by Gerry Spence
Coker said he grew up scared. He was always scared. But he was scared to be scared, because being a coward was like wearing a big sign that read I’M A FULL-FLEDGED CHICKENSHIT, and he’d rather be dead than be a full-fledged chickenshit. Then he read somewhere that you couldn’t be a hero without being a coward first, and that idea helped. One day, he stood up to Martin Sheldon, the school bully, and got his ass kicked good, knocked out a front tooth. He had to work all summer in the hay fields behind a team of old Percheron horses to save enough to pay for the dental bridge. After that, the bridge became his symbol of honor, and he took up boxing as a sport.
He was still scared, but he’d learned that being afraid helped him from getting his ass kicked, and if he fought with all he had and lost, he was still an acceptable human being, and strangely he began to look for a fight. It relieved his need to run. He’d probably never be a hero, but he’d learned how to deal with being afraid and survive. “Just bow your neck and fight till ya drop.”
After high school, he dutifully marched off to the University of Wyoming at Laramie, worked as a night bellman in the town’s only hotel, and later he’d labored nights in the local cement plant, sweat out those long hours under the kiln or cleaned up under the ball mill, where the noise was so damned deafening that you couldn’t hear a man screaming an inch away from your ear, and his ears rang for a week. At the end of the day, he and the other workers filled out a time card reporting their work for the shift. Then the rebellious side of the kid took over because he knew no one ever read the time card. He wrote things like “Seducing the canine, ten hours,” and if some asshole up in the front office read it, he was probably too dumb to know that Coker meant “Fucking the dog,” even though some nights he worked until exhaustion won the night. He’d learned to laugh at himself. How did he get that tired “fucking the dog”?
He decided to be a lawyer, because trial lawyers like Clarence Darrow were fighters. And Coker was a fighter. He graduated at the top of his class. It wasn’t that he was so smart, he told Murray. He was scared he’d flunk out. “What the hell would I do then? Sell vacuum cleaners door-to-door? Work the mines? Sleep in the park on a bench and freeze to death in the winter?”
Then he’d become infamous among the law school crowd as being the first honor graduate to flunk the bar. Maybe he was too scared to understand the questions. He couldn’t punch a bar exam in the face. Maybe the law wasn’t his kind of fight. After he failed the bar, he went to work in the oil fields and, of course, he got into a brawl with a couple of derrick hands there, and when the fight was over, he couldn’t work for a week and lost his job.
His mother said he should take the bar exam again. She said he shouldn’t be a coward and run from it. Her coward talk got to him, all right, and when he walked in to take the exam, he was mad. He hadn’t studied for it this time. He was taking the damn bar to satisfy his mother, to quiet her down—and damned if he didn’t pass it.
But there weren’t any practicing lawyers hiring lawyers out there in the boonies of Wyoming. Nobody needed lawyers. Seemed like nobody sued anybody in Wyoming. You needed a lawyer to examine an abstract before you bought a piece of real estate—sixty-dollar fee for a title opinion, and somebody might need a lawyer to draw up a will. If a drunk ran over you, well, the drunk went to jail and somehow you got by, and that was about it. There were a couple of shysters who sued for injured people, but in Wyoming, only the lawyers who represented corporations and big money were respected.
So there he was, this Timothy Coker with a license to practice law and he’d never seen the inside of a courtroom. Didn’t know the first thing about drawing a contract or trying a case. They didn’t teach lawyers anything in law school except how to read a case and write a brief. Some lawyers never went to law school. They studied under a practicing lawyer, often without pay, and some years later they took the bar, and some passed the bar “by reading the law,” as they called it.
Coker approached finding a job as a lawyer the same way that he’d sold his mother’s sweet rolls. He came knocking at Murray’s door with his good smile. He’d been up and down the state, in Wyoming’s big towns (which were really little more than villages) and the tiny burgs like Jackson. Unfortunately, no practicing lawyer needed a young lawyer still wet behind the ears to help him, and he was about ready to go back to the oil fields when he came upon John Murray in Jackson.
Then something magical happened. Neither of them knew what the magic was, but it grabbed them, not like love, but like when two men meet and right off they both feel better in each other’s company than they feel alone. “I was tired of talking to myself,” Murray said, “and Tim Coker seemed like a man who heard me. It wasn’t quite like that,” Murray said, “but it was something like that.”
Over the ensuing decade and under the guidance of Murray, and with a relentless dedication to the art of the trial, Timothy Coker became a talented advocate. And they did become equal partners. Standard doctrine on the frontier held that real men never exhibited feelings of closeness. If they felt it, they didn’t talk about it. But one time when they were celebrating a verdict they’d won for an old lady who’d slipped on the ice in front of the grocery store and broke her ankle, and after a couple of brews and some laughs, Murray heard himself saying to Coker, “You’re the best thing that’s happened to me for a long time.” Coker just smiled and raised his bottle of beer in response.
As for romance, Murray said, “I’ve had a few flings, all right, but I’ve come to the conclusion that falling in love is nothing more than an annoying chatter of the testicles.”
“That’s because you’re too intellectual,” Coker said. “You can’t make it with a woman by trying to explain the meaning of life. That either frightens ’em or bores ’em.”
“I’ve heard you claim more than once that falling in love is just another form of insanity,” Murray said. Coker had survived some passing flings, all right, one with a hairdresser who thought she could dig down to where the “warm and fuzzy stuff was buried,” as Coker liked to call it, and another who started waiting tables at the Big Chief Café and, as Coker was soon to discover, was seeking someone to pay the rent on her house and the loan on her car. And she had a couple of kids to feed.
“And how about that nurse at the hospital who got turned on by your so-called pugnacious personality?” Murray chided.
“I was too kind to her,” Coker said. “I was trying to treat her like a nice, sweet guy, and I guess I got a little bit too gentle for what the dame had in mind.”
But that was before Murray met Betsy Thompson at the lily pond. How could he confess to his partner that he was no longer a free man, that his heart had been captured, that he’d fallen helplessly, hopelessly, irretrievably in love with Betsy Thompson?
One night at quitting time, after a couple of beers, it all came bursting out. “Jesus Christ,” Murray said, “it’s like I’ve walked around all of my life with only one shoe. Then one day I found the other shoe, and it fit. Perfectly.”
“Betsy’s like your shoe? You really got it bad,” Coker said. “Like you told me a hundred times, fallin’ in love is just Mother Nature using your nuts to play her dirty tricks.”
“Yeah. But this is different.”
“Remember how ya told me ‘When those chemicals in the gonads get to boiling, you can mistake it for what you call love.’ You told me it has to do with the survival of the species. ‘If people were as uninspired about sex as they are about doing the dishes after supper, the human race would soon become extinct.’ Those were your exact words.”
“But this is different,” Murray insisted. “I used to be happy and safe hanging out in my intellectual self. What did I care about poetry? Now I’m writing it! Before Betsy, I couldn’t carry a tune in a chamber pot. Now I sing getting up and going to bed.”
“Before Betsy!” Coker said. “B.B., and save me from your poetry and your singing. You never could carry a tune. That’s gonna take a lot more than Betsy.”
“She teaches art to grade-school kids,” Murray said.
“I always knew there was something wrong with our educational system!” Coker said. He slammed shut the shaky door between their small offices but then opened it again. “I’m pulling my load, but musically speaking, if you don’t get over this and start bringing in a little do-re-mi, they’re going to throw our asses out in the street.” He slammed the door shut again.
A little later, Coker, feeling guilty for being such a hard-ass, brought in a couple of cold ones. Murray was staring out the window. Coker popped the beers and shoved one over to his partner. True, his partner needed a little guidance now and then when he went off on one of his infamous head trips. But this time it was a heart trip—and that kind was a lot more dangerous. Murray had been meeting Betsy at the lily pond.
“What the hell do you want outta life?” Coker asked.
Murray kept gazing out the window. Finally, he said, “I want peace.”
“A piece a what?” Coker said. “There’s no peace in our business. We gotta work harder. I always forced myself to do one more lap when I was training for a fight, even if I fell flat on my face from pure exhaustion. Work is the key, man. Keep your head down and work!”
“Well, I don’t want to go on suing a bunch of poor bastards who can’t pay their bills. Most of ’em haven’t even got a job. Most of ’em are as poor as we are. Nothing much going on here except a few crazies trying to kill themselves climbing the Tetons, and some cowboys who think that God created the world from the back of a horse.”
“Yeah,” Coker added. “The honest people never sue anybody. They just hunker down and work harder and pay their bills and die in the shadows.
Finally, after a couple more dead soldiers, Murray heard himself saying, “I agree. I am crazy. And I like being crazy. You can either hang in with a crazy partner or go it alone. Your choice.” Murray was bluffing.
“Well, to hell with it.” Coker said, “I’m up against the ropes, I’ll admit. But if you got it that bad, I suppose I’d better stick around to make sure you don’t hurt yourself. And I’ll say one thing: You could have done a hell of a lot worse than Betsy.”
And that seemed to settle it.
* * *
John Murray and Betsy Thompson continued to meet at the lily pond, each offering various excuses for arriving at the tip of the morning. Betsy, the teacher, the painter, claimed, “I’ve resolved to capture on canvas every mood, every variation of this pond if it takes the rest of my life.”
“Well, I understand,” Murray said. “I’ve spent a major part of my life studying the art of fly-fishing, hoping that someday I would become an expert. But that seems to be a long way off, considering all the variations a fisherman encounters. And I am also studying the most intelligent and wondrous of all birds, the Canada goose.”
One day in the early fall, Murray found himself shyly proclaiming to Betsy that the souls of two wild geese had settled on them, and without warning she grabbed him in her arms and accidentally smeared him with blue and yellow paint as she kissed him. They melted to the cushioning short grass on the bank. The grass was damp under their bodies, and the early air smooth and sweet. Resting on their elbows, they stared into the pond, the water as clear and smooth as window glass. “I wonder where the ripples have all gone?” he mused.
“They’re in us,” she said.
“Where are my geese?” he whispered.
“They’re still across the way,” she said softly.
He listened. He heard their strange soft songs, the goslings nearly old enough to leave the nest.
“The world has suddenly changed,” he said. “We are the same, but the world has changed.”
“Yes,” she said.
* * *
Later, in mid-October, while the aspens and cottonwoods were still golden, Murray and Betsy stood in front of the local Episcopal priest. They’d dressed for the occasion, the groom in his old go-to-court blue suit, middle button hanging loose, a blue shirt, and a dark blue tie with red stripes. He’d shined his black shoes and furnished them with new black laces.
She argued that no marriage should begin on a misrepresentation, with the bride wearing a virgin white dress. Her dress was a rich, deep cream color, trimmed just below the knees with a gay little ruffle of lace that bounced as she walked. She wore her mother’s turquoise necklace, pieces of blue-green stone the size of large grapes. Her ivory-colored shoes were round-toed and comfortable. Her black braid was curled into a bun high on the back of her head. Her grandmother’s large shell hairpins held it in place, along with a single red rose.
He swore, not to her, not to any preacher, but to himself, that she was so beautiful to his heart’s eye that he would spend the rest of his life striving to be worthy of her. He admitted it: He’d fallen into a pit occupied by those he’d always scorned—those maudlin romantics, those fools who claimed they were insanely in love.
Yes.
He was insane.
And he cherished his insanity.
* * *
Betsy told Murray, “I grew up wondering why I didn’t have a father like other kids. My mother never spoke of my father. One time I said, ‘Mom, where is my father?’ and she said, ‘We do not talk about him. And if we don’t talk about him, it’s like an iron door, and he can’t get through and hurt us anymore.’”
“I see,” Murray said.
“I was afraid that maybe my father was a murderer and he would come and kill us if he could get through the iron door.”
Murray’s eyes were sad.
“I grew up behind the iron door, and somehow I felt safe behind it until I met you.” She teared up and ran to the stove, as if to keep the pot from boiling over. But there was no pot on the stove.
“My mother worked at the laundry. She had those terrible varicose veins in her legs—her legs were almost purple—and when she came home at night after standing on those legs all day, she was too tired and too full of pain to cook supper. I cooked for us from the time I was old enough to light the stove.”
They’d wanted children of their own. But she was forty-two, and the doctor said it wasn’t her fault, nor Murray’s.
Murray said, “Well, honey, we’ve got each other, and as you already know, I’m the biggest baby a woman ever had.” And he tried to laugh, and she laughed with him.
Before they had exchanged vows, the Episcopal priest had sat the couple down on the hard oak pews of the old log church where the north window framed the Tetons—a holy place that any passing god would have chosen as his residence in chief. The air was pure. A mountain bluebird was chirping away outside the window. Even the sky was a gentle, inviting blue and promised eternal peace.
The smells inside the chapel were of old wood, the faint remnants of women’s perfume, and the Sunday shaves of men. Comingled was the faint smell of horse manure from the boots of generations of cowboys who occasionally attended church for the wedding or the funeral of some poor devil who got kicked in the head by the love beast or by a nasty bronco.
“I see here you want to marry a teacher,” the Reverend Matthew Hamondtree said to Murray. He’d been inspecting the marriage license. “Well, let me tell you, I’m married to one, and she keeps on teaching me.” He laughed. “Why are you marrying this woman?” the priest asked Murray. He wore the Episcopal priest’s garb—the black top and the white round collar. He was a man of middle age whose height, breadth of shoulders, and no-nonsense demeanor reminded Murray of a former tackle on some college football team.
“I have no choice,” John Murray said with surrendered eyes at Betsy.
“What do you mean you have no choice? I don’t see anyone with a pistol at your head.”
“I can’t live another day without her,” John Murray said.
“I see,” said the priest, with a look at Murray that questioned his competence.
“She’s standing on the shore with a life preserver,” Murray said. “Don’t you see her there? She is saving me
by marrying me. Otherwise, I will drown in an empty life.”
“Drown in an empty life?” the priest asked aloud. He thought for a moment. “Yes,” he said, “a person can drown in an empty life.”
Then the Reverend Hamondtree turned to Betsy Thompson. “And why, my dear, are you marrying this madman?”
“I’m a little mad, too,” she said. “I must have this madman. Look at him. He loves birds. He tries to talk to geese; he fishes and throws most of the fish back; he defends people who have committed sin; he writes poetry about the snow, and about spring grass, and about me. And he loves me. Doesn’t that prove he is quite mad?”
“Yes,” said the priest. “Quite. I find there is no logical basis for this marriage, and therefore it’s a good match. Are you ready?”
Then the priest, not risking further inquiries, and in the simple glory of the old log chapel, led them through their vows, and each put a gold ring on the other’s finger, and thereupon he pronounced the painter and the fisherman, both from the lily pond, husband and wife.
* * *
Some say one should always be mindful of the lurking occult. Not to be doubted, mystical powers rose out of the quiet waters of the lily pond. As the mirror reflects in reverse, so, too, did the forces at play at the pond.
One morning just at sunup in the late fall, and at Betsy’s suggestion, Murray visited the mirrored waters of the pond to catch a mess of trout for dinner. He was about to whip his fly back for a second cast when he saw the figure of a man across the way mostly hidden in the cattails. He was packing a shotgun.