Brain Storm (56 page)

“That’s all,” said Judge Horner. “Thank you. We do not need to hear oral argument from the defendant in this case.”

“But …” said Watson. He felt the floor heave under his feet. He was being dismissed before he could even argue! Why? Had he failed so abysmally that they didn’t even want to hear him? Was his brief that bad? Was Whitlow’s case so hopeless?

“We will issue our ruling in this expedited interlocutory appeal, probably sometime after lunch,” said Judge Horner. “That’s all. You may sit down.”

Watson’s mouth stuck open and he stared.

Judge Willard leaned forward and nodded, then whisked him away with the back of his hand.

“But—” began Watson.

“That will be
all
,” said Judge Horner, his tone suggesting he was about to rise from his chair and carry Watson away from the podium.

Tomorrow’s
Post-Dispatch
flashed before his eyes:
HATE CRIME CHARGES REINSTATED
:
JUDGE STANG SUMMARILY REVERSED
.

Watson picked up his folder and staggered back to his seat in front of Myrna. Half the lawyers were smiling at him, and the other half were leaning their heads together and whispering. Mocking him? Because
the Eighth Circuit had not even allowed him to argue his case? Were they making fun of him? Was the case such a loser that the court had decided it didn’t want to hear oral arguments?

Myrna was beaming. Donahue and Harper were leaving the courtroom.

“They didn’t let me argue,” whispered Watson. “My argument. They didn’t let me …” His careful presentation, his magnum opus on the First Amendment—his brief!—from which he had distilled an outline that fit on a single page of boldface headings and case titles, each of which were the jumping-off points for five-minute compelling arguments on points of law posed by questions from the bench? Questions never asked? The presentation never made? Useless? Not worth hearing?

“They said I couldn’t argue,” Watson repeated, his empty stomach squirming as he stared into Myrna’s bright, smiling face.

She pulled him down to her level and whispered in his ear. “That’s because you already won, ya big fuckin’ dummy.”

W
atson found his client propped up in a hospital bed, cuffed in four-point leather restraints to stainless steel side rails. He had just enough slack in the lines so he could hold the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
and read articles about himself. Without hair, his features seemed even more severe, the flesh of his face thrown into relief against the white of the pillowcase and bandages.

“You’re his lawyer, right?” said a nurse, his finger on the bed’s control pad opposite Watson.

A motor whirred and the head of the bed slowly elevated.

“I am his lawyer,” said Watson, recalling the joy he had once felt in representing a real person, albeit a racist, falsely accused of killing because of racism. How to sort out the feelings he had about defending a racist who possibly had done everything he’d been charged with, and more?

The nurse touched the turban of bandages on Whitlow’s head. “I need to change the dressings and put some more antibiotic ointment at the site.” He began unwinding the bandages, while Whitlow folded up his newspaper and patiently waited.

“I get put to sleep like a dog in a kennel,” said Whitlow cheerfully, “and when I come to, I find out my lawyer has kicked the government’s
ass to Hell and gone. And, hey,” he added, opening his restrained hands and showing Watson his new digs, “I ain’t in jail! I’m in a hospital.”

“Don’t jinx it by celebrating too soon, Jimmy,” said Watson, hoping his client would notice the nickname and wonder how his lawyer had come by it. “We could still have a trial, or the U.S. Attorney could ask for a rehearing en banc, which means he would request a rehearing before a seven-judge panel. He could even appeal to the Supremes if he wanted to. He has to weigh the benefits of a win against the risks of having another failure splashed all over the papers during his Senate campaign.”

The nurse lifted the last wrap from Whitlow’s shaved head, revealing cross-hatched sutures holding a scimitar-shaped incision together. He squeezed ointment out of a tube and dabbed it along the angry seam, while Whitlow winced and held his head still. The nurse finished his work, rebandaged Whitlow’s head, and left the room.

“And no matter what,” added Watson, “you’re still looking at manslaughter, at least.”

“All I know is it don’t look like they’ll be able to kill me just yet,” said Whitlow, returning to his newspaper. “If they offer manslaughter, you take it.”

He glanced sideways at his lawyer. “So, that seizure stuff
did
turn out to be important for my case, huh?”

Watson sat down in a chair next to the bed. “Yes. It certainly qualifies as a mental defect or disease. It sounds like you had a cyst they needed to take out.”

“And they was saying I might get a break at sentencing if the surgery fixed my temper and my bad attitude, right?”

“The consent forms look that way,” said Watson. “I wish you had told them to call me before you signed them. If you read them closely, the prosecution has simply agreed to file the medical reports and the consent forms at the sentencing hearing, along with a rather ambiguous recommendation for leniency.”

“But they’ll do some more psycho tests on me again before that, right? And if it looks like the surgery worked, then I might get off easier, huh?”

“Maybe,” said Watson.

“Well, you heard it here, first,” said Whitlow. “I ain’t the same person. The surgery fixed me up with a brand-new brain-box.”

“It did?” asked Watson.

“You bet,” said Whitlow. “It’s a medical miracle.” He gave Watson a wide-eyed, tender look. “For the first time in my life I know what it feels like not to hate. It feels so—”

“You feel better?” asked Watson.

“Feel better?” said Whitlow. “ ‘Feel better’ is what you get with a hundred-dollar hooker. I ain’t talking about
feeling
better, lawyer. I’m talking about how I don’t hate niggers no more. Niggers are just as good as everybody else. In fact, there’s plenty of white trash strewn all over the place that is much worse than your average Negro of colored. I know that now. I can see it as plain as high noon on a clear day.”

Watson searched his client’s face for traces of guile or sarcasm and found only buoyant optimism.

“You take this newspaper,” said Whitlow. “Used to be like I couldn’t read the fucking newspaper without blowing a blood vessel gasket. Looky, right here,” he said, pointing at an article that had the word
Choice
in the header. “It’s all about partial birth abortions. Now, back when I still had that cyst I’d read something like that and my brain would catch fire, because I’d think, ‘Look at this piece of shit! We got the fucking Holocaust happening right under our fucking noses. Two million babies a year getting flushed down the toilet. And they call it Choice!’ Then I’d call up my buddy Buck, and we’d talk about going out and bagging one of these bloodsucking, moneybag abortionists—maybe collect the head and hang it on the fence outside the clinic.”

Whitlow shook his bandaged skull, as if ruefully remembering his old self. “Today, I picked up the paper, I read that article, and I said to myself, I says, ‘Self, ain’t this a great nation we live in where we can all have different opinions about important things and still set down to eat at the same table?’ I said, ‘Self, don’t it take all kinds to make a world? What if we was all the same? Things would get pretty fucking boring, right?’ ”

He looked up from his newspaper. “I can think now,” he said earnestly. “I can see things clear as day. Now, I know you ain’t gonna believe this. So maybe you should just let me do the talking myself when it comes to telling the judge about it. But if I get outta here, I’m fixin’ to get me a job at Planned Parenthood. I know, you think I must just be saying that. But don’t it make sense? I mean,
choice
is the only thing that makes sense, right? Nobody is saying you
got
to kill your baby. Hell’s fire, no! What we are saying is you got a
choice
: You can
kill
your baby, or you can
keep
your baby. Because it’s America, right? What gets me is
I couldn’t see it before, because I had that fucking cyst taking up half of my brain. It like was pressing on certain circuits so I kept getting stuck on the baby part. It ain’t a baby. It’s a choice. It’s all about rights for women. And without I had the brain surgery I never coulda seen it.”

Watson almost leaned over, he was staring so hard at Whitlow.

“And see,” said Whitlow, his eyes shining, “it don’t stop with just
seein
’ what is plainly right there in front of me—stuff I couldn’t see before. It’s like the new me wants to go one better. The new me ain’t happy till he thinks of a way to make things even better. So, what I say is we give the women
more
rights,
better
rights, and another running twelve months’ worth of choices to boot. Suppose these poor women just
think
they want to have a baby, and then once it comes out they decide it ain’t the right kind or is nothing but a butt-load of trouble? Then what? The new Jimmy Whitlow will tell you what, we just go ahead on and extend this choice business all the way up to the first birthday to make sure the woman knew what she was in for before we make her go on and raise the thing. See? More choice,” he said. “Why? Because they got that fucking tumor out of my head, that’s why.” Whitlow turned back to his newspaper.

“They still saying I hate niggers?” he asked.

“I think so,” said Watson.

He shook his head again, as if he were his own rebellious teenage son. “Why was I like that? Why couldn’t I just be good? You know,” he said, with a contemplative frown, “I think I always
knew
I was bad. I mean, what most people would say was bad. I figured that if I died, like right now, I would go straight to Hell. If I thought about it, I just
planned
on going there, because I couldn’t act or think any different than just plain bad. But in the back of my mind I guess I always knew that couldn’t be right. It couldn’t be that I was just bad and nothing to be done about it except go to Hell. Something had to happen.”

He looked up at Watson again. “One time I walked all over a cow pasture during a motherfucker of an electrical storm, because I wanted to get struck by lightning the way St. Paul done. Then I could just wake up different. But it never happened, and I never won the lottery either. But this surgery.” He opened his hands and looked at the ceiling. “It’s a miracle. I’m a different person.”

He turned a page in the paper and snapped it open for another look. “And here’s another one I read with my new brain. See this one here on how they want to increase our taxes so they can give out more
Medicare? Now if I was my old self, I’da been cussing lightning bolts about how I can’t pay my own kid’s medical bills, because the government takes my money and gives it to old people, who all got more money than I do. I ain’t got health insurance, but I’m supposed to
buy
health insurance for these old stiffs, so they can get pacemaker number two put in and go play golf in Florida.”

His head slowly wagged with the weight of memories from his past. “That was the
old
Jimmy Whitlow. Because today when I read about the government wanting to up the taxes for Medicare, I said to myself, I says, ‘Self, ain’t it great how the government is trying to help old fuckers like Harmon Mayhew, who lives down the street from us. Harmon’s pushing eighty and don’t do nothing but drink all day long, and that tends to make him sick because he don’t eat—just drinks Jim Beam. He’s got a four-car garage full of antique cars they say are worth over a million dollars. But he won’t sell a one. And, praise God, he don’t need to, even though he is always having to go to the doctor, which is free because of Medicare. And the ambulance has come around twice—wait, three times—because he keeps falling asleep in bed with a lit cigarette. Now, I know for sure that if it weren’t for Medicare, Harmon woulda died twenty years ago. So this morning, when I read about more Medicare taxes in the paper, I says, ‘Self, ain’t it great how the government is taking my money to buy Harmon Mayhew a new liver?’ You see?” said Whitlow, touching himself on the side of the head, “because they fixed whatever was pressing up there. Now I can see what’s really happening.

“But again, just seein’ ain’t enough for me now. I gotta go one better. The old Jimmy Whitlow woulda thought, ‘Let’s go blow up a government building before they take
all
our money and give it to old winos on respirators.’ But my new brain? My new brain gets this great idea because the blood is flowing into all the right places. It come to me in a flash, about how to make people see how taxes is nothing but helping people. What they should do is pass a law where instead of taking the money out of your paycheck automatic, they just go ahead and let you take it home. But then under the new law you got to take your money out of the bank once a month and walk down the street and
give
it to Harmon Mayhew, in person, face to face, and to every other old sick fuck on your block on Medicare. Then you could see goodness right there in living color. You could say, ‘Self, you can’t buy penicillin for
your own kid, but your kid ain’t dyin’ yet like poor Harmon, and look what your money done for this helpless dead drunk old fart who can’t tie his fucking shoes anymore. Your money went and bought him a new mechanical liver which costs more than New Jersey, and it comes with a shopping cart, so he can wheel it around on the golf course all day and putt.’ You wouldn’t hear no more complaining about taxes if you did a scheme like that. No, sir!”

“What was in the briefcases, Jimmy?” asked Watson.

“The what?” asked Whitlow.

“The briefcases from the back of your car. What was in them?”

“Whew!” said Whitlow with a shudder. “You’re scaring me, lawyer. I don’t have any idea what the fuck you are talking about. That scares me, you know why? Because up in Minnesota they was talking about that same amnesia stuff that we was talking about when I was over in Des Peres. Is briefcases a thing I should remember?”