Impact (15 page)

“Are you still living in the flat in Berkeley?”

“Naw.”

“What happened?”

“They threw me out. Landlord games, you know? Trying to stiff the rent control. I may take them to court.”

Hawthorne wonders if he should be flattered that Jason's threats are so frequently litigious. “Are you in school this term?”

“Naw. They canceled the film class I wanted, and the rest of it's an anachronism, basically, so …”

Hawthorne shakes his head. In tune with recent policy, he speaks to his son without a euphemistic filter. “Are you selling drugs, Jason?”

“What? Hey. What the fuck are you
talking
about?” When Jason remembers he is talking to his father and not a cop, he mutters a quick apology.

“I'm talking about how you make your living. You haven't got a job. You haven't been hounding
me
for money lately, and I'm sure your mother hasn't been giving you any. So how are you surviving? Are you up there buying dope? Is Storm some kind of trafficker, Jason?”

Jason's voice lowers to an urgent rasp. “Jesus, Dad; chill out. I'm at the
police
station, for Christ's sake. What are you trying to do?”

Since what he is doing has more to do with himself than with Jason, Hawthorne gives up. He pats the pocket of his suit coat and feels the calming bulge of airline tickets. As it has been so many times in the past, the answer seems to be to get out of town as soon as possible.

He tells his son the money will be coming right away, then asks if he needs anything else. Jason seems about to say something significant, but says only goodbye. “Go see your mother,” Hawthorne prompts. “And me,” he adds, but far too late.

After a moment of bleak reflection, Hawthorne calls for Martha. When she appears in the doorway, he tells her to wire the money. She nods and leaves the room. A moment later she is back, looking at her watch. “Limo's here. You better get going.”

He nods, puts the file he has been reviewing back in his briefcase, gets his garment bag from the closet, and heads for the door. Various people bid him goodbye on the way out, but the turnover in the office is so acute he doesn't know quite who is wishing him bon voyage. When the street door closes behind him, he exhales with relief. He is always glad to get away, until he gets to where he is bound for.

“Where to, sir?” The limo driver places the garment bag and briefcase in the back seat of the long black Lincoln, and Hawthorne clambers in after them. “The airport,” he instructs. “United.”

He settles back in the glove-soft leather, places his briefcase beside him, and removes a memorandum of points and authorities. Laden with law and argument, it is an attempt to persuade a judge in Baton Rouge that an airport is not relieved of liability for inadequate runway lights because the pilot who crashed was soloing without a license to do so. It's a matter that will be appealed by whoever loses, so the argument is not crucial. Ordinarily, Hawthorne would have left it to one of the younger lawyers, except the next day he starts a series of depositions in Dallas, where he will grill flight crews and traffic controllers to determine whether a wind-shear crash that killed 137 people could have been prevented if proper warnings had been given. If he handles the deposition right, he will force the government to settle.

Then to São Paulo for more depositions; he hopes Martha has remembered to line up the interpreter. Then to Mexico City to meet with a group of potential plaintiffs who were shopping for a lawyer and had asked some American attorneys to come pay homage to them and their cultural traditions, which according to Martha included bribes. Then home for three days, a trial lawyers' symposium in Las Vegas over the weekend, a quick run to LA for a meeting with the personal-injury panel of the bar association. Then to Alaska for a pretrial conference in the helicopter case, tort-reform negotiations in Sacramento, then … he looks at his calendar, which is as scribbled on and scratched over as a pocket Jackson Pollock. He won't be home for ten more days.

A twinge in his side makes him squirm to a more comfortable position. The conversation with his son has left him empty and forlorn. That was another thing he and Dan Griffin had talked about—kids. Dan was always frank, consoling, nonjudgmental, occasionally even helpful in a California sort of way, perhaps because Dan was still a kid himself. Now there was no one who could provide him that same balm. Martha regards children as hazardous waste afoot.

As they near the airport, he remembers his plan and tells the driver to take an earlier exit. The driver shrugs, then does as he is told, and ten minutes later Hawthorne issues another instruction, and still others, and in twenty minutes he is there. It is his first visit to the site of a crash of a commercial airliner except vicariously, through the distant drama of admissible evidence.

The wreckage is gone, taken to a hangar at Moffett Air Base for reconstruction in aid of determining the cause of the crash. The bodies are gone as well, both those that are whole and those that are only scraps that have been meticulously tagged and bagged, in the hope that fingers and feet and ears and arms can eventually be matched with enough of their genetic complements that they can be given a name and returned to the folks who loved them. As a shudder rises and falls within him, Hawthorne tells the driver he will be a minute, then gets out of the car.

The grass is smashed flat, the earth is soft and glutinous. Soaked by oils and foams and blood, it seems to want to explain itself, to disclaim responsibility. As he walks toward the grove where the wreckage came to rest, Hawthorne's imagination soars. He hears the voices in the cockpit as they labor to save their charges, sees the attendants grope for words of comfort and assurance, senses the passengers grasping at whatever straw they believe will save them, until they abandon hope and await the crash in terror. He wonders who they blame, in those final seconds, for what is about to happen to them; wonders upon what authority some have died and some are spared

He kicks at a rock half buried in the ooze. Beneath it, something gleams. He picks it up. It is a brass button off a natty blazer, emblazoned with a crest of indeterminate significance. Hawthorne flips it in the air, catches it, imagines a man who might have worn it, a man much like himself. He walks back toward the car.

The driver leans out the window and asks if they're going to the airport or not, he's got another fare at noon. Hawthorne ignores him, tries once again to meld with the event; but though its leavings are all around, he can't come to grips with its enormity. He has spent his professional life reading accounts of air disasters, of what had happened in the sky and in the plane and on the ground, of what had fractured and dislodged, of who had died and how. Yet this ravaged knoll, empty of corpse or wreckage, is far worse than he imagined; implies horror beyond true telling. Suddenly mourning less for the passengers than for himself, Hawthorne climbs back into the limousine and orders the driver to return to the airport.

As they retrace their route, Hawthorne realizes he has lingered at the crash site so long he may miss his flight. He looks at his watch once, then again, then a third time before the airport exit finally looms out of the mists ahead. It is going to be close. If he misses the plane, he will have to arrange for someone to cover for him, doing what past experience has taught him to avoid, which is to trust someone other than Martha not to make a mistake.

Acid spills across his stomach. He dilutes it with a breath of air, then checks his ticket to see how much time he has to change planes in Denver. He gathers up the papers he has been scanning, pats his pocket to confirm the presence of the ticket he examined only seconds before, leans back, and closes his eyes.

“What airline do you want again?” the driver asks.

As he repeats the earlier instruction, Hawthorne feels a swelling sensation in his chest, as though his lungs are being stuffed like sausage. He tries to burp but can't; his lower lip quivers, then tingles, reminding him of the comedown off of Novocain.

As he rubs his lip with the back of his hand, he feels his vision narrow, as though the driver is plunging them into a tunnel. A part of him remembers there are no tunnels at the airport while another part senses a spider crawling down his arm, a tickle of tracks from his armpit to the fingers that now curl around the bright brass button, fingers that are sweating, pale, squeezed tight—holding on to what has somehow become his life.

Hawthorne inhales as much oxygen as his chest will bear. “I think you'd better take me to a hospital.”

The driver turns an ear. “Say what?”

“Don't stop at the terminal—take me back to San Francisco General.”

The driver's eyes appear in the rearview mirror, red, wide, as encompassing as a marsupial's. “You got a problem or something, pal?”

“I think I'm having a heart attack.”

The eyes disappear, to be replaced by a voice, throaty and afraid. “Wait a minute. This ain't no ambulance, buddy. Christ … Here. United you wanted; United you got. I'll put your stuff on the walk for you, no sweat. There ain't no charge, even. Just get out.… Come on, Mac, get out of the limo. I bet they got all kinds of doctors here, for Christ's sake. Hell yes. They'll take care of you just fine. I got other fares, pal.…
Jesus
, don't lie
down
like that. Hey! Over here! I need some
help
here. This guy's trying to fucking
croak
on me, the son of a bitch.”

Keith Tollison stumbled through his normal routine for three days before judging himself incompetent to pursue his practice. Then, with Sandy's assistance, he postponed, continued, canceled, and evaded as many of his responsibilities as he could, until he had cleared his slate of anything that would divert him from the circumstances foisted on him by the crash.

In one sense his preoccupation was shared with thousands—the entire Bay Area was obsessed with the disaster. Photographs of the wreckage wrested the news pages away from the pratfalls of the increasingly beleaguered president. The broadcast by Helen Macy, the first television reporter to reach the scene, was rerun dozens of times, until her tears became both legendary and her ticket to the LA market. Rumors were rife—pilferage from the baggage strewn across the crash site, thefts from the now-vacant homes of victims, wars between funeral directors and medical facilities over the organs of the dead. Lawyers were portrayed as vampires, airplanes as dangerously defective, airlines and the FAA remiss in matters of safety, hospitals inadequate to confront a disaster of this dimension to say nothing of the quake that was only a geologic tic away. And there was a bit of truth in all of it.

A part of Tollison was a public mourner, saddened by the loss of others. But his misery also had a more specific source, for what he had lost was Laura—she had vanished from his life as surely as if she had perished in the plane herself.

His phone calls went unanswered. She was never where she used to be at the times she used to be there. His only knowledge came from a brief conversation when they had run into each other at Safeway—Laura's responses to his queries both perfunctory and distant—and from his pestering of her neighbor to the point of inquisition.

What he knew was this. Galvanized by her circumstances, Laura was making daily trips to the hospital in San Jose, refusing Tollison's offer to accompany her and avoiding all but rote descriptions of what she encountered when she got there. Her reticence finally led Tollison to call the hospital himself, in the role of Laura's lawyer, to request a fresh prognosis. What he was told by Dr. Ryan was sufficiently supple to depress him.

Against the counsel of the specialists who attended him, Laura had begun to plan for her husband's return to Altoona, consulting with anyone who would discuss the subject—doctors and nurses, therapists and psychologists, even a priest—learning how to cope with whatever it was Jack Donahue had become. Her conduct allowed but one conclusion—Tollison had become subordinate to a man who was alive at the pleasure of devices that dented the definitions of life and death.

Lacking anyone to fight with to regain the status quo, he retreated to Brenda and, to his surprise, she welcomed his attentions. The reason was simple—her sister, Carol, had not been heard from in more than a week. As time went by and there was still no word, Brenda began calling him day and night, increasingly desperate, until he had agreed to aid in her search simply to regain some peace of mind.

Tollison had spent the week as a private eye, talking to police, hospitals, girlfriends, and the lengthy string of Carol Farnsworth's lovers that had accumulated over the years, most of them ne'er-do-wells who languished like driftwood on the fringes of Altoona. He had learned a lot—that Carol often smoked pot and occasionally sniffed cocaine, that she liked to shoot pool and was good at it, that her girlfriends called her Cee Cee, that she spent several nights a week at a bar called Cheerios—but his inquiry was essentially unproductive. No one knew where Carol was, no one had heard from her of late, and no one had been told of any plans that would keep her out of circulation for so long, which by now was a dozen days. Periodically, he suggested to Brenda that she declare Carol a missing person and bring in the authorities, but Brenda always refused, with a vehemence that caused Tollison to wonder if she feared her sister was a fugitive.

Since Carol ran with a crowd that assumed all questions had their origins with the police, his most promising lines of inquiry had been met with a sullen silence. Now Tollison was completing what amounted to his last gasp: searching her house from top to bottom.

He began in the kitchen, at the back, and worked his way toward the living room, in the front. As in the earlier stages of his investigation, he learned things. Carol read historical biographies, worshiped Robert Redford, applied something to her body called Mating Musk, subscribed to
Playgirl
, owned a vibrator, and loved the sounds of Sting and Springsteen. She was more than slightly slovenly and drank impressive quantities of Canadian Club, indicating her nickname derived from her libation rather than her first initial. She binged on Archway lemon cookies, collected matchbooks and stuffed rabbits, spent more than she should have on clothes, and bought them in styles ranging from sedate straight skirts to multi-zippered vinyl outfits that, given their size and his recollection of Carol's figure, must have been provocative.