Charisma

1 Saturday, May 5 Renny Sand drove south along 1-5 from Vancouver, British Columbia to Vancouver, Washington, taking a little side trip to Claremont. His intention was to visit the town where his conscience had last been sighted, lurching through the foggy northwest landscape like Bigfoot. The trip takes about eight hours, a straight shot down the Five, an emerald explosion of evergreens and brush and lush grasses. He'd driven four hours, stopped off in a tiny single-offramp hamlet in the middle of a thousand rolling acres of farm land, and found a motel next to a right-wing Uncle Sam billboard blasting left-wing politics in general and dose ol' debbo liberal Democrats in particular. He woke at six the next morning and hit the freeway again, grabbing coffee and a breakfast bagel sandwich from one of the countless espresso stands sprouting like toadstools in the Washington rain. The radio blared enough country music to make him want to Uzi a line dance. Renny's stomach felt raw and tight and sour. He punched the buttons on his rental Saab's radio, looking for something to listen to that didn't make him feel like a long-haul trucker or a holy roller, and finally settled on a sports station. Forty minutes of talk-show chatter about the Seahawks' latest draft acquisition dissolved in a sea of static. A few more twists of the dial found some pre-programmed top forty presented by a cloned disk jockey, resulting in twenty miles of rap, grunge, and annoying teenybop. Finally, he gave up and turned the damned thing off. The last trip along this interstate had been six years earlier, in February of '95. He was just another one of a dozen big-town reporters descending on the town of Claremont, a lumber town of twenty thousand set thirty minutes north of Portland. There they sat, in a poorly ventilated courtroom watching a parade of children testifying in the most infamous day-care scandal since McMartin. Live testimony, deposition, videotape...one piece after another in a bizarre and heartbreaking jigsaw puzzle assembled painstakingly for judge and jury. He recalled his first impression of the courtroom: bad lighting, cold air, packed house. There was one empty seat, next to a big red-faced farm girl with a phenomenal chest and crystal-blue eyes almost intense enough to pull attention from the trial. The kid talking on video was a little straw-haired boy named Darnell Whittaker. Darnell looked clean, neat and frightened, about eleven years old, with rings under his eyes that suggested that he hadn't had a full night's sleep in months. "And do you remember any of the other games they played with you?" asked the unseen inquisitor. Darnell's eyes darted around like an animal seeking escape from a trap. "Bad games," his video image replied in a low, shaky voice. "Naked lady games." That was all he would say. Darnell hadn't looked at the questioner again. The tape ended, and the monitor was rolled out of the room. The first of the live witnesses took the stand. This child was black, a remarkable kid named Tanesha Evans. At only eight years old, she had true star presence, reminded Renny of that spooky-smart little girl on the old Cosby show. Tanesha's skin and eyes fairly radiated health. The courtroom couldn't pry its collective eyes from the girl, from the moment she walked through the door until she laid her left hand on the Bible and raised her right. The D.A. was a middle-aged Seattleite named Betty Ann Welles. Betty affected a rather grandmotherly air today, but once upon a time Renny had watched her grind a crack dealer into splinters, her Miss Marple demeanor transformed into a damned fine impression of Jaws. "Tanesha?" "Yes, ma&Barnes, Steven is the author of 'Charisma' with ISBN 9780812568967 and ISBN 0812568966.