Courtroom Control

I have been a bailiff for nineteen years, which is the kind of number you say out loud once and then try not to think about. I turned forty-four in January and celebrated with a meatball sub in the courthouse basement cafeteria, because that is the level of glamour this job has afforded me. I am fine with that. Single for a decade now, by choice, mostly, and I have my routine down to where it almost counts as a personality.

The routine is order. That is the whole appeal of the job, if I am honest with myself, which I try not to be before ten in the morning. Courtrooms run on procedure. Everybody sits where they are told, stands when the judge says stand, and speaks when spoken to. My job is to stand by the door and make sure the building does not fall apart while that happens. Nineteen years of it and I still like it. There is a peace in knowing exactly what your day is going to ask of you.

Then there is Debby Dixon.

She is a defense attorney, twenty-seven, and she has been in my courtroom maybe six months. She is good. Annoyingly good, the kind of good that makes the rest of us look like we are coasting, which most of us are. She objects like she is flicking a light switch, knows the case number of every precedent she cites, and once made a prosecutor so flustered he called the judge "your honor" twice in one sentence. The judge did not find that funny. I did, but I am paid to have an expressionless face, so nobody knows that.

Here is what gets under my skin about her. She notices things. She noticed that I take my coffee break at exactly ten-fifteen. She noticed I keep a spare pen in my breast pocket for witnesses who forgot theirs. She noticed, one Tuesday during a recess, that I straighten my tie before I say "all rise" even though the tie has nothing to do with anything. She stood in the hallway with her trial binder hugged against her chest and told me that, watching me do it, and she had this look on her face like she had caught me in something.

"You really like the rules, don't you, Mr. Hendricks," she said. Not a question, the way she said it.

"Keeps the day moving," I said.

"Uh huh." She tilted her head. She does that. It should not be effective on a grown woman in a navy suit, and yet. "I bet you'd hate it if somebody made up new ones for you. Rules you didn't get to approve first."

I told her I did not know what she meant, which was a lie, and we both knew it was a lie, which is the worst kind of lie to get caught in. She smiled and went back into the courtroom and I spent the next forty minutes of testimony thinking about that smile instead of the defendant's whereabouts on the night in question.

That was in October. I want to be careful with the timeline here because I have caught myself rounding it up to make the story tidier, and that is not the kind of man I am. October. It is February now. She cornered me in the hallway maybe a dozen more times over those months, always during recess, always with some little observation. You breathe slower when the judge is annoyed. You count the jury on your fingers when you think nobody's watching. You have a favorite chair in the law library, third floor, the one by the window, and you get territorial when somebody sits in it.

That last one was true. It is a good chair. I had earned that chair.

The invitation came on a Thursday, late, after the docket cleared. She caught me in the marble hallway doing my last walkthrough, lights off, doors checked, the whole closing ritual I could do asleep and probably have. The building had that after-hours quiet it gets, all the echoes with nothing to bounce off of.

"My car's still in the garage," she said, "and I have about forty pages of discovery to read, and the library on three is the only place in this building with a chair worth sitting in. Care to walk me up, bailiff?"

It was phrased like a request. It was not phrased like a request. And I want to be plain here about what I understood and when, because I did not stumble into anything. She had been circling me for months and I had let her, and we both stood in that hallway knowing exactly what the walk to the third floor was for. She waited for me to say yes out loud. I did. She asked me straight, are you coming up with me, yes or no, and I said yes. That is how it started, with a yes I said while completely sober at six in the evening in my own workplace.

The law library after dark is a different animal. The lamps over the carrels make little pools of light and everything else goes brown and shadowy, and the radiator ticks like it has opinions about the thermostat. She sat in my chair, which was its own kind of statement, and set her bag on the desk.

She took out a silk scarf. Gray, nice, the kind of thing I would never own because I would lose it in a week.

"Wrists," she said, and held it out. "Behind the chair. If you want to. Say so or don't."

Let me explain what went through my head in that moment, except what went through my head was not really words. Nineteen years of being the one who holds the room. The one everybody checks with before they move. And here was this woman, nearly twenty years younger than me, holding out a scarf like it was a hall pass, asking me to hand over the keys.

I sat down in front of her, put my hands behind the chair, and wrapped the scarf around my own wrists the way she told me to. She checked the knot. She actually checked it, turned my hands over, tugged once, made sure I could feel the pull without losing circulation. That detail affected me in a way that I have spent two months trying to file under a correct heading and failed. She cared about doing it right.

"Good," she said. "Now we establish terms. You say red, everything stops, no negotiation, I untie you and we never speak of it. You say yellow, I slow down. Anything else means keep going. Understood?"

"Understood."

"Rico. Say it back to me so I know."

"Red stops everything. Yellow slows down."

"There he is," she said, soft, like I had passed a test I did not know I was taking.

Then she opened the desk drawer and took out a wooden ruler, the old flat kind with the brass edge worn dull, the kind this building has had since before either of us worked in it. She stood over me and dragged it across my thigh, slow, just letting me feel the wood through my uniform trousers.

"Tell me if this is a red," she said.

"It's not."

The first tap was light. Barely anything. The second had a little wrist behind it, and the third more than that, each one landing on the meat of my thigh a few inches apart, a dull warm sting that spread instead of fading. I sat there with my hands bound behind a chair in a government building, being struck with office supplies by a lawyer I had spent six months pretending not to watch, and every part of me was in agreement about it. She watched my face between strokes. She was reading me the way she reads a witness, patient, waiting for the tell, and when my breathing changed she knew she had found it.

"There it is," she said, and tapped me again.

I surprised her, which I do not think happens to her often. She had the ruler poised for another stroke when I said it.

"I want a second word. Gavel."

She lowered the ruler and looked at me, actually looked, the way she looks at opposing counsel right before she takes the file apart. "A second word."

"A different kind of second word. Red is the emergency brake. Gavel is for when I need you to check in. When I need you to stop and look at me and ask if I am actually all right, not just whether I am tied up right." I was aware of how it sounded, a bailiff explaining procedure to a lawyer, but this was procedure. It was the one thing I had expertise in. "And I want you to push. Not play at it. If you are going to do this, do it like you do everything else. I can take more than you think I can, and I would rather you find out where my line is by asking than by guessing short of it forever."

She set the ruler on the desk. "Gavel," she said, testing it. "The bailiff picks his own safe word and it is gavel. Of course it is." She was smiling, but it was the serious version of the smile, the one that means she is filing something away for use. "All right. If you say gavel, I stop, I check in, and we decide together whether we go on. It is a yellow with a conversation attached. And I will push, because you asked me to, and I want you to remember you asked."

"I will remember."

"Good." She rolled the scarf slightly looser, then decided against it and left it where it was. "Because I am about to be less gentle and you should know that was your idea."

Then she had me kneel. My hands were still bound behind the chair, so she had to help me out of it, and the logistics of that, being tipped forward and guided down onto the thin carpet by a woman twenty-seven years old who weighed maybe a hundred and thirty pounds, should have been comic and was not at all. My knees hit the carpet by the window, the one patch of the floor the cleaning crew never seems to reach, and she stood over me with the lamp behind her so I had to look up into the light to see her face.

"Posture," she said. "Sit up. Eyes forward. You know how to kneel like you mean it, you have watched enough arraignments."

So I did. I sat up straight with my hands locked behind me and my shoulders squared and my chin level, a man of forty-four kneeling on government carpet