By Oskar Rausch
Russ Pelletier is seventy-three years old, and he is the coolest man I have ever met who owns a Saab. He has defended doctors and sued doctors, sometimes in the same calendar year, and he regards this the way a fisherman regards switching from the river to the lake. He skis. He has a tattoo he will not explain. He takes a sauna the way the Finns do, which is to say silently, and this is how I came to know him: the two of us, strangers, sitting on cedar at a Lutheran retreat center in the Upper Peninsula, saying nothing to each other for forty-five minutes, which in Finland constitutes a friendship.
On the third day he spoke.
“Do you know about the crickets?”
I did not know about the crickets.
Russ had seen it on the Discovery Channel, late, on the kind of night when a man of his age gets up to use the bathroom and makes the mistake of walking past a television. The segment was about children in Vietnam. These were children who did not have iPhones or iPads or consoles. If they wanted to play a video game they went to a shop and paid by the half hour, like a parking meter, and when the half hour ended so did the game, whether or not you were in the middle of something. So mostly they did not do that. Mostly they fought crickets.
Here is the method, as Russ explained it to me, and as I have since confirmed with my friend Omar, who is a doctor and has seen it done, and who went very quiet when I told him why I was asking.
You catch a cricket. You pull a single strand of hair from your own head. You tie the hair around the cricket’s neck—gently, gently, because if you tie it too tight the head comes off, and then you have nothing, you have wasted a hair. Then you shake it. You shake the cricket around on the end of the hair until it is upset enough to show its fangs and open its wings, and when it is in that condition, trembling and furious and ready to kill something, you release it into the arena, where another child has done the same thing to another cricket, and the two crickets, who have no quarrel with each other and until ten minutes ago were both eating the same leaf, fight until one of them stops.
“I sat up in bed,” Russ said. “I said, out loud, to no one: that’s it. That’s the whole thing. That’s my career.”
He laid it out for me the way he lays things out for juries, with a long pause after every point so you can feel yourself agreeing.
The cricket is the doctor. The doctor does not know he is in a fight. He is eating a leaf. He is seeing twenty-six patients, of whom eleven are there for something that will resolve on its own and two are there for something that will not, and he is trying very hard to figure out which two. He has no quarrel with anyone. He went into this to help. That is the first and most important fact about a cricket: it would rather be in the grass.
The hair is the lawsuit. It is remarkably thin. It is made from the plaintiff’s own head—a real grievance, a real loss, a real strand of somebody’s actual life—and this is what gives it its strength, because you cannot argue with a hair. You can only be tied up in one. The children know that the tie must be gentle. Too tight and the head comes off, and a cricket with no head cannot fight, cannot settle, cannot be insured. A doctor who is destroyed outright is of no use to anyone. The art is in the restraint. You want him alive, and tied, and panicking.
The shaking is discovery. Russ was particularly pleased with this one. “Eighteen months,” he said. “Depositions. Interrogatories. You request every chart. You request his texts. You request the texts of the nurse who was on break.” You shake the cricket until he shows his fangs—which is to say, until he says something defensive in a deposition that can be read back to him later in a different tone of voice—and until he opens his wings, which is the moment he hires his own expert, who is also a cricket, but an older one, who has learned to fight for money.
The arena is the courtroom. The two crickets are the two experts. Neither of them has ever met the patient.
And the judge?
Russ smiled. In the dark of the sauna he looked like something carved. “The judge isn’t the judge,” he said. “The judge is the kid holding the money.”
Because in Vietnam—and here is the part the Discovery Channel got right and the law schools do not—the crickets were never the point. Nobody loved the crickets. The crickets were a medium. The point was the circle of other children around the arena, and the bets, and the way a half hour of someone else’s fight could be made to pay better than a half hour of your own video game. The children with the best crickets did not become wealthy. The children who ran the betting did.
“Contingency,” Russ said, and leaned back against the cedar, and closed his eyes, a man at peace.
I asked him what happens to the losing cricket.
He thought about it.
“Well, in Vietnam, nothing. It doesn’t die. People think they fight to the death but they don’t. The loser just—stops. It stops chirping. It turns around and walks to the edge of the arena and it won’t fight anymore, no matter how you shake it. You can tie a hair around it all day. Nothing. It’s done. It’s just a cricket now.”
He opened one eye.
“We call that early retirement. Or Florida. Or administrative medicine. I’ve seen a lot of them walk to the edge.”
And the winner?
“Oh, the winner goes right back in the box,” Russ said. “That’s the beauty of it. The winner proved he can fight. He’s worth more now. Insurable. Somebody’s going to want to tie a hair around that one.”
Omar, when I told him all this, did not laugh, which is unusual for him, because he laughs at almost everything, as a kind of medical necessity. He asked me instead whether the children in Vietnam ever felt bad about the crickets. I said I did not think so. I said they were children, and the crickets were crickets, and nobody had ever asked the crickets.
“That’s the part,” he said. “That’s the whole part. Nobody asks the cricket.”
Then he asked me how tight the hair has to be before the head comes off, and whether anyone had ever measured it, and I said I assumed that was the kind of thing you learned by doing, and he said yes, in his experience, it was.
Russ, for the record, is retired now. He does not keep crickets. He keeps bees, which he says is the opposite thing: thousands of them, all on the same side, and if you treat them well they make something sweet, and if you treat them badly they all come at you at once. He says he thought about going into that line of work instead, back in 1979.
“But there’s no money in bees,” he said. “Everybody knows what a bee is going to do.”
Oskar Rausch is Omar’s former cabin mate and sauna buddy. He has never been sued, tied up, or shaken, but he has been to Florida.