Snake Eater (2 page)

“I’ll try to get you out on personal recognizance,” I told him. “I doubt if it will work. They’ll want to go high. The courts are making examples of their drug cases these days. I’ll need to know some things.”

“I could use a smoke,” Daniel said suddenly.

“Oh, I’m sorry.” I put my pack of Winstons onto the table. “Help yourself.”

He glanced down at the cigarettes, then looked up at me and shrugged.

“Oh, Christ,” I said. “You can’t smoke that stuff here.”

“It’s my medicine,” he said, and that’s when I first noticed that beneath the table that separated us his right leg was jiggling furiously. I looked hard into his face and saw a tiny muscle twitching and jumping at the corner of his eye. Behind his mask of calm, Daniel McCloud was, I realized, in agony.

“Charlie told me you encountered Agent Orange over there.”

“Aye.”

“That’s how you met him?”

“Yes. We thought our government would want to take care of us.”

“And it didn’t work out.”

“We got nowhere. Charlie tried to help. Good fella, Charlie.”

“We?”

He shrugged. “Sweeney and I. Sweeney’s one of my buddies. We were S.F. together, got burned together, and—”

“S.F.?” I blurted.

He smiled. “S.F. Special Forces.”

“You were a Green Beret?”

He rolled his eyes. “We
wore
the farkin’ hats. A green beret is a hat, and it’s a book and a movie and a song. But it’s not a man. We didn’t even like ’em. Nobody put ’em on except when they had to. Anyway, Sweeney and I tried to get some medical help from the government. But we didn’t have cancer, we weren’t dead, or even, as far as they would admit, dying. We couldn’t prove what we got was from the Orange. So we had no case.”

“And marijuana helps you.”

“Aye. It helps the itching and the pain. It’s the only thing that helps.”

“How do you feel now?”

“Right this minute?”

“Yes.”

He exhaled deeply. “It’s driving me crazy, Mr. Coyne.”

“How much do you smoke?”

“I need six to eight sticks a day.”

“My God!”

He shrugged. Daniel shrugged often, I was beginning to notice. It seemed to be his primary form of expression. When he shrugged, he gave his shoulders a tiny twitch and darted his eyes upward. It wasn’t a very dramatic shrug. “It’s the only thing that’ll help,” he said.

“What about the trafficking charge?” I said. “Do you sell it?”

He leaned across the table and gave me a hard look. “I smoke it. What do you think I am?”

“A drug dealer, of course.”

“Never,” he said quietly.

I shrugged. “Charlie told me you had money.”

“Aye. I have some. That’s not where I got it.”

“If I’m going to represent you, I’ve got to know.”

He peered at me, then nodded. “I don’t sell it, Mr. Coyne.”

“Do you share it? The grass?”

“Aye. With Sweeney. He needs it, too, same as me. And sometimes Cammie. She’s my woman. Just a stick now and then. She keeps me company with it.”

Daniel McCloud did not fit my mental image of a Green Beret. He stood no more than five-eight, and he looked overweight in his baggy chino pants. His sandy hair was thin and uncombed, his face pockmarked, and his eyes were a washed-out blue. He wore steel-rimmed glasses. I guessed he was in his late forties, although he looked ten years older than that.

He looked like a lot of other country boys I have known who get old early in life.

He also looked like a man with a terrible disease who had spent a sleepless night in jail without his medicine.

“At the arraignment Monday,” I said, “I’ll have to argue for reasonable bail. I need to know some things.”

He nodded.

“How long have you lived in Wilson Falls?”

“Almost twenty years.”

“Own your own home?”

“Aye.”

“And a business?”

“I’ve got a shop. I sell bait and tackle, bow-hunting stuff.”

“You’re a fisherman?”

He smiled. “Aye. I grew up in the outdoors.”

“I love fishing myself. Fly-fishing, mostly. Fly-fishing for trout.”

“I look at it a little different,” he said. “I go after whatever is there, and I catch ’em any way I can. I like to improvise. Same way I hunt. Bow ’n’ arrows, snares, slingshots. It’s how I was brought up.” He closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, I saw in them for the first time a hint of feeling, something other than the pain, although I couldn’t identify that feeling. Wistfulness, maybe. Or loneliness. “My daddy was a poacher down in Monroe, Georgia,” he said softly. “He taught me the woods. He killed deer with bows and arrows and spears he made himself, so the wardens wouldn’t hear him. They all knew he did it. But he never once got caught. That was the fun he got out of it. That was his sport. Outwitting the wardens. Fishing and hunting weren’t sports for him. He was a Scotsman. Knew the value of things. My daddy took game and fish when he needed it to feed us. Never more, never less. He taught me how to survive in the woods. I knew all about survival before I ever got to Fort Bragg. How to eat whatever you could find, how to disguise your smell, how to be invisible, how to distinguish all the different sounds in the woods, what it means when there are no sounds. My daddy made me eat bugs when I was six. After bugs, any kind of meat’s pretty good. Better when you can cook it, but good anytime.” Daniel shrugged. “He used to tell me, ‘Son,’ he’d say, ‘they make the farkin’ law because they need general guidelines. They try to hit an average with it. But that don’t mean it’s right for a particular person. Maybe a deer a year per man is a good guideline. But it ain’t right for us. You’ve got to figger what’s right for you. That’s your law.’”

He looked at me and smiled. He was, after his fashion, giving me his defense. I guessed this was a long speech for Daniel McCloud.

“Like growing your own marijuana,” I said. “That’s your law.”

He shook his head. “God’s law. Not mine. My daddy told me that if it don’t hurt anybody else, and it helps you, then it’s God’s law you should do it. He never broke God’s law. Shit, neither did I. I guess we both broke man’s law some. Difference is, my daddy never got caught.”

We talked a while longer. Daniel told me what I needed to know to handle his arraignment on Monday. I tried to explain how it would go. “We’ll wait around for a long time. Eventually it’ll be your turn. They’ll read the charges against you. We’ll argue about your bail. The judge will set it, and if you can make it you’ll be released. Then you and I can start thinking about the probable-cause hearing.”

I told him they’d bring him to the district court in Northampton on Monday morning and I’d meet him there. I told him it was a lousy deal that he had to spend the weekend in jail, that if he’d been arrested any day but Friday or Saturday he’d be arraigned and out on bail the next day. He repeated that he knew “that farkin’ Oakley” had come for him on Friday afternoon on purpose, because he had it in for him and wanted him to suffer. I asked him if he was suffering. He nodded and said yes, as a matter of fact, he was suffering terribly, and he said it in such a way to make me understand that he was familiar with suffering and tried not to let it bother him. I asked him if I could bring him something. The only thing that would help, he said, would be a few sticks of cannabis.

I told him I didn’t think I’d be able to do that for him.

When we stood up and shook hands, Daniel said, “Can you get me out of here?”

I hesitated. Bail would come high. But I nodded and said, “Sure.”

The smile he gave me showed me what I hadn’t seen before—that Daniel McCloud, survivor of the terrors of the Southeast Asia jungles, was scared.

I
ARRIVED AT THE
Northampton District Court on Monday morning for the nine o’clock criminal session. I sat on one of the benches among the lawyers, witnesses, and accused citizens, feeling tired and headachy from getting up early and driving the two hours from Boston to Northampton—a long straight monotonous shot out the Mass Pike to Springfield, then a quick jog north on 91.

I wished I’d had the foresight to sneak a cup of coffee into the courtroom with me.

At the table in front of the bench the clerk shuffled a large stack of manila folders. A pair of probation officers whispered at their table.

About ten after nine a uniformed officer led six or eight bleary-eyed men into the prisoners’ dock. Daniel was the last of them. He looked out of place among the others, young men all, the weekend collection of lockups. Sobriety test and Breathalyzer flunkees, I guessed.

I jerked my chin at Daniel. He nodded to me.

His leg, I observed, was jiggling madly.

Then a side door opened and the judge came in. One of the officers said, “All rise.”

We all rose.

A voice from the back of the courtroom mumbled, “Hear ye, hear ye,” told us the Honorable Anthony Ropek was presiding, and concluded, “God save the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.”

The judge sat. The officer said, “Be seated.” The rest of us sat. The clerk leaned against the bench and conferred with the judge for at least five minutes. High drama.

Then the clerk returned to his table and began reciting names. To each one, the probation officers responded. Usually one of them would say, “Terminate and discharge.” A couple of times they said, “Request default warrant.” They directed their words to the judge. The clerk, however, ran the show.

It was all routine court business, and it gave me a chance to size up Judge Anthony Ropek. He was small and gray and businesslike as, with an unintelligible word and small gesture, he repeatedly gave his official endorsements to the requests of the probation officers. He was an old-timer, I guessed, still in district court after all these years, which meant that he’d probably been passed over for superior court or federal seats enough times to know that he wasn’t going anywhere else. This I took to be a positive omen for Daniel. Judge Ropek didn’t strike me as a man with a motive to build a reputation at the expense of an ailing Vietnam vet who grew his own marijuana.

After the probation cases came the weekend motor vehicle cases. All involved drunk driving. Most of them pleaded guilty, were fined, had their licenses revoked, and were enrolled in rehabilitation classes.

We heard a malicious destruction case. A mason with a long unpronounceable Italian name was accused of knocking down the brick walls he had constructed at a new condominium complex because the contractor had fired him halfway through the job. The prosecutor, a young female assistant district attorney, built her case entirely on the testimony of the contractor, corroborated by two witnesses, that the mason had cursed and uttered oblique threats when he was let go, and had thrust his arm from the window of his pickup truck and extended his middle finger as he drove away. Her implied argument, simply, was: Who else could have done it?

Nobody had seen him at the scene of the crime since the afternoon he was fired, the only point the defense attorney bothered to emphasize in his cross-examination of the witnesses.

When both sides rested, Judge Ropek said that he, for one, still retained reasonable doubt. Not guilty. It was the correct verdict.

The whole thing took less than an hour.

When the court recessed around eleven, twenty-five or thirty citizens had had their lives significantly altered by decisions rendered in the Northampton District Court. About a dozen couldn’t drive automobiles for sixty days. Another dozen or so no longer needed to report to probation officers. A few would soon be arrested for probation violations. One Italian stonemason found himself relieved of both worry and a few thousand dollars in legal fees.

Daniel McCloud was still jiggling his leg and waiting.

I went outside for a cigarette. I wondered how Daniel had endured the weekend without what he called his medicine. I hoped his case would come up before the lunch recess.

I thought about what I had witnessed during the previous two hours. Justice. Routine, boring, repetitive justice had been dispensed evenhandedly by Judge Anthony Ropek. In the course of a week, justice would be meted out hundreds of times in this courtroom, as it would in dozens of other courtrooms across the state.

My law practice rarely requires me to perform the peculiar formalities of courtroom routines. Most of my work is done by telephone or in conference in a lawyer’s office. Most of my practice is civil and probate, and you can judge the effectiveness of a civil or probate lawyer by his success in resolving issues before they find their way into a courtroom. It’s the law of give-and-take, compromise, negotiation. It’s my niche, and I’m pretty good at it.

Criminal law is different. The state, not a private citizen, is the adversary. The ground rules are more formalized, less flexible. Behind the state stand massive bureaucracies, enormous budgets, up-to-date technology. Behind the accused stands only a lone attorney, more often than not one who has been appointed by the state, and the presumption of innocence.

It usually turns out to be a pretty fair contest. The state bears the burden of proof. The presumption of innocence is a powerful ally.

On those relatively rare occasions when I find myself handling a criminal case, I inevitably recognize it as somehow more important. My client stands to lose not just some money, or his house, or custody of his children. Criminal clients go to prison when their lawyers screw up. Sometimes, because they are in fact guilty as charged, they go to prison even when their lawyers don’t screw up. Under this system, remarkably few innocent people are imprisoned—although a remarkably large number of guilty people go free. Still, I, for one, never can avoid the feeling that I’ve screwed up whenever one of my clients goes to prison. Even when they’re guilty, I always feel that I should have been able to get a “not guilty” verdict.

There’s a big difference between “not guilty” and “innocent.”

What would soon happen on that muggy Monday morning in July in the old Northampton courthouse, I knew, was the beginning of an intricate process that could land Daniel McCloud in M.C.I. Cedar Junction for fifteen years. What actually would happen would depend more than it should on me.