Rape by Joyce Carol Oates

behind at Fort Niagara State Park, Walt had had to sit down, he’d been so shocked.
    â€œThose fuckers! Sons of bitches! Jumping bail! All I donefor them! All I done for them!” Hot tears sprang into Walt’s eyes. He was not a man susceptible to emotions of much subtlety. In the course of a day he swerved between irascibility and phlegmatic affability. He could be good-natured. He was given to say that he lived for summers, his outboard boat. Fishing on Lake Ontario off his brother’s place at Olcott. He was a family man, too. He’d been married to Irma for thirty-three years. Six kids, most of them okay. The girls were the ones he’d most worried over. Marv and Lloyd, they’d always been trouble. Marv especially. And now this.
    For each of the Pick brothers, as for the other defendants in the case, bail had been set at $75,000. The actual sum paid out by Walt Pick, to a bail bondsman, had been $7,500 each. It was the goddamned lawyer whose fee was astronomical: Kirkpatrick demanded a retainer of $30,000 for each brother. His hourly fee was $250 out of court, $350 in court. There would be other fees, Walt Pick didn’t doubt. The Pick family, like the families of the other defendants, had had to take out a second mortgage on their home. Walt Pick had been humbled, forced to borrow from relatives. He’d had to sell, at a heartbreaking loss, his twenty-foot motorboat on whose scummy white prow was hand-painted in red letters Condor II .
    Irma Pick believed fiercely that her sons were innocent, but Walt guessed they were guilty as hell. They’d been in trouble with the law before. And some of it female trouble. The other girls had not dared to press charges with the police but the others had not been hurt as badly as the Maguire woman. Walt was informed this was serious, rape and aggravated assaultwere serious felonies, his sons could be sent to Attica for thirty years. Thirty years! They’d be old men when they got out. Old as their old man now. If they got out at all.
    Walt was advised by Father Muldoon, the pastor of St. Timothy’s Parish: hire the best damn criminal lawyer you can afford, he will plea-bargain the charges down to less than ten years, and for Lloyd, being younger, maybe less. If the boys behaved themselves in prison they could be out in as few as four or five years.
    Jay Kirkpatrick was the man. Kirkpatrick will cost you an arm and a leg and your left testicle but Kirkpatrick is the man.
    Others had spoken of Kirkpatrick, too. The Haabers had the idea the defendants should hire a “legal team.” Like O. J. Simpson, that kind of strategy. They could pool their resources. Kirkpatrick would be Marv’s and Lloyd’s lawyer but provide advice to the other lawyers. A team of lawyers, not individuals. A team made you think of sports, a game. A good rough game, that if you had Kirkpatrick as head coach, you might win.
    Walt said shit, far as he was concerned it was no-win. It was lose-lose. His hard-earned money and Condor II down the drain. Goddamn those sons of his!
    He’d hired Kirkpatrick, though. Like a gambler risking all his cash on a toss of the dice.
    You had to be impressed with Kirkpatrick. An hour’s interview with the boys and already he’d allowed them and their father to see how “rape” could be reinterpreted as “consensual sex”—“sex-for-hire.”The Maguire woman had been drinking, her testimony was shaky. A good cross-examination and she’d be discredited. And the daughter allegedly hiding in a corner of the boathouse had not actually seen anyone rape anyone by her own account. She could not testify that other young men had not entered the boathouse and raped her mother after the departure of the Picks and their companions.
    Kirkpatrick said, “There are two sides to every story, in a trial. The winning side, and the other.”
    Walt whistled through his teeth. Here was genius!
    Even so,