Dead Peasants (7 page)

21

Monday was a cloudy, dreary day with rain in the forecast. Jack awoke and watched the news while he ate a bowl of Cheerios. He wandered around the house and had second thoughts about buying one so big that he never even went to the second floor. Finding his way to the back yard, he picked up a pool skimmer and removed a few pecan leaves from the water. When he glanced up at the trees, he could tell that the pecans were getting ripe. Next, he opened all of the garage doors and started the engine on each of his vehicles, including the RV. After letting them run for five minutes, he went back in the house and found Lisa. His thrice-weekly maid had come.
She’s got to be the envy of her friends,
he thought
. I use what amounts to a one bedroom apartment and she gets paid to clean the whole house.
Still, she was punctual and pleasant and filled her hours by washing all the downstairs windows once a week and sweeping the sidewalks. After a shower and shave, he put on his usual casual attire of jeans, boots and a T-shirt, telling Lisa that he was going for a drive. At the back door, he paused to look over his collection of canes and chose one he found in an old shop in Hamburg on a European trip. It had a carved boar’s head for a handle.

He started for Lucille, then stopped. Today he would drive the Ferrari, maybe open her up if he found the right stretch of road. He returned to the house, replaced the pickup keys on the board by the kitchen door and grabbed the ones to the Ferrari. Jack stopped once more at the pickup to take his Texas map from the passenger door side pocket. He spread it on the hood of Lucille and chose a route of back roads leading at least to Mineral Wells.

Jack strapped himself into the Ferrari and started the engine, pausing to listen to its low roar. The Ferrari had paddle shifting which Jack loved. No more four-on-the-floor. Now with his hands at the three o’clock and nine o’clock positions, he could shift up through six gears by flicking the right paddle and back down with the one on the left. No clutch, and he didn’t even have to take his foot from the gas peddle. It was a marvel of Italian automotive engineering. Jack put the car in first gear and eased down the driveway. He passed the Rivercrest clubhouse, waving to a couple of the gardeners whom he had befriended and turned right on Camp Bowie and went to second gear. Doing so, he made sure his fuzzbuster was working. It was a Valentine One, capable of spotting both radar and laser beams coming from police vehicles. Soon he was driving through the western outskirts of Fort Worth, headed toward Weatherford. He took a right after a few miles and wandered the back roads. When he found one straight and empty, he went to fourth and fifth gears, hitting a hundred and fifty at one time. On curves that were rated for 35MPH, he dropped to second and took them at eighty, always with a grin on his face.
Maybe,
he thought,
he should do like Paul Newman did and take up road racing in middle age.
He slowed as he passed through Weatherford and soon found himself in Mineral Wells where he turned and took the freeway back to Fort Worth. Driving down Camp Bowie, he spotted Colby’s Lexus in front of her office. He went in and found Colby was on the phone. She motioned him to have a seat. He was flipping through a local realtor’s magazine when she ended her call and circled around the desk and gave Jack a brief hug before breaking away with an embarrassed look before. “Hi, there.” She smiled. “What brings you here? Can I sell you another house?”

Colby sat in the chair beside Jack and waited for him to speak. Finally, he relayed his day’s activities. “I think I’m bored. You’ve done a great job of keeping me entertained, but I don’t want to visit the museums again.”

Colby frowned.

“What the hell am I supposed to do with the rest of my life? I don’t want to go back to being a trial lawyer. Sixty and eighty hour weeks are behind me.”

Colby pondered his situation before speaking. “Why don’t you volunteer to do some pro bono work? Times are tough. I’ll bet there are tens of thousands of people in this area who could use some free legal advice. You could set your own hours, go and come as you please and do some good for folks who can’t afford a lawyer.”

Jack nodded his head. “Actually that thought had drifted through my mind lately. I just might give it a try. Got nothing to lose but a little time, and I’ve damn sure got plenty of that.”

22

The next morning Jack put on a white dress shirt, slacks, and boots. He located the Fort Worth Volunteer Lawyers Association on the internet and drove two blocks past the courthouse complex on Weatherford to a small two-story building with the association name above the door. He parked Lucille at a meter and dug four quarters from the center console of the truck. After feeding the meter, he entered the building to face a receptionist.

“Can I help you?”

“Name’s Jack Bryant. I’m a retired lawyer and would like to volunteer.”

“Have a seat, sir and I’ll be with you in a few minutes.”

Jack cooled his heels for fifteen minutes before the receptionist reached into the bottom drawer of her desk and retrieved a multi-page form and a clipboard. “Mr. Bryant, if you’ll step over here to get this form and complete it, I’ll have our director talk to you when he’s free.”

Jack stared at the woman and wondered why she couldn’t get off her butt and walk to him. After all, he was the volunteer. Still, he rose and walked back to the reception desk. When he looked at the form, it was ten pages. He filled in his name, address, bar number and prior employment in Beaumont before returning to the desk.

“Here. This ought to be plenty. Your director can read about me on the state bar web site. As you can see, I’m not a baby lawyer and don’t need to give you my life history.”

“Well, Mr. Bryant,” the receptionist huffed. “These questions are important and necessary.”

Jack bent over her desk, his face about six inches from hers, “Why don’t you give this to your director and see what he says?”

The receptionist took the clipboard and motioned him to return to his seat as she went through the door behind her desk. Thirty minutes later a small man, wearing a bow tie, opened the door. “Mr. Jackson Bryant, please come in.”

The director didn’t offer his hand as Jack approached and passed through the door. They rode the elevator in silence to the second floor and walked to a corner office with Graham Hill, J.D. on the door. Jack thought back through his career and could not recall any lawyer who put his academic degree after his name.

Hill went around his desk to his swivel chair. “Have a seat, Mr. Bryant. I’ve looked over the very brief information you provided about your career.”

Jack leaned forward. “Look, Mr. Hill, I don’t need to prove that I’ve earned my spurs. Did you check me out on the bar’s web site or on Google?”

“I certainly did, sir,” Graham said as he tented his hands under his chin. “We can certainly use you. Since you obviously know your way around the courtroom, we can use you handling divorces. You’ll have to commit to certain hours. We want the same six hours every day. And, your outfit will have to be modified. We want our attorneys to be dressed for success even in the office. That means wearing a suit and tie at all times. We need to be respected by our clients, don’t you agree?”

“No, sir, I don’t agree. I don’t need a goddamn tie to get respect. Forget it. I’m out of here.” Jack stormed out of Hill’s office, slamming the door behind him.

23

That night Jack thought about the wasted meeting with Hill. To hell with him. He still had too much free time and could do some good for people that couldn’t afford lawyers. He’d start his own clinic without the red tape. The next morning he left the house and started driving, this time east on Camp Bowie,. past the museum district until it became Seventh Street. After he passed Monkey Wards, he got to the bridge over the Trinity River. He found it interesting how memories of growing up in Fort Worth popped to the front of his brain. Now he remembered “the tamale man,” a little Hispanic immigrant who had a tamale cart that he parked on the grass on the side of the road just before the bridge. His wife made tamales and he stood there beside his cart every day, rain or shine, selling those tamales. Somehow he and his wife managed to eek out a living, at least enough to feed themselves and two kids. Jack did a double-take when he saw the tamale man still at his post. Jack changed lanes and came to a stop. The man’s face was now wrinkled, but he still smiled as Jack lowered his window.

“Good morning, sir. How many today?”

Jack didn’t really want the tamales, but ordered a dozen and tipped the man well before he drove away. Approaching downtown, he marveled at how much it had changed. The so-called skyscrapers of his youth were twelve story brick buildings. Now those old buildings were dwarfed by forty story glass towers, mainly built by the Bass brothers, multi-billionaires who inherited a few hundred million dollars from their bachelor uncle, Sid Richardson, and then made enough shrewd investments that each of them became billionaires. Jack slowly circled around downtown as an idea formed and took shape.

When he turned onto Main, he saw the old red courthouse, now surrounded by other buildings in the courthouse complex, but still standing out with its red granite exterior, massive columns at the top of the steps and domed roof, complete with a clock.
That’s what a courthouse should look like
, he mused.
People should feel a certain sense of awe as they climbed the twenty steps to seek justice.

Jack drove around the courthouse and crossed another bridge over the Trinity as he descended from the courthouse bluff to the river bottom below. The area on both sides was run down. About the only businesses were a couple of bars, a topless club and some bail bondsmen. That changed as he approached the stockyards. Abandoned and in disarray for many years, some far-sighted citizen saw the potential of a tourist attraction among the ruins. In a matter of years the covered pens became shops. A tourist train weaved through the area. Steak houses and Mexican restaurants sprang up. “Billy Bob’s Texas” billed itself as the world’s largest honky-tonk, attracting some of the best singers that Nashville had to offer. Cowboys were hired to stall their horses there and ride them among the tourists, pausing to pose for photos and accept a tip for their efforts. Every afternoon the cowboys drove a small herd of longhorn cattle through the area, emulating the cattle drives of another era. The folks in Fort Worth liked the stockyards because they served to remind visitors that Cowtown really did have its roots in the old West.

Beyond the stockyards there was little more to see. A couple of car dealerships had been abandoned, brought down by the great recession. When he got to Meacham Field, once Fort Worth’s commercial airport but now used only by private aircraft owners, he turned and headed back south. Once past the stockyards, he noted a cop shop, the Stockyards Police Station, on the right. A few blocks later he spotted an old fashioned ice house at the corner of Refinery and North Main. Beside it was a vacant lot where he parked and walked the property, using his cane to pick his way among rocks and debris.
Big enough,
he thought. He looked up to see that the lot was served by electricity. When he got to the back, he looked over the fence to see a neighborhood with homes barely fit for habitation. The roofs on most were patched. Old cars appeared abandoned in front yards. The streets were filled with potholes.
These people could use a good lawyer,
Jack mused.

Jack walked to the front and studied the ice house. It, too, was a throwback to days gone by. With rusted metal walls, it had two garage doors in the front that were opened on warm days. A couple of old wooden tables, each with two chairs, were on the concrete apron in front. With no air conditioning, ceiling fans stirred a decent breeze. Jack stepped across the threshold. To his right were four old men drinking beer and loudly slamming dominoes on a table. A worn and scarred bar ran across the back. Three barstools had seen better days, maybe twenty years ago. Jack limped a little, having twisted his knee in the vacant lot, as he took a seat on one of the stools. The bartender had a fringe of gray hair and a black handlebar mustache.

“What can I get for you?” he asked.

“Lone Star. Coldest one you got.”

“They’re all cold, my friend. I still ice them down every morning. No refrigerated coolers in this place.”

Jack nodded his appreciation as he downed half the beer and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Wow, that’s good. Can I ask you a question?”

“Fire away.”

“Who owns that lot next door?” Jack nodded in the direction of his pickup.

“Was owned by an investor who thought that the stockyards tourist area would eventually move this way, but I hear that the bank just foreclosed. You got any interest in it?”

“I might.” Jack finished his beer and put three dollars on the counter. As he rose, he stuck out his hand. “Name’s Jack Bryant.”

The bartender shook it and said, “Moe.”

Jack nodded, paused to watch the domino game and then went to his pickup. Now he had a plan.

24

A week later a small sign appeared on the vacant lot. “Sold,” it announced. The following week Jack arrived at his new property early, armed with a large Starbucks, the
Fort Worth Star Telegram
and the
Wall Street Journal
. He parked in Moe’s lot and waited until a contractor arrived. First his crew leveled the lot, and then started placing two by fours and laying re-bar. By afternoon an electrician had arrived. He ran 110 and 220 voltage lines from the main utility pole through metal tubing along the rebar to a place Jack designated for electrical boxes. The next day Jack watched as trucks lined up on North Main, awaiting their turn to pour concrete onto the lot. As they poured a section, finishers smoothed the concrete under the watchful eye of the contractor. At the end of the day the contractor walked around the lot and satisfied himself that the pitch was just enough to allow rainwater to flow to the street. Next he walked to Moe’s parking lot where Jack was leaning up against Lucille, confirmed that Jack was satisfied and climbed into his own pickup. About that time Moe walked out of his icehouse.

“Jack, my new neighbor, what the hell are you doing? You going into the used car business?”

Jack grinned. “You’ll know in a few days, Moe.”

Once the concrete was dry, the electrician returned to install flood lights around the perimeter on twenty foot poles. He was followed by a team from an alarm company. When Jack was satisfied that everything was done to his satisfaction, it was time for the RV. By then he and Santos, his handyman, had stripped the back of its bed, dresser and nightstands. They were replaced with a moderate-sized brown desk, executive chair and two guest chairs. There was just enough room along one wall for a small sofa. Now, Jack had an office.

The next morning he walked out the back door of his mansion, breathed in the morning air and greeted Santos. “Santos, I’ll drive the RV. You follow in Lucille.”

Jack pushed a button on the RV key ring to unlock it and climbed into the driver’s seat. After fastening his seat belt, he turned the key and the big diesel engine rumbled to life. With one last look at his mirrors, he slowly circled the house and headed downtown and out to his vacant lot. Once there, Santos stopped traffic momentarily for Jack to back the RV into the property. It took three tries before Jack was able to position the RV beside the electrical outlets with the front facing the street. Jack climbed from the RV, looked around and nodded his head in satisfaction. He and Santos were hooking up the electricity when the alarm company arrived to finish their job. Once they were gone, Jack took a piece of a cardboard box and, using a black marker, wrote, LAWYER, NO FEE! He placed it on the dashboard facing the windshield and told Santos, “Now, I’m open for business.”

The next day he arrived around ten, expecting to see clients lined up around the block. Finding no one, he started the engine to activate the air conditioning, made coffee and turned Bloomberg on the fifty inch flat screen TV. Figuring that he had not gotten the message out, he ripped another side from the cardboard box and wrote, OPEN on one side and CLOSED on the other.

Several hours later the door opened, and he expected to see his first client, only it was Colby.

“Jack! What the hell are you doing?”

Jack rose to greet her. “Just what you said. I’m offering my services for free. How’d you know where to find me?”

Colby plopped down on the couch. “I called the house, and Lisa said just to go out North Main until I spotted your RV. Jack, this is not what I meant. I assumed you’d go to the Tarrant County Bar and volunteer.”

“I did. Let’s just say that the director and I had a little disagreement on the first day.”

“But, but, don’t you know this part of town is dangerous?”

“Damn sure do. That’s why I’ve got this. He reached into a drawer and brought out a Magnum. You forget that I was Airborne? And I still go hunting four or five times a year.” He aimed the pistol out the front window. “I could put out a man’s eye at twenty-five yards with this peashooter.”

“Wait a minute,” Colby stuttered. ‘You can’t leave this RV here. It’ll be gone in a week.”

Jack motioned Colby to follow him as he stepped outside. He handed her his keys and said, “Push that button there on the right.”

Colby did so and watched in amazement as the RV was transformed. Quarter inch steel shutters silently slid down to cover every window as the flood lights came on.

“Now, step up and jiggle the door handle.”

When Colby did, a piercing, high decibel alarm erupted, forcing Colby to cover her ears until Jack grabbed the keys and pushed the button again.

“What if someone unplugs this thing?”

“Got battery backup for eight hours. I doubt if any bad guys can get away with it without the cops showing up in that length of time. Besides the cops have a station just down the street. I aim to befriend them in the next day or so.”

Colby offered her last lame argument. “They could steal your tires and mirrors.”

Jack smiled. “If they can find a jack big enough to lift this monster, they can have the tires. Besides, I had Santos buy a set of old used tires. The good ones are back at the house. I’m going to take the mirrors off this afternoon. Come back in. Coffee’s made.”

Colby sat on the couch while Jack poured her a cup of coffee. “When did you do all of this stuff to the RV?”

“I had a case down in the valley a few years ago. It was gonna last for a couple of months. I bought this as my office and home. Those counties along the Rio Grande are among the most lawless in the country these days. So, I had all the armor and alarms installed for that trial. Worked out well. I didn’t have to rent an office or a motel room and got a verdict north of a hundred million. Let me show you around.”

Jack pointed out the features of the RV. It was the biggest and most luxurious available. It came with a full kitchen, dining room, sitting room, one and a half baths and a bedroom in the back.

“This was the bedroom. I stripped it, and now it’s my office. I can have clients wait out here in the front if I’m busy in the office.”

Colby sighed. “Well, it looks like you’re sure about this. I just hope you don’t have to use that peashooter, as you call it.”

“Rob in town?” Jack changed the subject.

“He just left. Had a few unexpected days off. That’s the reason you haven’t heard from me,” Colby responded.

Jack ignored what was surely a lie. Something was keeping Colby from opening up to him. He figured his best plan was just to wait until she was ready to talk about it. In the meantime he would just enjoy her company. “Now, let me take you next door to meet Moe and some of my friends. I spent my life around refinery workers and longshoremen. I’m a whole lot more comfortable with these guys than the Rivercrest crowd. They’re even teaching me how to play dominos. One of these days I’m going to win a game.”