LEN BIAS: CROSSOVER
A novel
By: Michael D. McClellan | September 19, 2010
chapter 8
Amish country. Before today the closest I'd ever come was a Friday night in February, 1985, at the United Artists theatre in Landover. The actor was Harrison Ford, the movie was Witness. I'd hooked up with Tonya Newkirk, a sexy co-ed from my sociology class, and we'd eaten dinner at Jimmy's Crab House before heading over to see what Ford's new thriller was all about. I didn't like it. I thought it was boring from the start and completely unbelievable. The Amish woman's husband dies, so she decides to take her young child to Baltimore to visit her sister. They travel by train, and the eight year old witnesses a murder in the train station's men's room. Enter Harrison Ford, who quickly puts together a motive and ties it to drugs. Enter Danny Glover, who plays a bad cop who gets into a shootout with Ford, wounding him but not badly enough to keep him from taking the woman and the child back to Lancaster County, Ohio. Ford passes out from loss of blood, and is predictably nursed back to health by the Amish. He then stays on and begins living alongside the Amish, rising before sunrise, working the farm and doing carpentry work. Of course Glover and the rest of the bad guys finally figure out where Ford is hiding. They're armed to kill, but Ford lures them into a grain silo and drops an avalanche of corn on one guy, burying him alive. Then he digs the gun out of the corn and shoots Glover dead. Yeah, right.
Not only had we walked away from that movie bored stiff, we were completely convinced that the Amish world portrayed onscreen was nothing more than a Hollywood exaggeration. Who lives like that today? Who rides around in a horse and buggy when there are cars out there with 500 horses under the hood? Who goes without electricity when a flip of a switch can light a house and a push of a button can make dinner?
And yet here I am, inside this eight-person stretch limo that John rented to take me from Cleveland to Apple Creek, my leg suspended to prevent swelling, my head propped up on a pillow and my eyes scanning the countryside, when Emily points out the window at the horse and buggy up ahead, moving slowly and hugging the side of the road.
"There you go," she says, smiling. "The first of many."
Our limo slows as we approach and then waits for an oncoming car to pass. Finally our driver is able to ease halfway into the other lane so that the limo can get around the simple black buggy with the reflective caution triangle on the back. I crane my neck as we pass. An Amish couple is perched on an uncomfortable-looking seat, their eyes focused on the road ahead, as if the white stretch limo rolling beside them doesn't exist. The man is wearing a straw hat, a drab colored shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and dark pants held up by suspenders. The woman is wearing a solid-color dress with long sleeves, and some sort of plain bonnet on her head. We pass them, and they look like they're going to melt in this boiling August heat. Emily explains that the Amish women make summer dresses in broadcloths much like the men's shirts. She says that the material is lightweight and breathes easier than polyester, but I can't help but wonder how much that helps when the temperatures are in the high 90s and the humidity is off the charts like it is today.
We continue rolling south on Township Highway 44, past farmhouses, sawmills, corn fields, dairy farms, tractor repair shops, churches, country-style restaurants. I see an Amish boy in a field, riding what Emily calls an 'Amish tractor' - a tractor that has been placed on a full-wheel cart, which in turn is being pulled by a team of horses. She explains that the Amish don't use gasoline-powered machines of any kind unless they can be converted and used without the engine. That is crazy to me. Why retrofit a tractor so that it doesn't work the way it was designed? Why make everything as hard on yourselves as humanly possible?
Township Highway 44 turns into Apple Creek Road, and then becomes West Main Street as we roll through downtown Apple Creek. Blink and you'll miss it, Emily jokes. She's right. We pass a community center, a cluster of business, modest houses, a post office, a fire station. We pass an Exxon station, where unleaded gas is selling for $3.59 a gallon. And just like that, Apple Creek is in our rearview mirror.
We roll on, but my mind is back at the Exxon station, stuck on the price of gas. The number is just another cold reminder that this is no longer 1986, and with one sideways thought the door to a flood of memories opens, but only a crack; I've worked hard to suppress much over the past three weeks, to focus on my mother's favorite verse from the Book of Proverbs instead of my brother's death five short years after my own. Her voice is in my head constantly - What's done is done, Leonard. Let it go. So I try to stay strong for her. I know that's the only way I'm going to make it through this. Still, it's an unbelievable struggle. Day-by-day, hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute. The depression is so deep and so dark and so hopeless that I'm convinced that I'm dead again, damned to hell.
Sprawled out on this leather seat, my busted leg suspended by a makeshift pulley system, I can't help but see the irony in my current situation. Before it all went wrong Len Bias was the one who was supposed to roll in stretch limos, city to city, east coast to west. Boston. New York. Detroit. Houston. Los Angeles. Millions in the bank, shoe commercials on the telly, four star hotels, Versace suits, a mansion with an indoor court out back and a Ferrari parked by a fleet of Benz's in a garage the size of Rhode Island. Now here I am, Jason Schuler, a nobody ex-player rolling past cows and corn, dodging Amish buggies, closing in on an 80 year old farmhouse and a life as a middle-aged high school basketball coach. Check that - a white, middle-aged basketball coach.
"Happy Anniversary."
"Huh?"
"It's August 1st, remember?" She pulls a small rectangular box from her purse and hands it to me. "I was going to wait until we got home, but how many times are we going to be cruising in a stretch limousine? Go ahead, open it."
"Six years," I say flatly. "I guess I remember that much, right?"
I hold the gift in my hand, measuring its weight. I wish I could show some level of excitement or gratitude, or even something remotely approaching love. If anyone deserves it, it's her. At least I know the score. I know what I've lost. Emily believes her husband survived that accident. She thinks she's going to get him back, that I'll slowly recover from retrograde amnesia, whatever that is, and become whole again. What she doesn't know or refuses to accept is that I'll never be Jason Schuler. At least not the Jason Schuler she loves more than anything in this world. I'll never recapture memories I never experienced to begin with, no matter how many times we go through her journal, no matter how many friends and family members try to help, no matter how many places we go. What's done is done.
