Religious Conviction g-3

by Grif Stockley

  I return the slight pressure, realizing Bracken has done almost nothing in the case. You get what you pay for, I think, but I know this doesn’t apply here. What ever his faults as a human being, Bracken has too much pride to lie down on a case if it is within his power to avoid it. The other side of the coin is that he has too much pride to say he is just too sick to do it right.

  “You think she did it?” I ask, suspecting Bracken, like my self, never asks that question of his clients. Unless you’re arguing self-defense, knowing the answer to that question may ethically keep you from putting your client on the witness stand.

  “Probably,” Bracken says, grabbing his briefcase and leading me out the door.

  “For all I can tell, she could have been thinking about killing him every day for the last six months. We’re lucky Jill isn’t going for the death penalty.”

  A smart move on the part of Jill Marymount, Prosecuting Attorney of Blackwell County, I think as I walk beside Bracken down the hall to our reception area.

  There will be some not-so-subtle pressure on the jury, given Christian Life’s influence in Blackwell County No sense in adding to it. Life in prison for that beautiful body would be punishment enough, whatever her motive.

  After Bracken is safely on the elevator, Julia looks down at her watch and sniffs, “Damn, I thought he was asking you to marry him.”

  I hand her the cash to deposit for me, realizing now that Bracken didn’t even ask for a receipt. I’ll have Julia send him one.

  “He was,” I say and explain.

  Julia looks respectful for the first time in a month.

  “Surely he can afford a tailor.”

  I let that one pass and walk back to my office to study the file. I feel uneasy, wondering what I am getting myself into. I have the same mixture of dread and awe for Bracken that is supposed to be reserved for God. Where is the dread coming from? I can’t quite pin it down, but more than likely it is that I won’t come close to measuring up to him in a direct comparison.

  This is my chance to prove how good I am in the sight of the master, and I already feel my stomach begin to churn. Fear. Attorneys don’t talk about it publicly, but the anxiety is so tangible it becomes like a separate organ in the body once you enter the courtroom in a big case, especially if you aren’t as prepared as you should be. No profession except acting and politics risks greater public humiliation, a professor told my fresh man torts class. That’s why he taught, he cracked. As he pointed out, the public isn’t allowed in the operating room with a surgeon during a triple bypass. Your mistakes in public can send men and women to their deaths just as easily.

  As I squint at Bracken’s terrible handwriting, I realize I am imagining myself giving the closing argument in the case and Bracken nodding with approval. How ridiculous Bracken isn’t that great. But he is. Right at the top of the heap, and there would be nothing more satisfying than to read in the pages of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette the day after Leigh Wallace’s acquittal a quote by Bracken that I was going to be better than he was. What an ego I have! The truth is, though, that I hope he is too sick to do anything but watch the entire trial.

  “It’s about time you got a decent-looking male client,” Julia says so loudly the man sitting in the waiting room can’t help but overhear.

  “Mr. Blessing,” I say, extending my hand, “would you like to come on back to my office?”

  Richard Blessing stands and meets me at eye level with a firm handshake. Impeccably groomed in a slate green sports coat that I’ve seen at Dillard’s, he smiles, showing a row of strong, gleaming white teeth that make my dingy molars seem as if they came from a pawnshop.

  “I hope you can help me,” his voice betraying an anxiousness that is at variance with his selfconfident appearance.

  “I’ll do what I can,” I say, trying to get my mind off the file Chet Bracken handed me an hour ago. Over the phone yesterday Blessing had mentioned he had a products liability case he wanted to discuss. For about a year after I left the public defender’s office I was an associate at Mays amp; Burton, a firm that specializes in personal injury cases. Before being fired with another associate during an economic downturn (we were losing cases so regularly, somebody had to walk the plank, and it obviously wasn’t going to be one of the partners), I had learned enough about ambulance chasing to know I wasn’t any good at it.

  The dream of every lawyer in private practice is that a client will crawl in with a ten-million-dollar injury caused by the alcoholic president of a solvent insurance company. The problem with Mr. Blessing is that he looks as if he could run a marathon without breaking into a sweat. He has a strong yet sensitive face, with so much hair on his head he is probably running a fever.

  Yet every strand is in place. I resist the temptation to pat the ever-widening bald spot that sits on the back of my head like a dust bowl from the 1930s. Some guys have all the luck.

  I lead him into my office and tell him to take a seat.

  To get the ball rolling, I ask him what he does for a living and he explains he is a men’s clothing salesman for Bando’s downtown.

  “Each guy’s got to turn a minimum of a hundred fifty thousand a year, or we’re a number on last year’s spreadsheet,” he confides.

  “You wouldn’t believe the pressure to sell neckties to people who have a couple of dozen hanging in their closet already. The markup is terrific. We sell three-hundred-dollar suits that cost us maybe sixty bucks. If we can’t move ‘em, we’ll knock off a hundred and then another hundred and still make money. If it’s a good location, a store can clean up.”

  I notice a thread unraveling on the right arm of the sleeve of the russet blazer I got on sale this past spring at Bando’s. Damn. I thought I was stealing it, and they probably still made fifty bucks. If this guy was injured, it wasn’t his mouth. He’s a talker.

  “You said that you thought you had a products liability case,” I remind him, thinking he should have been a lawyer. He looks much slicker than the attorneys on our floor, but that isn’t difficult to do, as Julia reminds us on a weekly basis.

  “I think I do,” Blessing says, frowning.

  “In my business image is everything. You’ve got to look sharp if you want to sell in the most expensive stores where they can really jack up the profit margin. If the customer is going to lay out good money for a pair of pants and a matching jacket, you can imagine he doesn’t want to give his money to a guy who looks like a bum off the street.”

  I put my left arm over the offending thread.

  “Sure,” I say. I went in Bando’s once and was so horrified by the price of just the ties I had heartburn for a week.

  “It’d be like going to Alouette’s and being served by a woman in curlers with grease stains down the front of her dress.”

  Nodding to signify that we’re on the same wave length, Blessing tugs at his lapels.

  “If the store is going to make seven hundred dollars off a suit,” he says agreeably, “the customer should get something. It’s only right.”

  Hell, yes, I think. At the very least he should be congratulated on his choice of store. Maybe even a lint brush thrown in for free. I think I’ll wait awhile before I go shopping again. What is this guy’s problem? Did his tape measure break when he was measuring an inseam, or what? Ah, capitalism. No wonder the Commies have such cold feet.

  “I’m not exactly sure how all this ties in,” I say, wondering if I’m missing something.

  Any injury must be purely internal. With blue eyes the color of the inside of a flame and a diamond-hard chin, the guy could be a male model.

  “Here’s the deal,” he says, his eyes suddenly out of focus.

  “My boss was taking me to a late lunch because of the great month I’d had in January, which is usually one of the toughest in the business, and he wants to try this new Indian place a couple blocks from the store. In February it’s like being in a wind tunnel down there, and all of a sudden in front of my boss and about twenty other peopl
e my rug blows off into the gutter. I had to chase the damn thing. The way the wind was blowing, my boss said it looked like a little animal running down the street!” He jerks off his toupee and reveals a scalp as wide and barren as Death Valley.

  Though I am trying desperately, there is no way to keep a straight face. I pretend I have to sneeze and reach for a tissue from the box on my desk to cover my face. I begin to laugh into it and nearly suck it down my throat as I try to draw a breath.

  “It’s not funny, damn it!” Blessing cries, throwing the hairpiece on the corner of my desk where it catches on a two-hole punch I use to make files. The toupee, a rich brown color, looks like some eyeless mutant creature dreamed up by a special effects person for a science fiction movie. I wait for it to begin to move toward me.

  “Not funny at all,” I get out without choking.

  “It must have been terrible.”

  Blessing grabs his hairpiece and crams it back on his head. Amazingly, it fits like a jigsaw puzzle piece onto his own hair, which rims his head like a bad paint job.

  “All of February my sales were down to nothing. I’ve lost all my confidence. Every time someone comes into the store I imagine this thing,” he says, pointing to his head, “slipping down over one eye. After this happened, even the janitors were laughing at me.”

  I lean back against the wall and feel the bare skin of my own bald spot. The poor guy can’t laugh at himself.

  If this had happened to me, I would have spent the rest of my life telling this story. Instead, Blessing wants to sue.

  “Actually,” I say, “it looks incredible. You just popped it into place without a mirror and you can’t even tell you have it on.”

  Blessing winces as he pats his head selfconsciously.

  “It ought to,” he complains, “it cost fifteen hundred dollars.”

  Hell’s bells. No wonder he’s pissed. For that kind of money you’d think they could have thrown in a bottle of Super Glue.

  “Where did you buy it?” I ask, remembering there is a wig shop downtown that caters, judging by its windows to African-Americans. I doubt if Mr. Blessing bought it there.

  “At a place in Memphis called Wiggy’s,” he says, handing me a wad of papers.

  “There was an ad in the Sunday Commercial Appeal which guaranteed you couldn’t tell the difference.”

  I look through the documents, searching for a con tract. All I find are pages of testimonials from satisfied customers. There are pictures of wigs, and, curious, I look for one that covers up a bald spot. Wiggy’s! I don’t blame him for going out of town. It will be hard to keep my mouth shut. Since we are basically salesmen our selves, lawyers love a good story.

  “Did you sign any thing?” I ask.

  “Something, I think,” Blessing says, reaching for the papers on the desk between us.

  “The salesman who sold me mine said his had never slipped even a fraction of an inch in the two years he had worn it.”

  I study Blessing’s hair, marveling at the transformation. He must have felt as if someone had somehow suddenly pulled his pants down. I tell myself I’d never wear a toupee, but if I looked like this guy, I’d think about it, especially if I were in his business. He’s right.

  Appearance is important. You don’t go into a clothing store to discuss the meaning of life.

  “Is there a booklet on how to care for it or some kind of warranty?” For that kind of money, you surely get more than testimonials.

  “I know I got some other stuff,” Blessing says, riffling futilely through the sheaf of advertisements, “but I can’t find it.”

  Clients never bring in the right papers.

  “I want you to look some more at home,” I urge him.

  “They could be important.”

  He assures me that he will, and after I let him wring his hands for a few more minutes, I escort him to the elevators I’m not ready to sign up to argue this case at the U.S. Supreme Court, but I’ll take a look at his papers I’ve had worse cases. I might even get a free wig out of it.

  2

  After work I swing by Rainey’s house to eat dinner and get the scoop on Shane Norman and his Christian Life church. Until this past winter, my girlfriend’s religious beliefs were as indecipherable as my own, but after having had a benign lump in her breast removed, Rainey, to my surprise, and not a little to my dismay, has gotten that old-time religion. As I pull up in front of her modest frame house, I try to rein in my feelings on this subject, as it is becoming a sore point between us.

  A lukewarm Episcopalian (God only knows what they believe) until her conversion, Rainey now talks about “Biblical inerrancy If she weren’t serious, I’d be sorely tempted to laugh at her.

  Just a few years back we had our own Scopes mon key trial in Arkansas, a highly publicized battle in federal court over whether public school teachers should be required to teach “creation science,” thanks to a bill pushed through the Arkansas Legislature by the fundamentalists. Gleefully, the media, smelling a circus, sent reporters from all over to yuck it up at our expense as the ACLU brought in Stephen Jay Gould, the heavy duty Harvard rock sniffer, to testify about the probable age of the earth. Mercifully, the federal judge, a Methodist ruled there was a lot more theory than science put on by the attorney general, who was obligated to defend the statute with his own out-of-state scientists. Our AG, to his everlasting credit, had the good sense and political courage not to appeal.

  When I remind Rainey of the trial, she gets an irritated look on her pretty, pixieish face and says, as usual these days, that I’m missing the point. She argues my worldview (so-called “logic” supported by scientists who are forever changing their theories) is culturally determined and can no more be “proved” than what’s in the Bible.

  Perhaps to serve as a buffer between us during this pricklish period, Rainey has invited my daughter, Sarah, to dinner with us and has already picked her up and brought her to her house. The less time Rainey and I spend alone these days the better we seem to get along.

  There was a time when it seemed we were on the verge of getting married, but at crucial moments one of us, as Paul Simon says, slips out the back. Jack.

  Sarah, a high school senior and a daily reminder of her mother, who was a devout Catholic, comes to the door and whispers, her lovely face woeful, “We’re having soup, salad, and corn bread Virginal-looking (I can only hope on that score) in white sweats, she lets me give her a brief hug. Though we do not always under stand each other these days, we remain affectionate, usually forgiving each other our respective generational baggage.

  “Good,” I say, meaning it. Rainey’s soups are a meal in themselves. I follow my daughter through the living room and glance at Rainey’s numerous bookshelves, wondering if I will begin seeing religious works in this eclectic stew of a library. My girlfriend is a reader, and last summer was on a kick when she zipped through the novels of a woman named Jane Smiley and pronounced her the greatest living American novelist. Other seasons she gobbles serious nonfiction works like chocolate-chip cookies. Thick tomes on Freud, Arabs and Jews, and racial discrimination are regular additions to the McCorkle collection. How an intelligent, well-informed woman can regress to such a narrow view of life’s meaning is beyond me. Does a brush with death numb a person’s mind to such an extent that she can swallow a book whole and not taste the indigestible parts? It seems so transparently childish I am amazed that Rainey can’t see what she is doing.

  I catch a whiff of curry as I enter the kitchen behind Sarah. Rainey, in Lee jeans and a man’s workshirt, is peering into her refrigerator, which is covered with notices of do-gooder happenings: tickets for a silent auction for the Battered Women’s Shelter, a note asking for volunteers to work in the food tent for an Arkansas Advocates for Children amp; Families benefit, a reminder of the next meeting of an AIDS care team. Rainey, a social worker at the Arkansas State Hospital, apparently can’t get enough of human suffering. Maybe this new religious venture is a natural step, but befo
re she gets on the boat and heads for Calcutta to work with lepers fulltime, I’d like to make love to her just once. Charity begins at home, I have reminded her.

  At various times in our tortured two-year relationship we have acted like passionate pre-sexual-revolution teenagers who stopped at necking on her couch, or best friends who have taken care of each other in our darkest moments, but never lovers. Watching her hips tug against soft denim as she reaches down for a bottle of salad dressing, I am reminded again how sexy this woman still is at the age of forty-two. Tendrils of frizzy red hair hang past her elfin ears and frame her full mouth, which today is painted pink, like the azaleas soon to bloom in her front yard. When her eyes, this moment the color of blue-corn tortillas, flash with anger or delight, my heart pumps a little harder.

  “Smells great,” I say, edging over to the stove for a look.

  “Sarah cooked it,” Rainey says, grinning, as she turns around to face me. Her smile tells me that she adores my daughter; no surer way to a father’s heart. She has been good for Sarah. Having raised a daughter of her own, she is content to enjoy mine, and Sarah’s selfconfidence has blossomed with Rainey’s praise and encouragement Over the last two years their friendship has grown as steadily as Rainey’s favorite oak, which I can see budding outside the kitchen window. Rainey and I would surely be married by now if our own growth were as inevitable. If I dropped dead, I’d want Rainey to take Sarah. I have a sister, but we aren’t particularly close.

  We all laugh at this obvious lie. Nothing Sarah and I cook is more exotic than hamburger meat drowned in AI. sauce.

  “I made the salad,” Sarah says with a grin, taking Rainey’s teasing better than she would if it were coming from me.

  “Dad,” she adds solemnly, looking at my striped tie, “you dress like you’re the manager at McDonald’s.”

  I look down at my shirt. It is a decent enough Arrow.

  Orange stripes go with the tie. My pants, from Target, are gray.