“I object to that characterization,” said the professor, showing mettle at last. “Mr. Lochmueller wrote ecologist, not activist, on a notarized affidavit. If my opponent wishes to charge him with perjury, that will require a separate petition.”
Judge Monroe spoke for the first time. “As counsel for the defense observed, this is a great country. I have never heard of anyone going into business watching birds, but I am willing to believe it is possible. If he is an independent contractor he must have clients. Do we know who these clients are?”
The professor foraged through his notes. “Several university biology departments, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Indiana Department of Natural Resources,” he said at last, triumphantly. Lola squeezed my hand.
“Sustained, then,” said Judge Marion. “We will consider him an ecologist.”
“Naturally, I didn’t mean to substitute the terms,” said the opposing counsel smoothly. “Only to sketch Mr. Lochmueller, the ecologist”—a word he graced with a special sneer—“in greater detail. He has no scientific credentials, yet he questions my client’s scientific credibility. My client’s proposals were drawn up by forestry professionals with advanced degrees in resource management, and years of experience.”
In other words, tree salesmen.
He did further demolition work on my cosignatories and companions—they were all, of course, credentialed, but he found minor questions of character in each of them and presented us, ultimately, as a rabble of activists of the kind who lobbied Congress to cripple American industry with carbon emissions regulations, and so forth. I will say this: he knew his audience. He managed to avoid going into the substance of the dispute altogether by concentrating on our collective disreputability.
Our professor tried, rather late in the game, to rally with figures and statistics, but the effort was doomed. It was our word against theirs, and our word was made to seem politically motivated and highly suspect. Controversial was given us as a sort of consolation prize; highly could go only to a well-endowed corporation with a priapic presence in the Indianapolis skyline.
Lola attempted to cheer me up later, back at her house. “Those foresters wouldn’t know a tanager if it pooped in their Rice Krispies,” she said.
“It’s not funny,” I protested. “I’m part of case law now or whatever. Ten, fifty, one hundred years from now people will read about me and say oh, Nathan Lochmueller, that charlatan with binoculars.”
“I don’t know anyone who reads case law,” she said.
“You know what I mean. The record is out there in print somewhere. Of this slimy shyster calling me a philosophy major swanning from tree to tree.”
“Actually, I think it’s rather romantic,” she said.
That remark clinched it more than any made in the courtroom. I felt like a concert pianist who has just been complimented on his facial expressions. I don’t know the exact date on which the topics of conservation and climate change became inextricably intertwined, but it complicated my job. Calling it “romantic” confused the two. Lola and I had discussed this a thousand times. It is difficult to interest the public in, say, the decline of bluebirds in Indiana when that public experiences a steady patter of apocalyptic headlines: cities to be submerged, oil to run out, famine, war expected. You could argue that indifference to bluebirds and their like is what brought us to our current stage of environmental degradation, but that is referring again to all those imminent catastrophes. To argue that the bluebird is important in its own right—as a thing of beauty, an indicator of robust biodiversity, an important agent in a delicate ecosystem—well, while you make that argument someone else is off photographing an oiled stork or a stranded polar bear. I hated public ecosentimentality. Suppose you worked on something truly vulnerable, fragile, and important (much more so than Indiana birds) such as coral reefs. You would get really sick of researchers who secure better funding because they have cute organisms (maybe bluebirds) while yours are all scaly and slimy. I mapped Indiana by the millimeter to arrive at some kind of truth; Lola called it a pretty story.
“There should be whole armies of tree climbers out there,” I said.
“That’s why it’s romantic,” she said.
“The Soviets did it,” I said. “They put legions of men and women in the field gathering data before we ever heard of global warming.”
“Why are you bringing up the Soviet Union?”
“L. S. Stepanyan,” I said. “Personal hero of mine. Capped off the definitive Conspectus of Ornithological Fauna of the USSR with the sublime Birds of Vietnam.”
“Fine. What’s that got to do with your court case?”
“I don’t know. It’s not romantic. It’s sensible.”
“First, you’re overreacting. Second, don’t you think the Soviets were trying to create the illusion of full employment?”
“It’s not an illusion if everyone’s working,” I said, though she had a point.
“I didn’t know you were a Stalinist,” she said. “That’s decidedly unromantic.”
“That’s flippant,” I said. “What you saw today is a system engineered to eat itself.”
“Sure. Why are you surprised?” she said. “You think that everyone should share your views on everything, and you’re surprised and offended when they don’t. I never heard of L. S. Stepanyan, okay? How am I supposed to have an opinion? I take your word for it. Until I don’t. And then you get upset. Anyway, the Soviet Union is long gone. Get used to it.”
“I’d settle for any place that made a passing effort to keep itself going,” I said. “I’d settle for France.”
“No you wouldn’t,” she said. “They eat songbirds.”
Long after she had gone to bed I was still staring through her living room window at an endless stillborn suburbia. The moon was out and every identical silver street led to some privileged purlieu where the patio bricks and gravel driveways and refinanced cars and oversize barbecue grills all washed up; all the detritus, it seemed to me, of a million lives blighted by prosperity.
X
Happy Few
Darren was a dick before he got stabbed, but afterward he had an excuse. He was surly and superior about everything to everyone, and they made allowances, backed down, gave him beer. By they I do not mean me. That is why he shoved me down a flight of marble steps in the Old Courthouse in Hickory one month after he was attacked.
I have a book he gave me long before the stabbing. His inscription reads “To Nathan—a Great Brother.” We all called each other brother then, but already you could make out Darren’s trajectory from problem child to difficult teenager to adult asshole. Shane told me Darren got that book from him in the first place, as a gift.
And yet, Darren is about the only thing Shane and I never discuss. Though Shane doesn’t keep in touch with him, he still thinks that if you take an eight-inch blade in your back three times you might deserve some slack. But after I reeled down those marble steps I woke up in the emergency room with blood trickling from my ear. Ten years on and I still can’t hear right. Healing wounds like Darren’s cracked ribs and punctured lung mean nothing to me. He might as well have had the flu.
Darren’s assailant was a black kid named Frank. I used to sit next to him in Concert Choir. Obviously this was years before he stabbed Darren. He was very handsome, very smart, and his parents had brought him up to be a gentleman. Even his smile was a courtesy. Of course I am describing him before he developed a taste for cocaine and stabbed Darren. He now lives in the Pendleton Correctional Facility with twenty-four years left to serve. He joined the Nation of Islam and told his parole board he has no regrets.
Frank and Darren lived together for almost a year after Darren graduated from university, and they were nominally searching for work. In truth, Darren was smoking dope and Frank was snorting coke and they didn’t do much else until they had an argument about the electricity bill. Darren huffed out and went to a coffee shop just off campus. It was new, with folding c
hairs and tables because the permanent furniture hadn’t arrived in time for the opening. Enormous plate windows let in copious sunshine, and the new owner’s extensive jazz collection was in constant rotation.
A half hour later Frank appeared in the doorway with a U.S. Marine survival knife in his right hand. One eyewitness described him surveying the shop calmly, as though he might be deciding between an espresso or a latte before entering. Two other witnesses, however, noticed him spit several times through the door and onto the new beige carpet. Crack cocaine causes very heavy salivation, but none of the half dozen students and hippies assembled there would have known that. Another witness said that he seemed so calm the knife was not alarming. “He carried it like a tape measure or a clipboard,” the newspaper quoted. “Just a tool for doing his job.”
Darren was not facing the door. Frank took three long strides through the room and angled the blade forward into Darren’s right shoulder beneath the collarbone. Smoothly, methodically, he withdrew it and placed it neatly in Darren’s back just inside the left shoulder blade. He repeated this procedure once more in the same area but struck bone.
Later Darren described the sensation of being stabbed as similar to being punched, but not very hard. He had no idea what had happened until later, when Frank was already gone.
A customer at an adjacent table intervened. He was a grizzled hippie who went there every afternoon to condemn the newspaper page by page, loudly. Darren, who had been every day since it opened, had never spoken to him, but reported afterward that the management thought him a blight on their prospects. With one motion he rose from his chair, scooped it from behind him, and flung it over Darren’s head and into Frank’s face. For this valorous act he received two wounds himself as he scrambled for another chair and Frank pursued him. His left biceps and left thigh were both slashed before he could get a second unfolded chair safely interposed between himself and the blade.
All of this transpired in under a minute. No one had thought to move or scream; they watched in disbelief. The hippie circled to Darren’s side in order to shield him, too. Frank concluded that he had accomplished enough for one afternoon. He strode through the door and turned for a final inspection. Dropping the knife on the pavement with a clatter, he walked calmly away.
Both victims looked worse than they felt, with blood blossoms spreading over their clothes. They were persuaded to lie down until an ambulance arrived.
Darren had a dime bag of marijuana in the pocket of his denim jacket, which the police graciously overlooked. Frank turned himself in the next morning.
“That sounds like something that would happen to you,” said Shane. “But Darren?” I have never known what he meant by that. Anyway, there was consultation among us “brothers” over who would take Darren in. He couldn’t return to the apartment he had shared with Frank, and he didn’t want to live with his parents. Shane was in Vincennes with a serious girlfriend; Matt was in Lafayette but just married and soon bound for Costa Rica to study lizards. Flynn was in Indianapolis but his apartment had only one bedroom. Peter was still in Bloomington, sharing a house with a pair of blond strippers named Kiki and Anna. Both of them rode Harley-Davidsons. This was the obvious choice for a quick and pleasant convalescence, but Peter said that he couldn’t stand the constant drama himself. Naturally he had been saying this for two years.
I invited Darren to join me in Hickory. It meant sharing my room, but I had ample space. I shared a house with a couple of Hickory State graduate students named Rick and Alan. They spent their days in the library and their evenings in bars. There was nothing wrong with the arrangement in theory, and they agreed instantly when I explained.
I was in Hickory just for a semester, counting belted kingfishers on the White River. A Boy Scout could have done it, and the Parks Department should have known that, but since they signed my checks I didn’t enlighten them. The same Parks Department had an acute rat problem a few years before I arrived. Instead of implementing a sensible poison regime they wanted to do something “green” to burnish their public image. They bought three great Eurasian eagle-owls and introduced them within city limits. Anyone who had ever looked at one of those owls could have predicted the result, or so you’d think. Within a week nobody had seen a rat in about five square miles. Within two weeks puppies and kittens were missing. About three weeks later both the mayor’s Jack Russells were found eviscerated on separate rooftops. The town panicked, but the owls moved on to find tastier or easier fare, and the rats returned in force.
Every morning I clambered into a canoe provided by this illustrious Parks Department and paddled around looking for holes. Kingfishers nest in tunnels three to six feet deep, which they dig into natural mud banks. In other surveys I liked to get in and greet my birds personally, but all I could do was stare at the nose of the boat while I waited for the male to bring home some dinner. If he did, the nest was active, and if he didn’t, I had wasted two or three hours.
I enjoyed my work—even the dull canoes and kingfishers work—too much to take it seriously and get a graduate degree. A real ornithologist spends his life in a database: I was the underpaid field hand who collected the information in that database. I was like a voracious reader unwilling to taint or corrupt his passion by submitting to years of studying postcolonialism or feminist theory. Shane opted for library science instead of poetry for that reason. I didn’t want to become versed in alleles or study birds’ resource allocation. Field work was just fine.
Darren whimpered and cried and screamed in his sleep. I think I would have too—in fact, not long after he moved in, I did. I began to dream that Frank surrounded the house—in the morning I would wonder what that could even mean. I pictured him slashing the screen door and rushing through—not calmly as reports suggested he had at the coffee shop, but urgently with the blade already raised. And I dreamed that he came for me rather than Darren. Darren’s attack as I understood it was too surreal to be convincing: sunshine, jazz, the aroma of coffee, and those absurd folding chairs. It seemed like something that had occurred on a film set with no real consequence: the actors had to be told to lie down afterward. But in those first few nights listening to, absorbing, Darren’s own fear I shaped a different sort of scene for myself, a moment of high drama and tragedy, as though I were a penitent Claudius (though I had done nothing) and Frank a deranged Hamlet bursting from the wings. In the daytime certain things became troublesome, too. I could not picture eating steak again: drawing a serrated blade through moist flesh. This thought led me into difficulties even buttering my toast in the morning.
Ultimately I broke that spell with a joke. Every morning, holding the butter knife, head still reeling from the dreams of the night before, I asked: Is this a dagger I see before me? Darren was never awake at that hour, but when I told him about it he did not think it was very funny.
And it is worth mentioning here that when Darren shoved me down the marble steps of the Old Courthouse, there was nothing dramatic about it. A hand on my chest, and a dizzy adrenaline surge as I reeled, and then I was in the ER with a Syrian doctor inspecting my ear and muttering “Oh.” His mustache was perfectly trimmed. It did not and does not seem dramatic, or tragic, or even surreal. Just stupid.
In the daytime Darren’s only ambition and activity was getting stoned. He had arranged his futon against the wall with a stereo next to his head, and when he woke up at noon or thereabouts he simply moved back in order to sit up, then pressed Play on some aging rocker indulging his guitar—I cannot listen to Mark Knopfler to this day—and lit up. I stopped bringing him food after a few days of this so that occasionally he might have to get up. I didn’t hold it against him, though. It seemed to me that he might need a lair like a wounded animal and that he would know when to venture out of it.
The first clash we had came about over a parcel he had delivered to the house courtesy of the U.S. Postal Service.
I had magazine subscriptions under pseudonyms as a joke. My copy of Audubon was always
addressed to Ziggy Stardust, for example. One afternoon a large box arrived addressed to Saint Francis (Bacon), who usually took my National Geographic. I even signed for it.
“That’s for me,” said Darren, who had heard the knock on the door and entered the living room for what might have been the first time.
“What is it?” I said. Every inch of it was tightly taped and the return address was in Tennessee.
“A care package,” he said. I handed it over.
“Have you got a knife?” he said. I was momentarily startled by the question. Steak and toast, it turns out, were just the first step.
“Don’t be a girl,” he said, and tossed the package onto the sofa before thudding off to the kitchen. I say thudding because Darren has a strangely aggressive walk—he’s not heavy, but he stamps his heels down first and rolls onto the balls of his feet. He returned with a steak knife and cut through several layers of tape around three edges of the box.
Inside were a small rock, an old shoe, and a pound of marijuana. The first two items were for weight and space, I suppose. The marijuana was very tightly wrapped, but Darren cut the top of that open carefully.
I was slow to react—that is, to get angry—because a pound of marijuana is very impressive. The fragrance is overpowering, of course, but the leaf itself is very pretty; still austerely geometric even in fragments, and still green long after cutting.
“Beautiful,” said Darren.
“Did you just have a pound of marijuana delivered to my house, Darren?”
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