“The motion…” said the judge slowly, building tension into the moment of decision, “…is denied.”
Shenk exhaled, feeling how tense he had become only now that the tension had been relieved. He had been thinking, he realized, of Beth Keener, and of her husband, of having to tell them it was over before it began.
“However,” Judge Cates continued. “Defense counsel’s point is well taken. I do struggle at this moment to see how tortious cause can be definitively proved for a condition that is, by all appearances…”
Cates trailed off and sighed, and then picked up the thought, his voice gruff with uncertainty. “By all appearances impossible to explain.”
What wild winds were blowing inside Jay Shenk as he took breath to respond? What intermingling hurricanes of humiliation, irritation, excitement, and fear? Whatever was happening within, he only rose again, very calmly this time, and smiled as wide as ever, and said:
“Yes, Your Honor.” The smile growing broader: “Thank you, Your Honor.”
On the way out, he placed a hand on Riggs’s thick shoulder and left it there, even as the other man stared at him, baffled by this affability. “Hey, listen,” he said. “Good luck.”
Here again, perhaps, was a moment Shenk might have taken as a sign. The close call of Cates’s decision, the hard road the judge predicted. Shenk could have folded up his tents then and there and slinked away, at the sacrifice of merely a few months and a few thousand dollars.
Instead Shenk read Cates’s ruling on the motion for summary judgment by the light of his undimmable crusader’s optimism. He took this rote procedural victory as a signal that the world was lining up his way, that he was at the starting line of a race he would win.
He misread the portents. He dove in blind. The judge swung the gavel and away he went.
February 18, 2009
Just for himself personally, Shenk could not fathom why anyone was still going to the mall. Amazon and eBay and all these other places had made it so one didn’t have to go to an actual physical place, stand in lines with other people, buy clothes after other people had pawed at them and flung them back in crumpled piles.
But here he was today, riding a series of switchback escalators up into the massive dull-stone cathedral of the Westfield Fashion Square. A man on a mission, fully cognizant of how ridiculous he was, like a satirical character from a movie comedy: the middle-aged dude trying to slyly sidle his way into the lives of today’s youth. One did what one needed to do, so here he was at 3:20 on a Wednesday afternoon, searching for four particular teenage boys, known widely—or so Shenk’s sources had informed him—to hang out here after school.
“Gentlemen,” he said, when his sources had been proven out. “Can I talk to you for just a moment or two?”
The teenagers were gathered in a ragged circle around a clump of plastic tables, each with his own tray of fast-food garbage: chicken fingers on red plastic trays, taquitos piled up in a paper bucket like too many passengers stuffed into a fishing boat, sodas as big as washtubs. These were Wesley’s friends, the other members of his fledgling rock band, and, crucially, these were those who had been hanging out with him at the time of his accident, way back at the beginning of the school year.
One of them, a bony white kid with a mop of dark hair and smudged round glasses, cleared his throat and said, “Um,” and then—“You’re the lawyer?”
“I am, yeah. Jay Shenk.” The boy put down his pizza slice and shook Shenk’s hand with a greasy palm. “I’m working with the Keeners.”
“Sure, sure,” said another of the boys, an Asian kid with a silver stud earring in one ear. He leaned back in his chair, slid a French fry into his mouth. “I saw you in the paper.”
“Ah,” said Jay. “Of course.”
Jay Shenk was no spotlight hog, not drawn like a certain class of attorney to the fickle flash of media attention, but he had, inevitably, been a sideline presence in more than one media story about the weird case of Wes Keener. That’s how they knew him, these fellas, and they eyed him up and down. Obviously they had been told not to engage with strangers asking questions about Wesley. But a lawyer was different, right? A lawyer working for their friend’s family.
“All right—so—how can we help you?” said the first kid, the skinny one with the glasses.
“Do you mind if I sit?”
Shenk, in point of fact, was already sitting. He had draped his suit jacket over a chair beside him, just one of the gang. Just a dude with a ponytail, a generation older, hanging out at the mall. “What I want is information. That’s it. To do my job properly, I need all the relevant information, and I’m hoping you guys can help me out with that.”
The clutch of dudes stared back at him.
They were a motley crew, thought Jay fondly, but show me the group of fourteen-year-old boys who are not. Sparse patches of facial hair, scuffed shoes, jeans with holes. Their bodies still figuring out what shape they would one day take, when they were done with growth spurts, when they had figured out to some extent the relationship between diet and appearance, when the acne had cleared up, when they’d learned the transformative value of a decent haircut.
His own son, Jay reflected modestly, was better turned out. Ruben tucked his shirts in; Ruben combed his hair. If anything, Ruben could do with a little roughing around the edges, a little bit of wandering to the mall after school to eat nonsense food and crack jokes with other awkward teenagers. Jesus—what did his son do after school? Was there even a mall near them? He thought with a quick grievous rush of panic that he didn’t know what his son did after school, but then he remembered: He hangs out with me! He works at the law firm!
Oh, and poems! He does that poetry thing. He loves that. Jay smiled, shaking his head. His fucking kid. Beautiful ridiculous boy.
“Listen, man,” said one of the boys who had not spoken yet. He was a green-eyed blond kid, thickset and sturdy, with the faintest outline of a mustache above what were still a baby’s fat red lips. “We already said what happened.” The way the other boys angled toward him as he spoke, Jay wondered if this kid was the leader, the alpha, to the extent that these mild-mannered music nerds operated in any kind of traditional male pack.
“We told Wes’s mom the whole story. And the doctors. Like—months ago.”
“Yeah, I know. I know. I’ve read your statements! I read everything.” Shenk winked, and then, pulling a mischievous face, snagged a ketchup-soaked chicken finger. “Sorry, what’s your name?”
They introduced themselves, one by one, each mumblier than the last. The blond was Noah; the gangly four-eyes was Bernie; the Asian kid was Cal; the last one, Marco, wore a sleeveless T-shirt and had a pen-drawn tattoo of an octopus high up on his arm.
“All right. Nice to meet you guys officially. I’m Jay. And you’re going to be hearing from a bunch of lawyers, believe me. But just so you know: My whole job is to help Wesley. Wesley and his family.”
“Meaning, get them a bunch of money,” said Noah brazenly—testing the boundaries, seeing what exactly the lines of authority were in this situation.
Shenk nodded evenly, looking back at the kid, just as brazenly. “Yes, sir. And get them a bunch of money. A shitload of money, if I do my job right.”
He grinned. Cal laughed. Marco and Bernie looked at Noah to see if they were supposed to laugh, but Noah had twisted his mouth sourly to the side and crossed his arms, so they did not.
“But really, I just want to make sure I understand everything that happened that day.”
Noah kept his arms folded. But Marco shrugged and started talking, and the others chimed in as he went, tossing in details. It had happened during the lunch period, after everyone had eaten. They were in the courtyard outside the cafeteria, near the Cans—the color-coded garbage area, one can for regular trash, one for plastic and glass, one for paper and cardboard—and they were roughhousing, just “dicking around,” as Marco said. They were arguing, as they had been doing since the summer, over w
hat to name their garage-punk five-piece, and Wesley had rated Cal’s latest suggestion, Baby Genius, as “idiotic,” insisting once again on the name he’d been stuck on for weeks, which was the Reverse Psychologists.
But Cal said that sounded gay—that’s what everyone remembered Cal saying except for Cal, who now in the presence of the strange adult protested that he wouldn’t have used the word gay like that, as a slur or whatever—but the point is, this argument degenerated into a fight—
“But not a real fight,” Marco clarified. “Just like—dicking around. Like I said.”
“Just playing, basically,” Bernie agreed emphatically, and Cal said, “You know?”
You know was more than a rhetorical hiccup, Shenk understood. Did he know? They needed him to know that they hadn’t been fighting, not for real. This wasn’t that sort of friend group, bullet-headed and belligerent, play-violence pawing on the edges of the real thing.
No. These boys, Wesley included, these were not those boys—these were the boys who hung out after school drinking soda and arguing about how overrated, exactly, Green Day is. Who wrote shitty poems in the margins of their science homework, and later set them to four-chord progressions in Cal’s basement. Who maybe every once in a while stole cigarettes from Cal’s dad, but they didn’t even like them really and can you please not tell anyone?
“Of course,” said Shenk. “I get it. You were goofing around, and Wes got hurt.”
“Yes,” said Cal, and even wary Noah said, “Yeah,” and Bernie nodded mournfully at his tray.
Wesley Keener had been chasing after Bernie, charging after him with his head down, like a bull, and Bernie had ducked out of the way, right at the last minute. Wes slammed his head on the corner of the bench and fell to the ground.
All the boys went silent at the memory of the decisive moment. The instant that will not change, that will never change, that will live forever every time they thought about school, about childhood, about being a freshman and being fourteen. The terrible thing that happened, the thing that will never not have happened.
Their friend since first grade, friend and guitarist and lyricist, cracked his head into the corner of a bench and fell down hard. Mouth open, eyes open, flat on the ground. He wasn’t dead—God, for a second they thought he was, but then Cal put his head to Wes’s chest to make sure—but he was unconscious, breathing shallow, with a froth of spit at the corners of his lips.
“And we were all like—” Cal began, and Noah said, “Shut up,” and Cal turned to him and said, with bitter force, “Fuck you.”
“It’s OK, guys.” Shenk the mediator. Father to them all. “It’s OK. I know this is hard.”
Noah tightened his crossed arms and rolled his eyes. Shenk stayed with Cal: “You were all like, what?”
“We were all really scared. OK?” Cal dared a look at Noah, who took a bite of his cheeseburger, ignoring him. “It was just really scary.”
“I’ll bet it was.”
The one called Bernie, Shenk noticed, had gone quiet.
Shenk didn’t remark on it, didn’t turn to the lad and ask him, Why so quiet? What are you not saying? Bernie had receded from the conversation and Shenk let him recede. Let him process whatever he was processing.
He pressed on, meanwhile, with the other boys. Did the school call 911 right away, or did they take Wesley to the nurse or something first? (Right away.) How long did it take for emergency services to arrive? (“Like, maybe five minutes? Four minutes? It was really fast.”)
Shenk didn’t know what he was looking for. Shenk was looking for everything. You scratched every surface, never knowing what might bubble up. For example:
“Had Wesley ever experienced anything like this before?” he asked, for no particular reason, going down his list, but then Marco gasped, literally gasped.
Shenk’s eyebrows jumped. “Is that a yes?”
Marco nodded. He pushed his hands into his hair. “In gym. Playing soccer.”
“When?”
“Three weeks ago. He ran into Glenn Volpe and they banged heads. Hard. But, like—he didn’t black out or anything, I don’t think. Remember?” Marco said, turning to Cal for backup, but Cal shrugged, kept eating his fries. Shenk kept his eyes on Marco.
“Did you tell the paramedics about this incident, when they arrived?”
“No.” He shook his head, worried. “But, I mean—they didn’t ask.”
Shenk smiled at him tenderly. “It’s OK. It’s probably nothing.”
And it was probably nothing, but it was the kind of nothing that could be dressed up as something. If the paramedics had failed to do a comprehensive intake—comprehensive enough to include other recent head injuries—then what else might they have missed? What other crucial information might never have reached the doctors at Valley Village?
Almost certainly, Wesley having bonked noggins with some other dude in PE wasn’t relevant; just as likely, Shenk in settlement talks could make it seem like it was.
He patted Marco gratefully on the hand, filing the nugget away, and moved on. What was Wesley like until the ambulance came?
“He wasn’t like anything,” answered Noah, suddenly, fiercely, with bright, angry tears in his eyes, and then he said it again. “He wasn’t like anything.”
Shenk was reminded how young fourteen was. A fourteen-year-old is a baffled monster, cursed by the gods, the heart of a child in the body of a man. “He was just lying there, OK? Like Cal said.” He distorted his voice into that of a moony idiot, a brutally sarcastic dismissal of all sentimentality. “And we were all just so scared. I peed. Actually. OK? Satisfied?”
“Yup,” said Shenk, rising, tapping the table, graciously submitting to his dismissal, knowing well what was next. “Of course.”
Shenk didn’t warn the boys that they were all going to be deposed. He would have to contact their parents to make those arrangements. He said goodbye and left them to their junk-food bonanza and began the long journey across the mall back to his car.
He took his time. He inhaled deeply of the scent of Cinnabon. He lingered at storefront windows, captivated by the wares on display at Old Navy and at Kay Jewelers. He carefully examined the cell-phone cases and screen protectors at the various kiosks. Glancing occasionally over his shoulder, seeking the pursuer he felt sure was coming.
“Uh—Mr. Shenk?”
Jay smiled. Bingo. He was just getting on the escalator that fed down to the parking garage, and here came a voice behind him. “Mr. Shenk, sorry, I…”
The boy caught the lip of the escalator and almost crashed into his back.
“Oh,” said Shenk, as surprised as he could be, “Bernie.”
“Do you have another second?”
“I do. Here. Roll off with me.”
The escalator delivered them to a mezzanine level, between the lowest level of the mall and the first of the garage, where it was just them and a smudged glass window looking out into nothing, just them and the parking-ticket-payment machine making its shrill periodic beep.
Shenk looked at Bernie with kindness: “What is it?”
“Yeah, no, it’s just…”
Shenk waited. Bernie exhaled heavily, blowing a feathery forelock up out of his eyes. He was a gangle of arms and legs, the kind of string-bean adolescent who would grow up to be either unattractively thin or ropily muscled and athletic. Shenk wished for him the latter and feared the former.
“He, uh.” Bernie squeezed his eyes shut tight behind his glasses before he went on. “He was glowing.”
Shenk, who was never taken aback, was taken aback.
“What?”
Bernie opened his eyes again. “So he hit his head, right, on the bench, like Marco said. And then before he went down he, like…” Bernie looked pleadingly at Shenk: Believe me. Please. “He was glowing.” He looked down. “It’s hard to explain.”
“It’s OK. Can you try?”
“I don’t—I’m sorry…it was like—OK, have you ever seen one of those fish
, or a picture of one, where it’s like they are lit from the inside? Like a—what do you call it. It starts with p.”
“Phosphorescence,” Jay hazarded. Bernie nodded.
“Yeah. I swear it was like…” The boy trailed off, miserable.
“Like what?”
“Like there was something inside of him, like some kind of something, a spirit or something, and it was trying to come out.”
“Hey,” said Jay. “Hey. It’s OK. How long did it last?”
“Like—a second? An instant. I don’t know. And then it was gone.”
“The other boys see it?”
“I don’t know. I bet—” He looked off to one side, pretended to study the ticket machine, shook his head. “They’ll say they didn’t. Whether they did or not.”
“Huh.”
“Yeah.”
“Did you tell anyone? Did you tell the EMTs when they came?”
He shook his head. “I mean…” he started, and hardly needed to finish. What would they have said? What was Jay even going to say now?
“And—are you—I’m sorry to ask you this, Bernie, but are you sure?”
“Yeah.” The child looked right at him and stuck out his lower lip a little bit, daring himself to be courageous. “I am totally sure.”
“OK. Bernie.” Jay put out his hand. “Young man. Thank you.”
Bernie shook his hand.
Now, sadly, of course, this was not going to be information that he could use. It was of questionable relevance, from a legal standpoint, and also what the fuck was this kid talking about—he glowed?
But still. He let go of the handshake and opened up his arms—a father’s arms as much as a lawyer’s—and clasped Bernie very briefly to his chest.
January 16, 2019
1.
Evie—Evie the Haunted—Evie the Sublime—murmured, “Thank you,” in a cool whisper and then “Thank you all for coming,” and then played a single chord and let it ring.
It rang distorted and loud, and because of the sustain pedal the chord did not fade or threaten to fade, but hung there slowly growing, getting louder and more opulent, while stray whoops and shouts sprouted in the packed darkness of the Echo, someone shouting her name and someone shouting “I love you,” someone giggling and someone else telling the giggler to shut up, and all the while the chord was swelling above them, a D played in drop-D tuning, a chord of rich and echoing majesty, and because Evie—Evie of Kindness, Evie of Love—had sounded the chord not only through the sustain but also through a fuzz pedal that had roughed it up, muddied the chord around its edges, there was something ugly in it, something probing and hard to withstand, an unsettled and mysterious chord expanding in slow motion, moving over the crowded Echo like dark weather, rolling out above the heads of the audience and then coming down into the lungs, reverberating in the rib cage, echoing in the skull until it became almost unbearable, everybody growing silent now and just waiting for the chord to resolve, for a drum to be played, for something or anything to happen.
The Quiet Boy Page 9