Sometimes. Sometimes you can change what’s there, sometimes what’s there changes you.
LARKIN WATCHED Pike leaving, and in the moment he stepped outside, he was framed in the open door of their Echo Park house like a picture in a magazine, frozen in time and space. A big man, but not a giant. More average in size than not. With the sleeves covering his arms, and his face turned away, he seemed heartbreakingly normal, which made her love him even more. A superman risked nothing, but an average man risked everything.
The buzz cut and his friend came over. “You are coming with us.” The buzz cut spoke the words with a careful, starched pronunciation that made me think of Arnold Schwarzenegger, only the accent was Russian. “Sez who?” I can slay ’em with these comebacks.
Pike closed his eyes, and filled his lungs, then pushed with his diaphragm. He breathed deep again. Pranayamic breathing from the hatha yoga. Pike lost himself in a cool forest glade, dappled by sunlight filtered through lime green leaves. When he breathed, he smelled moss and sumac. His pulse slowed. He grew calm. He centered. Pike.
She said, “Oh, Studly.” I could see her smile. “The law is not about justice. You know that.
Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.
Throughout the meal Lucy would grin with the knowledge of her secret, and I would ask, “What?” and she would say, “You’ll see.” Then everyone stopped looking at Johnny Depp and turned toward the door. Lucy grinned wider, and I looked, too. Joe came over, gliding across the floor as the room parted for him. Tall men in sleeveless sweatshirts and dark glasses and brilliant red tattoos tend to stand out in Spago. Even Johnny Depp was looking.
We drove slowly, neither of us speaking, and worked our way out of the Marina, up through Venice, and along the beach. It was automatic driving, going through the motions without conscious thought or direction, movement without destination or design. Pike hunkered low in the passenger’s seat, his face dark in the bright sun, his dark lenses somehow molten and angry. It is not good to see Joe Pike angry. Better to see a male lion charge at close quarters. Better to hear someone scream, “Incoming!
Lucy said, “The law is an adversarial contest that defines justice as staying within the rules and seeing the game to its conclusion. Justice is reaching a conclusion. It has very little to do with right and wrong. The law gives us order. Only men and women can give us what you want to call justice.
The Predators The African lion makes a kill only twice out of every ten hunts. Leopards do better, catching their prey twenty-five percent of the time, and cheetahs do best of all the big cats, with a kill ratio of nearly fifty percent. The deadliest four-legged African predator is not a big cat. It cannot be outrun or outdistanced, its pursuit is relentless, and it captures its prey nine out of every ten hunts. The most dangerous predator in Africa is the wild dog.
Cole stared at the Pinocchio clock, then a small ceramic figurine of Jiminy Cricket a client had given him. Let your conscience be your guide. Everyone needed a Jiminy.
A woman I know gave me a build-it-yourself bird-feeder kit for Christmas, so I built it, and hung it from the eve of my roof high enough to keep the birds save from my cat. But the birds scratch the seed out of the feeder, then fly down to the deck and eat the seed. They know there’s a cat, but still they go down to pick at the seed. When you think about it, people are often like this, too.
Because of the wind, the crows were pointing in one direction but traveling in another. I wondered if they knew it, and, knowing it, understood it, or if they were simply oblivious, carried along by a force that was felt but not seen. The same thing happens to people, but most of the time they don’t know it, or when they know it, they think it an action of their own devising. They are usually wrong.
I leaned against the fence and crossed my arms and stared at her. After a while she looked over and said, “Why are you staring at me?” “Because I am the Lord High Keeper of the Knowledge of Right and Wrong, and I am trying to figure out what to do.” She blinked at me. “Jiminy Cricket,” I said. “He was also Counselor in Moments of Temptation, and Guide Along the Straight and Narrow Path. You need that.
She was looking at me expectantly, so I nodded. “Sure.” If you can at least look smart, people will assume that you are smart.
When long-term convicts were first released they often experienced a form of agoraphobia – a fear of open spaces. The prison counselors had a special name for this type of agoraphobia when they attributed it to convicts – the fear of life. Freedom gave a man choices and choices could be terrifying. Every choice was a potential failure.
The attendant smiled a goodbye at the door. “You look much better.” “I’ve achieved a measure of peace with my uncertainty.
That Sunday, the sun floated bright and hot over the Los Angeles basin, pushing people to the beaches and the parks and into backyard pools to escape the heat. The air buzzed with the nervous palsy it gets when the wind freight-trains in from the deserts, dry as bone, and cooking the hillsides into tar-filled kindling that can snap into flames hot enough to melt an auto body.
There is great audacity in the willingness to change, more than a little optimism, and a serious dose of courage. It.
Prove yourself brave, truthful, and unselfish, and someday you will be a real boy.’ The Blue Fairy said that. In Pinocchio.