Critical Injuries

by Joan Barfoot

  For being so fucking stupid in the particular way that caused all this, Roddy, with his cot, his grey walls, his lidless crapper, is in totally the right place. He has to belong in this world of the dimwitted, the dense, the furiously hard-done-by. Not bad, necessarily — he himself is not bad, and he can’t be the only one — but sort of mutated, sort of twisted, sort of bleached-out somehow. There are guys here that are like dried-up snakes flattened out by a truck. A few are even freakish like, oh, albino squirrels.

  The sounds, the unrelenting din of voices rising and falling and boots clumping and cutlery clattering and pool balls dropping into pockets and TVs blaring and even just pages turning, are one thing. The smells are another. The place stinks of disinfectant and containment: the mad fragrance of frustration, which brings them all to rage of one sort or another. In the middle of the night guys cry out, awake or asleep there’s round-the-clock grief. Roddy supposes he could do that too, if he chose, if he wanted, if he didn’t mind other people knowing what goes on in his head.

  If he imagined they cared.

  He knows more now about how things work. Stan Snell and Ed Conrad have both explained that after he’s sentenced, a couple of weeks from now probably, he’ll be moved on from detention centre to reformatory. That should be a good word, reformatory, promising hope and life-changing, happy improvement, but obviously it is not.

  There’s no question about pleading guilty, which he’ll be doing today. Because he is guilty; and because of course that first night, he confessed, just blabbed away to the cops about the whole thing, right down to what he and his dad and his grandmother had for supper. Everything except Mike. No wonder Ed Conrad sighs a lot. Roddy would, if he could, look for the mercy of understanding, an official, judging comprehension of one small, shattering, mistaken event. “You can hope, I suppose,” Ed Conrad says, “but I sure wouldn’t count on it.”

  Roddy was under the impression justice moves very slowly, but the lawyer has explained otherwise. “Pleading guilty speeds things. It’s going to trial that takes forever.” What Ed Conrad has done for Roddy is make a deal, a trade. He’s proud of himself for pulling this off. “You plead guilty to the armed robbery, the attempted murder gets dropped. It’s a good deal, you know, sawing off the attempted murder. I told them if they held on to it we’d be going to trial because you wouldn’t plead guilty, and there’s a good chance you’d skate on it. But if they dropped it, you’d plead to the armed robbery and the whole thing’s off the books. Everybody saves money and time, you get points for not dragging the thing through the system, which means not dragging some witnesses through the system, either, like that woman, and you’re better off all the way round, and so’s everyone else.” He grinned. “Except me. For me it’d be better to rack up big bills on your dad’s tab, trying to defend you somehow.”

  Nice.

  He’s probably right, though, he spends enough time defending guys who’ve done what they’re accused of doing, so all he can do is get them through the best he knows how. Maybe it’s not his fault his heart isn’t much in it, as long as he does what he’s supposed to. Probably this is pretty good, good enough. Roddy’s glad he won’t have to testify and doesn’t have to see anybody else testify, either. Not so much the paralyzed woman, and anyway how could she, but other people, like his dad, maybe, because of it being his gun. And like Mike. Either way, it’d be hard to hear whatever Mike had to say.

  This way Ed Conrad said the charge’ll get read out, the cops will have something to say, just the facts, basically, “no big deal.” One thing he said might happen is if the woman or people in her family want to make some kind of statements before Roddy’s sentenced. “You should be thinking about something to say to the court, too, make it clear what a good fellow you are, and a very sorry one.”

  Ed Conrad gets a rusty-metal tone sometimes in his voice. Is it just Roddy, or does he not like any of his clients very much?

  “Write something down,” he said. “At least make a start,” and Roddy has tried. Except he may be good at spotting what word doesn’t belong in a series of words, but he’s stuck when it comes to whole thoughts about something important. He’s written, “I’m sorry,” but then — what else is there to say? That he’d change everything if he could? That he never meant it to happen? Words don’t change anything, they don’t fix, they’re nowhere near big enough for real life.

  Maybe that’s why there’s so much yelling here, and those other worse, suffering sounds: because words don’t do the trick. Given time, Roddy, too, may lose more and more of them, be reduced, finally, to pointing or grunting.

  This morning when the wake-up buzzer goes off in the corridor, Roddy’s routine is instantly different. A guard comes for him, so Roddy doesn’t join the usual lineup for the cafeteria. He and three other guys get taken right to the showers, and when they’re finished there, instead of putting the brown jumpsuits back on, they’re handed real clothes. His grandmother, or his dad, must have dropped off his stuff. His only pair of dress pants, dark grey, which he’s never worn since his grandmother picked them up last year, a bargain, “because there’ll be occasions in your life now, you know.”

  So there are.

  Also there’s a white shirt he hasn’t seen before. New. Specially bought? And who wears white shirts?

  People accused of big crimes, he supposes.

  And in fact he thinks he doesn’t look too bad. His body’s better suited to dress pants and white shirts than to flailing around inside brown jumpsuits.

  One of the other guys has nothing to put on except the jumpsuit. That’s pathetic; to have nobody who even cares enough to bring clothes. “Fuck you,” the guy says, “what’re you looking at?”

  “Settle down,” warns a guard.

  They’re loaded into a van, going back to the courthouse. It’s like a drug, smelling for a few seconds the hot, free air, inhaling deep, like a flashback of a week ago, two weeks ago, a whole seventeen years when this sort of air was normal, breathable, taken for granted. Also, just for the moment between the front door and the van, heat bearing down on the top of his head. A country kind of day. A swimming pool and toke and beer and ice cream kind of day.

  Not ice cream.

  He and the other guys and the guards get to the courtroom by elevator from the parking garage in the basement, no moment outside at this end of the journey. They file in through a side door, and get lined up side by side on a bench. Birds on a wire. Roddy’s grandmother and dad are sitting together in the second row in the part where the audience, or whatever it’s called in a courtroom, watches from. There’s a lot of strangers sitting out there. They could be here for one of the other guys, or just out of curiosity, to watch any case at all, suck up other people’s bad luck. Like his; he, for one, feels pretty doomed.

  Or Jesus, some of them might be related to the woman. He doesn’t know if he’d recognize the husband if he saw him again. In the doorway of Goldie’s, he was just a figure, not a person whose features, in the middle of Roddy’s own catastrophe, get remembered. Also she’s got those two kids Ed Conrad mentioned, older than him. So maybe one or two or three or twenty of the people out there are from her family. He had that stray picture of one of them standing up in the courtroom, pulling out a gun, popping him one. This still doesn’t seem impossible, although also, it does. He doesn’t want to die. Just breathing is something. Does the woman feel that way, too? Not likely. She probably thinks just breathing isn’t much at all.

  Is anybody keeping a close eye on these people?

  His dad and grandmother look at him and his grandmother smiles and nods, but then their eyes bounce away. They came up with these clothes, they’re paying the lawyer, but maybe they haven’t forgiven him. Or his dad hasn’t forgiven him, and his grandmother has settled on one certain loyalty.

  People make big mistakes to be loyal. It can get them into all kinds of trouble. Lo
ok at him: when it came down to the day, he got cold feet about Goldie’s, but he didn’t back out. He thought that’d be letting Mike down.

  That’s not totally true. He didn’t back out because he didn’t want Mike to think less of him; which is not quite the same thing as loyalty.

  Once again, Mike isn’t here. Roddy looks away, down towards his knees, his lap, his thin unbound wrists. A real no-hoper, one sad, bad case, that’s how he figures it looks.

  This time there’s a real judge, black robe, the full deal. When he comes in, and everybody’s stood up and then sat down again, his eyes take a run around the room, taking in Roddy and the others but not pausing especially. Maybe for him it’s just another day at work. Like Roddy’s dad getting up every day, maybe this is only a job he does because he has responsibilities, he has other people he has to look after. He doesn’t look all that interested in the people in this room, anyway, although it’s hard to read either kindness or cruelty into a fat sort of face and a little bit of grey hair. The black robe is mainly the point anyway. It looks totally serious.

  When Roddy’s case is called, it’s like going on stage. He’s moved away from the others, off the bench at the side and into a chair beside Ed Conrad’s, behind one of the desks out in front of the judge. At another big desk there’s a woman, and one of the two cops that busted him. The bigger, older one; the nicer one, although not somebody, obviously, on Roddy’s side.

  Now here is Roddy in another way he wouldn’t have dreamed: standing up beside Ed Conrad admitting armed robbery. “Guilty,” he hears himself say when the judge asks for his plea. Ed Conrad said he should speak clearly in court, so he does, and then the word “guilty” ricochets and reverberates around the room like he’s proud of it.

  Everything sounds bad. The woman, the lawyer on the other side, sitting at the other table with the cop, says some of what happened. Then the cop takes it from there, the facts of the thing, including all the stuff Roddy told them himself, which was everything except Mike.

  The cop also reads bits from other people’s statements: the woman’s husband, describing being outside in his truck, hearing the shot, running in, seeing Roddy. Seeing Roddy throw up, too, and hand the gun over to Mike, and run out. Embarrassing, the throwing up part, and the running.

  “We have been unable to determine that the defendant did not act alone.” It takes a second to unravel that sentence. It means, Roddy guesses, they tried to rope in somebody else, Mike, and couldn’t, but they’re leaving it open. Mike’s maybe not out of the woods yet. Maybe that’s why he’s not here. Even so.

  Ed Conrad leans over with a friendly expression like he’s just going to ask his client about something or other, and whispers, “Sit up. Uncross your arms. Get that look off your face.” If he means Roddy should stop squinting, he can’t do that. It’s bad enough everybody knows he threw up. It’d be way worse if he cried.

  The cop says, “The victim remains in hospital, with an undetermined prognosis as to her full or limited recovery.” Which means Roddy isn’t the only one who isn’t exactly sure what he’s done. It’s so weird there’s this woman, somebody he probably wouldn’t recognize on the street unless she was wearing that blue suit again, and both their lives are suddenly completely different because of each other. Roddy shakes his head, because it won’t come clear. Ed Conrad clears his throat and shifts in his chair and frowns.

  The cop says this and that about Doreen: that she was away from Goldie’s for a few days visiting her sister; that robbers might have expected her to do the same as she did last year, which was let cash pile up in Goldie’s until she got back, only this time she changed her mind. The cop says, “The timing indicates forethought and foreknowledge. Deliberate planning targeting Goldie’s, not a random choice.” Ed Conrad objects. He says that’s an unprovable assumption, not one of the facts of the case the cop’s supposed to be giving. The judge agrees. Ed nods to himself like he’s done something smart.

  When it’s his turn to ask questions, about all Ed Conrad does, though, is raise the subject of how Roddy’s dad stored the shotgun and ammunition. “My client is only seventeen, after all,” he says. “The adults in his life have some responsibility to protect him, even from himself.”

  “Was that a question?” the judge asks.

  “Oh,” Ed says. “No,” and sits down.

  If this wasn’t about Roddy himself, it’d be kind of funny. Ed Conrad has nerve, though. Considering who’s paying him, it was kind of brave to suggest some of this could be Roddy’s dad’s fault. Or he’s stupid. Whatever.

  And that’s about it, except for both lawyers, Ed Conrad and the one against Roddy, wrapping things up. The one against him goes on about vicious crime, youthful violence, brutal, reckless behaviour, innocent victim, the need for harsh penalties to set an example. It sounds to Roddy sort of general; like it’s not really directed at him.

  Ed Conrad is different. For one thing, he talks slowly and softly about Roddy’s mother, and what does he know about her? He talks about a boy wrenched from one place and set of people to another due to family tragedy. A hard-working but difficult family situation, loving grandmother and father doing their best, a good sturdy outlook for someone with that kind of support. A reckless, immature, tragic act, he says, by a boy still with promise, who might be destroyed by harsh punishment. “He did a terrible thing,” Ed Conrad says. “But he is not a terrible boy. One out-of-character act should not destroy so much potential.”

  What does he think he knows about Roddy’s character? Roddy has no good idea of it himself. Nor about potential. He doesn’t want to think about that word at all. It means a future that’s lost. What he could have done, whatever that might have been if he’d ever worked out such a thing.

  What Ed Conrad really has no business doing, though, is bringing up Roddy’s mother. If he’d known the lawyer was going to get personal, for sure he’d have told him to leave her out of it. She had enough trouble, without getting dragged into this. Blamed in a way, although Ed Conrad doesn’t exactly say that. “My mother was great, we had fun, I trusted my mother.” He would like to stand up and interrupt Ed Conrad and say that. He glares, narrowing his eyes as best he can. Ed Conrad frowns back, quickly, a warning.

  The judge says, “I’ll set sentencing for one week today, ten o’clock, this courtroom.” Ed Conrad thought it would be a couple of weeks, but the judge probably doesn’t figure he has much to think about. Maybe he’d sentence Roddy right now, except that would look too fast. “I’ll hear victim impact statements now, along with any statement the defendant cares to make.” The judge sounds sort of bored. Like whatever’s getting said, he’s heard it before. He probably has. None of this is probably new to anybody except Roddy.

  He hears Ed Conrad sigh, and sees a tall older guy in a suit, not a suit like Roddy’s dad’s but smoother, and dark grey and three-piece instead of black and two-piece, walking from behind Roddy to the front of the room. He doesn’t look upset or nervous, but he does look real serious. He’s familiar, or his shape is: last seen outlined in the doorway of Goldie’s. The judge says, “Please identify yourself to the court,” and he says his name and where he lives. That he’s the husband. Also a lawyer. He gives some long-named company, and his own is one of the names. For sure he looks a whole lot smarter, and more expensive, than Ed Conrad.

  “I’ll be brief,” he says, “because I don’t think this young man,” nodding in Roddy’s direction but not looking at him, “is worth much of the court’s time. My wife, however, does deserve some attention.” That hurts, even though it makes sense the guy has to be bitter. “So I want to tell you just a little about her, so you’ll understand the person who’s been hurt by all this, through no fault or act of her own.” Well, that’s true. She did nothing except show up at the very wrong moment.

  “She and I have been married for just over six years. Her first marriage ended very badly,
and it was hard for her to make a happy life for herself in its aftermath. But we did. We have.” Hurray for them. Ed Conrad frowns at Roddy again in his quick sidewards way.

  “She has two children, both now young adults, whom she worked hard to help through the very difficult years after the end of that first marriage. I’m not here to invade her privacy, but I do want to say that all her adult life she has been a dedicated mother, as well as a creative and talented businesswoman as partner and vice-president of a major advertising agency. A productive and energetic member of society. But of course what’s most important to me,” and the guy’s smooth voice drops low and goes bumpy and rough, “is that she is my partner. We’ve each made a second chance for ourselves, which is a considerable triumph at this stage of our lives.”

  You’d think he’d know something about second chances, then. You’d think he’d consider sparing one for somebody else. But Roddy supposes that’d be quite a lot to ask of this man. “We enjoy our life. My wife is a person who knows the value of celebration, and that’s what we were setting out to do — celebrate a happy moment with ice cream. That’s all she was doing: going for ice cream.” His voice breaks slightly there. If Roddy’s heart feels clogged up with sentiment, what about everyone else’s?

  “And now because of this one kid here, she’s in a hospital bed where she can’t move or feel. She is paralyzed. Even in the best of medical hands, even the best possible outcome would mean months, maybe years of recovery. This boy,” and suddenly he is looking at Roddy, right into Roddy’s eyes, a hot stare that welds Roddy’s eyes, too, so he can’t look away, “this boy blew up her life, he exploded our hopes, he did something more terrible than he can imagine.”