by Robin Yocum
“Of course,” I said. “It’s a shrine in Steubenville.”
Neither of those things is true, but I thought it was smart to ingratiate myself with the mobsters. The fact that I had supposedly visited Martin’s boyhood home wasn’t going to make me a made man, but it might afford me some protection in a pinch.
I had always hoped to make it to the Baseball Hall of Fame and become Steubenville’s fourth favorite son, maybe even knocking ol’ Dino off the top pedestal. But obviously that didn’t happen.
By the time I got back to the apartment and sat down on the mattress to eat, the food was cold, but I had gotten used to eating food that way in prison.
I turned on the television for the six o’clock news. The male anchor—looking very grave—opened the newscast by saying, “Tabitha Donley is live near Richmond tonight, where a man has been found shot to death at Jefferson Lake State Park.”
I popped a few fries in my mouth and muttered, “That’s not good.”
Tabitha Donley was blond and attractive. She, too, was looking very serious, standing in front of yellow crime-scene tape. “I can tell you that a life has been cut short here in this western Jefferson County park. Investigators from the sheriff’s department are on the scene, seeking clues into the apparent murder of a thirty-five-year-old man who Sheriff Francis Roberson has identified as Rayce Daubner of Steubenville.”
Okay, I thought, that is really not good. Not good for him, and worse for me. Don’t get me wrong, it tickled me beyond belief that Rayce Daubner was dead. I would have loved to have shot him for setting me up on the drug rap—and for being a miserable human being—but I didn’t, and that’s a fact. However, I was smart enough to know that there were men wearing badges who would think of me as the most logical suspect. Aloud, I said, “Johnny, my boy, it is time to get out of Dodge,” and I leapt up from the mattress, ran to the bathroom, and scraped my toiletries off the vanity and into a leather shaving kit. I had a trunk and a few cardboard boxes full of personal items that my mother had packed away for me before they moved to Florida, an armload of blue jeans and shirts, and a suitcase of other clothes. The car was parked in the garage below my apartment. I grabbed the trunk and boxes and ran down the staircase at the back of my apartment. The first load filled up the trunk of the Camaro. I threw the clothing and suitcase into the backseat, then ran back upstairs for the foil-wrapped burgers. The mice could have the fries. I was dreadfully out of shape, sucking for air as I patted down my pockets, making sure I had my wallet and keys.
I unlatched the wooden garage door, slid it to the side, and found myself staring at the lacquered black finish of a Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department cruiser. Deputy Phillip Gearhard was leaning against the front fender, his arms folded, smiling and working over a piece of gum. Deputy Majowski stood behind the open driver-side door. “Going somewhere in a hurry, Mr. Earl?” Gearhard asked.
I swallowed. “I’m just going down to the corner to get a newspaper.”
He nodded toward the car. “You’ve got a lot of clothes there. Are you going to the dry cleaners, too?”
“Yeah, I thought I might.”
“Maybe you should come with us,” Majowski said.
“What for?”
“We need to chat.”
“Really? What about?”
Gearhard took two steps toward me and said, “Oh, I don’t know, maybe how the body of a former FBI informant, the same informant whose testimony sent you to prison, ended up out at Jefferson Lake State Park full of bullet holes.”
“I wouldn’t know anything about that.”
“Oh, I’m sure you don’t, but you’ll be happy to tell us what you don’t know, won’t you?”
“I’m not sure I want to do that.”
Majowski squeezed between Gearhard and the garage door jamb. “Given your current status with the US Department of Justice, I’m not sure you want to quibble over this one, Johnny.”
“I’ll close the garage door for you,” Gearhard said, grinning at my frustration.
Aunt Connie came out the back door, a look of panic on her face. “Johnny, what’s going on?”
“Nothing, Aunt Connie. I swear. I just need to talk to them about something. I’ll be back in a little while. Please don’t call my parents. It will just upset them.”
I knew she was going to call them the minute she got in the house.
Majowski opened the back door to the cruiser. “Watch your head,” he said as I slid inside.
“I know the drill,” I replied.
It was less than a mile to the sheriff’s department. We drove down the ramp to the parking garage and walked down the hallway that led to the jail. “Where are we going?”
“The sheriff wants to talk to you,” Majowski said.
“Yeah, so why are we going to the jail?”
“Because he’s not in his office at the moment.”
“Okay, let me wait in his office.”
“Can’t do that. You need to wait in a holding cell.”
I stopped. “Oh, Christ, no way. I’m not under arrest. I came down here voluntarily.”
“You did, but you’re being held for questioning on suspicion of murder. We can legally hold you for twenty-four hours.”
I didn’t argue further. If I could have run, I would have, but I was now trapped in the bowels of the jailhouse, walking between two rows of jail cells with two beefy law enforcement officers between me and the only door out. I stepped into the holding cell and waited for the familiar sound of the door clanging shut. When it did, Fritz Hirsch jumped off the bunk in the cell across from me, grabbed his imaginary microphone and said, “Well, ladies and gentlemen, this is an honor. We have a very special guest with us tonight. He is making his premiere appearance at the Jefferson County Jail. I give you the former star of the Steubenville Big Red—John-eeee Earlllll.”
CHAPTER NINE
MATTHEW VINCENT “SMOOCHIE” XENAKIS
I have disproportionately large lips.
They’re grotesque, and I’d consider them comical, were they not attached to my face. Because of my lips, no one in Steubenville knows me as anything but “Smoochie.” I detest the nickname, but I will never escape or outgrow it. Most everyone around here has a nickname, and once you’ve been tagged, you’re stuck. For a time in the eighth grade, I quit responding to anyone who called me “Smoochie.” Unfortunately, not many people noticed my silent protest, and those who did simply quit talking to me altogether, so I ended the standoff and accepted the nickname.
When I die, my obituary will read: Matthew Vincent “Smoochie” Xenakis. If they omitted my nickname from the obit, I would no doubt go to my grave without anyone in town realizing that I was dead. Down at Erna’s Coffee Shop, someone would read the morning paper and say to no one in particular, “Who is this Xenakis fella who died—Matthew?” And someone else would respond, “Beats me. The only Xenakis I know is Smoochie.” As nicknames go, it isn’t the worst in Steubenville—I knew a Dago, Gum-Nose, Polio, Tweet, Numbie, and Toad—but it’s definitely in the top ten.
I was never popular in school, and my protruding lips made me an easy target for abuse. In the fifth grade, the high school music teacher said I had the perfect mouth structure for playing the trombone or the tuba. Not being an athlete or a particularly good student or the least bit popular, I believed this to be a tremendous compliment and my ticket to popularity. I bragged about it at school, which turned out to be a classic blunder. “Yeah, those lips are perfect for playing a musical instrument,” said Rayce Daubner, one of my perpetual tormentors. “It’s the perfect mouth for blowing on my skin flute.” This brought a roar of laughter from my classmates.
The trombone became my only source of accomplishment, but it meant being branded as “a bandie.” I was a trombone player in a community where football players, even bad ones, were treated as gods. You could play in the marching band and still preserve your heterosexual image, but only if you played basketball in the winter and baseball in t
he spring. Then you were considered multitalented. But if you were in the marching band in the fall, concert band in the winter, and chorus in the spring, like me, you were simply a faggot.
I did go out for the wrestling team my freshman and sophomore years and earned yet another humiliating nickname—Canvas Back—by getting pinned in every junior varsity match in which I wrestled. Seeing that my prospects were not likely to improve after roughly thirty straight defeats, I hung up my singlet to focus on the trombone.
However, I don’t want to give the impression that my childhood and adolescence were terrible. Guys like Johnny Earl and Francis Roberson didn’t harass me. Frankly, I doubt that Johnny Earl even knew who I was in high school. But guys like Rayce Daubner and the gang of mutants that he ran with were merciless, and for no good reason. I was the perfect target, because I was weak and didn’t fight back. One reason I didn’t fight back is that my dad was a Presbyterian minister. I had been raised in the way of the teachings of Jesus Christ and to turn the other cheek. The other reason I didn’t fight back is that I am a coward. I remain one to this day. It pains me to admit that, but I am. I want to stand up to people, but I can’t. I usually avoid confrontation at all costs. Rather than admit to my humiliating cowardice, I simply choose to blame it on Jesus.
There’s a tradition in Steubenville in which incoming freshman boys are subjected to all types of verbal, mental, and physical harassment. This neatly falls into the category of “initiation,” and it is therefore nodded and winked at by school officials. This includes any type of torment and torture that can be dreamed up by the upperclassmen. Nick Simkowski was captured by some seniors and put in a dress, high heels, and makeup and then pushed out of the car at the intersection of Fourth and Market without so much as a dime to call home. I spent the entire summer before my freshman year within a sprint of home because I was so afraid of getting initiated. Despite my best efforts to stay hidden, Carter Drake and Eugene Filopovich grabbed me after band practice one afternoon a week before school was to begin. They stripped me down to my undershorts, duct-taped my ankles and wrists together around the trunk of a small maple tree in front of the high school, then poured pancake syrup in my hair. They wouldn’t let any of the other band members free me until Eugene ran to his house and got a camera so they could capture the moment for posterity.
Most of the upperclassmen eventually tired of harassing me, but Rayce made a career of it during all four years of high school. The Bible says that you should not hate, but I hated Rayce. The truth is—and this is not a Christian way to think—for years I fantasized about killing him. I used to dream about being a cop. In those dreams, I would pull over Rayce every chance I got, and when he got so fed up with the torment that he reached for the door handle, I would coolly unload my revolver, spattering his brains all over the passenger-side window. I lost sleep at night in high school because I would play this scene over and over in my head, each night killing Rayce with a bullet to the temple, or to the middle of the forehead, or into his mouth. I always shot him before he got out of the car, because even in my fantasies I was afraid of him.
It’s terrible to go through life as a coward. You want people to think that you’re not cowardly, but in your heart you know the truth. You will do things—anything—to avoid confrontation. It costs you your freedom. Many beautiful days of my childhood were lost, spent in my living room in front of the television because there were guys outside, somewhere, and I might get picked on. I wouldn’t go anywhere. I wouldn’t participate. I didn’t live. Life starts to slip away because of fear. Sometimes, I was afraid and I didn’t even know why. I would often tell myself that it was a fear of getting punched or picked on. But that wasn’t it. It was the humiliation that came with getting picked on. At school, whenever I would get punched in the back or put in a headlock while one of my tormentors scraped my scalp raw with his knuckles, the other kids would watch from across the room, and I could see the pity in their eyes. They were silently pleading for me to fight back. Do something, they were telling me. Stand up to them. Stand up for yourself. But I couldn’t.
Instead of standing up for myself, I looked for an escape. When I was in elementary school, I looked forward to junior high. I got to junior high, and it turned out to be the most brutal two years of my life. So I looked forward to high school, and that wasn’t much better. I thought it would be better once I got out of high school. But nothing has really changed. I still don’t have much backbone, and it has kept me down.
I’m the assistant social director at Ohio Valley Hospital, and I’ve been in the same job for ten years. My boss doesn’t really like me; he knows I’m weak and he takes advantage of that. He dumps work on me, screams, and throws temper tantrums. When he gets upset, his face burns crimson. He pounds his fists on his desk and yells, “Xenakis, in here, now!” It’s more degrading than getting shoved into a locker in junior high.
We have a real nice secretary in our office—Shirley McConaughey —and when he throws one of his fits, she looks at me with that same mournful look that I once saw in the eyes of my classmates. Stand up to him; be a man, her eyes seem to say. But I don’t. I just continue to take it. I don’t even have the confidence to go out and look for another job. I’m afraid he’ll find out and I’ll get fired. I create excuses and new reasons to worry.
After high school, I had very little contact with Rayce Daubner. That was, until I learned that he was having an affair with my wife. And, as I guess is the case in these sorts of things, I was apparently the last person in town to know, which added to my humiliation.
My brother Luke told me about it, and I imagine he took a degree of delight in doing so. Luke is one year my junior and the most brutally honest man I’ve ever met. I was the perfect preacher’s son—quiet and obedient. By contrast, Luke came home drunk when he was fourteen. He wrecked three cars by the time he was seventeen. He played football and ran track and was as fearless as I was meek. When I was a senior and Luke was a junior, Audie Kimbel, a raw-boned senior who was a linebacker on the football team, decided it was funny to stop by my locker every morning and give me a headbutt. After about a week, Luke came out of nowhere, jammed a forearm under Audie’s chin, and pinned him to the lockers. Audie couldn’t get any air, and as his face turned purple, Luke said, “Everyone else may be afraid of you, Audie, but I’m not. So knock it off.” My problems with Audie ended right there. Luke was loud and ornery and caused my parents many sleepless nights. However, you would be hard-pressed to find anyone in Steubenville who didn’t like him, with the exception of my wife. He didn’t like Dena Marie, either, and he made that clear from the day I announced that I was engaged to marry her.
“Why would you go and do a fool thing like that?” he asked.
“Because I love her.”
He rolled his eyes. “She’ll cheat on you.”
“She will not.”
“She cheated on her first husband.”
“I’m not her first husband. She’s changed.”
“People don’t change, brother.”
“They can.”
“She won’t.”
“You don’t know that.”
He shrugged and said, “It’s your life.”
After high school, Luke bought a small steel-processing business outside of town. Well, he said he bought it. I heard he won it in a poker game from Red Birnbaum. Actually, calling it a business was a bit of an exaggeration. It was a dump of a place in an aluminum pole barn, consisting of a steel cutter and a couple of benders. Birnbaum had cut steel for a locker manufacturer in Canton, but he was a horrific drunk and so notoriously unreliable that the company quit buying from him and he closed it down. There were several coils of tin plate in the pole barn, which gave Luke some stock to begin working. He found a few customers and started working sixteen-hour days, seven days a week. He cut steel for a company that made safe-deposit boxes. Then the locker company hired him to cut and bend parts. He got a big contract to cut steel for a company that m
ade fishing tackle boxes. Within a couple of years, he had thirty people working for him. He’s a millionaire several times over, but you would never know it by the way he dresses or the battered pickup truck he drives.
Six months ago, he showed up at my office at the hospital. The door was open; he rapped twice on the jamb but never broke stride entering the office.
The only other time Luke had been in my office was the day he cut off his pinkie at the second knuckle. Instead of going straight to the emergency room, he showed up at my office with a dirty rag wrapped around the stub and carrying and the tip of the finger in a Dixie Cup with a couple of ice cubes. “You got anyone here who can help me out with this?” he asked, holding out the cup. We got an ambulance to take him to Allegheny Hospital in Pittsburgh, and they sewed it back on. It’s about as good as new.
“So, to what do I owe this honor?” I asked. “All your digits seem to be attached.”
He wiggled his fingers. “All accounted for.” He closed the door behind him and sat down in the chair in front of my desk. “I have something that I want to talk to you about, and I didn’t think that your living room would be the best location.”
“Okay. What’s on your mind?”
“Remember that conversation we had the day you said that you were going to marry Dena Marie?”
“I remember.”
“Well, it’s happening. She’s cheating on you.”
I could feel burning pinpricks race up my neck. “No, she’s not. She wouldn’t do that.”
“Big brother, what planet are you from? Of course she would. She’s done it before, remember? She’s meeting Rayce Daubner almost every afternoon after she gets off work at the A&P.”
“I don’t—”
“And don’t say that you don’t believe me,” he said, cutting me off. “You may be a little naive, but you’re smarter than that. She’s playing you for a chump while you’re busting your ass to pay off her credit-card debts and take care of her kids.”