you took the car, and I couldn’t carry beer, what with the eggs and bread and what all.’ So I chugged the can, smashed the empty on her forehead. Bitch just smiled at me, so hell, I picked up the frying pan.”
Then he grinned, looking for approval from his state-appointed counsel. Just a couple of guys who understand you have to smack them around once in a while, let them know who’s boss.
I’m not real proud of what I did. He was small and wiry and sun-browned from his outdoor work, with a creased face and dumb, blank eyes. He was expecting to cop a plea, maybe get probation, go out drinking with the boys, brag about teaching the bitch a lesson. He wasn’t expecting his lawyer to be crazed on the subject of men beating women.
“ I’d like you to put out your cigarette,” I told him.
He looked around. “Don’t see no ashtray.”
“ I want you to swallow it,” I said, placidly.
He gave a nervous little smile, wondering if I was joking. I let him wonder a moment, then came around my desk and yanked him out of his chair by the scruff of his neck. The cigarette fell from his mouth, but I caught it, remembering even now the singe of hot ash in the palm of my hand. His eyes were wide and fearful. I let go of his neck, and with one hand, pinched his jawbone hard, forcing his mouth open. Then, I jammed the cigarette in, hit him under the chin to close his mouth, and yanked back on his neck to tilt his head toward the ceiling.
“ Swallow!” I yelled at him. “Swallow, you worthless piece of slime.”
I watched his Adam’s apple work the butt down his throat, then I let go of him.
The punk filed a complaint, and I was suspended for a month without pay, forced to undergo psychiatric testing, then counseling, then a program called Alternatives to Violence, which, ironically, was intended for abusive husbands and boyfriends. When I came back to work, I was reassigned to zoning cases, where I defended a Santeria priest for sacrificing live goats in neighborhoods usually reserved for drug deals.
It was years later in private practice that I crossed paths with another of those cowardly cretins. This one was a yellow-haired, blue-eyed devil in a padded-shoulder, double-breasted suit, a guy Granny would say considered himself the last Coke in the desert. He was a rich man’s son, driving a Porsche, living in a high rise on the Intracoastal, sharing his chrome and glass bachelor pad with a flight attendant who eventually grew tired of his two-timing. When she moved out, the blond boy’s ego was hurt, and he asked her to return his Christmas presents. She thought he was joking-the presents were the crowns on her front teeth-but he took them back anyway. With pliers.
“ Can we, like pay a fine, and go home?” he asked, slouching in the cushioned client chair in my office.
I couldn’t help it, but I kept looking at his smile. “You have nice teeth.”
“ Huh?”
“ They all real?”
“ Yeah, sure. What of it?” He self-consciously licked his lips and forced the smile closed.
“ Does it bother you when I look at your teeth?”
He shook his head and shot nervous glances around the office. Except for a full-size cardboard cutout of Joe Paterno, we were alone.
“ Nice teeth,” I repeated.
I riffled some papers, finding the A-form and the dentist’s report. “Two incisors, two canines, upper and lower. Eight in all. That right?”
“ Huh?”
“ The crowns you repossessed.”
“ Yeah, I guess. I dunno. What difference does it make? I mean, how much is it going to cost?”
“ Eight teeth,” I said, and then I counted aloud from one to eight, trying to imagine the pain and the terror he had caused. He watched me as if he had a lunatic for a lawyer. He did.
“ Stand up, shithead!” I ordered him.
“ What?” Confusion. The beginning of fear.
“ A tooth for a tooth.”
He bolted from the chair and started for the door. I jumped up, danced around my desk, caught him by a shoulder and spun him around. He screamed before I could slug him, and the sound, a high-pitched girlish squeal, threw me off. I swung high, glancing an overhand right off his nose, which nonetheless squirted blood and closed his eyes. The next shot was on target. I came up from below with a left that connected flush on his mouth, splitting his upper lip and breaking off two incisors right at the gum line. I felt a stinging in my hand and looked down to find the teeth embedded in my knuckles. I still have tiny scars to prove it.
He was wailing, blood pouring from his nose and gurgling from his mouth, and looking far worse than he was.
“ Six more to go,” I told him, but by now, my office door had flown open, and crowding inside were three of my partners, my secretary, a paralegal, and, mouth agape, the general counsel of an insurance company we were trying to woo. I decided to regain some sense of decorum, so I chose that moment to extract the two teeth from my knuckles and toss them into my wastebasket where they ping-pinged to the bottom.
“ My client,” I said to the crowd, as if that somehow explained everything. Then I turned to the insurance company lawyer, trying to salvage the moment. “You ought to see what we do to the opposition.”
So it was not without some history that I approached the ranch of K. C. Cimarron this cool summer night in the high country.
Light spilled across the countryside from a three-quarter moon. Cattle stood motionless in fenced fields, and as we slowed for a curve, a deer bolted in front of our headlights, prancing out of our way. We followed the dirt road as it wound toward the Red Canyon Ranch. I parked the car outside the gate, pulling off the road into some sagebrush, where we began walking the mile or so to the barn. By daylight, the barn was a faded red. At night, it was the black maroon of dried blood.
“ Kip, there’s a lesson about life I need to give you now, I hope you’ll remember as you get older.”
“ Oh brother.”
“ Listen up. You never strike a girl. Never. You never touch-
“ I know, Uncle Jake. Granny told me all that.”
“ Already?”
“ Yeah, plus, I shouldn’t cheat or steal or say nasty stuff.”
“ You got the whole course. Anyway, I’m glad you’re here. I want you to videotape Jo Jo.”
“ For my movie?”
“ No, for evidence. I’ll interview her on tape. I want visible proof of her injuries. It’ll help prosecute Cimarron and might help in my defense if he claims I assaulted him.”
“ Are you going to pick a fight?”
“ I’m going to tear him into little pieces.”
“ Uncle Jake.”
“ Yeah?”
“ He’s too big. He’s the only man I know who’s bigger and stronger than you, and in the mean department, he’s got it all over you.”
“ Don’t underestimate your uncle when he’s all angered up,” I told him.
The barn door was open, and inside, in the darkness, I could make out the shadows of horses in their stalls, a saddle sitting astride a railing, bales of hay silhouetted against a corncrib by the moonlight streaming in a window. Kip reached for my hand and stayed close. I was aware of the sound of my breathing, of the rumbling exhalation of one of the horses, the caw of a nighttime bird in the distance.
“ Nobody’s here, Uncle Jake,” Kip whispered. “Shhh.”
A few more steps. Then, “Jake. Is that you?”
It was her voice, coming from above.
