Time marches on in its steady, indifferent way. In the 20 years since their son's death, Dean Caldwell's hair has gone white and his wife LaRue has suffered a stroke that has left her nerve endings raw. She aches all the time now.
Time marches, passes, flies — and also sometimes stops. When this happens, time is one moment, a solid, frozen, heavy thing in which Troy Caldwell and Tammy Hill haven't aged at all. Their picture — Tammy in her white prom dress, Troy in his maroon tux — hangs in the Caldwells' dining room next to the table where LaRue has spread out her memories: the photo albums and letters of condolence, the court documents and newspaper clippings. Among the clippings is a story about a little boy who drowned and one about a parents' group that was organized after Troy and Tammy's death, hundreds of parents outraged over drunk driving's effect on so many innocent people.
Has anything really changed? the Caldwells want to know. Sure, the Legislature and courts have beefed up DUI enforcement, but there are still gaps, still drunken drivers who get away with reduced charges, still multiple offenders whose records go unnoticed, still deaths, loss, sorrow.
Dean and LaRue Caldwell shuffle through the mementos, re-read the letters and clippings, all of them old now; 20 years of unfinished business, nothing resolved.
A heavy day of drinkingThe accident happened on a summer night in June 1982. Troy Caldwell and Tammy Hill — he was to be senior class president next year, she was to be a cheerleader — were heading home after seeing "Rocky III" at Trolley Corners. A little after midnight, in Troy's dad's Honda Prelude, they were stopped at a light at 700 East and 3900 South.
Paul Bryan had been drinking for hours. Since breakfast, really. At night, he ended up at a bar on State Street and then, just before midnight, he headed east on 3900 South. He ran a light at 500 East, then sailed through the red light at 700 East, hitting the Honda Prelude with such force that the car crumpled and spun across six lanes of traffic.
He turned out to have a blood alcohol level of .30, nearly four times the legal limit, and in the patrol car on the way to jail he volunteered that he is "one hell of a drinker." A background check of police records reveals that Bryan, 27, had been arrested and convicted twice before on DUI charges, once in his hometown of Tooele and a second time in Salt Lake City in January 1982 on a revoked license; after this second arrest, 3rd District Court Judge Raymond Uno sentenced him to four weekends in jail and six months probation.
"They let him go twice," is how Tammy's father summarizes the courts' handling of Bryan's DUIs.
Over the years, this fact eats at Bob Hill. He fights depression, watches Bryan get out of prison early, watches accused drunken drivers hire lawyers who get them off. He watches Tammy's Hill's younger sister struggle with her big sister's death. Time passes. He reads Uno's obituary. He and his wife have another baby and the baby grows up. He waits for Bryan to pay restitution for the accident, receives nothing, thinks about contacting him, changes his mind.
Looking back, Hill says, "I never wanted to get within a mile of him. I was afraid I would strangle him to death." The Caldwells have had no contact with Bryan either, except for a letter of apology written from prison. He remains, after 20 years, the most important person in their lives — and yet a person not even worth thinking about.
"Detrimental to universe"Paul Bryan is not listed in the phone book. He lives in Sugar House by himself in a basement apartment.
Visit him and he disarms you immediately with his gentleness, his lack of guile, the directness of his gaze. In the first 10 minutes of an interview, he tells you he's a total jerk and a loser, that no matter what he tries — relationships, car repairs, anything — he'll mess it up, say something stupid. "I hear myself say it and I think, 'Oh Lord, not again.' "
He works for a recycling company driving a truck around the Intermountain West, picking up old cardboard and glass and plastic. He says he hasn't touched alcohol for 20 years.
Since the accident, Bryan says, he has spent years trying to figure out his life. He's been analyzed and treated. He's tried gurus, seminars, seven-day intensive retreats, life regressions, various religions and the Course in Miracles. Let's see, he says, which process was it —maybe one of the breathing things? — where he experienced his own birth?
"I hesitate to call it an experience or a memory. It could be a total fabrication. But I experienced being born and my mother not wanting to see me. The more I screamed and hollered and cried, 'Here I am,' she just turned her back and left." He has felt homesick all his life, he says.
It is tempting to try to deconstruct a man like Bryan, to analyze him, draw some conclusions. He tells you things about his life and you wonder if these are clues or just facts. He was adopted; when he was 11, he spent a year in bed recovering from rheumatic fever, and the year after that, because of the illness, he was kept in from recess and the years after that was not allowed to play sports; he loved his adopted mom and dad and they loved him; over the years he figures he disappointed and shamed them again and again.
One day when he was 14 and working at Hood Drug in Tooele, he flipped through "Easy Rider" magazine and saw a recipe for cheap homemade wine. Pretty soon he had gallons of it hidden away in his bedroom. He drank in the morning before school.
The thing was, nobody noticed. And nobody noticed when he skipped class. If he was with a bunch of boys who got in trouble, he'd be the one who never got blamed. It was almost, he says, as if he were a shadow. Somebody, as he says, who "wasn't fully a part of the picture."
It was as if he showed up and the world yawned and looked the other way; as if he was somebody who had no impact at all. The irony, of course, is that you can't live life and not make some kind of mark, especially if you're an alcoholic.
He married at 20, had a baby right away, then two more. Marriage and fatherhood felt claustrophobic, he says. "I could maybe stand a half hour of somebody being close and then I'd have to leave." He'd go on drinking binges, then come home and "try to be a good LDS boy," then go on another drinking binge. He always needed a back door, he says.
By early June 1982, he was newly divorced, living out of his truck in Salt Lake City and drinking at work. "You drink to avoid the pain of knowing all the pain you've caused, and then you cause more pain, and then you drink more and it's this spiral, and you cannot drink enough."
The first thing he remembers about the accident is sitting in his jail cell. He'd been drinking and driving for so long and basically getting away with it — even the two DUI arrests didn't amount to much — that it seemed to verify that he could get away with it forever, so at first he couldn't believe he had killed two people.
Bryan went to prison in January 1983. He was initially charged with second-degree murder. Because the charge implies malice aforethought — an implication he didn't agree with — he pleaded "not guilty." He is "disgraced" by that plea, he says now. "It's such a slap in the face of everybody, society and the victims."
Bryan was convicted, instead, of manslaughter and sentenced to serve one to 15 years in prison. An appeal got him out on a technicality two years later.
"My guilt now — I don't know if it was at the time — is because of trying to get out of prison. Even saying 'yes,' I wanted to sign the appeal, is saying I don't deserve full punishment," and that's crazy, he says. "I feel like I've cheated the system again."
Bryan's life is full of bad timing and bad choices, good intentions fitfully pursued, stops and starts that don't add up to much. After prison, he received a degree from the University of Utah with a major in math and a minor in psychology. He wanted to be a teacher but says he couldn't get into teaching classes at the U., and a subsequent stint as a teacher's aide for behavioral disorder students at a junior high was "horrible." For a while, he volunteered at the detention center after his release from prison. The idea was to give motivational talks about the consequences of bad choices, but Bryan doubts he made any impact on the teenagers. "I'm a horrible public speaker," he says. A few years ago, he tried massage classes — "my last and final attempt to connect with humanity" — but dropped out one day after another student said she didn't want to partner with him.
At this point, Bryan tells the story of his suicide attempt. He tells it in the same soft, even, self-deprecating voice he uses to talk about the accident and his drinking. He tells it to make a point about himself.
This was his reasoning: Everything about his life proved that he was "detrimental to the universe." This was his plan: go to the camper, take a bunch of sleeping pills, sit in the shower so he wouldn't make too much of a mess, use the kitchen knives to slash his wrists.
But there were some complications. The knives were gone. Instead, he had to use his pocket knife, and the blade was dull. He had thought about washing the pills down with liquor, but he didn't want to die drunk. Instead, he took the pills with coffee, then started slashing at his wrists and forearms. Several hours later, when he woke up, he took the rest of the pills, started in with pocketknife again, and passed out. Many hours later he woke up again, disappointed and disgusted with himself. "I'm so inept," he says, "I couldn't even kill myself."
Drowning adds to tragedyLaRue and Dean Caldwell sift through the papers and memories on their dining room table and come up with a newspaper clipping from 1984. "Funeral Saturday for drowning victim," reads the headline. The story is about a 7-year-old boy who drowned while swimming at a public pool in Tooele, a little boy named Jarom Paul Bryan, son of Kenneth Paul Bryan.
Jarom died while Bryan was in prison. When they read about the drowning, the Caldwells cut the story out of the paper; they have kept it all these years, adding the layer of Bryan's tragedy on top of their own.
Bryan keeps a copy of his son's obituary in a folder, along with the funeral program and a few pictures of his children. His two living children are grown now. He sees them about once a year, sometimes less. "We try to do something around Christmastime, but for whatever reason that's deteriorated."
For some reason, he says, he was never ordered to pay child support and he has never paid it on his own. "The slimeball that I am," he says. "A deadbeat dad. A loser as ever." As some sort of penance, perhaps, he has been a devoted friend for 13 years to the daughter of his landlord. The girl has Down syndrome, and for years Bryan has helped tend her, read her stories at bedtime, washed her hair. "She's an angel in my life," he says.
"I would love to say I've touched so many people's lives, to make up for the pain I've caused. I guess I've made a few attempts. Hopefully I'm not done." His dream, he says, is to work with his landlord to create a wildlife refuge for troubled youths. As he explains his idea, Bryan can't resist adding that it may not work out, that his attempts so far have been "feeble."
Forgiveness is elusiveRight after the accident, the Hills and the Caldwells thought about suing Bryan's family. "I made an appointment with Mr. and Mrs. Bryan," Bob Hill remembers. "They were both gray and old. They were (LDS) temple workers. I went to their house in Tooele and I asked them if they had any assets and they said 'No.' They lived in a modest little brick home. I didn't want to take that away from them."
For 20 years now, Hill has been trying to forgive the man who killed his daughter. "I did a really good job at first," he says. "Now I'm about half way." The Caldwells have wrestled, too, with forgiveness. "You know you have to forgive, and sometimes you think you could probably forgive, and other times you think, 'No, he took our son away. He knew what drunk driving was all about.' "
Janet Hill says she thinks she's forgiven Bryan, although she would still like him to tell her he's sorry. And the other day, she says, "It crossed my mind that maybe I could help him." Maybe share with him the books that have helped her move on with her life.
Maybe there needs to be some kind of closure, Bryan says. "I don't know if you can really do that till you have face-to-face contact, or some kind of opportunity for dialogue back and forth. But what I really don't want to do is cause them any more problem."
Tammy and Troy and the remorse he feels "are a part of my skin," he says. Life itself is a reminder, he says. If he sees a couple walking down the street, or a family shopping, or if he's out mowing his lawn, anything at all, he'll think "Troy and Tammy aren't able to do this."
Eight or 10 years ago, Bryan contacted the Caldwells' and Hills' LDS bishops. He thought maybe they would want to talk to him and that he could say, face to face, that he was sorry. The way he remembers it is that one of the bishops told him the family didn't want to see him. Dean Caldwell remembers his bishop saying that Bryan wanted to establish contact but thinks the bishop lost Bryan's phone number.
And finally, in this story of bad timing, of lives interrupted and matters unresolved — the story of not just the Caldwells and Hills and Paul Bryan but the problem of drunk driving itself — there is the question of Bryan's restitution for the crime he committed.
Bob Hill is still waiting for Bryan to pay. The amount was set at $27 a month, he says.
"That's the first I've heard of that," Bryan says.
It was such a small amount, Janet Hill says. A slap in the face. As if Tammy's life was worth nothing. Not that restitution itself ever changes anything. At best — and worst — it is a monthly reminder that guilt and loss are never quite done.
The state has no record, one way or the other, of whether Bryan was required to pay restitution. It's as if Paul Bryan never existed. According to Bradley Bassey, spokesman for Adult Probation and Parole, Bryan's file was destroyed in 1986.
You can't save files forever, of course. There are so many new crimes and punishments coming along to take their place. Time passes, flies, stops at the moment of impact, marches on, indifferent as ever.
E-MAIL: jarvik@desnews.com