Truly Like Lightning

by David Duchovny

  It was Janet Bergram. Hyrum, she said, had been in a fight. The kid Hyrum attacked was hurt pretty badly and still unconscious at a local hospital. Mary felt groggy, her body dumping the adrenaline from last night, and now filling up with dread. Janet said that it might be classified a “hate crime.” Mary didn’t know what a hate crime was. The boy Hyrum hurt was Mexican and that made a difference, made it worse.

  Mary threw on some Uggs and a robe and opened Hyrum’s door. He must have walked home from West Side Story last night. He wasn’t at the car when she finally made it out after the play. When she’d gotten home, she went into his room to apologize for taking so long, and in the dark, he’d said that that was okay and he was very tired and needed to sleep.

  He was still asleep, curled up in the fetal position like a little child. Some early morning light showed dried blood on his swollen bottom lip and scrapes on his elbows and knuckles. Mary couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t think. She needed coffee. She was going to have some coffee, goddammit. It was 5:45 a.m.

  She checked on Deuce. He was also asleep. She checked on Pearl. Pearl was out, and by the looks of the bed, hadn’t been home. Probably stayed at her boyfriend’s house. Everything was spiraling out of her control. Yes, she remembered Pearl asking—“Can I go out for like a cast party and then a few of us are going to Josue’s house for an after-party party? Don’t worry, I won’t drink. I love you…” Pearl saying “I love you” was new. It was like oxygen to Mary. She must have just stayed there. It got too late and she stayed there. Like a slumber party. Or she stayed there alone with him. That was okay, wasn’t it? She was seventeen years old, a woman, almost a woman.

  She didn’t know how to do this. What was she gonna tell Bronson? Yalulah? The crime? Hate crime? A boy was in the hospital. What had Hyrum done?

  She called Janet Bergram back. Told her Hyrum was still sleeping, but that he did show signs of having been in a fight. Janet said she’d be right over. She wanted to be the first to talk to him, before he went to school, or before the cops got involved, even before Mary talked to him, if possible. She said normally, some Mexican families might be hesitant to involve authorities, but because these folks knew Janet’s reputation, they trusted her, they’d talked to her. But now, because the kid remained in the hospital, it was only a matter of time before word of the fight got out, and things could spin out wildly with news reports, school, cops, etc. It could get messy, and she wanted the freshest, most unspun facts from Hyrum to get out in front of all the noise that might come. She wanted to talk to Hyrum before they lost the “narrative.”

  Mary grabbed some of Hyrum’s Adderall, washed it down with a cup of black coffee. That gave her some rented confidence. Janet showed up, and if she was worried about her job and the exposure this violence might bring to the gamble she had taken, she didn’t show it. She seemed concerned only for the kids involved. Good woman. Mary walked Janet back into Hyrum’s room and they woke him up.

  “Hy, honey,” Mary whispered. “We need to talk to you. Janet needs to talk to you.”

  Hyrum sat up in bed. “Yeah,” he said, rubbing his eyes. He had the sour morning breath of a man now, Mary noted, his sweet innocent boy scent wrecked by the opening onslaught of hormones.

  Janet sat on the bed. “You got into a fight last night?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Tell me about it. I’m going to take some notes, okay?” Hyrum shrugged. Janet pulled a pencil and a small pad from her bag, flipping it open like an old-fashioned detective on a TV show, Mary thought.

  “Some kids jumped me in the parking lot after the show,” Hyrum said, his breathing calm and deep.

  “Who started it?”

  “I dunno their names.”

  “Did you start it?”

  “No. There was like five of them, why would I start that?”

  “I’m just asking about how it happened. Tell me.”

  “Some kids stepped up, were like, ‘yo,’ and I was like, ‘yo.’ And they wanted to go, called me names. Called Pearl names.”

  “What names did they call you and Pearl?”

  Hyrum closed his eyes to remember. “‘Faggot,’ uh ‘Mormon,’ shit like that, ‘Mitt Romney,’ I think, which I get a lot. ‘Opie.’” Janet licked the tip of the pencil and jotted down the names on her little notepad.

  “‘Opie’?” Mary asked. “Like … Ron Howard?” Janet nodded.

  “Who’s Ron Howard?” Hyrum asked.

  “Did you know the boy?” Mary asked Hyrum.

  “Never seen him before.”

  “His name is Hermano,” Janet said.

  “Okay.”

  “Did you call the other boy names first?”

  “No. I was just walking.”

  “You didn’t call him the ‘N’ word or ‘Spic’?”

  “Oh yeah, actually, I did.” Hyrum yawned, still half asleep. “But I was like, what’s up, uh … ‘N’ word, like ‘yo,’ you know, not like, you know, calling him an ‘N’ word. Excuse me,” he said to Janet, “I know that’s wrong for a Nephite to say.”

  “Jesus, Hyrum, that’s ugly,” Mary said.

  “Everyone talks like that,” Hyrum said.

  “That’s no excuse! You’re not everyone,” Mary scolded him. Janet looked at Mary to stop interrupting or leading Hyrum; she wanted as unvarnished a recollection of last night as possible.

  “Thank you for the apology,” Janet said evenly, “but I need you to tell me exactly the words you used last night.”

  “I guess, uh, the ‘N’ word and ‘Spic,’ maybe.”

  “But you didn’t target him because he was Hispanic?” Hyrum looked blankly at Janet. “Because he was Latino?” Janet elaborated.

  “Target? Kid was way bigger than me, older. I was defending myself is all. Words don’t matter.”

  “Words matter,” Janet said firmly. “It matters about your intent; words can tell us what’s in your heart. And it matters because of certain things you may have been taught at home, in your bible—”

  “What?” Mary interjected.

  “Mary, please.” Janet looked at Mary, and then turned back to Hyrum. “Ways of looking at people who are different from you, Hyrum, a different color skin, as being inferior. Do you understand that?”

  “Like did I want to fight him ’cause he was Mexican?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s stupid. I wanted to fight him ’cause he was in my face and calling Pearl names and he punched me.”

  “He threw the first punch?”

  “First two.”

  “You didn’t strike back after the first punch?”

  “Nope.”

  “Second one?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, good. It’s important that you be clear and honest with me, Hyrum, because you’re your only witness against five other boys. One against five. And their story is very different from yours, I have to tell you, so it’s important that you tell the truth now, ’cause you’re gonna have to tell your story a lot to the school, maybe to the police, over and over, and it can’t change, or you’ll look like a liar, and if you tell the truth, the truth won’t change, the truth can’t change, all you’ll have to do is remember, and I’ll be able to say that you’ve been saying the same things all along. That make sense?”

  “Sure.”

  “Anything you want to change? While you still can? Anything you want to tell me?” Hyrum shook his head. “Hyrum,” Janet continued, “the other boys that were there say you hit this boy from behind. Ambushed him and hit his head on the ground. Kicked his head while he was down, and said, ‘Die, Spic.’ That’s their story.”

  “Hyrum!” Mary cried.

  “Please, Mary, please let Hyrum speak.”

  “That’s bullshit. Fake news,” he said. Hyrum remembered saying something like that, but it was something his dad had taught him, something between them. He wasn’t ashamed, but he didn’t want to share the secrets that kept them close. At the mention of “fake news,” Mary
saw Janet’s ears prick up, and she could guess why. She instantly regretted ever making Hyrum watch Maddow with her.

  “You didn’t sneak up on him?” Janet asked.

  “Not like that.”

  “What do you mean ‘like that’?”

  “That doesn’t sound like Hyrum,” Mary added. Janet shot Mary yet another look.

  “You didn’t kick his head when he was down, Hyrum?” Janet asked.

  “No. It happened like I told you.”

  “Anything else you want to say?”

  “Nope.”

  “You don’t want to say you’re sorry?” Mary was almost crying.

  “He started it,” Hyrum protested.

  “But the boy is hurt. He’s in the hospital!” Mary pleaded with him.

  “He shouldn’t have started it.”

  “Say you’re sorry.”

  “No.”

  Mary grabbed the boy’s shoulders and shook him. “Say you’re sorry!” Hyrum said nothing. Just stared straight ahead.

  “Mary!” Janet raised her voice, pulling her off her son. “Okay. Okay. That’s enough. Thank you, Hyrum.” She pulled out her phone. “Let me take pictures of your injuries before you clean up.”

  “I’m not injured.”

  “Let me take some pictures of your face and hands, and then you can clean up, okay? I need to have a record, you understand that?” Mary was still shaking, trembling, biting her lip.

  “Okay. Can I brush my teeth first?”

  “No!” Mary barked at him. “Which part of ‘before you get cleaned up’ don’t you understand?”

  After Janet had documented Hyrum’s physical state, and the boy was showering, Mary walked Janet to the door. “You have to calm down, Mary.”

  “Calm down?”

  “Yes, I understand how you feel, but—”

  “Do you have kids?”

  “No, but all the kids I work with—”

  “Then excuse me,” Mary cut her off, “because you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

  “I understand why you feel that way, but that’s not the argument to have right now. You need to get ahold of yourself and get him to a doctor to make sure he’s okay, and have a doctor document his injuries, too.”

  Mary tried to take a few deep breaths, but it was like the breath would only go so far down, her chest was so tight. “Do you believe him? He wouldn’t even say he’s sorry. He’s Bronson’s fucking son from head to toe. No apologies. I try to soften him, but it’s like he came to me complete, completely himself from day one.” Mary was rambling now, adding, “He’s such an angry kid. I don’t know why he’s so angry.”

  The sins of the father, Janet thought. Anger handed down from man to man since time began. She didn’t say that. “The fact that Hyrum doesn’t apologize—that may upset you, but I don’t see it as a bad thing—he’s unconcerned with appearing to be contrite, and that speaks more to his sense of being wronged than some coached effort at apology or faked contrition that we pull out of him or coach him to, understand?”

  “No.”

  “He’s not playing the game. From what I can tell, he doesn’t play games. Feels no pressure to say the right thing, is not even that interested in what the right thing would sound like.”

  “That sounds psychotic. You’re making him sound horrible.”

  “No, I’m making him sound strong and truthful, which I pray can only help him in the long run. If it’s worth anything, I sensed he felt bad even though he wouldn’t say it. I’ve dealt with psychotics. I don’t think he’s a psychotic.” Janet was not entirely sure of that, but she needed to settle Mary down.

  “That’s cold comfort,” Mary complained.

  “But it’s comfort, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “This is just a schoolyard fight. Happens all the time. There were no guns, no knives, no weapons involved. It’s actually very innocent. The only complication is race.”

  “The Mexican thing?”

  “Don’t call it that. But, yes,” Janet corrected her. “I’m in the middle. I’m an advocate for these people, you understand, and they need me, they need an advocate.”

  “So does Hyrum.”

  “Hyrum has you.”

  “Then he’s fucked ’cause I don’t know how any of this shit works.” Janet could see Mary in a panic, and she got it. She imagined pulling herself out of the world for decades and trying to re-create a past from two thousand years ago and then being yanked all of a sudden back into present time. It was whiplashing, mind-boggling. But no matter, Mary really had to get her shit together.

  “Mary, tell me, because it will help me help you here, was your son taught to regard people of color as inferior? Did your husband ever preach that?” Mary looked like she didn’t understand the question, which Janet interpreted as a positive sign.

  “Not once,” Mary said confidently, “not one time can I recall Bronson saying anything like that. In fact, the Mormon bible sees the Native Americans, Israelites—we would call them Lamanites—as the true inhabitants here, not the whites. Smith says something like, God denieth none that come unto him—none, okay—Black and white, bond and free, male and female … all are alike unto God. Smith was fucking inclusive before anyone. The kids knew this. Are you looking for a way to blame this all on Bronson?”

  “No, I’m looking into corners is all. And damn, Pearl was so good in West Side Story last night, but maybe not the best time for a white girl in your family to be taking a role from a Latina. Shit.”

  “What?”

  “Appearances.”

  “Appearances aren’t the truth.”

  “No? No…”

  Janet was somewhere between finding the truth, protecting the kids who needed protection, and covering her ass. Blaming Bronson could be a happy solution. Ugly, incomplete, but happy. She didn’t respond directly. She was gathering mitigating circumstances for another time perhaps, partial explanations for inexplicable events.

  “Can you think of any signs of, I don’t know … indoctrination before this?”

  “Indoctrination into what?” Mary had no idea.

  “Internet stuff. Hate groups. Chat rooms. We need to look at his phone. Do you have it?”

  Mary went to retrieve the phone from Hyrum’s bedroom. She could hear him in the shower, rapping. She tapped in Hyrum’s password, Jsmith, the same one for all their phones, and handed Janet the device. Janet scrolled through the history.

  “I don’t see any major red flags,” she said. “There’s some porn here, though.”

  “Jesus.” Mary sighed. She looked at some of the searches the young boy had entered—vague, innocent stabs in the grown-man dark like big boobies, naked sex people, and penis in vagina a lot. The proximity of that childlike curiosity to the infinite polymorphous maw of internet perversion brought tears of mourning for innocence to Mary’s eyes.

  “It’s not unusual,” Janet said.

  “At his age?”

  “Not at all. I’d be more surprised if I didn’t find any.”

  “I hate these fucking phones.”

  “You can’t blame the phone.”

  “I think I can.” It felt good to blame the phone, and suddenly the small, beautifully made object seemed insidious and devilish to her, like a grenade, or a Trojan horse.

  “Anything else like this?” Janet asked. “We don’t want to be surprised by some smoking gun here, anything that can feed an ethnic intimidation narrative, any kind of preoccupation or premeditation.”

  Mary thought a moment, and then went back to Hyrum’s room again. She retrieved a notebook this time, thick with Hyrum’s scrawls and drawings in pen and pencil.

  “These doodles.” Mary handed Janet the notebook. “Do they mean anything?”

  Janet flipped through the pages and sucked air through her teeth. “This you should throw away immediately,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Probably nothing, but those are Nordic runes—it’s the ki
nd of imagery that neo-Nazis use, white supremacists.”

  “Nazis? Holy shit. Holy shit, I can’t…”

  “It’s probably nothing, like I said, but you should get rid of it and anything else like it. It’s not a good look. He’s been taking his Adderall?”

  “Huh?”

  “I know Hyrum was prescribed Adderall. You’ve been making sure it’s been taken?” Mary nodded, lying; well, the Adderall was being taken, and that much wasn’t a lie.

  “Are you going to lose your job?” Mary pivoted the attention away from drugs and onto Janet.

  “That’s the furthest thing from my mind right now,” Janet claimed. It wasn’t, but she felt justified batting away the question’s implication.

  “This isn’t your fault,” Mary said, and hugged her. That disarmed Janet. And made her uncomfortable. She liked children a lot more than adults. She let Mary hold on without reciprocating and then gently reclaimed her distance.

  “I know that. Thank you, Mary. But I am complicit. I am a part of this.”

  The two women stood at the front door. Mary opened it for Janet, and then stopped her again. “What can we do now? I’m way better with instructions, please. What can I do? What should I do?”

  “Does his father know? Yalulah?”

  “No, I just found out. They’re not easy to reach. I will as soon as I can. Should I get a lawyer?”

  “Hold off on that for a moment. Let me see where it’s at later today. I’d like this to stay quiet and not involve lawyers if possible. There may be a quiet resolution.”

  “Just a schoolyard fight, right? What’s the big deal?” Mary tried smiling. She felt like her face might crack, like glass.

  “Exactly. If we need a lawyer, I know good, honest ones. I basically took Hyrum’s eyewitness testimony. I have a law degree. That’s a good thing to have for now. Let’s try to deal with this in-house.”

  Janet turned to go. Mary stopped her again. Janet could tell she didn’t want to be alone. She was used to being one of three parents, not one of one. She hoped Yalulah would get here soon, even Bronson. With no children of her own, Janet marveled anew at her job of being an expert for them, from what she learned first from books and statistics, and was confronted with the fact that no one knows how to do it right, parenting, the raising of children into happy men and women who wouldn’t rape and kill each other. A silly rhyme formed in her head—“One parent, two parents, three parents, none, no one knows how the fuck it gets done.” She decided against sharing the rhyme with Mary.