“Who…?” Norm started, but the line had gone dead.
Norm walked back to the garage in a trance. The man had not sounded friendly, but there was no question that he was going to the park.
Tryon Creek State Park abutted the campus of Lewis and Clark College ’s Northwestern School of Law in Southwest Portland. Hiking trails crisscrossed the wooded acres. During the daylight hours the park was a popular spot for lovers to stroll and joggers to run. At ten, the park was dark, and the lot was empty except for a beat-up pickup truck that was parked in a space near the entrance to one of the nature trails.
Norm parked a few spaces down from the truck and walked over to take a look. The night was warm, and he was dressed in a T-shirt and jeans. He bent down and peered through the cab window just long enough to satisfy himself that the truck was empty.
“Spencer,” a voice called from the trailhead. When Norm turned, he saw a man standing in the shadows several feet in on the trail. He walked forward, and the man faded into the darkness. Norm grew wary, but his need to find out what had happened with Casey overrode his common sense. He headed down the trail but the man had disappeared. He stopped and looked around. The voice called out again from farther down the trail.
Norm peered into the night. “I’m getting tired of playing hide-and-seek. If you’ve got something to say, come out and say it.”
There was no answer. Norm was angry. He knew that he should get in his car and drive away, but he did not want his tormentor to know that he was scared, so he rushed up the trail hoping to catch the man off guard. A baseball bat slammed into his shin, taking him off his feet. The pain was excruciating. He came down hard on his head and lay in the dirt, dazed. The second blow crashed across his shoulders.
Norm tried to stand but more blows drove him down. He could see his attackers through a red-tinted haze. There were three of them, and two of them hefted bats. The third reared back and delivered a brutal kick to Norm’s ribs. He heard something crack. An electric jolt of pain seared him, and he passed out for a second. When the world came back in focus, Miles Van Meter was squatting next to him, holding a handful of Norm’s hair. He used the hair to lift Norm’s head off of the ground. Rage distorted Miles’s features.
“You knocked up my sister, you fuck, but you will never see her or your little bastard. If you ever try to contact her again you’ll think this beating is the best thing that ever happened to you.”
Miles smashed his fist into Norm’s nose, crushing it. Then he stood up and nodded. The other two men beat Norm until he passed out.
4
Norm forced himself to drive to the nearest hospital where he was told that he had two cracked ribs, a fractured shin, and a concussion. When he was ready to be released, Norm’s parents took him home. His nose was broken, his leg was in a cast, his ribs were wrapped tight, his face was purple and yellow, and he had a splitting headache.
During the next week, Norm was confined to bed and had a lot of time to think. He felt terrible about Casey’s pregnancy. They had taken precautions most of the time, but there had been an occasion or two when they’d done without in the heat of the moment. Now she would have to pay for their mistake with her youth. His initial impulse was to do the right thing and marry Casey. He soon realized that marriage was not an option. How could he propose when she wouldn’t even speak to him? Norm wanted to believe that her family was keeping them apart, but it was more likely that he’d only been a summer fling for Casey. She’d never really shown any signs of affection. Now that he thought about it, they didn’t really have much in common other than screwing. He’d tried to tell her he loved her a few times, but she’d laughed him off. And she had never said she loved him.
Norm was reading The Oregonian the first time he thought about the baby as anything more than an abstraction. He was looking for the comics when the name “Casey Van Meter” brought him up short. An item in the society column mentioned that she was going to spend her fall semester in Europe. Norm’s first thought was that she was going to have an abortion. He felt cold and sad. It suddenly occurred to him that their baby would look a little like him. Norm was young and never one for long-range thinking, but the concept of immortality came to mind. A child was your immortality. Your child carried your genes after you were dead. If Casey aborted, part of Norm would die.
After further consideration, Norm decided that Henry Van Meter, a strict Catholic, would never countenance an abortion. On the other hand, he had a hard time picturing Casey giving up her dreams and desires to raise a child, knowing what he did about her. The most likely possibility was that Casey would give birth in Europe so no one would know she was having a baby. Then the baby would be put up for adoption. That did not seem right to Norm. He did not want his child to be raised by strangers. He wanted a say in what happened to his child.
If you went by appearances, Ken Philips was the last lawyer you would hire. Nothing about the short, balding man with the potbelly, mangy, gray-specked beard, and mismatched clothes hinted at his brilliance or his success. Philips’s office was small and furnished with the secondhand furniture he had purchased when he opened for business fourteen years before. There were no clippings on the wall advertising his courtroom victories. Instead of his diplomas he had framed his children’s first kindergarten art and a set of his wife’s photographs of the Oregon coast.
Unpopular causes were Philips’s passion. As soon as he was awarded his law degree, he had gone to the Deep South in the darkest days of the civil rights movement to represent blacks in violence-plagued voter registration drives. During the Vietnam War, he was the war protesters’ first line of legal defense. When he wasn’t involved in politics, Ken Philips earned a good living as a personal-injury lawyer.
“How does the other guy look?” Philips asked as soon as his secretary left them alone.
“Much better than me.”
When Philips laughed, his body jiggled like Santa Claus.
“So, do you want me to sue the bastards?”
“I just want to ask you some questions, if that’s okay. But I don’t have much money.”
“We can talk about the money later. Let me hear the questions.”
Norm looked down at his shoes. He had not thought about what he would say if he gained an audience with Ken Philips. It had taken all of his courage to go to the lawyer’s office.
“Are you in some trouble with the law?” Ken prodded.
“No. I don’t think so. It’s more like a personal thing with a girl.” He took a deep breath. “Mr. Philips, let’s say a girl gets pregnant and she wants to give the baby away. What about the guy, the father?”
“I don’t follow you.”
“There’s this girl. We slept together. Had sex. I think she wants to give our baby away. I don’t think it’s an abortion. Her dad is Catholic. He sent her to Europe to have the baby and I want to know my rights.”
“How long have you known this girl?”
“Just for the summer. I work at a gas station and my uncle sent me out to tow her car. We got to talking and I asked her out.”
“You work at the gas station full-time?”
“In the summer. I’m at Oregon. I’ll be a junior.”
“How old is the girl?”
“Nineteen. She goes to Stanford.”
Philips leaned back and tented his fingers on his ample stomach. “So we’ve got a summer romance here that got out of control?”
Norm colored. “We really tried to be careful. But a couple of times…” He swallowed.
“How do you know she’s pregnant?”
Norm pointed to his face. “Her brother and some of his friends did this after he found out. And she stopped seeing me. She won’t take my calls. I went over to her house but she wouldn’t see me. She said she’d call the cops if I tried to talk to her.”