Adam takes in a breath, letting the pain of breathing distract him from his line of thinking. Lately he has experienced pain like that from cracked ribs, as if he’d been the one attacked. “Do you have anything stronger than aspirin?”
The proprietor gestures toward a small display of patent medicines and shrugs. “Tylenol, Advil, the usual stuff. My wife likes Aleve.”
Adam studies the boxes, reads the ingredients, thinks back on the various commercial claims each one professes, and then checks the price. “You take credit cards?”
“Ten-dollar limit.”
Adam gathers one of each brand into his arms and dumps them on the counter with his paper and the coffee.
“Thanks, pal.” The proprietor bags his stuff and hands the plastic bag to him. Outside, Adam shoves his papers under his arm, shifts the plastic bag of drugs. Glancing next door, he sees the tropical fish store woman unlocking her door. She’s dressed in low-rise jeans and a tank top that just about touches the waistband. Her hair is still damp from her shower or from the early heat, and it hangs in gentle waves to her shoulders and is the color of molasses. She nods to him, a fellow early bird.
Adam has seen her before, just not this close. He spends a great deal of his day watching the street from his bolt-hole of an apartment. He’s watched her perform what seems to be a daily ritual of washing her front window—a willowy undulation side to side, up and down as she squeegees the plate glass with her long-poled blade.
What can he say to her? He feels a little like a voyeur face-to-face with his object. Up close, she’s older than he thought, not a girl, despite her youthful clothes, but a woman maybe in her late thirties, early forties.
Adam hesitates too long and she disappears into the shop. Taking a sip of his coffee, Adam waits to take advantage of a lull in the increased morning traffic. A moment later, the woman reappears, her hair bundled back out of the way with an elastic, a bucket of water in hand.
“Morning.” There, he’s established that he’s a human being.
She gives him the wary look of a woman alone on a city sidewalk, and he becomes conscious of his scrappy attire. “Mornin’.” Nothing more. She turns to her window washing.
“Hot again.” Points for having a conversation, points off for being platitudinal.
“Sure is.” Her accent is tipped with some flavor not from here. Southern? Midwestern?
“Keep cool.”
“You, too.”
Sure, a hot courtroom his destination, an unknown penalty. A life off the rails. He’s cool. Absolutely.
They spotted the dead dog first. The rest of us, Mom, Dad, and two others, were shocked into a momentary silence before coming to our senses and barking invectives at the men, and the woman. She’s the one who knelt over the body of my late challenger, running her hand gently down his side as if he might enjoy the feeling. I stopped my noise to watch.
Two uniformed men and one woman stood in our cellar and swore grandly at what they had come to see. It was a little stagy, their response, as if they were pleased to have been proven correct, that they had chosen well. I yarked. Mom and Dad shrank to the back of their cages. One of the others actually growled, catching the attention of the men, who stopped swearing and grimaced with some decision. I yarked some more, a little uncertain and more than curious. What did this visit really mean? The men carried poles with loops of line sticking out of their hollow cores. The woman seemed more confident and unlatched the cage containing my mother and my siblings. Mom shrank back but was silent, which the
woman took for a good thing. “Come on, Mommy, I won’t hurt you.” I stopped my yarking, wanting to hear more of this voice. Fitty, my dad, sat down and did something that was extraordinary in my mind, something I had never seen him do, but I understood immediately the reason for it. He put one paw up against the mesh of his cage front. An imploring “Hey, I’m with you,” sort of gesture. The men visibly relaxed. The woman tentatively held out a hand to Mom. Mom wasn’t having any of it, and pressed herself even deeper into the cage. In her experience, someone wanting her out of her cage meant only two things, a fight or a fuck. The woman snapped her fingers softly and made a clucking noise with her mouth, a sweet little kissy noise. Mom sighed. Capitulation. Slowly, my mother made her way to the woman’s hand, sniffing it with wariness wanting to be trust. Once Mom was out of the cage, a collar around her neck and a man’s strong hand hanging on to her leash, the woman gently handed out the six pups into a big box.
I yarked a question to the room:
What’s going to happen?
No one answered because no one knew. Mom cast a look in my direction, her tail swinging gently to and fro in a clear message:
Whatever it is has got to be better than this minute.
Dogs are existentialists. We think of now. But we do have a capacity for learning, which is predicated on our understanding of the past, not as some block of time, but as an action, a pain, a smell. Our idea of the future is limited to hunger pains, I will eat, and anticipation of a walk at a certain time every day. Those of us removed from that cellar that day lacked the imagination to picture a happy place; we knew only that things were going to be different.
Eventually, they came to me. Mom and Dad and the kiddies
were all boxed or muzzled, the growling dog had been silenced with a little happy juice, and the other dog was acting all goofy and “happy to see you.” I took a hint from him. I didn’t want one of those muzzles on me. I suffer a bit from claustrophobia.
Aaah aah aaaah
,
I said, cranking the length of my tail into raptures. We gladiator types look amazingly happy when we loll our tongues and split our jaws into grins. The men and the woman bought my act. They slipped a loop around my neck and we all headed up the narrow stairs to the first floor. I’d never been up there. It reeked of boys’ sweat and a pungent smoke. Pizza boxes lay on the floor, tantalizingly out of reach from my nose, as I was constrained by the rigid pole one of the men had in his grip. Beer cans were neatly stacked in a pyramid beneath the cracked window in the otherwise-empty room.
I didn’t get to look around for very long, as we were quickly hustled out of the place and into the street. A white van with its back doors wide open idled at the sidewalk. One by one, my parents and the other two dogs were hoisted into cages in the back. We were used to cages and didn’t protest. Before I was lifted in, another man, one I hadn’t seen before, came out bearing the weight of my last competitor, wrapped in a slippery blue tarp. The man’s face was grim, as if he was mourning the loss of a friend he’d only just been introduced to, or that he was sad to be right.
There was a moment’s inattention as the body of the dead dog wrapped in its slippery shroud slipped out of the man’s grasp, thumping to the ground and leaving the empty blue plastic sheet in his arms. The people gasped in unison, and I noticed a lessening of the grip on the pole, a subtle inattention brought on by the clumsy dropping of the dead dog. I bolted.
Adam sits beside his lawyer on a cold metal folding chair behind a rectangular table in the second-floor courtroom. The veneered surface of the table is lifted here and there, dried out by decades of overheating in winter and summertime humidity. On the floor beside him, faithful to the end, is his old briefcase. His Cartier fountain pen, a parting gift from his coworkers at his last corporation before being lured away to Dynamic, rests fully capped on the untouched lined yellow pad in front of him. Adam wants to cross his legs, to ease the unexplained pain in his ribs, but he knows that he must remain four-square, feet on the floor, forearms gently touching the tabletop, hands reverently clenched. The picture of a martyr.
“All rise.”
Adam stands as if a military man. Which is what he might have been had he followed the advice of his guidance counselor in high school, who was impressed enough with his top grades in an underachieving parochial school, but not
enough to recommend anything better than a state college, or the military. His last set of foster parents—foster father, really—believed the military was the place to become a man. He’d been to Nam. “Make a man of ya.” Whack, then the shoulder jab. “Toughen you up, boy.” Jab, jab.
Sophie stands at an identical table with a female lawyer who looks a lot like a college intern. They both wear subdued suits, Sophie’s in navy blue and the lawyer’s in gray; both have their long blond hair pulled into severe ponytails. They could be sisters.
Sophie. If only she’d added those two critical, essential, defining, unalarming words on that “While You Were Out” slip.
In.
Fucking.
Law.
Sister-in-law. Sterling’s sister, who wanted to talk about a surprise party for Sterling’s birthday. Then they would be sitting pretty right now, both of them enjoying the fruits of his labors, he as CEO designee of Dynamic, she as the future CEO’s PA, which was tantamount to queen bee of the corporate hive.
Instead, they stand side by side in a courtroom after all the words have been said, all the excuses his attorney can make—stress, responsibility, high-powered job—in an attempt to justify the unjustifiable. That the stress of his professional life and the excitement of the anticipated actions of that day had overwhelmed him makes him sound weak, unreliable. The court-ordered shrink has applied the psychobabble of his profession and subpoenaed managers to tout an exemplary work record. Exemplary except for this one egregious mistake. That uncharacteristic moment of loss of control has cost him everything.
And in this corner, Sophie’s own militants have presented a compelling story of stress, responsibility, high-powered job,
and an equally exemplary work record. Her shrink has rolled out the heavy guns of post-traumatic stress syndrome.
Adam keeps Sophie in his peripheral vision, not turning his head to see her sitting there, her plump mouth pursed in righteousness. Victimhood worn like a mantle. Shoulders back, head held high. Judge Judy, of whom he’s seen a lot in the past few months, would send her on her way, telling her to suck it up, saying her inaccuracy was the cause of all this. A seasoned professional staffer, she had made a neophyte’s mistake. In-law. All the difference in the world.
The judge enters the courtroom. After him there follows a scent of cooler air coming from an air conditioner placed somewhere a lot more pleasant than this chamber of horrors. He seats himself, and the dozen people in the room are allowed to resume their seats. Behind Sophie are her parents and her boyfriend, a burly fellow with a red-and-green tattoo running up his neck, as if some tropical plant is rooted beneath his black T-shirt. Behind them is a gathering of her friends and supporters. A short line of reporters, press credentials hanging around their necks, sit in the last row of chairs.
Behind Adam, there is no one.
Ted Abramowitz, his lawyer, later shakes his hand and congratulates him. “It could have been worse, lots worse.” The pumping hand action of the happy lawyer threatens to turn into a backslap. Worse? Than what, a death sentence? The judge has sentenced Adam to two years probation and one year of community service, plus assigning him court costs,
monetary damages, and counseling. Should this end here? Not likely. Sophie’s plump lips thin into a dissatisfied line. Her lawyer pats her on the shoulder and a look passes between them; a civil suit will follow.
Abramowitz assures Adam that he should be ecstatic. How so, Adam wonders, with a smear like this on his pristine record? Because he’s been unable to defend the takeover plan, the whole thing looks like a colossal mistake. And Wannamaker looks even more godlike, having saved Dynamic’s reputation by calling a halt. To say nothing of the fact that he’s going to have to fight to get any severance from Dynamic. No golden parachute was offered, just the boot heel of his pension—don’t let the door slam on the way out. Seems as though even the most morally suspect of giant corporations have limits. Not only that: Who will hire a top exec with a criminal record, however lightly handled?
To say nothing of his divorce.
His esteemed lawyer licks his lips in anticipation of further business. He’s going to be living off the fatted calf for some time at this rate. Although Abramowitz comes from one of the city’s better-known legal firms, it is a firm Adam has never used. Quick on the draw, Sterling engaged their personal lawyers, and was rewarded with the services of the best of the best in attorneys, a golfing buddy, a man Adam once thought of as a friend.
“Now we should figure out where you’ll do your service. We can get you someplace that won’t be too onerous. Maybe tutoring at the community college.” Ted Abramowitz stuffs his briefcase with the thick file folders of Adam’s case. Adam isn’t listening to the second-best lawyer money can buy. He
is jobless, convicted of a stupid mistake that wasn’t his fault. His wife is poisoning his daughter’s mind against him, and his lawyer thinks he’s had good news?
Once the verdict has been read, the press clamor for a sound bite. Abramowitz waves them away, fairly easily, as this case isn’t that interesting laid against the backdrop of the recent economic woes. Adam’s case, and the press’s interest in it, has been relegated to an inside page.
“Are you sorry?” One female reporter, a thin, narrow notebook in hand, waits for an answer. She wears jeans, and her dangling credentials identify her as from the local weekly, the giveaway paper. She looks about fifteen years old. Has he gotten so middle-aged that all young women look like teenagers? That they all look like his last memory of Veronica?
Adam’s lawyer bleats, “No comment,” but the girl catches Adam’s eye, holding it with the force of her own question. And for a confused moment, Adam thinks she means about his sister. That’s been the strangest thing, this regret that, in the end, it wasn’t Veronica after all.
The girl reporter and the disgraced executive stare at each other, she wants an answer to fill out her story; he has no answer. The moment is broken when the bailiff beckons to Adam and his lawyer. The judge wants a word.