Joe Dillard - 03 - Injustice for All (2 page)

There are five of us watching the game from our spot near the right-field foul pole: me; my wife, Caroline; her best friend, Toni Miller; my buddy Ray Miller (Toni’s husband); and Rio, our German shepherd. The Dillards and the Millers have been watching our sons play baseball together for ten years, alternately rejoicing in their successes and agonizing over their failures. Rio is a relative newcomer—he’s been around for only three years—but he seems to enjoy the games as much as we do.

Ray Miller and I have much in common. We’re both lawyers. After many years of practicing criminal defense, I switched to prosecuting a few years back, while Ray remains on what I now call the “dark side.” I rib him on a regular basis about defending scumbags, but I know he does it for the right reasons and I respect him. He doesn’t cheat, doesn’t lie, doesn’t try to pull tricks. He tends to see things in black and white, much as I do. We both despise the misuse of power, especially on the part of judges, although Ray is a bit more venomous than I in that regard. We’re close to the same age, and we’re devoted to our families.

We watch the game from our position in the outfield, away from the players and the other parents, because none of us wishes to distract our sons. We don’t yell at them during games as other parents do. We don’t criticize the umpires or the coaches. We just watch and worry. If something good happens, we cheer. If something bad happens, we cringe.

My son, Jack, is the star hitter on the Boone team. Ray’s son, Tommy, is the star pitcher. Back in November, both of them signed national letters of intent to continue their baseball careers at the Division I collegiate level. Jack signed with Vanderbilt, and Tommy signed with Duke. It was one of the proudest moments of my life.

This evening’s game has been intense. It’s the finals of the district tournament, and if Boone beats Jefferson High, they move on to the regionals. If they lose, their season is over. Jack doubled off the left-center-field fence in the first inning with runners on second and third to put Boone up 2-0. Jefferson’s cleanup hitter hit a solo home run off Tommy Miller in the second. Jack came up again in the fourth and hit a home run, a long moon shot over the center field fence, to put Boone up 3-1. In the top of the fifth, Tommy walked the leadoff hitter, and the next guy laid down a bunt that Boone’s third baseman misplayed, leaving Jefferson with runners on second and third with nobody out and their cleanup hitter coming to the plate. Tommy threw two great pitches to get him down 0-2, but the next pitch got away from Tommy just a bit and hit the batter in the thigh. Jefferson’s coaches, players, and parents all started screaming, accusing Tommy of hitting the kid on purpose. It looked as though a fight might break out, but the umpires managed to calm things down. Jefferson scored two runs when the next batter hit a bloop single to right field, but then Tommy struck out three in a row. The game is tied, with Jack leading off for Boone in the bottom of the seventh, the final inning in a high school game.

“They’ll walk him,” Ray says. I turn and look at him incredulously. He’s wearing sunglasses that shield his dark eyes. He’s an inch shorter than I at six feet two, but he’s thicker through the chest and back. His long brown hair, beginning to gray, is pulled back into a ponytail, and his forearms, which are leaning against the fence, look as thick as telephone poles.

“You’re nuts,” I say. “They don’t want to walk the leadoff man in a tie game in the last inning. They’ll pitch to him.”

Jack digs into the batter’s box and takes his familiar wide, slightly open stance. He’s a big kid, six feet two inches and a rock- hard two hundred ten pounds. He has a strong jaw and a prominent, dimpled chin— a “good baseball face,” as the old-time scouts would say. He’s crowding the plate as he always does, daring the pitcher to throw him something inside.

The first pitch is a fastball, and it hits Jack between the eyes before he can get out of the way. I hear the awful thud of the baseball striking his head all the way from the outfield. Jack’s helmet flies off. He takes a step backward but doesn’t go down, and then starts staggering slowly toward first base. The umpire, as stunned as everyone else, jogs along beside him, trying to get him to stop. I sprint down the fence line toward the gate, watching Jack as his coaches scramble out of the dugout to his side. By the time he gets to first base, I can see blood pouring from his nose.

I make my way through the silent crowd and onto the field. Jack’s coaches have taken him into the dugout and sat him on the bench. One of them is holding a white towel over Jack’s face. I see immediately that the towel is already stained a deep red. The coaches step back as I approach.

“They did it on purpose,” the head coach, a thirty-year-old named Bill Dickson, says. “They haven’t come close to hitting anyone else.”

I bend over Jack and gently remove the towel. His head is leaned back, his mouth open, and he’s staring at the dugout roof. The area around both of his eyes is already swelling, and there’s a deep, nasty gash just above the bridge of his nose. He’s bleeding from the cut and from both nostrils.

I put the towel back over the wound.

“Jack, can you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“Who am I?”

“Dad.”

“Do you know where you are?”

“Boone High School. Dugout.”

“What’s the score in the game?”

“Three-three, bottom of the seventh.”

“Has anyone called an ambulance?” I say to Coach Dickson.

“They’re on the way, but it always takes them fifteen or twenty minutes to get here.”

I can sense someone beside me, and I turn my head. It’s Ray, Caroline, and Toni.

“He all right?” Ray asks.

“He’s coherent.”

“Let me see.”

I pull the towel back again. Caroline gasps, and a flash of anger runs through me like an electric current. How could they do this?
Why
would they do this? It’s just a baseball game, for God’s sake. Jack has been hit dozens of times in the past, but never in the face. And Coach Dickson is right; their pitcher displayed excellent control until Jack came to the plate in the seventh. They hit him intentionally.

I gently replace the towel and look at Ray. I’m thinking seriously about grabbing a bat from the rack and going after Jefferson’s coach.

“You don’t want to wait for an ambulance,” Ray says. “We need to take him now.”

“Why?”

“His pupils are different sizes. There’s already a lot of swelling. I’ve seen this before, Joe. He might be bleeding internally.” Ray was a medic in the navy for eight years, so he knows what he’s talking about. At that moment, Jack leans forward and vomits on the dugout floor.

“We have to go,” Ray says. “Right now.”

Caroline and Toni rush off to get the cars while Ray and I each drape one of Jack’s arms over our backs and lift. Coach Dickson holds the towel in place to try to slow the bleeding as we walk Jack out through the gate. Just before we reach the parking lot, he loses consciousness, and I feel a sense of dread so deep that I nearly pass out myself.

He regains consciousness after we put him in the backseat, but during the ride to the hospital, he’s in and out. He keeps saying his head feels like it’s going to explode. I call the emergency room on my cell phone along the way, and they’re waiting when we arrive. They take Jack immediately into a trauma room, and in less than ten minutes they’ve taken him to surgery. A doctor comes out to talk to us briefly. He says Jack is suffering from an acute epidural hematoma. In layman’s terms, he says, Jack’s brain is bleeding. A neurosurgeon is going to perform an emergency craniotomy to drain the blood, relieve the pressure, and repair the damage.

We wait for three agonizing hours before the neurosurgeon comes out. The waiting room is filled with Jack’s coaches and their wives, his teammates and their parents, plus dozens of his friends from school who were either at the game or heard about what happened. Everyone falls silent when the surgeon, a dark-haired, serious-looking, middle-aged man wearing scrubs, asks Caroline and me to step into a private room. My daughter, Lilly, who is a year younger than Jack and was sitting in the bleachers behind home plate when Jack was hit, grabs my hand and comes into the room with us.

“I’m told you didn’t wait for the ambulance,” the doctor says gravely as soon as the door closes behind us. “Whose idea was that?”

“Why?” I ask. “Was it a mistake?”

“Under some circumstances, it could have been. But this time, it was the right decision. If your son had bled for another ten or fifteen minutes, I don’t think he would have made it.”

“So he’s all right?”

“He’s in recovery. It’s a serious injury, but thankfully we got to it in time. We’ll keep him in intensive care for a day or two. He’s going to have a heckuva headache, but we can control the pain with medication. He’ll have to take it easy for a couple of months, but after that, he should be as good as new.”

“When can we see him?”

“He’ll wake up in about half an hour. He’ll be groggy, but you can talk to him for a few minutes.”

We thank the doctor, and Caroline, Lilly, and I embrace silently. Caroline and Lilly are crying, but I’m so relieved, I feel as if I could float on air. We walk back out to the crowded waiting room. Ray and Toni Miller, along with their son, Tommy, are standing just outside the door. When the group sees Caroline’s tears, I can sense they think the news is bad. Ray looks at me anxiously, and I smile.

Caroline walks straight to Ray, reaches up, wraps her arms around his thick neck, and squeezes him tightly.

“You saved his life,” I hear her say through muffled sobs. “You saved Jack’s life.”

PART 1

1

The moment Katie Dean began to believe she’d been abandoned by God was on a Sunday afternoon in August 1992.

It was late in the summertime in Michigan. Katie, along with her mother and brothers and sister, had returned home earlier from the First Methodist Church in Casco Township. At seventeen, Kirk was her oldest sibling; then Kiri, sixteen; then Katie, who was just two months shy of her thirteenth birthday. Kody was the baby of the family at ten. They were gathered around the dining room table, waiting for Mother to bring the platter of fried chicken in from the kitchen.

The fresh smell of Lake Michigan floated through the open dining room windows, mingling with the sweet odors of chicken and garlic mashed potatoes. After lunch, Katie and Kiri were planning to pack a small basket with a Thermos of ice water, suntan lotion, and magazines, and hike to the sand dunes above the lake, where they would spend the afternoon lying in the sun and giggling about the Nelson boys, who lived just up the road. It would be their last visit to the dunes this summer. School was starting back the next morning.

Richard Dean, Katie’s father, sat listlessly on the other side of the table, staring into a glass of whiskey. He was thin and pale, with a thatch of dark hair above his furrowed brow. He was upset, but that wasn’t unusual. It seemed he was always upset.

Richard Dean was distant, as though not a part of the world everyone else lived in. He never kissed Katie, never hugged her, never told her he loved her. He was like a ticking bomb, always on the verge of another explosion. Katie’s mother had told the children that Father was sick from the war in Vietnam. She said he’d been wounded and captured by Viet Cong soldiers near the Cambodian border in 1970 and had spent four years in a prison in Hanoi.

Katie’s father didn’t have a job, but Katie knew the family lived off money he collected from the government every month. Her mother couldn’t work because she had to stay home and take care of Father all the time. He drank lots of whiskey and smoked cigarettes one after another; Katie had seen him lock himself in his room and not come out for a week at a time. Sometimes she’d hear him screaming in the middle of the night.

Father had picked them all up from the church parking lot just after noon. He didn’t attend church, but he drove the family there and picked them up every Sunday at precisely twelve fifteen. When Father pulled into the church parking lot earlier, Katie’s mother had been talking to a man named Jacob Olson near the front steps. Katie didn’t think there was anything unusual about it—Mr. Olson was a nice man—but as soon as Mother got into the car, Father lit into her. He called her a slut, white trash. He was yelling and spitting. The veins on his neck were sticking out so far, Katie thought they might burst through his skin. When the family arrived home, the first thing Father did was open a bottle of whiskey. He filled a tall glass and sat at the dining room table while Mother, Kiri, and Katie cooked in the kitchen and the boys went about setting the table. They all stepped lightly around Father. They never knew when he might strike, like a rattlesnake coiled in the grass.

Katie was still wearing the flowered print dress Mother had made for her out of material she bought from the thrift store in South Haven. It was Katie’s favorite summer dress, light and airy and full of color. She was looking down at the hemline, which crossed her thighs, trying to imagine the pink carnations coming to life, when Mother walked in carrying the chicken.

“Here we are,” Mother said. She had a forced smile on her face. She put the platter down in the middle of the table. Steam rose from the chicken, and through it Katie caught a glimpse of Father’s face. He was already halfway through his third glass of whiskey. His eyes had reddened, and the lids were beginning to droop.

“Chicken,” Father muttered into his whiskey glass.

“Goddamned fried chicken’s all we ever get around here.”

Mother attempted to remain pleasant. “I thought you liked fried chicken,” she said, “and I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t use that kind of language around the children.”

“The chiddren,” he slurred. “Probly ain’t mine anyway.”

“Richard!” Mother yelled. She rarely raised her voice; Katie shuddered. “How dare you!”

Father lifted his chin and turned slowly toward Mother.

“How dare me?” he said. “How dare
me
? How dare
you
, you bitch! How long you been screwing Olson, anyway?”