The Greening of Ben Brown by Michael Strelow

The Greening of Ben Brown by Michael Strelow

Author:Michael Strelow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hawthorne Books
Published: 2011-08-22T00:00:00+00:00


THE TRIAL IS PART CIRCUS, PART PRANK, PART LATE 1960S guerrilla theater.

It occurs to Andrew again that he has found himself smack in the center of the Green Man’s movie without having auditioned, without a screen test, without consent, if you don’t count stepping off onto the island that became a raft. An excellent adventure. There could be many tales to tell, tales superior to rocking the Green Man because there he was, talking right to you, hopping around the island and the Horchow bank. Then Marge, harder to corroborate, then Jake, the lawyer/priest/outboard repairman, splendidly everything. But Andrew feels uneasy about refusing his parents’ offer of a “real” lawyer, a family friend with a strong record of defense, a man known in East Leven legal circles, who lunched with judges and police chiefs and civic luminaries.

John and Margaret James found their only son an accessory to felony trespass and mischief. He was driving the getaway island. John felt his job as public relations man for the state was obliquely under attack by association. Horchow had had some problems with the State Department of Environmental Quality because waste solvents routinely dumped in a pit in the yard had reputedly leached into the river. Nothing proved, just that there had appeared downstream some of the chemicals from the solvents and Horchow was a “likely source,” the report said. They had relined the pits to let the solvents evaporate but admitted no guilt. Still, sometimes in heavy winter rains the pits filled, though they never ran over according to Horchow records; once they spilled into the dirt. And now there was his son mixed up in this clumsy public-relations monster that could turn on Horchow and then come tumbling toward everyone, where he would have to field the inquiries, maybe even with time, the accusations and demands for public responsibility. He had seen it happen before. The public remembering, like wet snow, clung to the business of East Leven, and now this Green Man caper with his son sent the hairs on John James’s neck erect.

Margaret James was a young girl when Anne Doucette sacrificed her sweet neck for the young people of East Leven. With Margaret’s darkhaired beauty she never needed rail-walking to gain attention, and she floated through grade school and junior high and high school then into the arms of John under the protection of the redeeming ghost of Anne Doucette. Her marriage was blessed and white; her son, Andrew, was a pearl of singular price. This trial and two parking tickets (paid within twenty-four hours) were the whole of her encounters with the forces of law and order. In what Jake had called the “friends pew,” she waited in the courtroom while John conferred with a lawyer friend, who had as a favor agreed to give John a running judgment about how Jake handled the proceedings on Andrew’s behalf. The lawyer had advised that smart council would have separated the two defendants into two trials and then distanced young Andrew as far as possible from the unpredictable Green Man.



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