Russell Banks - The Sweet Hereafter

The man came up to within a few feet of me and made a strange little smile, almost wistful. “You work for Ansel?” he said.

“I am Ansel.”

“Yes, I thought so.” He had bright blue wide-open eyes that were impossible to read and sharp small features. He was clean-shaven, and his skin was pink and taut. It was a likable face, but the face of a smooth talker, self-confident and intelligent, and pleased, even eager, to let you look directly at him. “I’m sorry about your children, Mr. Ansel,” he said, lowering his voice.

“You are, eh?”

“Yes.”

For a few seconds neither of us spoke; we just looked straight into each other’s eyes. He was good at it, he didn’t get nervous or scared or even glance away; he held his ground and waited for me to break the silence or the stare, whichever I preferred.

“I take you to be a lawyer,” I said, holding on to the stare.

“Yes, I am an attorney. My name is—”

“Mister, I don’t want to know your name.”

He hesitated a second. Then in a soft voice he said, “I understand.”

“No. No, you don’t understand.”

“I can help you.” He went on looking right into my eyes, as if he knew something I didn’t.

“No, you can’t help me. Not unless you can raise the dead.” I was sorry at once for having said it, a cliché, a boy’s smart remark, not a man’s sad one. I had revealed to him, and to myself, a desire that I did not want to permit myself and that I was instantly ashamed of.

Pushing past him, I made quickly for my truck, but when I pulled the door open and started to get in, he came up beside me and held out a business card. “Here,” he said. “You may change your mind.”

I took the card and lifted it up and read it in the moonlight: Mitchell Stephens, Esq., of a four-named firm, one of them Stephens, in New York City. Then I passed it back to him. “Mr. Stephens,” I said to him, “if right now I was to beat you with my hands and feet so bad that you pissed blood and couldn’t walk right for a month, would you sue me? Because that is what I’m about to do, you understand.”

“No, Mr. Ansel,” he said in a weary voice. “No, I wouldn’t sue you. And I don’t think there’s anyone in this county who would even arrest you for it. But you’re not about to beat me up, are you?”

I looked over at the bus. The children waved back at me, bright knots of apparition. The lawyer was right; I was no danger to him. I was a ghost.

“No, I’m not going to beat you up. Just don’t talk to me again,” I said to him. “Don’t come around my garage, and don’t come to my house or call me on the telephone.”

“You may change your mind. I can help you,” he said again.

“Leave me alone, Stephens. Leave the people of this town alone. You can’t help any of us. No one can.”

“You can help each other,” he said. “Several people have agreed to let me represent them in a negligence suit, and your case as an individual will be stronger if I’m allowed to represent you together as a group.”

“My ‘case’? I have no case. None of us has a case.”

“You’re wrong about that. Very wrong. Your friends the Walkers have agreed, and Mr. and Mrs. Otto, and I’m talking with some other folks. It’s important to initiate proceedings right away. Things get covered up fast. People lie. You know that. People lie about these things. We have to begin our own investigation quickly, before the evidence disappears. That’s why I’m out here tonight,” he added, and he drew a small black automatic camera from his coat pocket.

“Our children aren’t even buried yet,” I told him. “It’s you — you’re the liar. Risa and Wendell Walker, I know them, you’re right, but they wouldn’t hire a goddamned lawyer. And the Ottos, they wouldn’t deal with you, for Christ’s sake. You’re lying to me about them, and probably to them about me. We’re not fools, you know, country bumpkins you can put the big-city hustle on. You’re just trying to use us,” I told him. “You want us to pull each other in.”

He was not lying, though, and I knew it, and at bottom I didn’t give a damn what the others were doing, even Risa. It was almost funny to me at that moment, in a cruel and slightly superior way. Ghosts don’t enter into class action lawsuits. I calmly smiled at the lawyer, and I think I even wished him luck, and got into my truck and closed the door on him. Slowly I backed the truck away from him and drove out of the lot, turned left, and headed down the valley toward the Rendez-Vous.

As I had so many times over the last couple of years, I parked my truck in the deserted parking lot outside the Rendez-Vous, which, like everything else in town, was closed, and walked across the road to Room 11 at the Bide-a-Wile. I don’t know if I expected Risa to be there, but surely I hoped she would be — I had no other reason to go there this late.

She was sitting by the window in the wicker chair, and when I let myself into the darkened room, she said simply, without expression, “I knew you’d come.”

“Well, I can’t say I did.” I sat down opposite her, on the edge of the bed, and put my hands on my knees. “Habit, I guess.”

“Me, too,” she said. “Thank God for habits.”

We tried for a few moments to talk the way we used to, the way people who love each other are supposed to talk — intimately, more or less honestly, about their feelings for one another and for other people as well. We tried to talk not as if nothing had happened, of course, but with the accident and the loss of our children as a context. It was useless. I couldn’t say anything true about how I felt, and neither could she.

“This is the first time I’ve been able to leave the house,” I said.

“People keep calling on the phone and coming by to see if they can help out.”

“No one can help.”

“No. Not really. But they try.”

“Yes, they try.”

“You’ll go to the funeral, though, won’t you?”

“Yes,” I said, “I’ll be there. But I’d rather stay at home alone.”

“There’ll be a lot of people there.”

“I expect so.”

“I wish it was just going to be the families, you know, like us. They’re the only ones who really understand.”

“I guess so.”

“But people have been very thoughtful and sympathetic.”

“Yes. They have.”

We sounded like strangers sitting in a dentist’s waiting room. Finally, though, we gave it up and were silent for a while. Then she told me how she had known all along that something like this was going to happen. She had felt it in her bones, she said. As if she wanted me to be amazed and praise her for it.

I decided that she was stupid to think that and even stupider to say it, although I did not tell her so. Instead, I told her about my unexpected meeting with the lawyer, Stephens. Without saying why, I said that I’d stopped by the garage and while I was there I’d caught the lawyer taking pictures of the bus with a flash camera, which was more or less the truth. “The sonofabitch tried to get me to hire him for some kind of negligence suit,” I said. “He told me he’d already got you and Wendell signed up, you and Wendell and the Ottos, and I told him to shove it. We don’t need a lawyer,” I added.

“What do we need?”

“Good question.” I stood up and took a step toward the door; I still had my coat and wool cap on. “But we don’t need a lawyer,” I said. “Count me out.”

She looked up at me, and in the bands of moonlight falling through the blinds I could see her face clearly, and it was no longer lovely to me. It didn’t even look like a woman’s face anymore; it was like the face of a male actor who had made himself up as a woman. “Well,” she said, “goodbye.”