Copperhead

by Alexi Zentner

  TWO

  The details are sketchy. Boise is a college town, his parents say, like Cortaca, but four times as big. David John’s talked with his prison friend’s brother-in-law—his name is Quentin, a name that strikes Jessup as vaguely preposterous—and everything is set. Quentin can even get a rental house lined up for them. He’ll front the first month’s rent and will take it out of David John’s paycheck in small increments over the next six months. A good Christian, David John says, and no, not affiliated, not in that way. Unitarian Universalist. He’s offering a fresh start. A clean break.

  His parents watch him, and he just leans back in the chair, trying to take it in. Finally Jessup says, “When?”

  David John has already talked to his parole officer, already gotten approval—David John away from the Blessed Church of the White America? yes, please—and things are moving. Like he said, it isn’t a new idea for him and Jessup’s mom. The time line is aggressive.

  Tomorrow, Tuesday, is for packing. Wyatt’s dad has found them a used Jeep that’s got a hundred thousand miles on it but has new tires and is in good shape. It will make the trip fine. Anything that can’t fit in the Jeep or David John’s work van gets left behind. Hit the road Wednesday first thing, drive through the night to save on a hotel, Jessup, David John, Jessup’s mom rotating between the two vehicles, in Boise by Thursday night. Register Jessup and Jewel for school on Friday, take the weekend to get settled, and Monday they start their new lives.

  If there’s anything left over from the sale of the trailer after the mortgage is paid off and they pay back the Dunns for the Jeep, they’ll start saving again for a new place. Or, depending on how work goes, they’ll save instead for David John to strike out on his own again in a few years.

  While they’re talking, Jessup can feel his phone buzzing with intermittent texts. After a while, he excuses himself to go to the bathroom. He does go to the bathroom, but after he washes his hands he sits on the closed toilet seat, looks at his phone. Most of the texts he can ignore. Nothing from Deanne. One from Mike Crean, another from Derek Lemper. But there’re six from Wyatt, the first five variants on the same theme:

  you coming to the rally?

  It’s the sixth text that shakes him:

  brother. I need you there. otherwise why did I do it? you owe me.

  ONE

  It’s six fifteen when he asks David John if they can talk outside. Jewel is in her room reading or playing on her school-issued laptop, and his mom is at the stove, making pasta with red sauce, trying to use up the vegetables in the fridge.

  Jessup shrugs the borrowed jacket on again—he’ll need a new one for Idaho, boots too, the winters there making Cortaca look tropical, according to David John—and walks a bit up the driveway. After a minute, David John comes out.

  The snow is still holding off, but the air reeks of it, and Jessup wonders when it will start coming down hard. He wonders, too, if he’ll have a feel for the weather in Boise. He’s never lived anywhere else. Never been farther from Cortaca than the northern edge of the Adirondacks, a five-hour drive.

  David John is wearing his heavy work jacket, a pair of boots. He doesn’t seem bothered by the cold. He’s lived in the Cortaca area his whole life, too, except for those four years in prison, and even that was upstate New York.

  “Sorry,” Jessup says. “You know how it is in there. Hard to talk without Mom . . .”

  “You want to go down to the pedestrian mall,” David John says.

  Jessup stares at him. Nods. “How’d you know?”

  “It’s not a good idea.”

  “I know. I just . . . I don’t know.” Jessup rocks back on his heels. He shrugs. “I want to see. I need to see, I guess.”

  “Why? You ain’t going to march with Brandon Rogers and his kind. I know that. I’ve been paying attention. That’s not you. Never has been, has it? And that’s why we’re moving. I’m trying to get you away from that.”

  “I’ll be careful,” Jessup says. “I don’t know why, but I know I’ve got to, okay? I know I can’t go to Idaho if I don’t. I need to see it through. I can’t just walk away.”

  David John studies him. “Yes, Jessup, you can. We are. If I can walk away from this, you can walk away from this. Don’t you understand? We can give up anything if it means saving everything. You going down there? What do you want to see through? What do you think you’re going to get by going down there?”

  “For the life of me,” Jessup says, “I can’t tell you what I expect to get out of going.” And then he starts to laugh, and after a pause David John laughs with him.

  They stop laughing and Jessup waits. It takes a few seconds, but David John nods. “I don’t like it, but if you really think it’s important, I respect that.”

  “Thank you.”

  David John pulls the keys to his van out of his jacket pocket, holds them out. But when Jessup goes to take them, David John clasps his hands around Jessup’s hand. “Can we pray first,” he says, “please?”

  They bow their heads, foreheads touching.

  “Dear Jesus,” David John says, “please guide Jessup. Please find him to safety. Please light the way to peace. Please allow him to forgive himself for his transgressions. Please allow him to ask for forgiveness.”

  He doesn’t say Corson’s name, but Jessup feels it within him. Knows that he’ll be asking forgiveness the rest of his life, an angry kid with too much to drink and Jessup hitting the gas just a little too hard, something he should have owned up to but knows in his bones he never will, and now there’s a ghost that will haunt him, will taunt him, and that sound, the truck hitting Corson’s body, will be with him until the end of time, forever and ever, amen.

  “Please, dear Jesus,” David John says, “protect my son tonight, allow him to make good decisions, hold him in your love. Hold me, my wife, my daughter, my son.” He pauses and looks at Jessup. “Because you are my son, no matter what you say, Jessup, you are always my son and always have been. Dear Jesus, hold him in your love. Amen.”

  And then David John steps forward and wraps his arms around Jessup, holding him, and all Jessup can think of is that day on the football field when he broke his arm, David John cradling him, carrying him, the knowledge that this man would give anything to keep him safe.

  Jessup means it when he says it, “Amen.”

  ZERO

  He can’t get anywhere near the pedestrian mall. Traffic is backed up, people walking from all directions, singing, chanting, holding signs, smiling and serious, a flood of people. He parks David John’s van in front of a dry cleaner’s, the windows dark, two other cars pulling in after him.

  In the spring there’s the Cortaca Festival, and in the fall there’s the Apple Harvest Festival. Food and art, carnival rides, bands playing in the pavilion at the center of the pedestrian mall, but he’s never seen anything like this. As he gets closer, the already-swollen river of people thickens. People spill into the streets. The cars that are trying to get through are reduced to a crawl. He didn’t go to the Women’s March the weekend of President Trump’s inauguration, but he saw photos—the photographer for the Cortaca Journal got a shot from the roof of the parking garage, the pedestrian mall unfolded below, people piled up like sand on a beach—and he has to imagine it was like this. He doesn’t know how many people are here tonight. Thousands. Five thousand, ten thousand, enough to choke the roads, enough to mean that he has to turn sideways, slipping, juking, apologizing as he pushes his way through the crowd, trying to get closer to the center, to the pavilion.

  It seems like everywhere he looks people are holding unlit candles, and it dawns on him that this isn’t just a counterprotest, it’s not just a memorial: it’s a vigil. A college student, a girl, is standing on one of the concrete planters holding a cardboard box full of them, and she reaches down to hand one to Jessup. He takes the candle.

  Even from a distance, he
can hear the chanting, the drums. The protesters are making a joyous noise. He climbs up onto a bench, uses a tree to steady himself as he steps on the bench’s backrest so that he can see over the crowd. He can see a group of men on the grand pavilion at the center of the pedestrian mall. Jessup doesn’t know how to label them. Are Brandon and his ilk protesters? What, exactly, are they protesting?

  He decides it doesn’t matter. What matters is that even though he’s still fifty yards back, from his vantage point he can see that there are hundreds of them. If he had to guess, he’d say three hundred men—all men as far as he can tell—with some of them wearing body armor over their jackets, a few Confederate flags, at least one Nazi flag that he can see, somebody else waving a giant white flag with the flaming cross and the words “Blessed Church of the White America,” all crowded onto the grand pavilion stage at the center of the pedestrian mall, elevated above the packed crowd of people here to drown them out. Even from where he is standing he can see their anger. The snarls as they yell.

  And for the first time in his life, Jessup sees how comical they are. How pathetic they look. That fury directed out into the ether. There are hundreds of them, a force, more of these men than he has seen in one place in his entire life, and yet they are little more than a dollop of land surrounded by the sea, whatever rage they have contained by the teeming masses, Cortaca police and state police and what feels like all of the police in the world forming a circle around them, a moat of sorts, the only thing keeping this ocean of people away from these pitiful men, and from where he perches precariously on the top of this bench, it does seem like the people are an ocean, moving in waves, in and out, chanting now in unison, their voices a glorious chorus.

  He gets down from the bench, and even though the crowd tightens, bodies pressed together, men and women and even some children holding hands, he works his way through, closer and closer, until he’s pressed up against a building, as close as he can get to the pavilion without breaking through the lines of police officers, as close as he can get without actually joining the men on the other side, and he sees Brandon Rogers at the center of it, elevated somehow on a box or a pedestal, his face bathed in floodlights, television cameras pointed in his direction, his right arm immobilized by a sling, a prop that seems both glorious and feeble, and around him, his acolytes pump their fists, screaming, spittle dripping, the men chanting something of their own now, faces turgid with blood, a grotesque lust, and then Jessup catches sight of Wyatt, his friend, the boy he’s known since time immemorial, the boy who he’s spent his entire life with, the boy who has been like a brother to him, who hasn’t just been like a brother but has been a brother, years and years of history, the weight of history split by a rushing river coming at him, that boy, Wyatt, his brother always, his brother no more, at Brandon’s feet, and whatever hesitation Wyatt has allowed in his life, whatever equivocation he seems to have felt about his place in the church, it is gone, because he looks at Brandon like he’s looking at a god, his face shining with a joy so pure that it makes Jessup shiver, so that just for a moment Jessup wishes he were up there, too, that he could worship at the feet of this man, this movement, that he could make himself feel so big by making others feel small.

  And then it happens.

  It’s just a spark, a few dozen lighters set to candles, barely enough for Jessup to notice, but as each candle is lit, the person holding it turns and lights the candle of whoever is next to them, hands cupping the flame, wick to wick, a tender gesture, the literal passing of the torch, and soon it is a hundred candles lit, and as these candles are lit, the fire flickering, jumping from hand to hand, people begin to kneel, falling to the ground, falling silent, and Jessup thinks that he was right to compare this to an ocean, because a wave washes over him, these lights, this quiet, the men on the podium still screaming, but instead of being overshadowed by chanting, they are drowned out by stillness, hundreds of candles lit, hundreds lighting hundreds more, thousands of protesters now, on their knees, holding candles in front of them, the guttering flames a bulwark against the darkness, like nothing Jessup has ever seen. But suddenly he realizes that he was wrong to think of the sea after all, to think of a wave, to think of these people like an ocean drowning out Brandon and Wyatt and all of these wretched men, because these lights, this peaceful reverie from the crowd of thousands is not at all like water, it is nothing like water, it is like nothing other than a constellation of stars, the snow slowly coming down now, a benediction, a blessing, snow drifting from the sky, falling among them, each candle a single star, and together thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of candles before him, and he can see this, he can see all of this, can see the way the light comes together, one flickering light barely a glow, but together it’s stunning, overpowering, together these candles make a universe, and for what reason Jessup does not know, cannot tell, the men in the pavilion begin to fall silent now, too, as if they know their voices will not rise above joy and love and community, as if they know that what they have created for themselves is built only on tearing down, so they are silent now, even Brandon Rogers stopping, all of them, staring out at the vast expanse before them, looking over the ring of police and taking in the blinking heavens, and Jessup feels a sort of peace, because right there, right at the very front, he sees Deanne, sees her kneeling between her father and her mother, this first girl that he has loved, this girl who he will always love, and he moves carefully, stepping past a man and a small child, gently touching his hand to a woman’s shoulder so he can get by her, feels people watching him, all of them, those kneeling and those up on the stage, Jessup caught between the two worlds, Wyatt watching him, offering his hand to help Jessup up to the pavilion stage, offering a hand to his brother, his friend, and in this moment, Jessup thinks about what it has meant to be caught up in the history of his life, to have been raised in this church, and Wyatt has made his choice, and here, now, Jessup is making his own choice, either to join or to depart, and no other choice will ever matter or hurt as much as this one. As he nears Deanne, he thinks, no, David John is right, you cannot turn your back on family. Since Wyatt is as a brother to him, that means that Jessup cannot turn his back on Wyatt. Since he cannot join him and he cannot turn his back on him, Jessup’s only choice is to face Wyatt. So he makes his choice, stops in front of Deanne, looks at her and holds out his candle, holds it and waits, waits for her to light it, waits for the flame to catch, not asking for a declaration of love, not asking for redemption or forgiveness, asking for nothing other than the chance to face these men, to add a star to the night sky, the snow falling, the snow twisting, the snow glinting and ferocious in the dancing light of these thousand lights, and after what might be forever, Deanne touches her wick to his.

  He kneels in silence, his candle another light against the darkness.

  EPILOGUE

  TELLING IT

  Jessup is thirty-one.

  It owns him as much as he owns it.

  He speaks about it publicly. Not every day, not every week, but at least once a month. He stands in front of groups of teenagers, suburban mothers, black congregations in southern cities, high school teachers in midwestern towns, youth groups in Boston and D.C. and Denver and Seattle. He stands up and talks about the Blessed Church of the White America, tells people about the sound of Corson’s body.

  He tells them about sitting across the table from his mother. Tells them about David John bowing his head when Jessup gave him back his own words, saying, when you make a mistake, a real man stands up and takes responsibility, fixes what he can, tries to be a better person.

  He tells the groups about Jewel. About trying to explain to her what happened. About what it felt like to have her turn away from him. About how hard he has worked to get her to turn back.

  He tells them about Coach Diggins. Despite how he said he’d cut Jessup loose, Diggins was there for him: helping Jessup find a lawyer, meeting Jessup and David John a
nd Jessup’s mother at the police station, being the first one to reach his hand out, shaking David John’s as they all stood in the vestibule. Diggins the one who called the coach at Yale, who explained . . .

  Jessup can’t help it. When he talks about Diggins, every single time, without fail, his voice breaks and he needs a moment to recover. Coach Diggins forgiving Jessup when Jessup can’t forgive himself.

  He tells the groups about how he took a deal, pleading to leaving the scene of a personal-injury accident, obstructing governmental administration, a laundry list of misdemeanors. Youthful-offender status because of his age, because there were no priors, because it was an accident, because Coach Diggins fights for him and because, with everything that happened at the church, it all became part of something bigger. Tells them how the court let him serve his jail time on weekends, so he could keep going to high school, working through the youthful-offender treatment program, community service, no criminal record. Tells them about moving to Boise and doing the youthful-offender program there—everybody agreeing a change of scenery, putting miles between Jessup and the Blessed Church of the White America, would be a good idea—and always gets a chuckle when he talks about the amount of paperwork that entailed.

  Waits for the crowd to settle down and then waits for them to get uncomfortable with his stillness, and then waits another second or two before he tells them how none of that is fair, that he got off light for what happened, and that’s one of the reasons he is here, now, in front of them, trying to own his actions, trying to make right.