Gideon - 02 - Probable Cause (17 page)

I ease the Blazer between a Bronco and a Chevrolet pickup outside of what I take to be the central office. Andy has told me I must sign in first before I come to his office. What would institutions do without a sign-in book? Inside a small waiting room I look at the names and addresses before me:

Rogers, El Dorado, Helena. This place is not your neighborhood school. Relatives must travel hours for a visit, so I can assume that residents are grouped around the state by level of severity. As I write my name, a man of about forty taps me on the shoulder. He is, I hope, a resident: his eyes are crossed; he has a hump a camel would be proud to own, and from the sounds he is making he is without intelligible speech. He is holding out his hand, and though I have represented many mentally ill people who acted much stranger, I feel myself flinch.

“Homer,” the woman behind the glass says mildly, “what’re you doing down here? Does Mr. Trantham know you’re down here?”

Homer, who is dressed in jeans and a red, long-sleeved western shirt, makes more sounds I can’t understand; but there is no mistaking the friendly grin on his face.

To me the woman says, ““He wants to shake hands.”

There are food stains on Homer’s shirt, and I find that I am reluctant to touch this man who seems delighted by my presence. No telling where those hands have been, but with the woman watching me, I have no choice but to eKtend my hand. He pumps away, and I steel myself to really look at him closely and find that I am not as grossed out as I thought I would be. Of course, I have seen retarded people before, but not so close I could feel their breath on my face. I realize now that I think of them as freaks, some of whom are harmless and some who aren’t.

“How are you?” I ask loudly, self-conscious as a teenager meeting his first date’s father, knowing every word I say will be repeated by the beaming receptionist, a country woman whose brown hair is pulled tight in a bun behind her head. Homer grins sheepishly, as if he had been told an off-color joke in the presence of his mother.

I turn and look at the woman who orders, “Let go of his hand, silly!”

I think she is talking to me and pull my hand away just as he pulls his back, and he and I both giggle nervously. I’m beginning to feel like I’m the newest resident. Homer now studies me with unconcealed glee. He knows a soul mate when he sees one.

“Who’ve you out here to see?” the woman asks amiably, her voice crackling with humor as she files away the story. I thought he was his brother he acted so dumb!

“You didn’t write in who you’re visiting.”

I take a good look at my interrogator. She has a dimple on her left cheek as deep as a small well and her eyes are a sparkling green behind steel bifocals. She could be anywhere between forty and sixty.

“I’m here to see Dr. Chapman.”

Her dimple disappears instantly as her cheeks swell with disapproval.

“I saw you on TV.” Unvoiced is her unimpeachable indictment of me: You’re his lawyer.

I confess that she probably did and ask, “Can you tell me where his office is?”

“Homer,” she snaps, “take him upstairs to Dr. Chapman on your way back to your unit.”

I don’t know whether I am to take this as an insult or a high honor, but Homer, who seems to have permanently grasped the power of positive thinking, appears ecstatic. He nods eagerly, and without another word I follow him through an unmarked door. Once through the door we make a series of turns, and I realize immediately I am lost as we come upon two elevators. Happily, we take the stairs (though Homer appears entirely harmless, I’d just as soon not spend a couple of hours between floors with him). On the stairs we pass a little black male surely no older than twenty. He points at me and laughs hysterically. Homer frowns and says some thing that sounds unmistakably like “Fuck off.” It begins to dawn on me that if I stayed out here a week, I’d understand everything he is saying.

Upstairs, we pass through a set of double doors, and to my left is a group of obviously retarded men sitting on sofas watching a soap opera. This strikes me as strange, but why should it? It’s not as if you have to be a rocket scientist to watch “All My Children.” In the same area further ahead we pass a card table around which three employees (two men and a woman) dressed in ordinary clothes are sitting. I assume they are staff (I realize I expected to see nurses in starched uniforms sweeping by me on their way to patients’ rooms). Yet the residents, as strange as they look, are not, for the most part, sick, though I assume some are on medication to control their behavior.

Before I can speak, the woman, who seems to be sorting some papers as the men look on, says, “Homer, where’re you taking him?”

Without breaking his shuffling gait, Homer makes a series of noises, the last part of which sounds to me like “Lapland.”

Chapman. The three give me a hard stare but say nothing. Everybody in America knows a lawyer when they see one.

Andy is reading what appears to be a textbook in a small, dingy office with the door open and looks up as Homer brings me into view. The green concrete walls are mostly bare except for a calendar and an empty metal shelf. It is as if Andy has already been packed up.

I explain, “Homer brought me.”

Andy smiles, his eyes crinkling with pleasure at the sight of Homer, who now looks relieved to have discharged his unpopular task.

“Thank you, Homer,” he says formally.

“You did a good job. Go on back to the dayroom.”

Homer nods and moves off, his peculiar old-man’s gait no longer as distracting to me as when I arrived.

Andy rises and gravely offers his hand.

“Have a seat. I’ve been transferred up here out of harm’s way,” be says, his voice sounding sarcastic and at the same time embarrassed.

Wearing a short-sleeved sky-blue knit shirt over a pair of comfortable-looking pleated khaki pants, he is dressed far more casually than I expected. But then, I suppose Homer doesn’t mind. I sit in a metal folding chair opposite him, already feeling closed in.

“What are you supposed to be doing all day?” I ask, trying unsuccessfully to read upside down the title of his book. “Right now I ‘m reviewing our training literature,” he says mock-importantly, and then mutters, “as if it matters.”

I pick up the book from his desk. It is entitled: Nonaversive Intervention for Behavior Problems: A Manual for Home and Community. I flip through the pages, realizing I know zero about what is expected of retarded people.

“Doesn’t it?

“I ask.

A bitter look crosses Andy’s face.

“It’s supposed to, but there’s so much turnover,” he says, looking past me into the hall, “Homer isn’t going to do anything the rest of his life except wander these halls.”

“What about that suit to shut down places like this?” I ask, feeling the waxy cover of the book beneath my thumb.

Andy gives me an indulgent smile and for the next ten minutes lectures me on the myths of what he calls the deinstitutionalization movement.

“You get all these Utopia training models like this,” he says, pointing at his book, “but it’s not the real world. What good does it do to put a nonverbal, severely retarded man in a group home? There’s no place for people like that in American society. Retarded people are, by definition, the losers, the bottom of the barrel, in a country that insists on competition from the moment a child is born. Sure, the mildly retarded can learn enough adaptive behavior to get by, but the Homers of the world don’t fit in anywhere. In a consumer society people like him won’t ever be accepted because they don’t have any value.”

I nod, more interested in the emotion in his voice than in what he is saying. I’ll be the first to admit I don’t want Homer moving in next to me. The price of real estate in my neighborhood is already low enough without having to worry about Homer coming over to peep in Sarah’s window. What I want a jury to hear, though, is that Andy cares about these people even if they don’t. And it won’t hurt if they agree with him.

All Andy was trying to do was stop this child from mutilating herself—he wasn’t trying to move her into the half-million-dollar homes overlooking the Arkansas River. To get him to talk more, I deliberately bait him.

“You don’t sound too liberal on this subject. I thought you’d tell me that retarded people were like blacks—just give ‘em a chance to show they’re regular folks.”

Andy gives me a look that reminds me of the first time I talked to him in my office: Is this white asshole educable?

“The people who write these books and lead these movements are basically ideologues, no matter how much they’ve worked with the develop mentally disabled. It doesn’t matter whether you call them liberals or conservatives. They have this grand vision of how things ought to be. Frankly, I think they’re dangerous as hell,” he says, softly slapping the table in front of him.

Feigning disapproval, I cross my arms in front of me, anxious to keep him going. A jury has got to be made to see the guy’s no Dr. Strangelove rubbing his hands with glee at the thought of Armageddon. Down deep, Andy is paternalistic He just wants to stay down on the farm and take care of his retarded folks. He is probably deeply conservative, like most Arkansans. If so, I want to exploit that identification at the trial.

“You’re going to play into the prosecutor’s hands,” I say, believing just the opposite.

“She’s going to try to paint you as a real Neanderthal, the kind of professional who’s keeping Arkansas in the Dark Ages. Shocking defenseless children, keeping them locked up in institutions.”

Andy stands up and looks out his window. I can’t see what he is looking at, but probably he is staring off into the woods.

He says, after a long pause, ” You really think desegregation, when you weigh the pluses and minuses, has benefited most blacks? Look at where a lot of blacks are in the average school. Special ed. The slow classes. Or out of school hanging out, getting stoned on drugs and killing each other. In the United States there can only be so many winners. For whatever reason blacks aren’t ever going to win in America.

Sure, there are exceptions. The liberals will trot out a black who’s made it to prove integration is working. But you don’t prove anything by how your best kids do; they would have made it anyway. It’s your average kid who proves whether the system is working or not, and for most black kids it’s going to be the bottom, and it’s not really getting any better

His voice trails off, as if I should be making a connection.

What is it? Is he conceding black inferiority, or what? Is he saying blacks are like retarded people too stupid to compete? I stare at his back, unable to try to read his face. I have lost the thread somewhere. “It’s too late to go back to Africa, Andy,” I say, wondering whether he will take this as a slur.

He turns around and gives me a wintry smile.

“All I’m talking about is a sense of identity. These reformers have decided retarded people should be a part of the American rat race as if that were a good thing. I’m not so sure the Homers of this world would be better off competing and losing in a society that values only winners.”

I look toward the door, wondering if I should get up and close it. We are at the end of the hall, so it hardly seems worth it. The fire has gone out of Andy’s voice as if he has gotten stuck. Perhaps he has. Somebody is always ahead of us, but that doesn’t mean we have to slit our wrists. Normal everyday life has compensations other than just winning.

Maybe, though, if you’re forced to compete and you usually come in dead last, it’s hard to see the virtue in lining up for the next race. I say carefully, “I want the jury to see you have a point of view, but I’m not sure a racial analogy is going to be appreciated, however sympathetic it is.”

Andy props one leg against the wall and leans back against the windowsill with both elbows resting on the edge. He says sarcastically, “You really belisve in this legal crap, don’t you?”

My right ear itches and I dig at it with my little finger, a pleasure so sublime I scratch until it hurts. Is that how a self-abusive child begins? How to explain I don’t “believe” in the law.

“A friend of mine,” I say, remembering Clan Bailey’s beatific expression after he won his first jury trial “once said the law is like toilet paper; sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.” I study Andy’s puzzled expression and decide to spell it out for him.

“His point was that there’re more efficient ways to clean up a mess, but it’s what we’re used to in this country, and consequently a lot of people swear by it. I don’t swear by our legal system, but I ‘m getting used to it.”

Andy wrinkles his nose slightly at my remark. He is too proper to appreciate it. The truth is that I am surprised he was willing to get his hands dirty enough even to get close enough to Pam to touch her, much less shock her. I ask, “Can you get away with giving me a tour?”

“I think so,” he says.

“It’ll have to be a quick one, but you need to see this place to get a feel for what’s going on.”

In the next twenty minutes I see more than I want to. With me trailing Andy, we cover four of the six buildings on the grounds. It is the locked wards that give me the creeps.

Somewhat surprisingly, Andy still has a set of keys, and though all eyes are on us from the time we enter a ward until we leave it, Andy acts as if I am about to make an offer to buy the place. As we stride briskly through a ward in which some of the men are tied to their beds, I get a feel for the first time what Pam must have been like. Though none of them are in a position to abuse themselves, it is possible for me to picture some of them ramming their heads against their beds. One hideously deformed man (his eyes look turned inside out, and he has scar tissue for skin) rhythmically rubs his head against his sheets.

On this same ward several men, none with intelligible speech, gather around us. They seem starved for human touch, but, like Homer, they are hideous to me, and there are too many of them. The level of noise is astonishingly high, but I can’t understand a word. All I want to do is get out of here. Two male aides, one black and one white, walk over to us and greet Andy warmly. Andy acknowledges that he is showing his lawyer around, and we leave them shooing the men back toward a group of chairs and tables in the corner by a TV. Reading my mind, Andy says, “Homer’s ward is higher-functioning. You’d get used to it and see them as distinctive individuals. It’s the aides who don’t see them as individuals that give us the problems.”