All eyes turn toward Kenny.
CHAPTER FOUR
August 26, 1969
Jail is a metal world of hard edges and clanging noises. Cass lies on the thin mattress, sweating in spite of her gauzy Indian dress, coasting in and out of sleep. Her dreams are nightmare visions involving cops and judges and a long, long prison sentence. What would she tell Mom and Dad? What was happening to Ron? How had the pigs known their plans?
And, above all else, how the hell had real parathion been in that container?
“… still think it was Kenny’s fault.” The voice is Dana’s and so is the cigarette smoke that brings Cass to full consciousness. In the distance, Elvis checks into the Heartbreak Hotel.
“I don’t believe that,” Jan counters, her soft voice stubborn. “Kenny wouldn’t tell the cops anything. And he did empty the canister and fill it with pepper oil. I was there, remember?”
“Then how do you explain the fact that we’re in this place?” Dana replies. Her cigarette smoke rises to the ceiling like a campfire in the forest. “And how do you explain that creepy guy who said the canister was full of parathion?”
Cass rubs the sleep out of her eyes and sits up on her cot. “How long have we been here?” She looks at her bare legs and pulls her skirt down. Her Keds are under the hard bunk. She slides her feet toward the floor and slips them on.
Neither of the others even bothers to look at her. It is yet another reminder that whenever Kenny’s not around, she’s the kid, the one nobody pays attention to. The little sister, tolerated because she came with Ron.
Jan runs nervous fingers through her stringy hair. “Dana, will you please stop? Kenny didn’t do this. The pigs just knew, that’s all.”
“Someone had to tell them,” Dana insists. “Someone had to put a real parathion canister into the station wagon. Kenny’s father’s station wagon,” she repeats with sinister emphasis.
“We’re in deep shit,” she goes on. “I mean, I’ve got faith in Harve to get us out of here, but if they can prove that stuff was really poison, they’ve got us for attempted assault at least.”
“But we never even got to the bandstand,” Cass protests. “We didn’t really do anything.”
“We printed up a thousand flyers telling everyone at the fair what we were going to do,” Jan points out. She twirls a strand of hair in her fingers and looks at the concrete block wall with weary eyes.
A tide of cold, wet fear hits Cass like a sudden virus. Ron! He can’t afford this. He can’t afford the slightest hint of a criminal conviction. Not with his conscientious objector petition pending before his draft board back in Cleveland. And now that there are no graduate student deferments, the only way Ron can escape the draft is by obtaining CO status or fiddling his medical records—something he swears he won’t do, since it means some poor kid will have to fight in his place.
It’s not easy to get conscientious objector status, especially if you come from a standard white-gloves Presbyterian family. And once the draft board finds out Ron’s been busted for attempted assault, any claim that he has moral objections to violence will fall on deaf ears.
Sweat beads her forehead; she reaches a shaking hand to her mouth. Ron could lose his petition, he could be denied CO status and get drafted—and all because of her. If she hadn’t insisted they come to the fair …
Cass raises cold eyes to Jan and says, “If Kenny ratted us out, I’ll fucking kill the little bastard.”
Harve springs them by late morning. First the chicks, then Kenny, who’s by himself in juvenile detention, and finally the guys. They have a court appearance in three days.
Back at the White House, Cass and Ron discover that they no longer have jobs. Cris Correra at Amigos Unidos can’t afford to risk his federal funding by employing potential felons. Wes, Tarky, Jan, Dana, and Rap have also been cut loose. The summer migrant program is at an abrupt end.
Only Ted remains employed. Only Ted escaped arrest. He stood at the main tent, notebook in hand, waiting for the event to unfold. When nothing happened, he covered the fair the way the Blade expected him to, writing a nice human interest story about a boy with one hand raising a prize calf for the 4-H contest.
Rap explodes at the news. “Fucking shit. That Tio Taco we work for has all the balls of—”
“Don’t blame Cris,” Dana says with a weary sigh. “He has to dance to the government’s tune if he wants his funding.”
Rap’s vulpine face breaks into an evil grin. “I’ve gotta blame somebody, babe,” he points out. “Who do you suggest as a replacement for our fearful leader?”
“How about Kenny?” Cass says, her tone edged with venom. “He’s the one who fucked this up. Either he didn’t switch the canisters or he did all this on purpose.”
“Why would he do that?” Jan challenges. “Give me one reason why Kenny would get all of us arrested. Including himself, I might point out.” She’s usually the quiet one, but her anger can explode messily, like a can of garbage thrown from a passing car.
“He’s a juvie,” Tark the Shark reminds her. “Whatever happens to the rest of us, Kenny will get out of this without a record. Think about that when you can’t get a job because you’ve got a bust on your sheet.”
“We’ll talk about it later,” Wes Tannock pronounces. He stands on the staircase, halfway up to the room he shares with Tarky. “I suggest we all get some sleep and meet on the porch at six o’clock. Jan, call Kenny and tell him to be here, okay? And Cass,” he adds, “why don’t you make sure Ted’s here, too?”
Cass nods. She’s tired and hot and very, very worried about her brother. Ron says nothing, to her or anyone else. “Should we call the parents?” she asks him. He shakes his head. “What about your draft counselor?” Another head-shake. At last she says in a small, scared voice, “I’m really sorry, Ron.” At this, he strides out the door, slamming the screen behind him. She hears the Chevy start up in the driveway; the sound of spewing gravel follows. From the house, the Beatles remind her that all she needs is love.
She calls Ted. “What the hell happened?” he asks, then cuts her off when she tries to answer.
“I know you all got arrested,” he explains. “I found out when I got back to the Blade. But why? How did the cops know what was—”
“I don’t know.” Cass finds herself, to her utter humiliation, breaking into gusty sobs. “All I know is, Ron’s going to lose his CO status, and everybody here thinks Kenny fucked up. We’re meeting at six. Can you come?”
Ted agrees; he tries to say something comforting, but before the words leave his lips, Cass returns the phone to its cradle.
Six o’clock on a hot, humid August day in Ohio means gathering clouds, the promise of hard rain that will cleanse but not dry things out. There are rumbles of thunder and thick, humid winds and big fat drops that plop on the porch roof as the students gather to discuss the arrests. They sit in their accustomed places, even though those perched on the ledge are beginning to get wet.
Rap begins the assault. “Why’d you do it, Kenny?” he calls from his place on the porch glider. “Why’d you sell us out?”
Kenny’s face is white. “I didn’t. Why would I do a thing like that?” Sitting on the floor, knobby knees crossed, he looks even younger than his years. “I emptied the canister and cleaned it out and put in the capsicum oil, like I told you.”
He swallows; his mouth is dry, the words sticking like peanut butter. “I put the canister in my dad’s car. Jan drove me home. We left the car in the garage. When I went to bed, I swear, that canister had pepper oil in it.” He crosses his heart with his nail-bitten hands, just like the kid he really is.
Cross my heart and hope to die.
Cass hopes he does die. She stares through the kid, her own eyes blazing righteous rage. She knows he screwed them up. She knows he sold them out, tipped off the cops that they were planning this demo. She knows it because she has to blame someone, has to hate someone besides herself for what she fears will happen t
o her brother.
“So you’re telling us that somebody must have come by your house and switched canisters while you were asleep. Is that your testimony?” The cross-examiner is Tarky, whose tone of voice does nothing to conceal his disbelief.
“I guess,” Kenny replies. Then he lifts his chin and stares directly at Ted. “But at least I was there. I got arrested with everybody else.”
“Sorry, kid,” Rap cuts in. “Not a strong defense. Getting busted along with the targets is part of the cover. The cops round us all up, but you’re the one who gets a break when we get to court.”
“What about the FBI guy at the museum?” Kenny turns his attention to Wes, who has always been his hero. “I saw him. I followed him inside. He met somebody in the Swiss room.”
Wes asks the obvious question. “Who did he meet?”
“Assuming there really was an FBI agent,” Rap murmurs.
“There was,” Kenny repeats, sounding like a stubborn kid even in his own ears, “but I didn’t see who he met. The guards chased me away. And I didn’t recognize the voice.”
Dana takes up where Rap left off. “Of course not,” she says. “You didn’t recognize the voice because there was nobody there. There was no FBI agent. Because if there had been, you’d have told us. You wouldn’t have kept it to yourself and let us go ahead—unless you wanted us to get busted.”
“I didn’t tell you because I knew you wouldn’t believe me,” Kenny replies. His voice catches; tears are not far off.
The rain begins in earnest. A bright crack of lightning splits the sky across the street. Thunder follows a minute later.
“Well, you were right about that, kid,” Rap says. “I don’t believe you, and I don’t think anyone else here does either.”
“I do,” Jan says into the heavy silence that follows. “I believe you, Kenny.”
No one else agrees. One by one, heads are shaken, the equivalent of a Roman emperor’s thumbs-down.
Kenny knows where Rap and Dana stand; their contemptuous refusal to believe him doesn’t change the expression on his face. But when first Tarky, then Ted, then Cass, and finally Ron reluctantly join the consensus, his lower lip begins to tremble.
The last member of the group to be polled, Wes Tannock, looks down at the kid from his place on the swing and slowly, his features grave, shakes his head too.
Kenny can no longer contain his sobs. He jumps up and runs from the porch, slipping on the rain-soaked stairs, careening across the lawn as he makes for the station wagon.
Jan reaches for the porch swing and lifts herself up. “He can’t drive by himself,” she says and races after her cousin. Her bare feet slap the sidewalk and her hair flies behind her. She is a warrior goddess, a hippie Valkyrie.
The Stones rejoice in the fact that Mick’s girlfriend is, at long last, under his thumb.
Kenny knows it all now. Has it written down, too. Times, dates, places, everything. In the steno book, just the way Ted showed him. Kenny doesn’t think he wants to be a reporter like Ted, but his scientific mind approves of keeping records, of having documentary evidence.
Evidence that will prove he wasn’t the one who got them all arrested. Evidence that will change everyone’s mind about him. Evidence he intends to show as soon as the sun rises.
He waits at the tree behind the museum for the one person who can help him. The cool morning air is damp with dew and the world is bright and fresh after last night’s torrential rain. He pictures the scene to come, when he faces down his accusers and shows them once and for all that he wasn’t the one who sold them out.
But of course he isn’t stupid enough to just write it down so that anyone could understand it. He’s made his own code, something only he can interpret. That way if the notebook falls into the wrong hands, it won’t mean a thing.
And he’s hidden it, too. The notebook isn’t in his pocket or his room at home. It’s safe. Secret and safe.
Kenny only wishes he felt as safe as that notebook.
He pushes aside a branch and peers through the green curtain of leaves. No one coming—yet. That’s the beauty of the weeping beech. You could sit inside, covered by foliage, and no one would know you were there. The tree’s like a fuckin’ tent. The trunk tough as iron, smooth and gray, a perfect climbing tree. You could climb up and sit, share a joint, and talk about life, and no one in the park would know.
It’s 5:40 a.m. It’s good that he’s early. The person he’s meeting will be coming to him, coming into his tree.
At first, he was pissed at Jan for telling the others about the tree. It was theirs, this weeping beech. It was where they’d played as kids while his dad waxed the car. It was where they’d first decided to explore the mysteries of their opposite genders—you show me yours and I’ll show you mine. His was still a boy’s, but Jan was already beginning to grow hair on hers, and her tiny breasts were rock-hard and rosy. Good thing his dad was a serious car-waxer; he’d trembled in fear as he’d touched his cousin’s titties, knowing his dad would whale the tar out of him if he’d known what his son was doing beneath the green canopy.
But it was worth it, oh yes, and so was the first hand-rolled cigarette his cousin had offered him underneath these very leaves. He’d taken it the way he’d seen grownups handle tobacco cigarettes, and Jan had laughed at him. She’d shown him how to hold a joint, how to suck in the smoke and keep it in the lungs, taking in the heady perfume. He’d giggled and she’d giggled watching him giggle; they’d fallen on the ground like two fools and once again his boy-dirty hands had reached under her faded T-shirt to fumble with her green-apple tits.
The voice from below startles him; he’s been so caught up in the past, he’s forgotten to keep watch. He looks down. It still feels odd to see other faces inside the great green tree; after Jan shared their childhood hiding place with the others, it became a general meeting place—and, he suspects, a fucking place as well.
He scrambles down the branches and says, “Have I got something to tell you. Wait till you hear this.”
His companion reaches into a jeans pocket and pulls out a crumpled joint. He clamps it into a hemostat and says, “Let’s have a little hit first.”
Turning down a hit is uncool. At only sixteen, Kenny Gebhardt lives in fear of the uncool response. He shrugs and slips his fingers into the handle. He lets his visitor light the tightly rolled end and sucks in a huge lungful of smoke. He chokes, his eyes widen, he grabs his throat—and then he falls, paralyzed, onto the ground beneath the tree. He gasps for air, his face turning blue, his fingers clutching at his neck as though to rip open an airway. His legs twitch and kick, hitting the ground like a drum tattoo. A dark spot appears on the front of his jeans.
The struggling stops. His body convulses and lies still.
His companion looks over the scene, nods once, and then walks out of the tree canopy into the rising sunlight.
“We have to talk,” says Ron. It’s six o’clock in the morning. Neither slept well, and both found themselves in the communal kitchen, where Cass made cups of instant coffee.
Cass nods; misery envelopes her, especially when she thinks about Ron. “Not here,” she says, glancing around the porch of the White House as if the ghosts of the other students still sat in their accustomed places, ready to eavesdrop. “Let’s go to the tree.”
Ron nods. They walk toward the huge weeping beech in the little park behind the art museum. “Listen, I—” Cass begins.
At the same time, Ron’s deeper voice says, “It wasn’t your fault, Cassie.”
Cass turns hot, teary eyes on her brother and demands, “Wasn’t it? Would you have gone along with it if I hadn’t pushed? If I hadn’t been so fucking militant?”
“Hey, who knows?” His smile is the tender one she recalls from years of little sisterhood. “I have an ideal or two of my own, you know.”
Tears overwhelm her. A convulsive sob grabs her throat. She begins to run, jerkily at first, then gaining speed. The tree, she has to get to the t
ree. Wrapped in its protective leafy arms, she can sob out all her pain and guilt.
Tears whip her cheeks. Ron’s sneakered feet echo behind her; he could easily catch up, but he lets her take the lead. At the tree, she will beg forgiveness for what may not be forgivable.
A sharp pain stabs her side as she reaches the park. It slows but doesn’t stop her; she pumps her legs harder as the tree comes into view. The treehouse from Green Mansions comes to mind as she races toward the inviting canopy of leaves; she is Rima the bird girl, heading home at last.
She reaches the tree and grasps a strong gray branch in one hand as she catches her breath and waits for her brother. She pushes a fist into the place in her side where the stitch still hurts. Her breath comes in panting, heaving sobs. As Ron comes closer, she parts the branches and steps into the cool world beneath the canopy of leaves.
Kenny lies on the ground. Sleeping? But—
What was he doing in her tree, anyway? She steps forward, about to wake him, then steps back with a cry. Kenny’s face is blue, his body still as a doll’s. He can’t possibly be alive.
She raises her hands to her mouth and stifles a scream. “He killed himself,” she whispers. But then something strikes her. She looks at the area around the body—the only way she can look at it is to think of Kenny as “the body”—and sees no glass, no bottle of pills, no means of ingesting poison. No hemostat, although she has no way of knowing that one is missing.
Ron reaches her and grabs her by the shoulders. “Don’t get any closer.” He steps past her and blocks her view. “I think it was parathion. If we so much as touch him, we could be dead too.”
CHAPTER FIVE
As always, it was the chair I noticed first. Not the smile on the bearded face or the warm welcome in the brown eyes, so like mine and yet so different. Not even the startling increase of gray in hair and beard caught my initial attention. Instead, my eyes traveled first to the wide rubber wheels, then up to the strap that secured the twisted torso in place, finally to the hand and breath controls on the armrests. Even to me, my brother was his chair.
Troubled Waters Page 4
