The Sweet Hereafter (12 page)

Wendell Walker, on the other hand, when I first met him, seemed utterly defeated, gone, a dark hole in space.

Useless, even to himself. I had chucked my stuff in my room and wandered back out to the motel office, to get directions to where the bus had gone over and to check out some of the local response to the event to start work, in other words but also to see if there was someplace in town where I could get a decent meal. It seemed unlikely, but you never know about these small towns. I once found a terrific barbecue shack in Daggle, Alabama.

The office was gloomy and dark, cold as a meat locker; behind the counter, a door leading to what I took to be the apartment where the proprietors lived was open a crack, and a skinny band of light fell across the linoleum floor of the room. I thought I was alone, but when I walked up to the counter, looking for a bell or something to signal the woman who had checked me in, I saw a figure there, a large, heavyset man in a straight backed chair, sitting behind the counter in the darkness as if in bright light, looking at his lap as if reading a magazine. It was a strange position, alert but frozen in place. He looked catatonic to me.

Sorry, buddy, I said. I didn’t see you there. How’s it going?

No answer; no response whatsoever. He just went on staring down at his lap, as if he didn’t hear or see me. One of those country simples, I thought. Inbreeding. Great. First local I get to talk to, and he turns out to be an alien. The boss around? I asked.

Nothing. Except that his tongue came out and licked I dry lips. Then I recognized it: I’ve seen it a hundred times, I but it still surprises and scares me. It’s the opaque black glass look of a man who has recently learned of the death of his child. It’s the face of a person who’s gone to the other side of life and is no longer even looking back at us. It always has the same history, that look: at the moment of the child’s dying, the man follows his child into darkness, as if he’s making a last attempt to save it; then, in panic, to be sure that he himself has not died as well, the man turns momentarily back toward us, maybe he even laughs then or says something weird, for he sees only darkness there too; and now he has returned to where his child first disappeared, fixing onto one of the bright apparitions that linger there. It’s downright spooky.

I’m sorry, bud, I said to him. I just arrived here.

Still no response Then he stirred slightly, turned his soft hands over, and placed them on his knees. He was wearing a Montreal Expos sweatshirt and loose khakis, a fat guy, slump shouldered, not too bright looking.

Suddenly, he said, Are you a lawyer? His voice was low but thin, flattened out, like a piece of tin. He still hadn’t turned to face me, but I guess he’d taken my measure already. What the hell, I suppose I looked like a lawyer, especially up here, especially now. Something like this happens, people expect to see lawyers crawling around. Guys in suits and topcoats.

Yes, I’m a lawyer.

A good one?

Yes, sure. One of the best, I said.

Slowly he turned toward me and in the dim light examined my face.

Well, good. I need a lawyer, he said, and when he stood up, his large soft body tightened, and surprisingly the man looked very tough to me, like a fist, and I said to myself, Well, well, I damned near misread this guy entirely. Come inside, he said. My wife and I want to talk to you.

I reached into my pocket, drew out a card, and handed it to him, and he accepted it without a glance, like a bellhop taking a tip, and placed it facedown on the counter. With the other hand, he swung open the door to their quarters, washing the office in domestic light, and walked straight into the living room beyond, where I saw the woman in an easy chair, watching television with the sound off.

I followed him into the small room, and we three sat and talked for several hours, and all the while they watched the soundless television, never once looking at me or each other. Creepy, yes, but at the time it seemed entirely appropriate, even necessary, to our conversation.

This was a happy start for me, a lucky break. The Walkers were classically pissed off. Both of them. They wanted revenge, which was useless to them, of course they weren’t going to get it, but they didn’t know that yet.

And as I later learned, they wanted money, not as compensation but because they had been broke for so long and had always wanted it.

I learned from them that first night in town a lot of what the newspapers hadn’t yet told me-the names of the other parents whose children had been killed, the usual route of the school bus, the condition of the driver when she picked up their son, Sean, the weather, the exact spot I where the bus went off the road, the origin and history of the sandpit it ended up in, and so forth.

It seemed clear that the bus driver, Dolores Driscoll, was a dead end; she was probably only doing exactly what she had done for years, and besides, she herself had no real property or earning power to attach and was a popular woman in town to boot, a nondrinker with a crippled husband she supported. Not the kind of person you want to sue for negligence. The deep pockets, I knew, were going to be found in the pants worn by the state, the town, and the school board, or, more precisely, by their insurance companies. I explained that to them.

I asked them who else might be willing to join in a suit.

I don’t know, Risa said, her eyes still on the flickering screen of the TV. The Cosby show, which I hate. Ozzie and Harriet in blackface.

Nobody’s much talked about it yet. Although there’s been a lot of lawyers in town, I heard.

A couple of them checked in here today. But they seemed Too young and too old, Wendell said. One or the other. Too goddamn eager.

I knew the types. I explained that the best people to enter the suit were people who were unlikely to sign on with lawyers such as that.

No, I said, what we needed were folks who, like them, were intelligent and articulate, who came across as sensitive, loving parents, people with a solid family life, with no criminal background or history of trouble in town. Good neighbors I wanted, decent hardworking people like themselves, I said, laying it on a little.

‘Well, okay, there’s Kyle and Doreen, Risa said. The Lamstons. Up on Bartlett Hill. They lost all three of their kids. After everything they’ve been through. Especially Doreen. Risa was at that stage where every now and then she didn’t believe that she had lost her child; she thought that maybe it had only happened to other people in town.

Kyle’s a drunk, a belligerent drunk, Wendell said.

Nobody likes him. He’s trouble.

Belligerent, you say. Is he a known wife beater?

Yeah, a wife beater, he said. I’m afraid so. A ‘known’ one. He’s that all right.

All right, there’s the Hamiltons. Joe and Shelley Hamilton.

Wendell said, Anybody knows that guy knows he’s been stealing antiques from summer houses and reselling them to dealers in Plattsburgh for years.

I was starting to like this man, Wendell Walker. He looked like a pushover, but he had an attitude. In the middle of a wrecked life, drowning in sadness, he was still able to hold his grudges. He’d probably kept them locked up inside himself for years, feeling guilty, and now for the first time in his life he believed he was entitled to lay about him. His wife, though, was more conventionally linked to other people, a good looking, once sexy woman who still courted her neighbors’ good opinions and attention. She was trying to put the best possible construction on things, even if it meant lying to herself.

Wendell, though, he didn’t give a damn. Not any more.

They went on down the list of parents, most of them dismissed by Wendell out of hand, as his resentments and grudges and old injuries, one by one, surfaced and got expressed.

Sonofabitch owes over fifty thousand bucks in unpaid bills to the bank and half the businesses in town, and he’s about to lose his house and cars… .

She’s over to the Rendezvous or down to the Spread Eagle every night and has slept with every drunk in town at least twice The Bilodeaus and the Atwaters are all inbred.

They’re so dumb they don’t know Saturday. .

And so on down the line, with Risa reluctantly concur ring. Until they got to the Ottos, Wanda and Hartley, who had lost their adopted son, an Indian boy named Bear.

Wanda was pregnant, they were smart people apparently, college educated, even, had moved to Sam Dent a dozen or so years ago from the city and had made a respected life here as craftsmen.

Yeah, well, I bet they’re pot smokers, Wendell grumped.

You don’t know that. Risa lit a cigarette, as if in defiance.

They ever been busted? I asked, and lit one myself.

No, Risa said.

Not to your knowledge is what you mean,’ Wendell shot back. I wondered if he knew that his wife was probably having an affair with somebody.

I made notes and let them continue. I especially liked the part about the adopted Indian boy and Wanda’s pregnancy. It was possible she’d lose the baby over this. That happens. The pot business I’d check out later. (It turned out to be nothing, of course. At least no re cord.

Local suspicion was all. ) It was Wendell who mentioned Billy Ansel.

Risa kept silent, and I figured he was the guy she was having her affair with. That could be trouble, so I put an asterisk next to his name; but otherwise he was almost too good to be true.

Ansel was a widower, much admired in town, a Vietnam vet, a war hero, practically. And he had lost his two children, who were twins. Also, he had actually witnessed the event; he’d been following the bus in his truck on his way to work that morning and had helped remove the victims.

He’d know, by God, that his kids were dead. No denial there.

The bus, Wendell said, had been hauled back to Ansel’s garage. I went to school with him, Wendell added. I guess he’s maybe the most liked man in this town.

And he knows it. And likes it. But what the hell, that’s all right, I guess. He drinks, he added. But mostly at home.

Otherwise, no flaws. I watched Risa, who watched her hands. Double asterisk.

What about the kids who survived the accident?

Some of them were injured pretty badly, I understand. Any of them whose parents you think might be willing to join you in this?

Risa, as if relieved not to be talking about Billy Ansel any longer, rattled off the names of half a dozen families, including the Burnells, Mary and Sam, whose daughter Nichole was in the eighth grade, president of the class, queen of last fall’s Harvest Festival Ball. A potential Miss Essex County, or even a Miss New York, Risa said wist fully. I’m serious. Nichole was in the hospital in Lake Placid with a broken back, still unconscious, as far as they knew. Her parents, they agreed, were poor but honest, churchgoers. Pillars of the community, Wendell noted sarcastically. Her father, Sam, was a plumber; her mother sang in the choir. Nichole had been everybody’s favorite baby sitter.

It was a promising start. I retrieved a contingency fee agreement form from my room, explained the terms and got the Walkers to sign it, and went out in search of a burger and beer, which I found at the Rendezvous, a tavern located practically across the road from the motel.

Very convenient. I didn’t even take the car; just strolled over.

Turned out the burger wasn’t bad.

There was no one in the place who looked local, other than the bartender and the waitress. I guess everyone was at home watching TV to see if they were on the news. But I wasn’t the only customer. A couple of sharks in double knit suits Wendell was right: too old and too young, too eager sat at the bar watching the Knicks clobber the Celtics, while a few guys whom I took to be reporters, in leather jackets and stone washed jeans, trolled back and forth among the booths in back, talking shop and feeling superior to one another and to the town, practicing for the assignment that would bring them the Pulitzer.

The reporters who cover these backcountry cases, even when they’re stringers for the Plattsburgh Press Republican or something, always try to look as if they work for Rolling Stone or The Village Voice.

No way I was going to sit with the sharks at the bar, though, in spite of the Knicks game, so I took a booth in a far corner, just beyond the reporters, and ate alone, working up my notes. I was off and running.

Happy. More or less.

The next morning (I was right about the shower, by the way, and the bed was like a hammock made of wire, the room as cold as a fishing camp in Labrador), I drove over to the town of Keene Valley, ten miles to the southeast, where the bartender at the Rendezvous had told me there was a diner, the Noonmark, that served a decent breakfast and sold out of town newspapers. It was a pleasant drive.

The snow covered mountains loomed above the village, dwarfing it, making the buildings seem puny and temporary. Thin strands of wood smoke curled from the chimneys of the houses and disappeared into clean air. The sun was shining, the snow looked downy soft, the sky was a huge blue bowl, and according to the Lake Placid radio station, it was five degrees below zero. This place looks good in winter, but believe me, you want to observe it through the windshield of a warm car.

After a large country breakfast of pancakes and bacon among citizens who shook their heads sadly while they pored over the news accounts of the disaster in the village next door, I drove back to Sam Dent, where I found the Ottos at horne-if you want to call it that. I couldn’t tell if it was a DEW line radar station or a house. They lived in a dome, definitely homemade, covered with wood shingles and half set into the side of a hill, with odd shaped windows, diamonds and triangles, arranged in no pattern that I could discern from outside.

They didn’t exactly welcome me in. Hartley Otto answered the door, and a huge black stupid looking Newfoundland bounded past both of us and started barking ferociously at my car as if I were still inside it.

The dog was enormous, but the car looked like it could handle itself.

There are certain domestic animals, oversized and under sized dogs in particular, that ought to be granted extinction.