The trouble with Maggie is she’s too nice. Want some fancy words? OK. Altruistic, psychologically permeable, self-effacing, Freudian.OK,lemme give you an example. Al, her youngest, sees a cat out in the back yard. Stranger cat. It’s fur in all kinds of funny little black and white scribblings. You’ve seen horses like that, haven’t you?
     OK. He goes out.
     “Lemme water the clematis, no rain for three weeks.”
     He’s only five but he sounds like some kind of 1920’s Wall Street giant,always watching the DOW and all that stuff. It’s his father, Mr. Big Investment Frenchman. But at the same time it’s like the kid himself is bewitched. His father’s too serious and his jack-in-the-box treacherousness is a reaction to the boredom that usually reigns in the house. No TV, a mini-computer you can play DVD’s on but they all have to be French films, and the kid’s only six. You see what I mean?

     Out into the backyard he goes with this old mesh bag he got out of the garbage, that was filled with potatoes. A sardine in one hand that Maggic doesn’t see/notice. The bag? Well, a bag’s a bag,kids are kids and play with bags, she doesn’t want to get all weighed down with finickyness.
     He holds the sardine in one hand, the bag in the other, and when the cat comes to get the sardine, he plops the bag down over it, let’s it get the sardine first, that’s in his favor, right? But then, once it’s in the bag, he

     2.

     pulls it up by the top , the cat tries to claw him, a little success, a little blood, but he runs over to the pond in the back yard and throws the cat in.
     Maggie hears the cat screaming,the splashing,finally comes out, the cat is scrambling around/drowning in the pond.
     “What in Baruch Atta Adonai’s name are you doing, have you done?”
     Just a little hunting practice.”
     Which she ignores, tries to lift the bag up and let the cat crawl-jump out, but no go. A couple of scratches on her hand, sprints into the house and comes back with a huge beef-brisket -cutting-scissors and carefully cuts one strand of the bag, then another, the cat always trying to (unsuccessfully) claw her, until the bag is just a pile of strings, and the cat silently slips into the bushes and is gone.
     “I suppose you’re gonna string me up from a tree. Execution by hanging.”
     “Where do you learn all that crap?” At first angry, ready to (for the first time ever) slap him, and then suddenly filled with a sense of awe. “You’re such a wierd kid. I don’t know where you get your language, tone, whole manner of ‘delivery.’ It’s the maturity, beyond good and evil, just your ‘adultness.’”
     “It’s not adultness,” he laughs, “all monkey-rats have the same ‘delivery.’ Films, class, TV...and Papá. Je suis exactemente comme mon papá...”
     Which hits Maggie between the eyes, thinking, yes, it was true, he

     3.

     was just like Claude, Claude a little less veiled and hypocritcally double-dealing but under all of Claude’s mannerisms and masks, what was he beside Mr. Baby Brat?!?!
     “Ok, my friend, let’s go for some icecream.”

     You see what I mean? Your encourage the little monster to be a little monster and what happens when he grows up. I mean.....

     2.

     “What do you mean you’re innocent. Your fingerprints were on the gun. She scratched your cheek in a gesture of last minute desperation, and the blood under her fingernails matched yours one hundred percent. We have witnesses who saw you come out of the house, witnesses who were sitting on lawn-chairs in the front yard next door to your victim’s house. I don’t see why we even need a jury. This is as obvious as a vintage Lincoln penny, a sunrise over the Sierra Madre....”
     “I tell you, I’m....,” suddenly he breaks down and starts to cry, “OK...OK....she said she was going to leave him and I’d invested my entire emotional life in the dream of us being together. And then when it came time to leave him, she backed down. ‘It’s mainly money,’ she said, ‘We can get together when he’s not around but.....”

     4.

     “No buts about a bullet in the brain, n’est pas!?!?
     The judge gets up, walks over to the jury.
     “I’m not really supposed to do this. Distance, impartiality, let the lawyers do the boxing. But I’ve never seen a more boxed-up-to-prison case in my life. Like when I was a child and I took this potato bag and...let it go at that. Ça sufit...sufit.....don’t forget the Norman Invasion of England. Three-quarters of English is cognate with French...time to deliberate, talk things over....”