The Sweet Hereafter (11 page)

Upstate New York, to me, had always been Albany, with maybe a little Rip Van Winkle, Love Canal, and Woodstock tossed in; but this was wilderness, practically. Like Alaska. Suddenly, I’m thinking Last of the Mohicans. Forest primeval, I’m thinking. America before the arrival of the white man.

I’m driving along the Northway above Lake George between these high sheer cliffs with huge sheets of ice on them, and I look off to the side into the woods, and the woods come banging right back at me, a dense tangle of trees and undergrowth that completely resists penetration, and I start hoping my car doesn’t break down. This is not Bambi territory. It’s goddamn dark in there, with bears and bobcats and moose. Ten thousand coyotes, I read in the Times. Sasquatches, probably.

Of course, it was dead of winter then, that first time, and there was five or six feet of snow over everything, and daytime temps that got stuck below zero for weeks in a row, which only made the woods and the mountains more ominous. Trees, rocks, snow, and ice-and, until I turned off the Northway and started down those narrow winding roads into the villages, no houses, no sign of people. It was scary, but it was also very beautiful. No way around it.

Then I began to see the first signs of people-and I mean poor people here. Not like in the city, of course, not like Harlem or Bedford Stuyvesant, where you feel that the poor are imprisoned, confined by invisible wire fences, life long prisoners of the rich, who live and work in the high rises outside. No wonder they call them ghettos.

They ought to call them reservations Up here, though, the poor are kept out, and it’s the rich who stay inside the fence and only in the summer months. It’s like Ultima Thule or someplace beyond the pale, and most of the people who live here year round are castoffs, tossed out into the back forty and made to forage in the woods for their sustenance and shelter, grubbing nuts and berries, while the rest of us snooze warmly inside the palisade, feet up on the old hassock, brandy by our side, Wall Street Journal unfolded on our lap, good dog Tighe curled up by the fire.

I’m exaggerating, of course, but only slightly, because that is how you feel when you cruise down these roads in your toasty Mercedes and peer out at the patched together houses with flapping plastic over the windows and sagging porches and woodpiles and rusting pickup trucks and junker cars parked in front, boarded up roadside diners and dilapidated motels that got bypassed by the turnpike that Rockefeller built for the downstate Republican tourists and the ten wheeler truckers lugging goods between New York City and Montreal. It’s amazing how poor people who live in distant beautiful places always think that a six lane high way or an international airport will bring tourists who will solve all their problems, when inevitably the only ones who get rich from it live elsewhere. The locals end up hating the tourists, outsiders, foreigners rich folks who employ the locals now as part time servants, yardmen, waitresses, gamekeepers, fix it men. Money that comes from out of town always returns to its source. With interest.

Ask an African.

Sam Dent. Weird name for a town. So naturally the first thing I ask when I register at a sad little motel in town is ‘Who the hell was Sam Dent?

This rather attractive tall doe eyed woman in a rein deer sweater and baggy jeans was checking me in, Risa Walker, who I did not know at the time was one of those parents who had lost a child in the so called accident. I might not have been so flippant otherwise. She said, He once owned most of the land in this town and ran a hotel or something.

She had that flat expressionless voice that I should have recognized as the voice of a parent who has lost a child. Long time ago, she added.

Like it was the good old days. (Good for Sam, I’ll bet, who probably died peacefully in his sleep in his Fifth Avenue mansion. ) She gave me the key to my room, number 3, and asked would I be staying longer than one night.

Hard to say. I passed her my credit card, and she took the imprint. I was hoping that tomorrow I’d find a better place in town or nearby, maybe a Holiday Inn or a Marriott. This motel was definitely on the downhill slide and had been for years no restaurant or bar, a small dark room with scarred furniture and sagging bedsprings, a shower that looked as if it spat rusty lukewarm water for thirty seconds before turning cold.

It turned out there was no other place in town to stay, and as I needed to be close to the scene of the crime, so to speak, I ended up staying at the Walkers’ motel throughout those winter and spring months and into the summer, every time I was in Sam Dent, even when things got a little ticklish between me and Risa and her husband, Wendell. It never got that ticklish, but when the divorce started coming on, I was giving her advice and not him. Throughout, I kept the room on reserve, not that there was ever any danger of its being taken, and paid for the entire period, whether I used it or not. It was the least I could do.

The most I could do for the Walkers was represent them in a negligence suit that compensated them financially for the loss of their son, Sean.

And that’s only part of it, the smaller part. I could also strip and hang the hide of the sonofabitch responsible for the loss of their son which just might save the life of some other boy riding to school in some other small American town.

That was my intention anyhow. My mission, you might say.

Every year, though, I swear I’m not going to take any more cases involving children. No more dead kids. No more stunned grieving parents who really only want to be left alone to mourn in the darkness of their homes, for God’s sake, to sit on their kids’ beds with the blinds drawn against the curious world outside and weep in silence as they contemplate their permanent pain. I’m under no delusions I know that in the end a million dollar settlement makes no real difference to them, that it probably only serves to sharpen their pain by constricting it with legal language and rewarding it with money, that it complicates the guilt they feel and forces them to question the authenticity of their own suffering. I know all that; I’ve seen it a hundred times.

It hardly seems worth it, right? Thanks but no thanks, right? And I swear, if that were the whole story, if the settlement were not a fine as well, if it were not a punishment that, though it can never fit the crime, might at least make the crime seem prohibitively expensive to the criminal, then, believe me, I would not pursue these cases. They humiliate me. They make me burn inside with shame. Win or lose, I always come out feeling diminished, like a cinder.

So I’m no Lone Ranger riding into town in my white Mercedes Benz to save the local sheepherders from the cattle barons in black hats; I’m clear on that. And I don’t burn myself out with these awful cases because it somehow makes me a better person. No, I admit it, I’m on a personal vendetta; what the hell, it’s obvious. And I don’t need a shrink to tell me what motivates me. A shrink would probably tell me it’s because I myself have lost a child and now identify with chumps like Risa and Wendell Walker and that poor sap Billy Ansel, and Wanda and Hartley Otto. The victims. Listen, identify with the victims and you become one yourself. Victims make lousy litigators.

Simply, I do it because I’m pissed off, and that’s what you get when you mix conviction with rage. It’s a very special kind of anger, let’s say. So I’m no victim. Victims get depressed and live in the there and then. I live in the here and now.

Besides, the people of Sam Dent are not unique.

We’ve all lost our children. It’s like all the children of America are dead to us. Just look at them, for God’s sake violent on the streets, comatose in the malls, narcotized in front of the TV. In my lifetime something terrible happened that took our children away from us. I don’t know if it was the Vietnam war, or the sexual colonization of kids by industry, or drugs, or TV, or divorce, or what the hell it was; I don’t know which are causes and which are effects; but the children are gone, that I know. So that trying to protect them is little more than an elaborate exercise in denial.

Religious fanatics and superpatriots, they try to protect their kids by turning them into schizophrenics; Episcopa hans and High Church Jews gratefully abandon their kids to boarding schools and divorce one another so they can get laid with impunity; the middle class grabs what it can buy and passes it on, like poisoned candy on Halloween; and meanwhile the inner city blacks and poor whites in the boonies sell their souls with longing for what’s killing everyone else’s kids and wonder why theirs are on crack.

It’s too late; they’re gone; we’re what’s left.

And the best we can do for them, and for ourselves, is rage against what took them. Even if we can’t know what it’ll be like when the smoke clears, we do know that rage, for better or worse, generates a future. The victims are the ones who’ve given up on the future.

Instead, they’ve joined the dead. And the rest, look at them: unless they’re enraged and acting on it, they’re useless, unconscious; they’re dead themselves and don’t even know it.

If you want to know the truth, in my life, in my personal life, that is, though my ex wife, Klara, is the apparent victim (all you have to do is ask her), the true victim is my daughter, Zoe. Not me, that’s for sure. Because, though I may have lost her, Zoe’s not literally dead. At least not that I know of. Not yet. The last time I heard from her she was out in L. A. , walking around like a tattooed zombie with one of her purple haired zombie boyfriends.

She’s my only child; I loved her more than I thought was humanly possible. Certainly more than I’ve ever loved anyone else. I’ve told my story it’s a compulsion, I guess to friends and strangers and even to shrinks, all of whom feel sorry for me, if you can believe that, which is a way of feeling sorry for themselves, I’ve learned; I’ve at tended Al Anon meetings and ToughLove workshops for parents and spouses of addicts, where they promote a kind of spiritual triage ( Mitch, chill out, man, you’ve got to learn to separate from your child, they say, while you watch her drowning before your eyes); and I’ve spent more time talking to Klara in the last five years than in the entire fifteen years we were married I’ve done everything the loving father of a whacked out drug addicted child is supposed to do. I’ve even done a Rambo and kicked a few doors off their jambs and dragged Zoe out of filthy rat infested apartments, garbage heaps with satanic altars lit by candles in a goat’s skull on a TV in a corner; I’ve locked her up in rehab hospitals, halfway houses, and the Michigan farms of understanding relatives. Two weeks later, she’s back on the streets.

New York, Pittsburgh, Seattle, L. A. The next time I hear from her, it’s a phone call scamming for money, money supposedly for school or a new kind of therapist who specializes in macrobiotic drug treatment or, sobbing with shame and need, a plane ticket home (that’s usually the one that gets me). I send the money, hundreds, thousands of dollars; and she’s gone again. A month or two later, she’s calling from Santa Same scam, same format, different details: an acupuncturist specializing in treating drug addiction, a registration fee for a culinary arts school in Tucson, and if those stories don’t work, she breaks back to the old plea to let her come home to New York and let’s solve this problem together, Daddy, dear Daddy, once and for all, if I’ll just send the plane ticket and money to get her stuff out of hock,
etc.
By now, of course, I realize that if I don’t send money, she’ll raise it some other way, dealing drugs or pornography or even hooking.

It’s like I’m in the position of having to buy her clean needles to protect her against AIDS. Forget protecting her against the drugs.

For get healing her mind.

Five years of this, and what happens? You get pissed off believe me, enough rage and helplessness, your love turns to steamy piss. Of course, long before Zoe dropped out of boarding school and hit the streets, I was pissed off it’s in my genes, practically but she’s succeeded in providing me with a nice sharp focus for it, so that, except when I’m burning myself out on something like the Sam Dent school bus case, I’m dizzy and incoherent, boiling over, obsessed, useless mad. I’d rather be a cinder than a madman. But there’s no way I’ll let myself become a victim.

That guy Wendell Walker, who with his wife, Risa, owned the motel I was staying at, the Bide a wile-he surprised me. At first, I pegged him as a permanent loser, one of those guys who love their own tragedy, who feel ennobled and enlarged by it. But of all the parents in Sam Dent who had lost a child when the bus went over, he turned out to have the least interest in remaining a victim.

Except for Wanda Otto, maybe. We’re talking about the parents of some fourteen kids here, some of whom, like Billy Ansel, lost more than one child, so actually we’re talking about a list of only eight families in all. Of which, in those first few weeks before the case took off, I was able to interview five who had not already signed up with another attorney, which put them off limits to me, or who were not talking to anyone at all, like Billy Ansel, and even him I eventually got to. In a way.

And there was the girl Nichole Burnell, who survived the wreck; she was going to be the linchpin of the case, an all American teenaged beauty queen whose life was ruined I by her injuries and by the trauma of having survived such an ordeal. A living victim is more effective with a jury than a dead one; you can’t compensate the dead, they feel.

That’s how I planned to present her; luckily, it was how her parents viewed the event too. She had been their destiny, their glory: for their future, they had nothing but her future, and since it had been taken from her, it had been taken, as they saw it, from them as well: so now they were out for blood. One way or the other, they were going to continue to use her to get what they thought was their due.

Fine by me. I had my agenda too. In spite of the injuries, Nichole Burnell looked good, she talked good, and she had suffered immeasurably and would for the rest of her life. A beautiful articulate fourteen year old girl in a wheel chair. She was perfect. I could hardly wait to see the other side depose her.