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Ebook has 602 lines and 59978 words, and 13 pages

NIGHT COURT

BY NORMAN ARKAWY

The old courthouse was in the unreconstructed part of town. No buses ran out here, and the only way that Stan and Julie could reach the court was on foot, threading their way through the debris of neglect and vandalism that littered the narrow streets.

This was a part of New York that Julie had never seen. Twentieth century tenements, dimly illuminated by ancient incandescent lamps, lined the rubble-filled streets, where garbage and the decaying carcasses of poisoned rats lay stinking in the gutters. The night was warm, but Julie shivered. She hurried along at Stan's side, trying to hold her breath to shut out the unpleasant smells.

They stopped at the edge of the sidewalk across the street from the court and watched a crowd of people milling about the entrance, anxiously pressing to the box office to try to get hard-to-get tickets.

"Look at that mob!" Julie said. "We'll never get in!" She tried to sound disappointed, but she knew that she could not hide her feeling of relief. She didn't want to go in. She wanted to go away, back to the clean, pretty city she knew.

Stan smiled and patted her hand. "You underestimate me, honey. Little Stanley knows how to take care of himself. I knew there'd be a crowd tonight, so...." He drew two tickets from his pocket. "If you don't reserve 'em, you don't deserve 'em, I always say!"

He took her hand, and they started across the street toward the courthouse. It was a bleak, gray, stone-faced building whose ornate sculptured trim was weather worn and darkened with age. Once an aspiration to architectural beauty, it was pathetically ugly, a melancholy reminder of a bygone and possibly better era.

A modern theater marquee had been incongruously added to the old structure and, atop the shiny new addition, huge letters of light spelled out NIGHT COURT. Smaller cast aluminum letters protruded upward from the metal rim of the arcing canopy and formed the words of a motto: "Judge not, that ye be not judged". Bold type plastered across the gleaming glass facade of the marquee loudly proclaimed: "NEW SHOW NIGHTLY".

Stan and Julie pushed through the congestion outside the entrance of the court. A dizzying confusion of elbows and backs and sweating, eager faces surrounded them. Stan squeezed through the seething mass of people and, holding tightly to his hand, Julie followed. For the tenth--or hundredth--time, she was sorry that she had come. But it was too late to turn back now.

Stan showed his tickets to the guard at the door, and they were ushered politely inside where a uniformed woman with a military bearing guided them to their seats.

"Your ID cards, please," the young woman said.

Julie was startled by the request, and alarmed. A confiscated ID card meant trouble--police trouble! "Why?" she asked, nervously, "What did we do?"

Stan smiled knowingly. "It's just a formality," he assured her. "They give it back to you when you leave." He handed the usher his card.

"And yours, miss?"

Hesitantly, Julie took out her wallet. A cold premonition urged her to stop, to leave now, before it was too late. Then she saw Stan's amused eyes grinning at her and she reminded herself that it was already too late for her to leave. She gave the girl her ID card.

The usher smiled mechanically. She handed them each a program and hurried away up the aisle.

"Don't worry, honey," Stan said, "you'll get it back." He held his program up for her to admire. "Pretty snazzy, huh?"

The page was set up attractively but, Julie thought, the quotations seemed inappropriate. What was the purpose of the court, if not to judge?

"I still can't figure it out," Stan said, as if he had read her thoughts. He reached over and tapped Julie's program with his finger. "This is the third time I've been here, and you can believe me, honey, they both judge and mete out justice in this place!" He grinned at her. "This 'judge not' business doesn't make sense!"

Julie said nothing. There was nothing to say.

The room was rapidly filling up now, and she watched the people slowly filing in. She was fascinated by the looks of anticipatory pleasure in their faces, the whole place tingled with barely repressed excitement.

The spectators packed into the room until every seat was taken and they were standing, eight deep, in the rear of the court. Scanning their faces, Julie could feel--could almost taste--the many varied emotions that radiated from them: amusement, lust, hatred, curiosity, vengeance. It was a puzzling combination.

Julie began to feel sick. She did not like the hungry look on Stan's face or the merciless atmosphere in the courtroom. Why had she come?

She stifled a shudder. She knew why she had come. She had come because Stan wanted her to and, to be honest, because she had been curious to see what the Show was like. Now that she was here, she could not call the whole thing off just because her curiosity was satisfied or because she was too squeamish to enjoy what many people considered the best entertainment in town. She had no right to ruin Stan's evening.

She tried to assume a casual interest in the impending events. "What are all these lines for?" she asked weakly, indicating the horizontal lines that crossed the inner pages and were bisected by three vertical lines into four columns of uneven width. "It looks like a ledger."

"It is, sort of," Stan said. "Y'see, honey, this is a scorecard. In the first column, you put the name of the accused; in the second, the offense he's charged with; in the third, his plea; and in the fourth, the disposition of the case. Up here," he explained, showing her the appropriate place, "you fill in the name of the presiding magistrate. And here," he continued, "you put in the date. It makes a nice souvenir. If you fill it out right, you can look at it six months from now and remember all the fun, just as if it were happening all over again."

"Fun?" Julie's voice cracked.

"Sure!" Stan said with enthusiasm. "It's a terrific show! Everyone has a good time. Well, anyhow ..." and he chuckled, "everyone but the bums!" He laughed.

A man in the row in front of them turned around and looked at Julie. Perspiration glistened in an oily film on his round, pudgy moon-face. A lewd grin twisted his mouth. "First timer?" he asked.

Stan grinned back at him, sharing a comradeship of common experience. "Yeah. I kept telling her she didn't know what she was missing. Finally convinced her to give it a try. I've been here twice before, myself," he added proudly.

"Yeah? Me too!" the man said. "Guess that makes us real old pros: third timers!" He laughed and mopped his face with a crumpled handkerchief. "Damn! it's hot in here!"

Mild embarrassment and a violent dislike for the oily-skinned man combined to redden Julie's face in a hot blush. She shifted uncomfortably in her seat.

"Y'know, I never thought of it before," Stan said to the man in front, "but now that you mention it, I don't know of anybody who's been here three times." A smile of accomplishment spread onto his face. "I'll bet I'm the first one in my sector!"

A growing anger blended into Julie's feeling of disgust. "I don't see that it's anything to be proud of," she said coldly.

Stan's laugh was a derisive bray. "She talks just like a first timer, doesn't she?" The man in front of them nodded knowingly, again sharing with Stan the common bond of experience.

"The next thing you know," Stan jeered kiddingly, "she'll be preaching to us like one of those crackpot reformers."

The revulsion that Julie felt must have been clearly evident now. Stan smiled fondly and put his arm around her shoulder. "I'm only kidding, honey," he half-apologized.

"What's so wrong about the reformers?" Julie demanded, angrily shrugging away his arm. "Why shouldn't men be given another chance? What...?"

"He's right, honey," Stan said. "These joes don't have any homes or jobs or families or friends. They don't even have ID cards."

"No ID cards?" That was impossible! But Julie was beginning to learn that many impossible things could happen in a world that most citizens knew nothing about. "Then how can they be expected to get jobs? You've got to have an ID card in order to be assigned...."

"That's the general idea, lady," someone nearby said in a loud voice. Several people laughed. "You don't wanna put the court out of business, do ya?"

Julie's lips trembled as she opened her mouth to voice the word that shouted emphatically within her: yes! yes!

"Here they come!" someone shouted, and excited conversation buzzed throughout the room. Julie's voice was never heard. She stared silently at the people near her, then turned to the front of the room to see what they were all watching so avidly.

A straggling line of bedraggled, dirty, unshaven men shuffled into a wire enclosure set along the right wall of the courtroom. Crushed men--weary, lifeless, resigned to a life without hope--they filed into the pen and slumped onto the wooden benches that were placed lengthwise in three rows in the oblong cage. Their shoulders drooped in beaten curves. Their heads were bowed.

The man in front turned around and nudged Julie's knee. His triumphant smile was an obscenity. "Call those men?" He laughed and winked at Stan, then turned back to the front of the court to watch the preliminary proceedings.

An incipient convulsion crawled about in Julie's stomach. Her knee felt cold and clammy where the moon-faced man had touched it. Her skin was prickly and tight. She began to itch.

"Get up, honey," Stan was saying. "Here comes the judge."

She stood, numbly, her eyes riveted on the men in the wire enclosure.

"Julie!" She felt a hand tugging at her arm. "You can sit down now, Julie," Stan said. "Sit down!"

Mechanically, she sat down. Woodenly, she stared at the tableau before her--the judge perched on his elevated throne, the stone-faced attendants at each side of the dais, the wire pen filled with misery. Through the almost tangible excitement and glee of the spectators, the misery reached her, held her.

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