Rick Moody - The Diviners

Allison chimes in. “We have a car, back there. We have a car. Pontiac? We have a car and we can drive you wherever you need to go. Because of the border patrol. And we can get you water. Agua. ”

The mother says no absolutely and firmly, and then the group of them is standing there in the middle of the desert, the Mexican border jumpers and the two Anglo filmmakers, without having ten words of a common tongue between them. It’s only performance that is going to make the point clear, Vanessa thinks, and it’s not even a performance, when it comes to her. Who’s even thinking about the movies now; the movies are for kids in private colleges, so that they won’t feel lonely on weekends. Movies are so that she’ll have something to tell her grandchildren one day, about the people she met. Movies are because it’s the thing you can do here in this place; you can make a movie with your millions of dollars. Movies are nothing compared with the boy with the sprained ankle and the faces of his little brothers, sun burnished, etched with concern, desperate.

“We can’t let you go walking into the middle of the state park, where you are going to get picked up by the authorities, so that you’ll be delivered to Immigration and get deported immediately. We can’t let you do that to yourselves. If you came with us, you could come back to our hotel, and then we’ll find a way to get you into the interior of the state somehow, away from the border and the border patrol, and then we’ll leave you with whomever you want, in whatever city that you want, and then you can try to get some work somewhere. I’m not saying that I have any comparable experience, but I feel like you can understand some of what I’m saying here, and I’m being genuine about what I’m saying, that we just can’t let you do that. There are coyotes out there, there might be mountain lions out there, and it’s dangerous. We have a car, and we have unlimited Avis mileage, and we think you should get into the car with us, and we’ll bring you to the new life, if that’s what you’re after. We’ll bring you to the life on this side of the border, even though we sort of think this new life isn’t all that great. We don’t want to judge what it looks like to you, we just want you to have what you want, because we have enough to share. We can give you the chances you want, at least for now. We can give you the promise of this side of the border, if that’s what you think you need. Please just don’t go walking toward that volcano crater in the middle of the park when you can’t even walk, because you just don’t know what’s going to happen out there.”

Can’t the Mexican family, with their ruddy features, understand the human truth of the moment? The truth in the earnestness of Vanessa’s “please”? They must understand. They can understand that the teenage boy cannot walk into the desert with his ankle as it is, and they can understand the shoulder that Allison offers him now as they begin to head south, toward the car.

At the top of a hill, Allison tries her cell phone, on a hunch.

To the teenage boy, she says, “Ever tried one of these?”

“Sí,” he says.

“Hey,” Allison says after a moment. “There’s a message from my dad!”

The distinguished jurist, at work, in the temple of jurisprudence, District of Columbia, tenth day of December. The distinguished jurist, in the consideration of his part in history. The distinguished jurist, in a state of aesthetic arrest before the busts of the many noble judicial minds who have worked, labored, cursed, and cheered in these august halls over the course of the two hundred years of our national experiment, viz., the Constitution of the United States of America. Black, Burger, Hughes, Story, Holmes, et alia. The distinguished jurist, in a heartfelt and philosophical moment, knows well that, as the son of an immigrant, and having made his way through myriad barriers via the practice of such elementary virtues as thrift, loyalty, hard work, rugged individualism, et cetera, there is little in his early life to suggest, ab initio, that he should be present at such an important judicial moment. Which of these other justices, depicted in these busts, these marble opulences, was called upon the way this jurist and this court have been called upon to render judgment unto history, to fashion, as it were, an epilogue to democracy?

Every age has its landmark legal conflicts. The distinguished jurist was not birthed into the age of Gompers v. Buck’s Stove and Range Co., where he would have affirmed forcefully with the majority on the matter of property rights. Nor was he raised up so as to add his voice to Feiner v. New York, where it was precisely correct that a no-account hoodlum was carted off to a penitentiary. And, of course, he would like to have ruled during Stone v. Graham, since its outcome makes him miserable, serving as a precedent for his contention that his adversaries on the bench do not know how to read, cannot defend their votes, and cannot see the truth when it is right there before them. Alas, the distinguished jurist had not been called to judge these cases.

And yet the distinguished jurist has been brought here to this place now, and so he means to seize the moment. Well, he’s always here on Sunday. In that sense, it’s a day like any other. He partakes of the Holy Eucharist, et uxor and with those of their nine progeny who might happen to be visiting, and then he comes in. He is always working on Sunday, on petitions for certiorari, likewise the useless in forma pauperis petitions, writs of habeus corpus, which, by virtue of Barefoot v. Estelle, take less time than they did formerly. He works on his concurrences and dissents, which of necessity must include corrections of the imprecise grammar of his colleagues, whose lackluster rhetorical constructions are as delusional as their arguments from history.

This Sunday is not like those other Sundays. On this Sunday, there has been a summons from the chief justice, the man with the specially tailored robe, to discuss the case before them. The justices have assembled, the justices have stayed late, including those of their number who are of advancing years, and they have spoken to one another by memo and by phone, and finally they have met briefly in conference, where there were a number of heated exchanges concerning the preliminary opinion, per curiam, that the clerks are at present drafting. The tone in the building, not that the distinguished jurist worries about tone, is almost as bad as during Furman v. Georgia, wherein every one of the justices wrote, each with a different and in most cases equally specious opinion, on the matter of the penalty of death. Of course, it is not the place of lily-livered citizens of weak temperament to make the law of the land other than what it is and shall ever be, because the law of the land is that a man shall be hanged, or shot, or electrocuted, or injected, no matter whether he or she is old enough to vote. He shall be hanged on earth, and afterward he shall be commended for eternity to a lake of fire.

Here’s the interesting part. Notwithstanding the course of extraordinary events, the distinguished jurist has a long-standing dinner engagement scheduled for this evening and, while pacing the corridors, he is pondering whether or not it would be unseemly to break his dinner engagement. The distinguished jurist is looking at the busts of the justices and is wondering if the justices of the past would have kept a dinner date on a night like this. And it’s not just any guest who comes tonight. It’s his law school chum. How fondly the distinguished jurist feels about his chums from law school. They collected palindromes, they bet informally on outcomes of capital rulings, they rooted for the New York Yankees or the Boston Red Sox, never both. They stayed up long nights, slept badly, pressed their own shirts, never went without neckties. The distinguished jurist had no firm idea, notwithstanding his magna cum laude, that he would ever come to have the opportunity to serve here in a place so august, and as a result he was, in those days, relatively speaking, fancy free. He could spend an afternoon trying to come up with a palindrome like “Star comedy by Democrats.” He could spend an afternoon debating the issues raised in the Republic of Plato, wherein he concurred with the idea that poets should be banished from the city limits. They were close, the chums of law school, and this particular chum was his bosom buddy and his especial pal, because this particular chum would sing. What they did when they needed to blow off some steam was find a piano wherever they could on the campus, and there they would sing from the musicals of the period or they would sing light operatic songs, Gilbert and Sullivan, et cetera, and they would find that the singing of these songs choked them with emotion. They were young men who dreamed grandly, and though there was no certainty that they would come this far, they knew they were destined to do great things, and the songs they sang were a recognition of the scale of their dreams, from which dreams they never once deviated.