(This is a non-smutty, adult short story that addresses the topic of rape. Trigger warnings apply.)
THE TRIAL
I can’t understand what the man is saying, he is talking so fast. One time I had this Jewish friend, Nancy, and she took me to church with her, and there were all these men talking like that--fast, so you didn’t know what they were saying. My dad was some mad when he found out. I was little then. I think this is the man who really runs things. He sits in front of the judge, and his desk is almost as big as the judge’s, and every time one of the lawyers has a paper or anything they give it to him, and then he looks it over and maybe he gives it to the judge and maybe he don’t.
Unexpectedly the man pauses and then says a word I understand. It is guilty.
I am crying and my mom is crying. Even those two preppy girls who are always in here looking useless and like they just combed their hair are crying. One looks a little embarrassed, but the other is staring at us, defiant-like. My dad don’t cry. He stares straight ahead. Tommy looks down. I can’t see his face but his shoulders are trembling. I keep crying, and the man keeps talking. Three more guilties. My mom and I cling to each other. Dad don’t do nothing.
None of us really know what to do when the judge calls a recess. It is unexpected like the guilties. He tells Tommy he can’t leave the building. I know Tommy is thinking of running but I know he won’t. I wish I could take him up in my arms like I used to, back when we were little. I wish someone would take me up.
That prostitute didn’t have the nerve to show up today. As we go out into the hallway my dad says to Mr. Moore – that’s Tommy’s lawyer, for all the good he did, you get what you pay for, I guess – that she is the one who should be in jail. No one else says anything. We all know he is right. My dad puts his hand in his pocket like he is expecting to find one of those little liquor bottles there. He is surprised when his pocket is empty, but then he remembers he doesn’t drink anymore. Next to him, Tommy imitates him exactly. He is like a doll-version of my dad. The same gesture, the same look of surprise, the same remembering. Tommy stopped drinking two years after my dad. It didn’t have nothing to do with him being arrested, although it happened around the same time. He was only 18 then. Now he’s twenty. He’s blond and handsome like my dad, only fresher. He looks so innocent. He is innocent, I tell myself fiercely. Them jurors don’t know their ass from an anthill. I want to say that out loud, but I know I will stutter. I sit down on the long narrow bench in the hallway instead. I hope Tommy will sit next to me, but he is trying to look like a man. My mom sits next to me instead. We are still crying. Tommy is crying too. My dad looks like he wants a drink bad.
I agree with my dad, they should put that whore in jail, but this is my fault too. My elbow aches, like it almost always does nowadays. I gave up on physical therapy. If it weren’t for my damned elbow, I think, none of this would have happened.
Tommy’s friend Alex comes in. At least Tommy says they are still friends. That is why I admire and love Tommy so much. If my best friend turned around and said in a court of law that I raped someone, just to keep his own butt out of jail, I don’t think we would still be friends. But Tommy don’t mind. He says, with Alex planning on starting college and all, he just had to do it. And plus, Alex did make the woman lawyer look like a fool, changing his mind all over the place about what happened. First he said they were all three in the van and he, Alex, was holding the whore’s hands over her head while Tommy held her down on the seat and had sex with her. But then later Alex said he couldn’t really see what was going on. I’m no fool, I know they had sex and all. But that’s no crime, sex with some ugly n-word prostitute. I think if the jury had known she was a prostitute they wouldn’t have come back with that guilty.
I did feel bad for her, just once, when she was testifying. Cassandra was her name. She was telling all her lies, about how she just happened to be walking down Elm Avenue at three in the morning when Tommy and Alex pulled up in the van and asked her if she was working. She said when she told them no they jumped out of the van and threw her into the front seat and Tommy raped her. Like anyone would believe that. But then that woman lawyer asked her if she said anything else, and she goes, “Yeah, when they was raping me I said, ‘No, not again.’” And then later Mr. Moore asked her what she meant by that, and she said she was raped by her stepfather when she was little. And he asked her how little, and she says, “All the time from when I was ten until when I was fifteen.” And for all her lies I knew right then she was telling the truth. I looked at her and at her crumpled pink dress with half the buttons gone that are sitting on that table as exhibit 3, and how she cried and shook the whole time she was on the stand and talked so soft you could but barely hear her, and for a minute she wasn’t a colored prostitute accusing my brother of rape, but just a sad girl.
My dad lit up one of his cigarillos even though there were no smoking signs all over the place. Signs, but no guards. Everyone was making small talk, but I didn’t listen. I was remembering what a good boy Tommy had been. It was him that got my dad to stop drinking, and he did it for me. Me and my mom. Tommy was so young but he stood right up to my dad and decked him. Dad went to detox a few weeks later, and when he came back he started going to AA for real.
That was when I got hit by that car. Just a hit and run, I don’t know who did
it. I was in the hospital around the
same time my dad went to that detox place.
They said I’d never have full use of my left arm. Everyone said it was so lucky I was
right-handed. But with me needing all
that attention, and my dad trying so hard not to drink, between us we took
about all the attention and love my mom had to give. That’s when Tommy started going wild. Sure, he’d always been a normal kid, parties
and joy riding and such, but now he was getting into some serious drugs. That’s why his judgment was so impaired that
night, why he would find some hooker that would cry rape.
The court officer motions us back into the court room. Tommy’s eyes are pink but he sits ramrod straight like my dad. I don’t know what’s going on, but the judge starts to give a long speech. He is revoking Tommy’s bail. Tommy is going into custody. The court officer puts cuffs on his hands and shackles on his legs. My mom lets out a shriek, and I do too. But there is nothing we can do as he is led away. I hate that whore so much for what she done to us.
