Grif Stockley: Illegal Motion

Roy Cunningham looks at me respectfully for the first time.

“The school hasn’t said nothin’ about him being off the team, as far as I know.”

“Well, we need to get busy as soon as possible,” I say, trying to apply a little pressure.

“How much can you afford to pay?”

Roy steals a look at his brother.

“Five thousand dollars,” he answers quietly.

“If my wife and I hired you, when can you start?”

Five thousand dollars for a case involving as much work as this one will is chicken feed but the publicity alone will be worth it.

“Immediately” I say, deciding on the spot not to tie my representation on the rape charge to a deal to represent him on a pro contract as his agent.

Something tells me that this may have already been tried and failed.

Without looking again at his brother, Roy nods.

“That sounds good to me. Let me go call my wife, and I’ll be right back.”

He goes out of the room, followed by his brother, and I am left to think about this case. I am probably in over my head. If the university decides tomorrow that Dade will be kicked off the team and even out of school, what can I do that will be worth a pitcher of warm spit? I am just remembering that in 1978 Lou Holtz, when he coached the Razorbacks, applied the socalled do-right rule, and kicked three black starters off the team who had been accused of some kind of sexual misconduct involving a white coed in the athletic dorm. The university was promptly taken to federal court by two of the state’s most famous civil rights lawyers to get the players back on the team in time for the Orange Bowl against Oklahoma. I can’t remember the details, but they didn’t succeed, and yet the Razorbacks went on to crush Oklahoma 31 to 6, which was poetic justice in the eyes of many white

Arkansans. It seems to me the players weren’t even charged. The story was, as usual, the Razorbacks. Why did James suggest me? There are plenty of lawyers who have bigger names and more resources. As a solo practitioner, I’m going to have my hands full. Yet, why look a gift horse in the mouth? This case could lead to a whole new career.

While I am pondering these questions, Roy returns and tells me that I am now representing his son. Ten minutes later I am escorted to the door, having promised to drive to Fayetteville in the morning after I see a client. In return I have commitments from the Cunningham brothers for my fee and bond money. I need to think, and I drive north twenty-five blocks across town to a junior high school track that attracts dozens of joggers and walkers, most of them upscale whites from the neighborhood. I’ve fantasized for years that I would meet one of the women who come here, but it never happens. Some are very attractive, but I never quite manage to start a conversation that gets beyond the weather. Many of them are twenty years younger, and I look like a cardiac victim after ten minutes on the track, which may have something to do with it.

There is a good crowd tonight, and I stretch my muscles out on the grass of the football field inside the track while gawking at a blonde in pink spandex who is circling the track at a six-minute clip. Although I was a distance runner over thirty years ago at Subiaco Academy, a small Catholic boarding school in western Arkansas, I would be hard-pressed to stay even with her tonight. At five feet eleven, I am carrying saddlebags that could take a packhorse across the Rockies. If I were able to knock off fifteen pounds around my middle, I’d be in a position to work out seriously.

As I begin to run, I replay the conversation with the Cunningham brothers and wonder whether I’d be any different if I had a son. How can a man believe his child has committed the crime of rape? Yet, Roy is obviously more comfortable with his son’s sexuality than I am with Sarah’s. Dade Cunningham has to beat women off with a stick. I’d be livid if I found out Sarah was involved with her professor. It happens. Lawyers with clients, doctors with patients, teachers with students. Dominance. Control We love to call the shots. A form of rape, I guess. I think of those Saudi apes. The females bent over and sub missive. The penises were startling in their resemblance to ours and brutal as jackhammers.

I build up some speed, but I can’t catch up with the blonde tonight. Twenty-five yards ahead of me, she is running easily, her hair swinging behind her in a ponytail. I pass an old man who must be in his seventies. Not an ounce of body fat on him, but he is running in slow motion. He winces at me as if to say it doesn’t matter how much care you take of yourself: the genetic clock in side your body is ticking away like a time bomb. If aliens are looking down on the track, they must be scratching their heads. Why would any sane species chase each other around and around until they nearly pass out?

I glance at my Timex. If I step it up a bit, maybe I can catch up with the blonde. As she rounds the curve by the goalposts on the east end, her long legs scissor the air.

Sweat streams off my face like water cascading over a spillway. I am gaining on her, but my breathing is becoming ragged, and I can barely see. I pull to within ten yards of her. From the rear she looks great. Fantastic legs and ass. There is something about women who run. It is as if she senses someone is chasing her and she picks up the pace. As I come to the curve at the west end, a sharp pain grabs my side and suddenly I feel weak. Only five yards separate us. My eyes seem about to swim out of my head, but I squint to see the outline of her left breast on the curve. Packaged by the spandex, it looks magnificent.

She could be a model working out. I accelerate and am within two yards of her when my stomach turns over. I feel about to throw up. Immediately, I pull up and step off the track into the football field. Have I given myself a stroke? I put my hands on my hips and slowly make my way across the grass toward the bleachers on the north side. You idiot, I think to myself. What was I going to do if I caught up to her? I wipe my eyes with my shirt and realize I could have killed myself. My stomach feels better but my legs are wobbly.

As I cross the track to ascend the bleachers to the only exit, the blonde passes in front of me and is every bit as lovely in full profile as she appeared from behind. Fully focused on maintaining her long stride, she doesn’t even glance in my direction. She doesn’t know I’m alive.

“Hey, Gideon! You look terrible!”

Still half blinded by the sweat pouring off my head into my eyes, I look up toward the stands and see grinning at me my old friend and fellow lawyer Amy Gilchrist. We keep bumping into each other. First, classes in night law school, then she was in the prosecutor’s office while I was at the public defender’s, and we had some cases against each other. Now she’s in private practice, a grunt just like myself, hustling for cases and hoping the bills don’t come in all at once. I stagger across the surface of the track toward her. Her right leg is stretched across the metal railing that separates the bleachers from the track. She bends at the waist, making her torso parallel to her leg. Amy is short, compact, and cute as a but ton. If I weren’t almost twenty years older, I would have hit on her somewhere along the line in the last four years.

“If you were any more subtle, Gilchrist,” I say, wiping my face with my arm, “you’d be mistaken for a blow torch.”

Amy touches the toes of her Nikes, a feat I haven’t managed in years. Dressed in short shorts, a T-shirt that advertises a 10K race in Hot Springs, and spotless shoes, she looks damn good.

“You looked like you were chasing that blonde,” she says, nodding with her chin toward the east end of the track.

“But she was too fast for you.”