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 wistfully. “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 babysitter.
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 Rendez-Vous, 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 Rendez-Vous 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 home—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 undersized dogs in particular, that ought to be granted extinction. Horses too, now that we have tractors.
Hartley Otto was a tall, scrawny man in his early forties with a patchy beard and long graying hair tied in a ponytail with a twisted pipe cleaner. In his union suit, baggy dungarees held up with old-fashioned galluses, and high-topped working shoes, he looked more like an Appalachian hillbilly than an aging hippie, but that was the desired effect, I suppose. It was political. His gaunt face was prematurely lined, and he had dark circles under intelligent blue eyes and clearly had not slept much, if at all, in the last two days. I wondered if he’d be willing to get a haircut for the trial.
I stood silently in bright snow-reflected sunlight on the steps at the doorway for a few seconds and let him look me over. I’ve learned not to rush these things. Then I said, “Risa and Wendell Walker, they told me you might be willing to talk to me.”
“Oh,” he said. Just that, as if I’d told him it might soon snow. Though he was all sinew and bone, he looked fragile—as though a friendly clap on the shoulder would send him falling to the floor in a clattering heap.
“I apologize for coming over unannounced like this, Mr. Otto, but the Walkers said you would understand. I know it’s a bad time, but it’s important that we talk.”
“Yes, well, all right,” he said.
I took off my gloves, stuck my hand out, and said my name; he accepted my hand limply into his and let me shake the thing, as if it were an ear of corn. The guy’s gone, I thought, he’s off with his kid. I hoped his wife would turn out to be the angry one.
Usually, that’s all you need. The angry partner carries the defeated partner, who hasn’t the energy to argue against even the idea of a suit, let alone the actuality, which of course, once it’s under way, provides its own momentum. You do need one of them fueled by anger, however, especially in the beginning; two defeated parties tend to reinforce each other’s lassitude and make lousy litigants. The attorney often ends up fighting his own clients, especially near the end, when it gets down to dealing out the last cards, and the out-of-court settlement offers get made and refused. I wanted a mean lean team, a troop of vengeful parents willing to go the route with me and not come home without some serious trophies on our spears. Hartley Otto was lean, but he didn’t seem very mean.
He made a feeble gesture, inviting me inside, and I entered, bumped aside by the dog, who had apparently given up trying to scare my car. The place smelled like wood smoke and applesauce. There was no pattern to the windows from the inside, either, although I couldn’t imagine how you’d fit symmetrical windows into the building without breaking up the structure altogether. It was that kind of design. The light fell from above in a soft and diffuse wave that was actually pleasant, if a little disorienting at first. Mostly what you saw out the windows were treetops and blue sky, like looking up out of a cistern. I guess they felt safe living in there. I would’ve felt trapped.
It took a few seconds to adjust to the hazy gloom of the interior, which, when you looked away from the windows, turned out to be more like the inside of an enormous tepee than a cistern. It was a large two-story space divided into several smaller chambers with sheets of brightly colored cloth—tie-dyes and Indian madras—that had been hung from wires. On a low brick platform in the center of the main chamber I made out a large steel wood stove; the dog had flopped next to it like a shot buffalo.
A few feet from the stove, sitting cross-legged on a huge overstuffed cushion like a Bedouin chieftain, was Wanda Otto, her face darkly intelligent, eyes narrowed with suspicion and intolerance. She was clearly ready to go to war. My kind of woman.
“What’d you say your name was?” Hartley asked me.
“Mitch Stephens.” I drew out a card and gave it to him. He read it with deliberation and handed it to his wife, who swiftly passed her eyes over it and set it on the floor next to her
. I felt like Meriwether Lewis sent out from Washington to treat with the Indians.
“The Walkers sent him by,” Hartley said in a voice that sounded the way a sheet of blank paper looks. He moved around behind his wife and sat on what appeared to be a stool but was in fact a cushioned tree stump with a birch-stick back attached. Except for numerous large pillows scattered around the room, all the furniture was made of wood that still resembled trees, mostly birch, roughly cut and unfinished, with the bark left on. Twig furniture, they call it, made to look as if it grew in the woods in the approximate shape of a chair or table or set of shelves, and all you had to do was drag it home, strip off the leaves and lop off a few branches here and there, and voilà. Some people like that stuff, and they pay a lot of money for it.
“You want a cup of tea or something?” he asked me.
I said tea would be fine and took the liberty of shucking my topcoat. “All right if I sit down for a few moments, Mrs. Otto? I want to talk with you. Same as I talked to the Walkers last night.” I was wearing a suit, tieless, still dressed Manhattan style, which I regretted, but it was all I had brought with me. I promised myself that when I came up to Sam Dent a second time (and I was sure by now that I’d be making a lot of trips up here), I’d stop at EMS first. Flannel shirts, green wool pants, clodhoppers, down vest—the Adirondack look. By then, of course, it wouldn’t much matter; everyone would already know I was a New York lawyer. When in Rome, however.
Wanda pointed at a nearby pillow, and I quickly took it. The twig chairs and stumps didn’t look very comfortable anyhow. Besides, I wanted to get down near the floor, where she was, and look her straight in the eye. Let Hartley hover overhead, out of it, making tea. We were going to deal, this lady and I, the Indian chief and the white man.
“I’m a lawyer,” I said.
“I see that.” She was large-breasted, square-shouldered, with long dark hair that hung in a thick braid down her back. She wore a floppy print blouse that emphasized her pregnant belly rather than hid it, and a long wool skirt and moccasins, and her volume seemed greater than her weight—she looked as though she was terrific on the dance floor and bossy in bed. A heavy turquoise and silver amulet hung on a thong at her throat. She had big strong-looking hands, nearly as large as mine, and thick wrists with half a dozen silver bracelets on each, and there were several heavily embossed rings on her fingers.
The woman was deeply into the Indian trip, more so now, no doubt, than usual, probably into chants and meditation, sweat lodges and omens. I figured she was Jewish, Great Neck, Long Island, NYU, class of ’72, psych major, with a couple of years of social work and art classes at the New School, where she had met Hartley the Lutheran woodcarver, a draft evader from Wisconsin or someplace. They probably found this place on a camping trip. (Turned out I wasn’t far off. I had Wanda pegged exactly, but Hartley had come from South Dakota; they bought this land with money borrowed from Wanda’s father when they were crafts counselors at a nearby socialist summer camp and built the house the following year. I learned all this later, of course.)
“You know the Walkers, Risa and Wendell,” I said.
“Yes.”
“They speak highly of you.”
“Good. Will they speak highly of you?”
“I think so. Especially when I have won their case for them.”
“So they have hired you.”
“Yes.”
“I see. Their child has died, and they have gone out and hired a lawyer because of it.”
“Yes. Although my task is to represent them only in their anger, not their grief.”
“That’s how you understand your job? To represent anger?”
“Yes. You are angry, are you not? Among so many other things.”
She pursed her lips thoughtfully and remained silent for a moment. The dog had started to snore. Hartley had disappeared behind a curtain, and I could hear water running into a kettle, which surprised me—I’d imagined melting chunks of ice or maybe a hand pump, not a faucet and sink. They probably had a microwave oven and a food processor back there.
“Yes,” she said, expelling her breath. “Oh, yes, we are angry. Among so many other things.”
“That’s why I’m here, Mrs. Otto. To give your anger a voice, to be a weapon for you.”
“Against whom?”
“Against whoever caused that bus to go off the road into the sandpit.”
“I see. You think someone, a person, caused the accident.”
“There is no such thing as an accident.”
“No. No, there isn’t. You are right about that. But how will you know who caused this accident that took our son from us?”
“If everyone had done his job, your son would be alive this morning and safely in school. I will simply find out who did not do his job. Then, in your name and the Walkers’ and the name of whoever else decides to join you, I will sue that person and the company or agency he works for, I will sue them for negligence.”
“I want that person to go to prison for the rest of his life,” she declared. “I want him to die there. I don’t want his money.”
“It’s unlikely anyone will go to prison. He or his company will have to pay in other ways. But pay they will. And we must make them pay, Mrs. Otto, not to benefit you in a material way or to compensate you for the loss of your son, Bear, which can’t be done, but to protect the child you’re carrying inside you now. Understand, I’m not here to speak just for your anger. I’m here to speak for the future as well. What we’re talking about here is our ongoing relation to time.”
“I see.” And I think she did. The Walkers had seemed more muddled in their motives. The money promised by the lawsuit meant a lot to them, of course, but in a greedy childish way, and certainly more than they were willing to admit to themselves or reveal openly to me. The Walkers were poor and in debt, and their poverty had bugged them for years, and it seemed even more unfair to them now, with their child gone, than before. But Wanda Otto, and her husband too, never struck me as having any selfish interest in the money; they cared only about its handy capacity to function as punishment and prohibition. They were too lost in their Zen Little Indians fantasy to be wholly believable, maybe, or as reliable as the Walkers were, but I admired them nonetheless.
Hartley had returned bearing a mug with a tea bag in it. “Let it steep a minute,” he said. “You want milk?”
“No. A little sugar, though.”
“We only have honey,” he said.
“I’ll take it straight.”
“Well, Mr. New York Lawyer, what you’ve been saying makes sense,” Wanda said to me. “Not much else in this world does.” Then to Hartley, “We should hire this man to represent us. That way we won’t have to deal with any of the others. He can advise us on how to talk to the reporters too. You’ll do that?” she asked me.
“Yes. Certainly. For now, though, you should refuse all interviews. Say nothing to the press, nothing to any other lawyers. Refer everybody to me.”
“Are you expensive?”
“No,” I said. “If you agree to have me represent you in this suit, I will require no payment until after the suit is won, when I will require one third of the awarded amount. If there is no award made, then my services will have cost you nothing. It’s a standard agreement.”
“Do you have this agreement with you?”
“In my car,” I said, and, not without difficulty, stood up, almost spilling my tea. I’m not used to sitting cross-legged on the floor. “I’ll just be a minute. You should talk without me, anyhow, before you sign it,” I added. Also, I needed a cigarette, and I hadn’t noticed any ashtrays: the house was cluttered with small figurines and strange clay baskets that looked as if they were made to hold the spirits of ancestors rather than cigarette butts and ashes.
I stepped outside, coatless, still bearing my mug of tea, and the dog followed me and promptly pissed on the front tire of my car and took off down the road. I dumped the tea onto a snowbank, making my own
mark. Then I got inside the car, where it was still warm, and lit a cigarette.
I felt terrific. My mind was off and running, switching options and tracking consequences like a first-class computer. Everyone has a specialty, and I guess this is mine. For twenty-five years now, and for three different firms, even after making partner, I’ve been the guy who handles these disaster negligence suits. I could pull away from tort cases and just handle the white-shoe stuff if I wanted—I’ve got the name and face for it—or I could quit the practice altogether, move permanently out to the house in East Hampton and maybe teach a course or two at Fordham; but I won’t. Nothing else provides me with the rush that I get from cases like this. There is a brilliant hard-edged clarity that comes over me when I take on a suit for the Ottos and the Walkers of the world, an intensity and focus that makes me feel more alive then than at any other time.
It’s almost like a drug. It’s probably close to what professional soldiers feel, or bullfighters. The rest of the time, like most people, I muddle lonely through my days and nights feeling unsure, vaguely confused, conflicted, and aimless. Put me onto something like this school bus case, though, and zap! all those feelings disappear. Nothing else does it—not illicit sex, not cocaine, not driving fast late at night on the wrong lane of the highway, all of which I’ve tried. Nothing.
When I think about it, the only other event in my life that I can remember even coming close to giving me the same rush, the same hard hit of formalized intelligence, happened nearly twenty years ago, on the coast of North Carolina, when Zoe was two years old and we were renting a summer place way out on the Outer Banks. Klara and I were tight then, especially over Zoe; we still thought we had a future together, the three of us. Later, it would be only two of us with a future together, me and Zoe, or Klara and Zoe; then one of us, me alone, Klara alone, and who knows now about Zoe’s future? Fission in the nuclear family. It’s got a short half-life.
The Sweet Hereafter Page 10