“No, Harry, I actually don’t.”
“Yesterday. I came into this world April 14,1895. You know I was in the First World War? Damn right I was. I couldn’t tell you that before. Wanted to tell you, knew you’d been in Nam and you’d get a kick out of where I’d been. Corporal, Sixth Infantry—-went to France, to Cháteau-Thierry. Ten minutes in the trench first fucking day and I’m crapping in my pants, waiting to go over the top and get killed, and then I get hit in the shoulder by shrapnel from some goddam Kraut artillery shell. Luckiest thing ever happened to me. They sent me back to a hospital in Paris. Never saw action again. Got laid in Paris ten days in a row. Ginette, Marie … can’t remember the others. ‘Voulez-vous coucher avec mois, mam’selle?’They always said, ‘Oui, chéri.’ That was really something. You believe it?”
“I wouldn’t have believed it a week ago,” Dennis said, “but I do now.”
“Sorry I had to shut up about it. Jumped out of your car the other day, felt like a goddam fool. I couldn’t tell you.”
“I understand.”
“Wouldn’t mind seeing Paris again after I get my fill of New York. Maybe they say ‘Oui, chéri to an old goat of a hundred.”
Dennis smiled. “You’ll find out.”
“I will? How will I? They won’t let me go.”
Dennis had thought about this all day. “They’re not going to stop you with force, Harry. They want you to go through with the departure ceremony. But if you refuse, they certainly won’t kill you. These are civilized people, not barbarians.” As he said that, he remembered what had happened to him and the driver of the delivery van on the road from Springhill to Redstone, but with some effort he set that memory aside; it had nothing to do with what was happening now.
“If you tell them you’re going,” he said to Harry, “that will be that. They’ll have to accept it.”
Harry tilted the vodka bottle to his lips. When he had swallowed, he shook his head. “You don’t understand,” he said.
“Sophie told me everything.”
“About old Henry and Susie?”
“That too.”
“Suppose Henry and Susie had said, ‘No way. Fuck you, and fuck the horse you rode in on.’ What do you think would have happened?”
He hadn’t thought about that, Dennis realized. If the Lovells had balked, Sophie had said, “some sort of force, however mild, would have been used … that’s what we were trying to avoid at almost any cost.”
But he hadn’t dwelled on that; he had blocked that too from his mind.
Harry said, “The needle would still have gone into their arm, my friend. Bet your paycheck on it. And they’d do that to me too. They got people who deal with just that kind of situation, and you know who they are. Don’t look so innocent and so shocked. They’d throw me off a goddam mountain if they had to.”
“I can’t believe that,” Dennis said.
“You don’t want to believe it.”
He couldn’t afford to believe it. Because then Sophie was part of a system that would commit murder if it had to. The end justified the means.
“Harry, what if you just walked away? Got into your truck in the middle of the night and drove down to Carbondale and then up I-70 to Denver. Simply never came back?”
“Henry and Susie Lovell tried to do that,” Harry said.
Dennis said slowly, “The people here knew where to look for the Lovells. What if they hadn’t found them up at Pearl Pass?”
“They would have kept looking. Years ago there was a guy named Julian Rice. He got away. They hunted him down in Mexico. It took them two years, but they found him. They killed him.”
In her recounting, Sophie had left out the time element, the dedication to the hunt.
“They went down to Mexico and harped with Rice to convince him,” Dennis said. He was defending them now, he realized. Once a defense attorney, always a defense attorney.
“Julian Rice didn’t want to harp,” Harry said. “He wanted to drink margaritas in Puerto Vallarta and have fun with his sexy old girlfriend, and live.”
“They won’t find you,” Dennis said.
“You don’t know that. I’d have to be looking over my shoulder all the time. That’s some fucking way to live.”
“They won’t know where you went.”
“If I get a show in New York they’ll sure as hell know. And if not, they’ll know that you know, and you’ll tell them.”
“I would never do that,” Dennis said sharply.
“You will if you’re one of them.”
“I wouldn’t, Harry. I swear it to you.”
“You’d have to do it.”
Harry sounded so certain that Dennis hesitated. “Why?”
“They wouldn’t let you live here if you didn’t.”
He paced the room. He saw the dilemma. The village made no exceptions. They couldn’t. But unless Harry submitted meekly … they had to.
“What are you going to do?” Dennis asked.
“Don’t know yet,” Harry said. “I was kind of hoping you’d come round and drop some pearls of wisdom in my ear. If not wisdom, then some plain old good advice. I was using willpower, and I guess it worked, ‘cause here you are. You’re a lawyer. You been around the block a few times, and I get the feeling you don’t take shit from too many people. And you’re a friend. So what should I do? What would you do?”
Dennis sat down and faced the old painter. “Why do you want to live?”
“Does it matter?”
“It matters a lot.”
“Then I’ll tell you. I want to live a while longer to get my work out there where it’s meant to be. I can’t leave that job to anyone else because it takes all your energy full-time and no one else will do it right. I don’t want to live to be two hundred, or a hundred and twenty, or even a goddam hundred and five. I don’t care about the numbers so long as I can get some recognition for what I’ve done in there.” He jerked a thumb in the direction of his studio. “For sixty-five years of sweat. Sixty-five years of pouring out my guts on canvas. That ain’t the purest of motives, I know that. But it’s the only motive I’ve got, and I’m stuck with it.”
“It’s decent enough,” Dennis said. “Let me harp with them. I think they’ll understand. I’m a good convincer. I proved that down in Aspen.”
He talked to Sophie that evening in their bedroom. “He’s not asking for forever,” he said. “Not even a decade. Just some time in New York, then maybe Paris. Three years at most is my guess. He’s got a body of work in that cabin which is marvelous. You people believe in him as an artist. You’ve supported him for more than forty years. This could be the payoff. For him, and for all of you.”
“The town doesn’t want any payoff,” Sophie said. “They supported Harry out of the purest of motives. It was my mother’s idea, did you know that? She and Henry Lovell were on the Water Board back then. They lobbied for a while, and finally there was a town referendum, which passed easily. People loved Harry back then. He didn’t drink as much when he was younger. They felt proud to have an artist living and working here.”
“And now?”
“I don’t think that a lot of the young people understand it anymore. There’s a faction thinks he’s a parasite—got a free ride in the old days. All they see is the Harry who knocks off a quart of vodka a day. The Harry who paints is a stranger to them.”
“Why was he appointed to the Water Board?”
“Being on the board is not an easy job. There have been a lot of people who served for a few years and then resigned. A vacancy came up, and people felt that Harry could be more detached than a lot of other folks. He was the only one of us who didn’t have dozens of relatives in the town.”
“Did he want to be appointed?”
“He’d become one of us. And it was around the time when they told him they’d support him as a painter. It was hard for him to refuse.”
“Let me plead his case before the board,” Dennis said.
“The board isn’t a court
of law,” Sophie said. “The rules are different.”
“I can learn them.”
“Dennis, listen to me. People are pleased you won the case for my parents. But in the process you stomped on some toes. Grace Pendergast’s, for one. And Hank Lovell’s, and those boys’ who work up at the quarry. They see you as a kind of city slicker and they don’t fully trust you. But they will—in time. Right now, if you were an advocate for Harry Parrot, you would be a liability. You would lose.”
“Judge Florian thought I was a city slicker too. I need to do this. I want to do it. And I want you—I need you—to want me to do it.”
Chapter 27
The Boning
THE WATER BOARD met early the following Tuesday morning in the one-room Springhill schoolhouse on Main Street, before the children arrived to begin their school day A simple rectangular red wooden building with a sloping shingled roof, the schoolhouse had been built in 1927 after the old schoolhouse had been destroyed by a March snowslide. Every two years it received a fresh coat of crimson paint, so that it resembled a schoolhouse from a children’s storybook. It was not the sort of place, Dennis thought, where you should decide whether a man lived or died.
In late April the snow fell almost every day. No one could remember in recent decades a spring with so much snow. In the morning, though, the sun streamed at a sharp angle through the windows of the schoolhouse and fell in broad yellow bars across the blackboard, the teacher’s desk, and the rows of pine tables and chairs. Motes of dust swirled in golden air.
Meetings of the Water Board were open to all Springhill residents. The schoolroom chairs were filled not only with the five members of the Water Board but with two dozen other interested townspeople. Bibsy and Scott were there.
“It’s not a trial,” Sophie had told Dennis, when she told him the board was willing to listen to him. “It’s a friendly hearing. You asked for a chance to explain Harry’s point of view. They’re giving it to you because they feel they owe you something for what you did for my parents. They may ask questions. That’s all there is to it.”
Harry Parrot hadn’t been invited, which bothered Dennis. In human history there was plenty of precedent for trial in absentia, but none of it would give a defendant or his advocate much confidence in the outcome.
Sophie, in jeans and a white blouse, chaired the meeting. The others on the board were Amos McKee, Grace Pendergast, and Oliver Cone. Smiling, Sophie looked up from her desk and said, “Dennis? You wanted to say something.”
Dennis stood and told them he was pleased to have this opportunity. He was a newcomer, he realized, and this was a rare privilege. He wasn’t asking anything for himself; he was speaking on behalf of one of them, just as he had done in final argument in Judge Florian’s courtroom. Then, for Bibsy Henderson; this time, for Harry Parrot, his friend. He repeated everything that Harry had said to him. He explained Harry’s plans, Harry’s needs, Harry’s emotional life as an artist.
“I want to bring up the subject of immortality,” he said.
There was a slight stir of unease among the listeners in the room. Dennis smiled gently.
“There are two kinds of immortality,” he said. “One is physical— the idea of living forever. I’m sure that no one here believes that’s possible, or even desirable. But there’s another kind. The works of Shakespeare and Leonardo da Vinci and van Gogh and Picasso will be with us forever. And so will those artists, because of their work. That’s a real kind of immortality. It’s wonderful—it gives us a connection with the past and the future. It gives us a feeling of wholeness through time. And it’s achievable.” He paused. “But you never know which artist will achieve it and which won’t, because contemporary judgment is never quite objective enough. That judgment has to mellow over decades. I think Harry Parrot has a chance to achieve immortality, and you people can choose whether or not to give him that chance. It would be a kind of sin to make the wrong choice. So I beg you: choose wisely.”
He said, “If you have any questions, please ask them. I’ll welcome them. There’s nothing you can’t ask.”
From her seat on a student’s chair behind a wooden table, Grace Pendergast looked in turn at each of the other members of the board. All of them except Sophie nodded slightly at her. Sophie sat motionless.
Grace turned back to Dennis. She smiled warmly and said, “We’re grateful for the time you’ve taken and for all that you’ve told us. Harry can be happy to have such a loyal friend. We’re going to think about it. And when we reach a decision, we’ll tell Harry.”
“You don’t want to ask me any questions?” Dennis said.
“You’ve covered it all,” Grace said. “We have to go now. The children will start coming in at any minute.”
That evening, when Dennis arrived home from his office in Aspen, Claudia was in the living room with Brian and Lucy, helping them with their homework.
“Where’s Sophie?” Dennis asked.
“Over at her parents’.”
“Can you stay awhile, Claudia? I have to go out too.”
After he had eaten a quick bite Dennis stepped out into the cold April evening. The clouds had been swept away over the mountains toward the north. The first stars glistened like the heads of vibrating white pins stabbed into black velvet.
He squeezed behind the wheel of the Jeep and drove to Harry Parrot’s house. Springhill was quiet; except for a few lights there was hardly a sign of habitation. The violet-colored bank building gleamed ghostlike in the starlight.
Lights burned downstairs at Harry’s. The worn wooden shutters were closed. Three four-wheel-drive vehicles were parked by heaped pyramids of snow that had been plowed into mounds along the road. One of the vehicles was a blue Bronco; the other a silver gray Toyota Land Cruiser; the third a dark Ford pickup truck with a snowplow on its front end. By now Dennis knew many of the cars in town. The silver gray Toyota belonged to Grace Pendergast. The others he did not recognize.
It was rare that anyone came to visit Harry Parrot. Particularly rare of an evening. Harry invited no one. Dennis parked his Jeep farther down the road. He had wanted to talk to Harry alone, to tell him about the morning’s meeting with the board. He walked slowly toward the house, then stopped, stripped off a glove, and placed his palm on the hood of the Toyota. The metal was ice cold to the touch. The visitors had been here for a while. Dennis hesitated—he hung back a moment in the purple shadows near the pines.
The front door of the house thrust open forcefully. Light rocketed out in a triangular beam over the beaten-down snow heaped on the path. Instinctively, Dennis took two steps back from the car into the pine grove.
Two men moved briskly from the house, with Grace Pendergast right behind them. Harry followed, then halted—a dark shape in plaid shirt and rumpled paint-stained jeans against the bright gleam of the living room, where an orange fire leapt in the hearth.
Grace said, “You know that we’re trying to help you…”
“When I need your fucking help,” Harry growled, “I’ll ask for it.” The fire blazed up and a bold vermilion light flared across a man’s face. Dennis recognized Oliver Cone. The other man’s face, framed against the pyramid of snow, was that of Amos McKee.
The Water Board, minus Sophie.
Harry yelled, “You eesles—I’ll outlive you all!”
For a moment Dennis thought that Amos McKee was going to hit Harry. Veins flexed in McKee’s neck; his shoulders squared. Dennis tensed, ready to spring forward.
Grace stepped between the men. There were murmurings Dennis didn’t hear clearly. Then the visitors moved toward the Toyota. The front door of Harry’s house slammed shut behind them.
Dennis remained frozen in place, holding his breath. In the sudden darkness, Oliver Cone, Amos McKee, and Grace were only a few feet from him. They halted and faced one another, and Dennis could see the steam of their breath rising in the night air. Oliver’s eyes gleamed in the starlight like the eyes of a mountain cat.
Dennis
heard him say, “He could run. He’s higher’n a billy and he’s tuddish. We’ll have to cane him.”
McKee shuffled his feet. Oliver Cone looked at the doctor.
“Grace?”
“I couldn’t now,” Grace said. “It would have to be Mandee.”
The rest of Grace’s words were blurred as Oliver moved toward his truck. She followed. McKee called something after them while heading toward his own car. The doctor’s car door slammed. A minute later Oliver’s headlights blazed a broken white path and gleamed across the red hood of Dennis’s Jeep. Dennis crouched in the shelter of the pines. The lights veered off the Jeep. The engines roared in the night, a sudden burst of exhaust fumes fouling the air.
When the cars were gone, the smell remained for a minute, then faded. The pure night air took hold again.
Dennis rapped on the oak of Harry’s front door. He waited, then pounded harder with his fist.
The door opened a crack. Harry swayed a little, and the gaze of his red-rimmed eyes flicked past Dennis into the darkness.
“Where the hell’d you come from?”
“I was outside,” Dennis said. “They didn’t see me.”
“Come on in.”
This time Dennis said no to the offered vodka. “What did they tell you?”
“Told me I was a stubborn hind end of a mule.” Harry chuckled cruelly. “Pointed the bone at me.”
“Wait a minute. What about my appeal?”
“Hell, I didn’t thank you, did I? You’re a pal, but it didn’t do a goddam bit of good. Never thought it would—I just didn’t have the heart to stop you. They knew I’d get back to Paris and never leave. Let Ginette and Marie’s granddaughters screw me to death.” Harry took a step toward the staircase, then stopped, uncertain. “Gotta get some sleep. Think about all this.”
“Harry, I have to talk to you.”
“You’re talkin’, aren’t you? Or is it me doin’ all the talkin’? I’m a little drunk, Denny.”
Dennis seized him by the shoulders. “Sober up and listen to me. I heard them talking in the lingo. I don’t think they’re going to do anything quickly. Not until Monday, Grace said. Mandee is Monday, right? Then they’re going to beat you up. But they didn’t say why.”
Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 03 - THE SPRING -- a Legal Thriller Page 27