Free Talk Talk by T. C. Boyle

eyes closed and legs splayed. There was a taint of exhaust leaching in from under the floorboards and it was a small mercy because it cut through the human smell. The only light came from the green glow of the dash and the pale wash of the headlights beyond and Dana focused on it. The others might have been asleep, but she sat rigid with anticipation, staring out over the driver's silhouette to where the dark slick of the roadway unraveled before them and the hills and trees opened up on amber streetlights and the shadowy roofs of condos and tract homes where people lay dreaming.
    The bus deposited them at the courthouse, a policeman with a shotgun standing guard while they shuffled through a corridor and into a holding cell located somewhere in proximity to the courtroom itself. Once they were safely inside the cell, a guard released the handcuffs and they were allowed to mingle and gather as they saw fit. Dana kept to herself, or tried to. She made her way to the far corner of the cell, eased herself down on the floor and was careful to avoid eye contact with anyone, but the fat girl was there like a picked scab, dodging into her frame of reference every two minutes, and Angela careened from one group of women to the next, her fingers locked in the nicotine gesture, until finally she collapsed beside Dana and began a long spittle-flecked monologue on a subject--or subjects--that remained mysterious. Nothing happened through the long morning and into the early afternoon, when everyone began to bristle and stir as if an electric current had been switched on, and a man from the Public Defender's office swept into the cell and gave a speech Dana didn't catch at all. Shortly thereafter Iverson appeared, weaving his way through the clutch of prisoners, a woman with a briefcase at his side.
    And what did she feel when she spotted him there amidst the crowd swiveling his head from side to side, looking for her? Elation. Pure elation. She might not have liked him, might have assigned him a good measure of the blame for what had happened to her--he should have intervened, should have explained to them that they'd got the wrong person, should have persisted and used his influence and got her out--but she gazed on him now as if he were her savior. Finally, finally something was happening. He introduced the woman, who handed her her card--“Marie Eustace, Public Defender”--and leaned in close to quiz her sufficiently enough to understand that this was all a mistake, Iverson simultaneously translating in his rigid mechanical Sign. It took no more than five minutes. They would establish the identity of the true criminal and have her out of here ASAP, that was the promise, and Marie Eustace put on a look of high dudgeon and told her how outraged she was that the court had fallen asleep on this one. “Don't you worry,” she told her, “we'll have you out in no time,” and then she moved on to huddle with Angela.
    Dana had never been in court before and the flags and the arras and the great seal and all the rest might have impressed her under other circumstances, but all she felt as she sat there in the dock (that was the term, wasn't it?--yes, from the Flemish for “hutch, pen, cage)” was the same shame and anger she'd felt on the morning of her arrest, though it was multiplied now. By the power of ten, ten at least. She couldn't lift her head, couldn't scan the cluster of spectators for Bridger's face, couldn't do anything but go deep and close herself down. All through the weekend she'd distracted herself by mentally conjuring the poems she made a practice of beating out in class for her students so they could feel the music of them, the dactyls, iambs and trochees singing in their heads even as her hands thumped the rhythm on one desktop after another. She did it now, head bowed, vanished from the scene: “Just as my fingers on these keys / Make music, so the self-same sounds / On my spirit make a music too.”
    When they