For starters, Jack MacGregor was neither old nor white, but a smallish black woman. I guessed Jack must have been short for Jaqueline or some other similar name. She was sitting down, not on a platform like you see in the movies, but behind an ordinary-looking desk. She was, however, wearing the black robe of her office.
I could tell she was sturdy of build, pretty in a severe sort of way, and could have been anywhere between thirty to fifty years of age. A pair of intelligent brown eyes peered out from behind wire rimmed glasses. She did not smile. The eyes appraised me coldly and thoroughly, peeling away my defenses and laying the entirety of my existence bare with one sweeping glance. My legs felt weak, but I met her gaze anyway.
Hers were the eyes of someone who had seen and heard too much, of a woman who understands the dark motivations of the human heart and can no longer be dismayed. There would be no lying to this woman, and no talking my way out of whatever trouble I was in.
In a calm, even voice dripping with authority, she said, “Sit down, Mr. Hicks.”
I complied. The deputy had put me in irons before bringing me to see the judge, making sitting uncomfortable. But I did not dare complain. Not in front of this woman. A young man who I assumed by his demeanor to be my public defender was already seated to my left. An older man with graying hair, a patrician nose, and a hard flat line of a mouth sat to my right. He did not look at me.
“Do you know why you’re here, Mr. Hicks?”
“I’m afraid not, Your Honor,” I said. “I don’t remember much from yesterday.”
The eyes flicked down to a piece of paper, and I realized she was wearing bifocals. “According to those who witnessed the incident, at approximately 10:30 pm last night, March the 24th, you had a verbal altercation with a man named Alex Cannon. The argument took place in a tavern registered under the name The Amber House. The argument between the two of you escalated until the owner of the establishment had his security personnel escort the both of you from the premises.” She looked up again. “Any of this ring a bell?”
I swallowed. “I’m sorry, Your Honor. I don’t remember any of that.”
“Once outside,” she continued dryly, “you and Mr. Cannon engaged in a fistfight. Several witnesses reported that despite Cannon being significantly larger than you, you managed to get the better of the altercation, although you did suffer a few minor injuries.” She flicked a hand to indicate my battered face. “Mr. Cannon’s injuries, however, were not so minor.”
My heart sank. The room was cool, but sweat broke out on my forehead anyway. I looked down and closed my one good eye. “What did I do to him, Your Honor?”
A shuffle of papers. “One crushed left orbital socket, four missing teeth, a jaw broken in two places, several fractured ribs, and a dislocated right shoulder.” She put the paper down and glared sternly. “And he will most likely lose his left eye.”
I groaned. I wanted to sink down through the floor. I wanted lightning to strike from the sky and burn me to cinders. I wanted to climb down a hole and pull it in after me. It was bad enough what I was doing to myself, but now, I had ruined someone else, maimed him for life. I thought about my first day with the militia, and the prison labor detail, and the man who fell to the ground exhausted and gasping like a fish, and I imagined his face as mine. I hung my head and said nothing.
The judge gathered the papers in front of her, tapped them on the desktop a few times to straighten them, and returned them to a manila folder. She set the folder aside. “To be honest, Mr. Hicks, Alex Cannon was no better than you. But he wasn’t any worse, either. According to your record, you’re simply a useless drunk who occasionally urinates in places where such actions are forbidden by city ordinance. A nuisance to be sure, but until now, a mostly harmless one.”
I could find no fault with her assessment, so I stayed quiet.
“Cannon, for his part, is simply a man who lost his job as an engineer for the Civilian Construction Corps and decided to drown himself in a bottle, much as you have been doing. However, despite his current low station in life, he comes from a rather prominent family within the community. His father, who is very angry over his son’s injuries, is a member of the new city council.” At this, she leaned forward and pointed at the older man seated to my right. “And a friend of District Attorney John Crouch.”
My guts turned to water as I looked to my right. The DA’s face was impassive, his eyes focused on the judge. I did not want him to look at me, so I followed his example.
“Let me make this as clear and simple as I can, Mr. Hicks,” Judge MacGregor said. “There are three ways we can handle this. Only one of them is to your benefit.” She held up a finger. “One, you plead guilty to aggravated assault and resisting arrest, face six months of hard labor, and forfeit all of your registered salvage as restitution.” She held up another finger. “Two, you plead not guilty, we go to trial, and you wind up facing a year of hard labor, and we seize all of your property.”
She paused to let the words sink in. A year of hard labor. I had once met a man who had spent only four months in one of the prison camps. He had been a broken, hollow-eyed, starved thing. A shadow of a man. I shuddered.
“Or,” she went on, putting her hand down, “you enlist in the United States Army for a period of no less than four years. If you serve out your time and receive an honorable discharge, the charges against you will be dropped. If you do not serve the full term of the enlistment and are subsequently apprehended, you will be brought back into this courtroom, and if that happens, there will be no more deals. As it is, you’re lucky our docket is overly full and the Army so desperately in need of personnel, otherwise the court would not even be offering you this opportunity.”
The judge sat back and rested her hands on the arms of her chair. “So what’s it going to be, Mr. Hicks?”
I looked over at my defender, who had not said a word. He looked back at me and shrugged. “I’ve seen what happens to guys in the prison camps,” he said. “I’d take door number three if I were you.”
I stared at the floor for a long moment. The two swigs of liquor I had drunk earlier were wearing off. My hands shook, but not from fear. I knew I would not survive a year of hard labor in a prison camp. Death no longer had the power to frighten me, but deep down in a place I had forgotten existed, I felt a spark of something. A stirring I had not felt for so long it took me a few moments to identify it.
Hope.
It’s a hell of a carrot, hope. Put it on a stick and dangle it in front of someone, even someone as low as I was, and you can walk them for miles. My dad served in the Army. So did Blake. They had never talked about it much, but how bad could it be?
I looked up and said, “Your Honor, is there a recruiter in the building?”
*****
The Army could not take me in my current condition, so the judge ordered me into a treatment program. And by treatment, I mean they locked me in a cell, fed me two Xanax a day—one in the morning and one at night—to deal with the withdrawal symptoms, and an Ambien in the evening to help me sleep. This went on for five days.
The Xanax helped, but it could only do so much. I was in agony. I could not hold down food. Horrible black bile poured out of me every hour or so, until I began to ponder where it was all coming from. I was not eating, and so wondered if I was shitting out my internal organs. It would not have surprised me.
After the first five days, my heart stopped trying to beat its way out of my chest, the flow of high viscosity motor oil stopped, and I felt something I had not felt in months—hunger. Actual ‘I could seriously eat food right now and not puke it up’ hunger. The spark of hope in my chest burned a little brighter.
Near the end of the second week, I felt almost human again. To my surprise, there were no cravings. When I thought about booze, I just got mildly nauseous and that was it. Now, two years after recovering, I can drink without feeling the urge to get wasted like I used to. I have a theory about this.