Northwest Corner (21 page)

Exhaust fumes the air between them. Her bare arm rests on the sill of the open car window. Staring at her wrist, with its drugstore Timex on a cheap leather strap, he’s haunted by the wish to buy her a fine watch one day, something with real diamonds. Sentimental tears instantly threaten—in his heart he knows he’ll never buy her that watch—but he fights them off.

Behind him, his father shuts the door of the house and clumps down the porch steps.

Quietly, in a tone that gives nothing away, his mother answers, “He says he wants to be there for you.”

Sam gets in the front passenger seat, leaving the back for his father.

Nothing to say, but things get said anyway.

“Now, Sam, I’m going to ask you a couple of questions, and I want you to answer me with total honesty.”

Jack Cutter, Attorney at Law, sits behind a wide antique desk, the family threesome, such as they are, spread before his Majesty—mom and son on a two-cushion sofa, dad on a hardbacked chair he hardly fits into.

Dad butts his nose in: “Just hold on, Jack—what are you implying?”

The lawyer’s gaze sharpens to a practiced courtroom icicle, sizing up the antagonistic voice and its owner, evidently ruling thumbs-down on both. With the flat of a meaty hand, he smooths his green rep tie over his stomach.

He turns to Sam with a tight smile. “My professional advice is just ignore him, son. That’s right. Now, first question.”

DWIGHT

T
HREE YEARS
I
SPENT
in those offices, just down the hall from Jack Cutter. That they weren’t happy years wasn’t his fault. Yet, coming back now and finding new carpeting on the floor, the latest computer hardware on the desks (I was a whiz with an abacus in my day), my old secretary and occasional bedmate long gone, and a plaque with the name of some recent law grad on my old door, I’m guilty of holding it against him anyway. Maybe because he’s still an upstanding figure in the community, this self-inflated small-town buckaroo, himself to the nth degree and roguishly proud of it, and stacked up beside him in his own digs I can only feel like some shrunken head brought back from the Dark Continent in a burlap sack. Maybe because it’s not the friends who leave you early in the game whom you never forgive; it’s the friends who leave you late. Even his coming into work on Memorial Day especially for Sam’s sake—a fact that he manages to mention at least three times—seems a blowhard’s ploy to me.

But then, discredited and way out of touch, let’s just say I’m not an ideal judge in the matter. There isn’t a single word spoken by Cutter during his interview with my son, starting with Sam’s name, that doesn’t make me want to put my hands around his fat throat and squeeze the breath out of him.

“You’re positive he hit you first?”

“Yes,” answers Sam.

“Did you get a look at him before he hit you?”

“No.”

“You were talking to his girl.”

“No. She was talking to me.”

“Was she drunk?”

Sam nods.

“Were
you
drunk?”

“Maybe a little.”

“Wound up? Pissed off?”

Sam is silent.

“Was
he
drunk—the other guy? Loaded?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t see him.”

“Till you turned and clocked him with the baseball bat?”

“He hit me from behind—twice.”

“Hold on a sec. I’m a little confused here. Tell me again what you were doing with a baseball bat in a bar?”

“Objection.”

“Dwight,” Ruth warns under her breath.

“Ignore him, Ruth.” Cutter exhales. Then he turns back to Sam and repeats his question.

“Why’d you have the bat?”

“I still had my gear from the game with me.” Sam shakes his head as if unhappy with his own explanation.

Cutter waits for more, but there isn’t any. “So what was the bat in? Some sort of team bag?”

“Duffel.”

“Was the duffel open or closed?” Sam hesitates. “Closed.”

“And you had to unzip the duffel to get the bat out?” Sam is silent, staring at his hands.

“Son, look at me, all right? We need to focus here. This is pertinent. Did you
unzip
the duffel to take the bat out?”

Sam nods.

There’s another pause, longer. Jack’s lips are pursed. Ruth is glaring at me as if she knows by now how badly I want to unpurse those lips with my fist, and I look away from her.

“One more question,” Jack says. “Anybody else in the bar see you unzip that bag?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where was the bag, exactly?”

“On the floor, under the bar.”

“So not easily visible?”

Sam shakes his head.

“Were there people close by?”

“I guess.”

Jack sighs. “Okay, let’s move on for the moment. You unzipped the bag. What happened then?”

“I guess I swung at him.”

“You guess? That’s a helluva guess. And hit him where?”

“Stomach.”

“Below the ribs, you’d say?” Sam was silent.

“Say we call it his ‘midsection’ and leave it at that. Clear, but not too clear.”

“Quit screwing him up, Jack.”

Cutter swings his big head around. “When I want your assistance, Counselor, you’ll be the first to know.”

“Put your ego aside and let him tell it like it happened. Or he’ll never sound like himself on the witness stand.”

“For God’s sake, Dwight, butt out,” Ruth snaps.

“Tell you what, Ruth.” Angry pinkish blotches have appeared on Cutter’s walrus cheeks and, quivering like a soufflé, he takes a moment to Buddha himself. “My ex-partner’s behavior is understandable, if not exactly remedial to the situation at hand. I have sympathy for the guy, I do. Lasting feelings of impotence are a common side effect of incarceration.”

I stand up.

In the old days Cutter would’ve been on his feet, too, never caught flat; but he’s heavier by fifty now, deeper into heart-attack
land and, like all good lawyers, too smart to get into any dogfight he doesn’t already have the answer to. So he stays put. Scanning the legal pad on the desk, he clears his throat a couple of times.

I sit back down, the chair cracking under me as if it might collapse.

“Nic Bellic,” Cutter begins again with Sam. “He was your year at school?”

“Yeah, but I didn’t know him.”

“You sure about that?”

Sam hesitates, then shakes his head. “He tried out for the team, but got cut first week.”

“What about his family?”

“His parents are Serbian immigrants. That’s what the dean told me. They don’t speak much English.”

“Do they have any money?”

“The dean said they’re pretty hard up. His dad does part-time construction work. His mom makes dresses, something like that.”

Cutter nods sagely, a transitional gesture signaling a move into the next stage of his performance.

“Fortunately, Sam, I happen to be a UConn benefactor and am on reasonably good terms with Dean Burris. The head of surgery at Hartford Hospital’s a friend as well.” He leans forward, the edge of the desk shelving his gut, and fixes Sam with his Atticus Finch gaze. “Okay, I’ve done a little sniffing around these Serbs during my holiday hours. Your pal Saint Nic’s already had a couple of run-ins with Colchester’s finest. That’s right, you can chalk up another two bar fights, as well as a charge settled out of court for pilfering from the plumbing-supply store where he worked last summer. So you gotta figure the last place he and his parents want to see him is in a heart-to-heart with the UConn cops—or in court. Definitely to be avoided at all costs. And the university’s got little choice but to follow the family’s wishes on the matter—unless and until, that is, the kid’s injuries, or conditions stemming from the alleged original injury, should prove fatal.”

Here Cutter takes a few moments to check his notes and allow for applause. Looking up again, he does everything but bow to the wings.

“So let’s review the medical situation, shall we? Approximately two hours after receiving a traumatic blow to the midsection, the patient self-admits to hospital, complaining of severe abdominal pain. Kid can barely stand up. Says he was in a fight and got gut-whacked with a bat, but he claims total ignorance about the identity of his attacker. Pretty much standard ER behavior for bad boys who don’t want anything to do with the cops, even if they’re dying. Two days later, after unsuccessful observation and worsening pain, the docs open him up and look around. Duodenal hematoma promptly discovered. They sew him back together and in a few days he starts looking better. A little color in his cheeks, that petty-thug personality coming back to delight society once again. But then—bingo—sepsis hits, his blood’s poison, his BP’s nosediving, and his ass goes straight back to the prime-time ICU. That’s hospitals for you—if you’re not already dead, they’ll find some way to kill you once you get there.

“And then what does the idiot resident go and do? Prescribe the wrong antibiotics! The kid doesn’t improve, keeps sinking, now he’s just barely hanging on—till finally somebody has a George Clooney moment and figures out they’re headed for a doozy of a malpractice case. Which is the only time, I can assure you, that anybody will ever be motivated to do anything constructive in this great nation of ours.”

By now, Cutter is enjoying himself so much he’s actually grinning. I want to knock his teeth out.

“This fun for you, Jack? You like being the star of your own fucking reality show at my son’s expense?”

“Shut up,” Sam says to me, and to me alone.

He doesn’t repeat it. He doesn’t have to. He stands up and walks out of the office and leaves us there.

SAM

T
HE AIR OVER
R
OUTE 44
fuses his perceptions, muggy and bright. The shoulder is narrow; traffic passes close. He turns east, breaking into a desperate jog. It can’t be more than five miles to his mother’s house.

But he runs lumpishly today, unable to locate his stride, eyes hugging the gravel-strewn ground in front of him: an athlete in civilian clothes, his shoes heavy and flat.

It would seem a simple thing on the surface—that a child is not an event, alleged or otherwise, a mistake or accident or crime, his or someone else’s. That he is by definition more than this, sum rather than division, a living promissory note. That he might love his parents helplessly, in spite of who they are; just as, if he’s ever to find his place in the world, someday he must accept himself helplessly, in spite of who he has become.

He slows, then stops, a painful stitch digging into his side. He bends over. Not in shape, after all. No kind of “prospect.” Just another washout without a life plan.

He remembers stabbing a freshly sharpened pencil into the hand of a boy at school. It was Eddie Tibbet, his friend. They were ten. There was no logical reason for the attack, no apparent motive.

It is still fresh to him: the look of disbelief on Eddie’s face, his high, startled cry of pain. The teacher grabbing him by the wrist, dragging him off to the principal’s office.

To separate him from the others, she said: so he could not hurt anyone else.

A fuel truck lumbers by at close range, trailing gasoline vapor. Painted on the back of the stubby silver tank, for some reason, is a palm tree, brown coconuts nesting in green fronds.

He thinks of California.

And then, heading west in the opposite lane, he sees a second vehicle, a converted pickup, its flatbed vertically sectioned by large panes of clear glass—a roving window in search of a house. And for the instant it’s even with his position he is granted, as if by some higher power, insight through its crystalline lenses to the other side.

He snaps this mental picture, not knowing what it means.

Then the truck is past, and all views everywhere revert to the obscure.

The tips of his father’s brown lace-ups are badly scuffed from his mad dash along the roadside: the man’s been out running, too, chasing his son. Pale dust coats his pantlegs to the shins, and dark islands of sweat stain the armpits of his white button-down.

“I still know some people around here—” His father bends over—hands on his knees—to catch a wheezing breath, then slowly straightens again. “Come on … I can find you half a dozen lawyers better than that pompous asshole.”

“Forget it.”

“Sam, listen to me—”

“No.”

“Dammit, we need to do everything we can here.”

“ ‘We’?”

His father looks away. Sam repeats the question, his anger growing, as a yard away a minivan passes them in a rush of dust and fumes.

His father breathes out. A public service, in essence: trying to expel something potentially harmful to them both.

“You don’t want to go where I went. Never. You don’t want any part of that.”

“Doesn’t look like it killed you.” Out of bounds now, Sam lets it fly. It almost feels good. His father stares at him, takes a step closer.

“You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. It’ll ruin your life. Rot you from the inside out.”

“Too late,” he says softly.

(He is five again, and across the room his parents are killing each other.)

“Listen to me—”

He turns to get away. But a hand shoots out, grabs him high up on his left biceps. Strong blunt fingers that know what damage is dig into the soft tissue between muscle, sending a knifelike pain shooting up his shoulder and down his arm.

Before he can stop himself, his fist flies out: he punches his father in the face.

They both see it at the same moment: his father’s fist cocked in the stunned air, about to deliver the return blow.

And then his father, running.

RUTH

D
RIVING EAST ON 44
from Cutter’s office, on the lookout for her son, she is thrown back to an afternoon a good decade in the past: raised voices out on her front lawn, a man’s and a boy’s, where Norris is tutoring his indifferent stepson in the mysteries of the short game in golf. Then a sudden loud clatter—her husband’s prized pitching wedge tomahawked into a tree—and by the time she peers out the bedroom window to see what the fuss is about there’s only her son’s sweatshirted back, tearing up Larch Road at a jackrabbit clip.