I hardly ever acted without thinking, even then, but this was so outrageous that I yelled to them to stop. One of them yelled back over his shoulder, “Shut up, you little fucker, or we’ll shit on you.”
They were finished by then, anyway, and they zipped up and walked out, still laughing. The rest of the boys in the locker room walked out quickly, laughing nervously or frowning with shame and disgust.
Tommy was stuck tight in the locker, urine dripping off his chin and nose and puddling at his feet. I got the pen out of the latch, and pulled the locker open, wetting my hand in the process.
Tommy squeezed out of the locker and immediately began taking off his clothes. He wouldn’t look at me. “Well, hey, they got me good, didn’t they,” he said with a sound that could have been a laugh or a sob. “Yeah, yeah, that was a good joke all right,” he said in a steadier voice.
“Tommy, that wasn’t any kind of a joke,” I said. I was so mad and so embarrassed for him that I could hardly talk. “I’m sorry I couldn’t stop it. Let’s go to the principal right now and tell him what happened.”
Tommy was stripped off by now, but he looked at me and said, “John, I appreciate you at least trying. Now I’m going to take another shower and find some sweats that I can wear to class.”
“Do you want me to go ahead and tell the principal?” I asked.
“There ain’t no need to tell the principal. Them boys was just having some fun,” Tommy said.
“Come on, Tommy. That’s not right. They ought to be punished.”
He stared up at me intently, and said, “It happened to me, John, not you. I don’t want the principal to know, you got it?”
It was one of those three or four things that happen to every kid, when he learns the world is made up of the strong and the weak, and that fairness is not a universally held ideal. It took weeks for it to fade in my mind, but in the meantime Tommy was his usual self, talking and laughing with everyone, showing up at all the games, pep rallies and dances as if he was the biggest man on campus.
About a month after the locker room incident, on a warm fall day, a police car pulled up in front of the school while most of the senior class was sitting outside eating lunch. The students watched curiously as the two cops, acting on an anonymous tip, went in the building and met the principal, who was coming out of his office with a bolt cutter. The principal guided them to the locker of one of the boys who had peed on Tommy, and snipped the combination lock off. In a brown paper grocery sack, the policemen found eight one ounce sandwich bags of marijuana. Subsequent tests would show that one of the bags was covered with the boy’s fingerprints. That bag, in addition to the marijuana, contained some bread crumbs and mayonnaise residue.
They walked back outside, and the principal pointed to the owner of the locker. The two cops walked over to him and announced that he was under arrest for possession of illegal drugs with intent to sell. They made him lie flat on the sidewalk while they roughly searched him and handcuffed him. Then they yanked him up, read him his rights, and threw him in the back of the patrol car.
Some of those present said he worked his mouth open and closed like a fish, but no words came out. Everyone else sat in stunned silence. As the police car drove off, the principal said loudly, “That is what happens to drug pushers. Let it be a lesson to you.”
The football player’s father had held him back a year so he would have a better shot at playing college ball for a big program. The strategy had worked and his son had already accepted a full scholarship at the University of Alabama starting the next fall. His father couldn’t have known that the same strategy would result in his son being tried as an adult and sentenced to five years. We never saw him again.
The other boy who had degraded Tommy was one of the wealthiest kids in school. His family lived on a twenty-acre estate outside of town, complete with horses that no one ever rode. It was next door to the small working farm where Tommy’s parents continued to try to eke out a living.
About a month after the other player was arrested, the rich kid was on his way home from a dance about two in the morning. He turned off the main road onto the long tree-lined drive that led to his house, and punched the accelerator on the Trans Am he had gotten for his sixteenth birthday. Halfway down the drive, going eighty miles an hour, the low-slung car hit a six-inch thick dead limb that had fallen from an overhanging tree and lay diagonally across the road. The car went airborne and veered to the left, twisting on its axis in mid-air and impacting a foot thick oak while it was upside down and ten feet off the ground. Every one agreed that it was a miracle the driver survived. He came back to school three months later, walking with a cane, dragging his left foot and carrying a towel to mop up the drool he couldn’t stop.
I was fifteen years old, and there were some things I couldn’t even imagine yet, so it was years before I suspected a link between Tommy and his tormentors’ misfortunes. We had never been close friends, and that didn’t change. He went his way, and I went mine. After graduation, I went off to college, and Tommy took a job at a local manufacturing plant. I didn’t see him for years, until one night Kathleen and I were pulled over by a sheriff’s car as we came back from a client’s Christmas party out in the county. I knew I had been speeding, and I was nervously trying to remember how many drinks I had had and figure out whether I should take the breathalyzer test. I rolled the window down as the deputy walked up beside me, and a familiar voice said, “Would you step out of the car please, sir?”
Before I could get out, Tommy was shining his light on me, and then asked, “Shit, John, is that you?”
We stood out in the cold on the shoulder of the road for half an hour, catching up on old times, me talking too much out of relief that I wasn’t going to spend the night in jail. He stuck his head in the window to say hello to Kathleen, but she stayed in the running car for warmth. He had joined the sheriff’s department three years earlier and thought it was a great job. He was impressed that I was a lawyer. We promised to stay in touch, but of course didn’t.
A couple of years later, just before Kathleen left me, Tommy called me at the office one day. The area of the county in which his parents had farmed had developed like everywhere else. They had both died within the last few years. Tommy, as sole heir, was receiving offers from developers who wanted to build subdivisions. Tommy had received one offer from a man who didn’t want to buy the land, but wanted to go in with Tommy as partners to develop it themselves. He promised that Tommy would make at least twice as much money this way.
Tommy told me that he had checked the guy out through the sheriff’s department and couldn’t find anything of a criminal nature against him. But he wanted me to see what I could find out about him.
I asked the head of our real estate section what he knew about the developer. He had me pull the door of his office shut, said not to quote him, and told me the developer would be indicted before the end of the year on a variety of federal charges.
When I called Tommy back and told him not to do the deal, he said he had already decided that it was the way to make the most money. He had all the documents and was just about to sign them. He appreciated my advice, but thought he would go ahead and deed over the property to a limited liability company that the developer had formed. I told him I couldn’t say why, but it would be a big mistake. A lot of cops, like a lot of lawyers, think that their ability to judge character is infallible. Tommy had decided the developer was honest, and he didn’t want to believe he might have been wrong. He pressed me for more information, but I told him that was all I could say. Tommy hung up the phone still undecided on what he was going to do.
A week later, the headline on the business page of The Commercial Appeal announced that the developer had been indicted on sixty counts of bank and mail fraud. Tommy called me that afternoon and thanked me for my advice. After I told him he was welcome, and he told me to send him a bill, he asked, “John, what