across the table to me and said, “Hi Davy. It’s nice to meet you.” As she leaned across the table, the small cross dangled from her neck, suspended between us, and I fought off the urge to look down her blouse. It wasn’t that hard to do because she had these incredible brown eyes, so brown that the pupils and the irises seemed to be all one rich shade of dark chocolate.
But as I shook her hand, I couldn’t help thinking about what she looked like in a swimsuit. And of course, I wondered what she looked like without the swimsuit. I don’t know if there has ever been an empirical study of the phenomenon, but I have noticed that you can go to a strip club where a woman is only wearing a G-string, and the first thing that pops into your mind is “I wonder what she looks like without that three-inch patch of cloth?”
After a drink, we stood and went into the main dining room. Sullivan and I followed the women. He pulled a chair out for each of them as they sat at the white, cloth-covered table. After Beth sat down, Sullivan leaned over to me and whispered, “Like I always say, she’s sitting on the world we all want to conquer.” He may not have been a theoretical physicist, but Sullivan understood enough of quantum physics to know that string theory in general, and G-string theory in particular, is an attempt to unify and explain through a single model the theories of all fundamental interactions of nature.
A week later, the four of us were in Peters & Sullivan’s corporate jet flying to eastern Kentucky to meet our new clients. Riza and Sullivan sat across from each other, and I sat across from Beth in the plush leather passenger area. To the rear of the plane was a small bench seat with a liquor cabinet and ice compartment below the seat. As we took off, Sullivan had passed out a case summary that the referral lawyers had prepared, as well as bottled Coronas with lime wedges for each of us. It would still be cold in eastern Kentucky, so we all had worn jeans, sweaters, and coats. The coats were stacked in the luggage area in the back of the plane. The hum of the plane, and the ice-cold Coronas, had caused the others to drift off to sleep, including Beth with her closed laptop still resting on her knees.
Beth was probably better looking dressed in just a sweater and jeans than she had been in either a swimsuit or a fashionable business suit. She wore her auburn hair a little longer than that of most female lawyers. Her sweater, while not revealing, outlined her shape nicely. The small diamond cross on a simple gold chain that hung below her neckline was the only accessory that she wore, other than wedding and engagement rings. I had noticed the cross before, and for some reason, I got the impression that it was an item she never took off. The only luggage she had brought was a well-traveled Louis Vuitton duffle and a matching case for her laptop. She had not said much to me during the week and hadn’t said much more than hello as we boarded the plane. However, her incredible figure, large brown eyes, and full lips had been the subject of several conversations among the associates that week.
She had certainly gotten our attention. I assumed that the clients we were going to meet at the conference room at the Jennie C. Wiley State Park outside of Salyersville, Kentucky, would be equally impressed.
The park was a series of steep, wooded hillsides, some still covered with patches of snow and ice and which encircled a beautiful, steelgrey lake. It had been dark when we arrived at the facility, and I had not been able to tell much about the place. Sullivan had sent Riza into the lobby to check us in. He always did that. I guess she had instructions about how to do it. Sullivan and I each had our own cabins, and Riza and Beth shared a unit that had separate rooms with a common den area between them. I had gotten up early, showered and dressed, and walked down to the restaurant connected to the lobby for breakfast by myself.
The breakfast included a “country” ham that was shockingly salty but delicious. I stared out the window, thinking about what a pristine setting the park was. Native stone, a dark grey granite, had been used to construct the little conference center, and we appeared to be the only people that had stayed in the dozen or so cabins that night. The morning sky was cloudy and cold, and the grey lake mirrored the clouds.
“Health food nut, I see,” Beth commented when she walked over to my table and eyed my plate of ham, eggs, biscuits, and red-eye gravy. She put down her Louis Vuitton duffel and laptop case and sat down across from me. It was one of the first things she had said to me directly.
“You’re up early. Couldn’t you sleep?” I asked.
“Sure,” she said, and asked the waitress for coffee, black. “Were you worried that my suitemate might have kept me up all night?” She smiled.
“No,” I said.
“It was as if my suitemate wasn’t even there.” Her brown eyes flashed as they caught mine. Beth cocked her head to one side and raised her eyebrows as if to ask me a question. She looked down and grinned as she turned her gaze toward the window. I wondered to myself how many thousands of dollars had been spent by the firm so that Riza would officially have a room before spending the night in Sullivan’s room, but I didn’t say anything. They were an item and everyone knew it, but it didn’t do anybody any good to talk about it. I wondered how Sullivan managed to lead what amounted to two lives—one at home, and one at work—but he seemed to thrive on the chaos. At times, it seemed that when confronted with the option of orderly routine or confrontation, he would deliberately choose the course that was certain to create havoc. Maybe he was just a thrill junkie, “jonesing” for some new level of excitement.
I started to change the subject. I should have. But, for some reason, I felt compelled to give Beth a word of caution. “Be careful,” I said, “Sullivan hates gossip. And, remember, whatever you say to Riza goes straight to Sullivan.” Unwittingly, I had confirmed Beth’s suspicions. Now, she wouldn’t let the topic drop.
“Looks like a pretty sweet deal. Fly around the country in the boss’s private plane, drinking Sea Breezes and Coronas with fresh limes,” Beth said.
“Are we talking about Riza now, or me?” I asked.
Beth laughed, and said, “Well, I assume that everyone on the team has a different job description. I presume that you stayed in your room all night.”
I nodded and smiled back at her. I thought to myself that Riza and my job duties weren’t all that different. But I didn’t say anything about that, and I tried to switch the discussion to the morning’s activities. We were meeting our clients at the conference center. The referral lawyers would introduce Sullivan, and he would speak about how he saw the case developing from this point. He would have to talk about the amount of work that needed to be done without offending the referral lawyers. He would introduce Riza, Beth, and me, and the four of us would spend the morning helping folks fill out biographical data questionnaires for input into Beth’s laptop.
Frankly, it was difficult to believe that the case had gone on this long without that type of work already having been done. But, it wasn’t. The case was a mess. It was hard to understand how more than a million dollars could have been spent on the case up to that point, but I guess large sums had been spent on experts and environmental testing. It looked to me like we would need more help. I guess Beth had the same thought, because, as I signed the breakfast check to my room, she asked, “So, Davy, how long before you get your own paralegal?”
“Eileen is a damn good secretary,” I said.
“Yeah, I like how she answers your phone, ‘Whips, trips, and busted lips.’ But she’s at the office. What good is her being there going to do us here?” she asked, still smiling.
About halfway through the client work-up, Sullivan and Riza disappeared. He called me from the car and explained that he and Riza were going to take the plane over to Lexington to meet with our new environmental lawyer on the case. Sullivan was going to see what he could do about arranging a press conference to announce his participation in the case. He told me to finish up and have everything packed up by that evening so they could fly back and pick us up for the flight home.
I looked around. Beth and I were
seated at a table surrounded by about fifty or sixty people holding stapled forms and pencils. All of the people, young and old, looked grey and tired. They weren’t just tired because of the tedium of the morning’s activities; there was an air of defeated exhaustion about them. They milled about. They talked to each other very little. Many smoked.
I was impressed by how Beth would take a form from someone in what used to be a line in front of our table and comment on the ambiguity of the form to cover up for the client’s lack of proficiency in reading and writing.
To a person, they were likable. In terms of material wealth, they had nothing. Some didn’t have running water in their homes. Perhaps most surprising, none of them expected to recover a penny from this lawsuit. It crossed my mind that perhaps the referral lawyers had “promoted” this case without much input from the clients; but the more I talked to the clients, I came to understand that was not the situation. Instead, they lacked avarice.
I had not met people like this before, even growing up in Abilene. About the only thing that seemed to ignite a competitive spark was to discuss University of Kentucky basketball. I thought this a bit ironic, since most of the clients had not finished high school, much less college; and the last time I checked, there was only one player out of twelve on the Kentucky squad that was from Kentucky. Who is to say how or why we develop the allegiances that we do?
Most of the clients wore work clothes. There were some overalls, but mostly blue jeans with Carhartt or Dickies jackets. The only spot of color in the room was Woodrow Carter. I guess because his name had appeared first on the petition, he felt compelled to dress up. He had worn a tan, corduroy sport coat with a white carnation boutonnière. As the last of the group was leaving, I asked Mr. Carter if he would mind running Beth and me out to the airport.
Beth overheard me, and asked, “Are we going home tonight?” She reached down into her laptop bag, and began fishing for something. “I guess I better call my husband and tell him to expect me.” She pulled out a cell phone.
Before she could dial, I said, in a tone quiet enough that Mr. Carter couldn’t hear us, “I’d hold off on that until we talk to Sullivan. There’s always a strong headwind going back to Houston from the southeast. He didn’t say anything about it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we stopped over someplace.”
“Someplace, like where?” she asked.
“My first guess would be New Orleans,” I said.
She looked to see that Mr. Carter couldn’t hear us talking, and asked me with her brown eyes flashing again, “Is ‘headwind’ a euphemism for blow job?”
I laughed out loud, and Mr. Carter heard me and came over. I told him that we were ready to go, and he went to pull his pickup around to the front of the building while we finished packing up. After he had walked off, I said to Beth, “You’ve been around Sullivan now. Does he impress you as a man that would rather spend the night at the Jennie C. Wiley State Park or the Windsor Court?”
“Is home not an option?” she asked.
It’s true that I had left out that option. But I had traveled enough with Mr. Sullivan to know that we were going wherever Mr. Sullivan wanted to go. He used a corporate jet like most people used a car. I knew that I intended to hold off on calling Michelle until we stopped some place for fuel, and I had a better idea of where we were going. At least, that was my intention.
Beth didn’t flinch when I threw her duffel and my bag into the back of Woodrow Carter’s ancient, green Ford Ranger pickup. She crawled onto the bench seat between us; there was no backseat. She put her hand on Mr. Carter’s knee as he shifted the standard transmission into first, and told him, “Thank you for driving us to the airport.” Color flushed into his cheeks. He flicked the cigarette he was smoking through the crack in his side window, and it fell harmlessly onto the gravel path as we eased around the lake to the main road.
On our ride to the airport, Mr. Carter explained that Jennie C. Wiley was the wife of a white settler in the late 1700s. She was captured by Indians. Her five children were murdered, and after months of captivity, she escaped and was reunited with her husband. They continued to live in what is now Johnson County, and eventually had five more children. Thousands of their descendants still live in the area. Some were plaintiffs in our case.
We turned off the main road and began driving up an unkempt pavement that wound up one of the steep, rocky little mountains that shadowed the main road. But when we got to the top of the hill, there was no top. Mr. Carter explained how the coal companies had removed the top of the mountain and deposited the removed earth in the valley below. What was left was a barren plateau that sat like a man-made mesa among the craggy hills and mountains that surrounded it on all sides. I wondered to myself why the coal companies picked this particular geographic formation among all of the others for demolition. Was it the only one that held minerals in sufficient commercial quantities to warrant destruction? Was it just a matter of time until the companies leveled the other mountains? And why did the scraping away of the mountaintop stop at this height? Would all the local mountaintops eventually even out all of the valleys until eastern Kentucky looked like wind swept Highway 84 between Roscoe and Lubbock? Dad used to tell me that I should write a novel about my time at Texas Tech and call it “Wuthering Without Heights.”
The flattened hill was now suitable for a short, asphalt-paved landing strip in front of a small, private fixed-base operation (FBO) and a monolithic federal prison facility that sat just beyond the end of the runway. A couple of fixed-gear planes were parked outside of a corrugated tin hangar beside the cinder block FBO building. It would probably require a certain level of skill to land the Peters & Sullivan jet between the mountaintops on such a short runway without running into the prison.
Barely visible, a couple of hundred yards away, a line of grey turkeys walked down the hillside away from the prison. An old tom hung back to make sure his hens had safe passage. “There go the turkeys,” I said, almost as if I were talking to my dad while we were hunting from a jeep in West Texas.
“Yeah,” Mr. Carter said, squinting. He stopped the pickup and watched as the flock disappeared into the grayness of the hillside. I don’t think he had noticed them until I pointed them out. “The spring season’s not too far off,” he said to me. I would imagine that game seasons were about as relevant to him as they were to my grandfather. If you had your shotgun or rifle in the pickup, and you got a chance to put food on the table, you took it. I didn’t say anything to him about that, but I think he sensed what I was thinking. Without saying anything to me, he smiled at me. I told him about the time I saw my dad shoot a running turkey at about that distance with a .30-30 from the driver’s seat of a Jeep. I was just a kid, but I can remember that shot to this day. I saw the turkey tumble after the shot. I expected that the turkey would be demolished by the bullet, but when we drove over to it, only its head was missing. “Probably luck,” I said, “but it was a helluva shot.”
Mr. Carter started the pickup and eased back onto the road. “I used to be a fair shot myself,” he said. He dropped us off in front of the FBO, and we waved as he drove off. During the course of the day, and principally in the last half hour, I found myself becoming attached to the clients. I wanted to win. I wanted them to win. I felt like they needed me. I sensed that the case couldn’t be won, but I was already telling myself that if anybody could win this case, it was Sullivan and me. I’d figure out something. As Sullivan’s plane dipped down out of the clouds that seemed to rest like a roof on the mountaintop piers that surrounded us, I wondered if I was already violating his first rule.
The four of us landed in New Orleans about six o’clock that evening. Riza and Tim were pretty looped by the time they picked us up. It turns out that they had held a press conference and then met the Lexington lawyer at the Wild Turkey distillery outside of Lexington. There was a hospitality room, and they had purchased several bottles of Rare Breed for the ride home. I felt compelled to try and catch up, and I fo
rgot to call Michelle when we stopped to refuel in Memphis. I don’t know if Beth remembered to call her husband, or not. I never heard exactly what was said in the press conference, but apparently it went well.
A limousine picked us up in New Orleans. It dropped Sullivan, Beth, and me at the Old Absinthe House at the corner of Bourbon Street and Bienville and took Riza over to the Windsor Court to check in and make sure that our bags went to the correct rooms. The Old Absinthe House has a wormy oak, square bar that seems to be held up by a few slumping patrons on barstools positioned strategically around the square. The place smells like stale beer and vomit, but Sullivan always stops there first when he gets to town. After a few drinks you forget about the smell. We had each finished a drink, Sullivan having ordered something called a “Sazerac” with Michter’s rye, when Riza came back with the room keys. Sullivan began a long discussion about where we ought to eat that evening. He suggested an item at each place to consider in our vote: the dessert soufflé at Commander’s Palace, the gumbo at Mr. B’s, and the fresh snapper at Galatoire’s.
Experience told me that he would still be sitting in the Old Absinthe House an hour later discussing various restaurants—and I knew that if I was going to break through the bourbon-induced fog that had settled over me, I needed to eat right away. I told Sullivan that I was beat and that I was just going to walk to the hotel and call it a night.
“Come on,” he said, “let’s have one more, and then make them throw us out of here and we’ll go get something to eat. We’ve got a driver; where do y’all want to go? Don’t wimp out on us now, Davy. We’re just getting started. None of y’all have cigarettes, do you? Something about this place makes me want to have just one cigarette.”
When Sullivan went around the bar to try to buy a single cigarette from the bartender, I took my cue to slip out unnoticed. I knew that Sullivan would see my leaving as a flaw in my character, but some sense of self-preservation took over, and I had to get out of there. I stepped out of the bar on the Bienville side and saw the parked limo. I walked over and asked the limo driver directions to the Acme Oyster House. I had been to New Orleans several times with Sullivan, but it couldn’t hurt to double-check. As I walked back to Bourbon Street, I sensed that the car pulled away from the curb to follow me, but he couldn’t turn left on Bourbon Street. Still, as I went into the Acme on Iberville, I thought I saw him coming behind me, and I figured he had made the block at Dauphine. I thought to myself that the best plan for the evening was to get a dozen raw and maybe some bread pudding with some coffee before attempting to call home. I didn’t expect that Michelle was going to be too happy to hear from me.
A Minor Fall Page 4