Jesse’s childhood had been awful: he was five years old the first time he told a teacher about the “whippings” his father doled out whenever he got angry. That teacher reported it to the police, who then visited the Jenkins house in a black-and-white car. The officers came away half an hour later with a noncommittal report that they wrote up dutifully, filed, and forgot: no bruises noted on upper or lower extremities, child denies c/o, runs a piece of it, this abbreviation at the end borrowed from medical charts and misunderstood to mean “complaints” rather than “complains of.” This misuse, quite common, points toward the actual purpose of reports like these: they’re mainly marks on paper, things to have on file in case somebody gets called to account for something later.
But no one did get called to account for leaving five-year-old Jesse Jenkins at the home of his father. Hardly anybody knew until later. Most of what we learned later about Jesse’s life at home came from his mother, Jana; her testimony against you during the trial’s sentencing phase, delivered in a wandering, looping monologue, seemed, at times, more likely to win you clemency than condemnation. It wasn’t Jesse’s fault that he was the way he was, she said. His father made him that way. He was a good boy once, but I could never handle him after he turned twelve, she said. But he didn’t deserve to die like a dog, she said finally, in audible pain, and then she said it again. My son did not deserve to die like a dog.
The blow landed in your gut; by then you’d had plenty of time to think about the kid who’d known nothing but violence his whole short life, the kid shrugging gently this morning and possibly sharing a gentle moment of concern with you, but possibly not. Need; warmth; the suggestion of a secret. Later, you would wonder.
You wonder a little now, too, here in the present moment, but there are also twenty other kids to worry about. You mean to try to ask Jesse privately after class about Gene. Someone should ask someone about Gene.
But Jesse is gone when the bell rings: the stampede for the door has lost the urgency it maintained for most of the year, but it’s still a stampede. Tomorrow. You will ask him tomorrow.
3.
DESPITE THE NAME by which you’ll come to be known in the press, you don’t actually live in Morro Bay. The high school where you teach is there, but rents are cheaper over here in Los Osos. It’s a beautiful place now: it will remain one, though the accelerating world devours what it catches up with, and the Los Osos of the future will be built in large part atop the foundations of places still standing during your time on the outside. It’s California. Nothing lasts.
The housetops are mainly flat around here—a Mediterranean architectural instinct, the feeling that there’s no need to overdecorate—and there’s landscaping on the sides of all the driveways, big bottlebrush bushes and night-blooming jasmine. Your building, which will be an anachronism on the distant day when the renovation crew arrives, is modern. Round windows dot its oversized cedar shingles, the hint of a dream in which houses can float. At the far end of the parking lot, there’s a gymnasium-sized building; it houses an Olympic-sized swimming pool, and a hot tub, too—the sort of amenity that makes visitors from the east feel in the presence of some new decadence, one whose excesses derive not from wealth or status, but from the brute opulence of the landscape. The shore, the dunes; the sunlight on the ocean; the unvanquishable oleander up and down the highway, the coast live oak with its twisting branches like segments of brain cortex wriggling up from the ground. They set a scene, these views, pulling into the parking lot of Oakside Court, the apartment complex you call home, such as it is: modest on the inside but almost regal on the outside. In the right light, toward the end of the day with its windows glinting in the sun, it can resemble a Spanish medieval fortress set against the ocean, the stories of ages safely tucked away inside.
Its name sounds like a vague promise of luxury living, but it’s still cheap in 1972. However grand the visions of its landscapers, nobody local sees it and thinks, That’s where the rich people live. They know better. Your near neighbors down the hallway, in fact, are graduate students and new divorcées, people trying to live in as nice a place as they can afford while looking forward to something better. You know each other—from the parking lot, from the hallway, from the pool. Next door, in Apartment 9, there’s Thomas, a dairy tech student cutting corners until he can finish his master’s degree; across the hall, in 8, there’s Don, whose wife served him with divorce papers last fall. He’s seldom here on weekends anymore. It’s a good time to be a bachelor in America.
The others, around the corner, you know by name and face only: Gladys, who looks too young to have her own apartment and also too young to be named Gladys; Milt, who looks to be your age; and an older man you call “Mr. Adler” even though he always corrects you: “Call me Max.”
“Right! Max,” you say. He smiles.
“Good to see you, Miss Crane,” he says with a genuinely harmless wink as you turn the key in your door, opening onto the small world you’ve made of the interior of your apartment.
There will be much talk, in days to come, about the interior of your apartment.
* * *
SOME PEOPLE ARE COLLECTORS. They seek outstanding examples of things tailored to specific interests: a bust of the Frankenstein monster, production run unknown, sold through the mail in the early sixties and now seldom seen except at yard sales; issue #9 of Vampirella, with the cover story and art by Wally Wood; Japanese swords from specific dynasties. These are destined for display cases, most often, or for boxes in the garage should things get out of hand. Collectors are curators: they arrange their finds with a specific purpose in mind, even if it’s only, Look how much of this stuff I have all to myself.
You’re not a collector. Like anybody else, you decorate your home with personal touches, things that might give a guest an idea or two about who you are; but here, as in all things, you’ve tried to embrace chance a little, to let your whims speak for themselves. Decorations are as likely to have entered your house by accident as by design, and few of them last longer than a season or two. They get donated to church bazaars when you’re done with them; you like to imagine the former things of your daily routine going on to new lives about which you’ll never know a thing. Should thieves besiege your apartment tomorrow, there isn’t much you’d miss.
Take, for example, this gnarled chunk of driftwood later marked Exhibit 3-B by the prosecution. It caught your eye one morning at the shoreline: you were looking down, and you thought you saw a miniature canoe, possibly an abandoned child’s toy. It was an elongated arc of wood about a third the length of your arm, twisting a little midway through; but something had eaten dozens of holes in it: Insects? Tiny sea worms? Some pattern of accelerated decay brought on by long immersion in water?
Whatever the cause, the surface of the wood had been so thoroughly riddled that its composition was now more air than solid substance. What remained of the wood was a memory of its former condition, a reminder of its own past. You held it in your hand for the rest of your morning walk, and then it sat on your coffee table for a month, until you burned a steak one night and, needing something to mask the smell, remembered those tiny holes and thought of a use for them.
In a drawer, you located sticks of incense, also chance accumulations, fished from a glass case near the cash register of a San Luis Obispo record store by a clerk who cracked a smile when he asked: “Anything else?” The incense sat alongside pot pipes and hippie jewelry. The smile was because you didn’t look like the type.
But it appealed to your taste for hidden things. Its packaging was musty paper lettered from top to bottom in tiny clusters of italic text, devotional outpourings you sometimes skimmed but never really read: quotations from the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads, something called the Ten Virtues of Koh that delineated the specific benefits of burning incense; and, from Second Chronicles, this passage: