George Higgins - A change of gravity

Not my specialty at all. Take it away. Find someone else. Don't leave it for me to get rid of."

"We're the people running the places where those people and problems you don't want get taken away to. We are the last fuckin' stop. After us there ain't nobody else. Every day we're in situations where it's pretty clear someone'd better do something, someone's got to do something, and fast, or something bad is gonna happen and we'll all be in the shit. The wheels'll come off a the world.

"To deal with this kind of problem day after day, we have to have passion. You can't do the hopeless work that we have to do every day without taking risks, and you can't take those risks without passion.

Without believing… not that you're better'n anybody else, or that someone else couldn't do it better… just believing that you can do something that will make things better, because you know that you are it: there is nobody else. Behind you is the edge; people who get past you fall off. There is nobody behind you. Better, worse, almost as good: doesn't matter, they're not there there is nobody else.

"I know I'm not saying this's right. I can't help it. I'm doing it like I always try to do everything else: the best way I can in the time that I got. That is the best I can do. Me and Danny're the kind of people who believe that people have to be taken care of; the work has to get done, any which way you can do it. And if this means you have to get excited, and take some risks, that's what you do: you get excited and you take them. So you can get something done. Because that is a damned sight more important than just making sure that you're not losing your cool all the time, and that's why we're doing what we are doing to poor little Janet LeClerc'

She did not reply but reached her left hand forward and turned up the volume of the music. The traffic remained heavy but well-behaved all the way to the Route 20 exit in Lee and he took that west to Route 7 north up to West Street in Lenox. They talked about a movie that had cost more than 100 million dollars to produce and was doing almost no business, and how long it had been since there had been any new movie that either of them or anyone they knew had been eager to see.

The seats that Rachel had given to Diane for the concert were in the center of the shed twenty-two rows back from the stage, close enough so that they could see that the musicians in their shirt-sleeves in the orchestra were sweating at their work, and that both the piano soloist and the guest conductor had put on even more weight than their newspaper pictures and preview stories had suggested. The conductor had evidently taken no pains to moderate the volume and the tone of the orchestra so that the pianist's work on Brahms's second concerto would be presented to best advantage, but the soloist's work was perfunctory so that no real harm was done when the orchestra submerged it by playing too loudly.

At dinner at the Red Lion they were seated next to a table of six hosted by a red-faced man in his seventies who provided the entertainment for everyone at their end of the dining room by indignantly relating how he had lost a great deal of money at Saratoga the preceding day, more than he cared to say, betting on horses he had carefully selected from records he had spent many winter-evening hours systematically compiling and analyzing on his computer.

He said he believed the horses had 'lost on purpose. I'm convinced of it. It wasn't the jockeys it was the goddamned horses. They were doing it deliberately. Stumbling, bearing out. All sorts of stupid mistakes. Any fool could've seen it. It was a conspiracy, a conspiracy of horses. They'd gotten together in the barns or in the paddock or someplace or other and cooked it up. Just to make me lose all my money and feel bad and look like a damned fool in front of my friends."

Then leaving the track, chagrined and downhearted, 'what did I do but run into Dorothy," one of his ex-wives, 'just what I needed." She had insulted him loudly in front of a great many strangers. "She disparaged my sexual prowess, can you believe it? Asked me if I could get it up "even once a year now." The nerve of the damned stupid cow.

When the reason she gave all the papers when she left me eighteen years ago was that I wouldn't leave her alone for a minute. I couldn't deny it, it was true. But I should've anyway. I must've been out of my mind." Diane and Merrion listened and then laughed along with all the other eavesdroppers, and the red-faced man beamed at all of them.

When they got back to the grey house with the yellow door on Pynchon Hill a little before 10:00, Diane invited him to come in for coffee, which in their code was her way of informing him that she would make love if he really wanted to, but he said he had a full day ahead of him and thought he better head home, and she was not displeased when they lightly kissed good-night.

On the job that Monday morning, Judge Leonard Cavanaugh at sixty-eight was the senior justice in terms of years of service in all the seventy-one district courts of Massachusetts, 'in my thirty-seventh year of presiding over routine arraignments and other foolishness."

Taking no pains to conceal the immensity of his accumulated weariness even on the morning of the first day of the week, sometime around 10:00 when he was 'good and ready," he would take his place in his tall black chair behind the bench in Canterbury Courtroom 1. There as usual he would regard Merrion, whatever news that he came bearing, and the world and his own place in it the same way he had gradually come to view nearly everything: disapprovingly, usually powerlessly, with what he intended to convey as quiet resignation bordering on noble endurance.

"If you saw him you'd have no trouble believing he's the judge who's been sitting the longest. He looks it," Merrion would say, when Cavanaugh's occasionally-puzzling, sometimes-intemperate behavior on the bench came up in conversation. "He looks like it's been damned hard work, too; like it hasn't been easy for him. He doesn't look as though what he's been doing all these years's been a job that involved the use of his brain which a lot of times, he'll tell you, it hasn't.

"That's just the way they write it up." He looks like it's been heavy lifting. Hods of brick. Or he had to wear a wooden yoke, like they put on oxen, throw his shoulders into it all day, move a lot of heavy weights from here to over there. And then come in tomorrow and drag 'em back again. But he says he wont retire until they make him."

Cavanaugh had been appointed an associate justice of the Canterbury District Court in 1958 at the age of twenty-nine. Like many lawyers he had in his student days begun to harbor an ambition to become a judge, seeing the judicial selection as official validation of professional distinction. But in 1958 his career history although bright was rather short. His student days were not yet six years behind him. His resume recorded two years in the army's Judge Advocate General's corps discharging the ROTC obligation he had undertaken both to avoid the draft during his years at the College of the Holy Cross and then at Fordham Law School and for the Army Reserve pay that helped to subsidize the education and four years teaching commercial law at Northeastern Law School. He had also begun to lay the foundation of a money-making outside practice; he was Of Counsel to a seven-lawyer Boston firm specializing in corporate law. He had published two ponderous scholarly articles in the Hastings Law Journal on provisions proposed for inclusion in Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code:

Secured Transactions. They had been cited favorably by two obscure commissions established by state legislatures considering the UCC; the Maryland commission had invited him to contribute two days of expert testimony, paying his expenses and a consulting fee of $1,200.