The Banks of Certain Rivers

by Harrison, Jon

  “Never again, Christopher. I swear.”

  “Okay.” A pause. “Lauren’s really pregnant?”

  “She really is.”

  “Man. Are you going to get married?”

  “At some point,” I say. “I’d like to, yes.”

  “Okay. That’s fine. You should have told me, you know, a lot earlier.”

  “I know I should have, Chris.” I wait, and open my mouth, but what I want to say is hard in coming.

  “Chris?”

  “Yeah?” he murmurs.

  “That time….” I lean my head back and look at his ceiling. “That time in the barn. All of that time. I forgot about it. I’m not kidding, I made myself forget about it. God, Chris, never again. I’m ashamed to even think about it now. Did it really happen? Or is it like that video? Did it really happen like that in the barn?”

  Are we alive because we remember things, or because we can forget?

  “You’re my son, Chris,” I go on. “You’re my son, my family, and I love you.” I turn my head to look at him. I want him to know I mean it. He knows nothing though; he breathes deeply with his head turned and his mouth slightly parted, alive and unknowing in the deepest of sleep.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  While Christopher rests, I call Peggy Mackie and explain what happened. She doesn’t say anything while I tell the story, just listens, and finally says “Hm.” I think she understands. She’s dealt with a lot of teen boys in her career.

  “We’ll fly down later this week and bring her back, Peggy,” I tell her. “Or if you know someone you’d rather have sailing her home, that’s fine, I’ll pay to get her back up here.”

  “No, it’s okay. I just want you aboard with Chris when you bring the boat back. No solo trips. And I want Chris to call me to tell me all this himself.”

  “I think he was planning to do that,” I say.

  “Did Pete Tran stop by to talk with you?”

  “Nope. Never saw him.” It’s not a lie, either; I don’t mention that I might have been away from my house.

  “I don’t know what the hell is going on with this. If you end up not talking to him, just come to the district office tomorrow. Seven o’clock.”

  “See you then, Peggy. Thanks for being so understanding about this.”

  Lauren, at my insistence, comes over to spend the night. She was reluctant when I asked, but I told her she should. Chris knows, I explained, he understands. He’s okay with it. So she comes. I go into Christopher’s darkened room to put a blanket over him before we go to bed, and Lauren stands in his doorway with me and rubs her hand up and down my back while we watch him sleep.

  Chris stays home from school on Tuesday. Lauren greets him in the morning and he sheepishly says hi. I’m working on breakfast while they talk out in the living room, and I can’t help but listen to them.

  “I’m sorry about everything that happened,” I hear her say.

  “Seriously,” he says. “Don’t worry about it. I’m over it.”

  “If you’re angry with me, I understand. But I want us to talk about it, because, you know, I’m here.”

  “I was kind of angry at my dad. But we already talked about it. I know why he didn’t tell—”

  “It wasn’t all him, Chris. I was part of keeping it a secret too.”

  “I understand,” he says. “We talked about it. I’m not angry anymore. It’s fine. Are you going to move in?”

  “I hope so. But I want to ask you if it’s okay. This is your space too.”

  “There’s enough room,” Chris says. “And I’ll be leaving for to school next fall, so, yeah. It’s no problem.”

  “Thank you. I don’t want it to be weird. Any weirder than it already was. Or is, I guess.”

  “So you didn’t really spill anything on yourself the other day, did you, Ms. Downey?”

  “No,” she says. “I didn’t. And I want you to call me Lauren.”

  “It’s kind of strange for me to say.”

  “Well, you aren’t going to call me mom or anything like that instead, I hope.”

  Chris laughs. “No, I don’t think so. I’ll stick with Lauren.”

  Pete Tran does not come by at any point during the day.

  At six I shower and dress; the sport coat I wear, my only sport coat, was last donned a little less than a year ago for the end-of-season cross-country awards banquet. I should at least look presentable for whatever I have coming.

  Chris asks if I want him to come, and I reply with an emphatic No. Lauren asks me the same thing, and my answer doesn’t change. I tell her if I am to be publicly lashed, I’d like to bear the weight of the experience by myself. She shakes her head, goes to my room, and returns in a moment in a dress and sweater.

  “I am coming with you,” she says. “And that’s that.”

  I’d like to think I’ve become pretty good at handling these burdens on my own, but, like she says, I guess that’s that.

  We say little on the drive to the district offices. Lauren holds my hand on the drive, and she holds my hand as we walk into the building. The boardroom is not as filled with people as I’ve seen it in the past, but I am surprised to see a number of teen boys there sitting at in two rows of chairs along with a number of adults behind whom I assume to be their parents. I’m also surprised to see Steve and Leland Dinks seated in with them. Leland sees me enter and nods, and he gives Lauren a warm smile. I’m suddenly very glad she’s there with me. Cody Tate is seated in the room too, his nose and eyebrow clear of any scrapes. He sees me enter and quickly looks away. A stern-looking man sits next to Cody, and next to the man are two more men in suits. Kent Hughes from the paper is in the back of the room, tapping away at an iPad on his knees. Pete Tran, in civilian clothes, is standing by Jo and Frank Masterson. Their daughter is not with them. Pete steps over to greet me just as I’m taking a seat.

  “Were you looking for me yesterday?” I ask as we shake hands.

  “I was, in fact.”

  “To cuff me?”

  Pete screws up his face. “Why would you think that? We got a little break. You can tell your friend his theory was close, but not quite there.”

  “My friend? What friend?”

  “The pilot. The guy with the miniature golf course.”

  “Alan,” Lauren says.

  “Alan called you?”

  “More than once. I had a feeling this was all crap, but he knew it from the beginning. When he told me how the blood was on the kid’s face, that’s when I really understood it was bogus.” He nods over to the boys. “These guys are going to explain it. Oh, and those emails….”

  “Yes?”

  Pete draws a notepad from his packet and flips to a page. “Did you ever know someone named…Victor Tesh? Former student, maybe, or someone you knew in Lansing?” I shake my head; I’ve never heard the name before.

  “Or what about the Marshall Place Apartments in East Lansing?”

  This is a surprise. I haven’t heard that name in a long time. “That was…I lived there. With my wife. Well, girlfriend, then. My last year in college.”

  “The guys downstate are on it. I’ll keep you posted.”

  Peggy Mackie enters the room and nods hello when she sees me, and Pete excuses himself to go talk with her. A short man with a mustache scoots over to introduce himself after Pete is gone.

  “Mr. Kaz…Ka…” he tries.

  “Kazenzakis,” I say.

  “I’m Gary Burke from the teacher’s union.”

  “I got your call,” I lie.

  “Great, great. Listen, I’m here to—”

  The official-types start to enter the room and Gary Burke falls silent along with all the other small conversations that had been mumbling through the space. Stu Lepinski comes through the door with an accordion file under his arm followed by a couple board members I don’t really know; Gracie Adams files in last and they all take seats behind microphones set up at the table at the front of the room. A screen, glowing a washed-out
blue from the light of a ceiling-mounted projector, has been pulled down behind the table. Next to me, Lauren leans close and rests her hand on my forearm. Peggy closes the doors to the room, and Gracie clears her throat into her microphone.

  “I’d like to get going here,” she says. Gracie’s face wears a sour expression, and I get the distinct feeling she’s avoiding looking at me. “Peggy?” At the mention of her name, the boys all stare into their laps, as if in church.

  “So we’re here to talk about this business with Mr. K.,” Peggy says. “I guess to start, we need to see how this thing was made. Who is going to show us? Why don’t you go over to that table, I think you’re all ready. It should be all set up for you.” Two boys rise from their seats, along with their parents, and shuffle to a laptop set up at the side of the room. Peggy flips out the lights, and the hanging screen is bright with the projection of a computer desktop. Even though the room is dim, I can almost feel how the boy seated at the laptop is shaking.

  “So, um,” he starts, “we kind of—”

  “Can you speak up, please?” Gracie says. “Into the microphone.”

  “Yeah, um, there was this video, the original video, there were actually two of them.”

  “Would you show us the videos?” Peggy asks.

  “Yeah, sure.” The boy clicks away on the laptop, and on the projection screen the student parking lot of Port Manitou High appears. I am in the distance, frozen mid-stride. The boy clicks again, and I begin running, growing larger in the screen.

  “Hey!” I shout. Hey!

  I stand in the frame, talking. It’s hard to understand what I’m saying. The audio is muffled, scratchy with the sound of the windy day, and my hands are held out. I turn around and speak. At the bottom of the frame is a flicker of white, Cody Tate’s shirt, and the camera aims down to show him sprawled over the ground. I reach to pull the boy up, and, with my hands on his shoulders, I speak again. A boy’s voice fills the room, loudly over the speakers:

  “Tater’s a pussy, that’s what.”

  Laughter rings through the clip, and Cody Tate begins to swing his arms. My head snaps back as his elbow collides with my face and I fall, careening back and out of the shot gone suddenly mad with a view of shaking pavement and running feet.

  “Holy shit, holy shit, dude!”

  “Oh, holy shit, is he getting up?”

  “Cody, you hit that fucking teacher, dude. You laid him out.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You got your ass handed to you first though. Gretch kind of kicked your ass.”

  “No way, dude. I had to like, fight him off me.”

  I had to like, fight him off me.

  When the video is complete, the kid at the laptop clicks and starts a second one. It’s the same, almost the same, shot from a different angle. The high school gym can be seen in the background. It begins at nearly the same time as the first, with me running, but it ends sooner, the moment I fall to the ground.

  “So,” Peggy asks in the dark room, “that was how it really happened?”

  There’s a reply, but I can’t hear it.

  “Excuse me?” Peggy says.

  “I said yes, ma’am.”

  “All right. Now, how did you make the version that showed up on the Internet?”

  The kid at the laptop gets up to trade places with the second boy.

  “Well, Mrs. Mackie, we did some editing—”

  “Obviously,” Peggy says, and a couple of the parents chuckle. I do not chuckle. I notice in the dimness that Lauren’s mouth is slightly agape, and realize for the first time how tightly she’s gripping my arm.

  “Yeah, so, we did some editing, and it was like, we took the video of the guy, I mean the teacher, running toward us, this part”—he clicks the laptop and I am running toward the camera again—“we stopped it right…here. See how he has both of his hands up? If you play through that all the way, you see he’s just waving for us to like, cut it out. But we stopped it before that. He’s also at the edge of the frame, so you could think that Cody was standing just out of the shot.”

  “I see.” Peggy says. She’s turned, like all of the board members, so she can watch the screen up behind her.

  “So then, like, if you go forward about four-and-a-half seconds, that’s when he picks Cody up off the ground.” The boy advances through the video, frame-by-frame as I lift Cody Tate from the pavement, up to the moment I have my hands resting on his shoulders. “Watch that…it’s almost one second of footage in reverse, like this, check it out.” He scrubs backwards through the frames, I hurl Cody to the pavement, and a mother in the group exclaims Oh my God. “It looks like the teacher totally grabs Cody and throws him for real, right? Especially the way he holds his shirt right…there. If you speed it up ten percent it seems even more realistic.”

  “It does,” Peggy says.

  “So we cut those together this way,” the boy says, opening another video file. This one shows me running, spliced together in a jarring cut with the reversed footage of me picking up Cody Tate. “That version is still obviously totally fake. So I put a blur filter over that transition…like this…then I added shake into the frames, on top of the blur. So you can’t even really tell there’s a cut there. After that we just took the sound from when Cody hit the teacher, like how you can hear everyone react with surprise, I just laid it over the reversed part so it’s like they were reacting to him throwing Cody.”

  The room is silent for a long moment, and Peggy rises and goes to the door to flip on the light. “Can I ask one thing?” she says, looking over all of the boys before turning back to the kid at the computer. “One thing. Why? Why in the world did you do this?” He doesn’t answer. “No, really, why did you make this video? Did you have any idea what sort of impact it might have on Mr. Kazenzakis?”

  “I guess...I guess I just wanted to see if I could make it look realistic,” the kid says. “It was challenging.”

  “You made it look very real. Why wasn’t that good enough? Did you think at all about the consequences it might have? Do you have something against Mr. Kazenzakis? Do you even know him?”

  The kid at the laptop points to the second row of chairs. “Those guys know him,” Laptop Kid says, and a number of the boys hang their heads and stare down at their shoes. “They knew I was good with this stuff,” the kid adds. “They asked if I could make something like this.”

  “They asked you to make this,” Peggy says, her brows narrowing. “And you did.” She turns to the boys. “How do any of you know Mr. Kazenzakis? Is he a teacher of yours?” I can’t get a good look at any of their faces, but what I am able to see isn’t ringing any bells.

  “No,” a voice says.

  “Then how did this happen? Why did it happen? I want one of you to tell all of us here what you told me and Officer Tran this morning.”

  “Well…there was…a fight,” a boy’s voice says.

  “Yes, okay. A fight. Why did this fight happen? Was someone worried about something? Or was someone mad? Maybe both?”

  “Both,” another voice says.

  “Both.” Peggy crosses her arms. “Let’s start with the worried part. Some of you were pretty worried about something. What was it that you were worried about?”

  “Those pictures,” a boy says, and I wonder if I am imagining the sound of Denise Masterson’s parents shifting in their seats behind me. “Tater showed us all some pictures and we sort of freaked out because…I mean, we really freaked out because he sent them around and we thought we would be in trouble for having them. Because we thought they were like illegal.”

  “So you beat up Tater. You beat up Cody Tate.”

  “It wasn’t like a real beat down. None of us even asked for the pictures. We didn’t want to see that stuff in the first place. So we were pissed. And some of us thought it was pretty weak that he would do that to Denise”—another rustling behind me—“and we were pissed about that too.”

  “But then you found out they weren’t eve
n her.”

  “Yeah. We were really mad when we found that out.”

  “Okay. You were mad and worried. But why the video, then? Why drag Mr. Kazenzakis into it?”

  Another boy raises his hand to speak, a gesture I might find endearing in any other circumstance, and Peggy says: “Go ahead, Drew.”

  “We made the video after the fight,” the boy named Drew says. “Like, the next day, Cody told everyone the pictures weren’t real. And he said something about how his dad was going to have everyone prosecuted for beating him up. Because it was an assault or something.”

  “And you believed him?”

  “I mean, it’s obviously such B.S. now, but when he said it…he’s all rich, you know, his parents are totally rich, so, yeah, I guess we believed it. So a bunch of us were hanging out the next night and when we looked at the video, and it was like, I don’t even remember who noticed the backwards thing, but we were like holy crap, because we realized….”

  “What exactly did you realize?”

  Drew looks into his lap, and a man sitting next to him, his father I’m assuming, says something softly into his ear. “We realized we could make it look like the teacher did it. And I was like but why would a teacher do that out of nowhere? Someone remembered that he was tight with Denise somehow, her family, so it would totally make sense that he would be mad at Cody. About the pictures, I mean.”

  “So you made the video.”

  “We kind of made one, we tried, but it sucked so bad. It was obvious how fake it was. Somebody called Craig”—he nods to Laptop Kid—“and he came over and made one that was unbelievably perfect. In less than an hour. It blew us away.”

  “I just wanted to see if I could do it,” Laptop Kid adds. “I didn’t really have anything against him.”

  “Then why did you put it online?”

  “Everybody puts stuff online,” the kid says. “It’s just how we show stuff off.” Now Steve Dinks raises his hand. When Peggy nods to him, he rises to his feet.