Nothing Lost

by John Gregory Dunne

  UVA, J.J. said.

  What’s UVA?

  For people whose first choice was Harvard Law and didn’t get in.

  Like SMU Law and Osceola Community?

  Something like that, J.J. said.

  And this is a starter job for her. She thought she’d come out to the sticks, the people out here aren’t so smart as she thinks she is, she’d move up fast, and then she’s gone. Chicago. L.A. New York.

  Even during sex Allie had the ability to make connections. She’s from Connecticut, Allie said.

  Farmington.

  Where’s that?

  The fancy part of Hartford. J.J. had of course checked out Patsy’s résumé when he conducted the job interview, and hired her. Her father was CFO of a secondary insurance company. Steadman Feiffer. The third. Her mother had been a vice-president of the Hartford Junior League. Her twin brother was autistic and had been in an institution since he was two. Steadman IV. No other siblings. Economics degree, without honors, from Bowdoin. Bowdoin was almost certainly a second choice, or third, as UVA Law School was. No one not from Maine goes to college in Maine as a first choice. Vice-chairman of Campus Republicans. Summer intern for the Republican minority in the Connecticut legislature. Hobbies: golf and tennis. Golf handicap: 7. She actually put that down. She must have known the résumé was thin and needed filling out.

  You know a lot about her, Allie said.

  And you’re asking a lot of questions about her.

  You want to fuck her.

  No, I don’t. She’s a harassment suit waiting to happen.

  I didn’t say she wasn’t a harassment suit. I said you wanted to fuck her. You just won’t.

  It was a discussion J.J. was not prepared to continue. How’s Max? Still queer?

  If he wasn’t, J.J., you’d still be working for him.

  I should know better than to have a postcoital discussion in a broom closet, J.J. thought.

  Señor J.J., Allie said. She gave it the Spanish pronunciation—Señor Hay-Hay.

  “How did it play?” It was Poppy calling direct from one of the hideaways on the House side of the Capitol. She knew J.J. would never remain in Willie Erskine’s holding pattern. But she always had Willie try. WH must have rung off. She had waited until a recess during her subcommittee hearing to make the call. The subcommittee had something to do with the economy. She was the chair. Democrats think you can tax this great nation into prosperity, was what she said every time she gaveled a session to order. A Poppy-ism grown a little wilted. Always objected to by the minority. And never sustained by the chair.

  “Led the letters page.”

  “I meant the protest.”

  Of course. Poppy would be interested in the march of university coeds and women faculty members who had descended on the A.G.’s office yesterday protesting his decision three days earlier not to prosecute Jocko Cannon for allegedly attacking Brittany Barnes, the SMU sophomore swimmer who had refused to withdraw the battery charges she had filed against him. For allegedly dragging her down three flights of stairs in Rhino Hall. And allegedly fracturing her skull and cheekbone. And allegedly knocking out her two front teeth. “Allegedly” was a word that adhered to Jocko Cannon like a tick. It was whispered in the courthouse that his father, Ralph Cannon, Sr., retained an attorney whose sole function was to monitor the movements of his son, and to be available at odd hours for the spreading of paternal largesse and the removal of potential embarrassments. He’s just a company lawyer, Poppy said, no one special, it’s what company lawyers do, it bloats their hourly. In other words she did not deny that Ralph Cannon, Sr., kept babysitters watching Jocko around the clock. The A.G.’s decision not to proceed against Jocko would allow him to play against Florida State for the national championship New Year’s night in the Orange Bowl. J.J. knew that Poppy’s sympathy for Brittany Barnes was nil. Nor did she doubt that her multiple fractures were the work of Jocko Cannon. A bad kid, she had said more than once, someday his father is not going to be able to buy his way out of a scrape. What she cared about was how the A.G.’s decision might inconvenience Gerry Wormwold if she should decide to challenge him in a gubernatorial primary.

  “Page four, below the fold, in both the Herald and the Times-Ledger,” J.J. said. “The story was dead when the A.G. said he wasn’t going to move forward. Jocko can play. Rhinos versus the Seminoles. That’s all that counts. You could hardly call it a protest. A bunch of women marching is just a bunch of women marching.”

  That had been Allie’s verdict.

  Allie had been out on the steps in the event the march turned ugly and she had filled him in. The Kiowa and Cap City papers had both estimated a hundred and fifty marchers. A figure that came from the Rhino athletic department. Bigger than that, Allie said. The jock flacks would like to pretend it didn’t happen. Closer to three hundred. Plus the football goons. Brittany Barnes had walked with the women. Many of her supporters carried placards showing her in a neck brace, her smile showing the gap in her mouth where her front teeth had been. The football goons also carried photo blowups, theirs of ten or fifteen Rhino players whose teeth had been knocked out in games or scrimmages. One of the toothless Rhinos was Jocko Cannon. HEY, BRIT, GET A DENTIST, the crude lettering on Jocko’s poster said. JOCKO DID.

  That lawyer paid for the football posters, Allie said.

  Leo Cassady, J.J. said.

  He also had one made up that said THE TRUTH WILL SET YOU FREE, Allie said. He’s a cunt.

  The epithet Allie reserved for her special favorites.

  Wormwold declined to meet with the marchers. Nor would he answer questions forwarded to him by reporters about pressure from Rhino alumni not to compromise SMU’s title hopes by prosecuting Jocko Cannon. A statement was given to the press: “My office is dedicated to the highest principles of the law. We do not bend under pressure. The facts and only the facts decide which cases go forward.”

  His interpretation of the facts has bumped the Rhinos back up to a twelve-and-a-half-point favorite, Allie said.

  Bet your wallet, not your heart, Allie.

  Always take twelve and a half points, J.J.

  The Athletic Department had also issued a statement over the signature of Dr. John Strong, the Rhino coach. “Miss Barnes,” Coach Strong said, “is an honorable young woman who unfortunately is being led astray by special interests with an agenda of their own. I do not think these special interests have the best interests of the university’s football program at heart. Nevertheless, it is my intention to invite Miss Barnes and her family to Miami to cheer the Rhinos on against the Seminoles. A vacation in Miami will help the healing process.”

  Brittany Barnes did not join the healing process at the Orange Bowl.

  Poppy did not make it to Miami either.

  She had bronchitis. Or was it an inner-ear infection? The A.G. wondered why she was not down in the Orange Bowl with other state officials rooting the Rhinos on from the SMU cheering section. J.J. knew that Poppy did not really care for football, a secret she would not reveal even if lashed to the stake and the Worm had a match in his hand to ignite the kindling. At the hacienda in Bacadéhuachi, the children played soccer, as had Poppy when she was at Foxcroft until someone had called her a fast little Mexican. She always wore a diamond rhino pin designed by Harry Winston, but in fact her only real interest in football was whether John Strong would someday run for public office, and become a possible rival. A far more significant presence than the Worm. She never missed an opportunity to praise him. Gridiron John Strong, she would say. The Rhino football program without John Strong, she would say, is unthinkable.

  You should have said you had genital herpes, J.J. said. It’s the only excuse that has wheels. Nobody’s going to doubt that. Even the Worm.

  She kicked him under the covers.

  They had spent most of New Year’s afternoon in bed at their house in Proctor Park, the wooded section of Cap City where the fortune that Poppy had inherited from Jim Ford allowed them to live. Outside i
t was snowing, a blizzard in the making, the streets empty. In the kitchen, Esmerelda, the latest import from Bacadéhuachi, was making quesadillas, and occasionally they would hear snatches of a mournful ballad about love in the sun on the Sonoran plateau. It occurred to J.J. that he had never spent so much private time with Poppy since she had first gone to Washington. The congressman and the prosecutor enjoying the New Year.

  He wondered if Esmé was the diminutive for Esmerelda.

  Even here my attention is wandering, he thought.

  They watched the Orange Bowl on the flat thirty-six-inch screen in the bedroom, nibbling Esmerelda’s quesadillas and rooting the Rhinos on as everyone else in South Midland was meant to be doing, as if it were a penal violation not to. Nine seconds left, one last desperate play by Florida State, down 30 to 28, a fourth-down Hail Mary pass from midfield that fell short and was nearly intercepted in the end zone. One second left on the game clock, Rhinos national champions. Except not yet. Penalty flag. Unsportsmanlike conduct on South Midland number 94, Jocko Cannon, for spearing the Florida State quarterback in the head with his helmet as he lay on the ground after the play was completed. The quarterback’s name was Vinny Vincent. He was crumpled on the field, not moving, the announcers wondering if he were play-acting, not really hurt. Fifteen-yard penalty, rewind the clock, replay the down, Florida State was in field-goal range. Jocko Cannon became enraged at the referee, Tyler Cohen, and pushed him to the ground. Tyler Cohen immediately ejected Jocko from the game. Jocko went berserk, and began swinging his helmet at the Florida State players. Both benches emptied, meeting in a midfield melee that John Strong and the Seminole coach, Bubba Guillaume, were unable to contain. A real rumble, Guillaume said after the game, an ice pack against his eye. It took Metro-Dade police officers seventeen minutes to restore order on the field. Vinny Vincent was removed in a crash cart, and was later diagnosed at Jackson Memorial Hospital as having a concussion and a subdural hematoma. Fifteen Rhinos and fourteen Seminoles were ejected from the game. With so many ejections, both teams were represented by makeshift lineups when Florida State attempted a winning field goal. The kick from fifty-one yards was good, final score 31–30, once-beaten Florida State took the national championship from the previously unbeaten Rhinos.

  J.J. wondered if Allie had gotten a flutter down.

  “The referee, Mr. Tyler Cohen, made a questionable call,” John Strong said at the postgame press conference. “Jocko was trying to hold up, from my perspective, and I’m sure the film will back my coaching staff and not Mr. Tyler Cohen. Of course, Jocko lost it, and he should not have, but there would have been no reason to if the referee, Mr. Tyler Cohen, had made the proper decision and not succumbed to the moment for whatever reason. We all, and I am including Mr. Tyler Cohen, will have to look in our hearts and see where we went wrong, and how we can improve.”

  “Especially Mr. Tyler Cohen,” J.J. said.

  “He’s cute, that one,” Poppy said about John Strong later that evening. By that time she saw the unpleasantness at the Orange Bowl only as an event that she would try to reconfigure to her advantage at some future date. The here and the now were never long in Poppy’s sight line. She was always working three or four moves down the road. In the night, she had settled somewhere else. “This Maurice Dodd. Is he as good as you?”

  “No. He is not as good as I am.”

  “Can you get rid of him?”

  “No. I can’t get rid of him.”

  Or perhaps J.J. only imagined Poppy had asked these questions. Because he knew she was thinking them. What was it about Edgar Parlance that rang her bell? Her natural political habitat was not one occupied by Edgar Parlance, African-American handyman who in death had exposed racial intolerance in the heartland and brought a nation closer together. Then it came to J.J. Never underestimate Poppy’s reach. You’d think I’d know that by now. She’s thinking vice-president two national elections hence. Perhaps not actively yet, but he was sure the seed was germinating. Edgar Parlance was a way to broaden her appeal. Poppy McClure, surrogate healer, was how she would present herself. A long shot, but nevertheless. If the Worm had chosen him and not Maurice Dodd, Poppy would have been at the Loomis County Courthouse every day. Available to the national press that would descend on Regent when the trial began. The big print and broadcast organizations had already booked most of the available hotel and motel space in Regent and surrounding areas. Poppy would see the trial as the J.J. and Poppy McClure Show. Actually as the Poppy McClure Show, co-starring J.J. McClure. Sound bites throughout the broadcast day.

  “Prosecutor politics,” Alicia Barbara, the anchor for the cable-TV show Courthouse Square had called the assignment of Maurice Dodd. “A journeyman career prosecutor who would get the job done,” she said. “In his usual unbending way,” she said. Absent the “flamboyant style” of J.J. McClure. “A political no-brainer” for Gerry Wormwold.

  A cogent analysis, J.J. thought.

  In fact, Maurice Dodd was much on his mind.

  It was hard to avoid mention of him. Or the enjoyment Maurice Dodd took in the attention he had never before received.

  A little envious, are you? Allie had said to J.J.

  Maurice Dodd’s profile in The New York Times was more generous about his abilities than Alicia Barbara had been.

  He had joined the A.G.’s office immediately after his graduation from South Midland University Law School twenty-four years earlier. He was from Higgins, a crossroads community in Tribune County near the Wyoming border, population 112. Country, like me, J.J. thought. No. Country perhaps, but not like me. His father, Cletis, was a general storekeeper, his mother, Rebekah, a homemaker who raised Maurice, his four sisters and three brothers. His younger sister, Bethel, had been his secretary during his entire tenure with the A.G. She called him Mr. Dodd, he called her Miss Dodd. A form of address that was continued outside the office. J.J. wondered if anyone had ever made a move on Bethel Dodd. No. She had the sex appeal of a fire hydrant.

  Maurice had lost his right arm as an infantry lieutenant in Vietnam. It wasn’t a problem, he liked to say, I’m left-handed. An ostentatious way of drawing attention to his disability that infuriated Max Cline when he was running the Homicide Bureau. He was fragged, Max told J.J. one day at lunch. No, really, Max said. I know someone who served with someone who served under Maurice in the Mekong Delta. The gay network, J.J. remembered thinking. Always in touch. The someone who Max’s someone knew was a scout assigned to Kilo Company, 199th LIB. That’s the outfit whose unit brass Maurice always wears as a lapel pin, Max said. The scout’s squad leader was a nineteen-year-old Mexican corporal from East Los Angeles whose mother would regularly send him packages of chile delicacies from the bodegas in Boyle Heights. Like everyone else in Kilo Company, except Maurice Dodd, the corporal wanted out of ’Nam, and one day it hit him that his mother’s care packages offered an opportunity to rotate out a little quicker than the army had planned. He knew that a rat bite could send him to the military hospital in Cam Ranh Bay, and if the toxins in the infection were militant enough, it could put him on a plane back to Travis AFB in California. The downside was it might cost him a foot. It was a risk he was willing to take, so he opened a can of pipián ranchero and spread the contents between his toes and on the soles of his feet. The pipián made the rats in his hooch even more aggressive than usual, Max’s source had said. They were about the size of squirrels anyway, he said, and they loved that chilosa paste so much they were ready to move to East L.A. Maurice heard about the scheme, however, and had the corporal court-martialed. Cowardice in the face of the enemy, ninety days in Long Binh stockade. Didn’t matter. Rat bites became an epidemic in Kilo 199, pipián ranchero a rival for Panama Red. Then Maurice brought Article 15 charges against nine men in his platoon who had serenaded him on Christmas Eve with a carol that went:

  Jingle bells, mortar shells,

  VC in the grass.

  Take your Merry Christmas cheer

  And shove it up your ass.r />
  Max’s informant said that the grenade had landed in Lieutenant Dodd’s hooch on New Year’s Day.

  Jingle bells and pipián ranchero, J.J. thought. When connected to Maurice Dodd, each fragment had the sharp idiosyncratic particularity of the believable.

  Maurice Dodd told the Times he had been wounded in a firefight. No specifics given. The silence of heroism. He said he was proud to have served his country and saw no further reason ever to leave the continental limits, or even the state of South Midland. He said he had never had any interest in becoming a defense attorney. Nor did he chum around with members of the defense bar. He seemed to regard them as more pernicious than the Viet Cong. “I believe in the presumption of innocence,” he said. “It is guaranteed. That does not mean that I have to associate with people who defend those who I am certain are guilty of the crimes with which they are charged.” He was equally categorical about attorneys who had left the A.G.’s office for private practice. “They have a right to support their families in the best way they see fit,” he volunteered to the Times reporter. “I have an equal right to cut them out of my life.”

  As if the arm he lost put him two rungs higher on the ladder of virtue than anyone else, J.J. reflected. He had never mentioned to anyone what Max had told him about the fragging.

  Allie knew. Of course.

  I would’ve fragged him, she had said one day. Definitely. I would’ve finished the fucking job, though. Put him in a shroud, not some pinned-up sleeve he can wave around at juries like it’s some kind of fancy vestment priests wear when they say mass.

  Max seemed to tell her everything.

  If he wasn’t queer, J.J., you’d still be working for him.

  If Allie was a ballplayer, I’d trade her, J.J. thought. Except she’s so well known as a pain in the ass no other law enforcement agency in the city, county, or state would take her. Forget the DMV or Corrections. The municipal school board wouldn’t even let her check for grass in the toilets.