Tag: timed writing

[continued from Day 28]

Fenton “Fen,” Jr., a lanky boy of 13, with closely trimmed hair, took the stand, swore on a bible, said “yes ma’am,” and “yes, sir,” and did a pretty good job of appearing to be what he was, a kid from a tough neighborhood who had somehow managed to stay out of trouble. Until now.

“Fen, is your father Fenton Walker, Sr., the defendant in this case?”

“Yeah, that’s my dad.”

“And the victim, Tanya Walker, that was your sister?”

“Yeah.” Fen’s eyes dropped to his lap, where his hands lay clasped in his lap.

“Fen, would you please take a look at this photo, marked as People’s Exhibit No. 25. Can you tell the jury what you see there?”

“A blue hat. It’s a Fila baseball hat.”

“Fen, did you and your father live together?”

“Yeah, we all did. Me, Tanya, my dad, my mom.”

“And you saw your father often?”

“Objection, Your Honor.” The ASA was losing her patience.

“Overruled.” Judge Kilwin gave me a look that could wilt lettuce. “Counsel, lay your foundation and get to the point.” To Fen, he said “Son, you can answer.”

“I saw him every day.” 

“Would you say you are familiar with your father’s clothing, then?” I said, eyeing the judge.

“Yeah, I’m familiar. We ain’t rich, okay? My dad don’t got a lot of different clothes.”

And so I got right to the point. “Fen, did your father own a blue Fila baseball hat like the one in People’s Exhibit 25?”

“No.” Fen shook his head twice. “He ain’t never had a hat like that.”

I could have stopped here. I thought about it. But that wasn’t the plan. So I asked my last question.

“You’re sure about that, Fen?”

“I’m positive.” And he did look positive. Damn. The kid had done great.

“No further questions, Your Honor.” The Judge narrowed his eyes at me. He knew I was up to something but wasn’t sure what. I got the impression that the judge didn’t think too highly of my skills as a litigator. And that was fine. I wasn’t here to win an award. I was here to get my client acquitted. I returned to counsel’s table wearing my best poker face. I pretended to look through a file, watching the ASA from the corner of my eye.

She was thinking, tapping her pen on her lower lip. Maybe she smelled a trap. But that bait … those two words–I’m positive–dangling there in the space of the courtroom. One thing you have to understand about lawyers, certainty in an adverse witness is like blood in the water. It triggers something primitive.

“Counsel?” Judge Kilwin was eager to wrap things up.

The ASA stopped her tapping and stood. She’d decided. “Just a few questions, your honor.” Atta girl.

She took her time approaching the witness stand, pacing back and forth as if she was debating something serious. You had to admire the theatrics. Finally she asked, “Mr. Walker …,” and then, as if it had just occurred to her, “May I call you Fen?”

“Most do.” He was being nice, just like I’d told him.

“Fen, have you memorized every article of clothing in your father’s closet?”

“I wouldn’t say memorized.”

“You wouldn’t?” The ASA raised her eyebrows about as high as they would go.

“No.”

“Well I’m a little confused, then. When you say you’re positive that your father didn’t have a blue hat like that, isn’t that what you’re really saying?”

“No.” Fen looked a little indignant. I couldn’t blame him.

“Well, let me put it this way. Is it possible your father bought a new hat and wore it once or twice before you knew about it?”

“I guess.”

“Does your dad own a lot of hats?”

“Some.” Now Fen was looking at her like she was a complete idiot. Keep cool, kid, I thought.

“How many would you say. More than five?”

“Yeah.”

“More than ten?”

“Sure.”

“More than ten!” The ASA’s eyebrows appeared ready to take flight from her face. “More than 15?”

“Nah, not that many.” The eyebrows settled back down to earth.

“Ten to fifteen hats.” She let that sink in for a moment. “Sitting here today, Fen, could you describe each one of those hats to us?”

“No ma’am.”

“Fen, are you still willing to tell this jury–and I want to remind you that you are under oath–are you still willing to tell them you are positive that is not your father’s blue hat?

Fen didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”

The ASA was smirking now. She should stop. But I could already see she wouldn’t. “But how can you be so certain?” I stopped breathing. That was it. She’d stepped into the trap. And just like that, it slammed shut on her.

“Because that’s my hat, ma’am. Ain’t nobody wearing it that night but me.”

” ‘There is one more thing, Your Honor,’ I said.” From Anatomy of a Murder, by Robert Traver, p. 259.

* * *

“There is one more thing, Your Honor,” I said.

“Yes, Mr. Turling?”

“Your Honor, the defense calls Fenton Walker, Jr.”

Judge Kilwin looked up from the papers he was shuffling and peered sternly at me over his glasses, one eyebrow raised. “Approach.”

I strode to the podium, the assistant state’s attorney clacking behind me in her high heels. She’d been flipping through notes for her closing argument. She thought we were done. We weren’t done.

The ASA pushed a piece of hair behind her ear and glared at me before starting in. “Your Honor, this witness was not disclosed. And frankly, I’m not sure what he could possibly offer. The defendant himself told the police that his son was not at home on the night of June 8, 2009, and the neighbor, Mrs. … Mrs. …”

“Fairview,” I offered, trying to be helpful.

“Mrs. Fairview. She testified that Fenton Jr., “Fen,” I think she called him, was sleeping over at her house that night. He was in the basement with her son Carl, playing video games. She checked on them at 9 p.m. and again just after midnight. Your honor, this is a pretty transparent effort, in my view, to garner sympathy from the jury–to say, hey, look at this poor boy who will grow up without a father if you find the defendant guilty. The time for that is at sentencing, not at a jury trial for first degree murder. I would ask …”

Judge Kilwin had heard enough. “Mr. Turling? Your response?”

“Rebuttal witness, Your Honor.”

“And what, exactly, will the young Mr. Walker be rebutting?”

“Your Honor, Officer May, the forensic evidence tech, testified that he found a blue Fila hat at the scene of the crime. Fen is gong to testify that his father owned no such hat.”

“That’s it?” The judge seemed confused.

“That’s it.”

“Fine. Get him up there, get your answer and get him down. We’re not parading family members around now. This trial is almost over with.”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

The ASA looked disgusted.

[To be continued …]

“It was a face to which almost any door would have opened of its own accord.” The House of the Seven Gables, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, p. 96

* * *

It was a face to which almost any door would have opened of its own accord. The boy’s thick brown hair, standing up in crests, was dented in the front from the rim of the baseball hat he held in one hand. He had mischievous eyes, cheeks still flushed from the game, a broad smile, and a dimpled chin. Claire stared at him. And then she chided herself. She could be his mother.

Standing next to the boy was a smaller version of himself–same smile, same hair, the ears sticking out a bit from under his hat—what the boy looked like two years ago, Claire guessed. And then he’d grown into the ears, shot up a foot, and adopted a grown person’s manners. “Hi ma’am, I’m Joe, and this is my brother Paul. We’re looking to do some yardwork around the neighborhood this summer. Mowing and weeding, mostly. We can do leaves in the fall too.”

Claire recognized him then: Joey Granger. Theresa Granger’s oldest child. How was that possible? She remembered him, at four or five years old, pedaling around the block on a little blue tricycle. The Granger’s had that massive dog. A Saint Bernard, maybe? And they’d let little Joey have the reign of the neighborhood, knowing the dog would never leave his side. Claire had a vision of the dog’s massive paw pressing on the front fender of the tricycle, stopping the boy from pedaling out into the street.

“Joey, my god, I’m Claire Forster, I used to be friends with your mother.” His face underwent some barely perceptible transformation. “But that was so long ago. Didn’t you all move out to Fox Hills?”

“We did ma’am.” He shifted the duffel bag full of baseball equipment from one shoulder to the other. The younger boy bit his lip and studied the tip of his shoe, grinding it into the pavement in a rocking motion.

“We moved back here a few months ago, though,”  the boy explained.

“Not into the same house?” Claire remembered with a tinge of jealousy the beautiful old timber and stone Craftsman with the eyebrow dormers.

“No, but it’s the same street.”

“Oh, your mother must be so pleased! She always loved that block.” The boys stared at her, as if she’d suggested something obscene. Claire felt herself smiling stiffly, a twinge of uncertainty now playing at the corner of her mouth.

“No, ma’am.”

“No?” She felt something inside her sink and then settle again.

“Our mom is … she died. Last year. She got cancer.” The boy blinked, pretended to look down the block.

“Oh my god. I’m so sorry, Joey.” She hadn’t meant to call him that. It was too familiar, a little boy’s name.

He turned and looked her right in the eye. “So do you need some help with your yard, ma’am? I mean, Mrs. Forster?”

“He rode over the drawbridge into the great courtyard, and the echo of his horse’s hoof beats was the only sound that greeted him.” From Stories of the Knights of the Round Table, by Henry Gilbert, p. 106.

* * *

He rode over the drawbridge into the great courtyard, and the echo of his horse’s hoof beats was the only sound that greeted him. With a tug of the reigns the horse reared up and whinnied, eyes bulging and nostrils flaring. Faldo scanned the courtyard’s perimeter, shaded by the massive timber balconies above. Matching his movement, the horse turned in a slow, wary circle. Something was wrong.

The last time Faldo had set foot in this courtyard it had been bursting with noise, on the first market day of spring. People from the surrounding towns had flung off the stinking furs of a long, dark winter, scrubbed themselves pink in the brooks and streams, and donned clean linen breaches and tight-laced kirtles. They’d traveled for days, then waited in long queues to gain entry to the massive courtyard. Once inside the near-circular enclosure, goods were arrayed by type, in baskets and barrels, on makeshift tables, and in the backs of wagons. There were spring vegetables and herbs, mounds of cut flowers, wood carvings and ironworks toiled over in the cold months, embroidery, skeins of wool, beeswax candles, pies and cakes, gleaming jars of new honey, and baskets of speckled blue and brown eggs.

Children chased each other between the wagons and stalls, tossing hoops and balls, or clattering together in mock battle with rough wooden swords. Performers were generally relegated to the grounds outside the castle, but the odd juggler or stilt-walker still made his way through the crowd, knowing that folks were more apt to part with their coins before they’d buried them in their pockets than after.

A sudden motion made Faldo spin in his saddle. He squinted, peering into the heaps of discarded wood and moldering bales of hay stacked in the shadow of the far stone wall. A cat, piebald, with one ice-blue eye, sat on an old barrel, twitching its tail seductively. It was thin, half-starved probably, but he recognized it all the same. It was the seer’s cat.

He could picture her now, the old woman with the gnarled fingers full of rings, gold filigree and blood-red rubies stacked next to bands of braided wheatgrass and twine–totemic looking things. He remembered how her eyes, so like those of her cat, had given him such a start in the dim candlelight of her smoke-filled tent. It was just there, he thought, at the edge of the courtyard, that she’d taken his own hand in hers and told him. Told him everything. That this would come to pass. that he would live to see this place hushed, full of ghosts. And now he had.

“Lady Brackenstall was no ordinary person.” From “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange,” The Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, p. 608.

* * *

Lady Brackenstall was no ordinary person. Those given to superstition indeed questioned whether she was a person at all, and not some phantasmal presence clinging to the creaking hallways and wrought-iron ballustrades of Larchmere Manor. And she was a lady–une grande dame, bien sur–only in the ironical sense of the word. Une grande dame de la nuit, in point of fact.

Lady Brackenstall was–even lady Brackenstall would admit–now well beyond her prime, having been the proprietress of Larchmere Manor for over 25 years. Even presuming she had been a precocious young entrepreneur (and she had been), flinging open the heavy double doors of her establishment at the tender age of 20 or even 18 (and she had), the madame was still firmly settled in middle age.

But settled there with dignity. That was important. Many women her age, Lady Brackenstall had observed, grieved their youth like untimely widows, feeling abandoned and betrayed by each crease and fold, each wiry gray hair springing up where once only golden or chestnut waves had once flowed. Those ladies were preyed upon in their desperation by every door-to-door snake oil salesman and bent-backed midwife on the Eastern seaboard, soaking in vile tinctures, rubbing their skin with greasy liniments, wrapping it in stinking poultices, imbibing foul-smelling tonics and teas made of thistle of this and nettle of that.

Lady Brackenstall, ever with an eye for a swindle, steered clear of such nastiness. Without a husband to keep, already shunned by the social circles who might otherwise judge her, and uniformly feared by all who mattered, Lady Brackenstall embraced age as one relishing a due reward. She donned silk kimonos, brewed herself expensive little cups of Portuguese coffee, and had tropical flowers and sweet-smelling sachets placed all around her boudoir. She took breakfast in bed, never before 11:00, and commanded respect from all the young beautiful things in her employ.

“As she knelt by her, feeling with her palm the wet, burning forehead, she prayed a thousand times.” Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe, p. 85.

* * *

As she knelt by her, feeling with her palm the wet, burning forehead, she prayed a thousand times. At first she prayed for the old woman to get better, to wake groggy and confused, demanding green tea with lemon and the Sunday crossword puzzle.

Over time, her prayers became more discrete. An hour of sleep without the wracking pains that sent the woman’s knobby fingers, with their strangely beautiful shaped nails, clutching the railing of the hospital bed. An hour without the pitiful moans and whimpers, the subterranean growl of failing organs. An hour without the indignity of being rolled this way and that so that others, strangers with strong, capable hands, could inspect, wipe, apply cream, as if to an infant.

In the final days, Mother Morphine presiding, Kaylin’s prayers branched in other directions. That the hospice literature was correct, that death in this manner–essentially by dehydration–was painless. That the very ill felt no hunger, in the end. That it was a kindness to let them sink into sleep, not to force them to take liquids or soft foods, which their bodies, already preparing, shrunk from like poison.

And finally, because the waiting was unendurable, because it was surely impossible for a person to survive four full days without a drop of water, because the reality of it made her question all reassurances, because what happens to the sinking flesh, hung on the bone structure of the face like clothes on hangers, is a slow and silent terror, for all of these reasons Kaylin wished in the end only for death. And one morning it came for the woman, simply, without fanfare, as it had for the others.

“So where do  they go?” Jack asked her later in the nurses’ lounge.

“Who?”

“The people you sit with. The old ladies. Heaven? Or do you think they’re … just gone?”

Kaylin looked up at him, but didn’t stop pushing the bits of lettuce around on her plate. She shrugged. “How would I know that?”

“No reason. Only, you’ve seen it more than most. The passing. The exit. Whatever you want to call it.”

She supposed that was true.

And … well, you’re different about it. Different from the others. You see Michelle get all bent out of shape each time. Carl jokes about it, but that’s a cover. But you, when you came in here just now your face was almost … serene. Like pictures of the saints in church.”

That made her giggle.

“Like you know something we don’t.”

Kaylin rolled her eyes and took a bite. “Well I don’t,” she said.

“Knowing. Believing. You must at least have an opinion?”

“No Jack, I really don’t.” But that wasn’t true. And she could tell he didn’t believe her.

“Somehow, I had the presence of mind to reach up and yank the ejection handle above my seat.” Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline, p. 338.

* * *

Somehow, I had the presence of mind to reach up and yank the ejection handle above my seat. It’s something you train for in drills. Accurately identifying the moment of no return. But nothing prepares you for what it feels like when you actually do it.

There was no simulator console blinking red, no soothing female voice congratulating me on making the most of an irretrievable situation or, more likely, explaining to me how I’d overreacted, needlessly abandoning a state-of-the-art flying machine to a fiery death, assigning me double simulation sessions to fine-tune my reflexes.

We all knew the training modules were programed to err on the side of saving the aircraft, not the rookie–or even the intermediate–pilot. Only when you’d logged hundreds of hours as a fleet runner did the balance begin to slowly shift, the zone in which the simulator recognized “eject and abandon craft” as a valid response to a catastrophic event begin to gradually expand.

But I don’t need a computer to tell me this much: if I hadn’t pulled that handle, I’d be dead right now; a smoldering hulk of charred wreckage at the bottom of this canyon.

I’ve had some time to think about it, sitting here in the escape pod, as it dangles from an impossibly thin strand of nylon, the last line connecting it to the parachute above me, caught in the only branch left on the only tree visible for miles around. At least, it used to be a tree. It’s now little more than a sand-blasted stump of bleached driftwood. It’s incredible, really, that that either the nylon thread or the tree’s branch has held the weight of my pod. That both have done so, for nearly two hours, as the wind turns the pod in slow concentric circles, out over the sheer cliff of the canyon and back again, is truly inexplicable.

As I think this, there is a sharp crack and the pod drops suddenly, just as it swings out over the void. My eyes squeeze shut, my heart leaps to my throat. But the thread holds.

That’s it, I tell myself. On the next in-swing I’m going to unbuckle my belt and slam myself as hard as I can against the floor of the pod. The thread is going to break eventually, and I’ll be damned if its going to do so while I’m dangling over 1000 meters of nothing and a rocky streambed.

“Children are very sensitive to injustice, you know.” The Edible Woman, by Margaret Atwood, p. 160.

* * *

“Children are very sensitive to injustice, you know.” The woman–Eugenia Fairfield, 67 years old, of 1137 Covent Lane–removed blue plastic gardening gloves with a faded print of red-hatted gnomes from her hands and smoothed her rumpled shorts. She wore the sort of woven straw sun visor peculiar to lady gardeners. It made a circular frame for the coils of glossy black hair shot through with silver that she’d piled up behind it. The officer’s eyes kept returning to that hair, marveling at the way the strands wove in and out of each other in loops and braids. It was like some intricate model of an atom or the solar system, with lines drawn in to show the orbits of even the smallest asteroids.

“And adults aren’t, would you say? Sensitive to injustice, I mean?” Officer Patterson asked absentmindedly as she filled out the lengthy incident report pinned to her clipboard. It was an art form, sustaining the bare minimum of conversation needed to keep a witness standing there, patiently waiting for all of the blanks to be filled and the applicable boxes checked. You wanted to keep them attentive, keep them talking, but stall any serious recitation of the facts until the appropriate moment, when you’d reached that portion of the form.

The officer had tried other methods, of course. At first she’d filled the various parts of the form out in any old order. But something always got missed that way. She tried scribbling notes in a flip notebook, like some sort of overeager novice reporter, then copying the information neatly into the form later, seated in the cramped squad car, between bites of marinara meatball sub. But inevitably at such times another call would come in. She’d wind up sitting at her desk long after her colleagues had left for the evening, baffled as to the meaning of some inscrutable notation from earlier in the day. No, this was the best way.

“I wouldn’t say they’re insensitive to it. Not all of them, at any rate. But a degree of complacency grows up, wouldn’t you say? You must observe that all the time, in your field …”

“Mmm. Hmm.” Officer Patterson wrote a bit faster, drawing firm diagonal lines through the portions of the form that didn’t seem to apply.

” … Take what happened here ….” She finally came to “Witness Account,” and following it, the tidy yet always insufficient block of seven horizontal lines.

“Yes. What did happen, Ms. Fairfield? In your own words.” She always added that. It was silly, but she had found it to be effective.”

“Well officer, I have to say, I’ve lived here 30 years and never seen anything like it.”

“It was hard to conceive how all this beauty had been obtained.” From “Landor’s Cottage,” The Collected Tales and Poems of Edgar Allen Poe, p. 619.

* * *

It was hard to conceive how all this beauty had been obtained. Sarah drew herself nose to nose with a tiny glass unicorn, one of dozens of figures standing on motionless display in a lit curio cabinet.

She turned and ran her index finger lightly along the frilly edge of a bedspread in the enormous doll house. In each room a doll–perfectly to scale–went about some business or another. The mother doll, with her graceful chignon and real lace collar, sat alone sipping coffee at a table set for twelve, her tiny chin raised slightly, her eyes far away, almost pensive. In the next room the father doll sat at a miniature rollback desk with a tiny green velvet blotter, head in hands, bent over a stack of papers with real writing on them. Sara imagined that, with a magnifying glass, she might be able to read the words on those pages–no bigger than postage stamps, thinner than tissue paper–and decipher a root cause for the gloom that pervaded the rooms of that make-believe house.

Beyond the dollhouse was a massive white wrought-iron bed covered in crisp white linens. The spread at first appeared polka-dotted, but on closer inspection was hand-embroidered with little baskets of purple flowers, each one slightly different from its neighbors. Hung from a hook on the ceiling was  a sheer white canopy with purple scalloped edges. Sarah drew it lightly aside to see, raised up against the pillows, an army of porcelain dolls, their eyes fixed forward beneath curving lashes. Some were old, dressed in pinafores and heeled boots, others looked almost modern, in saddle shoes and mini skirts.

Sarah sat carefully on the bed, wincing as it squeaked in objection to her weight.

She had not been in that many other girls’ rooms. There was Shelly Parker, who stood with Sarah at the bus stop each morning, half under and half outside of the rectangle of shade thrown by the awning of the life insurance company. The broker never had any clients that early but was against kids loitering on his doorstep just the same. Shelly’s family was born-again Christian, some sort of fundamentalist Baptist sect. They went to church three times a week, and Shelly’s room was decorated with Precious Moments figurines and framed prints of Thomas Kincaid paintings–warmly lit cottages hugged tight by gardens brimming with blue and pink hydrangeas and bud roses–an old person’s idea of what a young girl might like.

Tabitha Lamott’s room, she could see, was also heavy with adult notions of childhood. But it was also fascinating. With rekindled resolve, Sarah waited, hands in her lap, to meet her new friend.

“As with many illnesses, the cure is simple, once perceived.” Watership Down, by Richard Adams, p. 112.

* * *

As with many illnesses, the cure is simple, once perceived. To begin with, Sharon needed a sturdy table. And one morning–after scuttling the kids out the door to school, settling for wet hair and a shift dress, and heading for the train–the universe provided her with one. There, two houses down and across the alley, was one of those giant wooden spools for industrial cable, propped against a chain link fence an a utility pole. It was the sort of thing college kids would use for a coffee table. The girls Sharon had shared an apartment with all those years ago might actually have had one. She had a vague recollection of it, strewn with ashtrays and bottles of cheap beer.

Sharon approached the thing for a closer inspection. Then, looking first one way and then the other down the alley, she gave it an appraising kick. Nice. Solid. She hastily rolled it across the alley and through her back gate, depositing it in a forgotten corner of her yard. For good measure, she covered it with an old paint-streaked tarp before glancing with alarm at her watch and tripping off once more to the train.

Getting the thing into the basement the next day did not go at all according to plan. The “controlled roll” she had envisioned was, as it turned out, a physics lesson waiting to happen. As always, between gravity and things wheel-shaped, all was dispatched with no undue delay. There wasn’t much left for Sharon to do but stand back and, later, plaster over the rather large depression in the basement wall.

A week later the makeshift table was ensconced in its own little corner of Sharon’s basement, next to the dust-furred hulk of her husband’s old rowing machine and stacked milk crates full of memorabilia from track meets and dance recitals. The table was covered in an assortment of textiles, found objects, inks and dyes, adhesives of all kinds, and sketchbooks–stacks and stacks of dusty old, elastic-corded moleskin sketchbooks, each with the year printed neatly on the inside cover.

And it was in this way, like iron shavings dancing in the path of a magnet, that the scattered bits of Sharon Belthower began to collide and adhere to one another. An old energy stuttered to life and flowed, once again, up and down her arms, pooling into her fingertips, stiff and lethargic; fingers that had almost forgotten what it was to create.