But by the end of the year, when he was almost well again, he adopted the name all our classmates had called him and would only answer to Skeet. His speech restored, he relished the slow, methodical, precise pronunciation of his name. “My name is Skeet,” he would say, and the way he said it seemed sinister.
One autumn evening after school, the air metallic and cool, we all went to play in the dead fall light that filled the outdoor lot of Jemson’s Brick 8c Tile down the street. On a cement island in the middle of the shipping yard was the neighborhood’s only really tall tree. We all liked to hang and swing from the tree, and that early evening our swinging brought down from the tree’s highest branches a bird’s nest. It went wheeling to the pavement. There were two eggs in it, and two chicks just recently hatched, one of which seemed to have been hurt in the fall. It was shiny and newborn, its nascent feathers wet and spiky like hair, and it was struggling, its beak opening and closing, one free wing flapping about.
“Look, look, it’s hurt,” somebody said.
“It’s not hurt. It’s just starting to come out of the shell.”
“No, not that one! Look! The wounded one!”
Everyone peered at the broken little bird, and after a while I looked around for Janie and Skeet. Janie was at my side, but Skeet was walking away. He was walking straight to the brick piles. I stood up from the huddle and watched him go. He came walking back into the group with a single red brick held high over his head. It was a remarkable thing to see, given that months before he could barely raise his own arms. I realized what he intended to do, and I stepped back swiftly. In the pause that followed the other kids looked up and, understanding, all scattered backwards. We waited. Skeet said something and let the brick fall from on high. We all approached slowly and looked down at the devastation. Flecks of blood and a yellow ooze spread out from under the brick. The wounded bird’s lone wing was still flapping feebly. A few of the children ran off crying. Another, bewildered, just said “cool.” In time they all wandered home, slowly and silently, but Janie and I stood with Skeet for a long time, until the one bird finally stopped moving. On our way back, I asked Skeet what he had said before dropping the brick. He repeated it, but so softly we still couldn’t hear him. “What?” Janie asked again. He said it once more, loudly and sternly and distinctly now — “I’m not the wounded one.”
The last time I ever saw Skeet we had an awkward encounter. My graduation from law school was kind of a miracle in my mind, not because I didn’t do well — I was an average student — but because I just never imagined it was-possible. Janie knew how much it meant to me. It meant just as much to her, I think, and she knew how much it would have meant to our mother. So Janie arranged a celebration picnic, on that first Sunday in June after the graduation ceremony, in Seneca Park. We were going to have friends of mine, mostly new friends from the college and from law school, Janie would bring Hal, and when my new girlfriend asked if we wouldn’t have any family, Janie looked at me and we both said “Skeet” out loud.
Skeet was sort of beyond the pale around all us pasty types. His sheer bulk, his thick arms and neck, and his new buzz cut set him apart almost as soon as he pulled onto the grass in his hatchback, his car stereo blaring, and stepped out to join us. We’d been sitting in the sun, on the grass, drinking wine and eating cheese, and Skeet’s arrival put a stop to our drunken chatter. I didn’t know how I would introduce him, but I was suddenly glad he was there. There, where my future was supposed to start, I had a taste of my indiscriminate and reprobate past, setting me apart like a brash tattoo from my new friends and classmates. But as the afternoon proceeded and I watched Skeet work so hard at simply existing among us, I was ashamed. My past was Skeet’s present, and I was wrong to claim any share in it, especially now that I was poised to walk away.
Barbara and Stan invited him to sit, and they tried to get him to talk about his work, but when you’ve just been fired as bouncer at a bar for brutally beating a patron, and now you’re collecting loans for Jimmie Lavender the loan shark, the talk does not go far and everyone sits empty-handed. Later Skeet dropped under the tree and began flirting with Barbara and Margaret, who were fixing the food. He sat with his hands behind his head and gnawed at a blade of grass, Marlon Brando-like. And when he gave me a wink, though Barbara saw it and got up to walk away in silent disgust, I winked back.
He was at ease in a way I almost couldn’t believe, far less removed and far more present than I could ever remember. Later Skeet and I walked off together. If I had been glad to see him, he seemed more happy for me, and happy to have been invited at all. He made me feel as though Janie and I hadn’t forgotten him — which we had — but that he had forgotten us, so busy and moving and new had his life become. He was overdoing it. There was something hollow and vulnerable in his enthusiasm. Still, he insisted — he had big deals going. Responsibilities. Work to do. That’s what it was all about now. Never better, never happier. Moving up. “Making my own way now,” he said, as though there were any other way.
“A lawyer,” he said, shaking his head, after we’d come to a stop. We were standing at the edge of the public golf course. Skeet turned and beamed at me, seemingly more proud of me than I was of myself. He held his head back and looked at me steadily. Then his admiration transformed into a leer. “Whooda thunk it,” he said, and in the space of those three words I felt no pride at all.
He poked me in the side and laughed. “You wouldn’t bust me, would you?”
“I can’t arrest people, Skeet,” I said, brushing away his arm. “I’m a lawyer, not a cop.”
“Yeah. But that’s not what I asked. That’s technical,” he said. “I asked, would you if you could?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No, Skeet.”
“You’d stand by me, right? Keep me out of the can.”
“Right.”
His expression veered sharply from suspicion to anger to wild-eyed amusement. He looked at me hard one last time, then smiled. “The fuck you would,” he said.
When I took the bar last month I was asked to take a pledge. A pledge to uphold the law. I know a little about the law. Now it’s even fair to say I “practice” it. But that phrase — “a practitioner of the law” — has always had an odd ring to my ear. Like a practicioner of magic, an instructor in illusions, a dabbler in the dark arts. Thinking of it that way, though, maybe it’s not so odd after all. Maybe it’s perfectly appropriate. Maybe all I do is dabble in illusions — the illusion of the law. I’d never voice that suspicion to a single one of my peers (a key to success in this line of work, one learns early on, is playing dumb and holding your tongue at the right time). Skeet knew nothing of the law itself. But in his limited way, maybe Skeet knew the only laws worth knowing.
Last week, on Saturday morning, Janie and I met again at Skeet’s apartment to clear out all that was left over. The few clothes, the dishes, the hot plate and filthy bedding, the archival implements and the butterfly boxes. The mattress and box spring we dumped in the alley. The huge desk and swivel chair, though Janie pegged them as potential “antiques,” demanded more energy than we could summon. We left them for the owner to keep, along with an envelope containing a check for the balance of Skeet’s rent. After sweeping the floors, we locked up and left. It was ten in the morning. We were finished.