The Sweet Hereafter

by Russell Banks

  Every year, though, I swear I’m not going to take any more cases involving children. No more dead kids. No more stunned grieving parents who really only want to be left alone to mourn in the darkness of their homes, for God’s sake, to sit on their kids’ beds with the blinds drawn against the curious world outside and weep in silence as they contemplate their permanent pain. I’m under no delusions—I know that in the end a million-dollar settlement makes no real difference to them, that it probably only serves to sharpen their pain by constricting it with legal language and rewarding it with money, that it complicates the guilt they feel and forces them to question the authenticity of their own suffering. I know all that; I’ve seen it a hundred times.

  It hardly seems worth it, right? Thanks but no thanks, right? And I swear, if that were the whole story, if the settlement were not a fine as well, if it were not a punishment that, though it can never fit the crime, might at least make the crime seem prohibitively expensive to the criminal, then, believe me, I would not pursue these cases. They humiliate me. They make me burn inside with shame. Win or lose, I always come out feeling diminished, like a cinder.

  So I’m no Lone Ranger riding into town in my white Mercedes-Benz to save the local sheepherders from the cattle barons in black hats; I’m clear on that. And I don’t burn myself out with these awful cases because it somehow makes me a better person. No, I admit it, I’m on a personal vendetta; what the hell, it’s obvious. And I don’t need a shrink to tell me what motivates me. A shrink would probably tell me it’s because I myself have lost a child and now identify with chumps like Risa and Wendell Walker and that poor sap Billy Ansel, and Wanda and Hartley Otto. The victims. Listen, identify with the victims and you become one yourself. Victims make lousy litigators.

  Simply, I do it because I’m pissed off, and that’s what you get when you mix conviction with rage. It’s a very special kind of anger, let’s say. So I’m no victim. Victims get depressed and live in the there and then. I live in the here and now.

  Besides, the people of Sam Dent are not unique. We’ve all lost our children. It’s like all the children of America are dead to us. Just look at them, for God’s sake—violent on the streets, comatose in the malls, narcotized in front of the TV. In my lifetime something terrible happened that took our children away from us. I don’t know if it was the Vietnam war, or the sexual colonization of kids by industry, or drugs, or TV, or divorce, or what the hell it was; I don’t know which are causes and which are effects; but the children are gone, that I know. So that trying to protect them is little more than an elaborate exercise in denial. Religious fanatics and superpatriots, they try to protect their kids by turning them into schizophrenics; Episcopalians and High Church Jews gratefully abandon their kids to boarding schools and divorce one another so they can get laid with impunity; the middle class grabs what it can buy and passes it on, like poisoned candy on Halloween; and meanwhile the inner-city blacks and poor whites in the boonies sell their souls with longing for what’s killing everyone else’s kids and wonder why theirs are on crack.

  It’s too late; they’re gone; we’re what’s left.

  And the best we can do for them, and for ourselves, is rage against what took them. Even if we can’t know what it’ll be like when the smoke clears, we do know that rage, for better or worse, generates a future. The victims are the ones who’ve given up on the future. Instead, they’ve joined the dead. And the rest, look at them: unless they’re enraged and acting on it, they’re useless, unconscious; they’re dead themselves and don’t even know it.

  If you want to know the truth, in my life, in my personal life, that is, though my ex-wife, Klara, is the apparent victim (all you have to do is ask her), the true victim is my daughter, Zoe. Not me, that’s for sure. Because, though I may have lost her, Zoe’s not literally dead. At least not that I know of. Not yet. The last time I heard from her she was out in L.A., walking around like a tattooed zombie with one of her purple-haired zombie boyfriends.

  She’s my only child; I loved her more than I thought was humanly possible. Certainly more than I’ve ever loved anyone else. I’ve told my story—it’s a compulsion, I guess—to friends and strangers and even to shrinks, all of whom feel sorry for me, if you can believe that, which is a way of feeling sorry for themselves, I’ve learned; I’ve attended Al-Anon meetings and ToughLove workshops for parents and spouses of addicts, where they promote a kind of spiritual triage (“Mitch, chill out, man, you’ve got to learn to separate from your child,” they say, while you watch her drowning before your eyes); and I’ve spent more time talking to Klara in the last five years than in the entire fifteen years we were married—I’ve done everything the loving father of a whacked-out drug-addicted child is supposed to do. I’ve even done a Rambo and kicked a few doors off their jambs and dragged Zoe out of filthy rat-infested apartments, garbage heaps with satanic altars lit by candles in a goat’s skull on a TV in a corner; I’ve locked her up in rehab hospitals, halfway houses, and the Michigan farms of understanding relatives. Two weeks later, she’s back on the streets. New York, Pittsburgh, Seattle, L.A. The next time I hear from her, it’s a phone call scamming for money, money supposedly for school or a new kind of therapist who specializes in macrobiotic drug treatment or, sobbing with shame and need, a plane ticket home (that’s usually the one that gets me). I send the money, hundreds, thousands of dollars; and she’s gone again. A month or two later, she’s calling from Santa Fe—same scam, same format, different details: an acupuncturist specializing in treating drug addiction, a registration fee for a culinary arts school in Tucson, and if those stories don’t work, she breaks back to the old plea to let her come home to New York and let’s solve this problem together, Daddy, dear Daddy, once and for all, if I’ll just send the plane ticket and money to get her stuff out of hock, etc. By now, of course, I realize that if I don’t send money, she’ll raise it some other way, dealing drugs or pornography or even hooking. It’s like I’m in the position of having to buy her clean needles to protect her against AIDS. Forget protecting her against the drugs. Forget healing her mind.

  Five years of this, and what happens? You get pissed off—believe me, enough rage and helplessness, your love turns to steamy piss. Of course, long before Zoe dropped out of boarding school and hit the streets, I was pissed off—it’s in my genes, practically—but she’s succeeded in providing me with a nice sharp focus for it, so that, except when I’m burning myself out on something like the Sam Dent school bus case, I’m dizzy and incoherent, boiling over, obsessed, useless—mad. I’d rather be a cinder than a madman. But there’s no way I’ll let myself become a victim.

  That guy Wendell Walker, who with his wife, Risa, owned the motel I was staying at, the Bide-a-Wile—he surprised me. At first, I pegged him as a permanent loser, one of those guys who love their own tragedy, who feel ennobled and enlarged by it. But of all the parents in Sam Dent who had lost a child when the bus went over, he turned out to have the least interest in remaining a victim. Except for Wanda Otto, maybe. We’re talking about the parents of some fourteen kids here, some of whom, like Billy Ansel, lost more than one child, so actually we’re talking about a list of only eight families in all. Of which, in those first few weeks before the case took off, I was able to interview five who had not already signed up with another attorney, which put them off limits to me, or who were not talking to anyone at all, like Billy Ansel, and even him I eventually got to. In a way.

  And there was the girl Nichole Burnell, who survived the wreck; she was going to be the linchpin of the case, an all-American teenaged beauty queen whose life was ruined by her injuries and by the trauma of having survived such an ordeal. A living victim is more effective with a jury than a dead one; you can’t compensate the dead, they feel. That’s how I planned to present her; luckily, it was how her parents viewed the event too. She had been their destiny, their glory: for their future, they had nothing but her future, and since it had been taken from her, it had been taken, as they
saw it, from them as well: so now they were out for blood. One way or the other, they were going to continue to use her to get what they thought was their due.

  Fine by me. I had my agenda too. In spite of the injuries, Nichole Burnell looked good, she talked good, and she had suffered immeasurably and would for the rest of her life. A beautiful articulate fourteen-year-old girl in a wheelchair. She was perfect. I could hardly wait to see the other side depose her.

  Wendell Walker, on the other hand, when I first met him, seemed utterly defeated, gone, a dark hole in space. Useless, even to himself. I had chucked my stuff in my room and wandered back out to the motel office, to get directions to where the bus had gone over and to check out some of the local response to the event—to start work, in other words—but also to see if there was someplace in town where I could get a decent meal. It seemed unlikely, but you never know about these small towns. I once found a terrific barbecue shack in Daggle, Alabama.

  The office was gloomy and dark, cold as a meat locker; behind the counter, a door leading to what I took to be the apartment where the proprietors lived was open a crack, and a skinny band of light fell across the linoleum floor of the room. I thought I was alone, but when I walked up to the counter, looking for a bell or something to signal the woman who had checked me in, I saw a figure there, a large, heavyset man in a straight-backed chair, sitting behind the counter in the darkness as if in bright light, looking at his lap as if reading a magazine. It was a strange position, alert but frozen in place. He looked catatonic to me.

  “Sorry, buddy,” I said. “I didn’t see you there. How’s it going?”

  No answer; no response whatsoever. He just went on staring down at his lap, as if he didn’t hear or see me. One of those country simples, I thought. Inbreeding. Great. First local I get to talk to, and he turns out to be an alien. “The boss around?” I asked.

  Nothing. Except that his tongue came out and licked dry lips. Then I recognized it: I’ve seen it a hundred times, but it still surprises and scares me. It’s the opaque black-glass look of a man who has recently learned of the death of his child. It’s the face of a person who’s gone to the other side of life and is no longer even looking back at us. It always has the same history, that look: at the moment of the child’s dying, the man follows his child into darkness, as if he’s making a last attempt to save it; then, in panic, to be sure that he himself has not died as well, the man turns momentarily back toward us, maybe he even laughs then or says something weird, for he sees only darkness there too; and now he has returned to where his child first disappeared, fixing onto one of the bright apparitions that linger there. It’s downright spooky.

  “I’m sorry, bud,” I said to him. “I just arrived here.”

  Still no response. Then he stirred slightly, turned his soft hands over, and placed them on his knees. He was wearing a Montreal Expos sweatshirt and loose khakis, a fat guy, slump-shouldered, not too bright-looking.

  Suddenly, he said, “Are you a lawyer?” His voice was low but thin, flattened out, like a piece of tin. He still hadn’t turned to face me, but I guess he’d taken my measure already. What the hell, I suppose I looked like a lawyer, especially up here, especially now. Something like this happens, people expect to see lawyers crawling around. Guys in suits and topcoats.

  “Yes, I’m a lawyer.”

  “A good one?”

  “Yes, sure. One of the best,” I said.

  Slowly he turned toward me and in the dim light examined my face. “Well, good. I need a lawyer,” he said, and when he stood up, his large soft body tightened, and surprisingly the man looked very tough to me, like a fist, and I said to myself, Well, well, I damned near misread this guy entirely. “Come inside,” he said. “My wife and I want to talk to you.”

  I reached into my pocket, drew out a card, and handed it to him, and he accepted it without a glance, like a bellhop taking a tip, and placed it facedown on the counter. With the other hand, he swung open the door to their quarters, washing the office in domestic light, and walked straight into the living room beyond, where I saw the woman in an easy chair, watching television with the sound off.

  I followed him into the small room, and we three sat and talked for several hours, and all the while they watched the soundless television, never once looking at me or each other. Creepy, yes, but at the time it seemed entirely appropriate, even necessary, to our conversation.

  This was a happy start for me, a lucky break. The Walkers were classically pissed off. Both of them. They wanted revenge, which was useless to them, of course—they weren’t going to get it, but they didn’t know that yet. And as I later learned, they wanted money, not as compensation but because they had been broke for so long and had always wanted it.

  I learned from them that first night in town a lot of what the newspapers hadn’t yet told me—the names of the other parents whose children had been killed, the usual route of the school bus, the condition of the driver when she picked up their son, Sean, the weather, the exact spot where the bus went off the road, the origin and history of the sandpit it ended up in, and so forth.

  It seemed clear that the bus driver, Dolores Driscoll, was a dead end; she was probably only doing exactly what she had done for years, and besides, she herself had no real property or earning power to attach and was a popular woman in town to boot, a nondrinker with a crippled husband she supported. Not the kind of person you want to sue for negligence. The deep pockets, I knew, were going to be found in the pants worn by the state, the town, and the school board, or, more precisely, by their insurance companies. I explained that to them.

  I asked them who else might be willing to join in a suit.

  “I don’t know,” Risa said, her eyes still on the flickering screen of the TV. The Cosby show, which I hate. Ozzie and Harriet in blackface. “Nobody’s much talked about it yet. Although there’s been a lot of lawyers in town, I heard. A couple of them checked in here today. But they seemed—”

  “Too young and too old,” Wendell said. “One or the other. Too goddamn eager.”

  I knew the types. I explained that the best people to enter the suit were people who were unlikely to sign on with lawyers such as that. No, I said, what we needed were folks who, like them, were intelligent and articulate, who came across as sensitive, loving parents, people with a solid family life, with no criminal background or history of trouble in town. Good neighbors I wanted, decent hardworking people like themselves, I said, laying it on a little.

  “Well, okay, there’s Kyle and Doreen,” Risa said. “The Lamstons. Up on Bartlett Hill. They lost all three of their kids. After everything they’ve been through. Especially Doreen.” Risa was at that stage where every now and then she didn’t believe that she had lost her child; she thought that maybe it had only happened to other people in town.

  “Kyle’s a drunk, a belligerent drunk,” Wendell said. “Nobody likes him. He’s trouble.”

  “Belligerent, you say. Is he a known wife-beater?”

  “Yeah, a wife-beater,” he said. “I’m afraid so. A ‘known’ one. He’s that all right.”

  “All right, there’s the Hamiltons. Joe and Shelley Hamilton.”

  Wendell said, “Anybody knows that guy knows he’s been stealing antiques from summer houses and reselling them to dealers in Plattsburgh for years.”

  I was starting to like this man, Wendell Walker. He looked like a pushover, but he had an attitude. In the middle of a wrecked life, drowning in sadness, he was still able to hold his grudges. He’d probably kept them locked up inside himself for years, feeling guilty, and now for the first time in his life he believed he was entitled to lay about him. His wife, though, was more conventionally linked to other people, a good-looking, once sexy woman who still courted her neighbors’ good opinions and attention. She was trying to put the best possible construction on things, even if it meant lying to herself.

  Wendell, though, he didn’t give a damn. Not anymore.

  They went on down the l
ist of parents, most of them dismissed by Wendell out of hand, as his resentments and grudges and old injuries, one by one, surfaced and got expressed.

  “Sonofabitch owes over fifty thousand bucks in unpaid bills to the bank and half the businesses in town, and he’s about to lose his house and cars….”

  “She’s over to the Rendez-Vous or down to the Spread Eagle every night and has slept with every drunk in town at least twice….”

  “The Bilodeaus and the Atwaters are all inbred. They’re so dumb they don’t know Saturday …”

  And so on down the line, with Risa reluctantly concurring. Until they got to the Ottos, Wanda and Hartley, who had lost their adopted son, an Indian boy named Bear. Wanda was pregnant, they were smart people apparently, college educated, even, had moved to Sam Dent a dozen or so years ago from the city and had made a respected life here as craftsmen.

  “Yeah, well, I bet they’re pot-smokers,” Wendell grumped.

  “You don’t know that.” Risa lit a cigarette, as if in defiance.

  “They ever been busted?” I asked, and lit one myself.

  “No,” Risa said.

  “Not to your knowledge is what you mean,” Wendell shot back. I wondered if he knew that his wife was probably having an affair with somebody.

  I made notes and let them continue. I especially liked the part about the adopted Indian boy and Wanda’s pregnancy. It was possible she’d lose the baby over this. That happens. The pot business I’d check out later. (It turned out to be nothing, of course. At least no record. Local suspicion was all.)

  It was Wendell who mentioned Billy Ansel. Risa kept silent, and I figured he was the guy she was having her affair with. That could be trouble, so I put an asterisk next to his name; but otherwise he was almost too good to be true. Ansel was a widower, much admired in town, a Vietnam vet, a war hero, practically. And he had lost his two children, who were twins. Also, he had actually witnessed the event; he’d been following the bus in his truck on his way to work that morning and had helped remove the victims. He’d know, by God, that his kids were dead. No denial there.