Devil House(23)

“Here.”

“Jason Fenton?”

“Present.” Two stray giggles, pebbles down an empty well.

“Anne Higgs?”

“Here.”

“Gene Cupp?” Nothing. “Gene Cupp?”

You know he isn’t here; you look over to his friend Jesse, who raises his eyes from their focus on a threadbare spot in the knee of his jeans just long enough to shrug.

Gene hasn’t been here in over a week. No one answers at his house when the secretary calls to report his truancy. No one seems to care about Gene enough to say what’s become of him, not even his friend, who must know, but who sits with his eyes averted, patiently waiting for the moment to pass.

You know how Jesse feels, you think. You remember. You became a high school teacher because you hoped always to keep the days of your youth close at hand: days when your desire to help others pricked at you like a thorn. From an early age, you’d been in love with the world: there was so much in it, a life so full of surprises if you only stayed open to them, ready to receive the transmissions when they came. A devotee of the chance encounter, the found pleasure, the happy accident, your eyes always open, trying to spread some of your inner light around: that was you, the you everyone knew. You cheered up every room you entered when you were a child; your mother, in her plea for clemency, said you had always been “the best part of anybody’s day.”

How the press ran away with that one! In those days before cable TV, it was harder for a local killing to get national traction, but your mother’s letter proved so easy to contrast with the details of your crime that columnists from as far east as Baltimore found it impossible to resist. “She was not the best part of Jesse Jenkins’s day, however dire a piece of work he may have been,” read an unsigned editorial that ran in the Sun while the world waited out your sentencing phase; its headline was “The Good Person Fallacy.” “She wasn’t the best part of Gene Cupp’s, either.”

They were wrong about that. It’s in the nature of the news cycle to untangle knots and to cast the duller threads aside: to simplify a narrative so that readers can take in a few details, confirm opinions they probably already held, and move on at minimal cost to themselves. But the weight of the evidence about you shows that you’d often been not only the best thing about Jesse Jenkins’s day, but possibly the only good thing in it. Today, for example, Jesse’s been riding the nostalgic waves that seem to float down the halls this time of year, but for him nostalgia is the portal into horror. When you wait hopefully for his friend Gene to reply, “Here,” it gives him a good feeling. A good feeling is sometimes enough.

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.