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Copperhead

Page 30

by Alexi Zentner


  He tells them all of it. He does this hundreds of times, standing in front of crowds of strangers and telling them the before and the after. He tells them who Kevin Corson was as a person, tells them what Kevin Corson’s parents said to Jessup, their unwillingness to forgive, and how that’s one of the things he has to hold inside himself, and that is part of why it is so important for him to be out here, claiming his mistake. He tells them about lighting a candle against the darkness. He owns it.

  He doesn’t tell them about Wyatt.

  BROTHERS

  He talks to Coach Diggins almost weekly, comes to Cortaca every year to talk to Diggins’s team at the start of the season, and that means that he sees Deanne occasionally. This year’s Christmas card has a picture of her with her husband and her two toddler daughters at the Apple Harvest Festival. She’s a pediatrician. Still lives in Cortaca.

  Wyatt still lives in Cortaca, too.

  They haven’t talked since Jessup got into the Jeep and started driving west to Boise. Jessup has reached out, but Wyatt won’t speak to him. Jessup might as well be dead. But he has held Wyatt’s silence. He has done at least that for Wyatt. He doesn’t know what the cost has been to Wyatt—what it has meant for Wyatt to live with his own actions—but he knows what the cost of his own actions has been for himself. One thing it has meant is that he’s lost two brothers. Wyatt and Ricky.

  Twice a year, on top of his talks to Diggins’s teams, Jessup flies to Syracuse, rents a car, drives two hours to the prison where Ricky is still incarcerated, takes a hotel room. The next morning, he signs in, goes through security, waits and waits, but Ricky won’t see him. That’s how it goes every time. He thinks of it as just another attempt to set things right.

  Because Ricky won’t see him, Jessup writes letters, but Ricky almost never writes back, and even then, when he does, the letters are vile, full of hatred, calls Jessup a traitor to the cause. Ricky has not been a model inmate. His sentence, originally twenty years, looks like it’s going to stretch to twenty-five, thirty, an entire life gone by.

  David John writes to Ricky every single day, but neither he nor Jessup’s mom go to visit anymore. It makes both of them too sad. David John’s shown Jessup copies of some of the letters he writes to Ricky; they are short but heartfelt, filled with small observations from his day, Bible verses, prayers that Ricky will find peace, family pictures. They are, David John says, meant to be a lifeline. All Ricky has to do is grab hold. But he doesn’t. Ricky writes back to David John every few weeks, but it’s clear to David John—clear to all of them—that Ricky is lost.

  It’s a permanent shadow over all of them.

  LIFTOFF

  Other than that, Jessup’s parents are happy.

  Of all things, his parents own a house that backs onto a golf course. It’s become something they can do together, and they play as often as they can in the summer, bring their clubs when they go to visit Jessup in Montgomery.

  Montgomery, Alabama. Coach Diggins went to bat for him there, too. Jessup sat out a year, working for David John, but Diggins called the football coach at Yale, told him everything that had happened, convinced him to give Jessup a chance. Yale and then law school at UCLA, and all of that led him to Montgomery. He still misses football, but he loves his job. He’s a staff attorney for the Southern Poverty Law Center. He knows it’s a penance, and he knows he’ll never work it off. He’s okay with that.

  He’s thirty-one and it’s Christmas morning and it’s snowing in Boise at his parents’ house. Montgomery suits him better than he would have expected, but he misses the snow. That’s one of the joys of visiting his parents over the holidays. Idaho at Christmas means snow. The other joy, of course, is seeing Jewel. She lives in Portland and is a consultant, finishing an MBA, too. She’s tried to explain to him what she does, but it involves regression modeling or some other gobbledygook, and he can never do better than to tell people she helps figure out what people’s salaries should be. All Jessup knows is that he’s thirty-one and a lawyer and his kid sister makes more money than he does. They visit each other often, talk on the phone most days.

  She’s downstairs already. Jessup can hear her talking with their mom. Jewel has been dating a girl named Ophelia for about a year. Jessup likes her. Everybody likes Ophelia. She’s funny. Sweet. She’s working as a barista, mostly floating around, but her dad is some internet bajillionaire, so nobody seems too worked up about it. Jessup’s parents go to Portland twice a year, same as they visit Jessup, and David John has been trying to teach Ophelia to golf. He doesn’t hesitate to introduce her as his daughter’s girlfriend.

  And yet.

  Jessup will never quite know what to say. He believes that you can unlearn the bad things you’ve been taught. His entire life since they left Cortaca has been based on that. But he still wonders if he’ll ever escape the sound of the truck hitting Corson’s body. There’s something fundamentally unfair about the fact that he’s been given a second chance, that David John has been given a second chance, while the dead men that they left in their wake have not.

  All Jessup can do is atone.

  ORBIT

  It’s an hour later in Montgomery than it is in Boise, so Jessup should already be up—he’s an early riser, five every morning to work out with a group of buddies, except Sunday, when he’ll sleep until eight or nine, depending on what he’s done the night before—but he’s on vacation, so he doesn’t feel too guilty about lying in bed. Besides, it’s barely seven o’clock. Christmas day or not, it’s early enough for a house with no children in it.

  The curtains are open, and he watches the snow tumble from the sky. It’s hypnotizing. It makes a soft patter on the glass: big, light flakes, cotton-candy snow, something he never gets tired of seeing, particularly since he only sees it a few times a year now.

  He feels the bed shift, Amy’s body rolling against him, her arm over his shoulder, her hot breath on the back of his neck.

  “Merry Christmas,” she says.

  He replies, “Happy Hanukkah.”

  “Hanukkah was over like a week ago, dumb-ass.” She kisses the back of his neck, scratches indulgently at his back. She likes to joke that the only white supremacist at the Southern Poverty Law Center fell in love with the only Jew in Alabama.

  They’ve been together close to two years. The wedding is in June.

  Amy knows all of it. Every single part. No exceptions. Even about Wyatt.

  She’s a year younger than him, and she works on the Teaching Tolerance project. She told him that he’ll carry it around with him forever. And she’s right.

  She’s a good woman. Better than he deserves.

  That’s how it works sometimes.

  And sometimes, late at night, in Montgomery, when it’s raining, Jessup looks out the window and imagines that the rain is a cleansing rain, the world scoured clean, the world made new, but he knows it doesn’t work like that. And even if it snowed in Montgomery, even if he could wake up to blankets of snow coating Alabama, covering everything, the world would not be made new. That’s not how it works.

  It works like this: the light swallows the darkness.

  No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.

  —Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you to my literary agent, Bill Clegg. I am, and will always be, grateful for your voice. Thanks, as well, to all of the fine folks at The Clegg Agency: Marion Duvert for being an international force; and David Kambhu, Simon Toop, and Lilly Sandberg for all of the stuff that happens behind the scenes.

  Thank you to my screen agent, Anna DeRoy, at WME. Fierce and fantastic.

  Thank you to my editor, Laura Tisdel. Editing this
book was a bit like playing Jenga, but instead of fifty-four blocks, it was 95,000 words. I still owe you a coffee mug that says “Okay. You’re right. Damn it.” Thank you to Amy Sun for all of the work that happens unseen but deserves credit. Thank you to Lynn Buckley for a cover that captures everything. Thank you to the countless people at Viking who help the ship sail.

  Thank you to my friends and family. Thanks to the early crowd for keeping me sane, and to Shawn for always being willing to talk it through.

  Thank you to my wife and kids for putting up with me when I’m in the middle of a project. This book, like all things, is for you.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Alexi Zentner is the award-winning author of two previous novels, The Lobster Kings and Touch. His fiction has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Tin House, Glimmer Train, and The O. Henry Prize Stories 2008, among others. He lives with his family in Ithaca, New York.

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