Under Radar (3 page)

Nothing like this happened, but stories about prison were Tom's pornography.

“Did you send many men to jail?” Tom asked.

“Well, yes, I did,” said the judge.

Tom waited for him to say more. Judge Davis waited for a better question. Tom found one, not a question but a way into the subject. “It's a fascinating subject.”

“Carry some guilt, do you?” Tom saw the judge treat the word lightly, this was Jew-to-Jew talk about the emotional scars of a particular childhood, not a hint of insight into Farrar's conspiracy.

“You're very shrewd. I suppose I do.”

“It's typical.” Typical of what? The more reassuring word would have been “normal.”

“Does prison help?” asked Tom.

“You mean, does the shock of the system cure some criminals of their crimes?”

“Something like that.”

“I think I know what you're asking,” said the judge. “You've read some articles about the expanding prison population.”

“Yes.”

“And you're aware that while more money is being spent on prisons, the cash goes to contractors and guards, not to any rehabilitation programs.”

“Right,” said Tom, with a mixture of relief and embarrassment for his awkward phrasing of something Judge Davis could put so simply, and his shame for the way his morbid fascination with prison could come out only in such a squeak, while behind the misshapen presentation of himself something inexpressible cramped the flow of thoughts.

“But this assumes,” continued the judge, warming to an audience, “that the main function of prison has to be a cure for crime, something other than punishment, or punishment that also protects.”

“Protects who?”

“You and me,” said the judge. He looked hard at Tom, because Tom had just confused the criminal with the victim. Tom was thinking about prison as a place where the criminals are protected from their victims. Now he was sure that Judge Davis, drunk but no fool, saw this blending as the real reason for Tom's questions. Yes, thought Tom, he knows I am guilty of something real.

“I meant that prison can protect the criminal from the people he hurt, the people who would want revenge.” Boy, did that sound odd.

“That's a novel thought for a lawyer.”

Tom felt the judge drifting with him into incoherence. He stammered, “And then, and then, you know, there's rehabilitation. Not to mention his punishment. I mean, not to mention that he's being punished. That is … you know, he's given the chance to, you know, look at where he is, and maybe decide that when he gets out, he doesn't want to go back because … jail is so horrible, and it is horrible, jail, isn't it?”

The judge dropped his congeniality. “I'm a liberal Jew, Tom, but I don't believe in rehabilitation for all but a few, in fact, for such a few that when I look at the individual cases of those who returned to the path of lawfulness, I see men whose returns were promised in their falls, and that's a small group of men, Tom, whose crimes were spiritual crises, almost artistic crises. The average thief and rapist, the average killer, however much and perhaps because he was so damaged by society and conditioning,
is too wounded and broken, too sick, too stupid, for any restoration of decency. Lock them up, Tom. Did I say stupid? Yes, I did. Do I sound cruel? I've sent three men to their death, Tom. You didn't ask about that. And I can sleep at night.”

While the men talked, the children's dinner ended. Tom paid some attention to Alma and Perri as they followed the fleet of children to the broad wooden deck beyond the dining room, where the hotel band played on a low stage. One extension of the deck was built on stilts over a rock shelf, which the water just covered at high tide. Then the children raced from one side of the deck to the other, to the few triumphant dying waves, inches tall, that succeeded from the bay. This gave the parents great happiness, the giddy shrieks of their children blended with the sounds of ocean and kitchen, every property of the evening resonant and clear, each fragrant piece of it, sound, vision, and emotion, suspended in a Jell-O of gently drunken satisfaction.

Alma loved music, and when the bass player or the pianist first tested the volume, she left the wave chasers. Alma, at four, was happy as soon as the musicians arrived in the little shack. She was old enough to know that the tuning and the busying with volume and balance were not yet the show, but was fascinated by all the efforts that she could not yet explain. Alma liked men, but she didn't know that she did; the power of the musicians was not just in their music and the skill from which the music flowed but from the stunning—to a four-year-old—
difference and presence and distinction of their sex. And then they were black, and their blackness was of a piece with the strangeness of their skills, the strangeness of their quiet assembly among the loud instruments. She didn't know that the house musicians were only adequate at what they did, that house bands, in the bargain for a steady job, trade away the possibility of a larger audience that can be theirs only if the audience is not captive. Like all house bands, they tested and then abandoned their original songs a few times, since the hotel's guests weren't there to hear that specific band but rather a set of generally familiar songs. Every night the band played roughly the same set, which always included “I Shot the Sheriff,” “Jumping Jack Flash,” “Michelle,” and a synthesizer-steel-band-calypso version of “Cheek to Cheek.” This repetition of old hits usually makes for sloppy music, but the house band had a sense of humor, which made them cynical, so they amused one another. This made them entertaining.

The band played, and Alma stood to the side, watching them. The judge continued to pound away at Tom. “As for punishment, our society chooses boredom over humiliation. I suspect that if we publicly scourged our criminals every now and then, some categories of crime might be less popular.”

Alma jumped up and down to the music behind in a line of other little girls.

The judge: “It'd work like gangbusters for your white-collar types, I can assure you of that, much more
so than it would on the poor. A man needs bread, or money for his drugs, and in the heat of his necessity, he'll do what he must, careless of which consequence lies in wait. But you and I have chewed that crust already. You take a lawyer who's pulled some kind of con, and you lead him into the town square and lay on fifteen good ones with a cat-o'-nine-tails, and I bet you that up on the forty-ninth floor, after that spectacle, there'll be some serious hesitation about cutting the legal corners. And I would love to extend this to public officials who take bribes. But what do you think? Do you see many dirty lawyers?”

Tom was distracted by the way Alma was dancing now; she was in front of the other girls, closer to the singer, who seemed to be singing directly to her. This might have been charming, but Tom was uncomfortable with the singer's connection with his daughter, he wasn't treating her like a little girl. He was singing to her like she was a woman. Tom wanted to stop this, but he had the judge's question to answer.

“Malpractice isn't my specialty. I do wills and trusts. It's all very dry.”

“With your interest in such things,” said the judge, while the singer was bumping and grinding and Alma was responding, “you might want to expand your practice. Curiosity and obsession are the best mentors.”

“I don't know if it's an obsession.”

“I think it is. That's not a crime. Wills and trusts are pretty far from helping drug dealers wash their dirty money.”

“I don't do that,” said Tom, about to get up. He tried to catch Rosalie's eye. She was deep in a huddle with the judge's wife and daughter, and he didn't want to make a scene.

“Of course you don't. You wouldn't be staying here with such a lovely wife.”

Tom took “lovely wife” to be a thought of pure condescension. The judge, having uncovered from Tom's slips of conversation the evidence of his criminality, saw a dull minor felon and reduced the sentence; Rosalie was not the glamorous hetaera who anneals herself to the serious bad guy, so if Tom was guilty of a punishable offense, it must have been small potatoes. Tom also read that the judge, after all of his years on the bench, had come to envy something in the criminal parade, nothing so easy as to say the freedom of the outlaw, but there was a kind of fabulous woman who, by her endorsement of an incriminated man, made Judge Davis repent his own pious authority and moral virtue. The judge could have said “beautiful,” but the beauties as he knew them were linked to men whose wealth afforded them the next level of luxury, at the resort hotels with full service spas and big bathtubs and thick robes meant for courtesans.

The singer was fucking the air across the dance floor from Tom's little girl. “Excuse me,” said Tom, rising. He knew he was giving Judge Davis the impression that he had left the table to escape his insight.

Surrounded by a shameless audience, Alma stood alone on the dance floor, six feet from the singer, shaking
her body to mirror his moves. The singer stabbed his hips toward her, he was fucking her for laughs, and she answered him in her own spastic way. She followed his lead, possessed by the music and the encouraging laughter and applause of the crowd. Jane Austen's fat husband was nearby, and as Tom ran to take Alma from the floor, Perri came up to him and said, “That man,” meaning Mr. Austen, “told Alma to dance.”

What an ugly thing, to see my daughter made into this joke, thought Tom. What a disgusting thing for everyone to think it's so funny that my daughter is innocent of the implications of her beauty and energy and love of music and movement. What evil people let a four-year-old roll her hips like this for their cheap amusement?

Tom rushed through the children dancing at the edge of the floor and took Alma in his arms. She kicked him. “I want to dance!” she cried.

“Honey, that's enough.”

“No!” She kicked him again, then punched him. Now everyone was laughing at Tom. He wanted to scream at them. Pagans! he wanted to say. This is child sacrifice, he wanted to say, burning a child's dignity for laughs.

The singer didn't stop. Tom pulled Alma out of the circle and brought her to the rail at the edge of the deck. The sound of gravel rolled by the sea like wind in tall grass, calming both of them.

“I want to dance,” she said, but the fury was gone. Tom thought that she was grateful for the rescue.

“You danced enough.”

“Why did you take me away?”

“The band was loud, and I didn't want the music to hurt your ears.”

She accepted this. It was often easy for Tom and Rosalie to quiet the children with simple lies that addressed the issues in close consonance. It was a lie, but if his four-year-old had not been tricked into dancing like a whore, he might have taken her away anyway, just as he explained. She asked if she could dance where she was, and he said Yes. Now she danced like herself, a free ballerina or figure skater,
en pointe
, back arched and right leg lifted. She rolled her hips and belly in one sexual shudder, as she had on the floor, but Tom kept a blank face and, allowing no response to her lewd gesture, he began to sever the connection between the encouraged concupiscence and the approval of her audience. After this, the charming ballerina took over from Salomé.

All of this happened quickly, and Rosalie joined them.

“Did you see that?” Tom asked quietly, while Alma danced.

“What was she doing?”

“That fat fuck over there”—Tom almost said “Jane Austen's husband,” but why give Rosalie a peek into the deeper vaults of the cave?—“told Alma to dance.”

“Oh, Alma,” said Rosalie, giving her Terpsichore a big hug and picking her up. “You do like to dance, don't you?”

“I was dancing,” she said.

“Yes you were.”

Rosalie took Alma in her arms, the girl's legs straddling her hips. Tom looked his daughter in the eye and saw confusion. She could not articulate what she was feeling, but Tom was certain that in her own way she knew that the performance had violated her. Alma had a sense of honor.

“It's over,” said Rosalie. “Come back to the table, Tom, the judge loved talking to you.”

“In a minute.”

“Where are you going?”

“I just want to say something to the guy who told Alma to dance.”

“What?”

“I want to tell him that I wish he hadn't.”

“Just don't hit him.”

“I won't.” She was joking. Tom wasn't.

Rosalie carried Alma back to Judge Davis's table. Tom stepped over the legs of some children who sat beside their parents on the deck. It was all so ordinary. Jane Austen's husband drank a Red Stripe beer, and his head kept time with the music. Tom stood next to him.

“Excuse me,” he said, “but did you tell my daughter to get up and dance?” All of this was only five minutes old.

“Your daughter?” asked the man.

“That little girl over there.” Tom pointed to Alma, sitting in Rosalie's lap.

“Oh. Yes. She was on the side of the dance floor jumping around, and there were some kids already there, and she seemed kind of shy about it. I thought she wanted to dance with them, so I told her to get out in front and have a good time, not to be shy.”

“And you saw what happened.”

“She danced. Is there a problem?”

“That was a stupid thing to do. That was inappropriate and stupid. She's four years old.”

“I'm not quite sure what you're so upset about, but if it's your family custom not to dance, then I'm sorry, I really am.”

“Do you think someone with a family custom against dancing would come to Jamaica?”

“Anything is possible. People make mistakes.”

“So who made the mistake here, you or me?”

“Maybe both of us. Why was she alone?”

“She was with her sister.”