by Packer, Vin
“I’m sorry, dad.”
“Lie after lie after lie! Last night in front of millions—this morning, in front of your own father.”
“I read the newspapers.”
“You’re damn right you did! Don’t you think I know you bury your head in them the minute you get home with them?”
“I just forgot.”
“You didn’t forget, Chuck. You just didn’t want to remember. You made a fool out of me! How do you think I look to the world this morning?”
“I don’t know, dad.”
“I look as though I forced you to say you’d spoofed. You know damn well!”
“You did tell me to admit it.”
“Chuck, I told you to admit it, but I didn’t make it up about you spoofing, the way the newspapers say I did!”
“I know.”
“All right! Okay, mister. Let’s just set things straight now.”
“They’re straight, dad.”
“Not quite, Chuck. There’s a small matter unattended. It won’t do much good, but it’ll be a little help.”
“What’s that, sir?”
“I put this stationery here for a reason. I want you to write the paper and tell them that you spoofed, and that it was not my idea. You tell them that, Chuck!”
“All right, dad.”
“You tell them I didn’t give you any orders whatsoever about how you were to conduct yourself on Cash-Answer! Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“And you have that letter to me by six o’clock tonight!”
“Yes, sir.”
“Yes, dad!” said Howard Berrey.
“Yes, dad.”
• • •
Charles Berrey sat at the round table in the library leaning on his elbows, remembering it all. There would be another fight tonight, he knew that. His mother had ridiculed his father’s idea that Charles write the newspapers.
“They’ll think we’ve all gone crazy!” she was screaming when he left the house to come here.
And his father? “Shut your yap! Shut your yap! Shut your yap!”
Last night Charles Berrey had thought his father would kill both of them. Even his mother had thought that. She had screamed over and over: “You want to kill us both! You will yet!” and once, after his father had slapped his face and while he was lunging at his mother, Charles Berrey himself had thought of killing. He had thought of his knives. He had sat crying in his bedroom, listening to the uproar, and he had thought of getting one of his knives.
But he was afraid of his knives, wasn’t he? Wasn’t he more afraid of his knives than anything in the world? He never thought of them as his knives, anyway. They were his father’s. His father had given him those knives, every single one of them but the little stone flint and the saber Howie had sent to him.
Maybe if things got out of hand again, the way they had last night, something would happen with those knives. Someone would use them.
For the third time that day, Charles Berrey unfolded the newspaper. With a feeling of sick apprehension he began to read the same news story again:
SHOOK-UP SLAYER SAYS GIRL DROVE HIM TO MURDER
By Ethel Waterbury
(SPECIAL TO U.P.) I talked with the shook-up slayer today. A 16-year-old boy with a handsome, slightly pale face and solemn brown eyes. He had close-cropped black hair with sideburns, but if the sideburns were an indication that he was a member of this wild, rock ‘n’ roll “shook-up” generation, they were the sole indication.
There was not a vicious expression to his whole countenance, nor any hatred there, nor any meanness. If I had seen this boy in my own backyard, I’d have wanted to say a friendly “Hi” to him. I’d have wanted to have him meet my own children.
Yet, on his own confession, Brock Brown admitted that less than a day ago he had slain 16-year-old Caroline Bates, after assaulting her, by plunging his pocketknife repeatedly into her body. He admitted he had left her there in the muddy road and gone home to wait for the police, taking the jackknife with him.
What made him do it? A boy who had never bought a rock ‘n’ roll record in his life, who wasn’t a wise guy or a smart aleck, whose pride was his neat grooming, and who admittedly had never “had anything to do with girls before.”
A soft-spoken, well-mannered boy, who says of his family: “Dad and Clara were always swell to me. I didn’t have an unhappy childhood. I had everything I wanted, from cars to clothes.”
But a boy, too, who had few friends his own age, who didn’t make the school fraternity because the others thought he was a lone wolf—a boy who didn’t “belong” the way other boys did.
A boy who never went to church, though he said he often prayed; a boy who is the picture of health, though he said he often had bad headaches that came over him suddenly “for no reason”; a boy who disclaimed any interest in things the other teen-agers did or said, though the words “shook up” were the only ones he could think of to explain his motive; a boy who was proud because he would not drive after dark and break the law, though brutal murder he would do—he did do.
“How do you feel?” I asked him. And the “shook-up” rapist-slayer, who had shown no emotion during hours of police questioning, studied his hands with a melancholy sigh and said: “I don’t know. I’m glad it’s over.”
Brock Brown did not seem overwhelmed with grief, nor even overly concerned. He was nervous as he sat there in the prosecutor’s office in his navy blue suit with his clean white shirt and fresh navy blue tie.
He showed very little emotion until he told about his attack on Caroline Bates, and then he began to tremble.
“She drove me to do it,” he said. “I didn’t want to do that crime. Why didn’t she go home, the way she was going to in the first place?”
The “crime” this pathetic youth was referring to was the rape of the Bates girl. Her murder, the crime for which he is being held, seemed of only secondary importance.
“I don’t know why I used the knife at all,” said the boy. “I don’t know how I thought of the knife, or why.”
“What kind of television shows do you like?” I asked.
He told me that he had no special favorites, but that he did not like movies about the Nazis because they reminded him of their cruelty during the war.
“I don’t like mushy movies either,” he added. “I walk out on those kind if they show them on television.”
Asked why he did not like such movies, his eyes were vacant. “I’m just not that kind of guy,” he answered.
Questioned as to what his ambition was, the youth admitted that he had not given it much thought.
“I was supposed to go to college or something,” he said. “I guess that’s over with now.
“I can’t give you any answers for this,” he said. “I know I said I was shook up, and that everyone thinks wrong of me for saying that, but I can’t think of any other way to put it. I used to pray to God a lot. I never asked Him for anything. I had what I wanted. But I used to say prayers of thanks.”
Then he repeated the familiar words again: “I’m just shook up,” he said. “There’s no other way of putting it.”
* * *
What does it feel like to interview a 16-year-old rapist-killer? Not the way you think.
You don’t feel hatred. You don’t feel hot anger. You don’t even feel disgust.
You go away feeling only a momentous emptiness, a void which only the question: “Why?” can fill, and a certain dumb, sad, horrible shock at the sudden realization that you don’t know the answer to “Why?” … and you wonder if anyone will ever have the answer to “Why?”
Charles Berrey folded the paper when he finished reading the article. He felt a sudden impulse to burn the newspaper, to burn it the way his father had made him burn the dollar bill that morning—to simply destroy it so he would never have to think about it again.
Over and over in his mind, he kept remembering the words: “I don’t know why I used the knife at all. I d
on’t know how I thought of the knife, or why.”
He thought of that, and he thought of his own knives. And he thought about what it would be like to go home. It was four-thirty on Memorial Day afteroon. He was due home at six o’clock—with the letter written!
He placed a piece of the stationery his father had given him on the desk in front of him, and he took out his ball-point pen. It would be easy to write the letter … All he would have to say was that his father had not told him to spoof. He just had to write it out. That his father had not told him to spoof, that his father had never given him any orders about how to behave on Cash-Answer.
Then Charles Berrey could hold back the tears no longer. They were tears of rage; of fear; of wretched, confused disappointment. They came, and he was helpless to prevent their flow. He thought of the way his father had slapped him; of all the fighting and the quarreling; of his knife rack; of the fire alarm box on the corner of Rider Avenue; and of how he would like to burn that newspaper. He cried, feeling the tears roll off his cheeks and splash onto the collar of his green sports shirt, and he thought of the way the rains came in the old Polynesian myth, of Maui’s grandmother with fire on her fingers and her toes, and the rain coming to put out that fire … But in the trees, the fire burned. Even the rain couldn’t stop it. Nothing could.
PART SIX
Chapter Sixteen
BROCK BROWN
It was Saturday morning, the day after Memorial Day.
In the corridor of the Kantogee County Children’s Home, where Brock was being held, Robert Brown faced the psychiatrist the circuit judge had appointed to examine the boy.
“Of course,” said Dr. Baird, “my opinion isn’t the only one that counts in a case like this. After all, there’s the hearing on the petition asking the juvenile waiver, and there are still some mental tests we want to give Brock.”
“They’ll try him for homicide if you say he’s sane,” said Robert Brown. “I’m sure of that.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Brown. I have to do my duty the way I see it.”
“He must have been insane, doctor. You said yourself there was that business about his mother, about his thinking he was responsible for her death.”
“Mr. Brown, I said there was a good possibility that Brock felt some responsibility because he may have wished her dead.”
“You never knew my wife, doctor. She hated that boy.”
“I never knew either one of you, Mr. Brown. If your son did wish his mother dead, and felt guilty as a result, it may certainly have contributed to a neurosis. That was probably why he felt sex was evil. Your wife died in childbirth. But a neurosis of that sort is quite common. Many children wish their parents were dead, and parents die every day.”
“Explain to me about his obsession with dirt again. Could you just do that, doctor?”
“Mr. Brown, a child soils. A child is always soiling, one way or the other. His mother must have blamed Brock for being dirty.”
“She used to call him a little pig, doctor!”
“Then, of course, you were a mechanic. There was always dirt on your clothes. Your wife may have mentioned that when the boy could hear it. Or perhaps the boy imagined that she did. Dirt symbolized blame to your son, and it also may well have symbolized sex, the thing that killed your wife.”
“Do you call that sane?” said Robert Brown.
“Mr. Brown, this is very unnecessary—all of it. I told you before, and I’m very sorry that I have to repeat it: in my opinion your son knows the difference between right and wrong. He is also capable of understanding the court proceeding against him, should that be the case, and of helping in his own defense.”
“Dr. Baird, listen. Please. I don’t understand this. I wish I could talk with you, or Dr. Fletcher. Won’t you explain it to me?”
“Dr. Fletcher agrees with my diagnosis, Mr. Brown. Now, neither of us is on trial.”
“It’s just that I want to help my boy.”
“And I wish I could help you, Mr. Brown. But there’s absolutely nothing more I can do.”
The doctor touched his hand to his hat as he placed it on his head and went back down the corridor.
Momentarily, Robert Brown stood watching him go. Then slowly he turned and went toward the room where Brock was waiting for him.
“Hello, son,” he said as the guard shut the door behind them.
Brock smiled meekly, standing to greet his father.
“Hello, dad.”
“I brought the clothes you wanted. I gave them to Officer Raleigh.”
“Thank you.”
“Clara sends her love, son.”
“I suppose she’s mad.”
“Why do you say that, Brock? There’s no one mad.”
“She had to come back from her vacation, didn’t she?”
“Brock, we’re not thinking about a vacation or anything else but how to help you.”
“Me? I’m helpless.”
“No one is helpless when people care about them.”
“I guess you can have more children, dad. I’m glad of that. Clara wants a baby.”
“Right now, Clara and I want you, Brock.”
“Do you, dad?”
The boy began to cry. He sat down in the leather chair in the anteroom and held his head with his hands. “I don’t know why it happened. I’ve tried and tried to figure it out. The doctors were here, the head-shrinkers. They know why, I suppose. I suppose they can figure the whole thing out, just like they always do. They think they know everything!”
“They think you’re sane, Brock.”
“I am! I told them I was!”
“You couldn’t have been, Brock. I know my own kid, don’t I? Something must have gone wrong in your mind.”
“No, dad. That’s where you’re wrong. Listen, dad. I’ll tell you something,” the boy said. “Earlier in the day—earlier, I was worried. I thought something might go wrong. I was all shook up, anway. Remember last night I told you that it was really me who took that flowerpot?”
“You never explained why.”
“I had a headache, dad. I had to take it. I don’t know. But that’s nothing. Dad, I took something else.”
“Something else?”
“A key, dad. I took a key that night when the Rubins called you up and made you and Clara come over. It was a key to their house, dad. I’m sure it was.”
“But why? Why did you do that?”
“I don’t know. I had a funny feeling about that key. That I was going to use it for something.”
“For what, son? For what?”
“Something! I don’t know! That’s how come I know I’m sane. All day I was thinking of using the key. I wanted to go back there to the Rubins. I wanted—to get them.”
“Get them for what? Sam and Estelle Rubin?”
“That flowerpot leaked all over me. It made me mad. I couldn’t forget it, dad. I kept that key. I was so afraid I almost told one of the teachers at school about it. But I didn’t. I just kept it. In my pocket.”
“I don’t understand, Brock. Sam and Estelle Rubin never did anything to you.”
“I know it. That was what was so crazy! But dad—listen, after Carrie—after what I did, dad, I didn’t want the key any more.”
“What do you mean, Brock? I’m trying to understand.”
“I didn’t want the key any more, dad! I threw it away! I felt silly carrying that key around! Don’t you see? I didn’t want it!”
“I’m trying to see, Brock—I’m trying.”
“Dad, if I was insane, I would have wanted to keep that key! I would have wanted to do something with it. I don’t even know what, for Pete’s sake! Don’t you get it?”
“Son, son, I’m trying to understand.”
“It was just like when I took the Mercury last week. After I tied the ten dollars to the steering wheel. I didn’t want that car! I didn’t want it! I felt silly! Just like when I knew I didn’t want the key any more.”
Robert Brown stood the
re staring at his son, a look of incredulousness on his face. He was beginning to remember something—beginning to remember the day last week when he had gotten the call at the garage to pick up an abandoned car.
“Was it a green Mercury, Brock?” he said. “It wasn’t a green Mercury?”
It had been left on a back-country road, with ten dollars held to the chrome steering wheel by a rubber band … It had been left on a dirt road … the same dirt road near Eastern Highway and Simon Point.
“Yes,” said Robert Brown’s son, grinning, “it was green. How did you know, dad?”
Chapter Seventeen
CHARLES BERREY
QUIZ KID TURNS FIREBUG, 1 DEAD
Quiz kid Charles Berrey, known to television viewers as “Chuck,” the bespectacled, eight-year-old with the elephantine memory, formerly a contestant on Cash-Answer, set fire to the library in his home town on Memorial Day afternoon.
Overcome by smoke and unable to escape a flaming death was Reddton’s beloved librarian, Miss Margaret Schuster.
The blaze was set at approximately four forty-five, while citizens of Reddton paid solemn tribute to the war dead in the lobby of the library. There, Miss Schuster had arranged an exhibit tracing the history of the Unknown Soldier in this country.
Charles Berrey, questioned on the lawn of the library while firemen were inside attempting to quell the flames, confessed to setting the fire. He said that he began the blaze with a newspaper in the library’s basement, where he had been “thinking.”
Just what this boy-genius with ambitions to be a baseball player was “thinking” to compel him to arson he refused to make clear. Spectators alleged that the boy’s failure to answer a question on the television show Cash-Answer Memorial Day eve may have incited his resentment against this building, which housed so much information on so many subjects.
The small, nervous youngster, described by neighbors as “more of a bookworm than a ballplayer,” forfeited $52,000 when he incorrectly identified a zebra swallowtail butterfly as a tiger swallowtail. After the television show, he made the tearful, unconvincing claim that he had known the correct answer “instantly,” that he had been merely “spoofing.”