by Jeff Hull
He had come on as a ranch boy working in the law to keep the home place afloat. His parents, he was quick to tell Tom, still had the homestead out near Dutton. Mostly he was sharp and quick and every question made Tom felt like he’d just stolen something. Nothing was on offer. It was all clever tricks. Spenser MacDonald was there to expose you and beat your brains out for having the gall to pull it off.
Even Tom’s most honest responses felt dirty in MacDonald’s rephrasing. Though at home he slept naked, he lay in the hotel bed in his boxers and a T-shirt. He left the TV on to mask the disconcerting city sounds—the CMT channel, as loud as he thought Brad Paisley could be without bothering people in adjoining rooms. For a minute he thought about Marlo Stark, somewhere out among the lights of this city. For a minute he wondered if she’d come to the trial.
She must be aware of it. The thought made him remember that small wrinkle in the fabric of his world, the brief awareness of something different. A curtain pulled aside momentarily to reveal a peek down a corridor into a world that seemed bright and colorful, though he could make out no permanent objects. But that was just a tiny shadow behind him now. In the morning he woke at five and showered and realized he had almost three hours to do nothing in.
* * *
Josie opened her eyes at 6:30 a.m., fully awake, her gut electric with anxiety. She’d been dreaming about anxiety, her body already juiced up in flight-or-fight for no apparent reason. She had been thinking so much about what she would have to do today. She knew things that nobody else did.
She wouldn’t be able to talk about those things—wouldn’t even if she was asked, not today, but she wanted to guard her secret and she feared so much that somehow, some way, the lawyers would make her say something about it in front of everyone. In the shower, she thought about the times she had been alone with Mike. The first night at the reservoir, when he had appeared so sneakily, the things he had prompted her to talk about. She liked Mike. She wanted to like Mike.
She wanted to like him more. Now there was an imperative. Now they were linked in a way she’d never been linked to anyone before. Josie showered and went with her parents to breakfast. She ate a spinach and cheese omelet. Her father seemed so far away, baffled more than distant, but out of reach in any case. And her mother.
Her mother was driving her insane. She actually ordered Josie coffee. Josie never drank coffee. It was as if her mother was trying to make up for sixteen years of neglect in one day—but her mother had never been neglectful. That’s what made it feel so crazy. Her mother wanted to talk.
A lot. Josie went into snail mode. Up into the shell. She offered almost no conversations. She had decided to wear a church outfit, a navy dress that reached below her knees. The courtroom was already filling when they arrived. It didn’t look like the TV courtrooms. This was benches and cheap carpet and stained plywood everywhere. She could feel the floorboards bounce under her feet as she walked down the aisle to where they chose to sit. Coach Warner was there.
Arlen Alderdice was there. Wyatt Aarstad. Britnee came in with her mother—they’d stayed at a different hotel to save money. Ainsley and her parents had stayed at the Hilton Garden Inn, and they were already seated when she walked in. Ainsley apparently decided the occasion was worthy of formal wear. She wore a dress Josie had never seen before—royal blue with spaghetti straps. The judge arrived and sat up on a dais that was smaller than what Josie had thought.
Then Mike came in, a guard grasping his arm above the elbow and jerking him into place. Mike looked around, seeing who he knew. Josie saw his glance elicit a tighter lip set, a higher chin angle from his mother, on the other side of the courtroom. He looked at Josie longer than anyone, long enough that she had a moment of panic that he knew what she was hiding.
But he couldn’t. Josie had no idea how boring a trial could be. The first hours were spent going through motions, introducing evidence, officers on the stand talking about what they saw. None of them had been there. None of them knew anything about it. It struck her as ridiculous that these people, so far away from where she and Mike and Matt lived, how they interacted and moved through their days, should have anything to say about what happened in Dumont.
But they would have everything to say about it. Ainsley was called first. Josie felt her gut clench when she heard Ainsley’s name—for hours, there had been a litany of nothing, words and terms and people who didn’t matter, and then Ainsley Martin. Ainsley sat in the chair and raised her hand and told the story pretty much the way Josie remembered it. There was no cross examination.
Arlen Alderdice came next. He told the same story Ainsley did, although he remembered more about the burning beer box, about the exact words Matt had said. Mike’s lawyer, the skinny guy with the fold-over gut, asked him a lot of questions. What were the exact words? Did Matt say “kill”? Did Matt threaten injury? Tell us again, what Matt said when Michael took the burning beer box off his head …
Then it was Britnee’s turn. What she remembered was the arrival, Matt holding back, searching, it seemed to her when she was prompted.
“Did Matt Brunner appear to you like he might do serious bodily harm to Michael La Valle?” Mike’s lawyer, Gossens, asked.
“He was definitely going to hurt him,” Britnee said.
“Objection!” from Spenser MacDonald.
“We’re going there,” Gossens said.
“Get there,” the judge said.
“Had you ever seen Matt Brunner hurt somebody in the past?” Gossens asked Britnee.
Britnee looked at Josie and seemed to be asking for help, though Josie didn’t know what to offer.
“I know Matt beat up some boys before. I saw it a couple of times.”
“When you were there, when you saw Matt Brunner about to beat up other boys, did you know it was going to happen?”
“Well, yeah,” Britnee said.
“How?”
“He kind of said so. He was always pretty clear about, ‘I’m going to kick your a-s-s,’” Britnee said.
“And when he kicked somebody’s a-s-s, did he stop when the fight was over?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, when it was obvious that he had won, did he stop?”
“Okay, I see what you mean. No. Matt was—the couple times I saw it happen, when Matt won the fight he kept on beating the other guy.”
The prosecuting attorney asked Britnee if the people she saw get beat up were ever seriously hurt, and she started to say she didn’t think so before Mike’s lawyer jumped in to object that she was not a medical expert. The court recessed for lunch with Josie knowing she was next or soon.
* * *
Josie Frehse broke Tom’s heart on the stand. Both attorneys wanted to use her. Gossens wanted to show what an awful, abusive partner Matt Brunner had been, and he wasn’t wrong. Except for years, he wasn’t wrong. In moments Matt had treated Josie unacceptably and those moments escalated in recent time and could be a pattern. Tom watched Josie sit in front of several dozen people—many she knew, many she didn’t—and tell the story that nobody was telling that night in Pep’s.
The pulling of her by her hair from the truck—Gossens, the attorney, got it all out of her—the punch, the kicks, and the tears pouring down her face while she told it. And then it was MacDonald’s turn to rip from her what she knew of Mike LaValle, his possessiveness, his talk of killing and hurting. He made her admit, in front of her mother and father and many people they knew well, that she had had sex with Mike LaValle. It all seemed so teenaged to Tom, though it was easy to see how a skilled attorney could turn it into plot.
Mike LaValle’s time on the stand was much briefer than Josie’s. Gossens built up a long trail of confrontation and threat. He crafted a story that ended at a bonfire with flames on a kid’s head and death threats.
“I thought he was going to kill me,” Mike said. “I thought a lot of times he was going to kill me, but this time he said he was going to kill me, and I thought he would.”<
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“If you thought that a lot,” Spenser MacDonald queried him on cross, “and you’re still alive, wouldn’t that suggest that your assessment of when somebody really means they’re going to kill you isn’t very accurate?”
Sitting and watching, Tom hated both of the attorneys for not trying to reach a truth. They were, he realized, trying to be right, which was such a different thing. He thought about how many times had he exhorted high school boys to kill someone, or some team.
Nobody took that literally. He knew Mike LaValle’s circumstances and he knew Matt Brunner bullied the kid. He knew Matt Brunner. He knew about the hazing that … dissolved everything he had been building. Mike spent most of the time looking dead ahead, but on a couple of occasions he turned to see the crowd and at least twice he caught Tom’s eye.
The kid was terrified, clearly, but what Tom took away was acknowledgment. Thank you for bearing witness. There was not much else. Tom was never called as a witness. The closing arguments came at the end of the day.
“Michael LaValle provoked Matthew Brunner at every level,” MacDonald, the prosecutor, opened with. “He ignored early warnings. He pursued Matthew’s long-time girlfriend until he actually slept with her. He threatened Matthew’s social status. And when it came time for Mr. LaValle to account for his continual impositions, he elevated the response beyond any reasonable norm.
“This is Montana,” MacDonald said, standing at the jury box, looking them each in their sincere eyes. “This is Montana. This is a place where hard work and waking up early and busting your gut is just a way to get by. It doesn’t make you special, it makes you one of us. You know what it’s like. I don’t have to tell you. I can tell you what it’s not like here. It’s not like New York or California where people bring lawsuits over hangnails and hot coffee and want to protect murderers and rapists. In those places, juries don’t seem to understand what happens in real life. But that’s not Montana. Wherever you’re from in Montana, you know what life is like.
“If you’re really from Montana, you know this case. This case is simple. A high school boy with an eye for trouble moved in on another high school boy’s girlfriend. The boyfriend, an enormously popular kid, a great athlete, the quarterback on the football team, the leading scorer on the basketball team, a kid with a bright future, an unlimited future, he reacts.
“Well, who wouldn’t? Maybe he says some things. Are the things he says real? Does he carry a gun? A knife? Or is ‘I’m going to kill you’ something he says with his friends when he plays video games? When they play basketball. ‘I’m going to slaughter you.’ ‘I’m going to crush you.’ Isn’t that how boys talk? But what happened with this boy, this mixed-blood boy, is he got paranoid. And he brought a knife to a fistfight.
“I want all of you,” MacDonald said, sweeping his arm across the jury box, “to think about this. Michael LaValle could have gone another route. He was sleeping with Matthew Brunner’s girlfriend. He deserved a beating for that, and Matthew told him he’d get one. For Montana boys, there are times when people act badly and other people can sort it out. It costs society nothing. People get corrected when they’re behaving badly. There are lesson to be learned. You take your beating and you go on. You do not thrust a seven-inch blade into someone’s guts and watch them bleed out in the snow.”
The moment MacDonald stopped talking, Gossens popped up. “Your honor, I have a motion.”
The judge indicated he should go on, though she seemed dubious. “I would like to enter a motion that this case be settled by fistfight.”
That sparked a sizzling hum in the courtroom. The judge squinted to figure out how to not be outrun on this. The prosecutor’s table was a huddle of heads.
Gossens went on: “The prosecutor’s closing argument suggests that my client deserved a beating and that, being a Montana boy, he should have taken it like a man. If that’s the way we do justice here in Montana, then I am filing a settlement motion. If the prosecutor can knock me out in a fistfight, he wins and my client goes to jail for a long as he likes. If I win, my client goes free.”
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” the judge said.
“But it’s exactly what the prosecutor is trying to sell the jury on. And here in Montana, there’s no legal precedent to preclude it. I’m happy to risk my face against his.”
That’s how it all starts, Tom thought. As long as every affront deserved a stolid, physical response, nobody had a chance. The day took a long pause while legal issues were pursued. In the end, the prosecutor risked censure. None of Mike’s witnesses were impugned. When they all filtered out of the courtroom, which felt more like a room where you might go to earn your driver’s license, Tom stood in the parking lot and remembered Josie on the stand. She would at least get out, he hoped.
That afternoon, all the people summoned as potential witnesses got in their vehicles and drove back home to Dumont. The following day, the only Dumont people left in that room to hear Mike LaValle found guilty of manslaughter were the Brunners, Caroline Jensen, and Tom Warner.
* * *
The prison did not look the way she had imagined it, not like on TV, though it was dirtier and more demeaning than she had imagined. She was X-rayed and searched, and they opened the zucchini muffins she had made, poking through them with wire probes. The disdain of the guards shocked her. Josie couldn’t imagine being so unfriendly to people she didn’t know. Pretty-little-white-girl-from-Dumont point of view, she thought then.
That’s why the world is different than I think it is. She sat at a table. There was no thick, distorting plexiglass, no speaker to talk into, just a table with cold, metal bench seats. Several other tables in the room were already filled with inmates and their visitors. Except for the jumpsuits, they looked like people she had seen all her life. Mikie came in escorted by a guard. He wore a beige jumpsuit, but he was not handcuffed or chained. He wore his mean, misunderstood look, the same one, she thought, he’d had when he walked away from stabbing Matt. He had an oval bruise under his left eye, and when he drew closer she could see swelling all along that cheekbone. She had been warned not to hug him.
He must have been warned of the same, because he sat right down across from her. And his face changed. He stared at her, searching, and smiled right away. It was not a huge smile, but it radiated the relief he was feeling, as if there was somebody in front of him who could finally see him. That made her happy. Even knowing the things she had come to tell him, it felt good to know she brought him back to himself.
“Are you okay?” was the first thing she asked him.
He nodded.
“What’s it … like?”
“Pretty awful.”
Josie didn’t know what to say to that, and knew that where he was and where he was going was not the territory of the conversation she’d come to map out.
“Is there anything I can send you? I made these myself,” she said, nodding at the muffins on the table.
“The food here is worse than school,” Mikie said. He huffed a little laugh.
“No way.”
“Dude, way. So way.”
“That’s awful.”
Josie desperately wanted to avoid silences, so she lifted her chin, a gesture toward the swelling on his face. “What happened?”
She saw the change, the curtain come over his eyes, closing off the view into that part of him. He shrugged. “Things happen here.”
For a moment she wished he wouldn’t try to show her how tough he was. She didn’t like people showing her they were tough anymore. But then she understood that it wasn’t for her. He would need that to survive now. “Have you talked to your lawyer about your appeal?”
Mikie lifted a smaller shrug as if nothing could be less consequential. Which prompted Josie to think about what was consequential, about why she was there.
“I came here because I wanted to see you,” Josie said.
“Thank you, Josie. I mean that. I know it’s not, like, where you’d
want to hang out.”
“But also because I have something to tell you.”
She could see that whatever she said next would come as a total surprise, so she said it.
“I’m pregnant. The baby’s yours. There’s no doubt.”
Josie had thought about how it would happen for the entire four-hour drive here. It was true, she knew. She’d had a period between when she last been with Matt and when she was with Mike. And then she didn’t have periods anymore. All the way here, she had thought about the different ways to say it, the different things she might say about it. It made her feel so old, so much older than him. She had imagined all the ways he might respond. What are you going to do? Are you going to keep it? Are you sure it’s mine? What do you want me to do? What will we name it? Oh my god, a baby?
Why are you telling me this? If he reacted badly, she had told herself, it might be just him being furious that life had given him something he was so ill-equipped to deal with, and it would have nothing to do with her or the baby. If he tried to tell her what to do, she would shut him down.
She’d already decided that. She had talked to her mother for a long time about it, tried to tell her everything she knew about Mike, tried to think about anything he might say.
But he said something she hadn’t anticipated: “They have to let me marry you. We can do it in here if we have to. They have to let me.”
“We’re not going to get married,” she said. “My first marriage isn’t going to happen inside a prison.” That felt reasonable. She couldn’t tell if he liked her answer, but the certainty with which she’d said it snuffed out immediate feedback.