Subscribe To
This Site
Short Story- Jake and the Price of Cool - pg 4A week later, and I got a call which brought me to the police station to make my statement. Not that I could be much help; besides the ski trip, I hadn't even been in the area for the couple of days before. It was the long weekend, and I had been holed up for the most part with my reading list and my story boards. What could I tell them that they couldn't have found out from anyone? I figured that Chuck had mentioned me, or that someone had seen me holding his hand as they brought his son's body out of the woods and laid him, cold as the ground, on the stretcher. The ambulance cut brown swathes through the white of the snow. I wondered if we'd be able to tell where everything had happened when the spring came. But I wasn't going to be let off with a simple little statement. The officer who took my name raised an eyebrow at it, flipped up a list from a stack of papers, and told me to wait. A short but interminably tense time later, I found myself in a frightening box-room in front of a desk with a lamp on it I kept expecting them to turn in my face. There was a mirror on the wall in front of me, so I knew I was being watched by more than the two guys in the room. I felt like asking why I couldn't have a female officer present, but that was stupid, and a nervous thing. I didn't care if I was talking to a woman or a man. I just wanted to know what was happening. They showed me a cassette tape, this random old school thing. I mean, everyone who's anyone does digital now. Then they played it for me. I heard two voices come out, crackly, a hiss on the tape making the words all but unintelligible. I didn't have as much trouble making it out as they had, I guess. They told me to tell them what I heard, and every word I said they wrote down. "He's not even a team player, because who would want him?" "Fat great beachy-greasy totally priggish whale of a bad time!" Giggles on the tape. "I'm getting a stomach ulcer thinking about him. He should come with a side of milk." Finally, the tape stopped. "Do you recognize the voices?" they asked me. "Can you identify them?" I thought it was a trick question. Of course I recognized them. I stared at the two cool officers. I felt as cold as if I was back out on the frozen plain with Chuck's icy fingers in mine. What did this have to do with anything? "The guy," I said. "That's Steven Withers. He's a friend of mine and Chuck's." "We have him in the next room," the officer told me. Then he coaxed a bit. He didn't see I wasn't reluctant, just stunned. "We're not accusing you of anything. We're just trying to fill in the blanks. Whose is the other voice?" It was obvious. "Mine," I said, all my puzzlement carrying over into the word. "It's me." "And can you tell us," they asked, "exactly who you were talking about?" I told them. Of course I recognized the conversation. Steven and I had been sitting on the bleachers in the auditorium, the darkened auditorium, making fun of the fat kid, Mr. Tape Deck. We were alone, or so I thought. "This," said the officer on the right, "was found beside the body of Jacob Adolfini." I was very quiet, and I guess my hindsight had got it right, because what he said was like a confirmation, not a revelation. The quiet went pretty much right through me, from skull to stomach to toes, and I was frozen. I barely heard them say, "Thank you," and dismiss me from the room. I would like to say I was incapacitated, catatonic, and didn't move until they carried me out, but that's not true. I got up, breathed deeply, lit a smoke, and left. It was no big deal, right? I mean, the guy was such a loser, not that that made him so much different from almost everyone else in our class. It hurt my eyes just to look at him, all that blubber and those clothes that were always too small. He never said anything to anyone, but I do remember the tape recorder. Him and his tape recorder. And now it turned out he had been spying on us all along. It wasn't just us either, as I heard at the trial. I sat in for a few days after I gave my testimony, and heard some of the other stuff he'd recorded. But it was the things I'd said, and Steven, that were the most pointed. And he, that ugly bastard, just sat there all quiet and sullen, at the defense table, never saying a word or looking around. It was like he didn't care what he'd done when he snuffed out a bright little life, someone so helpless and happy. Chuck sat at the back of the courtroom for the most part. He was with his ex all the time, so I never went up to him. Not that I figured he'd hear me if I said anything. His face was blank, like there was nobody home. Maybe there wasn't, now that Jake was gone. No one really blamed Steven and me. No one ever said anything about bringing charges. We were not at fault. It was a nothing thing, a bit of harmless ragging. Sometimes you have to lash out a bit to get things off your chest. You do, otherwise your little problems start to eat you alive. You have to bitch a bit. You get bitter otherwise. Besides, it wasn't just the tape. They had a lot of circumstantial evidence on the guy, this disturbed guy who had taken Jake out to the woods and made him cold as ice, and then who'd put that tape in the pocket of the green snowsuit to explain why he'd done it. But it was the tape that got him. Me and Steven, we should be heroes. At the trial, they thanked us. Steven met me outside, and we had a long coffee in the place across the street from the police station. We didn't talk about the trial. I don't know if we can. I wonder what I'll say, if I ever see Chuck again.
[1][2][3][4] back from jake to jenstuff home page
|
