At least he seems to know what he was supposed to do. I ask, “So what happened?”
Andy lets out a deep sigh.
“I don’t know. I guess it wasn’t thick enough.”
I study Andy Chapman’s face, which, for the moment, seems lost in confusion. His brown eyes look puzzled, as if he has thought many times about what went wrong. The difference between me and him is that electricity scares me too much to even think about fooling around with it. Involuntarily my mind goes back to the time when I was twelve and was shocked by an electric lawn mower. Closing my eyes, I can still feel the pain. My fingers felt like someone laid back the skin and briskly rubbed a hacksaw blade back and forth over the exposed nerves.
“Couldn’t she let go of it?” I ask, thinking of a movie I saw with Martin Sheen where, in the first five minutes, his wife was accidentally electrocuted while using an electrical appliance. Her muscles contracted, and she couldn’t let go of it.
His face takes on the hardness of a clenched fist as he remembers, “I released the button as soon as I realized what was happening, but it was too late.”
It sounds so grisly I feel my stomach turn.
“What happened then?”
Andy stares over my head and says in a monotone, “I tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and the emergency-room technicians said the doctor worked on her for thirty minutes after they got her to the hospital, but I think she was dead before then.”
I nod, feeling steadily sickened by the portrait he has painted. Perversely, but perhaps not unexpectedly, given my eastern Arkansas background, what is most vivid in my mind is an image of his black lips blowing into the girl’s mouth.
When I was entering puberty in eastern Arkansas my best friend, Jeffrey “Draino” Cummings, “made” me choose between what our adolescent minds agreed were the two worst choices in the world: having sex with one’s mother, or in Jeffrey’s words, “sucking snot from a dead nigger’s nose.”
I remember saying primly that I’d choose the second. Jeffrey, who obtained his nickname because of an experiment with a frog, hooted in derision until I changed my mind.
“Was it just you and the aide?” I ask, wondering if Leon is also black.
Andy closes his eyes as if the memory is too much for him.
“Olivia was there, and I had a social worker there to write down the exact number of shocks it was going to take, and also count how many times Pam hit herself before she stopped.”
I am stunned by the news that Olivia was watching. She is even tougher than I imagined.
“How could a parent watch her own child being shocked?” I blurt.
Andy does not seem to take offense at my tone. He says mildly, “Olivia’s one hell of a strong woman. She insisted that I shock her, too, so she’d know exactly what Pam was feeling.”
Once again I can imagine the jolt that radiated through me as I tried to splice the electric cord that summer morning in the backyard. It had to be over thirty years ago, but the memory of the pain has reappeared as if a skillful therapist had uncovered a traumatic incident from my childhood. My stomach queasy, I take a sip of my coffee, wondering if I’m about to throw up.
“Did you try it, too?”
I ask.
Somberly, he nods.
“One of the descriptions from the journals is that it is like having a dentist drill on a tooth without first having your mouth numbed. Frankly, I think it’s worse than that, but it’s also true that the pain goes away as soon as the current stops. It’s local and doesn’t radiate through the body.”
“Why couldn’t you have started with something milder?” I do not add that if he had, Pam might be alive today.
Perhaps irritated by my tone, his voice less patient, Andy says, “They can get used to a lower voltage. It can be reinforcing.
The literature says that if you’re going to use shock, not to hold back on the intensity.”
But a cattle prod? Nonplussed now by the image of Andy and Olivia shocking themselves a single time, all I can do at the moment is blink at this comment. Some comfort that must be to a retarded teenager. As a child, I used to be terrified when my mother made my sister cut a switch for her that she would then use on our legs. The fear of what was coming was somehow worse than the pain. Of course, that was part of the punishment. Can a jury handle this so-called treatment? On “60 Minutes” recently they did a segment on the comeback electro convulsive therapy was making in the treatment of suicidally depressed mental patients after years of bad publicity. Why? It works when nothing else does, according to the shrinks on the program. Yet there is a difference. The electricity itself
(no one seemed to know how) has a therapeutic effect;
here, its only function is to inflict pain. A theory as subtle as the one in the Spanish Inquisition. Doubtless, its defenders would howl in disagreement. I try to focus on what it is supposed to accomplish: the cessation of pain, the prevention of injury, maybe it can even save a life when it isn’t taking one. Andy would be so much better off if he could have obtained someone’s permission to try shock. It begins to sink in that maybe his boss, David Spath, knew what he was up to, but they made a deal:
Andy could try it, but if it didn’t work, he would have to walk the plank all by himself. Why else would he be so confident that his boss would agree to let him continue working with Pam and using a method that can’t stand the light of day?
“I’d like to talk with your boss and the other two who were there,” I say casually.
“Do you think they’ll be sympathetic?”
Andy spreads his hands and then slaps his legs softly.
“They don’t want to lose their jobs.”
I begin to doodle on the pad in front of me. Maybe they should lose their jobs. I doubt if what they helped Andy do is in their job descriptions. I anticipate him by saying, “They were just following your orders.”
Andy nods too quickly, convincing me that he has told them something similar. The problem was that this defense has already failed-at Nuremberg. Yet usually nobody cares about the peons. They probably need all the warm bodies they can get at the Human Development Center. He says, “I wouldn’t even bother with David. I’m just lucky he hasn’t fired me. I’m sure from the governor on down, they’ve put pressure on him to get rid of me immediately.”
I wonder if they are all black, but I will find out soon enough. David, whoever he is and whatever his color, must be quite a fellow. How does someone get into this business?
I suspect not too many kids say they want to be an administrator of an institution for the retarded when they grow up.
I write his name down, hoping he is white. The testimony of a black boss won’t mean much, since the jury will assume blacks stick together on everything. Thinking about the issue of race reminds me of Andy’s admonition after the probable cause hearing not to raise it again. I ask, “We need to discuss your problem with planting a seed in the jury’s mind that you might be the victim of racial discrimination. If we can even get one juror to hold out, I don’t think the prosecutor would retry it.”
Andy shakes his head vigorously, as if I’d suggested that he try to bribe the judge.
“Don’t you see that all you do is reinforce the belief that blacks are inferior by raising the issue of race?”
I rock back in my chair, totally dumbfounded.
“Are you crazy? You should know better than I do that it’s not going to break this prosecutor’s heart if some members of the jury are racists. She wants a conviction.”
Andy sets his chin and neck as if he is locking them into position.
“I’ve spent my entire adult life refusing to reinforce white or black racism. Each time a black asks for special treatment, he reinforces the behavior of whites who think we can’t make it by ourselves.”
I can’t believe my ears. This guy sounds as if he was programmed by Ronald Reagan.
“It’s not special treatment to demand a fair trial.”
A frown passes over Andy’s face.
