Chapter 22
The Trial
“It all seems crazy to me,” rambled on this reincarnated Billy the Kid. “But it fits well here in Boston, with the Common having been founded as a sort of skeet-range for practicing killing native Americans, and moving on to Mary Dyer and the big dig. And it fits well in the Roman church, with the rich pedophile clergy and people kissing the popes ring as though it were a golden calf, with poor people’s ambivalence wishing their children to be both good and rich, and so to join the clergy to steal in the name of God. I have a tough time just naming things.
“Maybe you could call Kerry Wordy’s management attitude the catholic work ethic as opposed to the protestant work ethic, since Catholic clergy say the rest of humanity is too illiterate or stupid to understand God, which greatly pissed me off when I was young, an Irish child. But, whatever you call it, it’s bigotry as crazy as the Israelites saying the author of the Ten Commandments told them to kill all the Canaanites and steal their land. Gee whillakers, Mr. Tolstoi!
“You sound like a friend of mine, young fella,” said Lev, hardly grinning.
“I’m not the only person who reads history and thinks objectively,” said the finance-administrator. “But there aren’t many others on Earth.”
“But seriously,” said Lev, “Do you think Ari’s as he is because he’s Jew?”
“I’m not anti-Semitic,” said the finance-administrator, “although I am anti that term, because more Muslims than Jews are Semitic. If I were anti-Jewish, I would point to Ari and say that he epitomizes the stereotype that anti-Israelites present to excuse themselves, calling Jews pecuniary, greedy and cheap. But I’m not anti anything, except bigotry and hypocrisy and prejudice.
“So I have to say that Ari’s little like any other Jew I’ve met, and I’d be ashamed to own him, if I were Jewish. In the same way, my new German ancestry makes me ashamed of owning Hitler, as I’m ashamed of those bigots calling themselves Christian in Ireland, being Irish from before. I’m ashamed anyway, because being human makes me part of it all. But what can I do?
“I think of Ira Hayes, the native American United States Marine who helped plant Old Glory on Iwo Jima and drowned drunk in a ditch at home. Other citizens of this melting pot of huddled masses called him just a whiskey-drinking Indian. I call him another victim of the bigotry of colonialism, of greed like Ari Hamm’s. It seems to me that ‘just’ is the key word.
“Where is the justice? I remember that organizing the United States civil rights movement began with a promise that justice would roll down like water, and I think of Ira Hayes drowning in a few inches of dirty water in a ditch. Then I have to wonder how he and a huge proportion of other native Americans became whisky-drinkers. Ghandi didn’t drink whiskey.
“Ghandi was an Indian who gave his life for his people. Ira Hayes was a native American who risked his life for his people and for the people who beat him into being a hopeless drunk, and he gave his life at last for nothing. I think of Woody Guthrie and his song of depression soup, saying that politicians may have seen through it, had it been just a little bit thinner.
“I think of Guthry’s protégé Pete Seeger, singing in the sixties and seventies along with the Civil Rights movement and the mess in Vietnam despite it, and I know people know those songs. Seeger sang of Ira Hayes, and he asked a question in another song that makes me weep every time I hear it. He asks who killed Norma Jean, and all of us did. And no one owns up.”
“That’s partly why I renounced my books,” said Lev. “The prejudicial references to people by their national origin, especially in War and Peace. And there’s only one Negro character in that book, and none of the other characters are sure he’s for real. Anyway, what you can do is what you’re doing, not being a French corporal. If only all would stand and tell the truth.”
“Exactly,” agreed the finance-administrator. “That was my favorite point in your book, although sometimes I’m close to accepting your general premise that nobody knows what he’s talking about, not even you. I have a hunch that beauty and truth are not hiding and lying, and I strongly suspect that bowing out of being a French corporal isn’t cowardice. I mean, it seems to me that bowing out of being a French corporal is nipping it in the bud, if one buds out soon enough, before ugly sets in.
“I mean that stuff I did in Lincoln County could have been unnecessary, if the incumbents had used the resources of their human integrity and never sold their souls for the promises of money the insurgents promised. So, to me, the craziest character at L’Amore de Santa Clara seems to be the human resources specialist.
“She says Woody Allen is a genius. Woody Allen made a fortune promoting self-pity, and now people like that human resources specialist feel sorry for him for screwing his adopted daughter. It’s like French movies, after centuries of ignoring Shakespeare in favor of the Aristotelian unities, intellectualizing the Hegelian notion of dialectical idealism into agreement with Sergei Eisenstein’s dialectical imagery, his montage theory of cinematography. I suspect that Eisenstein was right in his Zen notion that enlightenment can come from having your prejudices broken up by having your rationality forced outside the box, but the French intellectualize his theories back into the box. And the box, the intellectual subject of most French films now, is feeling sorry for oneself for being unable to love. Nothing genius in that, nothing creative, new.
“It’s like that Clingon character that’s supposed to be president now. What can people desire from that, other than to be able to say that they can behave as he does, because he does and he’s the president? And, if that’s why they voted for him, what do they desire for their children? Abortion?
“A person could argue that that’s a good reason for abortion. If kids are going to grow up with Clingon as a role model and their parents reinforcing that by telling them that they’d like them to be president of the united states, couldn’t we argue that we may as well put all humanity out of its misery? What kind of parents are people who voted for Clingon? And that economy business!
“Anyone who has given any honest attention to history since World War II, which certainly should be the baby-boomers who have lived it and voted for Clingon, must know that the economic boom during Clingon’s administration has come from the world stability from ending the Cold War.
“And anyone who knows basic economics knows that continuing it will require honest hard work, not the me-generation motivation Clingon’s example has inspired. If the work-ethic keeps its current direction, no one will bother to produce anything, except new excuses for litigation.
“Maybe Kate Plate will sue L’Amore de Santa Clara for letting her steal too many of the bagels Starbucks donates, or maybe sue Starbucks for donating.”
“Oh!” said Lev. “She must be the one with the muffins piled on the paper piled on her desk. She’s your human resources specialist?”
“That’s what the other two K’s call her,” answered the finance-administrator.
“How did she get that job?” asked Lev.
“I don’t know,” said the finance-administrator. “Someone who quit, complaining about corruption, told me she got it because her husband’s family has a lot of money. She told me she left her last job because new management asked her to spend more time at her desk than she did at the water-cooler. Those weren’t her exact words, but that’s what they added up to. Must have been some job-interview, selecting her for L’Amore de Santa Clara. She was there when we hired the quarter-stealing social-worker.”
“What was that last job of hers?” asked Lev.
“Human resources there too, she said,” said the finance-administrator. “For the Boston Tab. In most cities, most people consider ‘tabloid journalism’ an oxymoron. But in Fits city, with the big dig and the pedophile priests and a homeless-shelter named for l’amore de Santa Clara practicing racial discrimination, the truth is weirder than the fiction in the tabloids. So the Boston Tab is a respected newspaper.
“The part I don’t understand,” said Billy, “is whether those people are heartless or only thoughtless. That’s the question that troubles me.”
“Only thoughtless, I hope,” said Lev. “They don’t seem to me even to think of their reputations. But I’m not sure.”
“And Hitler?” the finance-administrator wished to know as well.”
“The same, I think,” said Lev, “ultimately, through complexity.”
“Okay, Lev,” said Billy. “Here’s what I want to know, about conserving and liberating. Do humans show their hearts when they weep for Bambi in movie theatres, or when they behave at their dinner tables as though that weeping of theirs is for the possibility that burning the flora may have overcooked the faun?”
“Whew,” said Lev. “I think that’s the fundamental question, and I don’t know the answer. By the way, how did you get your job, that position with such lovely possibilities, with those people of such untoward complexities?”
“That’s a long story,” answered the finance-administrator. “I just sort of fell into it after life of tumbling here and there, and then I fell in love with the place.”
“Tumbling how and where?” asked Lev.
“Okay,” said the finance-administrator. “I’ll try to make a long story short.
“You must know about the Lincoln County wars, and I guess you can’t but know what purgatory is, God throwing us back to try again to get it right. I was born again this century into a family that became so poor by the time I reached high school that I didn’t have a week’s change of socks. The other kids treated me like dirt, and I started feeling that dirt was my life, now or before, new or old. But, this time around, I tried to be more private, to focus more on my own self. I tried to dig my own way out of the dirt. Yes, I know what you’re thinking. I’m a slow learner too.
“At first, I tried to get myself killed again, hoping to get another ticket, one out of here. I jumped from roofs and climbed anything high, swinging from boughs as high and willowy as my embodied weight let me climb, but none of the boughs broke.
“When I was sixteen, I began traveling with the carnival, to get more into life where death is more possible. When I was seventeen, I requested and won a senatorial nomination to attend the United States Military Academy at West Point.
“Of course, with my knowledge of past life, I passed the tests. But my knowledge of my past life also told me I wouldn’t handle the discipline. So, I turned the nomination down, and I enlisted in the Army and volunteered for Vietnam, in 1966.
“That was when I was eighteen, and I volunteered for the most dangerous duty, but the Army said my abilities were more needed in the rear echelon. So I didn’t die as a snot-nosed lieutenant or as a combat engineer seeking explosives in dark tunnels.
“I turned down an assignment to Paris to go to Afghanistan, but I managed there to suffer but two attempts on my life and a fall from a motor-cycle in which I broke a crash-helmet, which I wore only because someone handed it to me that day.
“So, after ten years of such trying, I got stuck with an assignment in Indiana, about two-hundred miles from my this-life hometown. So I left the Army and went to college, but still had that problem of feeling I was dirt, and was too shy for friends.
“Until then, guns-blazing was my only bravado. So, I evaded extracurricular activities, and focused mostly on learning what was in the books my professors assigned, as far as I had to for the grades the professors offered for agreeing with them.
“I had a wife by then, but I’d married her more because she seemed to me to want me than because I thought I wanted her. She was a nice girl, but I still had a sense of adventure or desire to see and do more, and marriage didn’t settle that by any means.
“So, when older than I’d died the other time, I took maybe a little too much to heart some psycho-babble from my psychology courses. With a notion of ‘entitlement’ to what I felt I was missing, I committed what I think is the worst crime against a person.
“My sentence was ten to twenty years in prison, but I got out after a little more than five. Part of that was for good behavior, and part of it was because of overcrowding in the prison. The best that I can say of that is that I tried to use the time well.”
“I could have been killed there easily, a peckerwood on turf of many angry African Americans. But, by then, I knew I wasn’t barking right.”
“What did all that do to your marriage?” asked Lev.
“I may have gotten off, if I weren’t married,” answered the finance-administrator. “I defended myself in court, partly because my court-appointed attorney plainly wasn’t working to do it, but mostly because I was ashamed of having my family and few friends see me there, and the attorney said he’d call character witnesses, including my wife. He didn’t bother to contact the people I listed as character witnesses, although he said he’d tried and couldn’t reach them, although many of them had voicemail. He didn’t try, and I was glad of that, but I never knew what he’d do or wouldn’t.
“Anyway, the prison-time did in our marriage. In my fourth year there, my wife became pregnant by a friend of mine. But weirder than that is that she repented and joined the Mormon Church and divorced me because I wouldn’t join it with her. I read the Book of Mormon and had to wonder how a translation inspired by God of a book dug up in nineteenth-century New England could be word-for-word the same as translation of Isaiah by scholars in seventeenth-century old England.
“My wife replied that scholarship didn’t matter, and she said that she’d have to divorce me because otherwise she couldn’t get something she said the Mormons called the patriarchal blessing. I didn’t argue that the Mormon Church forbids divorce, because her church or she apparently had put rationality out of her questions, and I wasn’t with her to give her the hugs she needed, to give her confidence in her sense.
“’Your letters are too long for me to read,’ she wrote to me, leaving me wondering what she or anyone might say or do if I told them I was Billy the Kid, maybe what people said and did to Joan of Arc, but in some more modern way. Maybe they’d have subjected me to mental-health profession, instead of to religious disease. I bet you don’t know Garrett killed me on Bastille Day. I don’t expect that much attention.
“I spent most of my prison-time attending. I made a list of about three-hundred of the books my public education had told me humanity most respected, and I read them in chronological order in hope of according my attitude with the social development of Earth. Since the prison library was stocked mostly by prisoners’ requests, most of the books on my list weren’t there. But my wife sent them to me, until she got pregnant and joined the Mormon Church. I guess she then had too much else to do.
“Oh, but I knew her loneliness and poverty, and I know how the Mormon hierarchy takes advantage of other despair and ignorance and such to get their tithes. She sent a couple of the kids Mormons call missionaries to visit me in prison, with their short-cut hair and their short-sleeved shirts and their clip-on neckties, and I tried to talk with them about the Bible. I tried to talk of better ways it tells.
“Yes,” said one. “The Bible is very deep.”
“Sure are a lot of black people here,” said the other.
“They’re young,” said my wife, next time she visited.
“What about your own kids?” asked Lev.
“Two sons,” I answered. “They were in early elementary school when I went to prison, and I was too busy struggling not to starve to death after I left prison. So their mother, and the Mormon she married rather than keeping me or marrying her third son’s father, raised them to be Mormons. My oldest son committed suicide, thinking he’d otherwise go to prison for pedophilia, and my youngest son works for the United States Social Security Administration in a tiny town in Nebraska and thinks rave parties are sites of high philosophy and the epitome of camaraderie. They’ve both gassed themselves, or been gassed by others’ gassing, in their separate ways.”
“I guess I see how you feel the way you do about parenting,” said Lev. “How about the rest of your family this time around? Brothers and sisters?”
“The rest of my family resents my education. None of my siblings have graduated from college, and I’m an MBA. They also think the reason I asked them not to visit me in prison is that I resented them. I told them the reason was the same as my defending myself in court, that I was ashamed for them to see me there, but they don’t accept that. Anyway, I can’t talk to them, because they don’t care to hear about the world outside themselves. All I have to do to run them out of a room is to mention l’amore de Santa Clara. I once wore a L’Amore de Santa Clara T-shirt to a family reunion. No one mentioned it at all to me. They conspicuously ignored.”
“Basically, their only interest in me is in their forgiving me. They liked me much more when I was in prison than they do now that I’m working for a homeless-shelter. Maybe they’ll like me better after L’Amore de Santa Clara fires me, but the last thing they’ll do is understand. But they won’t know about it, because I can’t communicate with them. Well, maybe I can, but I haven’t found out how to yet.
“Still, I have a crazy dream of family life. Think of taking one of those rightly ramshackle antebellum plantation houses in the Mississippi delta and fixing it up into a foster home for the worst young results of the New Orleans public housing projects. I’d like to do that with a wife while raising a daughter of ours so lovely. Talk about a pipedream, in this life of mine! How can that come true?”
“So you’re alone in this ghastly life of yours?” asked Lev.
“My youngest son and oldest living sister say I’ll die alone, because I don’t consort with them. That’s the son who thinks rave parties are high philosophy, and that sister calls herself a Christian and says Joshua was right in trying to kill all the Canaanites, and she hasn’t said anything to me since I sent her an e-mail describing how the Alabama government set the dogs and fire-hoses on the praying African Americans in Birmingham. She lives near the Alabama line in Tennessee.
“But I don’t feel alone, except when I’m with people who pretend. So I feel most alone when I’m with my family, and I feel most at home with homeless people.”
“Well,” said Lev. “You seem at least good company to me, but you called that sister your oldest living sister. Does that mean you have dead sisters older?”
“One,” answered the finance-administrator. “An uncle molested her when she was nine, but the nearest she ever came to giving up on life was becoming a Star Trek fan, a trekkie. She graduated from high school when she was 56 years old, the age in this life that I was last year. That Christmas Eve, the last of the last past millennium, she died of a heart attack. I wonder where God has her now. The doctors said it was her first. First physical, maybe. Heart, attack. Humanity.”
“Nothing wrong with trekkies,” said Lev. “They tend to remember much and judge little. I attended a convention of them in New Orleans, and I have friends more spacey than they are. I bet she never thought she had to forgive anyone anything. I bet she never tried to claim that right. I bet she never called herself so good.”
“Not a snowball’s chance in hell of that,” said the finance-administrator. “You want to know what drives me nuts about almost everyone L’Amore de Santa Clara pays to be experts there, the counselors and social workers and psychologists?”
“A guess of mine,” offered Lev, “is that they say you’re a numbers person.”
“And, worse than that, a computer person,” replied the finance-administrator.
“Is that because you’re good with their computers?”
“They compute. I compute. Of course. How not?”
“You’re not afraid computers will steal your soul?”
“They’d have to have a soul of theirs for that,” answered the Finance-administrator. “They’re tools to leave Earth time for better things, and for quicker communication, for truth, beauty. Or so it seems to me.”
“I agree,” said Lev, “and I think you’re right that your story is quite long. And I still don’t know how you got your job at L’Amore de Santa Clara. Finish that part, if you can in fewer words than War and Peace, or if you can’t. Computers can't compute quite all of this, as far as I can tell.”
“Well,” said the finance-administrator, “after I got out of prison, I couldn’t find a job. I was up against both my criminal record and some of the residue from the stagflation of the seventies. So I was on welfare for a while, until a friend from high school gave me a job at a motel she managed, and I went back to school for my MBA degree, mainly for the GI Bill money and student loans.
But, even with that degree, the best job I could find was as a convenience store manager, also on my friend’s recommendation. So I did what many people do in such circumstances. I became a drunk, abandoning my sensibilities. That is, as far as I could. But I didn’t quite quit. I yet wished to win.
“Bumming through New Orleans, planning no destination I cared much to reach, I fell in love with the French Quarter. I got a part-time job in an elegant little guesthouse in the quiet end of Bourbon Street, and my high school friend back home in Michigan loaned me enough money to deposit myself into a little slave-quarter apartment on Dauphine Street. And, wonder of wonders, at last I felt at home.
“It helped that John James Audubon did most of his work on Birds of America on Dauphine Street, because I had checked that book out of my hometown public library this life, again and again as a child. But more it was a general feeling I got whenever I was on the street. Each morning, as I closed the gate of my house to walk to work, I looked around. I saw the Creole architecture and the little Italian grocery across the street. I saw the bicycle parked out front for deliveries. I felt at home.
“And I nearly developed a career. I went from my position as concierge for the little guesthouse to responsibility for all the computer systems in one of the city’s largest convention hotels, in less than two years. And I married again.
“The friend from high school divorced and left her family to come to New Orleans and marry me. But I had no more reason to marry her than I’d had to marry my first wife, and this second was not a person nearly as honest or kind.
“So we divorced, and my job fell apart, and I became a drunken bum again, and I left New Orleans with a pile of credit-card and student-loan debt and less than a dollar in my pocket, and I bummed America again, for my next two years, this life.
“Until I wandered into Boston. Here, I checked into the Veterans Shelter and there received a suit for job interviews. I went to Accountemps, and Accountemps sent me to l’amore de Santa Clara. Five weeks later, L’Amore de Santa Clara hired me.
“Five years later, I bought my condominium, and now they’re about to fire me, while paying me half again as much as my initial salary there, simply because I told them and no one else what they know full well, what they’re doing.”
“Why did you stay so long?” asked Lev.
“The place is important,” said the finance-administrator. “Also, I have the hots for a hypoglycemic Roman Catholic theologian working there. She does whatever feels right to her, mostly helping with immigration while she’s paid to council substance abusers. But the main reason I stayed so long is that the place is important.”
“The same reason you’re complaining,” said Lev.
“Exactly,” said the finance-administrator. “But I’m not going to become a drunken bum again. I’ve already fouled too many nests, and mine more than any other. And I’m just not going to do that anymore, as those news-grouper hypocrites do. I hope and pray I can now help to clean some nests. I’m trying.
“And firing me won’t stop my efforts. At last I found something I could do well with a sense of worthiness, and I feel like your character Pierre in War and Peace. I mean when he realizes that people pretending to be benefactors only try to benefit their own veniality. I wonder if Peter ever figured out Paul.”
“Some documents,” Lev answered, “suggest they didn’t love each other as Jesus said we should love our enemies.”
Although Lev and the finance-administrator sat alone in the cellar, a waitress was keeping up with them and had brought them several rounds. The finance-administrator had answered more than Lev had questions for, but neither of them was ready to give up the night or the camaraderie of conversation.
“I’m drunk,” said the finance-administrator. “Want to see what drunk is?”
“I’m Russian,” said Lev. “I think I know what drunk is.”
“Want to see what Irish drunk is?”
“I haven’t seen that,” said Lev.
“Let’s go to Southy.”
“Why in hell not.”
So they pushed back their chairs, preparing to leave. But, before they could stand, a man came fairly bounding down the stairs. His trousers were plaid knickers, and his cap matched his trousers but had a large puffy ball on top. In one of his hands, the man had two open bottles of the brand of beer Lev and the finance-administrator were drinking. In his other hand were another bottle of beer and a putter.
“I overheard your conversation,” said this apparition. “Mind if I join you?”
“Not at all,” said Lev, sliding back into his chair.
The finance-administrator didn’t answer, but he slid back into his chair and pulled it back to the table, as the apparition set a bottle of beer in front of each of them and sat, leaning the putter against the fourth chair.
“You know,” said the finance-administrator, “you look like Bob Hope?”
“I get that a lot,” answered the apparition.
“You even sound like Bob Hope,” added the finance-administrator.
“I am Bob Hope,” said the apparition.
“Who’s Bob Hope?” asked Lev.
“I am,” said Bob.
“He’s a comedian,” said the finance-administrator. “He goes around to war zones and makes the troops laugh. He’s been doing it since World War II. Too young for World War I, I guess.”
“Not by much,” said Bob. “I’m almost a hundred years old. I’m about ten years older than Theresa. You know, that woman who sat down on that bus in Alabama and wouldn’t get up. But I made a slight miscalculation and was born in England with a name that wouldn’t sell well here in the United States of America. So I had to clear all that up, moving here and making a name for myself. Making a name for myself. Get it?”
“Yeah,” said Lev. “I get it.”
“So what are you doing here?” asked the finance-administrator.
“Like I said,” said Bob, “I overheard your conversation. If you’re going to Southy, I’d like to tag along. I know it’s dangerous there, and I know you’ve given up six-shooters and heavier artillery, but I brought my putter.”
“What’s a putter?” asked Lev.
“That’s a putter,” said Bob, pointing to his, leaning against the chair.
“What’s it for?” asked Lev.
“Putting,” said the finance-administrator, beating Bob to the punch. “In golf. It’s a game, from Scotland. I guess that’s why Bob’s knickers and cap are plaid. The putter’s for rolling little white balls across short grass and into holes, for exercise, for pride.”
“Why don’t you just kick them in?” asked Lev.
“Why did you write fourteen-hundred pages just to tell people they don’t know what they’re talking about?” asked Bob. “But I know it’s rude to try to answer a question with a question, and you can use a putter to beat people to death too, if you’re Irish.”
“Why did you go all over the world making soldiers laugh?” asked Lev.
“Nasty job,” said Bob. “But somebody had to do it. I mean the soldiers’ jobs, not mine. And I don’t mean they needed to do it or thought it needed to be done. I mean they had it to do, like your French corporals. I thought they could use a little chuckle. Besides, I like to keep track of things. Everywhere.”
“Alright,” said the finance-administrator. “I’m glad we got that cleared up. Are we ready to go, before the subway shuts down?”
“What’s a subway?” asked Lev.
“We’ll show you,” said Bob.