There was no discouraging Benny from doing what he wanted to do. With other kids on my caseload, if I said something was best for them, they believed me. Why not? I was the adult in charge, oftentimes the only adult they had ever seen take charge. True, some would look down at their hands and ask me if I could explain this stuff to their parents and we would walk into the hall and make decisions by consortium. I was always clear, though, to explain to the child, separately, that the final decision was his alone. But Benny always took the reins of his case from the beginning to the end. His parents never appeared, so there was never anyone else to take the reins. Prosecutors would ask, "Don't you have any client control, counselor?" All I could do was shrug. They didn't know who was in the saddle.

Police reports are laden with the fascinating tales: Benny climbing steel wire fences, eluding them at the last minute; Benny sitting calmly in the security offices of the largest department store in the Northwest, coyly answering a neophyte official's questions and springing away at the last instant. He was Benny, Benny Armande. How dare they leave an amateur in charge?

And always legions of squad cars were called out in pursuit of this bony, high-Afro'd desperado, who was never known to have shot at anything. The gun he always carried was a prop. Without it there would have been no chase. Apparently, the south King County cops never looked at his rap sheet long enough to figure out what they really had on their hands: a small-time petty crook who never stole anything more valuable than school clothes, hardly worth the effort to recover. But he'd tricked them into providing his entertainment in the dangerous game, where he stood larger than life, always armed, the cloud of black and whites chasing him. He was the star of his own western, filmed in the small towns of Kent Valley, beneath snow-capped Mount Rainier.

Mary, another black lawyer and I talked Benny into going to lunch one day, after a pre-trial hearing. We took him to McDonald's. I was almost two years into Benny's representation and tired of trying to change him with words. But Mary, new and fresh, sat across from Benny, smiling easily, trying to catch his hard eyes.

"We will drive you today," she said. "Today is the day to go to the job corps office. Today is the best day to do anything, anything important." Benny sat silently. Lifted the burger to his lips with his bony hands. The right hand had a long, feminine pinky nail, the two gold rings glittering around his finger, promises of what his world could do for him if he shunned us.

"I'll go," he said. "I'll go. Can't go today, though."

When we were done with lunch, we walked back to the car, (Mary thinking maybe we would drive there anyway; I could see it in her eyes). When we looked up from the car handles, me with the key still in my hand, he was gone.

Then one day, a few weeks later, I was walking into the courthouse attorney room when the phone rang. Mark, another lawyer, picked it up and looked at me with the phone still to his ear, hand cupped over the mouthpiece. "It's Benny Armande's mother," he said, and the laughter erupted from my throat before thought kicked in. I took the phone, thinking for sure that it was my office, my own son with a question or a cop returning a call.

"You're such a joker, Mark."

"Who is this, really?" I said into the mouthpiece.

"Benny's been shot in the head," said the throaty voice on the other end, a woman.

I fell into a chair.

"Will you come to ICU, please?"

"Yes. Yes I will."

"Will you help me? There is something I need."

"I am on my way."

When I arrived, there were doctors and nurses covered in white gowns and masks. Rooms were divided by plastic curtains. In the bed, Benny was propped and his eyes were the same, clear and hard. I thought he had made it, unscathed, like usual. But there was a gauze bandage swathing his entire head except for the eyes and jaw line. I was comforted by the clarity in his eyes and came to realize that there were heads floating around the bed, big heads, small heads, heads dark like polished ebony, like Benny's head. This was Benny's clan. My God, these were his people. A woman stroked a bony, dark-brown hand with her own full, caramel-colored fingers. I recognized the one long nail on the skinny hand within hers. I looked up. His face hadn't changed since I'd arrived. His hand was limp.

"He blew his skull off," she said. "There's nothing under there," pointing to the bandages. The people cleared a place for "the lawyer."

Next page | Something was bound to go wrong