Copperhead

by Alexi Zentner

  Kilton Valley has elected to kick off. That means they’ll start the second half with the ball, but right now it means that Jessup is going to have some time before he hits the field. He sits down on the bench, the wet metal cold, but it gives him a minute to deal with his shoes. He likes starting the game with everything perfect. It doesn’t matter that the exercise is pointless; the rubber pellets on the turf cannot be conquered. He knows as soon as he’s back on the field he’ll have them gathered in his shoes. Once he hits the ground for the first time, they’ll be worked up in his pads, too, in his socks, his hair. You can’t escape them. He’s got rubber pellets embedded under the scab on his elbow. He unlaces anyhow, shakes out his shoes, and has them laced back up in time to watch the kickoff.

  But he misses the kick, because he catches sight of his sister and his mom at the end of the field, wending their way up the steps. And right with them, his stepfather. David John out of prison.

  WHEN IT HAPPENED

  Jessup at thirteen. Eighth grade and still hadn’t grown yet. Hoping he was going to grow. Not that he was a shrimp, but he was on the smaller side. Mom always told him that his dad was a big guy, she’d say six two and solid. An engineering graduate student at Cortaca University. Either way, he was a drunk—that’s what Jessup’s father and mother had in common—and he killed himself in a single-car accident before Jessup was even born. From what his mom said, it didn’t seem like things would have stuck between them anyway; they came from different worlds, and it wasn’t much more than a fling, the two of them partying together, Jessup the only good thing to come out of it. She doesn’t have a lot to say about Jessup’s father, and they aren’t in contact with that side of the family.

  Ricky’s dad, Pete Gilbert, was around here and there, though right now he is serving time at a state prison. Different prison than Ricky. Pete did okay as a dad when he wasn’t in jail, usually remembering Ricky’s birthday, showing up for football games despite how bad the team was, dropping by every few weeks. Doing his best to do right. Scrawny guy, and Ricky took after his dad. Pete and Jessup never talked much, but not a cross word, either. Nothing wrong with Pete except that he was just a kid when he got Jessup’s mom pregnant. She was only fourteen, right at the end of her freshman year, when she had Ricky, Ricky’s dad one year older but already dropped out of high school. What passed for a relationship between Pete and Jessup’s mom was over long before Ricky could walk. By the time David John had become a going concern, Pete was just some guy who occasionally looked in on his son. No beef between the two men.

  Ricky was already ten when David John came on the scene, but Jessup was only five. He doesn’t remember what it was like before his stepfather. Nothing concrete. His life might as well have started the day David John walked through the door. Ricky’s told him stories about what it was like before David John, but they seem unconnected to Jessup’s life. Theoretical. Even though Jessup knows that it’s true—his mom still goes to meetings every few weeks and calls herself an alcoholic—it’s hard for him to believe. They don’t keep alcohol in the house and Jessup doesn’t have a memory of his mother ever having a drink. But he knows that’s his stepfather’s doing.

  From Ricky’s perspective, David John is the best thing to happen in his life. David John made good money as a plumber, and with him around, Mom stuck to cleaning houses. Dinner on the table every night. A full refrigerator. Ricky no longer making grilled cheese for Jessup because their mom was working double shifts, cereal for dinner, school breakfast and lunch okay during the year, but things lean in the summers and on holidays. The nurse at school keeping a food pantry and Ricky bringing food home to make sure he and Jessup had something to eat.

  Neither Ricky nor Jessup was the kind to make excuses—David John wasn’t one for excuses, and they’d learned to own up to their actions—but in letters the brothers had written back and forth, Ricky had been remarkably forgiving of their mom.

  Not like Grandma or Grandpa were much help. Can’t have been easy. She was just a kid herself.

  Which was true. Ricky at fourteen, Jessup when she was nineteen. By the time she met David John and they’d married, she was only twenty-five. And her parents. Grandpa was okay. Stubborn bastard, but he didn’t say much. He liked spending time in the garage. He helped Jessup fix up his pickup, the only occasion Jessup can think of when he’s ever spent much time with his grandfather, the truck a beater that Jessup bought for six hundred bucks and brought back from the dead. But his grandma, his mom’s mother. Jesus. The old bitch had never been happy a day in her life. Hand the woman a pile of cash, and she’d complain about getting paper cuts. They kicked Cindy out when she was seventeen, Ricky only three. You’re on your own, girl.

  So David John was a lifeline, and Ricky grabbed hard.

  Not Jessup. He didn’t know why. Ricky was calling David John “Dad” by the time Jewel was born, but Jessup never got there.

  “Mr. Serious,” his mom called him.

  “Doesn’t matter none,” David John said, because it didn’t matter none to him. He treated both Ricky and Jessup like they were his own boys. Plenty of Jessup’s friends didn’t have fathers around, and plenty of the ones who did would have been happier without. If Jessup struggled to remember what it was like when his mother was drinking, all he had to do to get a sense of that life was to look around. Their closest neighbor had a boy near Jessup’s age, just a year older, and his dad was a drunk and mean and quick with a fist. Mostly they played at Jessup’s.

  SEA CHANGE

  No, Jessup doesn’t remember what it was like before David John came along, and he doesn’t think much of it, either. It was what it was, and then David John and his mom got together, and then it was something different. And the different was good. David John didn’t drink and didn’t allow it in the house. He believed in hard work and discipline and Jesus Christ and family, and he taught both Jessup and Ricky what it meant to be a man. They helped him with cutting and stacking wood, with fixing up the house, went with him on plumbing jobs during school breaks and dug up sewage lines. Learned to work a shovel, a chainsaw, a splitting maul, learned to say “Yes, sir” and “Yes, ma’am” and to make their beds and clear the dishes. David John was always patient, always willing to take the time to teach them how to do something properly. “If you’re going to do something, you might as well do it right.” Taught Jessup how to get his pads on, got up early with both boys to run and train for football but told them they weren’t stepping on the field if their grades weren’t up.

  “Can’t be lazy,” he’d say. “The world ain’t what it used to be. You need a college degree to get anywhere now, and they’ve got all kinds of quotas that you boys don’t fit into. You can’t just check a box and get into college. So study up unless you want to be working knee deep in crap your whole life like me.” Said it with a grin, but even though Ricky was set on following in his stepfather’s footsteps, Jessup liked school, and David John encouraged both of them. “You’re smart, but the world’s tilted against white boys like you nowadays. We live out here in the country in a trailer, and when they look at you, they’re thinking white trash. Teachers don’t expect much, so you’ve got to show them.”

  After dinner, television off and sit at the kitchen table. David John and Ricky and Jessup working over math and English and anything else they’d brought home from school. Ricky needed the help and Jessup didn’t, but either way, David John was there at the table with the two boys. What he didn’t know, he learned, just so he could give Ricky a hand. No college, but that didn’t mean he was dumb. Mom cleaning up and taking care of baby Jewel. Nothing stronger than iced tea for her.

  They went to church on the regular, too. That was something else that was new. David John’s brother a preacher. Ten minutes farther out of town, toward Brooktown. Two hundred wooded acres. A compound. “No trespassing” signs ringing the acreage. The church in an old barn that’d been fixed up.

 
Blessed Church of the White America.

  CORTACA AND SURROUNDING

  But first, Cortaca and surrounding areas.

  Glacial remains carved out a string of lakes in upstate New York, and Cortaca sits at the head of Cortaca Lake. The lake is thirty miles tip to tail, a mile across. There are gorges cut throughout the land around here, steep walls and rivers and creeks sawing through. Can’t walk anywhere without passing a waterfall. Something like 150 waterfalls in the area. There’s one almost across the street from the high school that has to be twenty stories tall and just as wide. The city prides itself on the waterfalls, but that’s not what most people know about Cortaca. What people know is the university.

  The joke is that Cortaca University is your Ivy League safety school if you’re rich enough to buy your way into Harvard but not smart enough to stay there. For most kids, though, Cortaca University is a first choice. Fifteen percent admission rate, expectation is that you’re near the top of your class. Ivy League doesn’t come easy. Or cheap. Not all of the students at Cortaca University come from money, but sometimes it feels that way. Mommy and Daddy dropping a quarter million to buy a condo for their precious to live in with friends because it’s just a smart investment, and besides, have you seen the rentals in Collegetown? The school is big enough that you can feel it when the students are gone. Every August, the grocery stores suddenly stocking microwaves and minifridges, new students accidentally driving the wrong way down one-way streets.

  The university has its own gravity—it’s the largest employer in town—but it’s not everything. There’s a whole other world in Cortaca that’s fallen through the cracks. Thirty-five percent of the county is under the poverty line. Used to be lots of good jobs, but it’s the same old story as any other Rust Belt town. Not as bad as Syracuse or some of the other towns that got hollowed out and had to rebuild, but bad enough. Empty factory buildings on East Hill, the ground contaminated from years of lax standards. Too expensive to clean up, so no hope for new construction. The skeletons of the buildings laid bare, roofs collapsing, windows knocked out, good places to go drink and party, make a fire, the light laying bare the rot. Jessup’s grandfather worked fifteen years assembling washing machines at one of the factories, but it closed up about the time Jessup’s mom was ten. From then on, it was three years here, two years there, nothing with staying power. Each new job a cut in pay. Assistant manager at a body shop now. The owner’s a good guy, let Jessup and his grandfather use one of the bays on the weekends to finish up Jessup’s truck. Paint job at cost.

  Not every job is gone. There’s still the Cargill plant and the salt works, and if you can catch on at either one, it’s a good paycheck. Solid work. A furniture-manufacturing plant past the university employs close to two hundred people, but there’ve been rumors about a move overseas. Made in America costs too much. The auto-parts plant near the municipal airport—six flights a day, two each to Washington, Detroit, and Philadelphia—has more than a thousand workers, but that’s owned by a multinational, so most people are just counting the days until it folds. Erkman’s Power Transmission makes bearings and couplings and employs nearly as many people. It’s locally owned, but the work is hard and the pay isn’t much better than you could do elsewhere. Starts at minimum wage plus two.

  Even with the decay, it’s a town that looks pretty in pictures and makes visiting parents feel good about sending their kids. Without the students, the Cortaca metropolitan area still has a population of about fifty thousand people. Big enough that there’s a Target and a Walmart and a whole string of chains lining the main road that cuts through town. But if chain stores aren’t your thing, at the foot of the hill, below where the university sits, there’s a pedestrian mall, two city blocks closed to traffic. The pedestrian mall is full of one-offs: local restaurants, small stores selling sheepskin clothing, antiques, outdoor gear. Boutiques. It’s picturesque. You have to go out of your way to stumble into the poor parts of town. Easier still to pay no attention to what happens when you get a little outside, in the surrounding areas. If you stay on the county highways, you’ll see trailers and run-down houses, but unless you take the county lanes, you don’t see the sheer numbers. Most of the country people keep some privacy. People like Jessup might as well be invisible.

  He doesn’t mind it, though. Likes not being seen. Likes being outside of Cortaca proper. Their trailer isn’t much, but he can walk out the back of their property and cut through the trees until he meets the deer trail, and from there it’s only a few minutes until he’s on public land. Forty minutes of good walking takes him to wetlands, not bad for duck hunting. Their trailer is set back off the road, not that there’s much traffic anyway. Midlake Road isn’t a shortcut to anywhere. In the winter, it gets plowed late. His mom has a rusted-out 2005 Ford Focus that she drives when the weather is good because it gets better gas mileage, but when there’s snow she takes David John’s work van, which is four-wheel drive. Jessup manages okay in his truck. At first he had trouble, because with the weight of the engine up front and the empty bed in back, he kept spinning, but David John wrote and told him to keep a two-by-six wedged across the back of the truck bed and then drop in a couple of sandbags. The two-by-six keeps the sandbags in place, and the weight from the sandbags keeps the back end from fishtailing in the snow. With the change in the weather, tomorrow he’ll have to put the two-by-six and the sandbags back in place before he heads out to keep the truck from sliding on him.

  Jessup knows that Cortaca isn’t a bad place to live. With the university and a history of good jobs—even if many of them are gone—the schools are solid. And for a kid like Jessup, who likes the outdoors and doesn’t have a lot of money, it’s a wonderland. But he’s ready to get away. As soon as he graduates, he’ll be gone.

  Too much history here.

  THE FIGHT

  It’s not his history. He doesn’t share a last name with either Ricky or his stepfather, but it doesn’t matter. Cortaca’s too small a town for people to stay out of each other’s business.

  The whole thing played in the papers and on television. Not just local, either. Story was national. Jessup doesn’t talk about it, and his friends know to steer clear of the question. Not that he has that many friends aside from Wyatt. Teammates, sure. Football in the fall, wrestling in the winter, runs the one hundred and two hundred in track and field in the spring. Buddies, really, which is different from friends. Plus, now, Deanne. And she’s never asked him about what happened with David John and Ricky in the alley. It’s a hole they could fall into. They both know that.

  Jessup’s just glad it never went to trial. That would have been an even bigger circus.

  An emergency job on the pedestrian mall. Saturday night turned Sunday morning, closing in on two o’clock. Ricky’s nineteen at this point. Out of high school and officially apprenticing with David John. During the days they both wear Dickies short-sleeve shirts, a DJM Plumbing patch above where their names are embroidered. David John liked to say you could charge an extra ten bucks an hour if you looked like you were a real business instead of just some idiot with a truck. He has tattoos himself, but they were out of sight: back, shoulders, chest. He made it clear to Ricky that if he got ink where you could see it while he was working, Ricky would spend his days wearing long-sleeved shirts.

  But emergency job, and Ricky coming from his girlfriend’s house. Stacey and her parents congregants at Blessed Church of the White America themselves. So Ricky wearing jeans and a tank top, heading to the van, parked in the alley behind the pedestrian mall, near the back door of the restaurant. The van, “DJM Plumbing” a phone number, and “On call, on time. Your local plumber” stenciled on the side. David John’s text to Ricky:

  already inside. Uniform on front seat.

  It’s a warm night. Early in September. A few days before the full moon, so even if the alley wasn’t lit, and the interior dome light from the van didn’t spill out over him from the open passen
ger side door, it would have been plenty bright enough to see Ricky pull off his tank top. He’s shirtless, holding his work shirt and ready to slip it on as the boys walk by.

  Two of them. Both Cortaca University students, cutting through the alley on the way home from a bar. Black kids. One from Atlanta, the other from Buffalo, both seniors, both twenty-one. Jermane Holmes and Blake Liveson. They’d both snuck their beers out of the bar with them. Bottles of Yuengling, TopFloor Bar running a special.

  Right there on Ricky’s back, “Blessed Church of the White America” circling a flaming cross, the whole thing about the size of a sheet of printer paper, six hundred bucks’ worth of tattoo. On his right shoulder, “eighty-eight” and on his left shoulder, “pure blood.” Impossible for Holmes and Liveson to miss.

  Sometimes Jessup wonders what would have happened if it had been him standing in the alley instead of Ricky. At seventeen, Jessup is six foot two and weighs in at 240. He’s chiseled. His face shows his age, but he’s got a man’s body, and all you have to do is see him walk to understand that Jessup is built for certain kinds of violence. But two different dads mean two different boys, two different bodies. Ricky thought of himself as lean—even though he played football—but he looked scrawny, like his dad. He was strong and never had trouble keeping up with David John at work, but when they arrested him, he was five eight and a buck sixty. Not imposing. Holmes and Liveson weren’t particularly big themselves, and they might have kept walking if they’d seen somebody Jessup’s size. But it wasn’t Jessup. It was Ricky.