Jesus Jackson

by James Ryan Daley

  As soon as I saw him there I quickened my pace, breaking into a full run by the fifty-yard line. When I reached him I had to pause, heaving for air to catch my breath.

  “What…the fuck…happened to…your bruises? Your…black eye?”

  He brushed me off with a wave of his hand. “Oh, you don’t need me to have those anymore.” Then he looked me over, seeming concerned. “What happened? You seem so excited?”

  “I got it!” I said proudly. “The proof. I got it!”

  Jesus propped himself up on his elbows. “Really?”

  “I stole Alistair’s phone. There are messages from him and Ryan making plans to meet in the woods.”

  “Well that sounds promising.”

  “And Alistair practically confessed everything, too,” I said, sitting beside him in the grass.

  Jesus furrowed his brow, and swung up into a seated position, face-to-face with me. “What do you mean, ‘practically?’”

  “Well, he didn’t give any details, of course, but he did say he knew why I was snooping around, and then he smacked me a few times and told me to stay away from his sister.”

  “That’s hardly a confession.”

  This annoyed me. “What the hell else could it mean?”

  Jesus shrugged. “In court, quite a lot of things…”

  “Well that’s why it’s a damn good thing I’ve got the phone.”

  “Damn good thing for what?”

  “For going to the cops,” I said, honestly astounded that he hadn’t reached the same conclusion already.

  Jesus jumped to his feet and began pacing. “Now just hold on a minute, you don’t need to do anything rash here.”

  I climbed to my feet slowly, warily. “What do you mean rash? Alistair pushed my brother off a fucking cliff! Between the phone and my testimony about the coke and the fight and Alistair threatening me, the cops have got to arrest him.”

  “Look,” Jesus said, lowering his voice a bit. “Eventually, you’re going to have to bring this thing to the police. There’s no doubt about that. But, if you bring it to them too soon, without the proper evidence…Well, it may wind up doing more harm than good.”

  “How? Ryan’s dead! What more harm could possibly be done?”

  “What are people saying, around school, was the cause of Ryan’s death?”

  “He fell off a cliff.”

  This was annoying. “Right,” Jesus continued. “Now let me ask you this, has anybody at school—anybody—mentioned the word cocaine? How about drugs? Or suicide?”

  “No.”

  “Of course not,” said Jesus, placing his hand on my shoulder. “It was an accident. Ryan fell. Now he’s a hero to the whole school. What do you think’s going to happen if you go in to the cops with your whole story about drugs and fights and murder, but they don’t believe the murder part?”

  I shrugged, though I knew very well what was coming.

  Jesus went on: “All they’re going to have left is a story about fighting and drugs.”

  I nodded, silently.

  “And those cops are going to take this murder thing very seriously. They’ll be in this school before you leave the station, asking questions, talking to principals, searching lockers. Ryan’s quiet, noble death will turn into a huge, awful spectacle.”

  He had a point, of course. The last thing I wanted to do was drag Ryan’s name through the dirt. And besides, if they knew that Ryan was all coked up, they might think he fell off in a drugged stupor or worse. “Alright,” I said. “Fine. So I’ll leave out the cocaine.”

  “Then you’ll have to leave out the phone. And then what do you have left? A scrap of cloth?”

  “And the fight and Alistair threatening me and the footprints—”

  “You need more,” Jesus interrupted.

  But I was too fed up to listen to him. Clearly Jesus didn’t give a crap about justice or the truth or making sure Alistair got what he damn sure had coming to him. Hell, all he probably cared about was that I wound up accepting whatever spiritual bullshit he was going to lay on me so he could collect the rest of his money…and I was seriously starting to doubt he’d have much success at that.

  So I turned and walked as fast as I could off of the football field, silently cursing Jesus Jackson and the day that I met him. I resolved to go to the cops that very day. As I hopped back on my skateboard and sped away from the school, I heard Jesus yell, off in the distance, “You need a confession! A real confession.”

  I didn’t care, though. I was already gone.

  Thirty-one

  An hour and half later I was staring at the bland brick façade of the police station, with Henry by my side and the phone in my hand, nearly paralyzed with anticipation. This was what it all added up to; this was where I would prove my case, get my revenge, or lose it all forever. I just couldn’t take that step: what if I didn’t have enough evidence? What if there were holes in my story, what if they just plain didn’t believe me? It took Henry finally placing his hand on my shoulder, and saying, “Are you sure about this? ” before I finally put on a brave face, brushed him off, and took those few steps up to the door.

  As we walked up to the front counter, Henry was sweating and twitching and his eyes wouldn’t stop darting crazily around the room. From the look of him, any decent detective would have assumed that he was the murderer. Luckily, though, he lagged behind a few paces as I approached the officer on duty: a pretty young woman with a demeanor I considered a bit too sunny for a cop.

  “Can I help you?” she asked with a smile, like she was working the counter at an ice cream parlor instead of a police station.

  “I need to speak with Detective Conrad,” I said.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. He’s usually not in on Saturdays,” she replied.

  I guess it spoke to my lack of experience with such matters, but it never occurred to me that the detective would be anywhere but at his desk, poring over a file of some murder case. “Oh,” I said. “Well I really need to talk to him.”

  “You can leave a message, if you like. Or else come back on Monday after nine.”

  This was clearly unacceptable. If I put it off, I’d lose my nerve. “No,” I said firmly. “It’s an emergency. I have some evidence about a murder.”

  “A murder?” She nearly started laughing.

  “Yes. Ryan Stiles was murdered and I have evidence to prove it.”

  Her face changed, became ever so slightly more concerned. “And what did you say your name is?”

  “Jonathan Stiles. His brother.”

  The second these words left my mouth, everything changed. The nice, smiling police lady became instantly and incredibly serious. Her left hand snapped at a phone and within seconds she made a half-turn on her chair and started whispering intently into the receiver.

  She hung up. “Follow me.”

  She led us back to the same white waiting room where I had been after Ryan’s death. Although she didn’t say a word, I assumed that we were waiting for Conrad to come all the way in from home. And by the sour and disheveled look of him when he arrived, I was sure that we had woken him up.

  He grimaced as he approached the two of us, his unshaven face sagging and wrinkling like a rotten tomato. “So are you really doing this?”

  I nodded. Henry froze.

  “Well come on in, then.” He opened the door to his office, straddling the threshold so we had to squeeze past his gut just to get into the room. We sat down in the two chairs facing his desk as he took the seat across from us. At first he just glowered, slurping his coffee and tapping his fingers on his computer keyboard. Then, as if he’d finally woken up enough to remember me, a look of recognition came into his eyes, and, almost with a note of sympathy in his voice (but not quite), he said, “So what’s this all about? ”

  “Ryan didn’t just fall into the ravine behind
St. Soren’s. He was pushed.”

  The detective appeared neither surprised nor concerned. “And what makes you think that?”

  “I happen to know that he got into a fight with Alistair St. Claire right before he died.”

  “Now how would you know that? You told me that the last time you saw him was before school on the day he died.”

  I took a deep breath, glanced over at Henry (who may not have actually breathed since we arrived at the station), and began my story—the story I’d conceived and rehearsed a hundred times in my head since the night before. “Well, officer, that was lie. I did see Ryan right before he died. Henry and I had wandered into the woods behind the school by chance, when we came upon Alistair St. Claire, Michael Murphy, and Philip Shea doing cocaine in a little clearing just about fifty feet inside the tree line.”

  “Wait a second,” broke in Conrad, scribbling notes on a pad in front of him. “You said it was Alistair St. Claire, Michael Murphy, and who?”

  “Philip Shea, sir.”

  “Right.” He paused. “And Ryan wasn’t there? He wasn’t doing drugs with them?”

  “No, sir. Just those three.”

  He jotted down one more thing on his pad, leaned back in his chair, and squinted at me skeptically. “Continue.”

  “Well, as soon as we saw them, we turned around and started to head back to school, but they ran after us and Alistair tackled me, while Mike and Phil went after Henry.”

  Conrad raised an eyebrow. “It took two of them to take on this kid?”

  I felt my heart beating faster “I’m just telling you what happened. Anyway, they pinned us both down while Alistair screamed about how if we told anyone we saw them they would kill us.”

  “Kill you?” echoed Conrad.

  “Well, yeah. That’s what he said. But I didn’t think he was being serious at the time. You know…I just thought he meant that he would beat us up or something.”

  “Right. Sorry. Go on.”

  “Anyway, right about then Ryan came running up out of nowhere, dragged Alistair off of me, pushed Mike and Phil away from Henry, and told us to run.”

  “And did you?”

  “Yeah, we ran away, but as we were leaving we saw Alistair and Ryan fighting…and it looked like it was getting really serious.”

  “And what time did all this take place?

  “Well, they let us out early that day…so probably like one o’clock.”

  “Okay, and then what happened?”

  I swallowed hard. “And then Alistair followed Ryan to the edge of the ravine and pushed him in.”

  He leaned in. For a brief moment, he actually seemed to be taking me seriously. “And you saw this happen?”

  “Well…no.”

  “Did you see anything after the fight?”

  “No….I mean, not technically. But we do have evidence that backs up what we’re saying.”

  Conrad raised an eyebrow. Henry, sensing his cue, pulled three big plastic bags out of his backpack: one containing the piece of fabric from the prickle bush, one containing a few dozen pictures of footprints and feet, and the other containing the phone. I launched right into a huge explanation of the significance of each piece, how we went about finding them, what we thought they meant, and how the detective could go about using them to convict Alistair.

  Just as I was finishing my explanation, Conrad excused himself from the room, saying he needed to check something.

  “How do you think it’s going?” I whispered to Henry.

  Henry shrugged, still too scared to speak.

  “Well, I think we’re making progress,” I said. “He seemed skeptical a first, but I think he starting to come around.”

  A few unbearably long minutes passed, and then Conrad came back into the room, sat back down, and told me to go on. It took about five more minutes for me to finish (I didn’t want to leave anything out), and as soon as I brought the story up to that very morning, I said, “So what do you think? Do we have enough to arrest Alistair?”

  Conrad leaned back in his chair, rubbing his temples with the middle finger and thumb of his left hand. Leaning forward again, he stared hard at Henry.

  After a little while, he said, “Henry—It’s Henry, right?”

  Henry nodded.

  “Henry, can you give me and Jonathan a moment?”

  Henry nodded again but didn’t move.

  Conrad paused, and then waved him to the door. “Just go ahead and wait for us out there, okay?”

  Henry finally got it. He nodded a third time and nearly sprinted from the room. Just then, Conrad’s phone rang. He picked it up, mumbled something like, “Yeah, okay,” and placed the receiver back on its cradle.

  Then Conrad turned back to me, his entire demeanor changed. He seemed sad, almost human. He said, “I had a cousin, an older cousin, named Jeff.” He stared wistfully out the window. “Jeff was about four years older than me and when I was growing up he lived with my aunt and uncle right down the road, not a hundred yards from my front door. Now, I was an only child, and Jeff had nothing but sisters, so as we grew up we were about as close to brothers as we ever knew. I mean, I looked up to him for everything—he taught me how to fish, play ball, gave me advice on girls, how to dress—everything. Anyway, I was probably just about your age when Jeff got drafted into the army. This was back in ’73, so that meant he was going to Vietnam. Now I remember like it was yesterday, the day a young man in uniform came to my aunt’s door with a telegram—”

  “Excuse me,” I broke in. “But what does this have to do with arresting Alistair?”

  Conrad shook his head. He stood up, came around the desk, and put his hand on my shoulder. “Never mind,” he said. “Come on.”

  I got up, unsure of where he was taking me, and followed him to his office door. He opened it. And I understood immediately what was happening, what he’d done. There in the waiting room, looking more like they were there to bail me out than back me up, were both of my parents, sitting beside a truly mortified Henry.

  “What the hell is this?” I demanded.

  Conrad leaned down. “Look, this is going to be hard for you. But the sooner you accept things the way that they are, the sooner you can start to get better.”

  “But what about all of the evidence? What about our story?”

  Conrad seemed truly concerned, but I was too angry to care. “Look, Jon, I know that, to you, it all makes sense, but it doesn’t add up.” He leaned down further, almost whispering. “We talked to Alistair. And Mike and Phil and the whole football team, and their families. Those guys were nowhere near your brother when he died.” Then he paused, as if unsure if he should continue. But he did: “Jonathan, Ryan tested positive for cocaine during his autopsy. But I think you knew that.” My face went crimson, showing Conrad just how right he was. “Okay. I’ll let your parents explain the rest.”

  And with that, Conrad exchanged a knowing glance with my father, gave me a little push across the waiting room, and retreated back into his office. I was speechless. All the progress I made had disappeared; it was gone. And as my parents ushered me into my mother’s car, I felt myself retreating from everything: the police station, my family, Ryan’s death. It all faded to a white hum on the periphery of my consciousness as I spent the drive home in silence, staring placidly at the trees and their newly colored leaves.

  Thirty-two

  My parents didn’t offer me any further details of Ryan’s death. And I didn’t bother to ask. In my mind, I’d heard enough: The coroner, or whoever, had tested Ryan for cocaine, and he came up positive, thus making me a liar. Furthermore, Alistair and his boys had gotten together on a story that was good enough to convince the cops, thus making my story implausible, at best. Whatever credibility I thought I had, whatever chance there was of convincing anybody of anything—it was all gone. What else was there to kn
ow?

  So my father took off with Henry (who seemed irritatingly relieved, almost smiling as he carried the bag of useless “evidence” by his side), while my mother drove me home. A few times on the ride she tried to start a conversation, first pointing out that there was a sale at some department store and then moving on to more pressing subjects like whether or not I was hungry and if I wanted her to rent me a movie. I didn’t answer a single one of her questions, just like I didn’t respond to her knocks for the next three days. I just remained locked in my room, accepting the occasional meal, while avoiding even the smallest bit of pointless conversation.

  It’s hard to describe my state of mind over those three days. I didn’t feel numb anymore, as I had since Ryan’s death, but I didn’t really feel sad yet, either. I just felt beaten; utterly defeated.

  And no one really seemed that worried about it. My mother left meals and clean clothes outside my door. My father left me pamphlets about Krishna and bought me one of those Zen gardens where you make lines in a little box of sand with a tiny rake. I barely ate the food, and I couldn’t bear to read a word of the pamphlets. But the Zen garden was actually quite nice.

  On Tuesday, after about three hours of raking tiny circles in the garden, I heard a knock at my door.

  Breaking my silence for the first time, I said, “Not now, Mom. Come back tomorrow.”

  “Jonathan?” It wasn’t my mother. It was Tristan.

  I stared deep into the swirls of sand, deciding stupidly that she could do no harm, and walked over to unlock my door. “It’s open,” I said finally, as I went back to my position on the bed, raking my garden.

  Tristan gently pushed open the door and came in. She squinted a bit as her eyes adjusted to the dark. “Jonathan?”

  “Hey.”

  I mustered an effortful smile as she shuffled over, taking a seat beside my little Zen garden. “That looks very calming.”