T. Boyle - When the Killing's Done

And then, absurdly, and he knew he was making a fool of himself even as he turned to her, he was roaring, “The fuck I’m not!”

Now, his stomach in freefall, he stamps across the wide tiled entrance hall of the courthouse — wide enough to drive a truck through — and up the elaborate staircase, with its hand-painted tiles shipped all the way over from Tunisia, as if that’s going to impress him, then around a turning to the right where the hall opens out to the grassy courtyard below, and finally down another enclosed hallway to Department 2. The door is immense, a great dark oiled slab laid to its hinges when they built the place back in 1929, and it opens on a courtroom out of another era, vaulted ceilings, wood paneling, high-crowned benches arranged front to back like pews in a church, the church of the law. He makes note of the court recorder perched at her desk off to one side of the room, of the dais in the center where, he presumes, the judge will appear in his own good time, of the bailiff, with his paunch and his swagger and his look of utter indifference, nobody innocent, nobody at all.

“This way,” Sterling murmurs, guiding him by the arm, Anise half a step behind him, and he throws back his shoulders and strides down the center aisle to the front of the room as if he’s walking the red carpet at the premiere of his own movie, and let them look, all of them, what does he care? The first person he lays eyes on is Alma, Alma Boyd Takesue, right there in the middle of the second row, wearing her executioner’s face. She lifts her head to shoot him an abbreviated glare before turning to Sickafoose, who’s propped up beside her like a stick man, and how he’d like to lay into him, just once, just sixty seconds behind a closed door or out in the alley, Jesus, yes, but then Sterling’s leading him to the bench right in front where he’ll have his back to the whole mob of them and he pulls away for just an instant before thinking better of it and sliding his butt resignedly across the slick burnished wood of the bench, Anise folding under the back of her dress to slide in beside him. And she’s looking good, at least, her eyes done up, a blush of lipstick — not too much, because she doesn’t need it — dressed all in white, the color of innocence, of exoneration and respect, the dress falling to the tops of her cherry-red vinyl boots and her hair raging round her like a jungle sprung to life. He feels a surge of pride in her. Anise Reed. The beauty, the lover of animals, the singer — he has her and they don’t, not the puffed-up bailiff or Tim Sickafoose or Ranger Rick or the judge who sweeps out of a door in the back looking like the dictator of a third-world country nobody’s ever heard of, and what is he, Mexican? Armenian?

There are preliminaries, of course, just like in a boxing match. Other cases, other people. Up and down, yes and no. And then they call the United States v. David Francis LaJoy and he feels his heart seize, despite himself. Never show weakness, he knows that, and he checks off his muscles, one after another, fighting to keep his eyes locked and his expression frozen. The prosecutor, smirking, whip-thin, a preppie type with a preppie haircut in a checked suit half a size too small who could have been Tim Sickafoose’s double, calls Ranger Rick to the stand and the court has to hear Ranger Rick go through a blow-by-blow account of how his suspicions were aroused by the consulting ornithologist and how ultimately he boarded the suspect’s boat and made the arrest. Then it’s Sterling’s turn and Sterling rises from his chair to lay into Ranger Rick, going over the same ground what seems like a hundred times till the man creeps back into himself and admits that he couldn’t specify what kind of shoes the suspect had been wearing on the day of the alleged incident, nor could he distinguish them from the shoes Wilson Robert Gutierrez had been wearing, and then it’s Tim Sickafoose’s turn to throw the dagger and on and on they go.

He has plenty of time for reflection (for one thing he never realized what a bore Sterling is, his voice like a TV announcer’s — late, late-night TV, when they trot out the popcorn makers and Ginsu knives — his face as heavy as sleep and his posture so weak his bones might have been melting, his suit boring, his tie, but maybe that was a facet of his genius, maybe he meant to bore the judge comatose and how could a comatose man pronounce anything but a verdict of innocent?). Time drags. Every once in a while Anise reaches out to give his hand a squeeze, a gesture for which he should be grateful, but he only wants to lean over and throttle her because he doesn’t need pity here or empathy or affection or whatever it is. Empathy’s for the weak, for the guilty. Before long, even before Sickafoose has had his say and Sterling, boringly, tries to undermine the testimony, he’s begun to feel sorry for himself. Begun to worry. He studies the judge’s face as if it’s a timetable at the railway station, complex, unrevealing, routed in a thousand different directions to a thousand different destinations. He’s going down, he’s sure of it.

And why? Because he believes in something, the simplest clearest primary moral principle: thou shalt not kill. There was a time when he was just like anyone else, feeding burgers into his mouth, hot dogs, roast beef, pastrami, the chops and steaks and chicken wings his father seared on the grill and his mother served up with salad and corn and fresh-baked rolls, and like everyone else he was oblivious to the deeper implications. He went through school eating the spaghetti with meat sauce, the burritos and tacos and carne asada the cafeteria ladies served up in neat tinfoil packets. In the commons at the community college he sat amidst the disarray of his books and sipped his Coke and chewed his ham and avocado on rye, and if the ham, stripped and cured and sliced, had once been the tissue of a living sentient being, he never knew or cared. On weekends, he pushed his cart through the supermarket with all the rest of them, humming along to the jingles and reprocessed Beatles’ melodies tumbling through the speakers, the sanitized meat in its plastic wrapping as innocuous as if it had fallen off a tree, the lobsters in their murky sweating tank no more an object of concern or even curiosity than if they were carved of wood. Somewhere someone raised a cow and somewhere else the cow was killed and processed while another anonymous someone checked his lobster traps for the slow-witted crustaceans gathered there. And took them to market. And dropped them in the tank. And there they stayed, their claws pegged and their fate sealed, until someone else put down his money, took them home and boiled them alive. That was how it was. And he never thought twice about it.

His awakening came almost twenty years ago now, not as an epiphany per se but more a lifting of the veil, an infusion of light and clarity, and it transformed his life. He was twenty-six, putting in sixteen-hour workdays in the first of his stores, the flagship in downtown Santa Barbara, located back then in a transitional area three blocks off State, the building an anonymous cinder-block structure that could have housed anything from a muffler shop to a dental clinic. Three blocks away was life — tourists, bars, restaurants, retail — but there was nothing on his block but a taquería and a postage-stamp park populated exclusively by bums and the odd drugged-out high school kid and his pasty girlfriend. The sidewalk was pocked with dark blotches, there were empty bottles in the blighted shrubs along the street, stains of urine and worse in the alcove that gave onto the front door, tight black scrawls of graffiti scarring the pale stucco walls.

It was a sad state of affairs, as far as he was concerned, and it drove him crazy. His every thought was linked to the business, to attracting customers and upgrading his product line and, of course, it was all about perception as far as the customers were concerned — who, he asked himself, even the most diehard audio freak, really wanted to lay out his hard-earned money in a components store, however hip, that was located across from bum central? He worried over it, got into shouting matches with various burnouts and gimps, wrote letters to the mayor, the city council, the newspaper — Can’t we clean this city up? — without any appreciable difference. But he was luckier than most. He worked hard. Offered a top product at a reasonable price. And because he knew what he was doing, an electronics freak himself, and his customers appreciated it, they came to him and came back again, and very gradually the business began to grow. Still, he wasn’t exactly paying attention to the larger issues. He was absorbed. He was busy.