Brain Storm (29 page)

Fifteen days to get through with a rich man’s case, Mr. Darrow? Try fifteen months, at least, for a criminal in the upper tax brackets, like O.J. or Lupine.

Of his own career, Darrow had written in his autobiography: “I was dealing with life, with its fears, its aspirations and despairs. With me it was going to the foundation of motive and conduct and adjustments for human beings, instead of blindly talking hatred and vengeance and that subtle, indefinable quality that men call ‘justice’ and of which nothing really is known.”

From the same volume came a quote Watson had retrieved after he had been named Whitlow’s court-appointed lawyer. He blocked and copied it for his brief on Whitlow’s behalf to the Eighth Circuit, should that great day ever come: “There is no such crime as a crime of thought; there are only crimes of action.” Darrow told juries, “I am not bound to believe them right in order to take their case, and you are not bound to believe them right in order to find them not guilty.”

Watson felt Darrow’s righteous glee at disrupting the normal equation of federal justice: Provide a smart lawyer at no cost and upset the handcart of “justice,” normally defined by well-funded government lawyers and rich defendants with cash.

Next morning, he woke up early and resolved to do penance. He would stay home—at least until ten or ten-thirty—before going in to see Arthur. He would fix the training wheels on Sheila’s bike, push Benjy in the swing, show his wife he was a good father, as well as a provider.

He strolled outside to get the morning paper and take in his corner of the world. Sandra’s eye was infallible. A year ago, when they’d bought the house in Ladue, she’d described the suburb as “perfect.” It was. No Bosnian Serbs lived in Ladue. No Chernobylian nuclear accidents. No West Bank. No Hutus or Tutsis. No drug cartels, no Somalian or Liberian warlords. No reactor waste reprocessing facilities. No death camps or euthanasia hostels for limiting federal entitlements to the elderly. Small, upscale, yet affordable—barely, on a Stern, Pale associate’s salary—it had charm and, yes, excellent schools. The schools were so good, they gave honorary degrees to the parents willing to pay the property taxes necessary for their children to obtain the very best education.

On warm summer evenings, Joe and Sandra and the other parents set up lawn chairs anywhere but on the flawless green lawns and watched as the kids left their high-resolution video monitors and surround-sound
home entertainment centers (without being told!) and emerged, blinking, into the waning sunlight of Planet Earth, complaining about the smell of dirt. These kids had all been held back a year or two to ensure academic dominance. They could go a hundred yards or even more away from home on their own, because they were medicated and xenophobic, trained to spot the trademark disarming smiles of strangers and other pathological serial killers.

“Come here, little girl,” spoken by an adult male in Ladue, was good for life in prison. Family values were in such abundance, they were strewn everywhere, and you needed a shovel and an old black yardman named Willy to help you gather them all up.

Later in the morning, Watson fixed Sheila’s training wheels. He rolled a big plastic ball in the yard with Benjy, who was just learning to pull himself up on it and fall over. Fifteen or twenty minutes at least of uninterrupted quality time.
This is life
, he thought,
just being. Just sharing. It’s so simple.

His buddy, Andy Harmon, who lived across the street, came out in his bathrobe to get his paper.

“Hi, Andy,” Watson gushed, craving companionship, regretting his enforced absence from the human race.

“Hi, Joe,” said Andy.

And Joe thought,
What a great guy!
Andy was the North Star, fire in the hearth, salt of the earth, heart of hearts. Andy had bought his house twenty years ago, when nice people could still afford to buy in the neighborhood. Now he was an affable part-time plumber surrounded by anal-retentive litigators and litigious gastroenterologists.

“Joe,” hollered Andy. “I’m hankering for a little hate crime tonight. If I get caught, will you be my lawyer?” He slapped his thigh, hee-hawed, and went back inside.

Flowers were up, trees full-blown with leaves, new grass, the smell of humus and the promise of seeds. A beautiful June morning … until the Saturday morning lawn services began arriving. White pickup trucks with orange hoses wound around yellow tubs full of chlordane. Tankers filled with Dursban and Dylox, Diazinon Ultra and Dacthal. All dedicated to maintaining the sort of lawns you find in perfect neighborhoods.

Choirs of birds thronged the trees, the wind soughed in taped saplings—newly leafed red maples, pin oaks, lindens, dogwoods—bees bombinated, children laughed, wind chimes tinkled—none of which
could be heard over the snarl and roar of lawn mowers, chain saws, leaf blowers, hedge trimmers, weed whackers, and tree-fogging equipment.

BCL, Inc.—Better Chemical Lawns—pulled up next door, where the widow Oma Hodgkins was outside supervising the weekly administration of herbicides and insecticides. A hooded toxicologist in a disposable jumpsuit, rubber gloves, and goggles started the compressor on the tank truck. Watson decided to get the kids inside, then maybe head downtown to the office for a little peace and quiet and some filtered air, but then he looked up at the wrong time, in the wrong direction, and saw Oma, and she was waving him over to meet her at the property line.

Almost bald, she had long, thin, silver chemotherapy tufts of hair on a speckled scalp. Four years ago, she’d lost her husband, Irv, to cancer. Shortly thereafter, two family dogs developed strange lymphomas and expired despite a king’s ransom in canine chemotherapy. The daughter, Uma Hodgkins, succumbed to a chronic skin disorder that had been written up in international medical journals. When dog number three developed mange and autoimmune anomalies, Oma concluded that she didn’t need an epidemiologist from the Centers for Disease Control to tell her this cancer cluster was no coincidence. She did her own research, talked to several doctors and lawyers, and then identified the culprit: electromagnetic fields from high-tension power lines six blocks away. She kept expounding about how she had found a neighborhood association of like-minded citizens who were contemplating class action litigation against Union Electric, and Joe could tell she was offended when he didn’t beg for the chance to represent them.

“Nice morning, isn’t it, Joe?” she said, inhaling a rainbow mist of heptachlor droplets from the tree sprayer.

She usually led off with one token pleasantry before getting down to business and insinuating that the entire neighborhood would be better off if Watson took better care of his lawn. She didn’t have the gumption to confess that she had petitioned the neighborhood association to hire a lawn service and add the bill to his share of the common fees; he had heard about it from Andy.

“Just talked with the lawn man,” said Oma. “He says those grubs of yours are going to spread. He said the neighborhood should coordinate applications so we can kill them all at once. Otherwise,” she said, with an earnestness she’d probably acquired from her oncologist, “the grubs will spread.”

Watson had never heard of grubs until he’d moved into Ladue,
where grubs were not only common lawn pests but, if left untreated, were also a reliable indication of poor moral character and a lack of family values.

“I’ll tell Sandra about it,” he said.

“I saw your name in the paper,” said Oma. “Now you’re a criminal lawyer.” She lifted an eyebrow and looked at the spurge and kudzu trellising around his ankles and the discolored spots caused by fairy ring fungus, brown patch, and black smut—lethal fungi she had delighted in naming aloud for his edification, back when he’d first moved in and received remedial lawn lessons from her.

“Oh well,” she said, a toss of her head eloquently expressing her opinion that his new hobby of defending murderers was no surprise to her: First, spurge and grubs go unattended. Then, you get brown patch and dollar spot. Next, you start defending murderers. Pretty soon, you’ll probably ignore your own children because you’re off somewhere exposing yourself to fatal viruses by indulging in wanton, extramarital coupling.

“I know,” she said sadly, “that you don’t have a feeling for lawns.”

“I don’t,” said Joe, avoiding eye contact, temporarily ashamed of his congenital indifference to grass, trying to remain her friend and neighbor.

“No oceans out here,” she said, looking out over the nonhorizon of the minimall. “No endless blue sea melting into the blue eye of God. No vistas. The city lights take away the night sky. We have nothing to measure mortal human beings against. I want a lawn where the green is so deep, it goes on forever. Infinite green is what I want.”

“It is a beautiful lawn,” said Watson. “You’ve really taken care of it, and it shows.”

“You know,” said Oma, “my mother always said you can tell a lot about a family by the look of their lawn.” Then she looked up suddenly and asked, as if the idea had just occurred to her, “You want my man to leave you an estimate?”

“I’ll talk to Sandra about it,” he said, backing away as the tanker’s pressure relief valves spumed forth a blossoming mushroom cloud of chlordane.

Lawn veneration was also disrupting his interior home life. Hannibal and Lilith—big, muscular mongrels from the pound—were roaming inside. The lawn had just been seeded, and Sandra didn’t want them trampling and digging in the yard. Plausible, he thought, but that didn’t
stop her from relishing the way the dogs set her husband’s teeth on edge. The dogs nipped and chased each other, claws scrabbling across the tiles, gouts of fur floating in their wake, low-throated growls. Baseline, routine hostility, punctuated by attack-level snarls.

Sheila and Benjy sensed the escalating canine brawl. They stood on chairs, covered their ears, and shrieked, “THE DOGS ARE GOING TO KILL EACH OTHER AGAIN!”

Hannibal and Lilith erupted in a full-blown snarling, barking mêlée. Sandra, who had zero patience for disobedience or misbehavior from the children, always serenely insisted that the dogs were “fine” whenever Watson threatened to club them with a fireplace tool or pitch them out into a blizzard.

Domestic volatility. His home page was in shambles, under construction, corrupted. Maybe he needed to install one of those decibel meters they use during ball games. He could hang it on the wall and mark everything above 90 decibels in fire-engine red. And when they all started screaming, he could watch the needle ascend into the red and shout “QUIET!” and point to it as an objective measure that there was too much noise.

Home life was too fraught with emotional trauma, uncertainty, domestic peril, daily catastrophes—all impossible to guard against via proper system maintenance. Hard drive failure was easy to guard against. Just maintain meticulous and thorough backups. Keep mirror images of the logical drive on a separate removable device. But how to run an uninstall or debug utility on the wife? Defrag and reformat your kid’s brain? PKZIP the two dog files and archive them in remote sectors of his hard drive, eliminate their presence on his personalized desktop, while allowing other family members access to them by way of multitasking, elsewhere, off in some other window, far from his? If only he could chart Sandra’s moods as easily and precisely as he could follow the movement of Cisco and Sun Microsystem stock options.

Someone should see the Creator about averaging out some of the highs and lows in life’s emotional performance profiles. Wait. How about just taking out the lows? Less depression, more elation. Or maybe make lows more bearable with safe, organic pills of some kind? But without lows would the highs then be, relatively speaking, lower? Is it like the stock market? Eliminate lows and there goes half of the buy-low–sell-high equation? Investors would have to make do with buy high, sell higher—which would perhaps be only half as gratifying?

As the dogs reached another crescendo of barking, he drowned out the bedlam by turning on the garbage disposal, which shook the whole house with an explosive sound of glass or metal.

“WHO PUT SILVERWARE IN THE GARBAGE DISPOSAL?”

He cut off the machine, put his hand into the maw, and shredded his fingers on the shards of a jelly jar glass. The sight of copious bleeding inspired gasps and a moment of silence from his family, long enough for them to ascertain that all of his fingers were still there, whereupon they went back to fighting with each other and screaming at the dogs.

Watson wrapped his hand in a floral dish towel, went out to the garage, brought in a five-horsepower Shop-Vac, and suctioned the glass out of the disposal. He let the deafening roar wash over him like warm water, and watched the domestic chaos happening like a silent movie on the other side of the noise.

“Do you have any money?” Sandra mouthed over the blast.

He lip-read the communication perfectly, so he screamed, “WHAT?”

She stooped over the Shop-Vac and switched it off.

“I drove all the way to the ATM for insufficient funds,” she said. “Then I went to the store anyway. Six other people were standing behind me, the kids are with me, the household supplies are in eight bags, and the cashier tells me that both of our credit cards have been rejected. Both over the limit. Do we need to talk about money?”

He could feel the subtext straining to assert itself, and it struck terror into his professional heart:
If we need more money, I could go back to the accounting firm, and you could stay home more. You could fall off partnership track, and spend time dipping milquetoast with the kids, while the other guys in the firm would be downtown working, eating your lunch, racking up billable hours, and snickering at your professional impotence.

He put his fingertips to his temples. “Uh, I have an idea. Let’s wait until after my appointed case goes away, and then we’ll talk. How’s that?”

She held off giving him a look.

“I’ll get some extra money to get us through this,” he said. “It’s temporary. Bonuses are due. I’ve got a good one coming.” He could go to Arthur, the alpha male, and ask him for an early disbursement.