The Laws of our Fathers (58 page)

    When I got to the space where we'd parked, the car was gone. I was briefly too shocked to move. Then after a panicked instant, I realized I must have turned myself around. With the agent still yelling behind me, I headed for the other side of the building. I ran in my sandals. When I came around the rear corner, there was a wall where five or six cars were parked. A high cyclone fence adjoined the desert.

    'Stop him!' the agent yelled this time. 'FBI. Stop him!' He seemed farther behind than before. Apparently he had lost me when I surged around the building.

    'Who? Dis one?' I heard. Suddenly, through the night, someone was reaching for me, standing now in the breach between a Ford and a car nearby. It was one of the New Yorkers.

    'Tony, be careful,' a woman called. He came to me through the night, his group nearby. The woman's bleached hair glowed under the parking-lot lights.

    'Where you going, bud?' Tony asked me. He was wearing a sand-colored leisure suit and a shirt marked by colored shapes like lightning bolts.

    'Tony, for Godsake,' the woman yelled, 'he might have a gun.' I heard her as she turned to speak to her friends. 'Always on the job,' she said.

    'This don't god no gun,' Tony said. 'Come on here. This gentleman back here wants to have a word with you. Whatsa matter?' he said. 'You don't like to talk wit the FBI?'

    I said nothing. I made no move. The time - the few precious seconds I had unconsciously counted - whittled away while this man and I stared at each other. He had a massive face with walrus jowls, set with a confidence that was not particularly malevolent. It simply said, I am a man and you are not. I have been alive long enough to know what to do here and you do not. I was immobilized by the sheer force of his experience. I had been caught. Busted. I was completely bewildered by the thought. The agent arrived then, blowing hard.

    'You are one dumb son of a bitch. Do you know that's how people get shot? Do you know what kind of trouble you can get yourself in?' He shoved my shoulder roughly. 'Lie down on the ground. Lie down there. Go on, damn it all'

    He ran his hands along my legs, inside and out, as I was prostrate on the asphalt with its strange worldly scent. He pulled Michael's wallet from my pocket and tugged on my hair.

    'What am I supposed to call you? "Jesus?" You smell bad,' he said to me. I'd bathed last night. I remembered June. I was not going to say anything. They told me to get up.

    I had been caught, I kept thinking. I realized I had walked into a new plane, another reality. Each instant now would be a piece of fresh time. One of them pushed me from behind and they walked me toward the front of the motel, leading tne along by the shirt collar. Tony introduced himself to the agent. From the Two Two One in Newark.

    'You know Jack Burk? In the RA in West Orange?'

    'Jack? Jack was in my class in Quantico.'

    'No shit? He's my brother-in-law.'

    'How do you like that? How is old Jack?'

    'Pig in shit, that one. He god Hoover's picture on the wall next to the Sacred Heart.'

    The second agent watched us coming, looking out the window of a blue Ford Fairlane with black-walled tires. He'd turned the dome light on inside the car. He wore a straw fedora and let his arm dangle out the open window, an unfiltered cigarette, which he idly raised to his mouth on occasion, between his fingers. He was parked in the front of the motel, blocking the driveway. He'd been waiting for me, of course. I'd never had a chance. The one who'd caught up to me introduced Tony, and the two agents fawned over him for a while. A siren keened down the strip.

    'Cavalry's on the way,' the second agent said. 'Tammy's 10 - I'd half the county.'

    'Oh brother,' said the agent who held me.

    'You take him in. I'll stay to explain. Fourteen's coming. You sure you got who you want?'

    The agent flipped open the wallet he'd taken from my pocket.

    'Michael Frain,' he said.

    'He's the one.'

    The agent grabbed me by the collar again and jerked me around to face him for the first time.

    'We been looking for you, Michael,' he said.

    

    

    
Sonny

    

    Tuesday morning status call. Open house in the chamber of horrors. I've had perhaps two hours' sleep. My blood is hot tar; wakefulness at instants feels like an out-of-body experience. And I have lost that convenient armor on my emotions. Words and events strike straight at my viscera with nothing in between. I'm in no condition for the sad procession taking place before me.

    The courtroom teems. Clients and families huddle with attorneys. Cops and PAs, probation officers, the State Defenders, all the felony court regulars greet each other in the corridors and the adjacent lawyers' and witness rooms. They agree on dates for the next appearance or talk out the plea deals, by which most of these cases are finally resolved. Annie polices the spectators' rows, directs defendants to the front, points out the lawyers or court personnel they need to see, while Marietta goes on crying out case numbers, passing up files, and reminding me why they're

    on the call - for arraignment or guilty plea, status report or ruling on motions. Her memory is phenomenal, her notes precise. This guy was supposed to bring in proof of employment; that lady has to make a urine drop this week, per prior order of Judge Simone.

    Some of the morning's crimes have a touch of bathos. One hapless schmo paid a policewoman posing as a hooker $50 to suck her toes. When she badged him, he begged her, tear-struck, to take $400 to let him go. Wired to avoid entrapment claims, she had no choice but to charge the bribery. But for the most part we wallow in sadness.

    'You're old for this line of work,' the transport deputy says, muscling a white-whiskered defendant, a drunk or junkie by the depleted looks of him, out of the lockup toward the bench. He is charged with armed robbery: razor to the throat.

    'Don't I know,' the defendant answers and arrives before me with a wistful look.

    Scanning his rap sheet and its cryptic notations - nine convictions by my count - I do the math. 'How many days ago, Mr Johnson, were you released from the penitentiary?'

    There is no type that has not arrived before me: a senior vice-president of First Kindle arrested in the North End for scoring smack. A seventy-two-year-old grandmother, a valued employee for forty-four years at a garden store, who began a few months ago, for reasons no one can explain, to jigger the receipts, making off with almost $32,000. Often, I imagine, if I remain here long enough, every creature that rode with Noah will appear, charged with something.

    But usually when I lift my eyes it's a young black man who's there, his story, told in his bail or pre-sentence report, numbingly the same - poverty, violence, a shattered fatherless family, little schooling, nobody to care. There is often a special sulkiness that grips them when they face the bench to find another woman. Women have been trying to tame them all their lives, at home, in school, mothers and caseworkers and truant officers whose remonstrations and example never answered the one question that seems to be boiling away in so many: What's this thing they call a man, does he have a peaceful, rightful place in this world? I want to lecture occasionally. 'There was no father in my home, either. I understand, I do.'

    That's never said. It's enough to move ahead. Some come before me defiant, making little effort to hide their hatred for the entire apparatus. But most are simply terrified and clueless. A nineteen-year-old, here for sentencing on a jewelry-store window smash-and-grab, a boy with a head of curls as disorganized as rubbish, wears a jeans company's T-shirt that reads unbutton my fly, a message not calculated to impress the court. The battle-hardened, on the other hand, are often disarmingly familiar.

    'Judge, she sayin I got to take six on this.' The lank defendant, with a sleeveless ‘I that reveals arms scored by tattoos and scars, gestures without respect at Gina, the P D beside him. 'Judge, man, I's just hidin in that store when they cracked me, Judge, I din't even take nothin, Judge, six, that's cold.'

    'You're on probation, Mr Williams, for another armed burglary.'

    'Oh, Judge, that's just a little ol knife, that ain't but a can opener. Six is cold, Judge.'

    'Yes or no,' I say. We both know it will be ten years after trial. Even I, who swore before taking the bench to remember a trial is a constitutional right, have found myself whacking defendants who rack twelve out of sport or in defiance of overwhelming proof. There is no alternative. I will dispose of a thousand cases this year and have time to try no more than fifty.

    Called to justice, no one stakes a proud claim to their crimes; no one believes these events define them. Their misdeeds, even if only hours old, seem remote as legends. Here at the time of judgment, everyone is mystified by what occurred. Their anger, their isolation, their need for whatever self-respect they were striking toward is, for the time being, wholly forgotten. Most cannot explain. They pensively murmur, 'Don't know, Judge,' when I ask, as I do often, 'Why?' As they stand here, almost everyone knows better.

    This morning I sentence Leon McCandless. Six weeks ago, Leon met a lady, Shaneetha Edison, who was at the Evening Shade Tavern with her three-year-old. By now, I know all about this kind of place. The fact that people have no money is everywhere. There are only a few lights that work, including the reflecting beer sign behind the bar, and what they reveal is filthy and broken. The paneling in the room is so old it has started to fray. The toilet in the back is stained, with a seat that's been cracked in half and a cistern that leaks and is always running. The whole tavern smells of rot. The people here are poor and drunk. There are customers all day, little groups of men standing around, talking stuff nobody believes and now and then dealing little bits of dope in coveys in the corners.

    After a drink or two, Shaneetha asked Leon for a smoke and he went to the corner for some loosies - individual cigarettes the Korean grocers sell from the pack for two bits apiece. When he returned, another fellow had his hand inside Shaneetha's dress. A classic tale: Frankie and Johnny. A moment later, the three-year-old, still at his mother's side, was dead. In Area 7, through whatever mysterious means they seem to employ there, by which almost three-quarters of the black defendants seem to speak freely in spite of Miranda warnings and a lifetime knowledge that confessing seldom makes anything easier - in the police station, Leon, the defendant who stands before me, explained about the gun he'd drawn. 'Damn thing just went off,' he said.

    'Thing just went off,' his lawyer, Billy Witt, repeats now for my benefit. None of us can tell in how many layers of his psyche Leon meant to shoot. I give him fifty years.

    'People just can't imagine. They don't get it' That's what the coppers and the prosecutors are always saying. I scoffed when I arrived here and now hear myself making similar remarks. People think they understand this. They see it re-enacted on TV, and in the privacy of their homes, in the dopey glow of the television, thinking whatever dreamy thought they have, figure they have the picture - they know what it's like to be scared, to see violence, to feel the antagonism of black and white. But that does nothing to convey the shock of foreignness, the distance between their world and mine which I feel in every glance, or the dismal truth that the average citizens of Dusseldorf or Kyoto, people whom my mother regarded as enemies, now share more of my life than four-fifths of the young men who stand before me, my supposed countrymen. I revert all the time to the structuralist stuff I studied in graduate school, about thought and culture and custom being one, and think, again and again, We have to change it all.

    After a brief lunch, as the call is winding to an end, we reach the Crime of the Day. Four members of the Five Street Diggers, a Gangster Outlaw set, stand before me for arraignment on a newly filed complaint. Rudy Singh has stepped up for the state. Two cops, Tic-Tacs, are beside him with their beerpots, sweaters, and running shoes. Gina Devore, the PD, takes the lead for the defense.

    Singh explains the background. As she was leaving the jail where she had visited her brother, a Five Street homegirl, Rooty-Too, was snatched - kidnapped - by other Goobers, the Hanging Hipsters, a rival group within the gang. I decline Singh's invitation to describe Rooty-Too's injuries in greater detail than saying she is hospitalized with contusions, missing teeth, and lacerations in the vaginal area. The Five Streets were desperate for revenge. They captured a Hipster, a ghetto star known as Romey Tuck, beat him, and then chopped off both his arms with machetes. The defendants were arrested in an apartment at Fielder's Green. There one forearm sat bleeding onto newspaper on the linoleum kitchen table, as it was being displayed to other Five Streets as a trophy.

    'Is the issue bond?' I ask.

    'Judge,' says Gina, 'the defendants are juveniles. The state's petitioned to try them as adults.' Good, I almost say.

    'Judge, they're being held in the jail. You know what that's like.' In for violence within the gang, they may not be protected by the usual strict codes. None of these boys is full-grown - two are rangy but not filled out, the smallest is still not much over five feet. I understand. 'Judge, if you'd consider bail. They can't go to school. Their visiting privileges are limited. One of these young men, Marcus - my client Marcus Twitchell -' Gina's eyes cheat southward to her file to be 100 percent certain she has got the name. 'Marcus is an honor student. He was selected last summer for Project Restore. He was -'

    Marcus, the last arrested, has been brought straight here from the station and has not yet been processed. He's still 'G-down' or' Gangster down,' dressed in gang attire, which includes a satiny Starter jacket in the glistening aquamarine of the Miami Dolphins and gangsta baggies hiked down so his belt line's at pubic level, revealing several inches of his striped briefs. His Brownies -brown garden gloves worn for scuffing, shooting, and leaving no fingerprints - still hang out of his side pocket. His eyes never reach above a spot two or three feet below me. He is slowly chewing gum. I ask about his record.