Above the Law

by J. F. Freedman

  Buck and I stood at the fence and fed the apple to the horses, an old mare and an old gelding, the one Riva rides. Maude and Big Red, two good horse names. Buck giggled as they slobbered over his tiny hand, their big horse lips sucking up the fruit.

  “Pretty soon you’ll be riding, Buck, like Mommy,” I told him, hoisting him closer to the horse’s face.

  He smiled and nodded at that. With a name like Buck, you ought to be able to ride a horse, not that he knows that yet.

  All those things he’s going to be learning to do over the years. I’ll be there, cheering him on, watching, helping, being a part of it. I’m old for a new dad, it means more when you’ve been waiting this long. I want to make sure I’m always there for him. One guaranteed way to do that is to keep my cock and the rest of myself out of single ladies’ hot tubs. And everything else of theirs as well.

  Dinner was casual and unstressful, given the circumstances. Nora left shortly after, citing fatigue. After putting our son to bed, Riva and I lounged around in the living room. It was great, having them there, although the digs weren’t up to our usual. No porch to sit on at night, no view of the ocean. But we were together, that was the important thing.

  “She seems like a nice lady,” Riva commented. “Not as uptight as I’d imagined.”

  “She’s in control of herself,” I said. “Most of the time. She has to be, she’s highly visible; in her job being in control or looking like you are is half the battle.”

  “It must be frustrating for her, having to stand outside and look in the window in her own jurisdiction,” Riva said. “Can’t you confide in her more?”

  “Did she say something to you about that?” I asked, irritated.

  “Not in so many words. But I could tell. You wouldn’t like it, if you were in her position.”

  “I wouldn’t let myself be.”

  “She didn’t have a choice, Luke.”

  “You always have a choice.” I didn’t want to get into this with her; and I didn’t like Nora trying to use Riva to get to me.

  “I’m doing the best I can for the case. It isn’t about personalities. She has to remember that. We all do.”

  “I’m sure you’re right.” Riva got up. “I’m tired. Let’s go to bed. That’s why we came up here, isn’t it?”

  “One of the main reasons.”

  As we were falling asleep, she said one last thing about Nora.

  “She’s lonely. It’s so apparent, the way she was with Bucky. I don’t even know the woman and my heart went out to her, all the heartbreak she’s had. She needs a man in her life. You ought to help her out.”

  The hairs stood up on the back of my neck. “Like how?”

  “Find somebody for her. We could have her down to S.B. for a weekend. You must know some nice eligible men, don’t you?”

  “I’ll think on it,” I said, feeling my body quivering. “When this is done. Can we not talk about Nora anymore tonight? I’m with you. I don’t want anyone else in our space.”

  “No one is.”

  She fell asleep on her side. No one is, I thought, except Nora’s shadow.

  “I’ve got good news and bad news,” Sylvan Furness said. “Which do you want to hear first?”

  “The good news, I guess,” Louisa Bearpaw answered with unease. Was this going to be yet another screwing-over by the BIA?

  “The Justice Department has agreed to turn jurisdiction of that compound over to Interior, and Interior is witling to sell it to you.”

  She smiled—that was a surprise. “Great. How much?”

  He hesitated, then timidly told her, “Two million.”

  She stared at him, her jaw dropping. “Are you shitting me?”

  He shook his head. “No. That’s what they want.”

  “Jesus Christ, Sylvan, that’s outrageous. It isn’t worth half that.”

  “We have all the construction bills. It cost almost that much to build.”

  “It didn’t cost the government one thin dime,” she replied hotly. “No one ever pays full price for a government seizure. You’ll be lucky to get fifty cents on the dollar.”

  “Not this time.” He shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “I told them it was going to be too much money, but they don’t care.”

  “They’d rather just sit on it.”

  He nodded. “For the time being.”

  “Jesus, what morons.” She sipped her take-out coffee, which tasted like metal in her mouth. “Okay, so that’s the good news. Some good news. What’s the bad news? You’re going to nuke the reservation?”

  “The department’s turning down your loan request.”

  Louisa Bearpaw shrugged her shoulders. “Why not?” It was a rhetorical question. “When have they ever done anything for us?”

  “It’s because you want to use the property for gambling,” he explained nervously. “They don’t want to be in the gaming business.”

  “They wouldn’t be, Sylvan, we would, but obviously the great-white-father attitude is still alive after all.”

  “Come on, Louisa, you know it’s not like that.”

  “No, I don’t,” she said, “but I don’t care. I can’t worry about what I can’t do anything about. Changing two hundred years of screwing the Indian is something I can’t do anything about, so I’m not going to try.”

  He threw up his hands. “Sorry.”

  “No big deal. We expected it.”

  Louisa was again in Furness’s office in Sacramento. Just her this time. The others who had come down with her from the reservation, Mary Redfeather and one of the men who had been at the previous meeting were nervously waiting for her over coffee in an IHOP down the street. She’d wanted this to be a one-on-one meeting, her and the BIA man. She figured she could work him better if it was just the two of them alone.

  “I’m sorry you drove all the way down here to hear that,” he said apologetically. “I could have told you over the phone. I told you that.”

  She shook her head. “I know. That’s not why we came.”

  He was perplexed. “Why did you?”

  “Remember how I told you if you couldn’t get us the loan, we’d come up with the money some other way?”

  “Yes,” he said slowly.

  “Well, we’ve got it,” she said, flashing him a smile. “We want to get started negotiating right away.”

  “Oh.” He was taken aback; he hadn’t expected this. “Where’d you get it?”

  “What does the BIA care, as long as it’s legitimate?”

  He was on the defensive, she had him on the run. “It doesn’t…I guess.”

  “Good.” She leaned forward. “Let’s get down to business. Are you authorized to negotiate for the department? Can you make a deal on your own?”

  He pursed his lips. “I can negotiate…”

  She bored in on him. “Can you say yes or no?”

  He hated feeling weak in front of this woman. “No,” he admitted. “I have to get department approval on any deal we’d make.”

  She nodded. “Okay. Now I know the lay of the land.” She reached into her purse and took out a pad and pencil. “Two million’s bullshit, it’s way too high, you know that and I know that and the dweebs in Washington know that. It’s no reflection on you, Sylvan,” she said, smiling at him, “I know you’re there for me, as much as you can be. And I appreciate it, believe me. I know you’ll do as right by me as you can. Won’t you?”

  He swallowed, nodded. “Yes, Louisa. I will.”

  “That’s what I want to hear. So let’s start talking turkey for real, okay?”

  “What did you offer?” a nervous Mary Redfeather asked Louisa.

  They were in the IHOP, working on their second big carafe of coffee. With the laws in California now they couldn’t smoke at the table, they had to go outside. Mary had been outside half a dozen times already this morning, waiting for Louisa to come back from the meeting.

  “Eight hundred and fifty grand.”

  “Did he take it?”
>
  “He’s getting back to me. You know how that works.” She opened three sugars into her coffee, to give it some flavor. “It’ll take months, but we’ll hear from them.”

  “Two million’s way too much,” the man, whose name was John, said with sour pessimism. “We can’t pay that.”

  “We could if we had to,” Louisa corrected him, looking over her shoulder to make sure they weren’t being eavesdropped on, “but we’re not going to have to. They’ll come around.”

  “How much do you think they’ll settle for?” Mary asked.

  Louisa sipped her coffee. Not very good. She needed to remember to make a pit stop before they started the drive home, all this bad coffee she’d been drinking.

  “About a million. Maybe a million one. They can’t do anything with it, they can’t get more than that. No other drug dealer’s going to buy it, that’s for sure. So who else would want it, except us?”

  “That’s still a lot of money,” John fretted. “We don’t have that kind of money.”

  “We’ll get it,” Louisa said confidently. She signaled for the waitress. She needed to put something solid in her stomach, to soak up the coffee bile.

  “Where?” Mary asked dubiously.

  “I’ve been talking with a group of investors,” Louisa said. “People who can see the possibilities.”

  “I didn’t know you were talking to anyone,” Mary said slowly. “How come you haven’t come to the council with it?”

  “Because I didn’t want to waste everyone else’s time,” Louisa explained impatiently. “I wanted to wait until we knew Interior would sell us the property. I’m going to come to the council, believe me.”

  “Are these investors of yours Vegas people?” John asked. “Can we trust them? They’re opposed to Indian gambling. They’d try to take it out from under us.”

  She shook her head. “No, these aren’t established gambling interests.” She turned to the waitress. “A bran muffin, please, butter on the side.” To her friends: “You going to eat anything?”

  They weren’t; they’d eaten while she was meeting with Furness.

  “Trust me,” she assured John and Mary after the waitress left to get her order. “The money’s there.” She smiled. “And this time it’s the Indian who’s going to win, instead of the white man.”

  Kate flew into O’Hare on United, picked up her rental Saturn at Avis, then headed south on I-94, which took her to I-90 east, into northern Indiana. Once she got through the snarl of Chicago and Gary, it was easy driving, mostly farmland, dotted with small towns along the way.

  By the time she reached the outskirts of South Bend, twilight was coming on, an especially brilliant meltdown of burnished oranges, silvers, vermilions, purples. Detouring by Notre Dame, she witnessed the reflection of the dying sun as it shimmered off the Golden Dome. She’d seen the famous landmark on television, watching football games, but she had never been in the heartland of the country before. She’d lived her entire life in California.

  She let her mind journey, conjuring images formed from secondhand experience, of burning leaves in the fall, golden retrievers running across soccer fields, swimming in quarries, tailgate parties at football games, snowmen in the winter.

  She found the address she was looking for without much difficulty. A substantial brick-and-wood split-level on a shady, tree-lined street. A Diamond Back mountain bike, similar to the one her younger daughter had, was lying where its owner, probably also a teenager, had dropped it on its side, midway up the flagstone walkway that bisected the lawn from the curb to the front door. A mud-splattered 4Runner was parked in the driveway in front of the open garage doors that revealed a lawn mower, shop tools, the accoutrements of the comfortable upper-middle-class suburban life.

  Home sweet home. Would it be as sweet an hour from now?

  She pressed the doorbell, shifting her soft briefcase from one shoulder to the other. Sounds of footsteps galloping down a hallway, the door flung open. A tall, gawky teenage boy loomed over her. Without a word he turned and called over his shoulder.

  “Mom, it’s for you.”

  They sat in the pine-paneled family room. From behind a door somewhere else in the house Kate heard the muffled sounds of a computer game. Her younger daughter was a computer freak, she had all the latest games, Kate knew the sound. Diane Jerome Richards, the boy’s mother, sat across from her. A tall, athletic-looking woman, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. Her red hair was short now, utilitarian in cut. They were drinking iced tea. A plate of homemade cookies sat on the coffee table between them.

  “Thank you for seeing me, Diane,” Kate said. “May I call you Diane?”

  The woman smiled. “Of course, Ms….” She scrounged in her jeans for a card.

  “Blanchard. Please, call me Kate.”

  The woman nodded, glancing at the business card she’d put in her pocket, the card that had come with the letter. “Kate.” She wasn’t ill at ease, but her expression was solemn. “Your telephone call came as a shock, I have to admit,” she said. “I’d buried that part of my life. I’d hoped it would never be resurrected.”

  “I’m sorry. But I have to do this.”

  “I understand.”

  “Have you lived here long?”

  Kate didn’t want to plunge right in to the point of her trip halfway across the country. Her desire was to help Diane Richards, the former Diane Jerome, feel comfortable with her; or at least not uptight, the normal condition people have with strangers who suddenly drop into their world and turn it upside down.

  “Ten years. My husband’s a professor at Notre Dame. Economics. We came when he was finishing up his thesis and stayed on when they offered him tenure.”

  “You have a lovely home. Do you work, also?”

  “Thank you. Yes. I teach. Fourth grade.”

  The doorbell rang again. Without moving from her chair, Diane called out, “Kenny, your pizza’s here!” She explained, “Ron, my husband, is teaching tonight. Kenny has evening spring basketball practice at the high school. I’m not going to cook just for me.”

  Kate smiled. “I have two teenagers of my own. Rusty’s Pizza’s the first number on our speed-dial.”

  The tall boy barged into the room. Diane handed him some bills from her purse. He took them and left without acknowledging Kate.

  Time to do what she had come for. Kate reached into her bag and pulled out the yearbook she’d taken out of the Stanford library. Opening it to a Post-it-marked page, she showed it to her hostess.

  “This is you?” Kate pointed to the woman’s picture from two decades past.

  Diane barely glanced at it. “Yes, it’s me.”

  Kate flipped the page. “And you know him.” Her finger hovered under the tiny photograph of Reynaldo Juarez.

  “Yes. I knew him.”

  “He was…”

  “My boyfriend.”

  “And Sterling Jerome is your brother?”

  A curt nod of the head. “One of them. By two years. He’s the closest in age to me.” She broke off her look from Kate. “That was so long ago. I used to have wishful fantasies that it didn’t happen, that it was all a dream.”

  Turning to Kate again, she said, “It did happen. I can’t will it away.” She hesitated for a moment. “Not that I want to. It’s part of me, who I am.” Her voice was suddenly sorrowful. “Who I’ve become.”

  They met the first semester of freshman year. They were in the same dorm, segregated boy-girl by floor, but the traffic flowed up and down the stairwells like water out of a faucet. They were as opposite as two eighteen-year-old kids could be, which was the initial attraction. A classic pairing: he the barrio hood with a brain, an attitude, and a reputation, driving a fancy car and spending piles of money in San Francisco on the weekends, she the protected daughter, the only girl, the baby of a hard-drinking Chicago Irish clan, her big, red-knuckled fireman father and big, hardheaded brothers full of old-fashioned Irish prejudice, ready to stomp any boy who would look sideway
s at her, especially if his skin was brown and his name was Juarez. As lazy and shiftless as niggers, her father would say, and as smelly, her mother, no stranger to bigotry herself, would add.

  This was when she was younger, going to parochial school all the way through high school, when black and Latino kids started infiltrating the Irish-Polish-Italian closed circle. She heard her parents and didn’t say otherwise, although she had secret girlfriends she knew her family would disapprove of, a black girl and one from El Salvador.

  No boyfriends, she traveled with her friends in a safe pack, all the parents and families knowing and approving of each other. She finally began dating her senior year, acceptable boys, from acceptable families. Nothing serious, no going steady, no staying out past midnight. Irish, like her family, and one Polack boy whose father was an important alderman and drank with her father and uncles. But that was where the line was drawn.

  They didn’t want her to go to Stanford, all the way out there, De Paul and Loyola were good enough for her brothers, what was wrong with those fine Catholic colleges, but the priest who was the principal of the high school, a scholarly Jesuit, convinced them it was all right. She was a smart girl, it was in her interests to broaden her education. Stanford was no hotbed of radicalism like Berkeley, up the road. And it was a great school, they should be proud that one of their children was so smart, so qualified.

  They gave in, and she went.

  Reynaldo was full of swagger, but he was shy around her. Her pale beauty, the purity of it, overwhelmed him. They looked at each other and away from each other for months, finding excuses to be in the common rooms at the same time. By the luck of the draw they had two classes together, chemistry and calculus, so they found themselves in the same lab at night, or studying in the same small group with the graduate assistant math tutor.

  Finally, he asked her out. For coffee. She said she wouldn’t mind a cup of coffee.

  A week later, they were lovers.

  They were cool about it. Their friends knew they were hot for each other, but they didn’t know how deep the feeling was. He lavished money on her, took her out to dinner, to restaurants of a caliber she’d never stepped foot into in her life, first locally, in Palo Alto, then up to San Francisco, to fancy establishments where the waiters handed them leather-bound wine lists and unfolded their napkins onto their laps. Driving his Porsche Carrera, the Eagles and the Police blasting from the speakers.