Troubled Waters (6 page)

Evidence that will prove he wasn't the one who got them all arrested. Evidence that will change everyone's mind about him. Evidence he intends to show as soon as the sun rises.

He waits at the tree behind the museum for the one person who can help him. The cool morning air is damp with dew and the world is bright and fresh after last night's torrential rain. He pictures the scene to come, when he faces down his accusers and shows them once and for all that he wasn't the one who sold them out.

But of course he isn't stupid enough to just write it down so that anyone could understand it. He's made his own code, something only he can interpret. That way if the notebook falls into the wrong hands, it won't mean a thing.

And he's hidden it, too. The notebook isn't in his pocket or his room at home. It's safe. Secret and safe.

Kenny only wishes he felt as safe as that notebook.

He pushes aside a branch and peers through the green curtain of leaves. No one coming—yet. That's the beauty of the weeping beech. You could sit inside, covered by foliage, and no one would know you were there. The tree's like a fuckin' tent. The trunk tough as iron, smooth and gray, a perfect climbing tree. You could climb up and sit, share a joint, and talk about life, and no one in the park would know.

It's 5:40 a.m. It's good that he's early. The person he's meeting will be coming to him, coming into his tree.

At first, he was pissed at Jan for telling the others about the tree. It was theirs, this weeping beech. It was where they'd played as kids while his dad waxed the car. It was where they'd first decided to explore the mysteries of their opposite genders—you show me yours and I'll show you mine. His was still a boy's, but Jan was already beginning to grow hair on hers, and her tiny breasts were rock-hard and rosy. Good thing his dad was a serious car-waxer; he'd trembled in fear as he'd touched his cousin's titties, knowing his dad would whale the tar out of him if he'd known what his son was doing beneath the green canopy.

But it was worth it, oh yes, and so was the first hand-rolled cigarette his cousin had offered him underneath these very leaves. He'd taken it the way he'd seen grownups handle tobacco cigarettes, and Jan had laughed at him. She'd shown him how to hold a joint, how to suck in the smoke and keep it in the lungs, taking in the heady perfume. He'd giggled and she'd giggled watching him giggle; they'd fallen on the ground like two fools and once again his boy-dirty hands had reached under her faded T-shirt to fumble with her green-apple tits.

The voice from below startles him; he's been so caught up in the past, he's forgotten to keep watch. He looks down. It still feels odd to see other faces inside the great green tree; after Jan shared their childhood hiding place with the others, it became a general meeting place—and, he suspects, a fucking place as well.

He scrambles down the branches and says, “Have I got something to tell you. Wait till you hear this.”

His companion reaches into a jeans pocket and pulls out a crumpled joint. He clamps it into a hemostat and says, “Let's have a little hit first.”

Turning down a hit is uncool. At only sixteen, Kenny Gebhardt lives in fear of the uncool response. He shrugs and slips his fingers into the handle. He lets his visitor light the tightly rolled end and sucks in a huge lungful of smoke. He chokes, his eyes widen, he grabs his throat—and then he falls, paralyzed, onto the ground beneath the tree. He gasps for air, his face turning blue, his fingers clutching at his neck as though to rip open an airway. His legs twitch and kick, hitting the ground like a drum tattoo. A dark spot appears on the front of his jeans.

The struggling stops. His body convulses and lies still.

His companion looks over the scene, nods once, and then walks out of the tree canopy into the rising sunlight.

“We have to talk,” says Ron. It's six o'clock in the morning. Neither slept well, and both found themselves in the communal kitchen, where Cass made cups of instant coffee.

Cass nods; misery envelopes her, especially when she thinks about Ron. “Not here,” she says, glancing around the porch of the White House as if the ghosts of the other students still sat in their accustomed places, ready to eavesdrop. “Let's go to the tree.”

Ron nods. They walk toward the huge weeping beech in the little park behind the art museum. “Listen, I—” Cass begins.

At the same time, Ron's deeper voice says, “It wasn't your fault, Cassie.”

Cass turns hot, teary eyes on her brother and demands, “Wasn't it? Would you have gone along with it if I hadn't pushed? If I hadn't been so fucking militant?”

“Hey, who knows?” His smile is the tender one she recalls from years of little sisterhood. “I have an ideal or two of my own, you know.”

Tears overwhelm her. A convulsive sob grabs her throat. She begins to run, jerkily at first, then gaining speed. The tree, she has to get to the tree. Wrapped in its protective leafy arms, she can sob out all her pain and guilt.

Tears whip her cheeks. Ron's sneakered feet echo behind her; he could easily catch up, but he lets her take the lead. At the tree, she will beg forgiveness for what may not be forgivable.

A sharp pain stabs her side as she reaches the park. It slows but doesn't stop her; she pumps her legs harder as the tree comes into view. The treehouse from
Green Mansions
comes to mind as she races toward the inviting canopy of leaves; she is Rima the bird girl, heading home at last.

She reaches the tree and grasps a strong gray branch in one hand as she catches her breath and waits for her brother. She pushes a fist into the place in her side where the stitch still hurts. Her breath comes in panting, heaving sobs. As Ron comes closer, she parts the branches and steps into the cool world beneath the canopy of leaves.

Kenny lies on the ground. Sleeping? But—

What was he doing in her tree, anyway? She steps forward, about to wake him, then steps back with a cry. Kenny's face is blue, his body still as a doll's. He can't possibly be alive.

She raises her hands to her mouth and stifles a scream. “He killed himself,” she whispers. But then something strikes her. She looks at the area around the body—the only way she can look at it is to think of Kenny as “the body”—and sees no glass, no bottle of pills, no means of ingesting poison. No hemostat, although she has no way of knowing that one is missing.

Ron reaches her and grabs her by the shoulders. “Don't get any closer.” He steps past her and blocks her view. “I think it was parathion. If we so much as touch him, we could be dead too.”

C
HAPTER
F
IVE

As always, it was the chair I noticed first. Not the smile on the bearded face or the warm welcome in the brown eyes, so like mine and yet so different. Not even the startling increase of gray in hair and beard caught my initial attention. Instead, my eyes traveled first to the wide rubber wheels, then up to the strap that secured the twisted torso in place, finally to the hand and breath controls on the armrests. Even to me, my brother
was
his chair.

It still gave me a jolt to see Ron's basketball player's body folded like a carpenter's rule into the ugly hunk of metal that made his life possible. I pasted on a smile and tried to act as if meeting my brother in federal court were an everyday occurrence.

I knelt next to the rubber wheels and said the first words that entered my head. “You could've stayed in Cleveland and fought extradition. You didn't have to make it easy for them.”

“It's good to see you, too,” Ron said with a wry smile. I put my arms around his shoulders and hugged hard, steeling myself against the realization that he wouldn't hug back.

He leaned down and brushed his lips against my cheek. His beard tickled my face.

“Cass, it was nice of you to come,” Ron said, “but Harve Sobel is my lawyer.”

“Not anymore he isn't,” I retorted. “Haven't you ever heard of conflict of interest?” Without waiting for an answer, I went on. “Maybe it was okay for you both to have the same lawyer back in '82, but with Jan facing new charges, Harve should keep Jan and I'll represent you.”

“The reason I waived extradition and had Zack drive me here from Cleveland,” Ron said, replying to the question I'd all but forgotten I'd asked, “is that they'd have won eventually, so why drag it out? Besides,” he added in a tone just a shade too firm, “I wanted to be here for Jan.”

“Jan!” All the pent-up rage I'd been feeling since I first saw her on the news exploded. “I can't believe she talked you into this in the first place, let alone running away when things got heavy. I can't believe she used you. I—”

“Cass.” Ron's tone was commanding. “If you don't stop talking about Jan like that, I'll get another lawyer. Maybe it won't be Harve, but it won't be you either unless you shut up. Got that?”

Ron's face was red, blood pounding to his head. He strained forward in his chair, chest pressing against the strap that held him in place. His hands made claw motions that didn't seem entirely planned.

There were a number of things I would have liked to say, starting with the fact that I for one had been hoping Jan had overdosed years ago and lay buried in an unmarked grave instead of popping up like a zombie in
Night of the Living Dead
, dragging Ron and me back to Toledo and all of us back into the sixties.

I didn't say it. I thought about Ron and Jan the way they were in the summer of '69 and I said nothing. If Jan still had the power to bring out a protective masculinity in my brother, so be it. So be it as long as it didn't get in the way of what I had to do in court, which was to put as much distance as possible between Ron and what Jan had done.

“Did they let you see her?”

“No,” he replied. “Not yet. But Dana said Harve saw her and that she was ready to face whatever happens in court today.”

“She'd better be,” I muttered. I had no doubt that the court was prepared to take a hard line against a woman who'd killed a federal law enforcement officer and then gone underground. My only concern was that whatever anger the prosecutor and judge had toward Jan wouldn't spill over onto Ron. It was my job to make sure that didn't happen.

A burly man in a Harley-Davidson T-shirt and black jeans stepped up to Ron's chair. He was carrying a cardboard tray of cellophane-wrapped pastries and three cups of steaming coffee.

I guessed he was the latest and best in a long line of home attendants. Stories about him had filled Ron's letters for almost a year, although we'd never met. I tended to blitz in to Cleveland every Christmas, bearing a Jon Vie chocolate cake and presents from the Museum of Modern Art. I knew only as much about my brother's life as I could learn in three or four days.

Fortunately, Ron's letters prepared me for the burly man who extended a beefy hand connected to a tattooed arm. “John Zachowicz,” he said. “But call me Zack, okay?”

I let my hand be swallowed in the big man's grasp, trying not to stare at the tattoo on the hairy arm: a devil's face superimposed with the words “Born to Raise Hell.” Wasn't that the sentiment Richard Speck had on his arm when he murdered eight nurses in Chicago? I consoled myself with the knowledge that the other arm read “Jesus Saves.”

Like Ron, Zack was a Vietnam vet. Unlike Ron, he'd been a “lurp,” a long-range reconnaissance patrol sniper who'd spent too much time in what Ron called “the bad boonies.” He'd gone from the jungle to a biker gang, from a perpetual marijuana haze to a hard-core heroin habit, from drug rehab to born-again Christianity.

“Bought some sweet rolls,” Zack said. He set the cardboard tray on a wooden bench next to Ron's chair. I was back in the Midwest; Danishes were sweet rolls, soda was pop, and I'd better not ask for an egg cream. I sat down on the bench and opened one of the coffees.

Zack opened a pastry and cut it with a plastic knife. When he had a pile of kid-sized pieces on the cellophane, he set them on Ron's lap. My brother moved his hand slowly toward the pieces, took one, dropped it, picked it up and finally succeeded in conveying it to his mouth. I could have eaten a whole Danish in the time it took him to take one bite.

Zack opened a straw and placed it into one of the coffees. He held the coffee under Ron's chin and Ron took a sip. “Hot,” he said. “Let it sit a minute, okay?” Zack set the cup on the bench next to me.

“Look in the bag,” Ron said, tilting his head to the right. I focused on the canvas book bag I'd given him five Christmases ago. I leaned down and pulled out a manila envelope. “You mean this?”

Ron nodded, a barely concealed grin of anticipation on his face.

Even before I opened it, I knew what it was. A photograph. I steeled myself to look into faces from the past.

But the picture wasn't a snapshot of old buddies. I held the eight-by-ten black-and-white glossy on my lap, taking care to keep my fingers at the edges so I wouldn't smudge the shiny surface.

It was a typical northwest Ohio landscape. Rows and rows of beet greens, as straight and narrow as a Presbyterian conscience, being hoed by hunched-over migrant workers wearing big straw hats. A short distance away, under an elm tree, stood a rickety baby carriage. Next to the carriage, her round face beaming, stood four-year-old Belita Navarro.

The picture was hand-printed and dried far too hastily on an ancient print-dryer. I knew because I'd printed it, back in the summer of '69. Printed it and given a copy to Ted Havlicek, who managed to get it published in the local section of the
Blade
.

“You kept it.” My voice was a whisper, barely there at all.

“Hey, it was my sister's first published photograph.”

“It was your sister's only published photograph.”

“I didn't know that then, did I?” Ron's voice was lazy, teasing. “The way you carried that camera everywhere you went, I thought you were going to be the next—I don't know who. But famous.”