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Pearl. She outweighed him by sixty pounds, had a
lead skillet the size of a tennis racket and a hell of a backhand.
“Still, Openshaw,” Archipelago told me, “you don’t want
to blackmail me.”

“It’s not illegal here,” I said. I’d read the criminal statutes
thoroughly. Both of them.

“You don’t want to do it, son, because you’re not a
seahorse’s ass.”

He was right in one respect. I hadn’t wanted to blackmail
him. His thing for sea birds aside, Archipelago was admired
throughout the region for his integrity, and that’s saying
something in a region where most everyone skipped school the
day integrity was taught. He’d once passed up a chance to be
governor cause his party was in bed with Big Sugar and looking
the other way while field hands, some as young as seven, were
getting beaten like slaves. And he decked the party chairman to
give him a taste of it.

I’d like to think I’d’ve done the same thing if I’d been in
his boots. The night before going to blackmail him, even though
I’d drunken enough rum to float a battleship, I couldn’t sleep.
As I tried telling myself over and over, my priority isn’t being
courteous to geezers. It’s harpooning Dickhead through the
heart. Why? Plain old-fashioned justice.
As if he was reading straight through my head and into my
thoughts, Archipelago said, “Injustice anywhere imperils justice
everywhere.”

I felt a stirring in my heart. I knew then and there that
he was righteous and true, that he deserved the title Honorable,
and warranted my awe. I offered him a quarter-million-dollar
bribe anyhow. He laughed, thinking it was a joke. Ashamed, I
pretended like it had been.

I got to go now. Got to find a good defense lawyer pronto.
P.S. Here’s Flarq’s courtroom scrimshaw of the Honorable
Solomon Archipelago.

Thursday, 8 July 2004 11:20 AM
Trying Time
    A local druglord who Moses knew was going out of town, so he
lent me his lawyer. But, as my luck was involved, the lawyer had
been taking most of his salary in “product,” and this morning—
the morning of my trial—he couldn’t’ve told the difference
between a sperm whale and a sperm.

So Nelson, who’d been a defendant often enough that
he spoke legal pretty good, filled in. To the charge I’d libeled
the whale by writing he was a bastard, he declared to the packed
courtroom gallery (both seats were occupied, by Thesaurus):
“The defense contends the whale’s parents are unmarried, so he
is in fact a bastard!”

But the Bluepeace team (so many lawyers, they had
to bring in an extra picnic table) had some evidence to the
contrary—a videotape of a preacher in a harness being lowered
by helicopter over the Pacific then performing a whale wedding,
plus a stack of lab reports proving that the happy couple was
indeed the alleged bastard’s parents.

“Objection, your Honor,” shouted Nelson, even though
he had no specific law reason for objecting in mind.
“Sustained,” Judge Archipelago said.

It turned out that videotaped evidence was inadmissible
because the court didn’t have a video player. The only one on
the island belonged to the druglord, and like I said, he was out
of town. You had to have figured my luck was due to change for
the better. If you did, you figured wrong.
“As I see it,” Archipelago continued, “the issue is whether
Openshaw is justified in calling the whale ‘Dickhead.’”
“It’s a term reserved for someone who has behaved like
a dick,” one of the Bluepeace attorneys quoted from some law
book.

“Agreed,” said Archipelago. “We need to hear what the
whale did that was dickish.”

“Your Honor,” Nelson begged, “it would be cruel and
unusual to make my client relive the event.”
Cruel, unusual, and possibly lethal. I was worried
it’d make my heart burst—literally. I said a silent prayer to
Thesaurus’s gods on the off chance any of them existed and were
listening.

“The