Dark Rivers of the Heart

“I’m in prison,” Harris repeated.

“Listen, these charges are bullshit. You were set up. None of this will stick. You’re a Teflon defendant. You’re not going to spend another day in jail.”

Harris opened his eyes. The sunshine was no longer painfully bright. In fact, the February day seemed to have darkened with his mood.

He said, “Never stole a dime in my life. Never cheated on my taxes. Never cheated on my wife. Paid back every loan I ever took. Worked overtime most weeks since I’ve been a cop. Walked the straight and narrow — and let me tell you, little brother, it hasn’t always been easy. Sometimes I get tired, fed up, tempted to take an easier way. I’ve had bribe money in my hand, and it felt good, but I just couldn’t make my hand put it into my pocket. Close. Oh, yes, a lot closer than you ever want to know. And there’ve been some women…they would’ve been there for me, and I could’ve put Jessica way back in my mind while I was with them, and maybe I would’ve cheated on her if the opportunities had been just the littlest bit easier. I know it’s in me to do it—”

“Harris—”

“I’m telling you, I’ve got evil in me as much as anyone, some desires that scare me. Even if I don’t give in to them, just having them scares the living bejesus out of me sometimes. I’m no saint, the way you kid about. But I’ve always walked the line, walked that goddamned line. It’s a mean mother of a line, straight and narrow, sharp as a razor, cuts right into you when you walk it long enough. You’re always bleeding on that line, and sometimes you wonder why you don’t just step off and walk in the cool grass. But I’ve always wanted to be a man our mother could be proud of. I wanted to shine in your eyes too, little brother, in the eyes of my wife and kids. I love you all so damned much, I never wanted any of you to know about any of the ugliness in me.”

“The same ugliness that’s in all of us, Harris. All of us. So why are you going on like this, doing this to yourself?”

“If I’ve walked that line, hard as it is, and something like this can happen to me, then it can happen to anyone.”

Darius regarded him with stubborn perplexity. He was obviously struggling to understand Harris’s anguish but was only halfway there.

“Little brother, I’m sure you’ll clear me of the charges. No more nights in jail. But you explained the asset- forfeiture laws, and you did a damned good job, made it too clear. They have to prove I’m a drug dealer to put me back in jail, and they’ll never be able to do that because it’s all trumped up. But they don’t have to prove a damn thing to keep my house, my bank accounts. They only have to show ‘reasonable cause’ that maybe the house was the site of illegal activity, and they’ll say the planted drugs are reasonable cause even if the drugs don’t prove anything.”

“There’s that reform law in Congress—”

“Moving slowly.”

“Well, you never know. If some sort of reform passes, maybe it’ll even tie forfeiture to conviction.”

“Can you guarantee I’ll get my house back?”

“With your clean record, your years of service—”

Harris gently interrupted: “Darius, under the current law, can you guarantee I’ll get my house back?”

Darius stared at him in silence. A shimmer of tears blurred his eyes, and he looked away. He was an attorney, and it was his job to obtain justice for his big brother, and he was overwhelmed by the truth that he was all but powerless to assure even minimal fairness.

“If it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone,” Harris said. “It could happen to you next. It could happen to my kids someday. Darius…maybe I get something back from the bastards, say as much as eighty cents on the dollar once all my costs are deducted. And maybe I get my life on track, start to rebuild. But how do I know it won’t happen to me again, somewhere down the road?”

Having held back the tears, Darius looked at him again, shocked. “No, that’s not possible. This is outrageous, unusual—”

“Why can’t it happen again?” Harris persisted. “If it happened once, why not twice?”

Darius had no answer.

“If my house isn’t really my house, if my bank accounts aren’t really mine, if they can take what they want without proving a thing, what’s to keep them from coming back? Do you see? I’m in prison, little brother. Maybe I’ll never be behind bars again, but I’m in another kind of prison and never going to get free. The prison of expectations. The prison of fear. The prison of doubt, distrust.”

Darius put one hand to his forehead, pressed and pulled at his brow, as if he would like to extract from his mind the awareness that Harris had forced upon him.

The car’s emergency-flasher indicator blinked rhythmically, in time with a soft but penetrating sound, as if warning of the crisis in Harris Descoteaux’s life.

“When the realization began to hit me,” Harris said, “back there a few blocks ago, when I began to see what a box I’m in, what a box anyone could be in under these rules, I just was…overwhelmed…felt so claustrophobic that it made me sick to my stomach.”

Darius lowered the hand from his brow. He looked lost. “I don’t know what to say.”

“I don’t think there’s anything anyone can say.”

For a while they just sat there, with Wilshire Boulevard traffic whizzing by them, with the city so bright and busy all around, with the true darkness of modern life not to be glimpsed in mere palm shadows and awning-shaded shop entrances.

“Let’s go home,” Harris said.

They drove the rest of the way to Westwood in silence.

Darius’s house was a handsome brick-and-clapboard Colonial with a columned portico. The spacious lot featured huge old ficus trees. The limbs were massive yet gracious in their all-encompassing spread, and the roots went back to the Los Angeles of Jean Harlow and Mae West and W. C. Fields, if not further.

It was a major achievement for Darius and Bonnie to have earned such a place in the world, considering how far down the ladder they had started their climb. Of the two Descoteaux brothers, Darius had enjoyed the greater financial success.

As the BMW pulled into the brick driveway, Harris was overcome by regret that his own troubles would inevitably taint the pride and well-earned pleasure that Darius took from that Westwood house and from everything else that he and Bonnie had acquired or achieved. What pride in their struggles and what pleasure in their attainments could survive, undiminished, after the realization that their position was maintained only at the sufferance of mad kings who might confiscate all for a royal purpose or dispatch a deputation of blackguards, under the protective heraldry of the monarch, to lay waste and burn? This beautiful house was only ashes waiting for the fire, and when Darius and Bonnie regarded their handsome residence henceforth, they would be troubled by the faintest scent of smoke, the bitter taste of burnt dreams.

Jessica met them at the door, hugged Harris fiercely, and wept against his shoulder. To have held her any tighter, he would have had to hurt her. She, the girls, his brother, and his sister-in-law were all that he had now. He was not merely without possessions but without his once strong belief in the system of law and justice that had inspired and sustained him during his entire adult life. From that moment on, he would trust in nothing except himself and the few people who were closest to him. Security, if it existed at all, could not be bought, but was a gift to be given only by family and friends.

Bonnie had taken Ondine and Willa to the mall to buy some new clothes for them.

“I should’ve gone along, but I just couldn’t,” Jessica said, wiping at the tears in the corners of her eyes. She seemed fragile in a way she had never been before. “I’m still…I’m shaking from all this. Harris, when they came on Saturday with…with the seizure notice, when they made us move out, we were only allowed to take one suitcase each, clothes and personal stuff, no jewelry, no…no anything.”

“It’s an outrageous abuse of legal process,” Darius said angrily and with palpable frustration.

“And they stood over us, watching what we packed,” Jessica told Harris. “Those men…just standing there, while the girls opened dresser drawers to get their underwear, bras…” That memory brought a snarl of outrage to her voice and, for the time being, chased off the emotional fragility that dismayed Harris and that was so unlike her. “It was disgusting! They were so arrogant, such bastards about it. I was just waiting for one of the sonsofbitches to touch me, to try to hurry me along with a little hand on the arm, anything like that,