Down Around Midnight (20 page)

I didn't ask for a refund, only that American Express prorate the charges, subtracting the cost of the last two and a half miles.

C
arrying me out of the woods that night, the firemen, whenever they paused to rest, would set down the backboard to which I was strapped and ask me how I was doing. The first time they asked, I told them, “I could use a cigarette.”

One of them, suppressing a grin, advised me to quit smoking: “Hell, something like that could kill you,” he said.

And we all broke out laughing. It was a welcome taste of the absurd.

Smoking is one of the bad choices I've made in my life. The quality of various other decisions, good or bad, is equally apparent. I don't give them too much thought. But there's one choice I made a long time ago whose consequences I continue to question, a decision the propriety of which still remained unresolved at the outset of my search: the decision I imposed upon my fellow passengers to remove the injured girls from the airplane.

Did moving the girls injure them further?

The girls were not residents of the Cape, but their parents owned property here. And that property is still in the family. In Chatham, the town to which they were traveling that night, according to newspaper accounts of the crash, there is a phone listed under their name. It is a measure of Cape Cod's enchantment that while family members, with the passage of time, might have moved from their home in Michigan, their attachment to the Cape has remained constant.

Situated at the foggy elbow of the Cape, where the Atlantic meets Nantucket Sound, Chatham, distinctive for its extensive barrier beaches, gives its name to Chatham Light, a 2.8 million candlepower beacon that is visible twenty-five miles out to sea. Home to a commercial fish pier that is among the more vital in New England and to the Cape's most fertile shellfishery beyond the borders of Wellfleet, it is home to many people who work hard for a living, and its saloons pump plenty of workingman's beer. The slogan has since been co-opted by the residents of numerous other communities, but it was on the bumper sticker of a Chatham pickup where I first saw municipal pride expressed in the phrase “A quaint drinking village with a fishing problem.” The million pounds of fish landed at the Chatham Pier in 2007 is probably a tenth of the catch landed there twenty years ago, but the longliners and draggers unloading there daily still constitute the town's most significant year-round industry.

Like a port of call for pirates or an open gold-rush town, Chatham is the town to which all the operators tended to gravitate back when you could identify a trawler captain by his Rolex, and it remains something of a rogue's paradise today. But that is not the image of Chatham promoted by the majority of residents who merely estivate there, showing up at the onset of summer, when, like coagulating algae, the population blooms from just under seven thousand to three times that. Chatham is a town of two minds about itself.

Fully half of the real property in Chatham consists of second homes. An upmarket resort that, to certain outsiders, is synonymous with Cape Cod—they may not really know the Cape, but yes, they've heard of Chatham—it is a town very special for its snob appeal. Its real estate is as expensive as that of any town on the Cape, but it's the only town where the summer people dress like the people on Nantucket. Nowhere off-island do you see so much of the pink they call Nantucket red. Every town on the peninsula has its souvenir T-shirts, but only Chatham does significant business in souvenir rugby shirts. This exaggerated peak-season sense of itself, as much as its concentration of year-round troublemakers, explains Chatham's reputation locally for the high quality of its cocaine.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation named Chatham to its 2007 list of America's Dozen Distinctive Destinations. Among the less class-conscious of its summer visitors is British prime minister Gordon Brown. The only Cape community other than Provincetown to support a commercial fishing fleet, it is the one Cape town, by contrast, that truly smacks of the idle rich. It reminds me a lot of Aspen, absent the latter's more obvious similarities to ancient Babylon.

My call to the Chatham phone number was the first I made in pursuit of the story after talking to Suzanne. Among the things I was surprised to learn from her was that she had seen the three Michigan sisters after the crash. She had been invited to visit the family in Chatham that summer after the last of the girls was released from the hospital. The visit, she told me, was brief, and her memory of it is vague, but as far as I was able to discover, it was one of only two occasions, both of them brief, on which survivors met after the crash.

The graciousness the parents had shown when they stopped by to thank me in the hospital was characteristic of their overall response to the tragedy. In a letter to the editor of the
Cape Cod Times
published four days after the crash, the girls' father expressed the family's gratitude to police, fire, and medical personnel and to the other passengers on the plane. A year later, in a phone call placed by a
Times
reporter doing follow-up on the anniversary of the crash, the girls' mother, speaking from Michigan, said they were “all walking now and they're all going to school, but we still have concerns about their bone injuries. We're excited that they're alive and that we have our kids. Father's Day was very special here. Every day we're grateful that they're alive.” The day the reporter called was the day the youngest started walking without crutches. “She threw away the crutches for the first time and is walking fine,” her mother said. “But it will be a long time before she can run.” Again praising the Cape's excellent community services, she told the reporter, “The support systems you have are fantastic. It made us feel very warm.”

In anticipation of reaching out to the family, I looked forward to receiving an answer to the question that had troubled me for so long.

The season had come to an end on the Cape when I finally made the call. There were two listings under the name in Chatham. I remembered learning in the wake of the crash that the girls' parents had not been on-Cape when it happened but that someone else, perhaps a relative, had been waiting to meet the plane, and I was hoping, at most, when I put in the call, to get hold of an extended-family member who was a year-round Cape Cod resident, or, failing that, to pick up a recorded message directing me to a number in Michigan.

A woman answered the phone. When I explained who I was, she seemed confused and at the same time somewhat fascinated.

“I think you should talk to my husband,” she said. She put him on the phone.

I gave the man my name, told him where I was calling from, and repeated what I'd told his wife: I said I'd survived a plane crash in 1979 with three sisters from Birmingham, Michigan, whose family I was trying to reach.

“I'm their father,” he told me.

Presumably retired, clearly remarried, and evidently living year-round on the Cape, he wasn't actively impolite, but he wasn't cordial either. To give him a better fix on me, I reminded him of our meeting in the hospital, when he and his ex-wife had come by to thank me and return the shirt with which I'd covered their daughter.

“Yeah,” he said, “I don't remember that.”

I told him I was looking for help in reconstructing the events of that night.

“I'll have to get permission from them before I talk to you,” he said. “If they're interested, they'll call you.”

And he ended the conversation.

He called me himself a few days later.

“They don't want to participate,” he announced.

Not cooperate. Participate. As if, rather than asking for help, I were offering his daughters a part in a movie.

It was hard to know how to respond. I'd talked to the fellow twice, now, for maybe a total of ninety seconds. In the face of such an abrupt refusal, one of the more natural follow-up questions is “Do you mind if I ask you why?” Sometimes the question is heartfelt. More often than not, it's a stupid question, an irrelevant one at best, a question reporters ask public officials to get them on the record, maybe get them to incriminate themselves further. Beyond that, the only purpose it serves is to keep people on the phone, give a caller time to explain himself and try to get a rhythm going. But asking why in this instance would have been disingenuous on my part, making me sound as insincere as he was trying to make me feel. It would have been disrespectful, not to him but to his daughters. Empathizing with my fellow survivors, I shared their disinclination. It was no easier for me than it was for his daughters to revisit the night in question.

All of this thinking was predicated, of course, on the assumption that he had asked their opinion, and I had to take him at his word.

“I understand how they feel,” I told him.

Never in my life had I been more honest with an assertion. And I asked if it might be possible to get a few minutes of
his
time.

I really only asked him half of it. In the middle of that sentence, he hung up on me.

 

 

I was twenty-two years old, a freshly minted reporter in Washington. I had just been promoted from copyboy and put on general assignment. A couple of miles outside the city, in Prince Georges County, Maryland, a D.C.-bound Penn Central Metroliner, traveling 112 miles per hour, had struck a thirteen-year-old New Carrollton boy, dragging him over a mile and a half, and he had been declared dead on arrival at the hospital. My city editor handed the story to me.

“Give me two and a half takes,” he said.

Two and a half pages, triple-spaced. A routine hard-news assignment.

I reported the story without leaving the desk, gathering the information over the phone. I typed it up, turned it in, and after it was marked up at the city desk, the story came back with a TK that hadn't been put there by me.

TK, appearing in copy, is editorial shorthand for “To Come,” indicating information not yet available, maybe a fact on which a writer is waiting, or a statistic that, in the interest of efficiency and speed, he didn't stop to dig up. Its use is indispensable to a reporter. You write the story, you file the copy with the TK circled in pencil, and while the editor is making his cuts, you're on the phone to the cops, nailing down a description of the murder weapon, the one you described as “TK caliber.”

But the TK added at the city desk was not inserted in the copy. Rather, it appeared in the margin, and it was preceded by the word “art,” which in the newspaper business is how editors specify photography: Art TK.

“Nice job. Let's get a photo,” my city editor told me.

A photo of the kid. The victim.

“OK.”

But being new to the job, I wasn't sure where to begin.

“Talk to the family,” he said.

The family. I'd managed to write the story without having to talk to members of the boy's family. The piece, as assigned, hadn't called for it. We were running it as a simple news item. That they'd talk to a reporter, of all people, in their hour of grief seemed unimaginable to me. I stepped away from the city desk thinking,
This isn't going to be fun.
I put it off for a little bit, didn't pick up the phone right away, and when I finally got around to making the call, the family didn't answer.

I remember it was late in the day. I think I might have called the boy's school, hoping to get a picture there. (It's possible I tried the school first in an effort to avoid calling the family.) Anyway, I came up short, and I tried calling the family again. Again no one picked up the phone, and there was no surer sign of my inexperience than the sense of relief I felt.

“I've been calling,” I explained to my city editor. “I can't get an answer at the house.”

He stared at me for a second. He nodded his head.

He said, “So get in your car.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to get in your car, drive up there, knock on the door, and ask his parents for a picture.”

“I don't think there's anyone home,” I said.

“Be sure to stop by a phone,” he said, “and call the desk before you come in.”

It was dark when I arrived at the house. Lights were shining through all the windows. Cars were parked out front. There was no getting away from the reality that someone was going to answer the door. I rang the bell, and soon enough I was looking at the boy's father. I remember it all in black and white, like a scene out of classic film noir. There, alone on the lighted door-step, I stood in my jacket and tie, sporting an open trench coat, a reporter now, doing my job, resigned to being greeted with all the disdain I believed my behavior deserved. Nothing about my being there was right. Nothing about it was appropriate. His grief was none of my business. And nonetheless, there I stood. I told him who I was.

He invited me in.

The door opened directly into the living room. Four or five people were sitting there, and most of them were crying. He ushered me into the kitchen, he and a young woman, a relative, who didn't seem much older than I; she was much too young, it seemed to me, to be in such firm possession of the poise and dignity she displayed. They asked me to sit. They offered me coffee. They may have offered me something to eat. I don't remember the details. All I remember, and will never forget, is how courteously I was received, how solicitous they were, how helpful. I remember a family utterly inconsolable going out of its way to make
me
feel comfortable.

We talked briefly, they gave me a photo, I thanked them, and they showed me out. The people in the living room were still crying when I left.

“We meet the worst people,” a cop once told me, describing his job, “and the best people only at their worst.”