“We might not dare to blaze out to you,
But the dock is one of those who are able:
The sea is not far, and here the bank is soft with ferns.
It was here your eyes stayed in the day,
Now you can stay like the night, white and stern.”
3.
I hear the wheels turning like thunder in the river
I hear the rattle of glass, the vacuum tubes
In the gunnysack. The hawk screams in the attic of
The trees. Mother, my home is here, with you.
It was the recording and composing studio all over again, or Hartpence’s afghan. This poetry was a room or a house he would see always from the outside. Worse, it was a room in his own house in which he could stand forever without being in it, part of the thing that made it somebody’s—his son’s, rather than just a room. Reading the poems and hearing the music was like looking into what he thought was a window but that turned out to be a mirror, revealing nothing to him—only himself, a man standing there looking. The boy was enfolded in the words and in the music, the rooms in which he moved took him into themselves, while the father could only stand and look.
Mr. Mortimer saw the Die Odes—which the boy later either included in the collection called Love Songs to Death or simply retitled—in April, a month before his son’s twelfth birthday. In June, when his teaching duties were over for the year, he went with his wife and child to visit his mother-in-law in Harrisburg. On Sunday, reading through the paper in his grandmother’s backyard, the boy saw an ad for a new model of equalizer and asked his father if he could go the next day and see if it was as good as they claimed.
“Certainly. Do you want to go by yourself or would you like some company?”
The Stereo Supermart was located in a district of warehouses and light industry, next door to a tavern. A beer truck making deliveries was double-parked outside, behind another truck. Mr. Mortimer found a parking space directly across the street, and when he and the boy had almost gotten across they heard a motor revving up behind them and turned just in time to see a black Corvette move past them with two teenage boys in it. The driver casually dropped a brown paper bag out the window, which crashed as it hit the pavement, like glass breaking. Mr. Mortimer got to the curb before he turned around again, and saw his son bending down to pick up the paper bag. As the boy straightened up, he opened the bag and pulled out a large green fragment of a Coke bottle. It was 11 a.m. He was putting the shard back into the bag when his head turned quickly to the right toward the massive back doors of the beer truck, which had just revved up its engine. The street was deserted. Mr. Mortimer was about to say something when the truck lurched into reverse, and he stood on the sidewalk, looking, seeing his son look from the truck to him with an expression that seemed then indecipherably serene, enveloped in the noises of the truck, the roaring motor and the rattling bottles. That expression did not change when the heavy bumper struck the boy on the upper thigh, just below the hip, causing his legs to buckle slightly and his body to lean and turn to the right, so that he could almost have read the advertising legend on those tall steel doors before they smashed into his cheek and nose, knocking his glasses off and snapping his head back and down, the whole of the body then, in its T-shirt and blue jeans, beginning to fall, quickly and awkwardly, to the pavement, where the double rear wheels of the truck crushed it lengthwise from the feet to the chest, where they came to a stop.
To his left something moved. It was the driver of the truck, who had opened his door and was standing now with one foot on the running board, a look of distaste and contempt on his face as he saw the body under his rear wheels. “Oh no, oh shit,” he said half aloud, the words coming out slightly slurred. Then, as he moved to get back behind the wheel, he looked toward Mr. Mortimer, who was standing on the sidewalk with his hands up and open in front of his chest, as if he did not know whether to reach for the child’s body or his own. His mouth was open. The driver waved at him once, a scornful downward swipe of his arm, as he finished getting back into the cab of the truck, which now lurched forward and away. Down the street.
The father leaped out between the parked cars, his right hand already sliding inside his jacket to the shirt pocket and pulling out the ballpoint pen and clicking the button, his head leaning over the parked car in front of him, craning to see the license number of the truck and mumbling it to himself as he searched his pockets for some scrap of paper—repeating it meanwhile, and finally writing it in big block letters on the palm of his left hand. The truck swerved wildly around the next corner, and he was left alone there on the street. He did not want to look down. He had seen enough to know that nothing could be done. The boy was beyond help, beyond pain, beyond any call.
When the police came, they were very good, very professionally courteous and understanding. One officer leaned into the back seat of the police car in which Mr. Mortimer was glad to be sitting, since he didn’t feel any strength left in his legs, and asked him if he would like a drink or a glass of water or something. “Yes, thank you,” Mr. Mortimer told him, though he refused the tumbler of whiskey someone had brought him from the tavern. The inside of the police car smelled of Naugahyde and of the oil from the riot gun whose barrel he could see rising up into the frame of the windshield. This is how criminals must feel, he thought, sitting in the back seat of a squad car under the power of the law. It was an odd thing to think about, he thought, as he drank, feeling the water fill his mouth and slide down his throat.
At the police station, where they asked him more questions and had him complete some forms and sign others, he felt even more strongly the machinery, the working structure of the law, this whole building, all these computers and teletype machines, all these people, working for him, to enforce the law. One heavyset man in a tan suit told him, “If everything you’re telling us is true, it sounds like at least felony hit-and-run, and most likely manslaughter.”
“Of course it’s true,” he said quietly.
“Do you have any witnesses?”
Behind him, all around him, he heard the hum of the air conditioner, and over that the bustle of voices and teletype machines, the generalized background noise of an office where people worked.
The hard part, he thought, would be telling his wife and his mother-in-law. But when he got out of the plainclothes policeman’s sedan in front of the house the two women were waiting for him, pulling aside the curtain in the living-room window and then appearing in the doorway. Their faces were drained and empty, they could not believe it, the police had called them but they had not given them any of the details—“Charles, a beer truck?” It was then that he realized he would begin to cry. He did not know how to cry, and he felt his face contort itself, making him look, he thought, grotesque, and making him feel doubly foolish: he had been prepared to comfort the women. His son. He was twelve years old. None of this was true.
He was thankful, with that part of his mind that still functioned clearly, that there were practical matters to be taken care of. His car was still parked across the street from that stereo place; he had to do something about a funeral. They would ask him, he thought, to select clothes in which his son’s body would be dressed. Someone would put those clothes on his son’s body. How? The arms and legs of the body would be stiff. There would also be an inquest of some kind or a hearing, and there he would be presented with the opportunity to testify, to tell how it happened. And then that man, that driver of the beer truck would learn, would learn the meaning of the law. He had hulked on the running board of the truck like an animal, his eyes glassy, his speech slurred.
The next morning Lieutenant Roventini, the heavyset plainclothes officer who had spoken with him yesterday at the police station, called to give him a progress report. Through the license number they had located the truck, which was registered to a local beer-and-soft-drink distributor. The people there had cooperated fully and had given him the name of the man who had been driving
the truck yesterday on that route, “A Mr. Anthony Blaquere, been with the firm thirteen years. But, Mr. Mortimer, he says he didn’t run into anybody.”
“But—”
At the preliminary hearing Mr. Mortimer told what had happened. The hearing room was much smaller than any courtroom he had seen in the movies or on TV. It was one of what seemed like half a dozen rooms on this floor where hearings of one kind or another were being held. People he did not know were sitting in clumps around the spectators’ area listening to the proceedings of some other case. A middle-aged woman worked the little keyboard of her shorthand machine while she chewed gum. At first this offended him, but this was precisely the impersonality on which or of which the structure of the law was built. The fake walnut paneling bothered him because it seemed unnecessary. It was not only an unsuccessful attempt to suggest the austere splendor of the law but a halfhearted one, like a poor set in an amateur theatrical production.
Mr. Mortimer now saw that Anthony Blaquere was bigger than he had remembered. As he walked forward toward the stand the muscles of his shoulders rolled under his coat, and when he sat down he took up the whole space of the chair, the bulk of his body rising up thickly to his thick neck and his close-cropped head. His small, dark eyes looked out of his face with a kind of brutish repose. Mr. Mortimer realized that the man did not feel in any way threatened by any of this and looked out at his accuser with the scorn of obliviousness.
“I made my deliveries to Mortenson’s. When I got back to my truck I finished up the paperwork. There was another delivery van parked in front of me, so I threw it into reverse and pulled out. The next morning the police call me and tell me I ran over some kid. I’m sorry the kid was run over—who would want to see a kid run down? But he must have jumped out behind the truck—even with the reverse beeper going and everything.”
“Didn’t you feel the impact?”
“Have you seen that section of Harrison Street?”
“Why?”
“It’s nothing but potholes and debris in there. I don’t think I even thought about it, but if I did I must have figured I had run over some debris.”
“Mr. Mortimer claims you were drunk, that you stopped your truck and got out of the cab and looked back, that you—”
“That’s a lie! That’s a lie! I’m really sorry about his kid and everything, but he’s calling me a murderer and, hey, that doesn’t go. That’s a lie.”
From his seat twenty-five feet away Mr. Mortimer could feel the hatred billowing out to him from the man, an almost palpable presence. Now the man was actually looking directly at him, punctuating his outraged sentences with short thrusts of his finger. His indignation was so compelling that for a moment Mr. Mortimer actually found himself convinced. Then he felt his jaw drop open, and a moment later felt something surge through his whole body, almost as if his chair had been hit from behind. He clenched his fists in his lap. This is what hate feels like, he said to himself. This bullet-headed man with the sneering face and the jabbing finger had killed his son and was now, in a public courtroom, in full view of the world, contemptuously, barefacedly lying and calling him a liar, challenging him. This could not be happening. None of this was true.
He still could not believe it when he heard the announcement that there was not sufficient evidence to indict the defendant.
As Blaquere came up the aisle from the stand, he was joined by two men in suits. Together they seemed to clog the space of the aisle. The boy’s father looked into the driver’s eyes, who looked back at him with what he took to be cold disdain. Mr. Mortimer was afraid that the man would hit him, here in the courtroom full of people. He was not afraid of being hurt, but he was afraid of being shamed further, that he would try to strike the man back, and that his ineffectuality would once again be displayed to everybody, like a man kicking a building and breaking his toe. He continued to clench his fists, and slowly realized by the slight ache how tightly he was grinding his teeth and what sort of grimace was contorting his face.
The hallway outside was crowded with people milling around, and as Mr. Mortimer made his way to the elevator he did not see the man until he felt his right arm grabbed and held above the elbow and then felt his left shoulder pushed against the wall. Blaquere was glowering down into his face and snarling, “Professor! I ought to cut your liver out, you lying motherfucker!”
The other two men were trying to pull him away, trying to get some leverage to move him by his arms and saying, “Tony! Get the hell away from him! Tony!”
As the man let himself be moved away, he was still shaking his finger in Mr. Mortimer’s face, growling, “You almost killed my poor mother! She just about took a heart attack!” The other two men pushed the truck driver along.
As the doors of the elevator closed behind them, Mr. Mortimer continued to lean against the wall of this corridor in the Hall of Justice. The whole thing had been remarkable for the quietness of its violence. Only a dozen or so people milling around them had noticed it, and even their surprised immobility was now already blending back into the general stir and movement of the hall. A large black woman looked at him and then at the door of the elevator, shaking her head. “Animals!” she said at last. When he tried to walk, he found the muscles in his thighs and calves were too fluttery to support his weight, and he had to stand where he was, leaning against the wall, for a few minutes. He realized that he would have to tell all this to Allison and her mother too.
The suggestion to see Callahan, the family lawyer there in Harrisburg, came from Mrs. Baxter, Allison’s mother. Mr. Mortimer went that afternoon and told him the story. At first the lawyer was puzzled that no other witnesses were called. “Didn’t anyone question the tavern owner or the people in there?” he asked Mr. Mortimer.
“No, why?”
“Well, you say he had been drinking. Maybe there was somebody in there who saw him or spoke with him, someone who might be willing to testify to that effect. But didn’t the coroner or deputy coroner present a report?”
“The coroner’s report was made a part of the record.”
“This is all extremely irregular. Even an insurance company would have made a more thorough investigation than the one you’ve described. I don’t quite know what to tell you. Certainly you could file a civil action for wrongful death, naming both the driver and the owner of the vehicle. I doubt if the driver has much, but if the company were held liable they obviously have assets.
“This is not a neat case, Mr. Mortimer. You see, the preliminary hearing tends to exonerate the driver, and in order to press the case we would have to somehow impeach or reopen those proceedings, and that means fighting City Hall. I don’t know what to tell you. This is all most—messy. We would have to bring in our own private investigators. Messy and expensive.”
The phone rang. While the lawyer spoke affably into it, Mr. Mortimer imagined himself talking to the bartender in Mortenson’s Tavern. The flat, cool dimness was a different world from the hot street outside. Over the mirror behind the bar a lighted glass diorama showed a miniature beer wagon pulled by a team of tiny Clydesdales. No one was there except for the bartender, perched on a stool at the far end, eating a liverwurst sandwich.
“You know Tony Blaquere?”
“What’s it to you?”
It was absurd. He looked out the window at the trees of the park across the street, all reaching their branches out into the brightness of the air, as if to contain it, which they did, some of it, moving intermittently among their green darknesses. Now the man across the desk was saying, “Good talking to you, Jack,” and hanging up, and turning to give Mr. Mortimer a look of calculation.
“There is something else about this case that bothers me,” he said. “An investigation like this is routine, it should be routine. Policemen are human, they can be distractible or careless at times, even incompetent at times. But this sounds too—well, the standard procedures don’t seem to have been followed, and one has to ask why. Why weren’t they followed? The
pattern suggests—well, it suggests that somewhere along the line a decision was made—by somebody or some bodies—to not follow the standard procedures. Do you see what I’m driving at?”
Mr. Mortimer looked at him across the desk. The lawyer was leaning back in his chair, turned at an angle, yet his head and shoulders leaned forward, and under his bushy eyebrows his dark eyes were hard and cold. Mr. Mortimer felt he was being taken much too quickly over ground he had never even known was there. He was always stumbling onto something new just when he thought he was about to catch up. He took a breath and said, “Someone is covering up?”
There was a pause.
“We don’t like to make accusations. But certainly if the—how can I put it?—the incompleteness of the investigation has elements of deliberateness, then, well, we are going to encounter a good deal of resistance.”
Mr. Mortimer looked at him. He saw again the man on the running board of the truck, waving him scornfully away. He saw again the two men in suits hustling Blaquere—his animal bulk—into the elevator.
“No organization is going to welcome an exposé of their incompetence,” the lawyer said. “Think how much more resistance there is going to be if there was deliberate malfeasance. This may prove to be, as I’ve said, very expensive, and very difficult. Mrs. Baxter has been a friend and a client for many years, and we would represent you, if you chose to go forward, but I have to tell you now, I am not eager to join this battle.”
Mr. Mortimer continued to look into those eyes, which now seemed to him tired. “In ancient Rome,” he said, “they would have hanged the driver and thrown the truck into the Tiber.”
Callahan’s bushy eyebrows went up. “Happily, we’re not in Rome.”
“If you did take the case, would you pursue it thoroughly, wherever it might lead?”
“Mr. Mortimer, we would never take any case without that commitment.”
“What forms do I have to sign?”
Callahan’s manner changed instantly. He leaned forward with a smile, saying, “Nothing for now. I’ll have my secretary draw up a letter. We’ll need a retainer—five thousand should do for now. You can give me a postdated check if you like.”
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