It’s snowing again. Steady. Temperature has dropped a couple of degrees, and he starts shivering immediately. Why did he leave his jacket in the truck? The cold is good, though. Wakes him up. He can taste the sourness of the beer still. Knows he shouldn’t be driving, but figures it’s fine given his weight. Won’t get stopped twice in one night anyway, will I? Why didn’t he skip the party, stay home with his sister, his mom, David John? Because he wants to see Deanne. She makes it all worth it.
He walks past parked car after parked car. The neat line of cars and SUVs clogged up, cars on either side of the driveway now, two wheels on snow-covered asphalt, two wheels on the grass. He won’t be surprised if somebody on the downhill side of the driveway ends up getting stuck in the grass.
There’s a quarter inch of snow coating the windshield of his truck. He pulls his jacket and gloves off the passenger seat and starts the truck. The heater’s cranky. Won’t be blasting on him until he’s halfway to Deanne’s. The windshield wipers do a crappy job of clearing the snow. Iced up on the glass. He grabs his scraper, glad of the gloves. They’re thin, but better than nothing.
He mostly has the windshield cleaned off when he sees the headlights. He doesn’t know how he knows it’s Corson, but he knows it as sure as he’s been sure of anything. The car, a dark-colored sedan, pulls over and slides to a stop in the grass across the road, nose at an angle, pointed down at the edge of the steep slope that leads toward the trees. Corson puts it in park and sets the brake. The car is ten feet ahead of Jessup, but off to the side, out of his way.
Corson gets out of the car. With the door open, the interior lights show that he’s on his own, and though Jessup knows he could take him in a fight, he can’t stomach the idea. He just feels tired. Tired of all of it. All he wants to do is see Deanne. All he wants to do is feel her body against his. He wants to tell her that he loves her.
Corson is moving slowly and deliberately. Trying not to act drunk. It gives Jessup plenty of time. He’s feeling like he’s sobered up. He hops into the truck, closes and locks the door. He rolls down the window, though.
“Not interested.”
Corson either hears him or he doesn’t, but he doesn’t acknowledge Jessup’s voice. Doesn’t change course, either. Walks right past Jessup to the back of the truck. Jessup puts it in gear, but before he takes his foot off the brake and starts moving, he feels the hard thud, hears the crunch of Corson’s boot. Asshole is kicking the truck again. Same place. The plastic lens over the brake light brittle, the thin crunch of metal. He looks in the side mirror and sees a shadow moving, Corson coming toward the cab of the truck.
Jessup stomps down on the gas. He spins the wheel hard, angry. He cannot pull away from the house fast enough. The truck lurches forward. A bee-stung horse. Snow and ice spit out from under the wheels, like a curse from a teacher’s mouth, like buckshot scattering through the air and bloodying the breast of a duck flushed from the water. The back end of the pickup, light and bouncy, skids wide and loose.
When it happens, he feels the sound of the impact as much as he hears it: like a soda can crushed by a stomped foot. But it’s two distinct sounds: the heavy thud of the boot and the gossamer crinkle of metal folding on itself.
Except the sound does not come from a soda can crushed by a foot. He knows what it is immediately. He stomps hard on the brake pedal, the truck stopping as violently as it started. He sits. The stereo is loud in the stillness, so he thumbs it off, but the windshield wipers squeak, so he turns them off, too, and then stops the motor.
It is too quiet. If everything were going to be okay, there would be a word. A voice. A sound. Something. Anything. But the only sound he can hear is an echo, a memory, the undertone that came with the thud and crumple of metal: the inevitable weakness of a body. He wishes it had simply been an empty soda can. But he knows it was a human being.
He gets out of the truck. He moves as slowly as he can force himself to.
He hit a deer once, more than a year ago, not long after he got the truck running, but that was different. The animal bounded out in front of him. Dumb-eyed and desperate. He barely had time to touch the brake before his fender tore open the deer’s belly. When he stopped the truck and walked back to where the deer was crumpled on the shoulder, it was still alive. A sort of miracle.
But the wrong sort of miracle. Guts spilled onto the asphalt, the slow sodium light of the streetlights washing everything down. The doe’s breath a desperate whistle of blood. Her right hind leg scraping weakly against the ground as if she was still trying to stand. He watched her like this for a minute or two and then went back to his truck. If he’d had his hunting knife with him, he could have been merciful, but there was nothing to do other than head home to hose off the blood and gore. He had to use a pair of pliers to fish out a chunk of the doe’s skin that was lodged in the creased fender.
Now he walks the long way around the front of the truck, touching the hood and then looking at the memory of the deer imprinted on the front fender; the metal still bears an ugly kiss.
When he has made his way around the truck, he looks. The body is ten, twenty feet behind the bed of the truck. He knows it is a person, but in the shadows and the false light coming from the house, it could be anything else. He wants it to be anything else. A soda can. A doe. But it is, and always will be, stubbornly, a dead body.
He’s even with Corson’s car now. The door is still open. The car is running, the soft chime of a warning that the key is in the ignition. The sound is elegant, and Jessup can’t help but notice it’s a Mercedes. He closes the door, the chiming stops.
He’s still shivering, but he doesn’t feel cold anymore. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out his phone.
Can he call the cops? Thinks of Ricky. Thinks of David John. Ricky in the alley, didn’t do anything wrong. Doing twenty years for defending himself. Jessup is only seventeen. The scholarship from Duke. The chance to go to Cortaca, Yale, anywhere. All of that gone. His whole fucking life sucked into a whirlpool, like his brother and his stepfather are reaching up from the depths of the ocean to pull him down.
He’s breathing fast. Gasping in air. Wind sprints. Dizzy from the heat during two-a-days. The smell of the mats in the wrestling room, head smashing into the ground on a bad takedown, three weeks keeping his headaches and the nausea hidden from his mom. Sprint training during track season, hundred meters on, hundred meters off, run until he pukes.
He’s squatting. One gloved hand on the ground in front of him, bracing himself. Doesn’t remember squatting.
Looks back at the house. It’s a jewel box, sparkling in the night. Only a few windows peer out over the driveway, and they are empty. Nobody looking out, and even if they are, too far away, not enough light to see him, to see what he has wrought. He catches a gentle burst of music, and then it’s cut off again, somebody going out onto the porch, closing the door behind them. Follows the line of the driveway with his eyes, sees the ribbon of light turn to darkness, and there, on the snow-covered asphalt, the deeper darkness of Corson’s body.
He feels his phone buzz and he stands up and pulls it from his pocket. Looks at the message on the lock screen:
never mind about diner. told m and b we will see them tomorrow. want to go somewhere private instead. just the two of us. come get me!
Can’t think. Doesn’t unlock the phone. Just puts it back in his pocket.
Too young, they’ll try him as a juvie. But he’s seventeen. Is that close enough to be tried as an adult? And there’s Ricky and David John, all that history. The mayor calling for a hate crime investigation. The prosecutor trying to make up lost ground. There are no accidents. Not in this world. Nobody will believe it was an accident. He’ll be an old man by the time he’s out.
He looks again at Corson’s car. It’s angled a bit, the nose pointed down the slope. Clear line to the woods, forty, fifty yards. The trees a dark mass. No lights down there. The clouds hiding the moon, the snow a thin curtain making the house seem hazy in the distance.
He walks toward Corson, keeping an eye on the house. The entire house is built to take advantage of the views of Cortaca, the lake, the university, not to look out over the driveway.
He gets to the body and steels himself. It can’t be worse than a deer: split the skin, slide the knife, the blood hot on your hands, the smell like nothing else.
But Corson is whole.
Nothing spilling out of him. If it weren’t for the way his neck is bent, the dent in his skull, for the utter stillness of Corson’s body, Jessup would think he was simply sleeping.
Somehow, that’s worse.
Jessup is suddenly overcome, runs and stumbles off the side of the driveway, falls to his knees, heaving. He empties his stomach once and then once again, a mix of puke and snot and he’s crying and gasping, and he has the image in his mind of Corson on the sideline after the hit, puking, too.
He can feel the wetness of the snow leaching through the knees of his jeans, his thin gloves, and he scoops a clean handful up and uses it to wipe off his face. The sour taste of sick echoes in his mouth and throat.
Slowly, unaccountably afraid that Corson will suddenly shudder back to life, he approaches the body. He nudges him with his toe. Nothing.
“It was a clean hit,” Jessup says. Or he thinks he says it. He gives Corson’s chest a soft tap with his boot, and says, clearly, deliberately, “It was a clean hit.”
A bang-bang play. Muscle memory and reaction. The ball and then Jessup’s shoulder into Corson’s sternum. The sound of the hit an echo still in Jessup’s head. He didn’t do anything wrong. Nothing to deserve this. Nothing to deserve Corson kicking his taillight in, nothing to deserve Corson calling him out at the party, nothing but bad luck rolling over on Jessup. He knows he didn’t do anything wrong, but he knows that’s not how the world works.
Ricky didn’t do anything wrong either. Changing into his Dickies work shirt in an alley, doing things the right way. People out there sucking off the government’s tit when good white people are working their asses off, that’s what Wyatt says, Ricky leaving his girlfriend’s in the middle of the night to wade in literal shit with David John so that the fine people of Cortaca can eat out without having to worry about what happens when they flush the toilet. Ricky minding his own goddamned business when Jermane Holmes and Blake Liveson jump him. Ricky taking a bottle of beer across the face and then facing off two black kids. If he hadn’t grabbed that pipe wrench, what then? Wyatt asks. It would have been Ricky laid out on the cement, Jessup and Jewel and David John and Cindy crying over a cheap casket, and Holmes and Liveson’s parents ponying up for the fanciest lawyers money can buy.
Bad luck. Bad timing. If Ricky had his shirt on thirty seconds earlier, if he’d lingered in bed with his girlfriend, Stacey, for another minute or two, Liveson and Holmes would have walked on by. Instead of spending twenty years locked away, right now Ricky would be married, Stacey popping out a boy, Jessup an uncle, David John never gone, the business doing well enough that Ricky could have his own van, money for Jessup’s mom to fill her gas tank until the handle clicked off, instead of paying for two gallons at a time. And Jessup wouldn’t be standing here, over the body of a dead black boy.
He can’t call the cops. He knows that. They’ll never believe it was an accident. And if he just drives away, what then? Somebody will find the body soon enough, and then there will be all kinds of fingers pointing at him. He can’t just leave Corson’s body here on the driveway.
He knows what he has to do, but he hesitates. No going back from it.
But he knows he doesn’t really have a choice.
Sink or swim.
Jessup dimly realizes that Corson’s skin is still warm enough to melt the falling snow—his face is wet, but there’s a crust of snow gathering on his clothes. Jessup grabs the collar of Corson’s jacket—his Kilton Valley letter jacket—with one gloved hand and reaches under his armpit with his other hand. Corson is solid. Dead weight. Literally, Jessup thinks, and he has to stifle a laugh. It’s not funny, but he can’t stop himself from snickering.
Jesus Christ, if this were Texas, they’d give him the chair for this. No. Not for this. Not for a black kid. Not in Texas.
But this isn’t Texas. It’s Cortaca.
No way for Jessup to say it was just an accident tonight, Corson was drunk, Corson was kicking his truck and all Jessup tried to do was drive away, nothing malicious; that’s not something anybody will believe.
The hardest part is getting Corson’s body into the car. Jessup opens the door back up and then ends up hoisting Corson onto his shoulder and dumping him into the driver’s seat, straightening him up. He tries shifting the car into neutral, but the lever won’t move. Brake pedal. Have to push down on the brake pedal. He shoves his foot in, his leg sliding over Corson’s, but then he stops. The car is on. Will the air bag go off if the car is on? Will the car brake on its own? This is the type of expensive car that has collision avoidance, all the bells and whistles. Jessup pushes down on the brake pedal, shifts it into neutral, and then he turns off the car. The air bag might still go off, but it will roll free with the engine off, won’t it?
He jumps back and slams the door shut, but nothing happens. The car might as well be a rock.
Parking brake. He opens the door again.
As soon as the parking brake is off, the car starts to move, slowly at first, slow enough for Jessup to close the door and stand back, but then it starts gathering speed, down the hill, the slope getting steeper with every foot the car moves. Jessup figures it’s going close to fifty miles per hour by the time it hits the trees.
He’s surprised by how quiet it is. There’s a metallic disturbance, glass breaking, but it barely carries to him. With the music and people talking, they won’t hear it on the deck.
He realizes he’s just standing there, staring at the woods. He can’t see the car. Can’t see anything. The trees are a dark mass, swallowing everything. An absence in the night.
He waits for another few seconds, but there’s no sound or movement from the house. He could be in another universe. It’s possible none of this ever happened.
His phone buzzes again. He looks at the time. It’s only been a couple of minutes since he walked out. How did time move so slowly? It’s the same message on the lock screen, insistent, reminding him that he hasn’t replied, demanding his attention:
never mind about diner. told m and b we will see them tomorrow. want to go somewhere private instead. just the two of us. come get me!
All he wanted to do after the game was see her, but after what has just happened, he doesn’t know if he. . . .
come get me!
He can’t go home. Not right now. It’s been, what, five minutes since he walked out of the party? Less? Everybody saw him leave. There’s the picture with the guys from the team, and that’s posted online, easy to confirm date and time. And the texts from Deanne. Only a small, small window for what happened with Corson. Everything that happened, his whole life out the window, three minutes since Corson rolled up? All he has to do is account for that small gap of time. All he has to do is be able to say that he had nothing to do with it, that everybody saw Corson drinking, what does it matter if he and I were arguing, the guy drives drunk and bad things happen, his girlfriend and buddies trying to get the keys off him but they’re the ones who let him drive away, so how is that my fault, and besides, I was here and then I was with my girlfriend, no, what happened with Corson was the obvious, a tragic accident, a lesson to all the other kids out there about the perils of alcohol, and what does that have to do with me? But if he goes home, there’s the whole night wide open, hours and hours when anything could have happened. If he picks up Deanne, then every minute is accounted for. That’s what he tells himself, but it’s not true. What’s true is that he wants to see her.
come get me!
Needs to see her.
already on my way. snow sucks. slow driving
don’t text while you’re driving
I’ll text when I get there
Jessup gets back in his truck and drives away.