False Dawn

8

The ramshackle building sagged in the middle and slouched on weathered pilings in the soft earth alongside an Everglades canal. An aging frump without makeup or girdle, Mississippi Jack’s was jammed with workers from the limestone pits, an Anglo-Hispanic-black crew that may have lived in segregated neighborhoods but drank more or less together in a place where you could feel, and occasionally hear, the dynamite blasts from the nearby rock pit.

I had pulled my ancient but amiable convertible into the muddy parking lot and found a spot next to an oversize Dodge Ram pickup that was hauling an airboat. I wore old jeans, boots, and a shirt that celebrated the joys of eating oysters raw.

The “L” in the neon Schlitz sign was dark and had been for as long as anyone could remember. Faded photos of the winners of the latest turkey shoot hung haphazardly inside the door. The jukebox rumbled with “Honky Tonk Woman” followed by “If It Don’t Come Easy.” Fishing corks plugged bullet holes in one wall and the hide of a sixteen-foot alligator decorated another. There was one pool table, the green felt stained from decades of spilled beer. The waitresses were sturdy sedans no longer on warranty and wore jeans, sneakers, and T-shirts tied around ample waists. The bartender paid off winners of a stud poker video game with two six-packs or a sawbuck-take your choice-and if the boys from the state beverage commission didn’t like it, screw them.

The bongs and clangs of a pinball machine competed with the twang from the jukebox. The voices were husky southern drawls, but pockets of the room erupted in occasional bursts of rapid-fire Spanish and inner-city jive. A gray haze of cigarette smoke drifted toward a ceiling of unpainted two-by-fours and kept the termite population to manageable levels. On the men’s room wall, above a machine that dispensed condoms for a quarter, a poet had scrawled, “Encase your porker before you dork her.”

There were no ferns. Or guys with white-on-white shirts, power ties, and red suspenders. Or talk of Aspen, tax-free municipals, or selling short.

Mississippi Jack’s was not the Harvard Club.

The waitress wiped our table with a wet towel, then stood, head cocked, hip shot, and smiling. About forty, she had a round face and a headful of bleached yellow curls that made her look like a happy poodle. “You’all here for the catfish fry or the gator hunt?”

“The beer,” I said. “Pitcher. Whatever’s on tap.”

“How ‘bout some swamp cabbage to go with that? Got a vat simmering in the back.”

So that’s what I smelled. “Plain or fried?”

She raised an eyebrow. I didn’t mean to sound like Chef Paul, just wanted to know what I was getting into.

“Any way you want it. We cook it with salt pork and milk, a dash of pepper. Personally, I like it plain in a cup, but you want it fried up with fritters, you got it. You want it another way, go talk to the cook after he sobers up.”

I turned to my drinking buddy. “Francisco?”

He was shaking his head.

“Maybe we’ll just stick to the beer,” I told her.

I have nothing against eating the boot of the sabal palm tree. In a little bottle at the French grocery, soaking in vinegar, they call it heart of palm. It’s not as elegant hereabouts, but it’s the same raw ingredient.

She brought Budweiser. American beer is weak and watery, and like network television, is calculated to appeal to the most folks while offending the fewest. It’s the lowest common denominator of brew, and like so many of our products, competes not on its quality, but on its image as created by Manhattan video slicksters. Best I can tell, there’s no beer that will help me dunk a basketball or attract a bushel of beach bunnies, so I go for the taste when I have a choice. Not that I’m a beer snob, which is an oxymoron rivaling “honest lawyer.”

Still, the Dutch beer Grolsch is my all-around favorite for savoring full flavor. I like it at forty-two degrees, not out of the ice chest. Americans drink their beer too cold and too light. The Yankee brews are laced with rice malt or corn malt, bland substitutes for barley. There are exceptions. Brooklyn Lager with its burnt amber color and molasses aroma is strong enough to go head-to-head with the spiciest chili. The wheaty, oaky Anchor Steam from San Francisco can hold its own with barbecue. Boston’s Samuel Adams has a bittersweet hoppy taste that washes down peanuts and jalapenos. But that’s about it for the American beers. The only time I’ll go for a light beer is with some broiled red snapper or other delicate victuals. Then I’ll choose one of the German weiss beers made from wheat. With a steak, I’ll try a Dos Equis if there’s no Grolsch around. Tsing Tao, the sweet Chinese beer, is fine for Szechuan or Hunan food, and a Guinness stout with its nutty hop aroma and burnt-oak flavor goes well with dessert.

Today, though, the talk was more important than taste, and after turning down the swamp cabbage, I didn’t want the waitress to consider me a citified sissy:

“Hey, Jim Bob, feller out here wants to know if we serve beer from Holland.”

“No, but if’n he wants, I’ll stick a tulip up his ass.”

Crespo drained his first glass without taking a breath. If he was feeling any heat from the upcoming trial, he didn’t show it. “ Diez anos?”

“That’s the offer now. A plea to manslaughter. Ten years, you’d be out in three.”

He poured himself another beer from the chipped pitcher. Budweiser was fine with him. I fished some boiled peanuts out of a bowl. From Jaw-ja, the waitress told us. You were supposed to scatter the shells on the floor. I did what I was supposed to. “Of course, you’d have to cooperate.”

Crespo looked at me with wary eyes. His face had healed nicely with only traces of scars on his leathery skin. Small and ferret-faced, he still managed to look dangerous. You wouldn’t be surprised to see him pull a switchblade from an ankle sheath.

“You’d have to tell them who killed the Russian,” I continued.

He shook his head. “I could do the time. No problema. But I’d have to live that long.”

He just let it hang there.

“Want to talk about it?” I asked.

Over at the jukebox, Randy Travis was singing a song I didn’t know. At the next table, a guy in a University of Florida baseball cap was telling a pal how much money he would make snaring alligators during the thirty-day hunt. “I figure I get my limit easy. That’s fifteen gators at, say, average of ten feet.” He did some arithmetic with a pencil on a soggy napkin. “Close to seven thousand for the hides at forty-five dollars a foot. And that don’t include the meat.”

“But you’re not figurin’ expenses,” his friend argued. The guy wore Army fatigues and was no wider than your average Buick. He sounded like a cracker C.P.A. “Don’t be fergittin’ your costs. License, tags, gasoline. And your time. Figger it out, boy.”

I moved closer to my client. Dr. Weiner would have said I was closing the horizontal zone. I just wanted Crespo to trust his faithful mouthpiece, somebody who had known him a long time, but maybe didn’t know him at all. “Francisco, you want to tell me about it. Who’s threatening you?”

His eyes darted across the room and back to me. But the mouth stayed closed.

“Is it Yagamata? Because if it is, I’ve got a real problem here. I don’t care if he’s a big client of my firm. I can’t let him manipulate you.”

“I am grateful to Senor Yagamata for looking after me.”

“That’s my job!” I banged my beer glass on the table, slopping some of the anemic brew. The alligator hunter stopped computing and glared at me. “Look, I promised your mother I’d take care of you, and I promised myself, too. This is a murder charge, Francisco, not another A and B in a bar.”

That made him smile, just a little. “I’ve gotten away with worse.”

Of course. I just wasn’t used to him bringing it up. “That wasn’t murder, Francisco. Justifiable homicide all the way. Even I could have gotten you off.”

“No, you couldn’t. You would have been a witness.” He smiled again. Two in one day was a new world record. “Except you couldn’t identify the killer, so nobody was ever arrested.”

“I thought the physical description I gave was pretty creative. You remember what I told the homicide detective?”

“ Si. A tall, husky Anglo with red hair in a brush cut and a tattoo of the American flag on his forearm.”

“I’d nearly forgotten about the tattoo. A nice touch, wasn’t it? Specifics always add a touch of reality.”

We both sat there thinking about it, the link between us that spanned the years, the spilled blood that made us the unlikeliest of brothers. My debt to him could never be repaid, so he wanted to cancel it. I couldn’t let it go.

“The coaches always told us to stay out of bars,” I said.

Crespo shrugged, then looked away. He was finished talking about it. He could banish the thoughts. I couldn’t. I always asked what I could have done differently. I could have listened to the coaches, for one thing.

Now I sat looking at Francisco Crespo in another bar. This time, ten years later, it was his life on the line, or at least his freedom. “Your mother’s worried to death, and so am I.”

“I will survive. I always do.”

“We’re the ones who care about you. Not Yagamata. Do you understand that?”

“He is taking care of my fees, verdad?”

“Yes, but I don’t care who’s paying the freight. I don’t answer to Yagamata, or anyone else. My loyalty is to you. I don’t know what Yagamata’s agenda is. I only have one, and that’s to give you the best defense possible. I can’t do that if you’re compromising your own case on orders from Yagamata. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

He looked straight into his beer.

“Francisco, I need you to help yourself. Show as much care for yourself as you did for me on a hot Sunday night a long time ago.”

“Jake, mi amigo, it is not your concern. I will handle it.”

“Wrong. It’s my concern. Even if I didn’t feel the way I do about you and your mother, there’s something else involved. It’s called ethics.”

Crespo furrowed his brow, and the little scars grew pinker. He didn’t seem to understand. That’s all right. A lot of guys who’ve hung out their shingle wouldn’t either. That’s not to say I’ve always walked the straight and narrow. The ethical rules are a hundred fifty pages of mush. Mine are shorter and simpler. I won’t lie to a judge, steal from a client, or bribe a cop. And I won’t bed down a wife in a divorce. Until the case is over.

“C’mon, Frankie baby,” I implored him. “Tell me what happened in the warehouse. Why did you attack him? Who put you up to it? Who killed Smorodinsky?”

Silence.

“Who are you protecting?”

He helped himself to the beer but stayed quiet.

“Will you talk to me?”

“ No se. Maybe later.”

“We pick a jury tomorrow. If Socolow likes the panel, he’ll withdraw the offer.”

“What would make him like the jury?”

“Six people who’ve got cops for cousins or who’ve been victims of crimes, or don’t like Marielito s. A bunch of hard cases who feel superior to you, who think you wouldn’t be in court if you hadn’t done something shitty. Mean-spirited people who won’t hold the state to its burden of proof and won’t cut you an even break.”

Our waitress appeared with a second pitcher of beer. “You boys want to try the chicken wings?” I waved her off.

“But we might get a jury he doesn’t like, verdad?” Crespo asked.

“Sure, half a dozen open-minded people with a healthy mistrust of authority and a feel for the underdog. It can happen, but don’t count on it.”

“If it does happen, this Mr. Socolow might offer an even better deal.”

“Maybe, but whatever it is, your cooperation will be a condition of the plea. You’d have to tell him who else was involved. You understand?”

Before Crespo could answer, we were interrupted. “ Hola, lawyer! Ay, where’s your little sail?”

Them again. Hector and what’s-his-name. Yagamata’s goons. Wiry guys in muscle shirts to show off their stylish tattoos.

“And the blond,” Hector said. “?Donde esta la rubia? ”

I felt the little surge of adrenaline our knuckle-dragging ancestors must have known. The fight-or-flee response. But I’m a lawyer, so I had another alternative: talk. “Tell your boss if he wants to have lunch, he can come here for some swamp cabbage and chicken wings.”

“He don’t wanna see you, asshole. It’s your friend here. He’s worried about him.”

“Me, too. We’re getting ready for trial, and we appreciate your kind help, but-”

“It’s okay,” Crespo interrupted, getting to his feet. “I’ll go.”

“Sit still, Francisco,” I ordered. “We’re not finished here. And this time, let me handle the problem.”

“Jake, it is all right. If Senor Yagamata wishes to see me, I will go.”

“ Bueno,” Hector’s buddy said, a humorless smile curling his lips. “We don’t like hacerle dano, to hurt nobody.”

“Good thing,” I said, “because it would take another dozen just like you.”

Hector looked surprised, but then, the time of day would surprise this guy. “What you mean by that?”

I was still in my chair, and they had moved, one on each side of me. In the movies, Arnold Schwarzenegger would just reach out and grab each one by the neck, bang their heads together, and calmly finish his beer. Try it sometime, and you’ll get bopped upside the head by two guys who have leverage and mobility on their side. A smart guy would just call it off. Who was I to play knight errant when the damsel had a mustache and was willing to take a ride with the dragon? But I was steamed at Matsuo Yagamata, who had bought himself some trinkets and some people, while he was at it. He owned Francisco Crespo and two petty thugs and maybe me, too. So here I was, expiating a decade of guilt by spitting in the dragon’s eye, because mad as I was at Yagamata, I was enraged at me, and short of banging my own head against a wall, I didn’t know what else to do.

“What I mean, dirtbag, is that you guys are two-bit sacks of shit with brains smaller than a mouse’s asshole. You’re a couple of candy-assed errand boys who need both hands to find your own dicks.”

It takes years of forensic training to become so eloquent. At the next table, the gator hunters stopped talking and turned to listen to our sophisticated colloquy.

Hector cracked a malicious grin. He liked this. His buddy started bouncing on the balls of his feet, excited and expectant.

“And your friend here is so scared his asshole’s whistling Dixie,” I concluded.

“Jake,” Crespo said. “It is not necessary. Please. I will see Senor Yagamata and meet you in court in the morning. Tell Mr. Socolow we go to trial.”

“You’re a good man, Francisco,” I told him, “and even if you weren’t, you’re my brother because of what happened in a place like this. So don’t worry. I can handle Hector. He’s shaking like a dog shitting peach pits.”

There are times when a man’s got to act like a man, and other times like an adolescent.

“ Cagado cabron! ” Hector snarled. I didn’t know what it meant but figured it wasn’t Have a nice day. He picked up a handful of peanuts and dropped them into the beer where they sizzled happily. Then he picked up the pitcher and poured it over my head.

At the next table, I heard someone say, “Shee- it,” and I heard chairs scraping against the planks of the wooden floor, veteran spectators giving us room to arbitrate our grievances. Hector placed the pitcher on the table. Peanuts stuck in my hair. The beer stung my eyes, soaked the front of my shirt, and dripped, icy cold, into my crotch.

“Hector,” I said softly, “I hate Budweiser.”

And then I slipped a hand under the table, grabbed it where the base met the top, planted both feet, and pivoted, swinging the table hard into Hector’s crotch. I dropped the table but continued the movement, swiveling two hundred seventy degrees and getting to my feet, expecting a first punch from his buddy and taking it, a glancing right hand off the side of the skull. I squared up, and snapped a left jab that he ducked. I followed with another that missed, and then feinted yet another jab and came across the top with a right that he tried to avoid by turning his head. He had good quickness, but I still caught him solid on the ear. I felt the jolt all the way to my elbow, and his cerebellum must have been dialing 911, because he folded neatly in half and crumpled into a carpet of peanut shells, unconscious before he hit the floor.

I didn’t have time to give him the mandatory eight-count because Hector took that moment to smash a pool cue across the back of my head. The wood broke with a hellacious cr-ack, but it didn’t hurt my head. Not a bit. Then he ricocheted what was left of the cue stick off my shoulder, and again, same thing. No pain. Those chairs they smash over the cowboys’ heads in B westerns must be made of cue sticks.

I was starting to feel invincible, a celluloid cowboy, snapping long-distance jabs. Since I was taller and stronger, I wanted to maintain what the experts call an outfighting range, keeping Hector from getting inside with quick punches or kicks. But Hector knew what he was doing. He had some hand speed and understood how to retreat, then come back with a flurry. When he counterattacked, I covered up with the double forearm block. It isn’t pretty, something like Floyd Patterson’s peek-a-boo style. It leaves you with bruises on both arms but protects your dimpled chin and semihandsome face.

I had stalked Hector halfway across the bar, around the pool table, and up against a cooler, but he spun away. He kept leaping in and leaping out, a flurry of punches, and then a retreat. He knew something about martial arts, his style similar to the White Crane method of kung fu. A crane can defeat a gorilla, simply by spinning out of its grasp and counterattacking with furious beats of its wings, beak, and claws. But it takes patience, intelligence, and timing. The bird must continuously circle the beast, changing position and attack angles, retreating time and again until it can attack and peck away at the gorilla’s eyes or otherwise discourage it from continuing the fight.

Hector had landed enough rat-a-tat-tats to raise some welts on my forehead, and the back of my skull, where the cue stick had landed without immediate effect, was starting to ache. Pain is like that, sometimes creeping up on you. I’m not exactly immune to pain, but I’ve grown accustomed to its pace. I played ball when a lot of guys got intimate at halftime with the Caine Brothers-Novocain and Xylocaine. It was expected. You played hurt or you didn’t play at all. I resisted the needle until a game against the Bills when I took an elbow through the face mask on a kickoff, and my nose went east and west where it used to be north and south. If we hadn’t been so thin on the special teams, they would have sent me to the locker room, but you don’t tackle with your nose, so you can play-compound fracture notwithstanding-if you control the pain. With the offensive line huddled around me on the bench to block the view of the cameras, the team doc put a shot of Xylocaine right between my eyes, and damned if I didn’t recover a fumble on a kickoff in the fourth quarter. After that, it was Darvocet for a separated shoulder, cortisone for turf toe, and an occasional jolt of my buddies, the Caine Brothers, for assorted twists and sprains.

Now I moved in again, and Hector caught me in the chest with the front snap kick they call Mae keage in karate. Then he spun to his right and tried to connect with the Yoko keage, the side snap kick. His timing was off, and he missed, leaving himself off balance, still spinning toward my left, his body open.

From somewhere in my peripheral vision, I was aware of the faces at the bar, intently watching us. They seemed to be smiling. The jukebox had switched gears, and Paula Abdul was in a rush for a guy who kissed her up and down.

I pivoted from the hips and stepped forward with the left foot. I hit him square in the solar plexus with a left hook that had everything I’ve got behind it. I heard the air wheeze out of him, and as he gasped for breath, I unleashed a right uppercut that started near my shoelaces and ended on the point of his unshaven chin. The punch lifted him off the floor and stretched him out on his back, feet twitching.

Francisco Crespo had gotten up and now stood at the bar, watching without expression. He hadn’t helped them and he hadn’t helped me. He was a good soldier who didn’t want to cross the general. I wondered what he would have done if I’d been in real trouble. But then, I already knew that.

I was aware of some murmuring at the tables, and in a moment, everyone was drinking and talking as if nothing had happened.

I was breathing hard when I paid the tab. I threw in twenty bucks for a broken cue stick and a fifty to cover renting the place as a boxing ring. Another twenty for the waitress, who asked us to come back real soon and bring our friends.

In the parking lot along the canal, an ugly Bufo frog the size of a double cheeseburger burped hello. Or was it good-bye? Some extremely unbalanced druggies are known to lick the Bufo, which secretes a milky hallucinogenic goo. I could never help wondering what bozo discovered this pharmaceutical phenomenon by first putting tongue to toad.

The knuckles of my hands were split and beginning to swell. I sank stiffly into my old convertible and looked at my maniacally macho self in the rearview mirror. Angry knots were already popping out of my forehead. A judge once told me that, based on my trial strategy, I must have played football too long without a helmet. Now I looked the part. Maybe that was good for my buddy Crespo. The trial was two days away, and when the jurors filed into the box, they wouldn’t be able to figure out which guy was the felon.