The questions, which seem both hard and mainly pointless, at least have given Roddy something to do here at night. Form after form, page after page, they help him tune out the racket, the shouting and swearing back and forth that goes on, the kind of flying threats for tomorrow that float and dive-bomb along the corridor from one mad guy to another.
Worse: occasional whimperings, or loud sorrows.
He can’t imagine anyone’s so interested in him, his desires, inclinations, and gifts, that much will come of all this. Probably everything’s just fed into a computer, which spits out some bare and simple plan of action that, however many questions there are, doesn’t truly take him into account. Well, because how could it? Like at school, the questions are mainly multiple choice. Like at school, they’re trickier than they look; and when they seem most innocent, he is most suspicious that that’s when they’re possibly trickiest, so that he has to circle and circle around them, like a dog tramping a patch of floor to lie down on.
Most of the answers aren’t right no matter how careful he is, because the questions don’t take shadings into account. Like, “Would you rather a) play hockey, b) swim, c) watch TV?” The way he would answer that is, he’d rather watch hockey on TV, like he used to do some nights with his dad, the two of them mostly silent except if there was a good goal or a bad fight, but connected, too. Another one comes closer: “When you watch TV, do you like programs about a) sports, b) nature, c) drama?” Still, much is left out. He feels squeezed into choices he wouldn’t otherwise make.
The intelligence tests have lots of questions about patterns and shapes: which word does not belong in this series of words, how would this shape look if it was turned inside-out and sideways? Trains and airplanes hurtle towards one another at varying speeds: when will the moment of collision occur? He’s good at patterns of words. He can transform shapes in his head and see how they would be, inside-out and sideways. Speeding objects are harder to calculate. The only sure thing is, they will collide. Which would be the point, if these things mattered at all.
At least the intelligence tests, if devious or confusing or just plain hard, must have plain answers, too. Questions on some of the other tests, the ones about what sort of person he is, he’d like to either skip or have room to explain. “When you are angry, are you more likely to a) yell, b) hit something, c) hit somebody?” There’s no place for “none of the above,” no space for saying that mostly he goes off to his room, or out, alone or with Mike, either downtown or into the country, depending. Getting his head clear, working the anger off, dulling the edges. But hitting something, that would be pointless, and feel kind of made up; and he’s hardly ever hit a person out of anger. More out of something like treading water: holding a place for himself, not getting pushed over, or around, or drowned.
Some people do yell when they get mad. Mike, for one, he’s seen Mike dance around with his arms waving, raging up at the sky, even about nothing much, like a flattened bike tire, some small thing gone wrong. Roddy’s vocal cords don’t work that way, nor do his arms feel capable of grand gestures. Yelling is caring too much. It’s too naked.
The aptitude tests are weird, too. “Would you rather work with a) numbers, b) words, c) hands?” — that’s an easy one. But what about “When you think of a dangerous animal, is it more likely to be a) a dog, b) a leopard, c) a skunk?” What could that have to do with anything? Unless that Stan Snell, the counsellor or therapist or whatever he is, can steer him towards being a circus-trainer or a zoo-keeper, what difference does it make what he thinks a dangerous animal is?
The woman works with words, he guesses, if she’s in advertising. She’s probably rich, and for a job like that she also probably has to be smart. It’d be unbelievably hard to be smart and have to lie absolutely still, not feeling anything. Maybe he and the woman are both in the same kind of trouble that way, their heads going around and not being able to actually do anything about any of it. He imagines the hospital bed is about the size of the cot in his cell. Even if Roddy lies very still, there’s still the hardness of the mattress beneath him, the rough blanket above, his heart beating, little digestive rumbles down below in his belly. Where his heels rest and how his eyelids quiver when he concentrates — she can’t feel any of that? And if she itches, she can’t move to scratch? Oh, but then, she probably can’t itch, either.
For being so fucking stupid in the particular way that caused all this, Roddy, with his cot, his grey walls, his lidless crapper, is in totally the right place. He has to belong in this world of the dimwitted, the dense, the furiously hard-done-by. Not bad, necessarily — he himself is not bad, and he can’t be the only one — but sort of mutated, sort of twisted, sort of bleached-out somehow. There are guys here that are like dried-up snakes flattened out by a truck. A few are even freakish like, oh, albino squirrels.
The sounds, the unrelenting din of voices rising and falling and boots clumping and cutlery clattering and pool balls dropping into pockets and TVs blaring and even just pages turning, are one thing. The smells are another. The place stinks of disinfectant and containment: the mad fragrance of frustration, which brings them all to rage of one sort or another. In the middle of the night guys cry out, awake or asleep there’s round-the-clock grief. Roddy supposes he could do that too, if he chose, if he wanted, if he didn’t mind other people knowing what goes on in his head.
If he imagined they cared.
He knows more now about how things work. Stan Snell and Ed Conrad have both explained that after he’s sentenced, a couple of weeks from now probably, he’ll be moved on from detention centre to reformatory. That should be a good word, reformatory, promising hope and life-changing, happy improvement, but obviously it is not.
There’s no question about pleading guilty, which he’ll be doing today. Because he is guilty; and because of course that first night, he confessed, just blabbed away to the cops about the whole thing, right down to what he and his dad and his grandmother had for supper. Everything except Mike. No wonder Ed Conrad sighs a lot. Roddy would, if he could, look for the mercy of understanding, an official, judging comprehension of one small, shattering, mistaken event. “You can hope, I suppose,” Ed Conrad says, “but I sure wouldn’t count on it.”
Roddy was under the impression justice moves very slowly, but the lawyer has explained otherwise. “Pleading guilty speeds things. It’s going to trial that takes forever.” What Ed Conrad has done for Roddy is make a deal, a trade. He’s proud of himself for pulling this off. “You plead guilty to the armed robbery, the attempted murder gets dropped. It’s a good deal, you know, sawing off the attempted murder. I told them if they held on to it we’d be going to trial because you wouldn’t plead guilty, and there’s a good chance you’d skate on it. But if they dropped it, you’d plead to the armed robbery and the whole thing’s off the books. Everybody saves money and time, you get points for not dragging the thing through the system, which means not dragging some witnesses through the system, either, like that woman, and you’re better off all the way round, and so’s everyone else.” He grinned. “Except me. For me it’d be better to rack up big bills on your dad’s tab, trying to defend you somehow.”
Nice.
He’s probably right, though, he spends enough time defending guys who’ve done what they’re accused of doing, so all he can do is get them through the best he knows how. Maybe it’s not his fault his heart isn’t much in it, as long as he does what he’s supposed to. Probably this is pretty good, good enough. Roddy’s glad he won’t have to testify and doesn’t have to see anybody else testify, either. Not so much the paralyzed woman, and anyway how could she, but other people, like his dad, maybe, because of it being his gun. And like Mike. Either way, it’d be hard to hear whatever Mike had to say.
This way Ed Conrad said the charge’ll get read out, the cops will have something to say, just the facts, basically, “no big deal.” One thing he said might happen is if the woman or people in her family want to make some kind of statements before Roddy’s sentenced. “You should be thinking about something to say to the court, too, make it clear what a good fellow you are, and a very sorry one.”
Ed Conrad gets a rusty-metal tone sometimes in his voice. Is it just Roddy, or does he not like any of his clients very much?
“Write something down,” he said. “At least make a start,” and Roddy has tried. Except he may be good at spotting what word doesn’t belong in a series of words, but he’s stuck when it comes to whole thoughts about something important. He’s written, “I’m sorry,” but then — what else is there to say? That he’d change everything if he could? That he never meant it to happen? Words don’t change anything, they don’t fix, they’re nowhere near big enough for real life.
Maybe that’s why there’s so much yelling here, and those other worse, suffering sounds: because words don’t do the trick. Given time, Roddy, too, may lose more and more of them, be reduced, finally, to pointing or grunting.
This morning when the wake-up buzzer goes off in the corridor, Roddy’s routine is instantly different. A guard comes for him, so Roddy doesn’t join the usual lineup for the cafeteria. He and three other guys get taken right to the showers, and when they’re finished there, instead of putting the brown jumpsuits back on, they’re handed real clothes. His grandmother, or his dad, must have dropped off his stuff. His only pair of dress pants, dark grey, which he’s never worn since his grandmother picked them up last year, a bargain, “because there’ll be occasions in your life now, you know.”
So there are.
Also there’s a white shirt he hasn’t seen before. New. Specially bought? And who wears white shirts?
People accused of big crimes, he supposes.
And in fact he thinks he doesn’t look too bad. His body’s better suited to dress pants and white shirts than to flailing around inside brown jumpsuits.
One of the other guys has nothing to put on except the jumpsuit. That’s pathetic; to have nobody who even cares enough to bring clothes. “Fuck you,” the guy says, “what’re you looking at?”
“Settle down,” warns a guard.
They’re loaded into a van, going back to the courthouse. It’s like a drug, smelling for a few seconds the hot, free air, inhaling deep, like a flashback of a week ago, two weeks ago, a whole seventeen years when this sort of air was normal, breathable, taken for granted. Also, just for the moment between the front door and the van, heat bearing down on the top of his head. A country kind of day. A swimming pool and toke and beer and ice cream kind of day.
Not ice cream.
He and the other guys and the guards get to the courtroom by elevator from the parking garage in the basement, no moment outside at this end of the journey. They file in through a side door, and get lined up side by side on a bench. Birds on a wire. Roddy’s grandmother and dad are sitting together in the second row in the part where the audience, or whatever it’s called in a courtroom, watches from. There’s a lot of strangers sitting out there. They could be here for one of the other guys, or just out of curiosity, to watch any case at all, suck up other people’s bad luck. Like his; he, for one, feels pretty doomed.
Or Jesus, some of them might be related to the woman. He doesn’t know if he’d recognize the husband if he saw him again. In the doorway of Goldie’s, he was just a figure, not a person whose features, in the middle of Roddy’s own catastrophe, get remembered. Also she’s got those two kids Ed Conrad mentioned, older than him. So maybe one or two or three or twenty of the people out there are from her family. He had that stray picture of one of them standing up in the courtroom, pulling out a gun, popping him one. This still doesn’t seem impossible, although also, it does. He doesn’t want to die. Just breathing is something. Does the woman feel that way, too? Not likely. She probably thinks just breathing isn’t much at all.
Is anybody keeping a close eye on these people?
His dad and grandmother look at him and his grandmother smiles and nods, but then their eyes bounce away. They came up with these clothes, they’re paying the lawyer, but maybe they haven’t forgiven him. Or his dad hasn’t forgiven him, and his grandmother has settled on one certain loyalty.
People make big mistakes to be loyal. It can get them into all kinds of trouble. Look at him: when it came down to the day, he got cold feet about Goldie’s, but he didn’t back out. He thought that’d be letting Mike down.
That’s not totally true. He didn’t back out because he didn’t want Mike to think less of him; which is not quite the same thing as loyalty.
Once again, Mike isn’t here. Roddy looks away, down towards his knees, his lap, his thin unbound wrists. A real no-hoper, one sad, bad case, that’s how he figures it looks.
This time there’s a real judge, black robe, the full deal. When he comes in, and everybody’s stood up and then sat down again, his eyes take a run around the room, taking in Roddy and the others but not pausing especially. Maybe for him it’s just another day at work. Like Roddy’s dad getting up every day, maybe this is only a job he does because he has responsibilities, he has other people he has to look after. He doesn’t look all that interested in the people in this room, anyway, although it’s hard to read either kindness or cruelty into a fat sort of face and a little bit of grey hair. The black robe is mainly the point anyway. It looks totally serious.
When Roddy’s case is called, it’s like going on stage. He’s moved away from the others, off the bench at the side and into a chair beside Ed Conrad’s, behind one of the desks out in front of the judge. At another big desk there’s a woman, and one of the two cops that busted him. The bigger, older one; the nicer one, although not somebody, obviously, on Roddy’s side.
Now here is Roddy in another way he wouldn’t have dreamed: standing up beside Ed Conrad admitting armed robbery. “Guilty,” he hears himself say when the judge asks for his plea. Ed Conrad said he should speak clearly in court, so he does, and then the word “guilty” ricochets and reverberates around the room like he’s proud of it.
Everything sounds bad. The woman, the lawyer on the other side, sitting at the other table with the cop, says some of what happened. Then the cop takes it from there, the facts of the thing, including all the stuff Roddy told them himself, which was everything except Mike.
The cop also reads bits from other people’s statements: the woman’s husband, describing being outside in his truck, hearing the shot, running in, seeing Roddy. Seeing Roddy throw up, too, and hand the gun over to Mike, and run out. Embarrassing, the throwing up part, and the running.
“We have been unable to determine that the defendant did not act alone.” It takes a second to unravel that sentence. It means, Roddy guesses, they tried to rope in somebody else, Mike, and couldn’t, but they’re leaving it open. Mike’s maybe not out of the woods yet. Maybe that’s why he’s not here. Even so.
Ed Conrad leans over with a friendly expression like he’s just going to ask his client about something or other, and whispers, “Sit up. Uncross your arms. Get that look off your face.” If he means Roddy should stop squinting, he can’t do that. It’s bad enough everybody knows he threw up. It’d be way worse if he cried.
The cop says, “The victim remains in hospital, with an undetermined prognosis as to her full or limited recovery.” Which means Roddy isn’t the only one who isn’t exactly sure what he’s done. It’s so weird there’s this woman, somebody he probably wouldn’t recognize on the street unless she was wearing that blue suit again, and both their lives are suddenly completely different because of each other. Roddy shakes his head, because it won’t come clear. Ed Conrad clears his throat and shifts in his chair and frowns.
The cop says this and that about Doreen: that she was away from Goldie’s for a few days visiting her sister; that robbers might have expected her to do the same as she did last year, which was let cash pile up in Goldie’s until she got back, only this time she changed her mind. The cop says, “The timing indicates forethought and foreknowledge. Deliberate planning targeting Goldie’s, not a random choice.” Ed Conrad objects. He says that’s an unprovable assumption, not one of the facts of the case the cop’s supposed to be giving. The judge agrees. Ed nods to himself like he’s done something smart.
When it’s his turn to ask questions, about all Ed Conrad does, though, is raise the subject of how Roddy’s dad stored the shotgun and ammunition. “My client is only seventeen, after all,” he says. “The adults in his life have some responsibility to protect him, even from himself.”
“Was that a question?” the judge asks.
“Oh,” Ed says. “No,” and sits down.
If this wasn’t about Roddy himself, it’d be kind of funny. Ed Conrad has nerve, though. Considering who’s paying him, it was kind of brave to suggest some of this could be Roddy’s dad’s fault. Or he’s stupid. Whatever.
And that’s about it, except for both lawyers, Ed Conrad and the one against Roddy, wrapping things up. The one against him goes on about vicious crime, youthful violence, brutal, reckless behaviour, innocent victim, the need for harsh penalties to set an example. It sounds to Roddy sort of general; like it’s not really directed at him.
Ed Conrad is different. For one thing, he talks slowly and softly about Roddy’s mother, and what does he know about her? He talks about a boy wrenched from one place and set of people to another due to family tragedy. A hard-working but difficult family situation, loving grandmother and father doing their best, a good sturdy outlook for someone with that kind of support. A reckless, immature, tragic act, he says, by a boy still with promise, who might be destroyed by harsh punishment. “He did a terrible thing,” Ed Conrad says. “But he is not a terrible boy. One out-of-character act should not destroy so much potential.”
What does he think he knows about Roddy’s character? Roddy has no good idea of it himself. Nor about potential. He doesn’t want to think about that word at all. It means a future that’s lost. What he could have done, whatever that might have been if he’d ever worked out such a thing.
What Ed Conrad really has no business doing, though, is bringing up Roddy’s mother. If he’d known the lawyer was going to get personal, for sure he’d have told him to leave her out of it. She had enough trouble, without getting dragged into this. Blamed in a way, although Ed Conrad doesn’t exactly say that. “My mother was great, we had fun, I trusted my mother.” He would like to stand up and interrupt Ed Conrad and say that. He glares, narrowing his eyes as best he can. Ed Conrad frowns back, quickly, a warning.
The judge says, “I’ll set sentencing for one week today, ten o’clock, this courtroom.” Ed Conrad thought it would be a couple of weeks, but the judge probably doesn’t figure he has much to think about. Maybe he’d sentence Roddy right now, except that would look too fast. “I’ll hear victim impact statements now, along with any statement the defendant cares to make.” The judge sounds sort of bored. Like whatever’s getting said, he’s heard it before. He probably has. None of this is probably new to anybody except Roddy.
He hears Ed Conrad sigh, and sees a tall older guy in a suit, not a suit like Roddy’s dad’s but smoother, and dark grey and three-piece instead of black and two-piece, walking from behind Roddy to the front of the room. He doesn’t look upset or nervous, but he does look real serious. He’s familiar, or his shape is: last seen outlined in the doorway of Goldie’s. The judge says, “Please identify yourself to the court,” and he says his name and where he lives. That he’s the husband. Also a lawyer. He gives some long-named company, and his own is one of the names. For sure he looks a whole lot smarter, and more expensive, than Ed Conrad.
“I’ll be brief,” he says, “because I don’t think this young man,” nodding in Roddy’s direction but not looking at him, “is worth much of the court’s time. My wife, however, does deserve some attention.” That hurts, even though it makes sense the guy has to be bitter. “So I want to tell you just a little about her, so you’ll understand the person who’s been hurt by all this, through no fault or act of her own.” Well, that’s true. She did nothing except show up at the very wrong moment.
“She and I have been married for just over six years. Her first marriage ended very badly, and it was hard for her to make a happy life for herself in its aftermath. But we did. We have.” Hurray for them. Ed Conrad frowns at Roddy again in his quick sidewards way.
“She has two children, both now young adults, whom she worked hard to help through the very difficult years after the end of that first marriage. I’m not here to invade her privacy, but I do want to say that all her adult life she has been a dedicated mother, as well as a creative and talented businesswoman as partner and vice-president of a major advertising agency. A productive and energetic member of society. But of course what’s most important to me,” and the guy’s smooth voice drops low and goes bumpy and rough, “is that she is my partner. We’ve each made a second chance for ourselves, which is a considerable triumph at this stage of our lives.”
You’d think he’d know something about second chances, then. You’d think he’d consider sparing one for somebody else. But Roddy supposes that’d be quite a lot to ask of this man. “We enjoy our life. My wife is a person who knows the value of celebration, and that’s what we were setting out to do — celebrate a happy moment with ice cream. That’s all she was doing: going for ice cream.” His voice breaks slightly there. If Roddy’s heart feels clogged up with sentiment, what about everyone else’s?
“And now because of this one kid here, she’s in a hospital bed where she can’t move or feel. She is paralyzed. Even in the best of medical hands, even the best possible outcome would mean months, maybe years of recovery. This boy,” and suddenly he is looking at Roddy, right into Roddy’s eyes, a hot stare that welds Roddy’s eyes, too, so he can’t look away, “this boy blew up her life, he exploded our hopes, he did something more terrible than he can imagine.”
How does he know what Roddy can imagine?
But he’s right.
“There’s no way to redress this. There’s no sentence that fixes it. There’s no possible justice. I just want to ask you, your honour, to keep in mind, when you’re deliberating, a loving, hardworking woman who was finally happy.” Shit. Happy. Loved.
Going back to his seat, the guy walks stiffly, kind of jerking, and doesn’t glance Roddy’s way. Roddy feels tiny, stepped-on, like an insect, one of the ones nobody but him sees any beauty in.
Now he can hear somebody else moving behind him, coming up beside him, soft short-stepping sounds. A girl. A young woman, right beside him, almost in reach if he leaned over slightly and stretched out his arm. And as if she is inclined to lean over slightly and stretch out her arm and touch him, she pauses in her journey to the front of the room. She is looking at him in a really strange way.
She’s got the wildest red hair, flaming out unbound and amazing. The dress she’s wearing doesn’t look like it belongs on somebody with that hair; it’s long and brownish and he can see through it to the shape of her legs, all the way up. She’s real thin. She looks — weak’s not the right word, but something like his grandmother’s glass animal figurines that she keeps in the china cabinet. She looks like she could break. Or be blown over.
Her skin, it’s pale and pure and like he can see right through it, like her dress.
Mainly it’s her eyes: really intent, staring right into him. Not like she’s angry or any second could pull out a gun, more that she’s trying to see right inside his head. He almost nods at her, just as gravely, a way of saying, Come right in, you’re welcome, feel free, look around. Save me.
Something is happening here that’s light-headed and also terrible in a way: he is being washed over, his whole self, top to toe, with warm, sincere, perfect love of this girl.
When she turns away and continues to the front of the courtroom he feels released, freed, relieved, although at the same time adrift and more lost than he already was.
Her voice is high and clear. She says she is the daughter and her name is Starglow. The judge says, “Your legal, birth name, please,” and she sighs and says, Alix.
She’s looking at Roddy again with those serious eyes. She says she doesn’t hate him. If not hate, what? Love? No, that’s him. Pity’s not quite right either.
She says she only wants to say that her mother is someone with a good soul. “She is paralyzed in her body,” this girl says slowly, talking to Roddy like she’s touching him, so his skin feels like it’s rising right off the rest of him, “but only in body, never in spirit. My mother has the promise of serenity, she can be a revelation of peace of the spirit. It’s very hard, but something so great can’t ever be easy. I just want to say this is a promise. It encompasses everyone who’s willing.” Her eyes still hold Roddy’s. Oh, he’s willing. He even thinks he can glimpse what she means by something so great and peace of the spirit. But it’s like a dream, what she means that he understands, it’s not quite graspable, and slips away.
His head swims, he feels faint, like he could go falling right over, as she slips past him, back to her seat. Everybody’s kind of frowning, rustling, resettling, including the judge. In this whole room, it’s like Roddy’s the only one who got any of what she was saying. For a few seconds there, he almost had hold of something.
“Thank you,” the judge says finally, in a what-the-hell-was-that sort of voice. Roddy is offended on her behalf; although probably that’s small-minded of him. Whereas she is large-minded, huge-hearted, enormous of spirit, and wouldn’t care. “Now then.” The judge turns to Ed Conrad. “Does your client have anything to say before we adjourn?” Ed looks at Roddy, who finds himself standing. This is like Goldie’s: something he’s doing without deciding or thinking.
Now what?
Now here he is, standing up in his dress pants and new shirt, looking at a man in a black robe who’s waiting for him to speak, but the point is the girl. She told him something important, even if he can’t quite hang on to its meaning, and he needs to tell her something back. A message between the two of them. “I’m sorry” is what comes out. “I’m really, really sorry. I didn’t mean it. I’d do anything if it hadn’t happened. I don’t know how it happened. I’m just sorry.”
Ah no, he has blown it. That was exactly what he already decided was useless, and it’s also not even close to anything he wants to tell her. How come there aren’t words for what he truly means, the scope of his regret, his sorrow, his sudden, weird love?
His gratitude, too. “And,” he says, turning slightly so he can just glimpse her, “thank you.”
That’s better. That’s closer.
Everybody stands up. A cop appears to lead Roddy away again. Roddy, looking back at the emptying courtroom, sees his grandmother and dad regarding him helplessly, the exact expressions that would be unbearable if they were the people he was looking for, but he’s watching the girl. She’s following her mother’s husband, her stepfather, he supposes. She doesn’t look back, but surely the way she moves, the certainty of her spine, the firmness of her feet, the transparency and sway of her dress, even, tell him that maybe after all, she heard, not so much his words but his intentions. The way he’s the only one, he figures, who had a clue about hers.
He’d be okay, if he could keep looking at her. No need to talk, although he’d like it if she did because her words mean something. Starglow, he says to himself, then adds Alix, but out loud so the cop says, “What?” and he feels sort of like a fool, but not really.
It’s not that any of what just happened makes sense; more that it doesn’t. Riding back in the van, he feels, not happy, but nearly peaceful. He keeps his eyes closed, to concentrate on how she looked to him, standing beside him, holding him hard with her eyes. That hair, that thin body, those words she spoke that he cannot remember, except for knowing that while they were being said, he felt strong, and almost sure of something. And how his skin felt like it was lifting right off his body.