The Sweet Hereafter

by Russell Banks

  “Our children aren’t even buried yet,” I told him. “It’s you—you’re the liar. Risa and Wendell Walker, I know them, you’re right, but they wouldn’t hire a goddamned lawyer. And the Ottos, they wouldn’t deal with you, for Christ’s sake. You’re lying to me about them, and probably to them about me. We’re not fools, you know, country bumpkins you can put the big-city hustle on. You’re just trying to use us,” I told him. “You want us to pull each other in.”

  He was not lying, though, and I knew it, and at bottom I didn’t give a damn what the others were doing, even Risa. It was almost funny to me at that moment, in a cruel and slightly superior way. Ghosts don’t enter into class action lawsuits. I calmly smiled at the lawyer, and I think I even wished him luck, and got into my truck and closed the door on him. Slowly I backed the truck away from him and drove out of the lot, turned left, and headed down the valley toward the Rendez-Vous.

  As I had so many times over the last couple of years, I parked my truck in the deserted parking lot outside the Rendez-Vous, which, like everything else in town, was closed, and walked across the road to Room 11 at the Bide-a-Wile. I don’t know if I expected Risa to be there, but surely I hoped she would be—I had no other reason to go there this late.

  She was sitting by the window in the wicker chair, and when I let myself into the darkened room, she said simply, without expression, “I knew you’d come.”

  “Well, I can’t say I did.” I sat down opposite her, on the edge of the bed, and put my hands on my knees. “Habit, I guess.”

  “Me, too,” she said. “Thank God for habits.”

  We tried for a few moments to talk the way we used to, the way people who love each other are supposed to talk—intimately, more or less honestly, about their feelings for one another and for other people as well. We tried to talk not as if nothing had happened, of course, but with the accident and the loss of our children as a context. It was useless. I couldn’t say anything true about how I felt, and neither could she.

  “This is the first time I’ve been able to leave the house,” I said.

  “People keep calling on the phone and coming by to see if they can help out.”

  “No one can help.”

  “No. Not really. But they try.”

  “Yes, they try.”

  “You’ll go to the funeral, though, won’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I’ll be there. But I’d rather stay at home alone.”

  “There’ll be a lot of people there.”

  “I expect so.”

  “I wish it was just going to be the families, you know, like us. They’re the only ones who really understand.”

  “I guess so.”

  “But people have been very thoughtful and sympathetic.”

  “Yes. They have.”

  We sounded like strangers sitting in a dentist’s waiting room. Finally, though, we gave it up and were silent for a while. Then she told me how she had known all along that something like this was going to happen. She had felt it in her bones, she said. As if she wanted me to be amazed and praise her for it.

  I decided that she was stupid to think that and even stupider to say it, although I did not tell her so. Instead, I told her about my unexpected meeting with the lawyer, Stephens. Without saying why, I said that I’d stopped by the garage and while I was there I’d caught the lawyer taking pictures of the bus with a flash camera, which was more or less the truth. “The sonofabitch tried to get me to hire him for some kind of negligence suit,” I said. “He told me he’d already got you and Wendell signed up, you and Wendell and the Ottos, and I told him to shove it. We don’t need a lawyer,” I added.

  “What do we need?”

  “Good question.” I stood up and took a step toward the door; I still had my coat and wool cap on. “But we don’t need a lawyer,” I said. “Count me out.”

  She looked up at me, and in the bands of moonlight falling through the blinds I could see her face clearly, and it was no longer lovely to me. It didn’t even look like a woman’s face anymore; it was like the face of a male actor who had made himself up as a woman. “Well,” she said, “goodbye.”

  “Goodbye.” I pulled my gloves over my hands and opened the door and stepped outside, where I turned and said to her, “I have to go home now.”

  “You go home, Billy.”

  I closed the door on her and walked away. We spoke again, of course, on numerous occasions, but always with other people surrounding us; we managed not to meet again in a room alone, however, or to speak face-to-face, and so it was as if we never saw each other after that, never saw the people we had once been, Risa Walker and Billy Ansel. From then on, we were simply different people. Not new people; different.

  Mitchell Stephens, Esquire

  Angry? Yes, I’m angry; I’d be a lousy lawyer if I weren’t. I suppose it’s as if I’ve got this permanent boil on my butt and can’t quite sit down. Which is not the same, you understand, as being hounded by greed; although I can see, of course, that it probably sometimes looked like greed to certain individuals who were not lawyers, when they saw a person like me driving all the way up there to the Canadian border, practically, saw me camping out in the middle of winter in a windy dingy little motel room for weeks at a time, bugging the hell out of decent people who were in the depths of despair and just wanted to be left alone. I can understand that.

  But it wasn’t greed that put me there; it’s never been greed that sends me whirling out of orbit like that. It’s anger. What the hell, I’m not ashamed of it. It’s who I am. I’m not proud of it, either, but it makes me useful, at least. Which is more than you can say for greed.

  That’s what people don’t get about negligence lawyers—good negligence lawyers, I mean, the kind who go after the sloppy fat cats with their corner offices and end up nailing their pelts to the wall. People immediately assume we’re greedy, that it’s money we’re after, people call us ambulance-chasers and so on, like we’re the proctologists of the profession, and, yes, there’s lots of those. But the truth is, the good ones, we’d make the same moves for a single shekel as for a ten-million-dollar settlement. Because it’s anger that drives us and delivers us. It’s not any kind of love, either—love for the underdog or the victim, or whatever you want to call them. Some litigators like to claim that. The losers.

  No, what it is, we’re permanently pissed off, the winners, and practicing law is a way to be socially useful at the same time, that’s all. It’s like a discipline; it organizes and controls us; probably keeps us from being homicidal. A kind of Zen is what. Some people equally pissed off are able to focus their rage by becoming cops or soldiers or martial arts instructors; those who become lawyers, however, especially litigators like me, are a little too intelligent, or maybe too intellectual is all, to become cops. (I’ve known some pretty smart cops, but not many intellectual ones.) So instead of learning how to break bricks and two-by-fours with our hands or bust chain-snatchers in subways, we sneak off to law school and put on three-piece suits and come roaring out like banshees, all teeth and claws and fire and smoke.

  Certainly we get paid well for it, which is a satisfaction, yes, but not a motivation, because the real satisfaction, the true motivation, is the carnage and the smoldering aftermath and the trophy heads that get hung up on the den wall. I love it.

  That’s why I spent most of six months up there in Sam Dent, practically becoming a citizen. Not my idea of a winter vacation, believe me. But anytime I hear about a case like that school bus disaster up there, I turn into a heat-seeking missile, homing in on a target that I know in my bones is going to turn out to be some bungling corrupt state agency or some multinational corporation that’s cost-accounted the difference between a ten-cent bolt and a million-dollar out-of-court settlement and has decided to sacrifice a few lives for the difference. They do that, work the bottom line; I’ve seen it play out over and over again, until you start to wonder about the human species. They’re like clever monkeys, that’s all
. They calculate ahead of time what it will cost them to assure safety versus what they’re likely to be forced to settle for damages when the missing bolt sends the bus over a cliff, and they simply choose the cheaper option. And it’s up to people like me to make it cheaper to build the bus with that extra bolt, or add the extra yard of guardrail, or drain the quarry. That’s the only check you’ve got against them. That’s the only way you can ensure moral responsibility in this society. Make it cheaper.

  So that winter morning when I picked up the paper and read about this terrible event in a small town upstate, with all those kids lost, I knew instantly what the story was; I knew at once that it wasn’t an “accident” at all. There are no accidents. I don’t even know what the word means, and I never trust anyone who says he does. I knew that somebody somewhere had made a decision to cut a corner in order to save a few pennies, and now the state or the manufacturer of the bus or the town, somebody, was busy lining up a troop of smoothies to negotiate with a bunch of grief-stricken bumpkins a settlement that wouldn’t displease the accountants. I packed a bag and headed north, like I said, pissed off.

  Sam Dent is a pretty town, actually. It’s not Aspen or Vail, maybe, and it sure isn’t Saint Bart’s or Mustique, where frankly I’d much rather have been at that time of year, but the landscape was attractive and strangely stirring. I’m not a scenery freak like my ex-wife, Klara, who has orgasms over sunsets and waterfalls and not much else, but once in a great while I go someplace and look up and see where I am, and it’s unexpectedly beautiful to me: my stomach tightens, and my pulse races, and this powerful blend of fear and excitement comes over me, like something dangerous is about to happen. It’s almost sexual.

  Anyhow, the town of Sam Dent and the mountains and forests that surrounded it, they gave me that feeling. I grew up in Oak Park, Illinois, and have spent my entire adult life in New York City. I’m an urban animal, basically; I care more about people than landscape. And although I have sojourned in rural parts quite a bit (I’ve spent months at a time in Wounded Knee, in eastern Washington, in Alabama, where I won a big asbestosis case, in the coalmining region of West Virginia, and so on), I can’t say the landscape of those places particularly moved me. They were places, that’s all. Interchangeable chunks of the planet. Yes, I needed to learn a whole lot about each of them in order to pursue my case effectively, but in those other cases my interest in the landscape was more pragmatic, you might say, than personal. Strictly professional.

  Here in Sam Dent, however, it somehow got personal. It’s dark up there, closed in by mountains of shadow and a blanketing early nightfall, but at the same time the space is huge, endless, almost like being at sea—you feel like you’re reading one of those great long novels by whatsername, Joyce Carol Oates, or Theodore Dreiser, that make you feel simultaneously surrounded by the darkness and released into a world much larger than any you’ve dealt with before. It’s a landscape that controls you, sits you down and says, Shut up, pal, I’m in charge here.

  They have these huge trees everywhere, on the mountains, of course, but down in the valleys and in town, too, and surrounding the houses, even outside my motel room; they’ve got white pine and spruce and hemlock and birches thick as a man, and the wind blows through them constantly. And since there’s very little noise of any other kind up there—almost no people, remember, and few cars, no sirens howling, no jackhammers slamming, and so forth—the thing you hear most is the wind blowing in the trees. From September to June, the wind comes roaring out of Ontario all the way from Saskatchewan or someplace weird like that, steady and hard and cold, with nothing to stop or slow it until it hits these mountains and the trees, which, like I say, are everywhere.

  What they call the Adirondack Park, you understand, is no small roadside park, no cutesy little campground with public toilets and showers—I mean, we’re talking six million acres of woods, mountains, and lakes, we’re talking a region the size of the state of Vermont, the biggest damn park in the country—and most of the people who live there year round are scattered in little villages in the valleys, living on food stamps and collecting unemployment, huddling close to their fires and waiting out the winter, until they can go back outdoors and repair the damage the winter caused.

  It’s a hard place, hard to live in, hard to romanticize. But, surprisingly, not hard to love—because that’s what I have to call the feeling it evokes, this strange combination of fear and awe I’m talking about, even in someone like me.

  That wasn’t what I expected, though. When I first drove up there, the day after the school bus went over, I was astonished by what I saw. 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, lifelong 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 Thüle 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 highway 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 reindeer 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.