Chris Bohjalian - Before You Know Kindness

What pushed her over the line firmly into FERAL’s camp occurred the following year, during an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Europe. She watched on the television news a pyre made from the carcasses of three-hundred-plus sheep on a farm near Inverness, a tiny fraction of the ten million cows and pigs and sheep being shot and burned and buried all across Great Britain and the continent across the channel-most of whom weren’t even sick. Suddenly she was sobbing uncontrollably, since she knew from her work with FERAL that foot-and-mouth disease wasn’t lethal either to people or animals and was actually treatable with appropriate veterinary care. Instead of trying to heal the animals, however, humans were obliterating them, and all because their value as food was in jeopardy and the slaughter was viewed as a reasonable way to restore confidence in meat.

Bottom line? Paige considered most of the individuals who worked for FERAL a tad fanatic and their behavior more times than not a bit extreme. But she was glad they were out there fighting the good fight, and she was happy to help-especially given the serious pile of money this particular case was likely to be worth. An injury this terrible? Her share of the contingent fee alone might well approach seven figures, given her firm’s policy that you “eat what you kill.” (Now, there, she thought, was an expression she was unlikely ever to share with Keenan or Dominique.)

She guessed altogether that somewhere between twenty-five or thirty people were employed in FERAL’s New York office and another ten or twelve in Washington, D.C. Somewhere in central Connecticut the organization also rented space in a warehouse, where they stored the FERAL shirts and mugs and canvas totes, the Pleather cat suits and skirts, and the myriad trinkets people could buy to show their support for the group. Most of the New York employees seemed to be involved in what FERAL called its “campaigns”-education and publicity, which included everything from sending a “humane instruction trainer” into one of the few public schools on the planet that would actually allow a FERAL staffer onto the premises, to getting Spencer or Dominique on Good Morning, America-while most of the employees in Washington assisted with the legislative lobbying efforts. FERAL had five full-time attorneys, but Keenan and his young assistant were the only two based in New York.

This morning Paige expected to meet with Dominique and Keenan and Spencer, and she was neither surprised nor flattered that on Spencer’s very first day back in the office she was on his agenda. She knew that what she did was important.

Consequently, when the receptionist, that strange young woman with the twin piercings in both eyebrows (four thin rings altogether) and the metal stud in her tongue told her (the stud occasionally clicking against her teeth as she spoke) that Spencer wasn’t coming in after all, she began to wonder exactly what had happened to the poor man. She wasn’t worried, because in the long run it could only make her life easier if he was physically falling apart. But in the short run it might complicate certain tasks. After all, they were planning to have a press conference the week after next, and one of the things she wanted to discuss today-and Spencer was critical to this part of the plan, both because he was the victim and because he was in charge of FERAL’s communications programs-was the timing of their various announcements.

Still, it was clear that she and Dominique and Keenan would meet anyway, and the receptionist made it sound as if one of Spencer’s assistants would join them as well. She guessed it would be that sweet Randy Mitchell, a young woman who had wanted originally to be a model but was just not quite beautiful enough: She was a tad too short, her face a bit too round, and even in long sweaters and those blouses of hers that were meant to remain untucked it was evident that she was little too wide in the hips. But she was certainly pretty enough to pose in many of FERAL’s promotional pieces, and in the course of three and a half years she had gone from being one of the FERAL Granola Girls-the young women who wore little but strategically draped garlands of granola while handing out vegan granola bars for free outside of Taco Bell, McDonald’s, and Kentucky Fried Chicken-to being Spencer’s principal assistant. She was, Paige knew, on a first-name basis with the producers of all the morning news programs and afternoon talk shows, and Paige had a pretty good sense that Randy was capable of getting the attention of the lifestyle and science reporters at most of the nation’s premier newspapers.

She emerged now from the glass doors behind the receptionist’s half-moon of a desk, wearing a peasant dress that fell almost to her ankles and black sandals that looked like they were made from old tires. She was smiling, however, and Paige had to admit that the woman had a beam that was downright telegenic.

“I hear Spencer isn’t returning to work today,” she said to Randy as they wandered down the corridor to Dominique’s office. “Has something happened?”

“He wasn’t feeling well.”

“He hasn’t been feeling well since the accident.”

“He got sick in the cab.”

“Vomit sick?”

Randy nodded sympathetically.

“The flu?” she asked.

“I didn’t talk to him. Dominique did. But it didn’t sound like the flu. It sounded to Dominique like Spencer was trying to do too much too soon, and his body was rebelling. He didn’t offer to do this meeting by speakerphone, and Dominique didn’t even suggest it.”

She saw that Keenan and Dominique were already sitting at the circular table in Dominique’s office, and she guessed they’d been meeting for a few minutes already because both of their paper cups-it looked as if his had held coffee and hers had held herbal tea-were nearly empty. Dominique was curled inside a clingy black sweater dress most women Dominique’s age (even women who jogged as religiously as Dominique and worked out as strenuously with a personal trainer) would never even pull off a rack, but it seemed to work on the FERAL executive: Even at forty-something, she moved with the confidence and grace of a tiger. Keenan, she saw, was wearing the sort of pinstriped suit that the lawyers in her own office wore. If, in fact, he hadn’t been wearing those hideous plastic wing tips, he could have passed for an attorney in her own tony firm.

She took the seat beside Keenan as a lawyer-to-lawyer courtesy, and Randy sat between her and Dominique. Once they had dispensed with the pleasantries and Dominique had made it clear that she had told Spencer not even to try returning to work for the rest of the week after what he had endured that morning in the cab, Paige started pulling her notes from her briefcase (the ballistic nylon one she reserved for her meetings with FERAL, not the leather one she still preferred to use with the rest of her clients). She began by passing stapled stacks of paper a quarter inch thick to the three other people, keeping the copy well marked with her notes for herself.

“Here, essentially, is where we are on the lawsuit,” she began. “I’m still expecting we’ll be able to file in two weeks and announce the action with a press conference at my firm. I’ve also attached some very rough thoughts on the sorts of things I’ll be asking Adirondack for in the interrogatories later this fall. Obviously, I’ll want all the materials and documents that refer to the bolt and the extractor on John Seton’s model, as well as any prototypes. I’m also going to ask for gross sales, gross profit, net profit, managers’ salaries and bonuses, the contributions they make to hunting organizations and the NRA, and their expenditures for safety engineering and research. Don’t worry: If that last figure isn’t in reality paltry, we can certainly portray it that way-especially if we compare it to, say, their gross advertising expenditures.”