Russ C (greasemonkey) wrote in rooms, @ 2015-03-22 21:26:00 |
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Entry tags: | !dc comics, *narrative, russ campbell |
Russ: narrative
Who: Russ C
What: Custody agreements
When: Recently
Where: Gotham
Russ had made it years without seeing the inside of a court-room.
When he’d been a kid - young, half-grown, half-fucking-feral, court had been the boogeyman. The bent of stories told over stolen beers around a fire out where the dirt met the skyline and the stars bled out overhead, the husks of broken down cars around them. Court was for losers: you got caught, you went to court. He’d jacked enough cars when he’d been young and risky enough to figure he was gold and untouchable and cocky, and he’d plowed through enough lights touching into red to strain for the sirens and the flash of blues in the rear-view but no one had ever chased him down. Court had stamped the documents he’d figured had ordered his sister gone, but court (and shoes, and ties, and jackets, and men with white collar jobs they took papers to) seemed real fucking far away when the dust got itself inside your clothes and there wasn’t much else for entertainment other than the snow on TV.
Court said you’d fucked up big enough you couldn’t figure out how to fix it yourself, and you couldn’t run fast and far enough to get out of the trouble you’d made yourself. The tie sat over his Adam’s apple, bobbed uncomfortably there, a fat polyester-blend knot that just made Russ itch for worn plaid and honest fucking dirt. He hadn’t pictured himself in a shirt. Hadn’t pictured himself much of anything, one foot in front of the next, he hadn’t looked for the finish-line of the race, hadn’t seen so much as a fucking flag. But he stood when the lot of them stood, when some broad in a robe ushered in like she was used to cutting lines for coffee, and other people thinking she was as important as she thought she was, and the cheap shirt with its package-folds still knife-sharp down the sides, itched under the Goodwill blazer.
Years, and he hadn’t pictured it this fucking ordinary. Strip-lights, and magnolia-yellow walls, and hard benches. He’d pictured something bigger, something that felt like church: reverential. But this, this was just some place people came to work, some place they just made decisions on paperwork that changed people’s lives. He didn’t look at Marina, the knot on his throat bobbed once, twice.
Lawyer had told him he didn’t have a shot. Leaned over the desk, the whine of roadside machinery competing with the gurgle of the heating vents and laid it on him straight, as straight as you could get in Italian loafers. Man wasn’t cheap, two hundred bucks an hour, but Russ liked honesty. You could wrap your hands around it, get acquainted far easier than pretty, paper lies. He was a laborer, blue-collar if he even had a fucking collar, shift work and he hadn’t known his son more than a year. “They go with the mother,” his lawyer had told him, as he eased one finger inside a collar stiffer than the polyester-blend one nestled uncomfortably under the straggle of overly long blond hair at the back of his own neck now. “She’s got herself cleaned up. Got a doctor to sign off on her clean bill of health.” The look he gave him wasn’t unsympathetic: for two hundred an hour, he could afford empathy.
“Go for partial,” his lawyer told him in the small office somewhere in the uptown quarter of Gotham, where the red lights didn’t reach so much as wrap around the corner. “And you’ll get it.”
They hadn’t brought in Nathan. He didn’t want them to, not even if something sharp twisted under his breastbone at the thought of what Nathan would say. All gap-toothed smile, sharp blue eyes under mop of curls: he made Russ think of Ford, and of Ford’s vulpine way of narrowing in on the immediate. He hoped - he could imagine - Nathan arguing to stay home. The place with the blue walls painted with handprints, the place where bedtime stayed the fucking same every night, and food didn’t come in takeout containers. Where the TV was tuned to sport if it wasn’t tuned to cartoons (and OK, they did more of that than the sports) but he could imagine Nathan arguing to leave, same way, and Russ didn’t want to picture either if the latter sounded more like reality.
He didn’t look at her. Didn’t even turn his fucking head. It wasn’t a fight, it wasn’t even off the starting blocks. It was just a break-down, terminated in black and white, a kid’s life torn down the middle. And yeah, he didn’t argue. Didn’t kick off in the lawyer’s office, not with Louis’s latest still ringing in his ears. He didn’t go saving people who needed saving, who the fuck was gonna give him a kid permanent, off the leash, not some respite before they bounced to some place a little more deserving?
The broad in the robe slammed down her gavel, and that was it. Punctuation and he didn’t turn right toward the daycare, primary colors and pictures on the walls, where Nathan was meant to wait until it was all done. Not his week, and not his day, and he turned left, left toward home and a bar, and a beer, and unknotting the damn noose around his neck, and a hope it was the last time he was gonna see court, this century.