Two Truths and a Lie

by Ellen McGarrahan

  “Uh-oh,” Peter says, as he turns the car off.

  The swordsmen are wearing beekeeper-ish mesh masks that completely cover their faces, and shiny full-metal helmets. If it’s a pirate under there, I have no way to tell. We decide to walk around the park to think.

  The stone cottages of old Adelaide are beautiful. They’re like San Francisco Victorians shrunk down to one story, made of golden sand, and overdecorated with gingerbread. They remind me a little of New Orleans as well, with their ornate porches and wrought ironwork, but really I’ve never seen anything like them, this perfect marriage of frill and solidity on these silent sun-stilled streets. Which makes it all the more jolting when we finally come back around the corner to where we started and—

  “Right there, by the tree, in the baseball cap,” I say. My missing puzzle piece.

  It’s his cheekbones. Even from this distance. High curved cheekbones that look like Sunny’s. I’m surprised by the ponytail and by his solidity. I thought he’d be skinny, somehow. And he is wearing a Tampa Bay Rays baseball cap and green camo pants, which seems about as un-Renaissance as a person can be.

  In a quick conference, we decide that Peter will walk up close under the guise of being a “bloke” in search of the “toilet” at the park building. I retreat to the car to watch out the front windshield, my heart pounding.

  Peter is coming back now, giving a discreet thumbs-up.

  “It’s him,” Peter says, as he gets in the car. “American accent, zombie T-shirt.”

  Ah yes, zombies. Zombies are another Eric interest, thank you again, Facebook.

  Peter has gotten back in the driver’s seat now.

  Don’t tremble, I tell myself. No point in trembling.

  “What?” I say.

  When Peter was a kid, he had a collie. The collie, Cameron, had long legs. Sometimes Cameron slept on Peter’s bed at night, and during the night Cameron would lie with his feet against the wall and his back to Peter, and slowly stretch his legs out until he pushed Peter right out of bed onto the floor.

  “You’re doing it, aren’t you,” I say, looking at him.

  Peter reaches over and pulls the door latch on my side open.

  “I’ll be waiting right here,” he says.

  He pushes the door open a little wider.

  I zip my coat tight, climb out of the car, and head toward the clod of knights on the lawn.

  * * *

  •

  Eric is by a tree, deep in conversation with a young man wearing a brown felt tunic and a leather neck guard. Both of them are holding swords. They are so intent on their conversation that they don’t look up as I approach.

  “Eric,” I say, totally interrupting. I don’t say it as a question.

  Eric turns toward me. I recognize his brown eyes from his long-ago mugshot, but his expression is so different now that he looks like a new person. The man standing in front of me is so robust that he is almost rectangular; he is hale and hearty and exuberant, his eyes radiant and friendly.

  “Hello!” As if there couldn’t possibly be a nicer surprise than me, barging in like this.

  “Can I talk to you for a second?”

  “Sure!” He’s still smiling.

  “I’m writing a book about Jesse.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “No,” I say. “So I really need to talk to you.”

  “That’s excellent,” Eric says. “Somebody really needs to. Because so many people, they look at his criminal record and they judge him. He was nothing like the man that a lot of people judge him to be. He didn’t have the easiest upbringing, he had a hard life, he didn’t exactly have the best influences chumming around with him, but he was a good person. He did some really dumb things, but in our youth we’ve all done something we look back on and say, are you kidding me? He was a really good guy, he was a good person, he loved my mom and my sister and I. And the way he was treated, nothing, it’s beyond criminal. I mean, they treated him like an animal. Less than an animal. They don’t usually shoot a gazelle, drag it down on the ground, and kick it unconscious.”

  He says it all in one burst.

  We stand there for a moment. A gazelle?

  “I witnessed his execution,” I say. Tentatively.

  “Oh, you’re the lady my mom told me about!”

  But before I can quiz him about what, exactly, his mom told him about me, Eric continues. “It’s good you’re doing this, because somebody’s got to tell people.”

  That happens to be what I think as well. But what? Tell them what?

  “He really took time to be a dad to me,” Eric is saying. “He actually got me a pair of World War I model kits, Eddie Rickenbacker’s plane and the Red Baron. And he painted on a sheet of parchment paper an aerial view of an airfield.” Eric pauses for a moment. “He was a good guy. He really cared. He had a good heart. He really wanted to be something modern society doesn’t recognize anymore. He wanted to be an honorable person. I mean, it was a dream of his. He wanted to be a samurai.”

  “With swords?”

  “Not the swords so much.”

  “A knight?”

  “Exactly,” Eric says. Nodding. “And that became one of my things as well.”

  * * *

  •

  It’s always such a crapshoot, an interview. Eric was almost seven when his mom and Jesse got together in mid-1973, and the murders happened when Eric was nine and a half. That’s only about thirty months total, much of which Sunny and Jesse seem to have spent on the run, living a life of drugs and guns. Eric is now forty-eight years old, he’s been married and divorced, he has a new partner and grown daughter, and he is living in Australia, as far away as a person can get from Florida without pitching a tent on the South Pole. I’d thought that perhaps Eric might have gained a bit of distance from the whole terrible situation, maybe have a slightly analytical perspective on it, but immediately I can see that, no. You can take it with you, apparently. Across the world, even. Although I’m one to speak.

  “Were you able to visit Jesse in prison?”

  “Starke Prison? Oh my God. That place, it looks like a Civil War–era prison. It’s horrible, it’s filthy, it’s built to intimidate—it’s stone and steel and bars and barred doors—it really does, it looks like a place you store munitions, not humans. It was freezing in there. Every time we’d go to visit, it was freezing. Even in the summer, it was cold.”

  “And you were a child.”

  “I was. I was. I mean, honestly, I’ve been working for so many years to get over the fact that, you know, you see a police officer or a police car or any sign of them and—you know?”

  I’m really just letting him talk now, trying to get over my own nervousness. I can see Peter watching me and Eric from our rental car, parked across the street from the Kingdom. This all feels like it’s happening very fast—coming here, finding Eric, standing here talking to Eric, listening to Eric talk about the police, with felty fellows all around us, slicing, swaying.

  “In America, honestly, it used to drive me crazy, I’d be driving down and I’d see a police car in traffic and I’d be like, ‘I’m not doing anything wrong, I’m an honest citizen, I’m obeying the law!’ But still I’d feel like I’ve got to watch out for them. Because I mean, honestly, when they took us prisoner over at the roadblock site, it was ridiculous.”

  There’s something in what Eric has just said about the police that has given me a pay attention vibe. But try as I might, I can’t grasp it, and now we’ve moved on.

  “It’s already come out in declassified documents under the Freedom of Information Act that the CIA brought in the majority of drugs in the sixties,” Eric continues.

  “Is that crazy?” I say. It’s an actual question.

  “And since then, both the bombing of the World Trade Center and the planes hitting the W
orld Trade Center, I mean the only reason that the United States government hasn’t been made to answer for those is because the CIA’s answer to everything is you saw nothing. They’re like Jedi.”

  I wait.

  “The fact is, I’m not a demolition expert, but I’ve seen enough building demolitions because it’s always cool when you live in a city and you’ve got nothing better to do in an afternoon and they’re going to implode a building—”

  “Eric,” I say. To get his attention. “There’s been a lot of talk about Jesse’s innocence.”

  Eric looks directly at me, intense.

  “He was!” Eric says. “He was standing— Okay, come on.”

  And with that, Eric spins around and starts off, with his sword, away from the knights, toward the street. I race to catch up.

  * * *

  •

  We reach a blue station wagon parked along a curb at the edge of the park. Eric strides up to the car and takes a spread-’em stance up against the driver’s-side window, one hand on the car roof, the other behind his back, as if someone is trying to cuff him.

  Jesse was like this, at the car, Eric says, looking over his shoulder at me.

  “Over the patrol car?”

  “No, over our car.”

  That’s odd, I think. The two truckers and Walter both remember Jesse pressed up against the patrol car. Jesse himself testified that he was being held at the cruiser. But I’m interested to hear Eric unimpeded, uncorrected, so I don’t stop him.

  “Where were you?”

  “I was in the backseat, with my mom and my sister,” he says, pointing. We both look at the interior of the car as if they’re all there still.

  “Okay, so then what happened?”

  The officer threw Jesse over the car and was holding him down, Eric says.

  “Was that the Canadian officer who did that?” I ask.

  “No, the uniformed officer. The Canadian was out about over there.” Eric points to a spot behind me.

  That’s odd too. The two truckers and Walter and Jesse all testified that Jesse was being held by the guy in the white T-shirt. But no matter. Let’s hear it.

  “Where was Rhodes?”

  “Rhodes, while the altercation was going on, he walked around like this.”

  With that, Eric walks along the side of the car to the front, and then across the front to about the location of the headlight on the right. If this car were the Camaro, the position that Eric is standing in now would be about one foot in front of the headlight on the car’s passenger side. I am standing by the door on the driver’s side, so I’m standing where Jesse was when the shooting stopped. Eric, as Walter, is diagonally across the car hood from me, about ten feet away.

  “The officer yelled at Rhodes, ‘Get back over here!’ And that’s when everything let loose and the whole, you know? I didn’t see him actually shoot. But Rhodes was the only one with a gun.”

  * * *

  •

  It’s that one detail. The part where Eric says, “The officer yelled at Rhodes, ‘Get back over here!’ ”

  I think I remember seeing that in the court documents somewhere. I’m not one hundred percent certain, but in this moment, it seems to me that yes, I think Trooper Black did motion at Walter with his gun and tell Walter to move. So how does Eric know that? He’s wrong about Jesse being held over the driver’s-side door of the Camaro. He’s wrong about where the Canadian officer was standing. So obviously he hasn’t bothered to pretty up his story—he’s telling me what he remembers. What he himself heard. Right? He heard Trooper Black tell Walter Rhodes to move. The location that Eric remembers Walter standing is exactly where crime scene investigators found a bullet casing that morning. One of only three found at the scene. The only one found outside the car. And Eric saw Walter holding a gun.

  Jesus God.

  It’s like a thunderclap has gone off in my head.

  I watch Eric at the front of the car. He has his hand in the air, like he’s got a gun in it.

  I can see it so exactly, right now.

  Walter Rhodes got out of the car with a gun hidden on his person, walked around to the front of the car, and when the officer admonished him, Walter “pulled it out and started shooting over the top of the car,” just like Eric is saying.

  The day feels like it’s gone black-and-white. Eric is so intense. Definite, descriptive, confident, committed. There at the front of the car, with his hand in the air, it’s like he’s reliving it, playing it out from a part of himself where it’s been hidden all these years. And now it’s alive, this memory, in full motion. I can feel it. It’s alive for me as well.

  “He shot them, you know. He shot them dead and left them in huge pools of blood.” Eric’s voice bounces and echoes around me. Walter Rhodes. Just like Eric says.

  * * *

  •

  I ask Eric to draw what he remembers for me, to be sure.

  We sit side by side on a fence rail along the edge of the park. Eric has my notebook and is sketching, head bent. I’m watching him and every so often taking notes, writing upside down on the same page that he’s drawing on.

  “And the patrol car was like this,” Eric is saying, pointing.

  “The cruiser was parked behind the Camaro?”

  “Right.”

  But it wasn’t, actually. Every other witness—Walter, the truck drivers, Jesse—said that the two cars were parked parallel.

  I take the notebook and squint closely at what Eric has drawn. In addition to the two cars, Eric has marked where everyone was standing—Jesse, Walter, Black, Irwin. He’s got them all labeled, with arrows pointing where everyone was and where they were moving to.

  Every single thing in the drawing is wrong.

  * * *

  •

  The knights are in heavy combat now, beside us, staggering slightly on the uneven grass, tilting to and fro. Eric is watching me as I try to think of what to say. Do you realize that what you’ve drawn here conflicts with all the police reports and with what every other person who was there that morning has said? I decide there is nothing for it but diving into the facts, one by one, and seeing how he responds. He still seems friendly, but there’s a wariness growing, I can tell. He’s got his sword across his knees and now he’s tapping it, lightly, as if to make sure it’s still there.

  I feel a bit thrown as well, especially after what happened just now at the car. That lightning bolt I’d felt of complete trust and belief. Of revelation. Before coming here today, I’d wondered if Eric was going to be defensive. To evade, to bluster. But which truth? And then he’d turned out to be so open, and so convincing. But now I wonder if Eric actually knows the basic facts of the case at all.

  I start with the Taser dart, the tiny barbed fishhook stuck in the police car window.

  “Do you remember a Taser being fired?”

  Eric looks blank. Pleasant, but blank.

  “There was a Taser dart in the trooper car,” I prompt him.

  “That’s weird,” Eric says now, musingly. “I’ve never heard about that, I don’t think. That’s very strange. I don’t remember the presence of any Tasers and I’d seen Tasers because, you know, I’d seen the police use them.”

  “Well, and your mom had one.”

  “She did?”

  “Yeah, she bought one.”

  “I didn’t realize that. The only time I’d ever seen a Taser was when they allowed the public in when the police were testing them.”

  I try to imagine a police-sponsored Taser test that allowed children in the audience. Aside from the scene in The Hangover, that is.

  “It was kind of weird, I thought it was very neat, it was like a Star Trek phaser set on stun,” Eric is saying. “It was a wonderful thing, because, I mean, they had this large officer, a federal marshal or something, and they had him g
o charging at a female officer who was about your height and build and she just said ‘Stop!’ and he didn’t and so she let him have it and so he fell on the ground.”

  “Just like that,” I say.

  “It’s amazing, the innovations,” Eric says, with a touch of dreaminess.

  It seems possible that he’s got no idea about the Taser, sure. Or maybe I’ve hit a wall.

  I think for a moment.

  “Did you see the officer draw his gun that day?” I ask.

  Yes, Eric says. The uniformed officer had his gun out when he first opened the door to the Camaro, right at the beginning of everything. But then the officer “holstered.”

  “Holstered?” I ask. “He put the gun back?”

  Eric nods.

  “The officer was showing off,” Eric says. “It doesn’t take a professional psychiatrist or any expert to see that. He wanted to show off for his buddy from Canada by rousting a carload of people. They might have some dope, they might argue with him, he might have to ticket them and haul them off, and look like the big man. Like John Wayne.”

  I watch Eric for a minute.

  “So one of the things they made a big deal of was there was a shot through the window trim of the cruiser,” I try next. There were photographs, I say, illustrating the angle of the shot: from the back of the car toward the front. “That doesn’t match at all with what you just said,” about Walter firing from the front.

  “The thing is, because the police concealed so many things and fabricated so many things, it would take nothing to move things a little bit before they take the pictures,” Eric says.

  What about the casings that were found in the car?

  “There were no casings in the car.”

  The gunshot residue tests that determined you’d handled a recently discharged weapon?

  “That’s horseshit.”