The first cops came and I was telling them what happen when my mom came. The cops tried to keep her from going in but she went in anyway and when she saw Cassie she scream and moaned and carry on so much I put my hands over my ears. And I was mad at her. I thought what did you think was going to happen. He hit us before just like he hit you so what did you think would happen. Sooner or later bad people do bad things, even a kid knows that.
By then all our neighbors were out and looking. One of the cops was nice. He sat me in the cop car where the neighbors couldn’t look so easy and give me a hug. He said he had some candy in the glove compartment and did I want a piece and I said no thank you. He said okay Benjy just tell me what happened. So I did. I don’t know how many times I told that story but it was quite a few. Anyway I started to cry and the cop give me another hug and called me a brave kid and I wished my mother would have a boyfriend like that guy.
While I was sitting in the cop car and telling what happened, more cops came and a van that said MAYVILLE POLICE FORENSICS UNIT. One cop from the van took pictures and I later saw some at the hearing but not the bodies. I don’t know why the people at the hearing felt like I couldn’t look at pictures of bodies I already saw in person. But what I want to say is that one of the pictures that man took got in the newspaper. It showed the cookies my sister made, how they were scattered all over the floor. Underneath it said SHE WAS KILLED FOR COOKIES. I never forgot that, how it was mean and true at the same time.
I had to go to the hearing. It wasn’t with a judge but with 3 people. They were 2 men and 1 woman who looked like teachers and talked like teachers. There was nobody in the room except for them and me and my mother and the cops who were first to get to the trailer, which they called ‘the scene.’ We didn’t have a lawyer like in Law & Order on TV and we didn’t need one. The woman said I was a brave boy and told my mother I should get counseling. My mother said that was a good idea, then later said to me some people think money grows on trees.
We go to leave and I thought it was over but then I of the men said just a minute, Mrs Compson. I need to say something. I need to say that you have to shoulder some of the blame for this tragedy. Then he told a story about how a scorpion beg a ride across a raging river from a kind-hearted frog but halfway across the scorpion stung the frog and the frog said why did you do that, now we will both drown and the scorpion said it is my nature to sting and you knew I was a scorpion when you let me ride on your back.
Then the man said you picked up a scorpion Mrs Compson and he stung your little girl to death. You could have lost your son as well. You didn’t but this trommer will be with him for the rest of his life. I suggest the next time you come across a scorpion you crush it under your foot instead of giving it a ride.
My mom got all red in the face and said how dare you. I never would have put my children at risk if I knew something like this could happen. The man said you are keeping custody of young Benjamin because we can’t prove otherwise. But if you did not have warnings of Mr Russell’s violent nature, maybe only a few, maybe many, I would be very surprised.
My mother started to cry and that made me want to cry. She said you are so unfair, sitting there on your high horse. When was the last time you had to do 40 hours of sweat-labor to bring home groceries? He said this isn’t about me, Mrs Compson. You have lost one child because of poor choices, don’t lose the other. This hearing is closed.
2
At some point during that summer – his season of many identities – Billy re-reads the story of Bob Raines’s death and the hearing that followed. Then he goes to the window and looks out at the courthouse, where a sheriff’s car has pulled up to the curb. Two cops in county brown get out of the front seat. One opens the back door and they wait for the man in there to climb out. The prisoner is rangy and skinny, wearing carpenter’s jeans that bag in the seat and a bright purple sweatshirt – too hot for this day – that has the Arkansas Razorback on it. Even at five hundred yards he looks to Billy like one sad fucking sack. Each cop takes an arm and they lead him up the wide steps toward whatever justice awaits him. It’s exactly the shot Billy will have to make when (and if) the time comes, but he barely sees it. He’s thinking about his story.
He set out to tell it as the dumb self, but it turned into something else and he only realized it after reading it cold. The dumb self is there, all right, any reader (Nick and Giorgio, for instance) would say the man who wrote it sticks mostly to Star magazine, Inside View, and Archie funnybooks, but there’s something more. It’s the voice of the child self. Billy never set out to write in that voice – consciously, at least – but that’s what he did. It’s as if he has been regressed under hypnosis. Maybe that’s what writing is, when it really matters.
Does it matter? When the only people who’ll ever see it are him and a couple of Vegas hardballs who may already have lost interest?
‘It does,’ Billy says to the window. ‘Because it’s mine.’
Yes, and because it’s true. He’s changed the names a little – Cassie instead of Cathy, and his mother’s name was Darlene, not Arlene – but mostly it’s true. The child’s voice is true. That voice never had a chance to speak, not even at the hearing. He answered the questions he was asked but no one asked how it felt to hold Cathy with her crushed chest. No one asked how it felt to be told take care of your sister and fail at the most important job in the whole round world. No one asked how it felt when you held your wet hand in front of your sister’s mouth and nose, hoping even though you knew hope was gone. No one ever knew that the gun’s recoil had made him burp as if he had done no more than drink a soda fast. Not even the cop who hugged him asked those questions, and what a relief it is to let that voice speak.
He goes back to the open MacBook and sits down. Looks at the screen. He thinks, When I get to the Stepenek House part – only I’ll call it Speck House – I can let that voice be a little more grownup. Because I was a little more grownup.
Billy begins to tap the keys, slowly at first, then picking up speed. The summer rolls on around him.
3
After the hearing me and my mom went back home. We buried Cassie. I don’t know who buried the boyfriend and don’t care. In the fall I went back to school where some of the kids started calling me Bang Bang Benjy and I got held back that year. I didn’t get in trouble for fighting but I skipped school a lot and my mother said I had to smarten up if I didn’t want to get taken away and put into a foster home. I didn’t want that so next year I tried harder and passed my courses. When I got sent to Speck House it wasn’t my fault, it was my mom’s.
She started drinking heavy after Cassie died, mostly at home but sometimes she would go out to bars and sometimes bring a man home with her. To me those men all looked like the bad boyfriend, assholes in other words. I don’t know why my mother would go back to the same types of men after what happened but she did. She was like a dog that pukes and then laps it up. I know how that sounds, but I will not take it back.
Her and those men, there were three at least and maybe five, would go in the bedroom and she said they were just rassling around but of course by then I was older and knew they were fucking. Then one night when she was drinking in the trailer she went out to the 7-11 for a box of Cheezits and on her way back she got pulled over. She was charged with drunk driving and put in the jail for 24 hours. She got to keep me that time too, but she lost her license for six months and had to take the bus to the laundry.