Chapter Four

So the great prosecutor left for vacation. Such a dedicated man was he, such a defender of the little people, so dedicated to fraternité was he, that he took with him several hundred pounds of records, case law and aides, consisting of secretaries, legal researchers and junior lawyers. He brought these, so the public was told, because they needed a break and he was joyous to give them that break. While the press conference was underway explaining his magnanimitude, stevedores loaded up the schooner in preparation for their holiday at sea. Despite that one or two of his aides were fairly green at the prospect, they all put their best face on about the spectacular opportunity afforded them and how it solidified the prosecutor's bona fides as a man who helped the little guy. A master of whitewash was our man the prosecutor.

The schooner set sail later that day, bearing the gleaming smiles of the supposed revelers, much as it carried the brass in its brightwork, or, more precisely, like it carried the paint that covered up some of the age-damaged wood. Should I say that the rot under the smiles was the same as that of the rot under the paint? Nay, these aides were good folk. Much like the soldier in an unpopular foreign war, they had chosen to acquire their food in this way, many of them not really knowing what it meant. Lost wives, lost families, lost opportunities and angry relatives they all had as a result of the dedication of their boss, and this presented yet another opportunity for them to abandon all hope of any personal development in the pursuit of their master's relentless ambition.

Oh, sure, they knew their master would provide for them well enough, so long as they kept producing, but they also knew they were about as well thought of by their master as the brass work on the ship; it served a purpose, but was completely replaceable once tarnished, broken or simply less pretty than a new piece.

Had not this very thing come to pass not a hundred days previously? The man with the paunch belly had built the perfect case against a mob boss, lovingly laying down each detail, laboriously constructing each stroke of evidence, endlessly researching precedent and carefully stoking public opinion, until such a day as it was felt that a trial might succeed. When the day came to announce the attorney who would stand up and take credit for all the work, had it not been another attorney with good hair, another rising star attaching himself to our man the prosecutor, who had stood up and told all and sundry the nature of the crime, strode purposefully into court and carried the day with the power of the oratory constructed for him? So furious was the owner of the paunch belly that he quit, accepted a small bribe to not relay his story to the newspapers and began teaching history at a high school. But, our story is not about him.

See, he doesn't have good enough hair to take on the evils of this world, the titans of industry cynically amassing fortunes on the backs of the downtrodden, pushing the capitalist manifesto on people and demanding they pay, by constructing things the people want and artfully marketing those things. A man sees a car advertisement on television and thinks to himself that he wants that car. He doesn't need it; he has a perfectly usable piece of junk not six or seven years old, decaying of rust, or, more precisely, possessing of a rust patch or two, with the flaky radio, and besides, it gets worse mileage. So thinking, off he goes and buys the new car, trading in his serviceable old clunker in the process. When it is determined he cannot pay for the car, he gets blamed for making a bad decision, but wants to blame the television for luring him into the decision that caused him both ruin and embarrassment, for, see, he now has neither his old car nor his new one.

But, a man with good hair, now, that's a man that can help. That's a man that can comment on the situation and say something must be done. He can then get into his flashy car and drive off, content that some silliness will ensue when the proper committees have met. Somehow, the man who traded his car must get a car, because without a car, he cannot work, work to pay for his house, work to pay for his clothes, work to pay for his things, and work to pay for his food, and will become another burden of the state. So, the last-chance loan is born. The man can now buy another car on credit, this one cheaper and more suited to his stature, as determined by a government test, this one with a loan that is harder to default on, with terms set by an administrator who has nothing but good intentions where he is concerned. It is also a loan that is a millstone because he cannot sell the car at all, being rather upside-down on it due to the favorable terms enforced by the administrator, but it doesn't matter because he now has a car befitting his stature. But, this is not his story, either.

One of the aides on the schooner did have such a loan on such a car. Several others had such a loan on their house, forever concerned about losing it and all the equity they had amassed simply by failing to pay a loan. The shackles we must draw in our mind around the hands of these poor, working people are nonetheless effective for being metaphorical. Here on the schooner sit they, for one reason or another, he of the fine hair with naked ambition, they of the mortgage with fear of loss, those of the family with concern for their offsprings' wellbeing, them that are married somewhat happy of the respite from the complaining about them never being home and them what used to be married struggling with the myriad economic woes the state of not being married anymore inevitably carries.

They were not focused. I guess that is the main point here. There sat junior fine-hair, like a lap dog, nearly panting his approval at every word uttered by his master, but remaining just as clueless as the most wind-brained Cocker Spaniel as to the meanings of the words being uttered. Oh, sure, provide him with a script and coach him on the talking points, and he was a spectacular success, but it was often rumored he had a string hanging out his back, and if you pulled it, he would emit phrases not entirely inappropriate to the question being asked.

The rest of the motley crew of the great schooner, that is, the crew of lawyers, gaggle of attorneys, not the real crew, who kept to themselves as much as possible, keenly aware of their need to eat but also distasteful of the proximity to such a magnum of Moriarties. They kept to the area of the ship without the Egyptian linen and gold-plated bath fixtures, where simple pleasures could be engaged in, and copulate they did. Arguably, they produced more than did the attorneys, as at least five new souls were added to push back against the drudgery of life during this trip. But, this story is not about them.

It is about the attorneys, dammit, and it is difficult to stay on topic because they are so dull. Each and every one is decked out in Neiman Marcus or some such, chosen for them by the sales lady who assured them it was just the right combination of conservative and bold, leading to them being essentially interchangeable. It was a sort of camouflage, these threads of theirs, as nobody stood out, so nobody could get picked on.

And they draped themselves around the room, as if hangers for their expensive clothes, a sort of collection of moving mannequins, as they talked about the upcoming case, pretending to bend their massive collective brains to the task of felling a man. A brainstorming session they called it, but, seized with the decorum of years of brown nosing and general political correctness, their session rose little above a brain squall. And, this would not have been the squall possessing of the fine, gentle, warm rain so common and beloved in the Pacific Isles, but the wind blown useless squall that throws mud in your eye common to desert dwellers, for, indeed, it was a hot wind escaping the average lawyer blunderbuss, a wind that generated little but wilting, that parched those it contacted, rendering them helplessly grasping for some streak of joy, some rose in the desert, maybe a glass of water.

They, the budding lawyers, were immune. When one's soul has been roughly used long enough, it ceases to need much in the way of sustenance, that sustenance being the whimsy to gaze upon a flower, or, worse, to ruminate that one has never seen a poem as lovely as a tree. Perhaps there is a whimsy in the ordered braying of the American Pinstriped Brown Nosed Lawyer, but if there is, I certainly have not found it.

And so they worked late into the night, and, for no apparent reason, began again early the next day, congratulating themselves on their continued dedication.