Against the Wind (33 page)

Like you, is the unspoken inference. I don’t care; if my drinking stops her from taking it seriously, I’ve done my bit for mankind. And my child.

“Probably a good idea,” I say. I can see she’s a bundle of nerves, I’m the link with the past she’s putting behind her, she doesn’t want anything, me especially, fucking things up.

The door flies open behind me and by the time I’ve turned Claudia’s in my arms. I lift her, holding her close.

“Oh daddy-do,” she exclaims in her child/grown-up way, “I didn’t know you were here.”

“Just got here, pumpkin,” I say. “I haven’t even been to my hotel yet.” I put her down. She’s a big girl; I’d forgotten. One month.

“Come on.” She grabs my hand. “I’ll show you my room. It’s really neat.”

As she drags me away I look back to Patricia, standing on the unsoiled shag carpet in the middle of the living room, an unconscious, apprehensive smile frozen on her lips. Without even realizing it, she’s drained her glass.

It’s amazing how quickly a couple of weeks can go by. Not to a kid; to a kid time drags, a week can go on forever. But for an adult who’s trying to hoard precious hours, even minutes, to have them in the bank against weeks or months of separation, time flies like a rocketship. It’s hard to be in the moment when you’re afraid of what the future may not hold.

School is out—Christmas vacation, why I’m up here. Patricia’s working extra-hard, even during the holiday lull. “I have five years of catching up to do,” she tells me later that first night I’m there, “they work their butts off.” Welcome to the private sector, I felt like telling her. But I didn’t, because her former job wasn’t her fault, and she’s happy working hard. She doesn’t say it but she’s also happy I’m taking Claudia off her hands for a little bit, giving her the chance to dig in without guilt-tripping herself.

So Claudia and I are constantly together. After the first few days of picking her up in the morning and taking her home at night I move her into the hotel with me: books, clothes, teddy bear. We roam the streets, the art museums and coffee shops, a man and his girl on the town. Her maturity amazes me, Santa Fe is a wonderful little jewel but Seattle is a real city, big, lots of variety. She takes to it like a duck to water, the endless choice of movies, places to eat lunch, places to shop. We buy belated Christmas gifts for some of her friends back home; she’s wistful about them, many of them friends from the cradle, but the new friends are swell, they’re just like anyone else.

She’s adapting beautifully. Part of me, the selfish part (most of me), is sorry. Somewhere in the back of my mind I’ve filed a scenario about a tearful child begging her daddy to take her home, to where it’s really home, where everything is good and comfortable. In other words, where I live. But the better part of me, and I’m discovering there is one, albeit small, is happy, genuinely so, because the move hasn’t been as traumatic as I feared, and she seems to be at peace with it. Of course, it’s all new still. Maybe when reality sets in she’ll feel differently. I hope not; mostly.

“Are you going to let me stay up ’till midnight so I can see the ball come down?” Claudia asks.

“Sure,” I tell her. “How will you know it’s a new year otherwise?”

“From the calendar, silly,” she giggles. There’s a bit of coquettishness in her laugh. She’s growing up, my little girl.

We’d spent a few days skiing, returning to Seattle New Year’s Eve day. It was great fun, by the end of each day we were exhausted, eager to climb into bed early. Now we’re back in my hotel room eating a room-service dinner; her choice, I gave her the option, we could’ve gone out. I’m glad she chose this; I don’t want to share her. Besides, I know dinner in a hotel room is her idea of supreme luxury. Shrimp cocktails, cheeseburgers, ginger ale and chocolate cake a la mode. All the good stuff. Out of deference to her (in my head, but still …) I’m not drinking tonight; it actually feels good, not merely penance.

We talk: about her new school and friends, her mother, me. Her mother’s new job is disturbing to her. It takes more of Patricia’s time than the old one, much more. She can’t visit the new office after school like she used to, either. It’s too far away, Patricia doesn’t want her taking city busses by herself, and the atmosphere isn’t conducive to children lying on the floor reading and drawing. The clients wouldn’t understand, she was told. Something about confidentiality, a new word she’s learned. Her mom’s much more uptight now.

She’s also not there as much. The hours are longer, and she’s dating. No particular man, as far as Claudia knows. That one gives me a jolt, that she’s dating, I don’t want her anymore, I truly don’t, but the idea that other men do is disturbing. Your basic garden-variety primitive masculine jealousy: other men sleeping with the mother of my child. It’s an ugly thought; the jealousy. I didn’t realize I was still so chauvinistic.

“Have you met any of the guys she’s going out with?” I ask.

“One.”

“What’s he like?”

“He’s bald.”

“Besides that,” I laugh. “Anyway, what’s wrong with being bald?”

“Nothing, I guess. You aren’t.”

“Wouldn’t you love me as much if I was?”

“Yeh. But you’re not.”

“Did you like him?”

“I guess.” A shrug saying I don’t really want to talk about this. “I just met him for a minute when he came to pick mom up.”

Patricia’s gain is Claudia’s loss. It’s inevitable, in the long run it may even be healthy, but it bothers the hell out of me. A new kid in a new city spending too much of her time with other kids’ mothers and sitters. I know it’s none of my business but I’m going to talk to Pat about it. She won’t like it, but that’s tough titty. Claudia’s my child, too.

Dick Clark does the New Year’s bit with the ball now. We watch on television as thousands of nuts scamper about Times Square, drinking and yelling, some of them stripped to the waist even though it’s below freezing out, like you see at football games in Pittsburgh or Cleveland. I realize with the time delay those ant-like figures up on the screen are all asleep or crashed out somewhere by now, but the manicness comes through, different from when I was Claudia’s age watching with my grandparents. Halloween for real, with real stabbings and real blood. I was always happy my kid was growing up in a small city instead of a big one; now she’s going to be part of that thundering herd.

A disquieting thought. I put it out of my mind. She’s here now, having fallen asleep minutes after the magic hour, still in her party dress. For too brief a moment, as I watch her lying there, her mouth slightly open in child sleep, she metamorphoses in my fanciful imaginings back into the child of old, daddy’s little girl, barely out of diapers and still sucking her thumb.

But that’s not her, not really. She’s a couple of years from teenagehood. Changing and growing, finding her true self, the one she’ll live with the rest of her life. Like I’m doing. The way I feel right now, she’ll get there before me.

THE NEW MEXICO
state penitentiary is less than a half-hour’s drive south of Santa Fe, down the same back road the bikers took when they were leaving town (they thought for good) seven months ago. It’s cold out, bitter. February’s the coldest month of the year, this year even more than usual, cold as hell and dry. We’ve had northern winds for a month, they’ve blown everything away, even the color, nothing bright outside, the sky itself pale, pale washed-out blue, almost clear, like the blue of mountain creek water during a false-spring runoff. Overhead an occasional streak of cirrus clouds, the sun faint yellow, half-transparent, skirting the mountains. Not a picture-pretty winter’s day; going outside is labor.

I drive down to see the bikers, my once-a-month visit. Visit number four. Before all this is over there’ll be hundreds once we start going into court on formal appeals.

I’m their only human contact with the outside world. I think about that a lot. It’s a funny thing, or maybe not so funny, but I’ve become extremely ambivalent about them in hindsight, about the case. Not the way it turned out, but my involvement. The feeling blindsided me, I thought I’d be completely engrossed in the appeal, because of the obvious injustice of what happened to them. That part still holds true: they were screwed and I hate that, I hate the way the system lets that shit happen, to them and to others like them, all the time. And I’m going to fight like hell to overturn that decision. I am, it’s not just an idle promise I make to myself to assuage my conscience. I am going to see this through to the end.

But there is a part of me that wishes I’d never gotten involved. For openers, I lost. I don’t lose that many, and to lose a big case doesn’t feel good, it’s not part of my agenda, particularly when I’m taking such an ass-whipping in my personal life. It certainly helped push the dissolution of my partnership over the edge. Granted, I wouldn’t have wanted to stay there, it would’ve been an impossible marriage, but I would have liked to have left on my terms, not theirs. No one likes getting canned, whatever the language says it was. And to be going out on your own with a defeat as your most recent decision is not as good, simply put, as going out with a win. I have business, but I’d probably have more if the decision had gone the other way. Winners attract, losers repel.

But that’s not the main issue. We all lose, I’ll rebound. What eats at me, constantly, like a rat gnawing in my gut, is the time with Claudia that I lost, time I will never recapture. I thought I knew at the time I was losing it but in a certain sense I didn’t, because until she and Patricia actually, physically left, and I was without her, it wasn’t real for me. I didn’t gut-believe it. I’d still be missing her as much as I do now, but I would’ve put in the time. There would have been no recriminations, like there are now. Bottom line, these guys cost me part of my life. Sometimes, I’m realizing, that’s more important than the black-and-white pursuit of justice.

Too late now for excuses, second guesses, might-have-beens. It’s like what getting drunk’s gotten to be: feels good while you’re doing it, but the payoff changes your mind about is it worth it. It’s for losers, all that stuff. I can’t help that I lost a case, a partnership, a child, most of my life’s savings. I am not a loser. I’ve got to get my act together and live by the Mickey Rivers school of life (one of my favorite baseball sages, up there with Casey Stengel and Satchel Paige): ‘I’m not going to worry about the things I can’t control, because if I can’t control them there’s no point in worrying about them; and I’m not going to worry about the things I can control, because if I can control them there’s no point in worrying about them.’

“Hey, there, hoss, how’s it hanging?”

“Long and low,” I say.

“Beats the shit out of short and low,” Lone Wolf replies, his lip curling off his canines in a half-assed smile, the teeth stained almost-black from the plug of Red Man tucked in his cheek. A man can acquire some nasty habits in prison, when he’s sitting around with nothing to do while waiting for the hammer to drop.

We’re in the attorney-client meeting room on Death Row, not a pleasant place to be. Sterile, overlit, unremittingly cheerless. Meetings in here feel like oral surgery without novocaine. In the old days, before the prison was rebuilt, it had a kind of funkiness about it. It was, albeit under the grimmest of circumstances, a place where human beings could relate to each other, which is important here, because everything about doing time on Death Row is terrible, utterly demeaning and depressing, a mixture of boredom, futility, and certainty.

We sit facing each other on hard plastic chairs at a long Formica table that runs the length of the room. A floor-to-ceiling Plexiglas barrier separates us. It’s two inches thick, bullet-proof. We talk on telephone receivers that connect across the barrier. We’re the only ones in the room. Everything we say and do is privileged: once a month the room is swept for bugs, for the state’s protection as well as the prisoners’. One illegal eavesdrop on a lawyer-client discussion and it could be a major lawsuit, even an overturn of a death sentence. The state doesn’t want shit like that—they play it by the book in here, willingly. They can afford to; it’s all so stacked in their favor they’d be stupid to cheat.

“What’s the good news?” Lone Wolf asks.

I shake my head: there is none. He asks the same question each time I see him, not because he thinks there might be some good news—he knows I’d be telling him if there was some the minute I heard myself—but as part of a ritual, our own Kabuki. Another habit to be cultivated to keep the days going, like doing a certain number of pushups or flossing your teeth at certain self-regulated times.

“Same old same old,” he says.

I nod. I wish I wasn’t here. Lone Wolf doesn’t say so, but I suspect he wishes the same. There’s nothing I can say or do. The appeals process in a death-penalty case is a long proceeding, tedious and nitpicking in the extreme (unless it’s you sitting there, about fresh out of options) with lots of checkpoints along the way. It pretty much takes care of itself as far as the technicalities of the law are concerned. It’s a hoary cliché but nonetheless still a true one that no judge or legal system, no matter how harsh, including those in Texas, Louisiana, Florida, the places where they actually kill people in quantity in the name of justice and the American way, wants to see a man put to death by the state until he’s exhausted all his appeals. Since we’re the only democracy left in the world that still executes its citizens, we have to be careful about it, or at least make a show that we are.

The problem with this case, the appeals side of it, is we conducted it too good, my colleagues and I. The way you get to retry a murder case, or any capital case, is to find a mistake. A big one, that would’ve (or at least could’ve) changed the outcome if it hadn’t been made. More convictions are overturned because the defense fucked up than any other reason. In hindsight, these boys would have been better off with a shitty defense, because that might have been grounds for retrial.

No such luck here. Every lawyer in New Mexico, from the penthousers to the ham-and-eggers, knows we did the best job that could’ve been done, given the lynch-mob attitude in the community. (Aside from the opening we blundered into on the coroner’s report, which in hindsight was inevitable. They would’ve snuck it in one way or the other.) So what we’re looking for is something the judge said or did, or something the prosecution did (or didn’t do) that would warrant a new trial, or at least a reopening of this case.