Well, it’s the blood. I had a cousin a usurer, an uncle in storm windows. An aunt bought up second mortgages, bad paper. Crap artists the lot, dealing in misunderstanding, leading folks on like bad daddies walking backwards in water with their hands out to kids wading inches beyond their reach. Not me, but we’ve something in common: that we take people’s word, I suppose, so long as it’s in triplicate. But not my style finally the cancerously compounding interest with repossession at the end of the rainbow. Hit them up front, I say, and be done with it. Not for me the jumped car and crossed wire, the hot shot at dawn or midnight. I eschew schlock, fingerprints on the screen of the burned-out TV, the old man’s greasy veronica where he’s dozed in the wing chair, all that wall-to-wall with its thinned nap where the weight’s come down like the lawn mowers of time. To hell with merchandise, houses surrendered after they’ve been lived in seventeen years. Junk, jetsam. Maybe it has to do with the fact that I have no sense of smell, except for the stinks I imagine in my head.
The Phoenicians. Lebanon and Syria now, Phoenicia that was. My people — I am Phoenician — wrote the first bailbond. (It’s “Ba’al” incidentally, from the Hebrew, not “bail.”) The notion that the system began in medieval England is false. What happened was that the Crusaders brought the practice back with them from the desert. Phoenician justice was swift: a trial immediately followed arrest; the suspect was taken before the judge or Lord (the Ba’al), evidence was heard and the man was punished or went free. But once a foreigner was arrested, a Canaanite. The charge was he’d fired a crop. The man denied it and said he had witnesses, relatives who had returned to Canaan and could prove that he’d had nothing to do with it. They would swear, he said, that he’d been with them miles from the scene at the time. Well, it would take time to get word back to Canaan that we were holding one of their lads. A messenger would have to be sent. A three-day camel trek, another few days to find the relatives and convince them to return, another three-day camel trek (“trek” is a Phoenician word; “track” comes from it, “race track,” “railroad track”) to get back, ten or eleven days in all. Now, there were no jails in Phoenicia. The concept of captivity didn’t come in until much later, a Hellenic idea. Where do you keep a guy like that, a guy accused of setting fire to an entire crop? Do you take him to your tent, an alleged incendiary? A man who might have burned fields, what could he do with canvas? There was no jail, only justice. If your eye offended they plucked it out, if your kick they tore your leg off. So where do you put a fellow up who claims he’s innocent?
Like all great ideas the answer is simple. You don’t. This was a nomadic people, this was a people lived in a sandbox like somebody else would live in Pennsylvania — gill-less they were, tough, with a horned, spiky skin that took the sunburn and converted it to energy, maybe even into water itself, adaptive, resourceful, shagging the evolutionary moment like a fly ball — whose very beasts, you’ll remember, went without water thirty and forty days, a people who invented oasis. You think not? You think maybe God spread a little golf course in the desert like a prayer rug? You think? Invented oasis. The process is lost, all gone now the old techniques, but probably using the sand itself, working in the medium of sand. Sand and lenses. Taking a camel’s eye, say, and the desert’s own hot sun and igniting the sands, focusing, burning them molten, turning them liquid, making them water, seasoning them with their own piss and the camel’s blood. Planting seeds, maybe shooting off into the mess, stirring it at night when it cooled. More piss, more blood. Resourceful, resourceful, sand and water alchemists, collecting whatever rain there was, oiling it with their sweat, conservationists of the bleak, minding the broth, getting it going, one green shoot by one green shoot, nursing each, growing a world. Maybe I exaggerate — I’m proud of my people — but something like that.
So let the kid go, this Canaanite, resourceful and Semitic as themselves. Just because he could be guilty, the elders reasoned, it wasn’t a good idea to have him around. He might, out of spite, put out their oasis. But make sure he comes back. Take something of value. His rings, say, or his animals. Turn this bad apple and good scout back out into the desert with fair warning, fixing him with that stare which had fired the sands. “All right. Ten days. Come back or we fetch you.”
“Hey, Phoenician,” a lawyer calls, “over here.” It’s Farb. He’s standing with a white male, aged thirty-three or — four, well dressed and very nervous. It can’t amount to much, but in my business you don’t cut a lawyer. I pat Farb’s shoulder.
“Shoplifting, right?”
“How about that Phoenician?” Farb says. “Does he know a thing or two?”
“She never did anything like this,” the guy says. “We even have a charge account at the store.”
“Who’s up? Cooper?”
“Cooper,” Farb says, “Cooper, I think.”
“He’ll fix your wife’s bond at five hundred,” I tell the man. He’s biting his nails. “You can make that. What do you need me?”
“He doesn’t want it on his record that he put up collateral with a court,” Farb says.
“You got kids?”
“A son.”
“Seven years old, eight?”
“He’s nine.”
“Your wife’s people, they’re alive?”
“Yes, but…”
“They live in Cincinnati?”
“They’re divorced. I don’t understand what…”
“He’s determining the risk,” Farb explains.
“What risk? I’m good for the money. What do I look like?”
“Everybody’s got a good suit, sonny. They come to court like they’re sitting for portraits in banks.”
“Don’t get excited,” Farb counsels his client, “answer his questions. There’s nothing personal.”
“There’s everything personal,” I say. “She got siblings, your wife? A brother she’s close to?”
“There’s a sister in California, but I don’t…”
“They write letters, they call long distance? Presents, does your sister-in-law send the kid presents? Does she remember his birthday?”
“Usually. I think so. Yes, usually.”
“I’ll ride the river with you, a bridge over troubled waters. My fee is ten percent of the bond. Like show business, like your wife was a movie star instead of a shoplifter. I take the fifty up front. You got fifty bucks? Yes? Done. I’ll see you when Cooper sets the bail. Take this form meanwhile. Fill in the blanks as if you were your wife, and have her sign where I’ve penciled the x.”