Chris Bohjalian - Before You Know Kindness

“Charlotte?” It was Willow on the other side of the door. “You okay?”

“Fine,” she answered, aware that her voice sounded strange and loud. “I banged my shin on the bathtub,” she lied. Quickly she doused a tissue in cold tap water and pressed it against the cut. Almost instantly the paper grew red.

“Do you want some ice?”

“No. I’m okay.”

When her cousin had retreated, she sat back down on the toilet seat. She realized that she felt as lousy as she had before she had carved a delicate little gash into her stomach, and she took some comfort in this. Mutilation might help some girls, but clearly it wasn’t going to help her. She might be screwed up, but at least she wasn’t about to become the Queen of the Band-Aids. She wiped her eyes and applied two of the adhesive bandages across the wound. Then she flushed the razor blade down the toilet.

Dominique Germaine had her doubts about a lawsuit Monday morning, but she wanted to hear more. She liked suing big organizations. In her tenure FERAL had sued dairy councils, meat packers, and public school systems that hung posters encouraging children to drink their milk; they had taken legal action against circuses and aquariums and a marine science museum; they had sued the U.S. Department of Agriculture to make sure that rats, mice, and birds would be afforded protection in the Animal Welfare Act, and then (just for good measure) they had sued the cosmetics companies, the drug companies, and a couple of shoe companies, too. It astonished her that it had never crossed her mind to have her group sue a gun maker or find someone with a reason-real or imagined-to sue one: After all, she loathed hunting. In this day and age it seemed to Dominique to be an anachronism that was at once barbaric and cruel. And it certainly wasn’t a sport, since sport implied a competition of sorts, the certainty-or, at least, the likelihood-that each side had a fighting chance. Obviously no mallard or deer had a fighting chance against a human with a rifle. No elephant had any prospect of “winning” against a hunter armed with a Holland & Holland.500 Nitro or one of those legal monstrosities that fired armor-piercing shells into the creatures. A lawsuit was an intriguing idea, regardless of whether Spencer McCullough had a prayer in hell of receiving a penny in compensation-in or out of court-because of the way FERAL could use the family’s lawsuit to shed light on the mind-numbingly violent culture that surrounded guns and hunting and… deer camp.

The very term gave Dominique the shivers. She had grown up in Montreal and known children whose families owned hunting shacks in the province’s eastern lakes region or in upstate New York, and so she had a pretty good idea of the way the men fell back innumerable steps on the evolutionary ladder when they were there. She doubted that they even continued to walk upright after a day or two of eating half-cooked doe meat (yes, she knew they illegally killed does the first day; it was a tradition with many hunting families).

Here before her now, some two and a half hours after he had first broached the idea of a lawsuit, was her deputy director and the organization’s general counsel. Keenan Barrett was a tall and elegant southerner with a red cob for a nose, eyes the color of cornflowers in bloom, and a great shock of white hair he kept slicked back with Brylcreem. He was probably pushing sixty, and outwardly he had the demeanor of a good-natured but slightly ponderous headmaster for a private school long past its prime. It was only after he’d spoken for a few minutes and methodically slogged his way to his point that you got a sense of how sharp he really was-which was part of the reason why he had driven John Seton into such a fury on the phone Sunday morning. He tended to still his adversaries, lulling them so they let down their guards or giving them the impression that he was nothing more than a gracious old windbag. Then he would pounce. Dominique had seen him do this in meetings with Revlon and Gillette and a Quebecois fur company, first causing the eyes of the corporate denizens across the table to glaze during his courtly preambles and then causing their blood pressures to climb like Nepalese trekkers when abruptly he put FERAL’s findings or demands (or both) on the table. He was patient as well as intelligent, and as a result he got things done. When Dominique was around him she always felt like a teenage girl who had an ill-advised crush on an older friend of the family.

He sat down in one of the four modern swivel chairs that surrounded the circular table she used for small conferences, and she emerged from behind her own desk to join him. Her office wasn’t huge-they were a nonprofit-but it was far from shabby. It looked out on the northern entrance to the Empire State Building. On two walls there were abstract paintings of tropical birds she had found in a Miami gallery, all of which looked like vaguely erotic flowers, and the polished hardwood floor was the silky color of soy milk. If the room struck some journalists and visitors as a trifle tacky, it was usually because in her desire to make certain there were no animal-based or animal-enhanced products in her sight, there was a lot of hemp on the couch and the chairs, and the coffee table, the credenza, and the desk were made from postconsumer recycled paper. It was actually pretty expensive stuff, but it looked like you wouldn’t dare put anything heavier than a paper cup of coffee or a yellow legal pad atop any of it.

“You know,” Keenan began in his soft, patient voice, “there are myriad reasons why it is just so difficult to be a parent these days. A good parent, that is. My sense is that our friend, Spencer, is going to have a lot of conversations with young Charlotte over the next couple of months that can only be called intense. Same with this John Seton fellow and his little girl. Those conversations will be rather different in nature, as you can imagine, but they will share a certain umbrella reality that may have a good deal to do with what those families read about this story in the newspapers or happen to catch on the nightly news. My guess is that although it’s unlikely we’ll ever see anything that happened up in New Hampshire go to trial, we may be able to turn what I thought was going to be a public relations nightmare to our advantage.”

“I don’t think Spencer and Charlotte have intense conversations about anything. Spencer saves his intensity for us.”

“Maybe you’re right. Maybe Catherine and Charlotte will have to have the hard talks.”

“Actually, I find it rather encouraging that you believe a gun manufacturer might even consider settling,” she said. “I figured this was all, I don’t know, nuisance material. Frivolous. After all, even if there is some tiny defect with the rifle, the man left it sitting around since last November with a bullet inside it. And we still don’t know whether there was a flaw or if this brother-in-law is just an imbecile. Besides, the child shouldn’t have been playing with the weapon. It’s pretty obvious that if you pull the trigger on a gun, there’s a chance that someone’s going to get hurt. Wouldn’t this be like suing a knife company because you cut yourself on the blade?”

“Oh, we can muddy things up a bit. Spencer’s lawyers, that is. Especially if the extractor was defective. Then he’s in pretty fine shape, though there won’t be a doubt in anyone’s mind that his brother-in-law should have gotten the darn thing taken care of last year. But even if the extractor doesn’t have some little ding somewhere, Spencer’s lawyers would have a shot. Pun intended. It comes down to the nature of most gun chambers and magazines. I had my assistant do a little research online this morning-intellectual curiosity, more than anything. I wanted to see the general shape of product liability with guns, and whether ol’ Spencer would have a chance of getting his bad wing in front of a jury. Then I took a walk over to that sporting goods store by Madison Square Garden and looked at the hunting rifles.”