Russell Banks - The Sweet Hereafter

“Goodbye.” I pulled my gloves over my hands and opened the door and stepped outside, where I turned and said to her, “I have to go home now.”

“You go home, Billy.”

I closed the door on her and walked away. We spoke again, of course, on numerous occasions, but always with other people surrounding us; we managed not to meet again in a room alone, however, or to speak face-to-face, and so it was as if we never saw each other after that, never saw the people we had once been, Risa Walker and Billy Ansel. From then on, we were simply different people. Not new people; different.

Angry? Yes, I’m angry; I’d be a lousy lawyer if I weren’t. I suppose it’s as if I’ve got this permanent boil on my butt and can’t quite sit down. Which is not the same, you understand, as being hounded by greed; although I can see, of course, that it probably sometimes looked like greed to certain individuals who were not lawyers, when they saw a person like me driving all the way up there to the Canadian border, practically, saw me camping out in the middle of winter in a windy dingy little motel room for weeks at a time, bugging the hell out of decent people who were in the depths of despair and just wanted to be left alone. I can understand that.

But it wasn’t greed that put me there; it’s never been greed that sends me whirling out of orbit like that. It’s anger. What the hell, I’m not ashamed of it. It’s who I am. I’m not proud of it, either, but it makes me useful, at least. Which is more than you can say for greed.

That’s what people don’t get about negligence lawyers — good negligence lawyers, I mean, the kind who go after the sloppy fat cats with their corner offices and end up nailing their pelts to the wall. People immediately assume we’re greedy, that it’s money we’re after, people call us ambulance-chasers and so on, like we’re the proctologists of the profession, and, yes, there’s lots of those. But the truth is, the good ones, we’d make the same moves for a single shekel as for a ten-million-dollar settlement. Because it’s anger that drives us and delivers us. It’s not any kind of love, either — love for the underdog or the victim, or whatever you want to call them. Some litigators like to claim that. The losers.

No, what it is, we’re permanently pissed off, the winners, and practicing law is a way to be socially useful at the same time, that’s all. It’s like a discipline; it organizes and controls us; probably keeps us from being homicidal. A kind of Zen is what. Some people equally pissed off are able to focus their rage by becoming cops or soldiers or martial arts instructors; those who become lawyers, however, especially litigators like me, are a little too intelligent, or maybe too intellectual is all, to become cops. (I’ve known some pretty smart cops, but not many intellectual ones.) So instead of learning how to break bricks and two-by-fours with our hands or bust chain-snatchers in subways, we sneak off to law school and put on three-piece suits and come roaring out like banshees, all teeth and claws and fire and smoke.

Certainly we get paid well for it, which is a satisfaction, yes, but not a motivation, because the real satisfaction, the true motivation, is the carnage and the smoldering aftermath and the trophy heads that get hung up on the den wall. I love it.

That’s why I spent most of six months up there in Sam Dent, practically becoming a citizen. Not my idea of a winter vacation, believe me. But anytime I hear about a case like that school bus disaster up there, I turn into a heat-seeking missile, homing in on a target that I know in my bones is going to turn out to be some bungling corrupt state agency or some multinational corporation that’s cost-accounted the difference between a ten-cent bolt and a million-dollar out-of-court settlement and has decided to sacrifice a few lives for the difference. They do that, work the bottom line; I’ve seen it play out over and over again, until you start to wonder about the human species. They’re like clever monkeys, that’s all. They calculate ahead of time what it will cost them to assure safety versus what they’re likely to be forced to settle for damages when the missing bolt sends the bus over a cliff, and they simply choose the cheaper option. And it’s up to people like me to make it cheaper to build the bus with that extra bolt, or add the extra yard of guardrail, or drain the quarry. That’s the only check you’ve got against them. That’s the only way you can ensure moral responsibility in this society. Make it cheaper.

So that winter morning when I picked up the paper and read about this terrible event in a small town upstate, with all those kids lost, I knew instantly what the story was; I knew at once that it wasn’t an “accident” at all. There are no accidents. I don’t even know what the word means, and I never trust anyone who says he does. I knew that somebody somewhere had made a decision to cut a corner in order to save a few pennies, and now the state or the manufacturer of the bus or the town, somebody, was busy lining up a troop of smoothies to negotiate with a bunch of grief-stricken bumpkins a settlement that wouldn’t displease the accountants. I packed a bag and headed north, like I said, pissed off.

Sam Dent is a pretty town, actually. It’s not Aspen or Vail, maybe, and it sure isn’t Saint Bart’s or Mustique, where frankly I’d much rather have been at that time of year, but the landscape was attractive and strangely stirring. I’m not a scenery freak like my ex-wife, Klara, who has orgasms over sunsets and waterfalls and not much else, but once in a great while I go someplace and look up and see where I am, and it’s unexpectedly beautiful to me: my stomach tightens, and my pulse races, and this powerful blend of fear and excitement comes over me, like something dangerous is about to happen. It’s almost sexual.

Anyhow, the town of Sam Dent and the mountains and forests that surrounded it, they gave me that feeling. I grew up in Oak Park, Illinois, and have spent my entire adult life in New York City. I’m an urban animal, basically; I care more about people than landscape. And although I have sojourned in rural parts quite a bit (I’ve spent months at a time in Wounded Knee, in eastern Washington, in Alabama, where I won a big asbestosis case, in the coalmining region of West Virginia, and so on), I can’t say the landscape of those places particularly moved me. They were places, that’s all. Interchangeable chunks of the planet. Yes, I needed to learn a whole lot about each of them in order to pursue my case effectively, but in those other cases my interest in the landscape was more pragmatic, you might say, than personal. Strictly professional.

Here in Sam Dent, however, it somehow got personal. It’s dark up there, closed in by mountains of shadow and a blanketing early nightfall, but at the same time the space is huge, endless, almost like being at sea — you feel like you’re reading one of those great long novels by whatsername, Joyce Carol Oates, or Theodore Dreiser, that make you feel simultaneously surrounded by the darkness and released into a world much larger than any you’ve dealt with before. It’s a landscape that controls you, sits you down and says, Shut up, pal, I’m in charge here.

They have these huge trees everywhere, on the mountains, of course, but down in the valleys and in town, too, and surrounding the houses, even outside my motel room; they’ve got white pine and spruce and hemlock and birches thick as a man, and the wind blows through them constantly. And since there’s very little noise of any other kind up there — almost no people, remember, and few cars, no sirens howling, no jackhammers slamming, and so forth — the thing you hear most is the wind blowing in the trees. From September to June, the wind comes roaring out of Ontario all the way from Saskatchewan or someplace weird like that, steady and hard and cold, with nothing to stop or slow it until it hits these mountains and the trees, which, like I say, are everywhere.