Stephen Cannell - The Viking Funeral

"How about anyplace on earth but there?" Shane said.

"I'll miss you guys while you're gone" Chooch said.

"No, you won't/5 Shane grinned.

"How come?"

"'Cause we're gonna wait till Christmas and you're going with us/' Alexa finished.

"Really? Is that allowed, taking your kid on the honeymoon?"

"From now on, this family stays together," Shane said.

That night Shane lay awake in bed, listening to Alexa sleep beside him… The slow breathing, the warmth of her next to him. They hadn't made love. It was strange not to consummate their marriage on the wedding night, but Alexa had been told by the doctors not to do it for a month, because they wanted to keep his heart rate and blood pressure down until they were sure everything had stopped leaking inside his head. There was one week left on that ridiculous sentence. Shane had argued, but Alexa stood firm. He probably wasn't going to win many arguments with her, or as the Day-Glo Dago would say, "Fugedaboutit."

So instead of sex, he lay on his back, looking at the ceiling, turning his new wedding band around on his finger, reflecting, trying to make sense of all that had happened.

He'd been very close to death. The docs told him that his heart had stopped twice. He'd flown down that heavenly corridor, chasing a column of pure white light. He'd seen all of the people in his life that had mattered: the Deans, Jody, Chooch, and Alexa.

Then he thought of the beautiful chestnut-haired woman whom he had known on sight was his mother.

"I'm sorry," she had said. "It was an accident. I didn't want to leave you."

What kind of accident would take you away from your child, make you leave him at the back door of a hospital? Then suddenly he realized that she had not put him there; she'd died and somebody else had. She'd come to him in a near-death experience and told him that she always loved him… Always wanted him. Shane didn't think that when you had a near-death vision, it included lies.

Whatever caused her disappearance, he now knew it hadn't been her fault. His mother had loved him, and with that realization, a piece of the darkness that had always haunted him finally slipped away.

He closed his eyes and tried to see her again. He could almost create the vision, but not quite. Yet in its place there was a memory of her love… Gentle and pure and full of warmth.

"So what is love, anyway?" Jody had scoffed. "Just a lotta horseshit and a four-letter word. "

Boy, Shane thought, poor Jody. Jody had missed out on everything. Suddenly, Shane felt sorry for him-sorry he couldn't have found a way to fix that.

Jody might not have been able to love Shane, but Shane had loved Jody, and in his memory he still did.

He closed his eyes and wondered if the gift Jody promised to him had been the bullet that took him to the edge but gave him a chance to meet his mother, to feel her warmth, to finally experience her love, if only for a few precious seconds. Seconds that had changed him and taken away his painful darkness.

Before he fell asleep, he decided that was it. That was Jody's gift.

From the very beginning, that must have been God's plan.

*

All-American Tobacco is a fictitious company, but some of the underlying events of this story were inspired by national headlines. There is currently a billion-dollar civil case pending against Phillip Morris, filed by the Colombian government, over alleged lost cigarette taxes. In 1998 a Reynolds Tobacco subsidiary settled a case involving taxes on cigarettes transported from Canada and paid fifteen million dollars in fines and penalties. A former executive of that company went to jail. Hundreds of other Fortune 500 companies were investigated by the U. S. government. Finally, Bonnie Tishler, Assistant Commissioner of U. S. Customs Service, in a statement before the Congress of the United States, on June 19, 1999, stated that the Treasury Department had elected not to pursue prosecution. "It is very difficult, with a large Corporate structure, to get your hands around exactly who may or may not be facilitating the business of money laundering… By punishing the U. S. Corporations, we may in turn be punishing… Their ability to sell their products to countries such as Colombia. It could hurt our ability to export and cost us jobs, while at the same time not really making any progress against the drug cartels… The object of our investigation is not to put U. S. companies in jail."

Instead of prosecuting corporate officers, the federal government elected to mail out warnings to hundreds of U. S. companies that helped launder billions in Colombian drug dollars.

To date, no further action has been taken.