Snapper (15 page)

At most, I was stalling. The logging company would be compelled to arrange for a U.S. Forester to make another appraisal. By then, thanks to government bureaucracy, winter snows or spring rains might make logging impossible. Moreover, the Forest Service could probably guess more or less who was behind this sabotage. A group of concerned citizens, including myself, had taken them to court over these trees, and lost. Twice. Yet they would have struggled to muster proof, I thought. In any case, they never pursued me, and I suppose that ultimately they got their trees.

Nonetheless I like to picture a logging team arriving at one of the little groves I created, where the trees stood as tombstones and mourners alike, commemorating Lola everywhere with towering solemnity, forbidding them to cut her down.

In retrospect I think I was angry with Lola for witnessing my courtroom humiliation, and that is why I carved her name alone. It might have been more fun to string out whole poems from tree to tree, or to engineer a few clever obscenities. But she had accepted my invitation to join me for the summary hearing.

“It will be just like watching a hanging!” she said.

I hadn’t known what to expect, and at the last minute I decided that I should at least wear a tie. Lola rolled out of bed and into a bathrobe and walked toward her closet. My cream
linen shirt and plain black trousers were hanging, freshly ironed, from the closet door. She opened it gingerly.

“I have several,” she said. “Just a minute.” She rummaged through a drawer somewhere inside. I didn’t want to know why Lola had surplus neckties, and from whom and in what circumstances she had obtained them.

Lola had recently taken a job with an Indianapolis publishing company, working in some capacity on a series of instruction manuals for dummies, or idiots, or morons, I forget which. Inside of two weeks she had already become an authority on bicycle repair and barbecue sauce. She lived on the eighth floor of an apartment building about a mile from downtown. She didn’t know anyone there and invited me to stay for a week, more if I liked. Maybe, I thought, I can prevent her from getting to know anyone, which had always been a problem in the past. It was mid-March, and most of my birds were still in Cuba or Nicaragua.

“Here,” she said, with five ties draped over her forearm. They were not short, thin, knitted ties such as a woman might wear for fun: they were bold, wide, expensive silks.

“Have you met a banker I don’t know about?” I said.

“Don’t be silly. When I have enough fabrics I am going to start quilting. Forty years from now, probably. I think you should try the paisley.”

“Don’t you have black?”

“What kind of quilt could I make with that?” She held the paisley tie, a revolting churn of purples and yellows, up to my shirt on the closet door.

“Perfect,” she said. “I think the judge might take a shine to you.”

“Three judges,” I said.

It didn’t really matter. I was not going to take the stand or
be cross-questioned or anything thrilling like that. A summary judgment is a means of preempting a trial. It happens when one side has no real prospect of winning, anyway. Two lawyers argue before a judge, or in this case a panel of judges; the panel reaches a decision, and the case is closed.

Unfortunately this had already happened in a district court, but we, the concerned citizens, appealed that decision, and thus it would be repeated in a circuit court. Appallingly (I thought) none of us had attended the first hearing—it is not compulsory, and it is boring. I had decided that I would attend the second hearing, so that at least I could report to the others what had gone wrong. I had explained this to Lola several times, but she insisted still on picturing me as the stalwart defender of venerable trees and the champion of vulnerable songbirds.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “We’re just going to sit in back.”

“Don’t you like it?” she said.

“It will look great in a quilt,” I said.

Indianapolis is the twelfth largest city in the United States, but it feels like the country’s largest suburb; it is all sprawl and you spend half of every day in your car. There is nowhere on earth I detest more. Sometimes in the evenings we walked around the square mile that constitutes downtown. Most states keep their commercial and civic capitals apart: think Albany versus New York City, Springfield versus Chicago, Sacramento versus Los Angeles or San Francisco. Only in Indianapolis can you see vast phallic commercial architecture sneering at noble limestone expressions of democratic virtues. The capitol building, courthouse, library, and war memorials erected with public funds for the public good feature broad
inviting steps, large accommodating doors, paths radiating in all directions—they are an implicit invitation to everyone to participate in civic life and the business of governance. And they are dwarfed by the concrete, steel, and tainted glass towers of banks and insurance companies. It hurts just to look.

My previous involvement had consisted in filing an affidavit asserting that certain bird species would suffer from clearings the Forest Service proposed to make—birds, that is, that the Forest Service had claimed would benefit. Henslow’s sparrow does favor small meadows, but not miles away from its existing habitat. It was as if they proposed to open ice cream stands for the benefit of local children in a totally uninhabited town. Mine was one of many affidavits filed by the Forest League, a group including the National Audubon Society, the Sierra Club, and various concerned citizens. Among them were some of the finest ecologists in the world, biologists and botanists who published regularly in academic journals and mainstream outlets such as
Science
and
Nature
—impeccable professionals who had written affidavits much like mine but sharper, smarter. I was effectively a weakness, a liability in our case, though I didn’t know it.

The case did not fail on my account alone, of course. It failed because it was tried in Indiana, where science, education, and Darwin are all equally deplored—because it was tried in a state that once attempted to legislate 3.2 as the value of pi. That was in 1897, on the grounds that 3.2 would be more amenable to commerce. The defendants in our case were the U.S. Forest Service, as mentioned, whose primary function is the facilitation of timber sales. They brought with them testimony from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which truly reveres
all woodland creatures provided they can be shot, trapped, hooked, netted, or clubbed. They had further testimony from the Indiana Department of Natural Resources. Unlike their federal brethren, they are warm-hearted and generous; they are also underpaid and undereducated.

“But where do you put three judges?” said Lola. She wore a simple black dress with a turquoise scarf that complemented her pale blue eyes. I began to think of places to go to follow our court date with a dinner date. Unfortunately in Indianapolis that would mean driving for an hour or two.

“To be an effective judge, you need to sit behind a nine-foot desk, right?” she said. “Otherwise you’re another nobody.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s not a trial. Just a hearing. I don’t know where they hold hearings. I assume one of the judges chairs the thing.
Presides
.”

“Well, how do the other two feel about that?” she said.

“I expect they do it all the time.”

“Let me help,” she said. I hadn’t worn a necktie in years, and I couldn’t make a serviceable knot. She looped it over her own head. “I used to help my brother when he was little,” she said.

“Maybe I could wear your scarf instead,” I suggested.

There was something brisk, even maternal, in the quick detached manner she had with the tie—I pictured her, briefly, preparing a little boy for some awful wedding or funeral, and I ventured a joke.

“Maybe we can corner one of these judges after the hearing,” I said. “Turn you into Lola Lochmueller.”

“That,” she said, noosing my own neck now, “is a terrible name. It sounds like Klingon. I’ll bet it would look like barbed wire on the marriage certificate, too.”

She pulled the thin end until the knot met my throat.

“I’m sorry,” she added. “Your name is lovely. It’s perfect. For you.”

Lead counsel for the defense wore a white turtleneck sweater beneath a suede blazer. He was black, good-looking, and about thirty-five; he had been flown in from Washington, D.C. Beside him sat a beautiful Asian woman whom I felt sure had passed her bar exam no more than a week before, after storming every academic barricade at Georgetown Law.

Counsel for the plaintiff—that is, my guy—was a retired law professor, local, who wore a knitted tie beneath a veteran burgundy cardigan. I had not met him, and he had no way of knowing who I was as I sat with Lola in the back of the room. Both he and the opposition had looked at us quizzically on entering—we had arrived early—as though they had not expected an audience.

The room itself was something in between a courtroom and a conference hall. All the walls and furnishings were rendered in a bland, possibly synthetic stripped pine—if they did fell those trees, I thought, they should at least invest in a chamber more redolent of the majesty of the law. At the front was a crescent-shaped desk that could give up to five judges at least four feet each—it was the sort of configuration used in academic panel discussions and congressional inquiries on TV. Two plain library tables, one for each counsel, sat in the middle of the room, and to one side was a smaller table for the court clerk. There was an American flag in one corner and an Indiana flag in the other; ready, I thought, for ignorant armies to pick one each and clash by night. Lola and I sat on hard black plastic chairs against the back wall—there were only four of them, probably set aside for journalists.
Behind the judicial crescent desk hung the seal of the state of Indiana, which depicts—appropriately enough—a pioneer swinging an ax at a tree, and a buffalo fleeing over a fallen log. A good trial lawyer could use that, I thought.

Judges Monroe, Marion, both men, and Vanderburgh, a woman, filed through a separate, judicial entrance behind the crescent desk. Judge Marion said distinctly to Judge Monroe the words “an exemption to new marina fees,” before he spotted Lola and me and halted in midsentence. He tapped Judge Monroe’s arm to alert him, I suppose, that this hearing was not business as usual. Judge Vanderburgh was not, apparently, friendly with her fellows, or else she belonged to a different marina. The court clerk entered from the public door and even she seemed to notice our presence.

Trim though white-haired, Judges Marion and Monroe were a similar age, possibly eligible for retirement but clearly fond of their robes. Judge Vanderburgh was a small but squat and masculine-looking woman in her forties. Judge Marion sat at the center of the crescent, with Vanderburgh to his left and Monroe to his right, and he presided.

He began reading from a sheet in front of him, which described in convoluted legalese the parameters and substance of the case: namely that we, the plaintiffs, predicted significant ecological impact contingent on the Forest Service’s proposal; therefore the Service had been negligent in not carrying out a formal environmental assessment.

That suave imported lawyer rose to address the judges, and with elaborate hand gestures stated that while the proposal might be considered controversial, it could not be called “highly” controversial, the standard called for in such-and-such a regulation.

“Mere opposition does not constitute controversy,” he
announced, planing his open palm horizontally like an umpire, declaring his own argument
fair
.

“That’s exactly what it does!” I wanted to shout. Lola noticed my agitation and took my hand. With her thumb she began to caress the outside of my index finger.

The judges waited patiently while the professor rose to wrangle with his opponent over the meanings of the words
controversial
and
highly
, referring to similar cases contested elsewhere. I sensed that all of this had been worked out and submitted previously in writing, and that this preliminary definition of terms was a formality. I was wrong, of course. The court ultimately granted us
controversial
, but not
highly
.

Twenty minutes in, Judge Marion interrupted the skirmish with the following assertion:

“In order for a thing to be highly controversial, there must be substantial dispute.”

I squeezed Lola’s hand to comment on the egregious circularity of this pronouncement. She squeezed back.

The opposing counsels began to haggle over the meanings of
substantial
and
dispute
, and the affidavits came into play. Mine was first, courtesy of the opposition.

None of the data that I cited in my affidavit was aired in the courtroom. Only my conclusion was read aloud—that “the Service’s suggestions seriously undermine the scientific credibility of the proposal itself.” These words of mine were read aloud, twice, theatrically, by that lawyer from Babylon, D.C. I pictured him walking past the homeless asleep on subway vents to counter the winter cold; calling at some boutique coffee shop for a drink that mixed three languages in five syllables. His time out here alone must have cost hundreds in trees.

“Could the learned counsel please tell us more about the author of this statement?” he said.

Our professor seemed unprepared for this. He had to peer at his notes.

“Nathan Lochmueller, ecologist,” he said.

“Yes, that appears on the affidavit. What I mean is, does he have any credentials that do not appear there?”

“I believe he is an independent contractor,” said the professor.

“I believe that, too,” said the opposition. “What I would like to know is whether he holds any credentials unknown to this court.”

“Not to my knowledge,” said the professor.

“Have you met this Mr. Lochmueller in person?” said the inquisitor.

“No. I have not,” said the professor.

“And do you know the nature of Mr. Lochmueller’s independently contracted ecological work?”

The professor shifted in his chair. He was probably used to lecturing students his adversary’s age, not being hectored by them, and I don’t know how much or how little courtroom experience he had. Either way he was being sniped from an unsuspected angle, harried by a canny opponent, and he knew it.