Isolated Judgment

by Jonathan Watkins

  “Motor pool,” he explained to Fish in a casual, conversational voice as he worked. “A year in Germany, working on Humvees and Jeeps. Not a bad gig, but not what I wanted to do, you know? So I put in the slip and they flew me out to the war, like I wanted.”

  Fish could only assume the man meant Vietnam, considering his age.

  “A man needs a war, Chief. You maybe know that, now that you’re in your middle years. I guess you didn’t know it back when you should’ve enlisted. Too late, now. Me, I knew before I was old enough to go in. My old man was World War Two. Out on a destroyer in the Pacific. He’d get to drinking sometimes, but wouldn’t talk about it. Even fall-down drunk, he didn’t talk about what happened out there fighting the Japs. But he’d get a few beers in him and he’d look over at me and say, ‘A man has to have his war.’ That’s it. No stories to go with it. I figured, hell, if he keeps saying it, maybe there’s some truth in there, right? So I enlisted soon as I was eighteen. And you know what? He was right as can be. Going through it...you can’t be a man without that under your belt. You come out different. I don’t mean that in some spooky ‘you don’t know what horrible things I’ve seen’ kind of movie bullshit. I mean, sure, there’s some spooky shit. Rough stuff. But you don’t come out all crazy or broken up inside unless you were prone to that before you went to war. Least that was my experience. You come out and you know who you are. Maybe that’s your problem, Chief. Maybe you never had to figure out who you are.”

  The motor was back together, and when he pulled the cord, it rumbled to life. The pompadoured man flashed him a confident wink, and they were on their way.

  Now, lying there in the filthy bottom of the resurrected boat, Fish did have an idea of who he was. He was a man whose right hand had been shattered by three blows of a ball-peen hammer. The pompadoured man had recuffed Fish’s wrists in front of him once they’d set out toward the boat. Even so, Fish couldn’t bring himself to look down at the ruined, throbbing appendage. The first blow had landed in the center of his palm, crushing it against the hardwood floor, and Fish had not answered any questions. The second had shattered two fingers, and Fish had gagged. He’d have vomited, if there had been anything left in his stomach to push out.

  He’d talked after that second blow. His first two fingers felt like they were partially severed, though he couldn’t be certain without finding the courage to look. The pain of that second blow had been a bright, living thing—so sharp and exact that a part of him marveled at it. Marathon runners talked about going so far past what they perceived as the limit of their endurance that it was like a new state of being, a characteristic of their physical form they hadn’t known was there to be discovered. The pain was like that. Fish hadn’t known it had the potential to exist, that such a clear and immediate agony was something his body was capable of generating.

  He’d talked as quickly as he could, clinging to the notion that it would end. It would end and someone would sew his hand back together. Someone would give him a pill or a needle and make it all swirl down and away and be done.

  But then there had been the phone call, and the pompadoured man came at him with another question about the lawyers. Fish had opened his mouth to answer, but not quickly enough, apparently. The third blow had landed on his other two fingers. That one, at least, had brought some small benefit: The entire hand was now throbbing, but the sharp, bright agony was gone. Fish suspected, as the boat bounced rhythmically along, that the third blow had so overloaded the nerves in his hand that the pain signals were muted now, bottlenecked in their rush to get to the brain and announce the devastation that was happening down in their neighborhood.

  Fish tried not to think about it. He didn’t want to imagine his fingers dangling loose by thin strips of skin. He didn’t want to think of pulverized bone or white shards poking through his flesh. He didn’t want to think of the black-rimmed word amputation.

  Above him, a fat white gull charted a lazy circle against the blue. Fish focused on it desperately, trying to sink all of his attention into that distant bird. He imagined he was up there, high up in the late morning sky. He was free and alone, wheeling and dipping and darting any which way he chose. He was untroubled, up there in the blue forever. Up there, he wasn’t broken, and up there he hadn’t lost his resolve and betrayed the one principle that he’d promised himself he would cling to with everything he had inside him—keeping the Judge and Lou safe.

  He could have stayed up there for an eternity, but then the pompadoured man spoke up again, and Fish came crashing back down into himself.

  “You sure you don’t know if these two old fellas have firearms out there on their fancy little island?”

  Fish turned his head to look at the man in the lilac tracksuit. He looked as relaxed as a man could be, perched on top of a bright orange flotation cushion, one hand idly keeping the motor’s stick on course. An island retiree, out for a lazy putter around the lake.

  But as the silence between them drew out, the pompadoured man’s easy grin melted. He looked directly down at Fish, and his thick eyebrows dipped low over his eyes like descending thunderclouds.

  “I still got that hammer,” he warned.

  “I don’t know,” Fish answered. “It’s a private island. My jurisdiction doesn’t include it. I have no idea about guns or anything else but what I’ve told you. It’s them and a dog and a big house. You want more than that, you’ll just have to walk on in there and find out for yourself.”

  He hadn’t planned on saying the last bit, and it just flew out of him before he could call it back. It was a challenging statement, and it came out in something close to a sneer.

  The pompadoured man smiled, and let out a single bark of laughter.

  “Shit, I guess you don’t fold all at once, do you, Chief?” he said. “Still got a little bite left in there somewhere? That’s alright. You be proud of that. I’ve seen guys—guys I served with, mind you, who wouldn’t have taken that second thump I gave you with the hammer. Hell, I served with guys wouldn’t have dreamed of taking the first one. That’s a fact. You gave it a go. That’s something can’t be taken away from you.”

  Something inside Timothy Fish snapped as he listened to the man who had tortured him try to offer words of encouragement. It was too much. He’d confronted the pathetic illusions that had prompted him to steal the tackle box of treasure. He’d acknowledged his shortcomings and the trembling, incessant inadequacies that had plagued him all of his adult life. If there was supposed to be catharsis in that sort of self-evaluation, Fish hadn’t discovered it. What he had discovered was a certainty that he had to atone for his mistake. He had decided to protect the Judge and Lou from his blunder. That would be his stand, his line in the sand.

  He had failed. Spectacularly. He’d rushed to tell everything he knew about the Wailing Isle once that second hammer blow came down. If the pompadoured man had told him to shut up, Fish would have begged him to let him keep talking.

  And now his torturer was trying to soothe Fish’s wounded pride. He was trying to alleviate Fish’s shame. It was too much to bear. A terrible, reckless anger rose up in him.

  “You’re going to lose,” Fish said in a flat, clear voice.

  The pompadoured man’s eyes narrowed, like he was looking at Fish for the first time. He grinned and produced a cigarette from his jacket pocket. He cupped his hands around a Zippo lighter and drew in a lungful.

  “Is that right?” he said mildly. The Zippo snapped shut and went back in a pocket.

  “Of course it is. People like you always do. And I’m going to be there to see it when you do.”

  The pompadoured man blew smoke out his nose and seemed contemplative. He cocked his head to one side, thinking.

  “Guys like me?”

  “Criminals.”

  “Shit. Okay. I thought for a minute we were talking reality here, Chief.”

>   “You said a man needs his war,” Fish continued, the anger in him like a single glowing ember. He was breathing on it furiously, keeping it alive, stoking it into something larger. “Maybe you’re right. I didn’t ever serve. It never even crossed my mind.”

  “I ain’t exactly bowled over with surprise over here, Chief.”

  “And maybe I am just a little island cop,” Fish persisted over him. “Hell, maybe not even that. A bureaucrat. A functionary. So what? I show up. Every day, I show up and punch in and do it. I don’t make much, and nobody walks around talking about how they respect me. But I signed on to the job, and I’ve done it. And it takes a lot more heart to do a...a shitty, demeaning job than it takes for you to do the horrible things you do. It doesn’t take heart to be a bully or a killer.”

  The pompadoured man chuckled.

  “How the hell would you know, Chief? You ain’t got it in you to be either.”

  “Because it’s what normal people know,” Fish spat. “All of us. The people who don’t crawl around hurting others. Guys like you? You’re going to end bad.”

  “Yeah? You’re going to arrest me, Chief? You’re going to wrestle your way out of those cuffs and turn into a super cop? Don’t fucking kid yourself, buddy. This is ending one way, not the other.”

  Fish stared into the pompadoured man’s face, and every bit of resentment and outrage he felt came out of him in a flurry of spite-fueled certainty.

  “This is my war!” he shouted, the heels of his shoes striking against the side of the boat. His hand was forgotten. His body was rigid with intent. “Right here! Today! And I swear to God, you miserable son of a bitch, I’ll see you lose!”

  “Chief—”

  “Fuck you!”

  “Yeah, I heard you. Now crane your head over there,” the pompadoured man said, one finger pointing ahead. “Is that Wailing Isle?”

  Fish’s storm subsided when he heard the question. He followed the man’s finger, and struggled to sit up enough to peer over the lip of the little boat. His thighs were knots of deep pain from the beating he’d taken in his foyer, but he managed to hold himself up enough to see the Judge’s island appearing on the blue horizon.

  The lenses of his glasses were scratched and scuffed, and there was a tiny spot of blood hovering on the right one, a red mote that followed along wherever he turned his head. As he squinted ahead, he could just make out the highest peak of the Judge’s three-story estate rising out of the woods that covered the island’s rocky skin. A white speck stood out on the rim of the island, and Fish knew it was the Judge’s boat, the Learned Hand.

  A small part of him had hoped to find the Judge and his groundskeeper gone. He knew Prosner still attended legal conferences, and was still the sort of esteemed figure that was sought out for guest lecturing all across the country. While Fish had broken and shouted Judge Prosner’s name out to the pompadoured man, he had silently comforted himself with the idea that maybe, just maybe, there would be nobody on the Wailing Isle. His betrayal wouldn’t matter. His weakness would do harm to nobody but himself.

  Seeing the white speck of the Learned Hand dashed that fantasy.

  Don’t say anything, he reminded himself. Even if it doesn’t slow him down. Don’t give him anything. Make him work for every last rotten thing he does.

  Fish collapsed back down against the floor of the boat. The pain in his thighs subsided and he gasped with relief. He turned his head to look at his captor again, steadfast in his conviction that there would be no more help from him.

  The pompadoured man was pointing Fish’s service revolver at him.

  “Yeah, that’s the right place,” he said, and his free hand flicked the butt of his cigarette out into the water. “I looked at those charts you got rolled up in your closet. That’s another thing they teach you in the army. How to read maps. There ain’t any other island it could be.”

  As Fish stared into the barrel of his pistol, the pompadoured man slid off his plank, so that he was kneeling over the chief. He reached back with one hand and killed the motor. The world grew quiet.

  “I’m glad you found yourself a war to fight, Chief,” he said softly.

  “Don’t do this,” Fish whispered, and hated himself for having said even that. Don’t beg. Jesus, you’ve begged all your life. Don’t do it now. Not...not now.

  The pompadoured man plucked the bright orange flotation cushion up from where he’d been sitting. He held it in one hand, the pistol in the other. Fish watched the man’s face go slack and empty, watched the eyes beneath the caterpillar brows turn dark and opaque, like night-shrouded glass.

  “‘’’Course, you know the one truth about all wars, don’t you?”

  The pompadoured man lunged forward and mashed the orange cushion down on Fish’s face. Fish groaned as the weight of the man bore down on him. He struggled to turn his head so he didn’t suffocate. He breathed in dust and grime from the floor, choking.

  Oh, God. Oh, God. Don’t. Don’t beg. Don’t beg.

  He felt the barrel of his pistol as it was pushed against the cushion, driving into his temple, pinning him.

  “People die in wars, Chief.”

  Fish heard the words, but they were unintelligible to him. His eyes were screwed shut, and he was suddenly far away. A slope of rich green grass rose up under his feet. The mingling fortunates hailed him, waved him to their sides. The orchestra worked its easy magic, while the ice sculptures melted prettily in the sun.

  She was there, touching him lightly on the shoulder, looking up at him with something close to bashfulness. He said something wry, and thrilled at her red, blossoming smile.

  * * *

  The limo driver, who’d said his name was Tucker but “everyone calls me Big Tuck,” laid his blazer across the hood of the limo and began unbuttoning his white dress shirt. He was tall and extremely skinny, with a line of stubble above his lip.

  “You better not be lying,” he warned Darren.

  Wordlessly, Darren reached into his wallet and brought out two fifty-dollar bills. He wagged them in the air between them.

  “Okay, man.” Big Tuck chuckled, and peeled the dress shirt off. Issabella and Theresa, standing on either side of Darren in the field reserved for the medieval fair’s parking, gaped at the man’s exposed torso. There wasn’t a square inch from Big Tuck’s collarbone to his navel that wasn’t covered in tattoos. Snakes, daggers, skulls and curling barbed wire were all etched into his flesh like a quilt composed of urban clichés.

  “I think you lost the bet,” Issabella whispered.

  “Yeah,” Theresa agreed.

  Darren smiled.

  “Not yet,” he said. “Turn around, Tuck. Make me a believer.”

  Big Tuck sighed, amused, and turned around. Tupac Shakur was hanging on a cross that stretched from the base of Big Tuck’s neck down to the small of his back. A crown of thorns adorned the late rapper’s brow, and whoever had done the work was accomplished enough that Tupac’s expression of forlorn martyrdom was convincing.

  “No way,” Issabella breathed. “That is amazing.”

  Big Tuck hopped back around, laughing.

  “Boom!” he shouted, and held his hand out, palm up. “I told you! Alright, pay up.”

  Darren shook his head in disbelief, and the money changed hands.

  “That takes all kinds of nerve.” He chuckled. “Or a staggering lack of foresight. What the hell are you going to do when you’re sixty and Tupac looks like melted butter?”

  Big Tuck folded the bills and slipped them quickly away in a pocket. He shrugged the dress shirt back over his shoulders.

  “Sixty? Shit. There isn’t a man in my family who’s seen sixty. Live it up when you can, Fletcher.”

  Throughout the ride north, Darren had chatted and joked with the young limo driver from Detroit eno
ugh that Big Tuck had dropped the “sirs” and “ma’ams” that his employer no doubt demanded he adopt with customers.

  “This is a sound philosophy,” Darren agreed, and looked at the two women beside him. “To yon merry festival, m’ladies?”

  “You know, we have actual work to do here,” Issabella said.

  “Aye. A quest most perilous. Keep thee close to me, woman, and be on your guard.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I shan’t allow any harm to befall thee, fair Izzy.”

  “You’re a funny dude, Fletcher.” Big Tuck chuckled. “This is the craziest job I’ve had yet. Seriously. I’ve never driven drunk white people out to a fantasy camp in the woods before.”

  “Don’t encourage him.” Issabella sighed.

  Big Tuck held his hands in the air and grinned. “You go ahead, do your thing. I’ll chill. You get all that jousting and Shakespeare stuff out your system. With what you’re paying? I’ll make a fire and camp out as long as you want. You enjoy yourselves.”

  After the three of them were halfway across the field of cars, and the crowd of festivalgoers thickened around them, Issabella looked back at the limo driver. The tall, genial kid was sitting on the roof of the limo, smoking a cigarette and talking on his phone.

  “I think he thinks we’re crazy,” she said.

  Theresa snorted and nodded her head.

  “Wait until he sees me come back with all the knickknacks and souvenirs I can carry out of here. He ain’t seen crazy yet.”

  * * *

  Once she’d managed to extract an explicit promise from Darren that he would focus on work, and not on finding more sources of drink, Issabella kissed him before wandering off with Theresa.

  The festival was exactly as she had pictured it—a large field filled with colorful tents, booths and assorted performance spots. Way in the back, in the direction Darren had wandered off toward, she could see the upper spires of a faux castle front. Red and yellow banners stirred lazily above it. The mild wind brought smells of cooking chicken, cotton candy and the accumulated odor of hundreds of bodies milling about.