Angel Landing (28 page)

The real trouble began during the cross-examination. What happened was not brought about by the art of the district attorney, a man in his sixties who was used to dealing with tax evasion and petty larceny. When I confessed, it was not because I was badgered or tricked, for the district attorney stuttered noticeably, and he seemed more surprised than anyone that he was prosecuting a case as important as Finn's.

“So you say that you saw Mr. Finn twelve times,” the district attorney began, as much to refresh his own memory, it seemed, as to question mine.

I felt quite dizzy; when I looked over at the defendant's table there were two Michael Finns. “Perhaps a few more times,” I now told him.

“A few more times,” the district attorney said pleasantly.

“All right, all right,” I said, pinching my tweed skirt between my fingers. “Several more times.”

“I see. But just what do you mean by ‘several'?” The district attorney smiled. “Exactly
how many
times did you see the defendant?” The courtroom was much too hot, my head was spinning, and I imagined that the district attorney could see Finn and me that first night in the field, he could see us beneath Minnie's goosedown quilt.

“All right,” I said. My own voice sounded as if it belonged to someone else, the words I spoke echoed off the mahogany that paneled the courthouse ceiling and walls. “I admit it,” I cried. “We were lovers.”

Reno LeKnight sat up so fast that he nearly shot out of his seat. The district attorney eyed me carefully. “Would you please repeat that,” he asked.

“What?” I said, hoping that I had not actually spoken. Perhaps my guilt was so strong that the words I thought inside my head had begun to echo. “Repeat what?”

“I believe you just said that you and Mr. Finn were lovers?” the district attorney said tentatively.

Reno LeKnight jumped up. “The witness has stated all the information she has. I suggest that she be excused from the stand.”

But the judge denied the motion, and the district attorney certainly didn't plan to let me go now. Reno LeKnight did manage to win a twenty-minute recess; and when the court was adjourned, Reno took my arm and led me from the witness stand to a corner in the outside hallway.

“Are you crazy?” he asked. “Are you mad?”

I shook my head, though I myself was not certain just what it was that had possessed me on the witness stand.

“Listen to me, just listen to me,” LeKnight said. He spoke slowly, as if I might no longer be capable of understanding the language. “Do not give out any more information. The damage has been done. Not only is your credibility as a witness worthless but you've also cast doubt on the entire defense. Don't make it worse than it already is.” LeKnight went on, shaking my shoulders for emphasis. “Answer all the D.A.'s questions as briefly as you can.”

Reno turned and walked away, clearly disgusted with me. I walked outside. If I didn't have fresh air I would sink to the floor in a faint; but out on the courthouse stairs, immediately encircled by reporters, I still had trouble breathing. I ran over to Lark, who was waiting for me and the reporters I would bring her.

“Come with me for a minute,” I said, tugging on Lark's coat sleeve.

“Introduce me,” Lark said, nodding toward the reporters who had followed me. Lark smiled broadly and reached into her bag of case histories, but I kept walking to Lark's parked station wagon, where I sat in the driver's seat, rolled up all the windows, and locked all the doors. If I had had the key, I might have turned on the ignition and driven away from the courthouse, and Michael Finn. But instead I sat without moving until Lark came up to tap at the window; then I unlocked the passenger door.

“What's wrong with you?” Lark asked.

“Lock the door.”

“We had an agreement, didn't we? You told me that you weren't interested in publicity, though Lord knows those media people seem to be interested in you.” Lark eyed the photographers who leaned on the hood of the car.

“We were lovers,” I said to Lark.

“Who?” Lark asked.

“Michael Finn and I.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“I confessed on the stand.”

“Confessed to what?” Lark asked. “Oh, no,” she said when I didn't answer. “You didn't?”

I nodded.

“You see what comes from keeping your emotions bottled up inside,” Lark said sadly. “You wind up doing something tremendously stupid.”

“I go back on the stand in a few minutes.”

“Do you love him?” Lark asked suddenly.

“Well, yes.”

“And he refuses to get involved,” Lark guessed.

“That's what he says.”

“Well, if your testimony does one thing, it will certainly force the man to admit he's involved with someone; he'll have to when he reads about it in the newspapers.” Lark smiled.

“Will he ever be able to forgive me?” I asked her.

“Certainly he will.” Lark opened her door, and persuaded me to leave the station wagon and return to the court. “But if he doesn't,” Lark said as we neared the courthouse stairs, “you'll just have to forgive yourself.”

I sent all the reporters, with their questions about my relationship with Finn, right over to Lark. By the time I had returned to the courthouse, Lark was surrounded; she dodged questions about me and set about convincing the crowd that EMOTE was far more interesting than a brief affair between a social worker and an accused bomber.

My testimony was over in less than twenty minutes. At first, the people in the courtroom craned their necks and leaned forward in their hard wooden chairs. No one coughed, or fluttered or moved. But when the district attorney failed to ask for intimate sexual details, the crowd quickly grew bored. Only Reno LeKnight sat on the edge of his seat until I was dismissed. In the end, I confessed to little more than not being quite as objective as I had once been presented; and my relationship with Michael Finn caused a smile or two instead of a sensation. When asked if he wished to question me further on redirect, Reno LeKnight shook his head and turned to the crowd.

“I think she's already told us more than enough,” LeKnight said.

As I walked away from the witness stand the courtroom had already turned its attention to Reno. The attorney tossed his head like a peacock as he prepared to call his next witness: the court psychiatrist who had met with Michael Finn for less than half an hour the day before. It seemed the only one who watched me get up and leave the witness stand was. Michael Finn. When I stopped at the doors, before leaving the room, Finn was straining to see me; one of his arms was thrown across the back of his chair, his forehead was wrinkled, his eyes were as careful and narrow as if he had been stalking a deer.

For a minute I saw the confusion in his face, the pain beneath the borrowed blue suit and the white shirt which was buttoned up high. If we never saw each other again, he would still be easy to remember. He would be wearing the same borrowed clothing each time I imagined him, he wouldn't change any more than a photograph, and I would carry him with me just as if he had been trapped on paper. For me he would remain as he was when he watched me cross the room just before I closed the courtroom door and hurried away as fast as I could.

FIVE

M
Y ANNOUNCEMENT AT
the trial might have done some terrible damage, Reno LeKnight's carefully planned tactics might have been thoroughly shattered, and I might have spent the rest of my nights tossing and turning, if it hadn't been for a welder in Elizabeth, New Jersey, a man none of us in Fishers Cove had ever met.

If I had known what was to happen, I might not have been so depressed when I returned to Minnie's after the trial. I sat in the kitchen with my head in my hands, refusing to look my aunt in the eye.

“So you screwed up,” Minnie told me when I finally confessed that I had broken down on the witness stand. “So what?” my aunt demanded. “When you let yourself get down in the dumps, you're heading right down the road to high blood pressure.”

“Finn will go to jail and I'll be fired for unprofessional activities,” I said.

“Are you breathing? Can you walk? Do you have food and a roof over your head? Consider yourself lucky.”

“Minnie,” I said, “I'm not lucky.”

“You can't get yourself worked up over every mistake,” Minnie told me. “Relax. Stretch out. Chalk it up to experience.”

“There's something wrong with my life,” I said.

“Please,” Minnie said as I got up from the table and grabbed my coat, “don't be hasty. Let me mix a little brewer's yeast into a glass of tomato juice for you.”

But tomato juice wasn't what I wanted, and I found myself walking toward the Modern Times. At the bar, I slipped off my coat and ordered a whiskey and water. I was prepared to spend the evening alone, until finally, fortified by whiskey, I would walk home. But before I had taken my first sip, the barstool next to me was pulled out, and I was joined by Carter Sugarland.

“What are you doing here?” I cried. “You're in jail.”

“Correction.” Carter smiled, ordering a beer and stomping his Frye boots on the wooden floor to clean the heels of ice. “I was in jail. I am now out on bail. This was my eighteenth arrest. Disturbing the courtroom was worth a couple of hours behind bars.”

“Really?” I said, thinking of Michael Finn standing on the wide green lawn of the Stockley School.

“Minnie told me you were here. I came to cheer you up. I heard about what happened in court.” Carter took my hands in his. “The first time on a witness stand everybody makes mistakes.”

“A catastrophe, not a mistake,” I corrected.

“Have another drink. It'll seem less like a catastrophe.”

We sat at the far end of the bar, but all the same, we seemed to attract attention. The construction workers who eyed us might have only been looking at Carter Sugarland's long hair, and his rimless glasses. They might not have known that I had been Michael Finn's lover, they might not have recognized Carter from the photo on the front page of the
Fishers Cove Herald
that very same day. But all the same, I avoided their eyes, and looked upward, at the color TV which sat on a platform high above the cash register.

“Self-pity,” warned Carter, “is a dangerous thing.”

“Yup,” I said, “it certainly is.”

“I'm glad you agree.” Carter took off his glasses and cleaned them with a cocktail napkin. “Now what do you plan to do about it?”

“Do?” I said.

“Well, you'll have to find another job.”

“I suppose so,” I agreed. Eventually I would be called into Claude Wilder's office, eventually the board of directors would hear of my confession. “And there's nothing to keep me in this town.”

“Nothing?” Carter asked.

“Are you serious?” I said. “Look what I did to him in court.”

“If you did anything like that to me, I'd forgive you,” Carter said. “I'd forgive you in a minute.”

“There were some jobs in the pamphlets you gave me,” I said. “In Florida.”

“The one working with radiation victims?” Carter smiled. “I never thought you'd really be interested.”

There would be palm trees and no winter; sleet would never touch the Florida streets I would walk. After my radiation group had filled out their grievance forms, we would all walk down to a local diner and order home fries and eggs. Instead of therapy, I would be in charge of finding a lawyer, dealing only with facts.

“Florida,” Carter said thoughtfully.

It was then that I happened to look up at the soundless TV hanging above us. In color, on a twenty-four-inch screen, was a power plant exploding. Iron and steel flew higher than birds, the sky was a deep orange color.

“Look,” I said to Carter.

“Angel Landing,” Carter said when he saw the screen.

But there was no harbor bordering the power plant, no sea gulls flew in the orange sky; the landscape that surrounded this explosion was not the one I had known for so many summers.

“It's someplace else,” I said. “It's another explosion.”

Carter sat up. “Jesus Christ,” he cried, and he grabbed the bartender's shoulder. “Make that louder,” he demanded. “Turn the sound up.”

All around the jukebox there were groans when the sound on the TV was turned up. But Carter and I didn't listen to any complaints; we watched the screen above the bar, the falling iron and steel. We were transfixed, we saw nothing but the orange sky. Even after a TV reporter wearing a hard hat appeared on the scene, it took some time for me to realize that another explosion, just like the one at Angel Landing, had occurred in Elizabeth, New Jersey.

“It's another accident.” Carter shook his head. “Another fucking accident.”

The reporter avoided the falling flames; he tried his best to interview the welder responsible for the accident. But the welder, who lay in the New Jersey dirt, had fallen from high atop a scaffolding when a faulty valve he had installed accidentally some days ago caused a weld to explode during today's testing. Both his legs were broken, and he now waited for two ambulance attendants to lift him out of the mud and carry him away.

Several construction workers had left their tables to join us at the bar and watch the TV.

“Look at that,” one of them said, pointing to the welder on the TV screen. “Why the hell do they have to show him laying in the mud? Jesus Christ.”

The reporter's tone grew even more serious as he mentioned Michael Finn's name and the TV screen above the bar flashed to the landscape I knew so well: the heavy purple clouds hanging above the gray harbor, the sea gulls flying in crazy circles.

“This may make quite a difference to the ongoing trial of welder Michael Finn,” the reporter told us solemnly. “The question is: Just how common are accidents in nuclear power plants?”