All the Beautiful People We Once Knew

by Edward Carlson

  “May I help you?”

  Her battery was low on juice and I had no idea what it would take to charge it. I informed her I would like to review a case file but that I couldn’t recall the docket number, had left it in the office. She provided me a small rectangular piece of paper to inscribe pertinent information: name of parties, name of counsel. I had little to go on but Thomas’s full name and for counsel I listed myself. With the same low energy she searched the computer for the file, disappeared into the stacks, and returned a few minutes later with an accordion file marked Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, containing long green manila folders bolted with tiny brass fasteners.

  “I can’t let you leave with these but you can review them over there,” she said, pointing at a counter. I asked if there was a copier. She said there was but it was broken. And besides I wouldn’t want to spend the fifty cents it charged per copy, which was what it cost now and probably soon would cost a dollar if they ever fixed the machine. I refrained from telling her it was on the WorldScore tab. It was fine, she said, if I wanted to photograph the contents of the file with my phone.

  Heavy paper weighed down the file and I felt that Hondaesque, voyeuristic excitement of uncovering more salient facts for impeaching Thomas’s credibility. One folder for administrative matters, setting forth the names and addresses of the parties. Another folder containing filing receipts and administrative cover sheets. A verified complaint by Regina Thomas née McAdoo against her husband Mike “Bud” Thomas seeking divorce due to irreconcilable differences. A stipulation of divorce signed by the parties agreeing to joint custody of the minor child Caitlyn Josephine Thomas and the equitable division of marital property. Mr. Thomas to retain sole possession of the real property at 143 Mill House Road in exchange for the payment of certain sums due and owing to Ms. McAdoo. Boilerplate lawyer language reciting the Pennsylvania statutes governing the divorce followed by facts of the marriage—when, where, how long—to establish the court’s jurisdiction followed by numbered paragraphs concluding with a signed court order dissolving the marriage. Affidavits signed by the parties attesting they did not enter the joint stipulation of marital dissolution under duress. I photographed the entire divorce file despite the fact it appeared to lack anything incriminating other than the reality of another busted marriage.

  Toward the back of the file there was another folder, lime green and stamped and new, containing a verified complaint by Pennsylvania’s Department of Human Services—Child Welfare Services (DHS/CWS) against Mike “Bud” Thomas. Ms. Regina Thomas née McAdoo—unfathomably keeping his name—now alleging that her former husband had sexually and psychologically abused their minor daughter Caitlyn Josephine McAdoo. That Ms. McAdoo had provided sufficient evidence for DHS/CWS to move the Court to rescind its previous order for joint custody and abolish Thomas’s rights to unsupervised parenting. A report from a school psychologist corroborating Ms. McAdoo’s concerns. Another letter from Thomas’s previous lawyer advising the Pennsylvania court his representation of Mr. Thomas was limited to the marital dissolution and did not entail the new matter regarding custody. A letter from Thomas to the Court explaining that the allegations his former wife lodged against him were 100 percent false, that he was an injured Operation Enduring Freedom veteran, that his ex-wife was addicted to painkillers, that she had done this to him because he refused to subsidize her addiction, and that he was waiting for disability payments to rehire a lawyer but preferably one who wasn’t such a bastard. The judge granting Thomas 120 days to retain counsel to challenge the protective order that would remain in effect pending adjudication. So ordering that the minor Caitlyn Josephine Thomas shall be relegated to the sole custody of her mother Regina McAdoo. So ordering that Mr. Thomas shall have no unsupervised contact with his daughter absent the continuous presence of the following individuals, including Thomas’s second wife, Joan Thomas née McFarland. So ordering that in the event neither parent proved capable of fulfilling their parental responsibilities to the Court’s satisfaction, the child to be placed under the protective custody of DHS/CWS.

  “It’s a shame what they’ve done to this man,” the clerk said, Thomas’s file now bridging the gap between us.

  “I see that.”

  “He plays bass guitar every Sunday in our church band. He’s a good man. Feeds half the church with all that venison sausage and jerky he makes. You should ask him for some.”

  “I will.”

  “It’s that drug addict he was married to. She’s the problem. And to think he had to come home to her after going over there to defend our freedom.” I peered around the corner of the file shelves. On the wall above her desk was a framed photograph of the old, black, parallel World Trade Center towers and exhortations to Never Forget and reminders that Freedom Isn’t Free. “So you’re his new lawyer?”

  She possessed solid clerical instincts. Suspicion began to gnaw at her.

  “I’m an attorney,” I said.

  “Yes, but you must be Mr. Thomas’s attorney. Correct?”

  My quasi-misrepresentation had gone on long enough. I told her I was not.

  “But you represented you were.”

  “No I didn’t. I said I was an attorney. I didn’t say I was his attorney.”

  “Then why on God’s green earth would you want to review that file?”

  It was time to go. Her position was compromised; I feared soon she would start blowing a whistle. The folders wouldn’t fit inside the Redweld. I handed the bulky mass to her as she lectured me.

  “Sir, the information in that file is strictly confidential and should only be viewed by officers of the court, the parties themselves, and their attorneys.”

  “You never said that.”

  She pointed at a sign on the wall written in all caps: PER PA. CODE XYZ 123 ALL FAMILY COURT RECORDS SHALL ONLY BE REVIEWED BY THE PARTIES AND/OR THEIR AUTHORIZED REPRESENTATIVES. Ignorance of the law was no defense. Her lantern battery now fully charged, there was no reason to argue.

  “Won’t happen again,” I said, and hurried from the clerk’s counter, refrained from triple-checking the photos I took of the files’ contents. Outside, the car was cold but the engine ignition immediate and blowing heat. I half-expected the clerk to follow me from the courthouse, standing on the low steps, shaking a fist and chewing Thomas’s jerky. I drove a mile toward the rock-hard hills, turned right, toward a cluster of quasi-suburban houses, drove some more, pulled over to the black-and-pink verge, and confirmed that I digitally possessed the photos, the legibility of their contents, their relevance in establishing Thomas’s underlying motivation to jack-up his claims for injuries that didn’t exist. Anxiety set in, congealed and then firmed; I had violated the law, evidenced by the slip of paper. More a dishonest mistake, but certainly the clerk would inform Thomas of this event after playing bass with the Baptist band, evidence of my civil espionage forwarded to Thomas and then to Lazlis and then to Judge McKenzie followed by potential sanctions and Rule 11 violations and then a citation for unethical conduct but certainly nothing as significant as disbarment let alone jail time. I was already litigating against the allegations. It was an honest mistake. The clerk was complicit. The engine clicked and the upholstery settled and I could hear myself move in the driver’s seat as I struggled again to be comfortable with myself and debated whether to call Celeste and Fleeger and tell them what I had found.

  I exited the car and my hands shook from adrenaline or cold or both as I rolled a cigarette, bits of tobacco bouncing from the paper as I struggled to lick the gum. The case against WorldScore had consequences for this man. I got it. Consequences and expectations that the consequences be resolved in his favor.

  I looked up from the tip of the crooked, barely lit cigarette at the small green road sign ahead: MILL HOUSE ROAD. I again checked the photos on my phone. I was correct. This was Thomas’s street. The distant sound of the far-off wind. A sound I hadn’t heard in years, the cold wind of the country in winter. The temperature dropped by the
half-minute and flurries now circled and fell, silently landing in the winter wheat. I shifted the car into drive and turned left onto Mill House Road. My phone buzzed with messages from Fleeger. Three of them sent in the span of my cigarette, each relaying the same question:

  Dude, where’s the report?

  Thomas’s house appeared smaller in person than it did in Honda’s surveillance video. As if set down by giant hands on acreage surrounded by woods. The deer stand and the steps of a makeshift ladder bolted to the large trunk of a bone-white buttonwood, bleached by winter. I exited the car and entered the woods, crunching dry leaves. Someone had stapled neon-orange NO TRESPASSING signs to almost every other birch or maple tree. The woods surrounding the house thickened with shadows as the low clouds progressed across the remains of the day.

  I watched the house from the woods. No lights in the windows of the home. No soft yellow bulbs. No blue television screens. No Avalanche parked in the driveway. A half-cord of circulars piled by the front door. The wind shook the American flag pegged to the wrought-iron porch, scattering cracked rhododendron leaves across Thomas’s long front yard. I looked around me. There was no one there. I returned to the warm American sedan, engine still settling, and prepared to leave.

  A school bus braked in front of the house and the door opened. Not quite a teenager—a tween—descended the bus’s stairs and jumped to the ground. She was dressed all in black: sacklike black dress, black tights, bat wings of eyeliner, swinging a spiky rubber bookbag that looked like a naval mine, capable of blasting a hole through the hull of a destroyer. The house’s front storm door banged shut behind her. I watched in the rearview mirror as Thomas’s Avalanche accelerated around the corner, GOTTA GO decaled across the windshield. Fear of a confrontation hummed and buzzed and deep down inside my intestines percolated their contents and I ducked behind the dashboard as Thomas turned into his driveway riding the brakes and gunning the engine at the same time. Grapefruit-sized red rubber testicles swung from beneath the rear bumper, festooned with messages of vindictive patriotism. The horn blared on repeat until Thomas’s daughter exited the storm door. She sauntered down the porch steps and climbed into the cabin of her father’s truck. He hugged and kissed her. They looked at something she held in her hands and he backed the truck from the driveway, his one free arm around his daughter’s shoulders as he pulled her close and again kissed the top of her head. They were on a mission, I thought. And he was in violation of a court order. And I probably would have done the same, though I possessed no context to know this for certain.

  I followed the Avalanche’s long, red brake lights. Snowfall broke up the traffic, denying me frames of reference, like driving inside a cloud. I peered forward to locate the truck, the little lights atop the high cabin angry and red, and followed Thomas onto Interstate 80, hidden inside a vortex of snow. I imagined his fellow Baptists reacting positively to the truck testicles at Sunday church, as Thomas lifted his bass guitar case from the truck bed of his burnt-sienna Avalanche. Nice balls, Bud. Thank you, Pastor. He exited the highway and I let up a bit, putting some distance between us. The Avalanche entered a shopping mall parking lot. I exited the car behind a bank of snow-dusted SUVs and watched Thomas descend from the cab. Swinging no four-pointed cane. No thick, plastic orthopedic brace fastened around his thorax. No cervical tic where his neck met his shoulders. Same bolero-cut Carhartt and easy movements of his arm again across his daughter’s shoulders and he snugged her close as she tapped away text messages. He stopped walking and scratched his head, scratched it hard, chiseling grooves into his skull to satisfy this itch of the damned that couldn’t be sated. His daughter spoke to him and he stopped scratching and together they entered the shopping mall’s clear, bright automatic doors.

  The car doors locked behind me with a press of the fob and I entered the mall, wary of Thomas’s platinum-blue eyes greeting me behind the tritium sights of a .45 millimeter Glock. I felt exposed in the brightness of the mall, multitudes of me reflecting in the premature teardrop Easter Sale ornaments hanging from the mall’s window ceiling. Conspicuous among the too much noise, too many counters and stands hocking crap, too many Starbucks cups and Bluetooth gadgets, too much butter and perfume, too many people staring at their phones. Through the narrow slits of the crowd I glimpsed multiple Thomases: stocky, denimed, proud, Spydercoed. With distended centers of gravity and jackknife mustaches and close-set eyes. I rode the escalator to the mall’s mezzanine and leaned over the brass railing and watched the American crowd below. Swinging shopping bags and sniffing their wrists and yanking their kids and scrolling through Facebook as they walked and waddled. Fat and fungible and proud and smeared with makeup. I disdained them.

  Thomas and his daughter entered a store constructed to look like a Polynesian hut, outfitted with images of highly-defined abdominal muscles stretched over male pubic bones. I ordered a mango smoothie from an Asian American girl crusted with tanning foundation and returned to the brass bannister. I thought of Kath and smelled my fingers. Her bouquet of metal and musk and some hand-cut tobacco. This was good, I thought, because it was under control. Ten minutes later, Thomas and his daughter exited the hut, she swinging bags of hairless twelve-packs. Again he scratched his scalp, attacking it, the shopping crowd moving past him now, a boulder in the stream. His daughter reached up and took both his hands and told him to stop. Not for her sake but for his. For a moment I thought he would crumble. She draped her father’s arm across her shoulders and they exited the mall through the automatic doors.

  I hurried down the escalator. Knocking into people, swimming through the crowd. I wanted to tell him that I was sorry. That I didn’t know about the custody battle. That I empathized with him. That he was special. That I’m sorry for what we were doing to him. But that he needed to get over this, whatever it was. That we were not so different. But that he still possessed agency. That he could still control his fate. That this victim thing wasn’t working for him and because it wasn’t working for him we had to work against it. You see, that’s my job. The same way you flew airplanes, I have to do this. But you have to move on. You have a good kid and you’re not old and she will need you but you have to move on. You have to get over it and you have to move on. There is no other choice. The sedan door handle cracked and I started the engine and the heat resumed and again I pursued Thomas. Move on, man. His angry red lights once again visible atop the traffic. I will tell him this. I will do what I can to get this case settled but you have to move on. I will do this for him so long as he moves on. I let up. Knew he was heading home and the direction from here to there.

  Thomas parked the Avalanche in the driveway. Soft bulbs illuminated the wood-paneled living room behind white curtains. I stooped across the crunchy yard, around the side of the split-level house, thinking I could be disbarred for this, not really caring anymore but possessing no faith in my judgment. I crouched between the air conditioning units and listened for a sound, any sound. Nothing. Orion’s belt blinked clear and bright, unclouded by the city’s halogen smog. I circled the house, around the black ash pile of a spent bonfire. Standing now in the middle of the backyard, surrounded by blackness, the wind in the woods behind me, I felt nothing.

  I closed in again, upright, bold, undetected. Filled with the clarity of spent adrenaline, I ducked into the shadows and studied the kitchen from beneath the pressure-treated deck. A box of Stove Top Stuffing on the counter. A half-drank two-liter bottle of Diet Pepsi. Wonder Bread. A carton of Marlboros. A small skyline of amber pharmaceutical bottles of varying girth and height. Crouching beneath the deck, I approached small windows and peered into the basement. The house smelled fusty. Of creosote and dust. Files of papers lined shelves or lay piled on the floor, spilling into smaller piles and leading paths to larger ones. There was an order to it. As if arranged by a strange insect, one that ate pulp for spinning into a web of paper, no doubt Thomas’s responses to my discovery demands. I pressed in for a deeper look. There was a workbench surrounded by
pegboard for hanging tools by hooks. Hand drills. Planes. Chisels. Screwdrivers and pliers arranged by size. Canisters of mineral oil and metal bits stored in glass baby food jars, readily accessible for projects such as maintaining Thomas’s long Kentucky rifle, its walnut stock wrapped in protective rags and snugly vised beneath the neon tube light above Thomas’s scored workbench.

  Upstairs the daughter whined. She didn’t want to do it anymore, she said. It was Joan’s job. Thomas explained under his breath that Joan was no longer here and she knew why and it was for the better and now he needed her to do this for him so come on get over here and do it. After all, he bought her those clothes. Now it’s her turn to show a little appreciation.

  Stomach churning, I rose from beneath the pressure-treated deck and stooped around the side of the house, eyes level with the beige carpeted bedroom floor.

  “No, dad. It’s gross,” the girl protested as Thomas unbuttoned his flannel shirt sitting on the bed. He pulled his undershirt over his head, revealing a body of black hair and deep, thick scars. He pressed a bottle of moisturizer into her hand and she capitulated and squeezed its gooey white contents across the length of his shoulders and down the sides of his back. Over the rotator cuff and shrapnel wounds. As she rubbed in the cream, he smoked a cigarette, watching them both in the mirror above the dresser. He closed his eyes. She rubbed in more cream, now into his back, along the sides of his spine. He tamped out the cigarette, lay down on the bed, and turned off the light. I stood there in the dark. The empathy was gone. I felt repulsed. The girl pulled a blanket over his half-naked torso and exited his room.

  I circled the house. The girl now curled into the crook of a La-Z-Boy, texting. My footprints were visible in the snow. Certain the falling snow would cover them, I texted Fleeger that I had a productive trip to Pennsylvania. Good news to report. Getting on the road. We’ll talk in the morning. His replies were immediate.