Eight years ago, the news said the Shell station owner found the boys’ bodies when he arrived at work. Said one was sexually assaulted. Quoted a police detective who reported that the assailant bit them both and shot them, once each, in the forehead. Said they were Duane Bronson, age fifteen, and his little brother, Steven Bronson, age thirteen, out for a joyride. Single mother. Minor juvenile records. Said anyone who’d seen anything should call the Sheriff’s Office.
I’d seen something. Christ, I’d given them a ride to the station.
I called the number.
Responsible one that I was. Answering the door when I didn’t know who was knocking. Never afraid of the worm that might crawl into my ear when I picked up the phone. Fool that I was.
Officers would send a car to pick me up, the man said. No need to drive myself. A quick conversation, that was all. They appreciated my cooperation.
Sometime during the second night, I didn’t became I did.
Dream logic.
The big, tall, white detective with black hair always knew it. The black detective with a moustache always knew. The woman cop who brought me coffee, though I didn’t drink coffee, always knew it too.
I was the only one who doubted it.
Like I didn’t get the joke.
Say it, goddamn it, the moustache said.
Say it, goddamn it, the black hair said.
Please say it, the woman cop said.
For thirty-eight hours I didn’t say it. And then I did. I said it.
I knew it, the black hair said.
So I caught my breath and backtracked. I didn’t do it.
You did, said the black hair.
I didn’t, I said.
‘Help us out,’ the black-haired man said when I first sat down in the interview room. His name – Detective Bill Higby. He said, ‘You were there. You had your dad’s rifle in the trunk. Help us understand what happened.’
‘I wasn’t there. I gave them a ride. I left.’
‘It was raining,’ he said. ‘It was dark. It was two in the morning.’
‘Three.’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘What happened next? Imagine what happened.’
‘Nothing to imagine. They got out of the car. I drove away.’
‘Imagine what happened to them after you left.’
‘Should I have a lawyer?’ I asked. Not always a fool.
‘Sure. We’ll get you one. But this first.’
‘I imagine … they went to the pay phone. Tried to call someone for a ride.’
‘But the pay phone was broken,’ he said.
‘I didn’t know that.’
‘Of course you didn’t. What did they do next? What did you do?’
‘I didn’t do anything. I was gone.’
‘Imagine what they did,’ he said.
‘They waited. What else was there to do?’
‘Where? Where at the station did they wait?’
‘Somewhere in the light?’ I said. ‘Maybe they sat by the door to the minimart? The overhang would keep them dry.’
‘A couple of kids who snuck out while their mom was sleeping?’ he asked. ‘And stole her car? They would sit in the open where everyone could see them?’
‘OK, so they would sit in the dark.’
‘Where?’
‘I don’t know. Wherever it was dark. Behind the station.’
‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘That’s very good. And what did they do while they sat there?’
‘I don’t know.’ Then I remembered the smell of wet cigarette smoke as I drove them to the gas station. ‘They would smoke. Talk and smoke and wait for morning.’
‘Right again.’ Broad smile under all that black hair. ‘We found the cigarette butts,’ he said. ‘You’re good. You could do my job for me. What next? What happened next?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Of course you do.’
‘Someone came?’
‘Or someone never left,’ he said.
‘I left,’ I said.
‘Of course you did. And tell me – imagine it – how did those boys die?’
And hours later, after the pinnings to the wall, after the proddings and pokings and the dream logic, when they told me again to talk, I talked and I talked and I talked – crazy responsible fool that I was – and I said, ‘I did it.’
Funny thing – my teachers always called me smart. ‘You’re smarter than that,’ they told me. And when they called Dad in for a conference, they said, ‘Your son is smart. But his thinking lacks structure.’
Dad told them, ‘He’s school smart but world foolish. He’s got no common sense. I tell him all the time—’
The teachers interrupted before he buried me too deep. ‘We would be happy with academic improvement. With more application—’
‘And a lot more common sense,’ he said – this man who drank himself out of every job he ever held and chased his wife out of his arms.
‘Do you have anything to add?’ the teachers asked me.
I looked at Dad and said, ‘It takes one to know—’ until he raised his hand to hit me.
‘Enough of that,’ the teachers said.
‘He’s too smart for my liking,’ Dad would say.
And that was that until the next time they called him in.
They kept me in the county lockup for seven months while the court scheduled, delayed, and rescheduled. My public defender, Lance Stoddard, came to see me when he could and assured me he had all the evidence lined up so he could knock down the prosecution. I should relax and stop asking to meet so often, because our meetings took time away from his building my defense. I wanted to believe him. I needed to. But each time he came to see me, he seemed to know less about my case.
So when they took me out of the county jail and into the courtroom, and Lance started his opening argument by sputtering and looking to the judge for help, I knew I was screwed. When the prosecution showed slides of my fingerprints on the car battery from Steven and Duane Bronson’s Cavalier, and Lance failed to tell the jurors how I tried to help the boys with their radiator, I thought again, I’m screwed. When the prosecution showed slides of the boys’ fingerprints from inside my car, and Lance argued that I should be praised for being a good Samaritan instead of accused of murder, I thought, I’m still probably screwed. When the prosecutor said that the boys each died from a single gunshot into the forehead, that the bullets were twenty-two caliber, that I had a .22 rifle in my car trunk, and that ballistics showed that my gun could have fired the bullets – and then Lance failed to argue that could have was insufficient in a murder trial – I thought, Yep, screwed. When the prosecution hung up two pairs of white Fruit of the Loom underwear, one of them threadbare and smeared with blood, and Lance failed to ask why the hell the other pair was even relevant, I thought, Oh, no. When the prosecution demonstrated that the blood on Duane Bronson’s T-shirt matched my own, and then Lance tangled himself up in an explanation that confused even me, I thought, Oh shit. But when the prosecution showed pictures of Steven’s and Duane’s bodies with the bite marks on them and then introduced an expert who said the marks matched my dental alignment – and Lance looked at me as if this was the first he’d heard about the bites – I knew I should start thumping my veins for the lethal injection.
But all the way to the verdict, Lance said he expected the jury to rule against the state. And, after the guilty verdict, he said no jury would sentence an eighteen-year-old to death.
He lined up three character witnesses. Dad came in a gray suit but never looked at me from the witness stand. He had tears in his eyes, though, and he brought tears to mine as he explained the difficulty of raising two sons as a single parent and said he knew me only as a loving son. Jared wore a suit too, and he said we grew up side by side after the death of our mother. He told a story about a Christmas week when we were the ages of the Bronson boys and, along with Dad, we hiked and played in the snow around a rented cabin that backed up to the Cartecay River in the northern Georgia mountains. If the jury believed his version of that story, we’d lived a happy, wholesome life. Last, my freshman track coach, Ernie Kagen, came to the stand in a green sport coat, khakis, and loafers. He told the jurors that four years earlier he kicked me off the team a week before the season ended because I missed too many practices and seemed to lack commitment, but he’d never seen greater raw talent in a young long-distance runner. He regretted that I graduated from high school without ever returning to the team. ‘What a waste,’ he said, as he finished. ‘What a waste of a life.’
Overall, I figured the testimony did me more good than harm, but I needed much more than that. The jurors came back after forty-five minutes and told the judge I should die.
On the night after the sentencing, although I knew a van would come the next day to take me to the state prison, I slept more soundly than I’d slept since I went to talk to Higby about what I saw when I picked up and dropped off the boys on Monument Road. I dreamed of the Christmas-week vacation that Jared had described on the stand.
At that time, Dad was trying, on and off, to break his drinking habit. One night, he stumbled in and looked at Jared and me as if he’d finally blown a fuse and his brain had just stopped. Flecks of spit hung on his chin. He said, ‘That’s it,’ as if he’d made a big decision. Then he stumbled to the couch and passed out.
The next morning when I got up, he was cooking breakfast. He’d never before cooked us breakfast. I did remember him vomiting at the smell of scrambled eggs after a hard night. But this morning he chewed a piece of toast and laid strips of bacon in a skillet.
I stood in the doorway and watched. He hummed while he cooked. Hummed. He’d shaved and showered, and he’d slicked his wet hair back over his head.
When he saw me watching, he waved at the table for me to sit. ‘Good, good, good,’ he said. ‘That’s good.’
He brought a platter of eggs to the table and spooned some on to a plate. He jabbered about this and that and went to the toaster to put down the bread. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘I know what it is. I’ve been doing it all wrong. You’ve seen it, right?’ He laughed to himself as if he’d figured out a puzzle that everyone else in the room had given up on. ‘It’s this stinking air,’ he said. ‘That’s part of it. Standing water. Swamps. The damned paper mills pumping poison into the air. The damned Maxwell House plant. The damned brewery. You never thought you’d hear me say that, did you?’ He laughed. ‘The damned brewery. The goddamned brewery. Goddamned Anheuser-Busch.’
I asked, ‘Did they fire you?’ He’d worked for the past ten months as an electrician there.
He stared at me. ‘Of course not. I’m just tired of this town. The fumes. The gasses on the ground in the morning. I’m sick of it.’
‘You can’t not breathe,’ I said.
‘Nope,’ he said. ‘You can’t not breathe. And that’s the problem. Part of it. That’s why we’re getting out of here.’
Jared stepped into the doorway, his hair messy, sleep in his eyes. ‘What are you talking about?’
Dad’s face gleamed. You hear about florid drunks, and he was like that – but this morning he was sober. ‘Road trip,’ he said. ‘To the mountains. Northern Georgia. Clear air up in the mountains.’
‘Did you get fired?’ Jared asked.
‘No, goddamn it, I did not get fired,’ Dad said.
‘Then, what’s wrong with you?’ Jared said.
I wanted to tell him to shut up before Dad changed his mind, but Dad said, ‘For the first time in a long time, everything is right. I came in last night and I looked at the two of you, and do you know what I saw?’
‘Child neglect?’ Jared said.
If Dad had been drunk, that might’ve gotten Jared a black eye. But Dad just smiled. ‘I saw two young men. My boys are growing up. And if you want to know the truth, that scared me. Made me think straight.’
‘Nothing straight about you last night,’ Jared said.
The toast popped up, and Dad buttered a piece for me and a piece for Jared. ‘I got to thinking. This place has dragged on us. Ever since your mother died.’
‘It took you until now to figure that out?’ Jared said.
‘You know what’s been missing?’ Dad said. ‘Love. I mean, I’ve loved you boys as well as I could. I’ve tried. But this is a bad place.’
‘We know who made it this way,’ Jared said.
‘Sit down and eat,’ Dad said. ‘And then pack a bag. We’re going to the mountains.’
So, after breakfast, we drove north into Georgia, up through Waycross and Tifton, then Macon and Atlanta. We headed toward the national forest that spanned the Georgia–Tennessee border.
We rented an off-season cabin, and the air was cold and sharp on our lungs and smelled like pine and the frozen rot of fallen leaves. For three days we hiked the paths at the southern end of the Appalachian Trail, and at night we built log fires in the fireplace. When we woke on the fourth morning, the wind was blowing and snow was falling. Dad, who’d slept in pajama bottoms and nothing else, laughed and ran outside and danced like a mad man in the blizzard. Jared and I got dressed and went outside with him. We threw snowballs and stared up at the blinding white sky, and we were happy – so happy I almost forgot what sadness felt like.
When we went back inside, Dad’s belly and back were pink and wet, and he’d bloodied the bottoms of his feet by dancing on the sharp mountain stones. But he still laughed and said, ‘My feet are too frozen to feel the pain.’
We stayed in the cabin that day and the next because the hiking paths were slick with ice, and on the third day we cut our walk short, but in the car on our way back to the cabin, Dad said, ‘You see what I mean now? The air is good.’
‘I see,’ I said.
‘Sure,’ Jared said, as if he was starting to hope it was true.
‘It’s good,’ Dad said. ‘Life is good.’
‘The higher you fly, the farther you fall,’ Jared said.
‘Don’t talk that way,’ Dad said. ‘Don’t even think it.’
But Jared was right. Some infections get into the bone. You can take medicine and knock them down for a while. You can feel good enough to go out and dance. But the sickness roars back sooner or later. Dad’s infection was like that. His life was.
On this trip, it came back in the shape of a waitress who served us at a diner on the morning before Christmas Eve.
Dad’s face paled when she poured his coffee, and when she left our table, he said, ‘Jesus Christ. Doesn’t she look like your mother?’
‘No,’ Jared said, ‘she doesn’t.’ There was fear in his voice because he knew what was coming.
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Dad said.
‘I remember Mom a little,’ he said. ‘And I’ve seen pictures.’
‘You were three years old,’ Dad said, ‘and pictures never catch the whole person. Not your mother, anyway.’
‘Mom’s whole person looked like a worn-out Georgia waitress?’
‘I’m telling you, she looked like her.’
We spent an hour and a half at the diner, and when we left, Dad had the woman’s phone number and her promise to meet him for a date that night.
‘What do you all do around here for fun?’ he asked her.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘there’s a bar called Pete’s Haven where some of us hang out.’
‘Oh, shit,’ Jared said.
‘I’ll see you at eight,’ Dad said.
Back at the cabin, he promised he wouldn’t drink. But we knew he was lying – and knew that he knew it too – and when the snow started falling again in the afternoon and he glanced at Jared and me as if he was made of mischief, and took off his shirt and kicked off his shoes and ran to the door, Jared said he didn’t feel like it and I said I didn’t either.
And that was that.
In the county lockup on the night that the jury and judge sentenced me to death, I dreamed of the trip to northern Georgia, and when the van came to take me to the state prison in Raiford the next morning, I closed my eyes and pretended I was riding toward snow-covered mountains.