surely more nutty than tragic. What next? I look at my watch. It’s almost nine.
“I’ll be down in fifteen minutes.”
“What’s wrong?” Sarah asks, as I hand her the phone. If she hadn’t already washed her hair and wasn’t in her robe, I’d take her with me. Every kid ought to see a jail at least once.
“Middle age,” I groan.
“Dan’s gone middle-age crazy.”
I tell her what he told me.
“Don’t you gossip about this,” I warn her.
“I’m sure it’s all a misunderstanding.”
Unfortunately, it is not.
“I ‘m guilty as hell,” Clan confides as I drive him back to his car, which is still parked in front of the Quik-Pie, an all-night convenience store five minutes from his house.
“All of a sudden I just scar fed it up before I had paid for it,” he says miserably.
“A little piece of the wrapper was even hanging from my mouth when this security guard pops up out of nowhere and starts screaming as if I was gonna try to crawl up through the ceiling. I must be nuts.”
Turning to the Quik-Pie parking lot, I agree but do not say so. Clan would have been released on his own recognizance if he hadn’t given the cop, who had just pulled in to get a cup of coffee, so much lip. With Brenda out of town and five dollars in his pockets, I have had to put up a minimal bond for him.
“Obviously, you had no intent to steal it. They should have waited until you were out of the store. You can sue ‘em for a million bucks for false imprisonment.”
Clan leans his head against the window on his side of the Blazer.
“You can’t go in and suck down a package of Twinkies and expect to get away with it.”
I turn off the engine which has begun to shudder in neutral and listen to ominous sounds coming from the hood. From the noise it sounds as if someone is trying unsuccessfully to shut down a nuclear power plant.
“Why in the hell did you do it? Maybe we can get a doctor to testify that you suffer from some eating disorder.”
His head still against the glass, Clan cuts his eyes to me.
“I do,” he says grimly.
“I eat too much damn food.”
I look through the window at Quik-Pie and see a good-looking blonde in shorts at the magazine rack. She must be looking for something to read before bed. For a society as obsessed with sex as the United States, we don’t spend much time actually doing it.
“That’s not a crime,” I say, losing the thread of our conversation.
“Stealing is,” Clan says wearily, as he opens the door.
“Look, why don’t you just go in there and ask her to come home with you. You can tell Sarah this woman was going to have to sleep down at the jail and you took pity on her.”
I laugh and him to look at Clan who, incredibly, seems about to cry.
“We’ve got to do something,” I say, now ashamed that I let myself be so easily distracted.
“This could be really humiliating if they make it stick.”
Dan’s eyes are red.
“Thanks for that insight,” he says dryly.
“Well, damn it,” I argue, “you just can’t plead guilty.”
Clan sighs, making a mournful sound through his nose.
“Why the hell not? Because it’s not the American way? Do we have to litigate everything in this country? I ate me damn things! I’ve done it before, if you can believe I’m that stupid.
Why? I haven’t got the slightest idea.”
Jesus Christ, I think, now uncomfortable with what I am hearing. He really is middle-age crazy. Is this Dan’s idea of living dangerously, or what? Some guys get a sports car;
others inhale Twinkles. What do
“Everybody does stupid things,” I say.
“This doesn’t have to make you want to jump off the Arkansas River bridge.”
Clan stands outside the door and bends down to peer inside at me.
“I’m so fat I couldn’t climb over the side if I wanted to,” he says smiling, albeit wanly, for the first time tonight.
“I’d have to roll down the bank.”
I grin, feeling better. If he can joke about it, he is all right or will be.
“Well, you’ve got a free lawyer, of’ buddy,” I say, sticking my hand through the window.
“You think about it tonight and I’ll do whatever you want.”
His big paw, which is as moist as an ink blotter, clamps down on mine. I look down to avoid the tears in his eyes.
Hell, I might be crying, too. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette will carry this story. Reading my mind, Clan mumbles, “I can’t wait to read the paper tomorrow.”
I return the pressure but still can’t look him in the eye.
“It’ll seem more like a joke than anything else,” I say, unable to deny the story will make the rounds.
As usual, Sarah, like a longsuffering wife, is waiting up for me.
“What happened?” she asks from the couch, still in her robe, just as I left her an hour and a half ago. In her lap is a European history book. Woogie, who is sitting primly by his mistress’s side, looks at me suspiciously as if he has no intention of buying a cock-and-bull story about a late-night client.
I sit down by her on the couch and begin to pet Woogie, who quickly rolls over on his back to have his stomach scratched. When all is said and done, it doesn’t take much to make my family happy. If I were to go strictly by our code of ethics, I would never have told Sarah a word about Clan.
A lawyer is bound to keep his client’s confidences, but she would only think he had done something worse than he has.
Still, I am at a loss to explain his behavior.
“He’s a lawyer!” Sarah exclaims as I try to minimize his actions.
Woogie’s eyes looked glazed with pleasure. This is as close as he will ever come to an orgasm.
“But not exactly a serial murderer.”
Sarah, who ought to be more charitable after reading her history book, with its unending story of mass slaughter, will have none of it. As if banging a gavel at me, Sarah’s hand moves Woogie’s muzzle in an up and down motion.
“Behavior like this is exactly why people don’t trust lawyers.”
Actually, it’s for stuff a lot worse, but she is missing the point.
“My own theory is that lawyers’ worst sins are of omission,” I say, noticing for the first time how gray Woogie is getting. He probably thinks the same thing about me.
“There are lots of people we refuse to help or just go through the motions because they don’t have the money to pay us. If there’s a hell, those are the kind we’ll burn for.”
Woogie hops off the couch. All this attention is beginning to get to him. My daughter nods, but I suspect she is still too young to feel comfortable with the various shades of gray that stipple the middle-aged human organism. There is only one cure for that, and with luck, it’s a good thirty years off.
As I’m brushing my teeth before getting into bed, it occurs to me that the partners in Mays amp; Burton would consider me a far worse thief than Clan. I’m glad I have never told Sarah when I acquired Andy as a client. As someone who hasn’t stolen even so much as a boyfriend, my
daughter probably i wouldn’t be very sympathetic. | the next morning in municipal court, Daniel Blackstone (I never knew before what the initial stood for) Bailey pleads guilty to the crime of theft of property which has a value of less than one hundred dollars.
“You’re sure you want to do this?” Darwin Bell, our black judge, says more to me than to Clan, who is
