A change of gravity

The young people expanded, seeming somehow to take up more room than had been enclosed by the roof, cellar hole and exterior walls of the courthouse. On weekdays especially Mondays, when the mornings yielded up the weekends' ripe harvests of police operations in Hampton Pond, Hampton Falls and Cumberland, the other towns within the Canterbury jurisdiction they sat and stood along the walls, sat and crouched upon the stairs, hunkered in the corners and bunched up on all the maple benches. Endlessly but slowly they went into and came out of the elevator that plied up and down between the basement and the first and second floors, distributing them among the corridors leading to the offices and conference rooms and courtrooms; never coming to rest even when standing still or seated and admonished to be silent in one of the three trial sessions. As they moved about they had much to say to one another about the inexhaustible variety of things to do in the great tempting, yielding, wide world outside; before, after, during or instead of, days and weeks and months and years spent or to be spent in the other spacious world inside, in jail, together or with absent friends or strangers. They had so much to talk about that they never seemed to finish saying it, and so were never quiet. They held endless discussions at their normal outdoor-hailing conversational volumes that accumulated, reverberating and combining to make a ceaseless, unintelligible, unrelenting din like the noise of an assembly line building heavy machinery; noise that broke like surf against the walls and surged along the floors, echoing against the ceilings of the corridors and stairwells and restrooms, booming, wearing and abrading and eroding the tender surface of the mind and nerves.

Most of the young people left the courthouse each day before noon. Those not led away tearfully or broodingly in handcuffs trooped out the side door (the ceremonially wide front doors at the top of the broad crumbling concrete steps Barrows Construction having used too much sand in the mix, sand being cheaper than calcined clay and limestone being locked and blocked for reasons of security), shuckin' and jivin'; genially menacing; waiting for the twilight and the dark to come; untied black and white high-top basketball, cross-training and workout shoes flapping, a hundred, two hundred dollars a pair; oversized black pants billowing, unfastened and un zippered black sweatshirts and hooded jackets sliding off their shoulders, jostling and shoving one another as they passed the metal-detector archway that had screened their entrances.

But noon was too late to soothe Merrion's mind; by the end of each morning it had become raw and inflamed, so that by the middle of any weekday while he would have been willing to concede that calm reflection and assessment might once more be possible, he would be in no mood to attempt it. Once during his ninth or tenth year on the job, by then as first assistant, Richie Hammond had said to him after a brutal day: This's an awful job, you know, a really awful job." And he had said to Richie, slowly and distinctly, meaning every single word:

"There are days when this can be the worst fucking job in the world."

It had passed into standard usage in the Canterbury courthouse. "Okay, altogether now, kids: what kind of job is it today?" "The worst fuckin' job in the world." And then everybody would laugh, and think to themselves that this laugh in defiance of the fact that there was absolutely nothing to laugh about would be what would get them all through the day on the job.

Except when he was being truthful, as he did not often allow himself to be once or twice with Cavanaugh, who looked incredulous, suspicious that Merrion was putting him on; several times with Hilliard after a good round of golf, a dinner and some drinks Merrion always led that cheer and acted convincingly as though he believed it. But on those other occasions he said: "But I guess in fact I don't, really, believe that. As silly as I know this sounds, Dan, except maybe to you, there have been times in that courthouse when I think I may've done someone some good.

I'm not saying now I think I've saved people. Nobody saves other people. Only idiots think they can do that; only bleeding-heart assholes'd even try. But maybe I've managed to actually grab some poor kid or some poor strugglin' bastard and help him pull himself up out of the mud. Give him a break, maybe first one he's had, see if he gets just that one break, maybe he can save himself.