Snapper (16 page)

“I believe he studies birds,” said the professor.

“He watches birds,” said the counsel for the defense. “Your Honors, this is a great country, where a man can make a living as a birdwatcher.”

His honors did not respond.

“I believe that traditionally Hoosiers are known for their industrious nature. Mr. Lochmueller swans around from tree to tree all day observing his feathered friends.”

“Your point, please,” said Judge Vanderburgh. She was apparently not in the mood for flattery.

“Of course, Your Honor. Mr. Lochmueller levels a serious charge about scientific credibility. I think some inquiry into his profession and his credentials is warranted. The only living Nathan Lochmueller I was able to find currently resident in Indiana in a search of public records holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy. According to the IRS, he claims every year that he doesn’t earn enough to pay income tax. My esteemed colleague seems unable to confirm this identification. At any rate, it is not clear that Mr. Lochmueller is in any position to assess the ‘scientific credibility’ of the proposal. I would speculate that he is not so much an ecologist as an activist.”

In retrospect I suppose that I could have stood and introduced myself—it would be an unusual, unruly sort of disruption but no reasonable judge would hold me in contempt of court. At least, I think not. At that time, however, I was paralyzed by this formal demolition of my character; it seemed to require my absence; to interrupt it might somehow be seen as impeding justice, and I might be forcibly ejected from the room. In a movie or a story such a dramatic gesture might conform to the premise of the work generally, but a lawsuit is not a work of art, and its aims are to obfuscate what it cannot denigrate until money is free to speak.

“I object to that characterization,” said the professor, showing mettle at last. “Mr. Lochmueller wrote ecologist, not activist, on a notarized affidavit. If my opponent wishes to charge him with perjury, that will require a separate petition.”

Judge Monroe spoke for the first time. “As counsel for the defense observed, this is a great country. I have never heard of anyone going into business watching birds, but I am willing to believe it is possible. If he is an independent contractor he must have clients. Do we know who these clients are?”

The professor foraged through his notes. “Several university biology departments, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Indiana Department of Natural Resources,” he said at last, triumphantly. Lola squeezed my hand.

“Sustained, then,” said Judge Marion. “We will consider him an ecologist.”

“Naturally, I didn’t mean to substitute the terms,” said the opposing counsel smoothly. “Only to sketch Mr. Lochmueller, the
ecologist
”—a word he graced with a special sneer—“in greater detail. He has no scientific credentials, yet he questions my client’s scientific credibility. My client’s proposals were drawn up by forestry professionals with advanced degrees in resource management, and years of experience.”

In other words, tree salesmen.

He did further demolition work on my cosignatories and companions—they were all, of course, credentialed, but he found minor questions of character in each of them and presented us, ultimately, as a rabble of activists of the kind who lobbied Congress to cripple American industry with carbon emissions regulations, and so forth. I will say this: he knew his audience. He managed to avoid going into the substance of the dispute altogether by concentrating on our collective disreputability.

Our professor tried, rather late in the game, to rally with figures and statistics, but the effort was doomed. It was our word against theirs, and our word was made to seem politically motivated and highly suspect.
Controversial
was given us as a sort of consolation prize;
highly
could go only to a well-endowed corporation with a priapic presence in the Indianapolis skyline.

Lola attempted to cheer me up later, back at her house. “Those foresters wouldn’t know a tanager if it pooped in their Rice Krispies,” she said.

“It’s not funny,” I protested. “I’m part of case law now or whatever. Ten, fifty, one hundred years from now people will read about me and say oh, Nathan Lochmueller, that charlatan with binoculars.”

“I don’t know anyone who reads case law,” she said.

“You know what I mean. The record is out there in print somewhere. Of this slimy shyster calling me a philosophy major swanning from tree to tree.”

“Actually, I think it’s rather romantic,” she said.

That remark clinched it more than any made in the courtroom. I felt like a concert pianist who has just been complimented on his facial expressions. I don’t know the exact date on which the topics of conservation and climate change became inextricably intertwined, but it complicated my job. Calling it “romantic” confused the two. Lola and I had discussed this a thousand times. It is difficult to interest the public in, say, the decline of bluebirds in Indiana when that public experiences a steady patter of apocalyptic headlines: cities to be submerged, oil to run out, famine, war expected. You could argue that indifference to bluebirds and their like is what brought us to our current stage of environmental degradation, but that is referring again to all those imminent catastrophes. To argue that the bluebird is important in its own right—as a thing of beauty, an indicator of robust biodiversity, an important agent in a delicate ecosystem—well, while you make that argument someone else is off photographing an oiled stork or a stranded polar bear. I hated public ecosentimentality. Suppose you worked on something truly vulnerable, fragile, and important (much more so than
Indiana birds) such as coral reefs. You would get really sick of researchers who secure better funding because they have cute organisms (maybe bluebirds) while yours are all scaly and slimy. I mapped Indiana by the millimeter to arrive at some kind of truth; Lola called it a pretty story.

“There should be whole armies of tree climbers out there,” I said.

“That’s why it’s romantic,” she said.

“The Soviets did it,” I said. “They put legions of men and women in the field gathering data before we ever heard of global warming.”

“Why are you bringing up the Soviet Union?”

“L. S. Stepanyan,” I said. “Personal hero of mine. Capped off the definitive
Conspectus of Ornithological Fauna of the USSR
with the sublime
Birds of Vietnam
.”

“Fine. What’s that got to do with your court case?”

“I don’t know. It’s not romantic. It’s sensible.”

“First, you’re overreacting. Second, don’t you think the Soviets were trying to create the illusion of full employment?”

“It’s not an illusion if everyone’s working,” I said, though she had a point.

“I didn’t know you were a Stalinist,” she said. “That’s decidedly unromantic.”

“That’s flippant,” I said. “What you saw today is a system engineered to eat itself.”

“Sure. Why are you surprised?” she said. “You think that everyone should share your views on everything, and you’re surprised and offended when they don’t. I never heard of L. S. Stepanyan, okay? How am I supposed to have an opinion? I take your word for it. Until I don’t. And then you get upset. Anyway, the Soviet Union is long gone. Get used to it.”

“I’d settle for any place that made a passing effort to keep itself going,” I said. “I’d settle for France.”

“No you wouldn’t,” she said. “They eat songbirds.”

Long after she had gone to bed I was still staring through her living room window at an endless stillborn suburbia. The moon was out and every identical silver street led to some privileged purlieu where the patio bricks and gravel driveways and refinanced cars and oversize barbecue grills all washed up; all the detritus, it seemed to me, of a million lives blighted by prosperity.

Darren was a dick before he got stabbed, but afterward he had an excuse. He was surly and superior about everything to everyone, and they made allowances, backed down, gave him beer. By
they
I do not mean me. That is why he shoved me down a flight of marble steps in the Old Courthouse in Hickory one month after he was attacked.

I have a book he gave me long before the stabbing. His inscription reads “To Nathan—a Great Brother.” We all called each other brother then, but already you could make out Darren’s trajectory from problem child to difficult teenager to adult asshole. Shane told me Darren got that book from him in the first place, as a gift.

And yet, Darren is about the only thing Shane and I never discuss. Though Shane doesn’t keep in touch with him, he still thinks that if you take an eight-inch blade in your back
three times you might deserve some slack. But after I reeled down those marble steps I woke up in the emergency room with blood trickling from my ear. Ten years on and I still can’t hear right. Healing wounds like Darren’s cracked ribs and punctured lung mean nothing to me. He might as well have had the flu.

Darren’s assailant was a black kid named Frank. I used to sit next to him in Concert Choir. Obviously this was years before he stabbed Darren. He was very handsome, very smart, and his parents had brought him up to be a gentleman. Even his smile was a courtesy. Of course I am describing him before he developed a taste for cocaine and stabbed Darren. He now lives in the Pendleton Correctional Facility with twenty-four years left to serve. He joined the Nation of Islam and told his parole board he has no regrets.

Frank and Darren lived together for almost a year after Darren graduated from university, and they were nominally searching for work. In truth, Darren was smoking dope and Frank was snorting coke and they didn’t do much else until they had an argument about the electricity bill. Darren huffed out and went to a coffee shop just off campus. It was new, with folding chairs and tables because the permanent furniture hadn’t arrived in time for the opening. Enormous plate windows let in copious sunshine, and the new owner’s extensive jazz collection was in constant rotation.

A half hour later Frank appeared in the doorway with a U.S. Marine survival knife in his right hand. One eyewitness described him surveying the shop calmly, as though he might be deciding between an espresso or a latte before entering. Two other witnesses, however, noticed him spit several
times through the door and onto the new beige carpet. Crack cocaine causes very heavy salivation, but none of the half dozen students and hippies assembled there would have known that. Another witness said that he seemed so calm the knife was not alarming. “He carried it like a tape measure or a clipboard,” the newspaper quoted. “Just a tool for doing his job.”

Darren was not facing the door. Frank took three long strides through the room and angled the blade forward into Darren’s right shoulder beneath the collarbone. Smoothly, methodically, he withdrew it and placed it neatly in Darren’s back just inside the left shoulder blade. He repeated this procedure once more in the same area but struck bone.

Later Darren described the sensation of being stabbed as similar to being punched, but not very hard. He had no idea what had happened until later, when Frank was already gone.

A customer at an adjacent table intervened. He was a grizzled hippie who went there every afternoon to condemn the newspaper page by page, loudly. Darren, who had been every day since it opened, had never spoken to him, but reported afterward that the management thought him a blight on their prospects. With one motion he rose from his chair, scooped it from behind him, and flung it over Darren’s head and into Frank’s face. For this valorous act he received two wounds himself as he scrambled for another chair and Frank pursued him. His left biceps and left thigh were both slashed before he could get a second unfolded chair safely interposed between himself and the blade.

All of this transpired in under a minute. No one had thought to move or scream; they watched in disbelief. The hippie circled to Darren’s side in order to shield him, too. Frank concluded that he had accomplished enough for one
afternoon. He strode through the door and turned for a final inspection. Dropping the knife on the pavement with a clatter, he walked calmly away.

Both victims looked worse than they felt, with blood blossoms spreading over their clothes. They were persuaded to lie down until an ambulance arrived.

Darren had a dime bag of marijuana in the pocket of his denim jacket, which the police graciously overlooked. Frank turned himself in the next morning.

“That sounds like something that would happen to
you
,” said Shane. “But Darren?” I have never known what he meant by that. Anyway, there was consultation among us “brothers” over who would take Darren in. He couldn’t return to the apartment he had shared with Frank, and he didn’t want to live with his parents. Shane was in Vincennes with a serious girlfriend; Matt was in Lafayette but just married and soon bound for Costa Rica to study lizards. Flynn was in Indianapolis but his apartment had only one bedroom. Peter was still in Bloomington, sharing a house with a pair of blond strippers named Kiki and Anna. Both of them rode Harley-Davidsons. This was the obvious choice for a quick and pleasant convalescence, but Peter said that he couldn’t stand the constant drama himself. Naturally he had been saying this for two years.