A faint smile formed on his heavy mouth. “Listen. I became a lawyer. How much more Jesuitical can you be than that?”
We exchanged a glance, a silent acknowledgment of what we both understood and never talked about.
Flynn looked away, the cigarette dangling in his pudgy fingers as he stared out the window. In the distance across the river the snow on the peak of Mt. Hood shimmered a rosy pink in the early morning sun.
“Actually, I was going to be a priest once. My mother wanted me to.” He caught my reaction out of the corner of his eye. “No, really,” he insisted. “I’m not making it up. I was an altar boy.
True story. For almost a year.” He raised his hand to his face and sucked on the cigarette that was stuck between his fingers like a nail driven through a board. “Then the goddamn priest decided he liked me.”
I thought I knew what he meant. “Liked you?”
“Yeah. He tried to put his hands on me. I never went back. My mother never quite got over it.”
“What the priest did?”
“No. I never told her about that. It would have destroyed her.
She was about as devout as they come.”
Leaning forward, I searched his tired, red-rimmed eyes. “You never told her? Not even later on?”
The single strand of smoke twisting up from the burning cigarette spread out into a slow-turning gray-marbled haze. Flynn stared into it, lost in the shapeless shifting design of something that had no plan, no purpose, nothing but the free-working forces of chance.
With one last drag, he blew what was left of it straight ahead, watching it like it was a river running into the sea.
“No,” he said finally, looking back at me. “What good would it have done?”
“Some people would tell you that things like this have to be brought out into the open; that you have to talk about things that happened to you as a child if you’re going to get on with your life.”
Pursing his dry lips, Flynn nodded thoughtfully. “Shows you what the fuck they know, doesn’t it?” A jaundiced smile crawled onto his mouth as he rolled his wrists over and opened his thick-fingered hands. “I mean, I just talked about it with you, and I hate to tell you, but I don’t feel any different about it now than I did before. Besides, you’re forgetting something. For a priest, the guy wasn’t that bad-looking.”
Shaking my head, I turned my chair until it was at a right angle to the desk. My eye caught the small clock I kept on the corner.
It was just seven-thirty.
“What are you doing here, anyway? You were supposed to come by this afternoon.”
I had known Flynn for years, and he had never once been on time. If he showed up within an hour either side of when he said, he thought you had nothing to complain about. Any later than that, he would shrug his shoulders and look at you with those ruined eyes that seemed to chronicle centuries of destruction and offer the same excuse he was giving me now.
“I’ve been in the program more than fifteen years. I do what they tell me. I take it one day at a time. But sometimes I have a little trouble keeping track of the hours.”
It did not make any sense at all, and I knew exactly what he meant.
“Tell me something,” I said, my eyes fixed on him as I tilted my head back and to the side. “How come I haven’t fired you?”
“Probably because you never hired me.”
“You sure?”
“No, not really. I started doing this kind of work sometime after they kicked me out of the law, but before I stopped drinking.”
“Well, I must have hired you then.”
He shrugged. “Maybe. Or maybe I just showed up one day. Why?
You want to fire me now?”
I hesitated, as if I wanted to think it over. “No,” I said finally.
“You’d probably sue me, and the way I remember it, you were a pretty good lawyer.”
The grin faded from his face. He bent his head and slowly worked his jaw back and forth. “Not bad, I guess,” he said, looking up, and then quickly changed the subject. “I finished everything on those two cases.”
He reached down and opened the black briefcase he had set on the floor next to him. The stitching on the leather handles was frayed and one of the hinges was loose. He handed me two neatly marked file folders, containing the results of the investigations he had done on cases, both of which were still months away from trial. I was more interested in what he thought about the arrest in the Jeffries murder. He had not heard about it, and when I told him, he had no reaction. I wondered if it was because, deep down, he had hoped that whoever had killed Jeffries would not get caught.
It was a sentiment I could not entirely be sure I had not harbored myself, somewhere in the deep recesses of my soul. It was an evil, fugitive thought, the kind no one would admit, but one that would have been infinitely more excusable in Flynn’s case than in mine.
Without wanting to, Jeffries had helped make my name as a lawyer; he had made certain Flynn would never practice law again.
“You didn’t hear anything about who they were looking at?” I asked, anxious for the latest rumor. “No idea who it might be?”
He studied his hands, held in his lap, then raised his head, searched my eyes for a second, and looked away. When he looked back, there was a glint in his eye, whether of malice or amusement I could not tell.
“If I was still drinking,” he remarked with wry sarcasm, “I would have suspected myself.” With an effort, he shoved himself up and sat erect in the chair. “No, that’s not true. Well, it might have been true then. Not now,” he added, shaking his head like someone trying to free himself of a bad memory. “He did me a favor.”
“Did you a favor?” I asked, incredulous and a little irritated.
“Because he’s dead, you think you’re supposed to forgive him-
just forget about it? After what he did?”
Flynn put his arms on the edge of the desk and bent forward.
“What exactly would you suggest I do? Go out to the cemetery and kick a little dirt on his grave? It was fifteen-no, sixteen-
years ago. You weren’t there. Do you have any idea how drunk I was or what I said to him?”
He could not help himself. As the memory of what he had done, what he had said, came back, he remembered it all, and there was still a part of him that was glad he had done it.
“I got so damn tired of being put down by him, and the way he used to interrupt me to correct something I’d said, sometimes just the way I had pronounced a word. The bastard was relentless. He enjoyed it. You should have seen his eyes. You remember those eyes? The way they cut right through you. And that smug little thin-lipped smile of his. And all you could do was stand there and say: ‘Yes, your honor. No, your honor.’ It was like standing in front of your father after he had just beat the hell out of you with his belt and agreeing that you did something wrong and deserved everything you got. I couldn’t take it anymore.” He paused, clenched his teeth, and shook his head. “I couldn’t take anything anymore,” he said, a bitter look in his eyes. “Not one more thing. I tied one on. God, was I drunk! And I marched into his courtroom and called him every name in the book and then some. Hell, I don’t even remember most of what I called him.”
He laughed helplessly. “But I’ll never forget that look on his face.
‘Who do you think you’re talking to?’ he demanded. His face was all flushed. His eyes were popping right out of his head.”
Flynn thought of something. “You know how when you’re drunk-really drunk-there’s a place inside your head, the place where you watch yourself make an idiot of yourself and think it’s really kind of funny? Well, as soon as I heard Jeffries say that-
‘Who do you think you’re talking to?’-I had a whole speech ready, but the only part of it that came out was, ‘I have the privilege, your honor, to be addressing the biggest asshole in the western world.’ I think I even bowed.”