Some Great Thing (4 page)

Mahatma couldn’t come up with a lead paragraph. He wrote one sentence, deleted it from his computer screen and tried another. Half an hour later, Chuck Maxwell came up
to him and said, “The trick is to not think about details. Just write the sucker. Bing bang, put it out.” Mahatma sighed. Chuck persisted. “Be like me, Hat. Let the story write itself. Stop looking at your notes!”

Mahatma ignored him.

“I’ve been doing this for years. Don’t even look at your notes. Put ’em away! You’ve got a deadline to meet.”

Mahatma thought Maxwell was crazy. Writing a story without notes!

“Just give it a try,” Chuck said. “Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Good,” Chuck said. “Look at me. Now tell me just one thing. What happened today?”

“I was covering a speech by the mayor at a reception for Franco-Manitobans. The mayor talked about the historic place of French people here. He mentioned constitutional talks between the government and francophone leaders.”

“Forget that stuff,” Chuck said. “Tell me something unusual. Something weird!”

“In the middle of the reception a guy came out of the blue with a vacuum, plugged it in and began sucking letters out of a mailbox.”

“All right! Then what?”

“The cops dragged him off.”

“You get his name?”

“Jake Corbett.”

“You get the charge?”

“Theft from the mail.”

“So whaddya got so far?”

Mahatma showed Chuck a lead paragraph about the mayor urging the province to recognize the constitutional rights of Franco-Manitobans.

“Never mind the French stuff! Put the vacuum in the lead.”

Mahatma wrote: “A civic reception ground to a halt yesterday when a man walked into Winnipeg City Hall, plugged in a vacuum and began sucking letters out of a nearby mailbox.”

“Better,” Chuck said. “Second paragraph you say the cops arrested the guy with a pile of mail in his hand. Third graph you name the guy, say he’s on welfare and say what they charged him with. Then you get into the mayor’s reception, toss in a graph or two about that French stuff, and bingo, your story’s done!” Mahatma produced a second and a third paragraph. Chuck stood behind him, watching the computer screen, keeping Mahatma on track. When he finished the story, Mahatma stood up. His legs were stiff, his neck ached and his eyes stung from staring for so long at electronic fuzz.

“Thanks, Chuck.”

“You just needed a jump-start. You should have seen me when I started. You’ve got it all over me, Hat. I couldn’t even spell when I started! I dropped out of school in grade ten.”

Mahatma was too tired to listen. He’d been listening and thinking all day. He drifted out of the newsroom, ate two hamburgers in a greasy spoon, walked home and fell asleep on the couch.

Mahatma left home early the next morning to buy
The Herald
in a drugstore. Standing at the corner of Lipton and Portage, he let two buses come and go as he pored over his first page-one story. The headline ran across two columns below the fold:
Cops Stop Mailbox Theft
. The minute Mahatma arrived at work, Betts sent him to the cop shop to cover Corbett’s hearing. “The cop shop?” Mahatma asked.

“The Institute of Public Protection. Opposite City Hall. Hurry.”

The halls outside the courtrooms were packed with bikers, hoods, women with black eyes and relatives of the accused. There were also lawyers and Crown attorneys. Mahatma saw a black judge walk by in his robes. Everyone looked at him. Mahatma heard one man advise another, “Stay away from that judge. If you’re on his docket, tell your lawyer to get you another date. The man’s crazy.”

A clutch of men and women crowded around four sheets of paper taped to a wall. There was one sheet for each courtroom. Each sheet had a list of names and offences. Mahatma found what he needed on the sheet for Court B: Jake Corbett—Theft From Mail.

The dimly lit courtroom had no windows. In the back, divided by an aisle, were two sections of public seats, each with twenty-five chairs. Every chair was taken. Latecomers leaned against beige stucco walls. The Crown attorney and defence lawyers stood near the front, working at podiums. At the very front, the judge’s chair rose above the courtroom, and higher still rested a portrait of Queen Elizabeth. To one side was the prisoner’s dock. Behind the Crown attorney was
a long desk marked Media Only. Reporters occupied four of the five chairs. Mahatma took the last place on the right. The man to his left was in his early twenties, but he looked to Mahatma like a schoolyard brat. He wore jeans and a purple shoestring tie. His ears seemed as big as satellite dishes under punkish needle-points of blond and yellow hair.

“You media?” the brat asked.

“Yeah,” Mahatma said.

“Journalism student, I bet.”

Mahatma smiled vaguely. The young man unfolded
The Herald
to scan the story on Jake Corbett and the vacuum. “You know this Mahatma guy?” he asked.

“How come?” Mahatma said.

“Well, if I didn’t have to be following his story, I could be doing something interesting. And who has a name like that? Sounds like a goddamn saint.”

A voice called out, “Order please, all rise.” Everybody stood. The judge entered the courtroom.

The brat shoved the newspaper back under the table. “Old man Hill doesn’t like me reading in his courtroom,” he whispered.

Everybody followed suit when the judge sat down. He was the dark-skinned judge Mahatma had seen in the hall. He wore a black robe with red stripes running over the shoulders and down the chest in two lines. He was a short man with a slight build, but he had a big head with salt-and-pepper curls combed back.

“Let’s get this going, Mr. Peters,” Judge Hill said to the Crown attorney. “We’ve got a full house today.” The first prisoner came to stand in the dock. His lawyer remanded the case to the next day. The prisoner was sent out.

“Call number 37, Jake Corbett,” cried the court clerk.

A door to the adjacent prisoners’ holding cell swung open; a guard shouted into it, “Corbett! Jake Corbett!”

In rumpled clothing and unbrushed red hair, Jake Corbett limped into the prisoner’s dock and leaned on the wooden counter before him. The charge was read. Theft From Mail, contrary to Section 314(1)(a)(i) of the Criminal Code of Canada…Corbett pleaded guilty. Judge Melvyn Hill asked for details. The Crown attorney checked a file on his lectern. “It appears, Your Honour, that Mr. Corbett placed the activated nozzle of a Hoover vacuum cleaner into a Canada Post letter box and removed a quantity of mail by means of air suction.”

“That is an indictable offence, Mr. Corbett,” Judge Hill said. “It can lead to incarceration. What do you have to say for yourself?” Corbett embarked on an explanation about the Charter of Rights and his overpayment deductions. The judge cut in, “Get to the point. Why were you stealing letters?”

“I wasn’t stealing, Your Honour!”

“The accused was holding six letters in his left hand when arrested, Your Honour,” the Crown said.

Corbett protested, “But I was gonna put them back.”

“Then why were you holding them?” asked the judge.

“I was just trying to get my letter back, and I’d a been cutting down my chances if I’d put back the letters I kept sucking up, Your Honour!”

“You were fishing for a letter you had just posted?” the judge said. “Can you prove it?”

“No, Your Honour, I never got it. I got arrested.”

The judge cupped his chin in a palm. “I’d send you away
for thirty days, were it not for the fact that I, too, have been tempted in the past to retrieve correspondence in the exact same fashion.”

Mahatma and the reporter to his left both got that down word for word. The judge said, “Although I hasten to add, for the benefit of all those in the courtroom, I repeat, all those present, that I have never acted on such an impulse. So while I congratulate you for your ingenuity, I must warn you not to do it again. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Your Honour.”

“I’m giving you an absolute discharge, Mr. Corbett, but I’m warning you that if I see you again within twelve months, you can expect harsh treatment. This court has no time for foolishness.”

“Call number 91,” cried the court clerk.

Whispering to the reporter next to him, Mahatma asked, “Don’t the prisoners come up in the order listed on the page?”

“No, they come up random. Why? You lookin’ for somebody?” Mahatma shrugged. “I’m waiting for the Dwight Matthewson case,” the brat said.

“What’d he do?” Mahatma asked.

“Caused a public disturbance. But he’s black.”

“So what?”

“Everybody knows Judge Hill gives black guys a hard time. Say, who are you, anyway?”

The judge rapped his gavel on wood. The next prisoner stood taller than both guards. “That’s him!” the brat whispered.

“State your name,” the prisoner was told.

“Dwight Matthewson.”

“Are you represented by counsel?” the judge asked.

“I don’t want a lawyer. I want to get this over with.”

“You’re making a mistake,” the judge warned him.

“I want this done with,” Matthewson repeated.

“Read the charges,” the judge said.

A clerk read out: “Dwight Matthewson, you have been charged in the City of Winnipeg, on or about the 18th day of July 1983, with causing a public disturbance, to wit, screaming and shouting in the mayor’s office. How do you plead, guilty or not guilty?”

“I was there,” Matthewson said.

“Nobody asked if you were there,” the judge said. “What we need, Mr. Matthewson, is your plea.”

“I did what I feel is right. My plea is guilty. Sure I—”

The judge cut him off. “Guilty!” He turned to the Crown attorney “What happened, Mr. Peters?” The Crown attorney said Dwight Matthewson had stormed into the mayor’s office, brandishing a placard and hollering that racial minorities were barred from jobs at City Hall. Judge Hill cleared his throat. The brat elbowed Mahatma. “You listen to me, Mr. Matthewson. Wouldn’t you agree that yours was an act of colossal stupidity? Waving a placard around and shouting like a child. There are more civilized ways to express one’s beliefs, wouldn’t you say? Hmmm? Speak up!”

“I need no lesson in civility from you.”

“Don’t be smart with me, Mr. Matthewson. I won’t put up with it. You are a disgrace to your race. If everybody started busting into offices, waving signs and impeding business, we’d have anarchy! We’d have a nation of boors. Have you considered that? No! Well, you will now! Three weeks in jail ought to smarten you up, Mr. Matthewson.”

Matthewson’s jaw sagged. “Three weeks? I have a family, I—”

“Think about that next time, Mr. Matthewson.”

The guards led Matthewson out. “Told you he was a bastard,” the brat said. Mahatma finished writing and got up. “Who do you work for, anyway?”

“
The Herald
.”

“
The Herald
? You’re not Mahatma Grafton?”

Mahatma raised his eyebrows in acknowledgement.

“No offence, man. You did a good story on that guy with the vacuum. That’s why I was pissed off. I don’t have anything against your name. It’s just a little weird, that’s all. You’re not riled, I hope?”

“No.”

“Good.” The young man with ears like satellite dishes offered his hand. “Edward Slade.
Winnipeg Star
. I do cops and robbers.”

“Whaddya got for page one?” Betts asked.

“Corbett got an absolute discharge,” Mahatma said.

“No more than four inches. Anything else happen?”

“This judge called a black prisoner a disgrace to his race and jailed him for three weeks just for causing a public disturbance.”

“I bet the judge was Melvyn Hill.”

“You know him?”

“We call him Thrill Hill. We get a story every time he opens his mouth. Give it eight inches.”

An idea came to Mahatma as he returned to his desk. He raced back to the Institute of Public Protection.

Judge Melvyn Hill sat at an oak desk in a small office. Several shelves of legal texts loomed behind him, as well as a portrait of the Queen and another of Prime Minister Trudeau. He was out of his robes this time, wearing a tweed suit. He had large temples and hollow cheeks. He removed a pair of reading glasses, held them in his left hand and said, “I don’t speak to the press.” Mahatma, standing at the door, wondered if that were a dismissal. “I have absolutely nothing to do with reporters,” the judge said, examining papers on his desk. “They never get anything right. They shouldn’t be allowed to work until they complete graduate studies at a reputable university. That would straighten them out. The number of times I’ve been misquoted would make your head spin.”

The judge ranted on about the media. Then, suddenly, he stopped, lifted his head to aim hazel-green eyes at Mahatma and raised his chin a notch. “What did you say your name was?”

“Mahatma Grafton.”

“Any relation to Ben Grafton?”

“My father.”

“Well come in, lad. You should have told me so. Your dad’s an old friend of mine. We go a long way back.”

“I’ll tell him I was talking to you.”

“Yes, do that. Do that. Tell him Judge Hill sends his regards. Now, have a seat, young Grafton. What may I do for you?”

Mahatma sat down, fingering his notepad. He wondered if he should open it. He had a feeling the judge would talk. “It’s about the Matthewson case.”

“I don’t discuss particular cases. But I will say this: as a rule
of thumb, I lean harder on Negro offenders than non-Negroes. I hold an extremely responsible position. People follow every word I say. I will have no one, and I say
no
one, accuse me of favouring people of my race. And, by the way, I don’t approve of the word ‘black.’ ‘Negro’ sounds much more civilized.”

Mahatma wrote as fast as he could, wincing with expectation. The judge would surely berate him, throw him out, insist it was off the record. But the judge kept talking. He said Negroes had to earn respect in the world. It was high time they did something for themselves. He had been born of illiterate parents and look what he had become—a respected citizen, a judge, a linchpin of democracy. No sir, he would not tolerate foolish acts by Negroes, for whom criminality was doubly shameful. Mahatma wrote so fast that the bone in the knuckle of his middle finger ached. This was a national news story! It would embarrass the hell out of the judge. But he deserved it. Listen to the pompous fool!