The garage catches my attention. It has two closed, retractable doors. There’s a storage room to one side with covered windows. Above it, there appears to be a small apartment with a set of wooden stairs twisting around the corner and apparently up the back. There are two large windows facing the house, one with a broken pane. Ivy is consuming the outer walls, and appears to be making its way through the cracked window.
There’s a certain quaintness about the place.
Miss Birdie bounces through the double french doors with two tall glasses of ice water. “What do you think of my garden?” she asks, taking the seat nearest me.
“It’s beautiful, Miss Birdie. So peaceful.”
“This is my life,” she says, waving her hands expansively, sloshing her water on my feet without realizing it. “This is what I do with my time. I love it.”
“It’s very pretty. Do you do all the work?”
“Oh, most of it. I pay a kid to cut the grass once a week, thirty dollars, can you believe it? Used to get it for five.” She slurps the water, smacks her lips.
“Is that a little apartment up there?” I ask, pointing above the garage.
“Used to be. One of my grandsons lived here for a while. I fixed it up, put in a bathroom, small kitchen, it was real nice. He was in school in Memphis State.”
“How long did he live there?”
“Not long. I really don’t want to talk about him.”
He must be one of those to be chopped from her will.
When you spend much of your time knocking on law office doors, begging for work and getting stiff-armed by bitchy secretaries, you lose your inhibitions. You develop a thick skin. Rejection comes easy, because you learn quickly that the worst thing that can happen is to hear the word “No.”
“Don’t suppose you’d be interested in renting it now?” I venture forth with little hesitation and absolutely no fear of being turned down.
Her glass stops in midair, and she stares at the apartment as if she’s just discovered it. “To who?” she asks.
“I’d love to live there. It’s very charming, and it has to be quiet.”
“Deathly.”
“Just for a little while, though. You know, until I start work and get on my feet.”
“You, Rudy?” she asks in disbelief.
“I love it,” I say with a semi-phony smile. “It’s perfect for me. I’m single, live very quietly, can’t afford to pay much in rent. It’s perfect.”
“How much can you pay?” she asks crisply, suddenly much like a lawyer grilling a broke client.
This catches me off guard. “Oh, I don’t know. You’re the landlord. How much is the rent?”
She rolls her head around, looking wildly at the trees. “How about four, no three hundred dollars a month?”
It’s obvious Miss Birdie’s never been a landlord before. She’s pulling numbers out of the air. Lucky she didn’t start with eight hundred a month. “I think we should look at it first,” I say cautiously.
She’s on her feet. “It’s kinda junky, you know. Been using it for storage for ten years. But we can clean it up. Plumbing works, I think.” She takes my hand and leads me across the grass. “We’ll have to get the water turned on. Not sure about the heating and air. Has some furniture, but not much, old things I’ve discarded.”
She starts up the creaky steps. “Do you need furniture?”
“Not much.” The handrail is wobbly and the entire building seems to shake.
Nine
You make enemies in law school. The competition can be vicious. People learn how to cheat and backstab; it’s training for the real world. We had a fistfight here in my first year when two third-year students started screaming at each other during a mock trial competition. They expelled them, then readmitted them. This school needs the tuition money.
There are quite a few people here I truly dislike, one or two I detest. I try not to hate people.
But at the moment I hate the little snot who did this to me. They publish in this city a record of all sorts of legal and financial transactions. It’s called The Daily Report, and includes, among the filings for divorce and a dozen other vital categories, a listing of yesterday’s bankruptcy activities. My pal or group of pals thought it would be cute to lift my name from yesterday’s sorrows, blow up a cutout from under Chapter 7 Petitions and scatter this little tidbit all around the law school. It reads: “Baylor, Rudy L., student; Assets: $1,125 (exempt); Secured Debts: $285 to Wheels and Deals Finance Company; Un secured Debts: $5,136.88; Pending Actions: (1) Collection of past due account by Texaco, (2) Eviction from The Hampton; Employer: None; Attorney, Pro Se.”
Pro Se means I can’t afford a lawyer and I’m doing it on my own. The student clerk at the front desk of the library handed me a copy as soon as I walked in this morning, said he’d seen them lying all over the school, even tacked to the bulletin boards. He said, “Wonder who thinks this is funny?”
I thanked him and ran to my basement corner, once again ducking between the stacks, evading contact with familiar faces. Classes will be over soon and I’ll be out of here, away from these people I can’t stand.
I’m scheduled to visit with Professor Smoot this morning, and I arrive ten minutes late. He doesn’t care. His office has the mandatory clutter of a scholar too bright to be organized. His bow tie is crooked, his smile is genuine.
We first talk about the Blacks and their dispute with Great Benefit. I hand him a three-page summary of their case, along with my ingenious conclusions and suggested courses of action. He reads it carefully while I study the wadded balls of paper under his desk. He’s very impressed, and says so over and over. It’s my advice to the Blacks that they contact a trial lawyer and pursue a bad-faith action against Great Benefit. Smoot wholeheartedly agrees. Little does he know.
All I want from him is a passing grade, nothing else. Next we talk about Miss Birdie Birdsong. I tell him she is quite comfortable and wants to remake her will. I keep the details to myself. I present to him a five-page document, the revised last will and testament for Miss Birdie, and he scans it quickly. Says it looks fine without seeing anything in it. Legal Problems of the Elderly has no final exam, no papers to be submitted. You attend class, visit the geezers, do the case summaries. Smoot gives you an A.
Smoot has known Miss Birdie for several years. Evidently she’s been the queen of Cypress Gardens for a while, and he’s seen her twice a year on visits there with his students. She’s never been inclined to take advantage of the free legal advice before, he says, pondering and tugging at the bow tie. Says he’s surprised to learn she’s wealthy.
He’d really be surprised to learn she’s about to be my landlord.
Max Leuberg’s office is around the corner from Smoot’s. He left a message for me at the front desk of the library, said he needed to see me. Max is leaving when classes are over. He’s been on loan for two years from Wisconsin, and it’s time for him to go. I’ll probably miss Max a little when both of us are gone from here, but right now it’s hard to imagine any lingering feelings of sentiment for anything or anybody connected with this law school.
Max’s office is filled with cardboard liquor boxes. He’s packing to move, and I’ve never seen such a mess. We reminisce for a few awkward moments, a desperate effort to make law school sound provocative. I’ve never seen him subdued before. It’s almost as if he’s genuinely sad to be leaving. He points to a stack of papers in a Wild Turkey box. “That’s for you. It’s a bunch of recent materials I’ve used in bad-faith cases. Take it. Might come in handy.”