Point of Law

by Clinton McKinzie

  “We’ve been trying to decide if we should call the police, even though they aren’t exactly friendly to our cause. Would your father get in any trouble for firing the gun?”

  He probably wouldn’t, at least not with the local authorities. There’s nothing illegal about firing a gun on Forest Service land unless it’s done recklessly. But if some sort of complaint is filed, it could make more problems for him with his superiors back at the Pentagon. Roberto, though, would be in serious trouble for having taken part in the brawl. No fighting is usually an explicit condition of any parole.

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” I say. “My family can do without the hassle.”

  “All right. No cops. Fast is a friend of the sheriff’s, anyway. He’s a volunteer deputy or something, if you can believe that.”

  For a moment neither of us says anything more. We simply look at each other. Then she raises a hand and gently touches my cheek just as I’d touched Cal’s nose. There’s a trace of electricity in her fingers, a far milder buzz than the jolt I’d felt when hugging my brother, but powerful nonetheless. First contact, I think. Progress.

  “You need stitches.” She drops her hand to her side and wipes a drop of blood on her jeans.

  “It’s okay. My dad Krazy Glued it.” When her single eye widens, I explain, “It’s an old Burns family remedy. Probably not a very good one, but it does the trick.”

  Kim laughs. “Krazy Glue! My God!” It’s the first time I’ve heard this woman laugh. The sound is surprisingly light, like a small bird fluttering into the air. The angry red splotches start to fade from her face.

  Emboldened by the laugh, I ask, “I was just going to soak in the spring, and I’d like to hear what you and Fast were fighting about. Want to come? You look like you could use a bath.”

  “Good idea,” she says, and rubs a hand through her matted hair. “I’ll get us both some cold tea and meet you there.”

  The hot spring is wonderfully deserted. The activists are too busy rehashing the fight to bother with taking advantage of the valley’s amenities, even though they won’t be available for public use much longer. It’s quiet, too. Thicker stands of spruce and aspens border the small pools, forming a kind of screen. The trees block out the sound of the conversations taking place just a hundred yards away. The only noise is the trickle of the stream feeding into the pools and the rustling of an easy breeze through the aspen leaves.

  The three bathing pools are bordered and split by tall boulders and the rotting logs of lightning-struck trees. Dad and I had sat in the highest pool yesterday afternoon. According to his decades-old memories, it’s the warmest but also the most shallow, barely two feet deep. He’d said the two lower pools are cooler because the hot venting water has had more time to mix with the creek’s snowmelt. Remembering too Dad’s advice about cold water being more helpful to a bruised body than warm, I choose the lowest and deepest pool for my soaking. The water is the color of pennies.

  Kim walks up as I sit on a boulder, groaning quietly from the pain in my ribs as I work to unstrap my sandals. In each hand she carries a dripping Mason jar with a liquid inside that’s almost as dark as the stream. Nothing’s ever looked so good to me as this woman bringing me something cool to drink.

  “I make it myself. It’s a restorative tea, which you look like you could use. I make it from herbs I grow in the garden at home, then brew it in the sun,” she says, unscrewing the lid from the jar and putting the jar in my hand. It’s cold—she must have gotten it from an ice chest. “My way of saying thanks.”

  “Cheers.” I finish half the tea in one pull. It tastes as if it’s been sweetened with honey.

  Kim sets her own jar on a rock with a clank. She turns to one side and begins to unbutton her shirt. Trying not to stare, I get my sandals off, then drag my vest over my head. Again I feel a painful tweak in my ribs. It almost makes me gasp. My bruises and stiffening muscles ache. But I’m too distracted, checking Kim out, to really notice the pain.

  She slips off her shirt to reveal a pale yellow sports bra. Turning away again so that her back’s to me, she shimmies out of her jeans. Matching yellow bottoms. Her body is lean and tan. Long runner’s muscles carve down her thighs and calves. Above them, she has narrow hips and a slender back faintly etched with muscle. If I had time, I could count the ribs. When she turns back in my direction, I see that her breasts are small and high beneath her bra.

  She looks at me and catches me staring. I clumsily look away but not before I see her flush. I take another pull from the jar, draining it this time. She steps into the water with jerky steps and her hands held unnaturally rigid against her thighs. It’s as if my ill-concealed leer has robbed her of her grace. I mentally kick myself, not for admiring, but for having gotten caught.

  “Uh, I don’t have a swimsuit,” I hear myself say. “Actually, I’m not wearing any underwear either.” Yesterday the activists had all been frolicking naked. I guess Kim is more modest than her followers.

  “Don’t worry,” she says without looking at me. Her voice sounds a little strained. “I doubt you can show me anything uglier than your face right now.” Then she gives me a quick laugh to show me she’s only kidding.

  “Ha-ha,” I answer. Dropping my shorts, I step into the water. It’s colder than I expect. It pushes the breath out from my lungs and raises goose bumps on my flesh. It makes me want to dance and shiver. I crouch down until my butt is on the gravelly bottom and the water is high on my chest and try to focus on relaxing my stiffening joints rather than the woman across from me, who’s now acting oddly shy.

  “So you’re a famous climber, huh?” she asks after dunking her head, scrubbing it, and pushing the hair from her face and eye patch. “Sunny said Cal was gushing about meeting you last night.”

  “A few years ago I was kind of famous. It was a long time ago.”

  “It couldn’t have been that long ago. What are you, twenty-two or twenty-three?”

  “Twenty-seven. How old are you?”

  “Didn’t your parents teach you never to ask a question like that of an older woman?” She laughs again, sounding more relaxed but, like me, not yet quite at ease. “Well, I guess today you earned the right to ask some impertinent questions. I’m thirty-six.”

  Her body is a decade younger at least. I want to tell her so but can’t think of a way of saying it without sounding too aggressive.

  “You look athletic, too. Runner?” Her almost total lack of body fat, her thin calves and lean muscles, make it a good bet.

  “You’ve got good eyes, Anton,” she replies, making it clear that I’d been caught. “I used to do a lot of running. Lately it’s been more hiking and yoga. This thing with the valley has got me a little too preoccupied to train.”

  “Speaking of eyes—what happened to yours?”

  She flinches as if I’d slapped her.

  Oh shit, I think. I expected it to be some ridiculous childhood accident that she laughs about now. But from the wounded look on her face I can tell it’s something much more than that, something she certainly doesn’t laugh about. I should have asked Sunny instead, made sure the injury wasn’t private. But I’m not very good at restraining myself—in that regard, but to a far lesser degree, I have the same tendencies as my brother.

  She touches the eye patch in the same painful, self-conscious way I’ve been probing my cheek. Then she folds her arms across her chest and settles lower in the water as if to hide herself beneath the nearly transparent liquid. It feels like she’s gone from just a few feet away to miles. For a moment she doesn’t answer, just looks down at the water. But then her eye locks on mine.

  “It was pierced by a knife,” she finally says. Her words hit my chin like a sharp jab. Then she swings the hook. “It happened right after I was sexually assaulted.”

  Fuck.

  I turn away from her gaze and lean toward where a large boulder perches on the pool’s bank. I pretend to beat my head against it. “I’m sorry for asking. I’m sorry it hap
pened. Please believe me when I say that I had no fucking idea.”

  She doesn’t laugh at my make-believe self-flagellation, but she does smile just a little, grimly, when I look her way again. “It’s okay. You didn’t know. And I’m dealing with it.”

  “It’s not something you get over very easily,” I say quietly as I settle back into the water.

  She’s staring at me, probably trying to see if I really believe that or if I think like so many men that rape is just something you can walk away from, like falling in a mud puddle. Wash it off and you’ll be fine. I hold her good eye until she finally says, “You’re right. It’s not.”

  After a moment of staring back at me, Kim apparently decides to tell me about it. “It happened twelve years ago, when I was a law student at the University of Utah.”

  Despite the way my body has finally adjusted to the cold water, her story gives me a fresh chill. I’m no stranger to violence and the sick things people can do to one another, and I’ve heard and seen far worse, but hearing it from this proud, beautiful woman in her calm voice both enrages me and at the same time makes me feel helpless and weak.

  A football star at the university asked her on a date. She accepted because the invitation was so strange, coming from a jock a few years younger and someone so different from her—Kim describes herself in those days as a “rabid activist for all causes,” from the environment to gun control to protesting the U.S.’s interference in Latin America. A real hippie chick, she says, fifteen years too late. She snobbishly thought of the invitation to a fraternity party as something that would expand her consciousness and understanding of mainstream America. Sort of like a visit to a less intelligent, foreign culture. And she admits she was flattered by her date’s popularity at the school, too.

  But the date didn’t go well. They’d argued before they even arrived at the party. And Kim drank too much wine at dinner. She continued drinking at the party and annoying her escort by quarreling with half the people there, yelling over the booming music. In hindsight, she suspects someone put something in one of her drinks. But in the subsequent police investigation it was never proven. They said she probably just drank too much.

  She woke up somewhere in a room in the back of the fraternity house. It was the strobelike flash of a camera burning through her tightly shut eyes and the sound of drunken laughter that brought her out of her stupor. She lay still for a long time, too horrified to open her eyes, too scared to move. This had to be a nightmare. But it didn’t stop. The laughter, the rough touch of hands—squeezing, prodding, slapping—and the camera’s red flash through the veins in her eyelids didn’t stop. When she finally opened them, she discovered that she was naked in a room with four young men. One of them was her date.

  They probably hadn’t physically raped her, according to the examining physicians at the hospital. There was no bruising and the rape kit showed no signs of semen. But that wasn’t the point. At the very least they’d violated her with their eyes, their camera lens, and their laughter. There could have been no greater defilement of her pride.

  Without her clothes, she staggered from the room and down a staircase. The party was still in full swing. Another girl took pity on her. She helped collect Kim’s clothes and drove her home. Kim ran from the car, sobbing with rage, shame, and fear. She ran right into her apartment to vomit into the sink. As she lurched and heaved over the porcelain, she didn’t notice the upturned knife in the drying rack.

  Tears are rolling out of her remaining eye but her voice has no quaver in it. Despite her svelte and graceful exterior, there’s a hardness to this woman. A tough, sturdy strength. There’s a weakness to it, though. Deep underneath I get a sense of brittleness. As if it wouldn’t take much of a fall for her to break. After holding herself together for twelve years, it seems that this thing with the valley might just be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

  “Jesus, Kim. I’m sorry,” I say uselessly.

  In my head I’m taking the bloody knife back to that fraternity house. I’m carving up four young men. If I’d known her then, and if I were just a little more like Roberto, I would have taken more from them than just an eye.

  I can’t help but ask, “Did they get arrested?”

  I’m praying that they did. Then at least she would be given some sense of closure. Some kind of justice. My face is aimed at the water between us but my vision is lifted up, trying to gauge the psychological damage. My hands are clenched under the water so tight that my fingertips might puncture my palms.

  “No. The police said they couldn’t prove that it happened, much less that it wasn’t consensual. It was their word against mine. The school didn’t even suspend them because my date had rich parents who gave the school a ton of money.”

  “Fuck,” I say out loud. “That makes me feel really good about our justice system. What a fucking joke.”

  She shrugs, now looking far calmer than I feel. “They’re always improving the laws, trying to make it work better. Like protecting witnesses and with rape shield laws and all that. After finishing law school, I worked to get what happened to me included in the elements of sexual assault. It’s still not perfect, but our laws are getting closer to being an instrument of justice.”

  She can’t really believe that. In my three years as a cop I’ve come to realize that criminal law is simply a weak attempt to disguise a world of anarchy, chaos, and unfairness. A world where the rich and the strong prosper and the weak suffer. It’s a pretense, the idea that the laws are based on it being better to let ten guilty men go free than convict a single innocent man. Innocent men are still convicted, and the guilty, even when they are convicted, rarely pay what they should. And the so-called “search for the truth” of the trial process is totally ridiculous. Evidence is often inadmissible because it’s “too prejudicial.” The defendant has the right to remain silent or lie even when he knows the truth. The right to plead not guilty even when he is guilty, then to beg for forgiveness prior to sentencing. The right to challenge evidence even if it’s both reliable and probative. And he has the right to counsel, who will counsel him not to confess, not to answer questions, who will blame the victims, and will do everything in his or her power to get the client off.

  I close my eyes and slouch lower in the water. I make an effort to unclench my fists but it doesn’t work.

  “Glad you asked?”

  She’s smiling again, a sort of sad half-smile. She splashes water onto her face to wash away the tears.

  “I’m sorry, Kim. Again.”

  “Hey, I don’t want to be depressing. I shouldn’t have even told you. It’s just that you pretty much saved me in the meadow there, and I feel like I owe you for that. Believe me, it’s not something I talk about much. So tell me, what do you do when you’re not being a famous climber?” She’s trying hard to lighten the mood.

  “I’m a cop. A special agent for the Attorney General’s Office in Wyoming. I mostly take down meth labs.”

  “Really?” She cocks her head. “What you were saying just a minute ago, about the law being a joke . . . Well, it doesn’t sound like something a police officer would say.”

  “It’s exactly what most cops I know would say. It’s just a game.”

  “What about the scar on your face? Did that happen climbing or policing?”

  I feel foolish, after having heard what happened to her. Earlier I’d played with the thought of how our disfigurements might bring us together. “Climbing,” I say. “Just climbing.”

  “Was it worth it?”

  “Yeah, I guess so. It was a good trip despite getting smacked in the face by a falling rock. I couldn’t wait to do it again.”

  Kim smiles fully for the first time since we’ve gotten in the spring. “You’re honest,” she says, “too honest and intelligent to be so dumb.” Then, after a minute, “I can’t imagine why you guys do it. Risk your lives on the cliff for nothing. How is it worth it? Don’t you get scared up there?”

  I want to
explain it to her but don’t know how without sounding even dumber. I want to tell her about the joy that comes with the terror, and how it bursts into flame when the fear is conquered. The bigger the fear, the bigger the rush. The best rushes come more than a thousand feet off the deck, when you’ve got a hundred-and-fifty-foot rope-length of shitty gear connecting you to your partner and it feels as if Death is climbing just beneath you, grasping at your ankles. When your heart is pounding out a heavy-metal rhythm at a hundred and eighty beats a minute and your muscles are racked with lactic acid. When the easiest thing in the world would be to just let go. But you don’t. You fight.

  I don’t say any of this, though. I’m realizing that I know nothing about fear compared to her. Nothing about the consequences I take such delight in cheating.

  Instead I just say, “You ought to try it sometime, Kim.”

  She laughs this time. “No thanks. Not until hell freezes over.”

  Neither of us realizes that Satan is pulling on a pair of his warmest socks.

  NINE

  TONIGHT I DON’T go back over to join the activists’ bonfire—playing the peacemaker between Dad and Roberto has to take priority. They’d apparently argued while climbing down in the canyon this afternoon. When they returned, my father’s face was tight with a frown. Even Roberto’s ever-present smile looked forced beneath his crystal blue eyes. But I couldn’t seem to focus on our family’s problems. Instead I watched the dark shapes of the activists moving before the flames from across the meadow, trying to spot Kim. While my brother and father talk loudly over the hiss of my stove with false amiability about past climbs, visions of Kim’s tan skin, slim hips, and small breasts beneath the yellow fabric float through my mind. Foolishly, I know, I’ve convinced myself that I’m the one who can ease her pain.

  “Remember that trip to Notchtop Spire?” Dad asks. “When you and Antonio dropped the rope?”

  Roberto groans and laughs. We’d been very young at the time, just boys, thrilled to be allowed to climb with Dad up a moderately serious alpine route. We climbed all day with my father leading then belaying Roberto and me, who were tied ten feet apart at the end of the rope. He led us up to broad ledges before the real business began just below the spire’s peak. Halfway up, a steady drizzle engulfed us. It took hours to reach the summit because Dad had to haul us most of the way. Finally, on the summit’s tiny perch, he set up a rappel off the back side while Roberto and I readied the rope. A sudden bolt of lightning frightened us—we somehow managed to drop the rope too close to the edge. It slithered down the steep incline like an angry snake until it snagged on a flake of rock fifty feet below. Dad didn’t berate us, but his eyes gave us a beating. He had to risk his life soloing down to the rope on the slick granite. We’d been scared shitless, thinking he was so disgusted he would leave without us. Or die. But he came back, the errant rope coiled neatly over his shoulder.