Famous in Cincinnati

 
 Famous in Cincinnati
     by Infamous Dougles (the Dredger) Driedger 

After the merger, Paupanekis and Linklater and Sons should rightly have been renamed Paupanekis and Linklater and Sons and Daughters. Lawyers have a way of keeping things traditional, don’t you know. The first postmerger case the legal teams combined to execute concerned the mistreatment of a handicapped woman who, though perambulant, had no use of her arms and hands and wheeled about in a special bicycle with her legs and feet. She felt embarrassed that she had to sit in such a fashion with her feet and legs towering over her body, and that when, for instance, in a hurry to get across the street at a crosswalk because the bus was roaring toward her, or cars had sped up and were whining in her direction, circumstances  required her to add behaviours to her motions that she found beneath her. Under those circumstances, she had to pedal very quickly for all her life and she looked foolish. She was not above knowing that her knees, snickering so fast up and down about her own ears, her bare feet gripping the wheels and making the rubber hot from handling (the emergency so critical, with said vehicle threatening), looked more than comic. That they (the knees and so, her, in other words) appeared to onlookers absolutely, in the purest sense of the words, stupid and ludicrous. She took the city of Cincinnati to court (something about the city allowing the citizens of the metropolis to make a laughing stock of her) and won her case. Paupanekis and Linklater and Sons now had a win and no losses tucked under their belts, and she, of course, had improved her financial lot quite extraordinarily.
    The next two cases they lost. They had no choice. They plea-bargained with the prosecuted and gave in, excepting a large sum of money in exchange for sending a certain Bob Nighty and another, in the next case, a Mr. Barneswipe, both at the time federal prisoners awaiting parole hearings, back to their cells with years added onto their sentences for crimes they likely had at one time committed.  After that, however, with money recently earned, the mergered teams were able to orchestrate the next five or six cases in their favour and soon they became successful. Ten years into the new merger, this legal company began to think of itself as an old boy in the club of jurisprudence. 
    Paupanekis seldom went back to the home of his youth. He did not like to think of his parents. They still lived (if you can call it that) in the same rural place they had resided when he left there at the age of sixteen. He actually never wanted to see them again. The whole business of pruning and landscaping sat poorly with him. He would become somebody. And he did. He married into a poor family, he worked in a series of bars as a bouncer and later as a lap dancer, and then sped off with his last job’s boss’s old jalopy into fame and fortune. Caught and tried in court for stolen property, he blamed it, he told the judge, on an old acquaintance, Robert Linklater of Nelson house, whom he had not met since schooldays, but whom he recalled had stolen their principal’s car on a drunken Saturday night. Paupanekis, without a lawyer, was defending himself. The judge did not buy it. Paupanekis called Linklater as a witness, and discovered that he was, in fact, a lawyer already. Articling. The two liked each other immediately. Paupanekis lost this his first case but Robert smartly got him off with warnings and small fines. They met again when Paupanekis finished law school, and together planned one day to form a partnership. Now they were famous in Cincinnati, their companies merged.
    When the two grew old, they quit law and stopped taking cases. Their children, sons and daughters, took over the business and these two old timers spent much of their time fishing and reading. They read to each other whenever the opportunity presented itself. One year, they chartered a small yacht, a sailing ship really, and spent a few months flitting about the Pacific. They ended up stormbound on a little island, uninhabited, and very beautiful. Here, Paupanekis said, when they came ashore, they could live in peace forever, if only they had books. They had fishing equipment which they made, like Robinson Crusoe would have done, of local materials: willows, fine roots of certain plants such as the bigartoiliani, famous for its fine root system, which they used for line, hooks from the bones of previous fish catches, and bait from the crayfish that abounded. But they needed reading material to make this place ideal. 
     They hit on a fine solution, though, in time. They would write stories for each other. They did that. They wrote at first stories of their own lives, but soon grew utterly bored with reading what they already knew. They began to make up stories, new stories, stories they invented. These satisfied them. They wrote one hundred  each before they were rescued (and here it needs to be said that their boat had suffered so much damage in a huge storm that they had always known that they would not be able to sail it across the Pacific). They decided not to bring these stories with them to civilization, fearing somehow that merging fiction with fact would deprive them of their glory. They drowned their books, so to speak, in the ocean before they boarded the yacht sent for them. Paupanekis and Linklater and Sons and Daughters proudly scribed across the lovely white boat’s forecastle. 
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