Against the Wind

by J. F. Freedman

  “Interesting?” I ask, referring to her work.

  “No.” She pencils a question mark in a margin. “Do you know how many law school graduates cannot write? I mean a simple declarative sentence. It’s appalling. And the worst-written briefs seem to invariably wind up on my desk.”

  “Pretty soon you won’t have to put up with it anymore.”

  “It can’t be soon enough for me.”

  I was fishing, hoping she’d tell me she’d changed her mind and wasn’t taking the Seattle job. She took the bait and calmly spit out the hook.

  “So how’s your preparation going on the murder case?” she asks off-handedly.

  “Good, good,” I tell her.

  She looks up. “Oh?”

  “Yeh, better than I expected actually, at this point anyway. I’ve got some pretty good people lined up for the other three defendants, we’re getting together formally next week to start plotting strategy. But the best thing,” I tell her, “is I’m finding holes in their case you can drive a tank through. By Robertson’s own construct the whole timing is off. Look,” I say. “Listen and tell me if I’m crazy.”

  She looks at me as if I am crazy. I ignore it and press on.

  “They left the bar at two. Dozens of witnesses confirm that. They took her up to the mountains. That’s a good forty-five-minute ride, you know that, you know the area. They all fuck … have intercourse with her. Twice apiece. With me so far?”

  She nods. She’s starting to listen with interest.

  “Okay,” I go on. “Let’s say ten minutes a pop. Then they take her back. So that’s an hour and a half travel time plus the same amount of time playing doctor. It’s five in the morning already; oh, I forgot, two more pops back at the motel, another fifteen minutes, they were probably quickies, now it’s a quarter after five. At five to six they’re in Cerrillos, I’ve got a receipt and a witness, and an hour later they’re in Madrid, again with a witness. Now you tell me: when did they take this guy back up to the mountain, stab him countless times, shoot him, emasculate him, and get her back to the motel? It doesn’t track, Pat. It’s a physical impossibility.” I beam at her. God, this feels good. Saying it out loud confirms it. “Unless I get a real curve thrown at me I have a damn good chance to walk these four. I’m talking completely.”

  She stares at me. Like I did something wrong instead of proving my case beyond a doubt.

  “What is it?” I ask. I sip the tea; it’s not bad, although a beer would be better.

  “Nothing.”

  “What? Tell me.”

  She pushes her work aside, takes off her glasses. It’s a classic move, done unconsciously of course, but nicely executed. She’s never tried a case in her life but I’ll bet she’d be pretty good at it.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way,” she tells me.

  Whenever somebody says that to me I know I’m going to.

  “What?” I ask again.

  “I’m only telling you this because I think you should hear it.”

  “What, already?” I hate procrastination; I do it enough myself that it grinds me when it comes from someone else.

  “I heard what you said and it sounds good, Will. But the word on the street is this is a hopeless case. That you’re tilting at windmills.”

  I explode inside.

  “What kind of bullshit propaganda is Robertson spreading?” I demand of her, my voice rising with my temper. “That bastard,” I fulminate, “he’s trying to rig this fucking thing. You see,” I say, pointing a finger like a schoolmarm, “this proves he’s nervous. He knows he’s already got problems and he’s trying to win it outside the courtroom. You just heard it,” I say, “you can see I’ve got genuine goods.”

  “Please don’t yell at me,” she says softly. “I’m not accusing you of anything.”

  “Sorry, babe, sorry. But I hate that kind of shit. It’s a typical prosecution ploy, but I’ve never known John to resort to it.”

  “He doesn’t want to lose.”

  “Of course he doesn’t want to lose. I don’t want to lose either but I’m not playing head-games on him, trying my case outside the courtroom.”

  “He especially doesn’t want to lose this one. It’s all over the office,” she says. “He’s convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that they’re guilty and he can’t stand the idea that four scumbag bastards—those are his words not mine—might walk away because of some devious lawyering, his words again,” she adds quickly, “not mine.”

  “It’s not the way you do it,” I tell her. “You know that. It’s unprofessional.”

  She puts her hand on mine. It sends chills down my back. I stare at the two hands.

  “Will … I’m warning you, that’s all. At least listen to that.”

  “These men are my clients,” I tell her with conviction. “They deserve the best defense they can get. Especially,” I add, “since I’m convinced they did not murder that man.”

  “Okay. I said it. It’s over.”

  “Thank you.” I’m touched. “I appreciate it. I really do.”

  Actually, I’m bothered, a lot; she wants me off this case too much. Everyone does. They all want my clients to lose, and they’re afraid I’m going to go down in flames trying to stop it.

  “You are my child’s father,” she reminds me. “I don’t want to see you winding up in an ugly place.”

  “I’ll try not to. But I am going to conduct the best defense I can.”

  “You always do. That’s why you’re the best.”

  Even as I’m basking in her praise the proverbial bell goes off in my head. “Have you been talking to Andy or Fred?” I ask.

  “What would I be talking to them about?” she asks back.

  “Nothing. Just asking.”

  “Are they down on this case too?”

  “Not really. They’re down on me in general,” I throw in, hoping to defuse the future.

  “I know.”

  “You do?”

  She nods. “It’s around town.”

  I slump in my chair. “What exactly is ‘around town,’ as you put it?”

  “That you might leave the firm.” She actually looks away for a moment.

  “You’re joking.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “That’s bullshit! Stupid rumors, pure and simple,” I tell her. “Because of the timing of my leave.”

  She nods again.

  “I don’t know how some of this stuff gets started,” I go on. “There’s nothing to it.”

  “That’s good. It would be tragic if it was otherwise,” she says.

  The air’s become too close in here. I’ve got to leave. The trouble is, I don’t want to. I want to stay in this little house of memories with my child sleeping in the next room and her mother holding my hand in hers.

  “It’s late,” I say. “I’d better go.”

  I’m hoping she’ll stop me. It won’t take much.

  She nods. “I’m beat. Big day tomorrow.”

  I’m forced to my feet. “For me, too.”

  She walks me to the door.

  “’Night.”

  “Good night.”

  She leans forward, brushes my mouth with her lips. I read more meaning into it than she does, I think.

  “Good luck, Will.”

  “Thanks. I feel good.”

  “Just don’t become consumed with it. You can’t win every time out.”

  “I know that.” God, how I know that. Standing on this porch with her is living-in-pain proof of how much I know that.

  PART TWO

  I’M FLYING, MIND-BLOWN BEYOND belief, sitting in a sweat lodge west of Taos with my old friend Tomas Lost Ponies, the famous Pueblo shaman (“Donahue,” “Nightline”), a man who is always smiling and laughing despite the fact that he and his people have been dumped on for as long as he has memory, which in his case is seventy-seven years, although he doesn’t look much older than me, if at all. By strict application of the law I shouldn’t be here; it’s ille
gal for a nonmember of the Native American Church, meaning anyone who isn’t at least one-eighth Indian, to participate in these rituals, especially the taking of peyote, which to the ignorant and arid world of Anglo-Saxon American law is just another mind-altering drug, intrinsically evil and abusive. And as an officer of the court, of course, I should be particularly sensitive to what is legal and what is not. But I am a guest here, it would be ungraceful of me to refuse my host’s hospitality. And I know, again putting on the black robes of the legal profession, that while the law is stern she is also an understanding and compassionate mistress (at least in first-year lawbooks), and that all laws are a mosaic of events, coincidental and accidental, so that today’s Plessy v. Ferguson is tomorrow’s Brown v. Board of Education.

  I am, therefore I hallucinate. And if anything that feels this good is illegal, fuck it.

  It’s past midnight. We’ve been tripping for over twelve hours, sitting in the sweat lodge and seeing the inner and outer worlds in the flame of a candle, the sweat pouring off our naked bodies, then going outside and dancing, first under the white glare of the sun and then for the last several hours in moonlight while millions of stars twinkle overhead, each significant, each communicating to me, me communicating back to them, reaching out to them, at various times soaring through time and space so that I am flying through the heavens alongside them, whispering out secrets to each other, the beauty of the cosmic consciousness that bonds us all and makes us one.

  “Man, you are so ripped.” Tomas is laughing. We’ve jumped into the lake to cool down, he and I and the other men who are partaking with us. I stayed under the water talking to the fish, beautiful shimmering fish, infinite in color and variety. The fish stare at me with their bulging eyes as they talk back in the profound way only fish can talk. God, they are so sexy, so coquettish, like that little fish Cleo in Disney’s Pinocchio. I can stay under and talk to them because they’ve shown me how to use my hidden gills, my Pleistocene throwbacks which very enlightened beings can call back.

  Right now I am in such an extraordinarily enlightened state. I am one with the sun and stars and life underwater.

  “I’m talking to the fish,” I explain. For some reason, unknown to me, this sends him into paroxysms of laughter.

  “I am,” I continue patiently. One must be patient when one is explaining enlightenment, even to another who is also enlightened.

  “Talking to the fish.” He can’t stop laughing. “That’s a good one.”

  “I am.” Enough is enough with the laughing.

  “A long time, I’m sure,” he says.

  “Long enough to learn their secrets,” I answer sincerely, if a touch smugly. “And stop laughing, it isn’t that funny.”

  “You were under less than ten seconds,” he tells me. “I pulled you out. Otherwise you’d have dived for the bottom.”

  So? Ten seconds can be a long time. Still, it is a bit confusing. It seemed an eternity.

  “Anyway,” he continues, “there aren’t any fish in the lake now. They haven’t restocked it yet.”

  I smile inwardly. That shows how little he really knows. There were thousands of them down there, all colors of the rainbow, they were rubbing all over me, showing me how to use my prehistoric gills.

  “Good thing I was here with you,” he adds, “you probably would’ve drowned. Don’t you know humans can’t breathe underwater?” He looks at me sideways, shaking his head. “Shit, Will,” he says, “you could give hallucinogens a bad name, man. Don’t hippie out on me, okay?” We’re standing off a ways from the others. He glances over at them. They’re deep into their own rituals, aren’t paying us any attention.

  “I’m okay,” I reassure him.

  He eyes me dubiously. “The elders don’t like bringing whites into the ceremony,” he says. “Don’t want Uncle BIA coming down on them.”

  “I’ll be good.” I giggle involuntarily. “Those fish were so beautiful. I never knew fish could be so sexy.”

  He laughs with me. “You got pussy on the brain, man,” he says.

  Pussy on the brain. Jesus, even in this stoned state this guy’s got me pegged. I look at him carefully; he guilelessly, unselfconsciously, smiles back at me, and in a flash-point of misunderstanding, exacerbated by my mind being in a state too enlightened for my spirit to handle, something about that clear, innocent smile triggers a bomb that’s been waiting to detonate, the bomb of suspicion I carry just below the conscious, like a permanent black cloud of unknowing. Tendrils of paranoia start creeping up the back of my brain, a purple Rorschach that suddenly, without warning, explodes inside my head, wiping out the reservoir of good feeling that’s been accumulating all day and night. And then comes the awesome clarity that only a stoned mind can produce, where you can see into the past and the future and make them one. They’re out to get me, all of them, with Tomas as the front man, it’s been a set-up from the beginning, concocted and executed by my enemies to bring me down. Shit, how could I have been such a dumb, unsuspecting fuck? In my position you can never let your guard down, not for an instant.

  “Hey Will.” Tomas breaks my reverie. “Check out the shooting star.” He points heavenward, where a dying light is falling. “Beautiful, huh?”

  “Yeh.” I’m looking up. It is beautiful. It’s all so beautiful. He’s beautiful and I’m beautiful and the sky and the stars and the moon, the other participants, the whole enchilada. All beautiful, all love. Fuck me and my twin curses of civilization and litigation.

  They go back inside the lodge. I stay outside, alone with the night. The blanket of stars packs the dark sky. Standing naked like this, my hairy body wet with my sweat (I’m not nearly as evolved as the men inside, who barely have hair on their pubes, let alone anywhere else), my glands throwing out a primeval territorial stink, I could, to a lost traveler from another galaxy, be mistaken for the first of my species to have stood on this spot ten million years ago. I feel that old, and that young.

  Across my mesa, on the next ridge, I see a lone coyote trotting along, his dark form silhouetted sharply against the indigo sky. For a moment he seems to turn and look back at me and I’m seized with an irresistible impulse to be him, be inside of him, be a coyote spirit, and without preamble I turn my head and torso skyward and howl at the stars, a long, high, piercing howl that echoes across the darkness, bouncing off the canyon walls, a howl at the stars like the wiliest of old coyotes, braying at myself, at myself and all my surroundings, now that I’m whole with them again, the positive side of the peyote kicking back in, showing me the sheer audaciousness of my silly, confusing, god-forsaken, and still extraordinarily beautiful cosmos. When your insides are peyote and your outside is a northern New Mexico night you know for sure that God has a sense of humor. He must, to forgive so easily all the bullshit ramblings of a mind raging with banalities, unable to accept basic simplicity. It flashes me to Claudia and to the poster of Einstein on her bedroom wall, with the epigram underneath: “Life should be as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler.”

  Howling at the moon, full blast now, really into it, like a lovesick dog sniffing around a bitch in heat. My hosts have come back out and are finding this funny as hell, splitting their sides as they pass around a bottle of wormy mescal, for religious purposes and to ward off the chill. I’m the college-educated, earth-ignorant butt of their pagan jokes. I like it, though, playing the mascot, fool to the king and his court, new kid on the block eager to please. There’s nothing malicious in them and their laughter, it’s the spirit of children, innocent and happy.

  Sure. And all God’s chillun got wings and a split-level home with a convertible in the garage, instead of a one-room cinderblock shack with an outhouse. I should be as free and knowing as these men. And as forgiving.

  Dawn is approaching. We have bathed each other and dressed, and now we’re on horses riding east to the top of the mesa. No one feels the need to talk; a natural state for my hosts, but even I, after a day and night of having my mind and spirit bent,
altered, shaped and caressed, am happy and comfortable to be passive and let it all come to me.

  We sit on horseback on the edge of the mesa and watch the sunrise: hypnotic, like waves breaking, over and over and over again. It’s breathtaking, but a wave of sadness tinged with apprehension washes over me; in a short time, too short, I’ll be sitting in a courtroom starting jury selection. I’ll be back in the world again.

  We part company. They all have a hug for me, they were all glad I was part of it. I feel like tattooing it on the back of my hand so the next time the paranoia comes I can just check it out like looking at my watch: oh, yeh, it’s only my own stuff, not to worry, it’ll go away.

  ONE LAST PRIVATE MOMENT with Tomas, then I’m in my Beemer, heading south. It’s still early, not yet seven, I’m starving, I haven’t eaten in twenty-four hours. I pass a McDonald’s and I’m tempted to stop, but an Egg McMuffin doesn’t seem the way to break my fast.

  The AM/PM Minimart has chili dogs, two for ninety-nine cents, shredded cheese, relish and onions included. I sip at a large black coffee while the owner, a middle-aged lardass with a Parris Island haircut, loads up my dogs for me. As he hands over the greasy bag and my change he cocks his head, staring. I involuntarily look behind me, then back.

  “Do I know you?” he asks, his eyes narrowing.

  “I don’t think so. I don’t recall ever stopping in here before.” That’s all I need, some shit-kicker who was robbed last month and harbors the fear that every off-hours customer is the perpetrator, come back to haunt and humiliate him again.

  He shakes his head. “No, that ain’t it.” He shrugs, turns away. Then he remembers, turning back to me with a triumphant smile. He chews tobacco or dips, his teeth are black. “You’re the lawyer for them bikers. The ones killed that kid up in the hills. I seen you on the news.”

  I smile disarmingly. “Guilty as charged.”

  His face darkens. “Guilty is right. They ought to take those fuckers and fry their fucking brains and you along with them.”

  Fuck me. That’s a twist. Usually bikers are thought of as folk heroes, sort of modern-day lowrider Robin Hoods, especially to closet outlaws like this guy. If people like him are down on us it means the boys have piled up a hell of a lot of negative publicity. Not a good sign.