A Single Shot

John, glancing warily around, remains standing just inside the doorway. On the wall across from him, a Syracuse law degree hangs between a photograph of Pitt waving from the deck of a sailboat John would never have guessed he could afford and framed words in a foreign language. A small metal plaque on the desk says “Thank You For Not Smoking,” and just above it sits an ashtray. John thinks about his father, hat in hand, coming here to beg, and of Daggard Pitt tugging at his misshapen leg and regretfully clawing at the air with his frozen hand. Pitt says, “Did you know I once had political ambitions, John?”

John doesn’t say. He smells alcohol on the lawyer’s breath.

“I ran for three different offices—eight times, all told—and never came close to winning anything.” He waves dismissively. “If you can’t find anybody else, run the crippled midget, was the town joke—only don’t vote for him!” He shuffles over and tries to hand John what he’s holding, but his crippled fingers won’t let go and finally John has to yank the documents from the lawyer’s grasp. Laughing breathily, Pitt tries to make a joke out of it. “I don’t want her, you can have her…”

John doesn’t even smile.

Pitt weakly clears his throat. “That’ll put us on an even playing field with her anyway, John.” He hobbles back over to the desk, situates himself behind it, and from the box near his elbow pulls a cruller. John follows him to the near side of the desk, but doesn’t sit down. The lawyer dunks the cruller into a half-empty coffee cup that was there when they came into the room, fishes it out, peers at the drenched pastry like it’s a bug he’s found, then half eats it. “Just sign there on the back, John, above your name.”

John tosses the unsigned papers on the desk.

Pitt lays down the other half of the cruller. “They’re no good ’less you sign them, John.”

“I ain’t goin’ to.”

“Why not?”

John takes the sack off his shoulder and drops it on the desk, where, with a loud thump, it lands on Pitt’s cruller. The lawyer jerks his head back. “That was my last cruller,” he says peevishly.

Verbalizing his fractured thoughts becomes too much for John. He silently stands there, his legs trembling, waiting for the lawyer to open the sack and look inside, but instead Pitt reaches into the box near his right elbow, pulls out a doughnut, and bites into it. Red jelly squirts out two sides of his mouth. He catches the jelly in his claw-hand, then lays down the doughnut, picks up a napkin with his good hand, and carefully wipes his frozen fingers. “What a mess,” he says, then matter-of-factly frowns at the sack. “I’m awfully glad you decided to nip this thing in the bud, John.”

“Huh?”

“This sack doesn’t belong to you, does it?”

John doesn’t answer. No clear thoughts occupy his mind, only muddled images. And dark colors.

“Your wife came to see me yesterday afternoon,” says Pitt, wrinkling his brow at John as if he’s a young child or a retarded adult. “I told her that as your attorney I was prohibited from talking privately with her, but she insisted, and you know, John, I question whether we in the profession always best serve our clients by paying strict attention to the rules—after all, a family breaking up is one of the worst things anyone could go through, and the rights and wrongs of it are muddled and, it seems to me, different in every case.” He nods at the desk drawer to his right. “A small one, John? I—perhaps both of us—could stand a small one?” Without waiting for an answer, he reaches into the drawer, pulls out a mug and a quart bottle of Jim Beam, uncaps the bottle, fills the coffee cup and the mug, then pushes the latter across the desk toward John. Afterwards, he seems to lose his train of thought.

“Your father wanted me to bend the rules, John—he wasn’t in the hole so deep the bank couldn’t have worked with him, but it was more profitable for them to sell the place—but I wouldn’t do it, wouldn’t go to bat for him because—in those days—I didn’t want to make waves.” He moves his crippled hand in a choppy line through the air to signify waves. “That was right before I ran for D.A. the first of three times.” He picks up the coffee cup and holds it to his lips for several seconds. As he drinks, a thin line of whiskey dribbles from one corner of his mouth, and every swallow causes an exaggerated, painful-looking bob of his Adam’s apple. John can see that he’s bombed. “I hear tell the only candidate ever got less votes than me was Ralph Dolan running for sheriff that time.”

John says, “This ain’t about my father or your running for goddamned D.A.”