Golden Orange (4 page)

“No you ought
not
to,” said the judge. “If I were you I'd ask my client to step in here and then I'd go outside and have a soda pop until you're called.
That's
what I'd do if I were you.”

The lawyer weighed it. If he challenged the hanging judge, Winnie was going to the slam without a doubt. If he let the judge indulge his eccentricity …

Ninety seconds later Winnie Farlowe stood alone and silent before Judge Singleton. The judge downed another glass of Evian, and finally, with a look that could've opened a safe, he said, “Do you know what they say in county jail when somebody farts and the other prisoners hear it?”

“Excuse me, Your Honor?”

“Do you know anything about me?”

“A little, Your Honor.” Winnie suddenly went damp all over. He'd sprung a leak from last night's vodka binge, and a gremlin golfer was taking divots from his brain.

“Do you know I
enjoy
putting deuces in jail?”

“Your Honor, I wasn't driving a car. Why, I'd
never
drive when …”

“You happened to be at the wheel of a ferryboat, but you've no doubt driven a car lots of times when you were drunk. All alcoholics do.”

“Your Honor, I assure you I haven't. And I don't know where you got the idea that I'm an …”

“Alcoholic.”

“I don't think I'm an …”

“What kind of car do you drive?”

“A five-year-old VW, Your Honor.”

“How often do you drive it with a B.A. reading of point-two-oh, or higher?”

“Your Honor, I don't …”

“Do you have any memory whatsoever of making a citizen, in effect, walk the plank and nearly drown in that cold black water?”

“It's the newspapers, Your Honor!” And now Winnie was sweating buckets. “Walk the plank?
What
plank? Your Honor knows there's no plank on the ferry!”

“You told the passenger you were going to shoot him.”

“My old service revolver was at home, Judge! I didn't
have
a gun on that boat!”

“But he believed you. And he jumped into that cold black water.”

“He panicked, Your Honor!”

“People were screaming for help. Other people were threatening to jump into the cold black water rather than ride it out with an alcoholic at the wheel of the boat. A dangerous drunk who really doesn't remember what happened that night. Do you have blackouts?”

“Blackouts?”

“Never mind. Of course you do. You're an alcoholic. I read the probation report.”

“That guy from the probation department jumped to conclusions, Your Honor!”

Then Judge Singleton said casually, “I'd decided to send you to jail. For six months.”

Winnie went as silent as a barnacle on a keel. His skull was on fire. The Evian looked like a tall cool sweating vodka in the meaty paw of Judge Singleton.

Winnie could hear the ice cubes clinking against the judge's teeth. Winnie's own mouth seemed full of beach sand. The judge's stare was a prison searchlight.

“I wouldn't be helped in jail, Your Honor,” he finally croaked.

“Helped? Do you think I'm interested in
helping
the people I send to jail? Boy, I'm a warehouse specialist! I put lawbreakers on the shelf so the people of this county can have a break for a while. And I'm also here to provide a little revenge and retribution. Oh yes! People
need
revenge. Just ask the family of someone
killed
by a drunk driver. Just ask the family sometime.”

“Judge, please! I'm not a …”

“How long did you serve with the Newport Beach Police Department? Fourteen years?”

“Fifteen years.”

“Fifteen years. And then what?”

“I'd still be there except some disks blew when a burglar kicked me down the companionway of a boat. My back locks up on me maybe three days a week. Can't hardly sit. Can't ever lie on my stomach. I paid for the boat parade damage, Judge!”

Winnie Farlowe was drowning in vodka ferment. He couldn't think. He tried to recall some of the commendations he'd been awarded as a cop, but strangely, all he could think of was his late father. Winnie was a little boy again, facing this terror not at The Drinker's Hour, but in broad daylight. And he wanted a father to save him. He felt like weeping.

“I was in law enforcement myself,” said Judge Singleton.

Prepared to
grovel.
“I know, Your Honor!”

“Sheriff's Department. I worked at the county jail when you were a baby.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I know what can happen to ex-cops when they do jail time. Do you know what can happen to ex-cops in jail? When the inmates get hold of him?”

A gulp. “I got a pretty good idea, Judge.”

“I remember once when I was a young deputy. We had this policeman in jail awaiting trial. Lived in Orange, I think it was. Maybe Tustin. Anyway, he shot his wife in a drunken rage one night. We isolated him, of course, but somebody screwed up on the graveyard shift. He was taken in for a morning shower with the other court transfers. The inmates knew the guy was a cop and they got to him in the showers. Know what they did to him before anyone could stop them?”

“I got a pretty good idea,” Winnie repeated, wishing the judge would
stop
!

“Well, I guess I never forgot how he looked on that shower room floor. Bleeding like a pig and crying like a woman.”

Winnie's instincts told him to keep his mouth shut and let this man have his say. He
thought
he saw a glimmer of mercy in those ferocious black eyes.

“I'm going to give you five days and suspend it. You'll pay a fine of close to a thousand bucks and be placed on probation. That means you better not operate a boat if you've even walked
past
a saloon. And you
better
not appear in public in a drunken condition.” He took a sip of Evian and said, “Don't thank me. I don't like to be thanked.”

Another croak. “No, sir!”

“Lucky you're white. If you were black I'd catch hell for giving you a break, wouldn't I? You treated Christmas like a seagoing Scrooge, didn't you? With
contempt.
”

“I guess so, Your Honor.”

“If you get picked up for anything, anything at all related to drunkenness, you'll do time. Do you understand me, boy?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“Okay, get outta here and tell your lawyer to can that boring speech.”

“Yes, Your Honor,” Winnie said, walking shakily to the door.

“One more thing,” said the judge, stopping Winnie in his tracks.

“Sir?”

The judge grinned. A chilling grin. Chocolate ice. “Do you know what they say in county jail when somebody farts and the other prisoners hear it?”

“No, Your Honor.”

“They say, ‘Still a virgin, huh?' So every time you're tempted to booze it up you think about how nice it is to
hear
yourself fart. Do you understand me, boy?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

Winnie's sweaty fingers slipped right off the brass doorknob on the first try. A hairy shudder sidled up his spine like a tarantula.
Still a virgin, huh?

4

Dream Vision

I
t was still warm and balmy at five o'clock in the afternoon. That's when Winnie got to his apartment on the Balboa peninsula, wanting a drink more than he'd ever wanted one in his life. Wanting it all the more when he pictured Judge Singleton with his James Earl Jones Voice of God, and eyes like a defendant's bad dream.

Winnie's brand-new pinpoint Oxford shirt looked like a bar rag from Spoon's Landing. He stripped it off and tossed it on the floor with the rest of the week's laundry. He put on his old baggy Hang Tens, opened two beers, drank the first without stopping and took the other with him out on the porch, where he sniffed the brisk salt air over the peninsula. He gulped down the second beer, shivering when he thought about psychopathic inmates and soundless farts.

Winnie shook it off, trotted down the steps to the alley behind the apartment house, then jogged barefoot across Balboa Boulevard to the beach, one block away. That block saved him about $300 a month in rent for a cramped “studio” with a daybed.

He sprinted across the warm white sand and hit the surf without much of a shock. He figured he was greenhousing: Sheer terror followed by utter relief equals one hot body. The ocean felt like Hawaii water to him, not the cold surf of Southern California.

Winnie plunged through the breakers, enjoying the sting as they slapped against his chest like a wooden mallet smacking fresh squid into tender steaks.

He knew it was risky to swim out. He'd lived near the beach all his life and understood riptides and undertow, yet he was swimming right toward trouble. Daring the rip? Some surfers two hundred yards down the beach yelled “Dumb shit!” at him, but he swam past the rip and beyond. He swam out perhaps five hundred yards before the juices started draining.

The undertow was much stronger than he'd thought, and the sun was dropping fast. Winnie treaded water and looked toward the sunset, knowing that before he swam much farther
against
this tide, the fireball would melt into the sea.

He began stroking desperately. As a young lifeguard, he had patrolled this beach, notching his jeep with esoteric little rabbits to record the heads (tails actually) of all the surf bunnies he'd collected. But this was no time for surf bunnies. Winnie Farlowe was in trouble!

Too macho to call for help from the teenage surfers who straddled their boards less than a hundred yards away, he continued to stroke. He couldn't bring himself to do it, not an ex-lifeguard/marine/policeman. But at last he hollered: “Here!”

Here? The surfers knew he was here. There, actually. There in the surf, churning back and forth in the undertow.

Winnie finally screamed: “HELP ME!”

The kid who paddled toward him, and towed him from the skeg of his board, was wearing a wet suit with a yellow stripe. The kid was blond, of course, about sixteen years old. He bitched about missing some rad tubes and said that old dorks shouldn't be anywhere near a rip, even a baby rip. That was the gist of the conversation, as much as Winnie could understand, in that he was gagging on the last rad tube that whacked him in the back of the skull while the kid's powerful strokes dragged him through the foam.

When Winnie's feet touched sand and he turned to thank the surfer, the kid was already submarining through the nearest breaker, heading back toward the school of others lying still on the blue-black ocean, awaiting nirvana. The Perfect Wave.

A violent coughing fit struck Winnie when he reached the back stairs leading up to his apartment. By the time he got inside, he was shivering and queasy, tasting brine from his mouth to his belly. A cold beer made him feel better. A shot of Polish vodka helped even more. Another beer and Winnie was half-convinced he could've managed just fine without that little son of a bitch. He might even go for a swim tomorrow, rips or no rips, just to prove a thing or two. After all, a former lifeguard never really loses it.

By eight o'clock, Winnie had devoured a pot of clams at Digger's Hot Pot, where he “dined” four nights a week. By 8:10 he entered Spoon's Landing ready to tell everybody how he'd toughed it out in court. How the hanging judge just had to watch helplessly as Winnie slid out of his clutches, like an eel through a gill net.

He found Spoon glaring at Bilge O'Toole, who was racing his turtle, Irma, across the bar against one owned by a commercial fisherman they called Carlos Tuna, a turtle wrangler who amazed Gold Coast millionaires with the outrageous story that his turtle, Regis, was one hundred years old.

Bilge O'Toole was already weepy drunk, which was as predictable as investment swindles around these parts, and Spoon was telling him he should take his Irma and go on home. Five young off-duty cops were shooting snooker in the adjoining room, and bitching about the yesteryear music on the jukebox.

At the other end of the bar, Guppy Stover was sighing mournfully, but everyone ignored her. They knew that to say “What's the matter?” would get them gaffed for half an hour, during which they'd hear about the U.S. Navy boatswain's mate who wooed her but left her on the beach when he found a Waikiki grass widow on a refueling stop during his last cruise. Which was in 1945, but seemed like yesterday to Guppy, who still wore her mass of gray hair in the W.W. II, Andrews Sisters shoulder-length style.

There were about four or five others at the bar, three of them strangers to Winnie, everybody looking exceedingly miserable, which was normal on Tuesday nights for some reason. Winnie walked to the bar and nodded at Spoon, who poured him a draft and a double shot of Polish vodka.

Spoon's navy cap dipped twice, which was Spoon's way of asking, “Well, what happened?”

“This place is about as cheery as the Gaza Strip,” Winnie said, sipping the vodka and chasing it with two big gulps of draft.