Jesus Jackson

by James Ryan Daley

  “Poke around, look for clues.”

  “Okay.”

  “And try to construct a narrative of what happened.”

  Of course. I had a hundred different stories floating around in my brain about how things might have gone down; what I needed was to come up with one plausible story. And who knows? Maybe it would just prove that the whole thing had been an accident, and I could leave it alone. “Great,” I said. “So let’s go right after school, okay? To investigate?”

  Now Henry really looked scared. “Wait, you said we were just talking!”

  “Yeah, just talking…and a little looking around.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.”

  I reached over, put my hand on his shoulder. “It’ll really help me process this whole thing.”

  “I’ll miss my bus, though. And my parents…”

  “We’ll take the late bus, for the kids that play sports. It’ll be fine.”

  “But shouldn’t we just let the police—”

  “Listen Henry, I wasn’t going to tell you this, but Alistair said something really suspicious to me when we saw him earlier.”

  “Suspicious how?”

  So I told Henry what Alistair had said to me, and then I filled him in on my whole theory about how things might have gone down after we left. He looked a bit uncomfortable about it all at first, but as I went on he clearly became more and more animated, more involved and more curious, as if allowing himself to sink into one of his novels.

  Finally, he cut me off in the middle of one of my theories. “Well the crime scene itself is bound to be a disaster by now. Lots of cops and EMTs and everyone will have trampled through it, basically destroying any hard evidence that may have been left. But then again, if we go to the spot where we ran into Alistair, we might find something. I don’t think the police would have snooped around over there, so far from the edge of the ravine.”

  “Alright, then. I’ll see you at 2:05, behind the school.”

  “Okay,” he said. “2:05.”

  Eleven

  There have been few times in my life when I have felt more foreign, more incredibly different than I did every day after school at St. Soren’s. Like every other school, the final bell heralded a great rush of students into the hallway, a great wave of relief and expectant freedom on their faces. But at St. Soren’s I never shared in that relief, that freedom…and, if anything, I seemed to dampen it in everyone who laid eyes on me. I was a wandering freak show, a great big human-shaped sign that read “Pity me,” “Feel sad for me,” “Pray for me.”

  And I didn’t even have the courtesy to force a brave smile, to thank them for their prayers.

  So it was for more than mere convenience that I had Henry meet me behind the school, instead of at my locker or on the steps. And by the time he came bounding out of the doors, his tiny frame dwarfed by his gargantuan backpack, he seemed to have given up any reservations about our plan. He practically skipped up to greet me.

  Dropping his bag on the ground at my feet, he reached into the outside pocket and pulled out a handful of plastic sandwich bags. “Here,” he said, handing a few to me. “We’ll need these to collect evidence.”

  “Where did you get all these?”

  He raised an eyebrow, slyly. “I told the lunch lady I was diabetic, and needed to break up my Twinkie into a bunch of little portions.”

  “Good idea.” I chuckled. “You know, a little weird, but good.”

  “Thanks,” he said, clearly quite pleased with himself.

  “So, what now?”

  Henry took off his little wire-frame glasses, wiping them on his shirt. His eyes scanned the horizon. “First we should go to the scene of the crime. There probably won’t be much there, but it’s worth a shot.”

  “Alright then.”

  So we started off down the path toward the ravine. Maybe it was because I knew Ryan’s last steps had gone through the woods, and not down the path, but it didn’t hit me that I’d be standing in the exact spot where my brother actually died until we were right there, at the edge, where he fell.

  And then the reality of it all hit me. There was no mistaking the exact point where Ryan went over—the path only opened directly onto the ravine for about three or four feet, which was now blocked by a makeshift wire fence and covered with police tape. The moment I saw it, all the blood rushed out of my head; my eyes welled. I sank to my knees.

  Henry, who’d been almost giddy with anticipatory excitement, seemed to instantly realize, in a great avalanche of understanding, the unbelievable magnitude all of this had for me. He averted his eyes, and mumbled something like, “Uh, um…well. Do you need, I mean…is there anything, uh…are you alright?”

  I was not all right. Not even close. All of my imaginings from the morning—all of my theories and visualizations about the fall—were now overwhelming me. I tried to breathe, failed, and whispered, “I’ll be fine. It’s just, you know, kind of a lot to take in.”

  Henry fidgeted for a second and then began to poke and prod around the foliage on either side of the path. I sat, silently watching him, until he first let me in on what he was doing.

  “So, what we’re looking for here is anything out of the ordinary. The problem is that almost everything is out of the ordinary, because you had so many cops and paramedics and everyone else in here poking around for so long.” He made his way a little further down the path. “Maybe, though, if we can locate the exact spot that Ryan got onto the trail, we can trace his path back to the spot where we last saw him.”

  It was actually quite comforting, listening to Henry add a little logic to the situation. It gave a certain weight, grounding, to my flight-prone emotions. I struggled to my feet. “What do you mean, exactly?”

  “I mean, the police assumed that Ryan had jogged down the path the same way that we came in, so they would have only looked for clues along the side of the path. But we, on the other hand, know for a fact that Ryan must have come straight through the woods, at some point breaking through the bushes along the side of the path, which would leave a noticeable amount of broken twigs, ruffled leaves, maybe even a few—”

  Henry sank into a squat, poking his nose almost all the way into the dirt.

  “A few what?” I asked.

  He lifted a large, brownish oak leaf, revealing some seemingly random indentations in the dirt underneath. “Footprints.”

  “Oh.”

  Without a second’s pause, Henry pulled out his phone, snapped a picture of the footprint, and began measuring angles in the mud with a green plastic protractor. He made a few complex algebraic calculations (about what, I have no idea) and then snapped his face toward mine and said, “Size 10 or 11 cleats. Nike, I think. Sound familiar?”

  I felt the hairs rise along the back of my neck. “Those are Ryan’s shoes. They’re a ten and a half.”

  Henry did not look surprised. “Well, this is where he came through.”

  “So what do we look for now?”

  “Now we trace it back to the clearing.” And with that, Henry made a circle around the bush, and began to crawl on his hands and knees just past the edge of the path. I wanted to help him out, really, but I just couldn’t take my eyes off the break in the brush where Ryan came through, and the line of police tape where he went over. I pictured a hundred different scenarios—each more horrid and violent than the last—and in each one, Ryan was fighting for his life, struggling against Alistair and his fuckwad friends, as they dragged him, kicking and screaming, to the precipice.

  Finally, when Henry had made it most of the way to the clearing where the fight had happened, he cut off my awful thoughts. “Oh boy. You should come see this.”

  “What is it?” I asked, hesitating to catch up.

  “Most of the ground back here is covered with pine needles and grass.” He pointed around the woods. “So you’re
not going to find much in the way of footprints. But over here…” He walked a few paces deeper into the woods. “Over here there’s a small patch of soft dirt, and look what I found in it.”

  Henry’s discovery was pretty damn clear, even from where I was standing. In that little patch of dirt was a distinct set of footprints, obviously cleats, and perfectly formed down to the company logo.

  And it was clearly from a different person than the one we had seen by the ravine.

  “Holy shit.”

  Henry ignored my shock as he began circling the footprint, taking pictures of it with his phone, and scribbling down his measurements and calculations. A sudden uneasiness washed over me, and I had to turn away, take a walk. When I came back, Henry said, “Well, it’s an Adidas, about an eleven or a twelve.”

  Henry seemed to be waiting for some kind of acknowledgement or encouragement to continue, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to say anything at all. This whole idea, to investigate on our own, seemed brilliant a few hours ago, but now was bringing me far closer to Ryan’s death than I was even slightly prepared to handle.

  But I knew I couldn’t give it up. After all, we’d made progress, probably even beyond what the police had. “Okay. Good,” I said, struggling to get out the words. “So now all we need to do is match the footprints to their owners and take it to the police?”

  Henry was too involved in his newfound cop role to notice my persistent desperation. He said, “Well, I’m afraid it’s not that simple in this case. A few footprints alone probably won’t convince anybody of anything. We need to trace these back to the ravine, hopefully find a few clues along the way, and then use whatever we come up with to create some kind of a narrative.”

  “A narrative. Right.”

  “When we do bring all of this to the cops, we need to have a story to tell them, backed-up with some actual hard evidence that reconstructs all of the events from the time we left until the moment that Ryan was pushed into the ravine.”

  A wave of dizziness and disorientation hit me, forcing me to stop and steady myself. “Sounds like a plan.”

  And so Henry began his unbelievably unhurried crawl through the woods. Seriously, the kid was moving at the breakneck pace of about three feet per minute. He’d move one arm, push up his glasses, press his face into the ground, peer at a patch of dirt or broken twig for a minute or more, take a picture of some invisible detail with his phone, and then move another limb to do it all again.

  After about twenty minutes we still hadn’t made it all the way back to the ravine, and I was about ready to scream. But right then Henry’s hand darted at the ground. He brushed a few leaves and some dirt to the side, snapped his head around and said, “Look at this.”

  I hurried over. In his open palm was a large, dirt-covered, chunky silver ring, with the words, “St. Soren’s ’14” on one side, and an engraved picture of a football on the other.

  “It’s a ring,” I said, stating the obvious.

  Henry reached into his pocket, retrieving a plastic sandwich bag. “Not just any ring—a class ring.”

  “With a football on it…”

  “Exactly. You get them junior year, customized with your favorite activity, class, or whatever.”

  We both stared at the find, while Henry turned it over in his fingers; there were no initials or inscriptions. “So we just need to find the football player without a ring on, and we’ve got them. Right?” I asked.

  “It won’t be that easy,” Henry replied. “Not everyone buys a ring, and the people who do don’t necessarily wear them all the time. Some people frame them, some give them to their girlfriends, some wear them on a chain, and some just leave them in the box.”

  “Ah.”

  There didn’t seem to be anyplace else to look for clues, just a patch of pine needles between us and the clearing. I said, “So what do we do?”

  Henry sat cross-legged on the ground, mindless of the mud and dirt. He placed his backpack in front of him and arranged three plastic bags in a straight line on top of it. He picked one up, put the ring inside, and said, “We need to find out who bought this particular ring. There have to be records, if not at the school then at the ring company. I’ll look into it, but if I can’t find anything, the police can always subpoena the ring company’s records later.”

  This sounded reasonable. “Alright.”

  “Meanwhile, I also found this,” he said, lifting a second plastic bag.

  From where I was standing the bag just looked empty. “Is there even anything in there?”

  Henry stood up and brought it closer, so I could see what was inside: a little triangle of rubbery, dimpled white fabric, maybe an inch across, with some strands of blue and orange thread stuck to the back of it. Two of the triangle’s sides were straight and met at a perfect right angle, while the third side was jagged, as if it had been ripped from the corner of a larger shape.

  “That linty stuff on the back looks like the school colors,” I said.

  “It is the school colors. I pulled it off of a prickle bush about twenty yards back.” He examined it more closely. “But what’s this rubbery stuff?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said, trying to view it from a better angle. Then it came to me. “It’s a number! From a football jersey! Or at least it’s a piece of a number.”

  Henry’s eyes opened wide. “Yes! Yes, that’s it exactly!”

  “But what number is it?”

  “Impossible to tell from this piece. But all we need to do is look at each of their jerseys, and find the one with the hole.”

  “Exactly. But how do we get close enough to do that? It’s got to be a pretty small hole.”

  Henry put the plastic bags in his backpack. “I don’t know. We’ll have to give that some thought.”

  We began the slow trudge back up to the school. I was feeling such a crazy mix of emotions—triumph, sadness, excitement, nausea, fear—that I couldn’t quite tell if I was about to burst out laughing, crying, vomiting, or all three.

  I looked up at the huge stone crucifix towering above the school, and it came to me—a way we could get close enough to the football team.

  “I’ve got it,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Yeah, yeah…it could totally work.”

  “What is it?”

  “We’ve got to go to that party.”

  Henry went white. Whiter than a cloud, whiter than a sheet, like a blank piece of paper painted white under a bright light. “That what?”

  “That keg party. Friday night. The one Alistair invited us to. Every Friday night before a weekend game, the whole football team wears their jerseys to the keg party up by the radio tower. I saw Ryan leave for it a hundred times.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.”

  “Yes you do,” I said, putting my hand on his back as we came up to the parking lot, just outside the football field. “You’re in high school now. You go to parties. Just don’t forget to bring your little plastic bags.”

  Twelve

  The first thing I had to do was get someone to take us to the party. The radio tower was about three miles north of town, at the top of a tall hill just off the side of the highway. Walking there was really not an option; skateboarding would be far too difficult (and I assumed impossible for Henry); and of course I couldn’t ask either of my parents to take me. So for the whole bus ride home, I was trying to figure out how to scrounge up enough money for a cab, and wondering if it was really such a good idea to blow my last twelve dollars on Jesus Jackson.

  Thankfully, though, the solution to my problem was waiting for me at home, right in my own kitchen: Tristan Mitchell, Ryan’s three-year girlfriend and one of the only seniors at St. Soren’s that I had ever actually spoken to before that day. As soon as I walked in the house and saw her standing at the counter, red-eyed and puffy-cheeked and drinking a cup of hot te
a with my mother, I knew that I just had to ask, and she would oblige.

  The hard part would be the timing. Tristan was right in the middle of what appeared to be an extremely emotional conversation with my mother, and I clearly couldn’t just barge in and ask her for a ride to a keg party. On top of that, after seeing the looks of her—she was a mess: totally devastated—it seemed a bit doubtful that she would be planning on going to any kind of party for quite some time.

  So I decided to wait it out. I took a seat on the living room couch in between the kitchen and the front door, where she’d have to pass before leaving, and pretended to read a magazine, waiting for them to be done. Unfortunately, this turned out to be quite a while.

  I always hated our living room. That is, I always hated that particular living room—the new one, bought and decorated after my parents’ divorce three years prior. Our old one, in our old house, was what a living room should be: a cozy, somewhat cramped hodgepodge of comfortable furniture, knickknacks, family photos, a coffee table covered in unread magazines and books and perhaps a solitary sock, all centered around a television that was on more than it was off. It had a greenish old carpet that you could spend a whole Saturday morning on, eating sugar cereal and watching cartoons in your pajamas, feeling just as comfortable as if you’d never gotten out of bed.

  The new one couldn’t possibly have been more different. Like the entire house, it looked as if it were copied inch for inch out of a home-decorating catalogue. Everything matched—the curtains with the sofa with the armchair with the painted trim around the outside of the fireplace—and nothing was comfortable. You couldn’t sit anywhere without messing up some perfectly arranged pillow, you couldn’t put anything on the coffee table without a coaster. The floors were hard and dark and smelled like pine, and besides, there was no more television, since it’d been relegated to an only slightly more comfortable “den.”

  The odd thing was that my mother had never been even remotely like that before the divorce. Sure, we had nice things and a nice house, but never in such a desperately “perfect” way. Never to be showy. Since the divorce, though, it was as if that house was the only thing my mom had left to cling to or to define herself with. Like losing a husband could be somehow negated by gaining a prime piece of real estate.