The Ravine

by Robert Pascuzzi

  So when Danny got a very strong message to reach under his seat and take the tire iron with him, he knew it was the right thing to do.

  Tony looked at him like he was out of his mind. “What the hell are you bringing that for? You know the place is empty. We have to get in, open the safe, take the cash, and get out of there as fast as possible. You won’t need that!”

  “Who knows if we will? What’s the difference? I’ll just leave it in the gym bag, just in case.”

  “In case of what?” At times like these, Tony knew there was no talking sense to his brother, who could be so thick-headed. Anyway, Bags was on his way across the street, pulling on his gloves; it was time to get to work.

  Tony unlocked the front door while Danny and Bags pressed into the shadows, following him inside once it was open. Great! The key worked. They shut the door. Now it was up to Danny to punch in the security code while Bags shined his flashlight on the keypad. It beeped a few times, but they were done in a flash, and, amazingly, good old Jack had given them the right code.

  The plan was for Tony to take the lead, using only his flashlight to illuminate the way. They would head directly to the master bedroom, open the safe, take out every last dollar, scoot down the stairs, punch in the exit code, and close and lock the door. There would be no stopping to look for jewelry or pinching something one of them might want to grab. By the time the robbery was discovered, the crocuses would be forcing their way up through the earth. So far things were going just as planned. It bothered Tony that the lamp he thought was on a timer wasn’t on. The bulb must have burnt out, he reasoned.

  They crossed the foyer and started up the steps. The house was old, so the steps creaked, but that didn’t concern them because they knew the house was vacant. In a hushed voice, Danny said, “Remember, we have to turn left at the top of the stairs.” He could hear his heart pounding and the blood rushing through his head; he barely could find the breath to speak. Suddenly he wanted this to be over with. Something was wrong; he knew it, but he dared not say anything to his brother because Tony hated it when Danny had one of his stupid “feelings.”

  They gathered at the landing and the beam from Tony’s flashlight hit the chrome of the bathroom faucet, and then lit on the door to the master bedroom, which was closed. They were at the door in a few seconds, and it clicked open when Tony twisted the knob. Kevin stirred in the guest bedroom, mumbled something to Missy about hearing the alarm go off, and then turned over and went back to sleep.

  Tony saw the three of them reflected in the blackness of the mirror, and thought how young and frightened they all looked—Danny in particular, with those big eyes poking out of his head. He silently pointed to the closet door. “That’s the one,” he whispered. When they opened the door, it was just as they had imagined.

  This was the real deal. The safe stood about two feet high, was gun-metal gray, and was bolted to the floor. There was no way anyone was ever going to carry that baby out of there. Bags was reputed to have nimble fingers, so it was his job to turn the combination lock to the correct numbers. He squatted down, and Tony realized for the first time that he was wearing a backpack.

  Danny shined his light on the piece of paper Jack had given them the day after Christmas. Bags’s hand was shaking so badly that Danny had to reach down and hold his wrist. But within a few turns they heard the cylinders click into place. Bags turned the handle and pulled out one of the drawers; it was filled with piles of neatly stacked cash.

  “All right!” Bags exclaimed. “We hit the mother lode!”

  In their excitement, they forgot their promise to keep the noise down, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was getting the cash into the bags and getting the hell out of there. Tony unzipped his bag and started feeding the cash into it.

  Missy and Kevin both bolted upright when they heard voices down the hall.

  “Somebody’s in the house,” she whispered. “We better call the cops.”

  “The only phone up here is in Mom and Dad’s room. I’m going to go check this out.”

  Missy groped around, found a kids-size baseball bat, and whispered, “Here, you’d better take this; maybe it will scare them away. Be careful!”

  Kevin crept down the hall in the dark, reached around the wall, and turned on the bedroom lights. He saw three men gathered around the open safe, and they turned around at once, clearly startled and shocked.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” he shouted, lifting the bat above his head.

  “We were just leaving,” Tony said. “Don’t do anything stupid and no one will get hurt.” He tried to sound menacing but knew this was a bad situation about to get much worse. He put his hands up as if to imply that he was giving up, but now he was glad Danny had prepared and figured he would know what to do.

  Danny was kneeling next to his bag; he slid his hand in and gripped the tire iron. Then a woman in a nightgown appeared at the door, and the guy with the bat said, “Missy, go downstairs and call the cops, right now.”

  When Kevin moved a step closer, Danny whipped out the tire iron and clubbed him around the knee, and the guy brought the bat down on Danny’s head. Tony jumped in and tried to grab the bat, but the man was swinging it furiously. Somehow Danny managed to stand up and wildly swing the tire iron. He caught the guy on the side of the neck, which knocked him down and out cold, but then Danny started beating him on the back, shouting, “Bastard, don’t you ever hit me!”

  Tony jumped in and said, “Stop! We’ve got to get out of here.” Bags grabbed the gym bag with the cash and ran down the steps and out the door.

  When Tony got to the bottom of the steps, he saw the woman dialing on the phone in the kitchen. He ran in the room, pulled the phone from her hand, and ripped it out of the wall, inadvertently sending her flying across the floor. Holding the phone like a club, he leaned over her and threatened to kill her if she called the cops; then he turned and ran out the door. Missy sat crumpled on the floor, trembling and calling out for Kevin to come downstairs. Eventually, when she found him, her shrieks echoed throughout the neighborhood.

  CHAPTER 5

  Crossroads

  Our lives are the sum total of the choices we have made.

  —Wayne Dyer

  DANNY AND TONY rushed off to track down Bags and get their fair share (and beat him to a pulp), but he was nowhere to be found. It turned out the bag he ran off with contained around ten thousand dollars. That’s roughly the amount the police gathered up after it went flying through the windshield, along with Bags, when his VW Bug took off like a missile and collided head-on with a big oak on Winding Way in Gates Mills. The police estimated he was going at least seventy miles per hour. In his obituary, it was noted that he was a graduate of Geauga High and an avid football fan.

  By the time Danny and Tony reached their street, the sun was coming up. There were several police cars in the driveway. The brothers backed up when they saw the twirling lights, but made it only as far as Mentor before they were apprehended. Missy had attended Geauga High and recognized Tony and Danny for the stars they used to be. The Chesterland police were not at all surprised, but they were mighty disappointed in the Turner boys. The officers who were assigned the duty of breaking the news to Steve and Debby did so with the great delicacy and sympathy only another parent could understand.

  Kevin Grant spent almost a month in the hospital and suffered a brain injury at the base of his skull, along with numerous broken ribs and a punctured lung. A few more strokes with that tire iron and he probably wouldn’t have recovered. Don and Linda Grant flew back that day and were horrified to see the condition of their son, their house, and their daughter-in-law. Linda began to cry when she saw Kevin, and didn’t stop until that night when Missy took her aside and told her the good news about the baby that was due later that year.

  Because of the ghastliness of the crime—and the bitter irony of the fleeting fame once enjoyed by the Turner boys—it was the top news story in the Cleveland area for a few d
ays back in January of 1981. The court proceedings were handled quickly; because there were two eyewitnesses, Tony and Danny were advised to take a plea bargain. And so they were each sentenced to a minimum of ten years and a maximum of twenty-five. The Grants, and in particular Kevin, thought they had gotten off too easily, but they wanted to get on with their lives, so they finally agreed with the prosecutor and the sentence was passed.

  For the first year, they were held in the same part of the Chillicothe Correctional Institution and had some contact, but then Danny was moved to a unit on the other side of the prison, and they could only communicate by letter or by an occasional phone call.

  Tony, in particular, seemed to mature while in prison. He realized that this was an opportunity to take a new direction once he was released, and, if he played by the rules, he might get out early. He was determined to make something of himself. While in prison, he attended anger-management classes and constantly read books on business and self-improvement. He even began to develop a sense of gratitude about his situation. He knew they had come pretty close to killing someone that night, and if not that night, it would have happened another time. He accepted the fact that they were fortunate they were caught.

  He felt sorry for Danny, and somewhat responsible, but there wasn’t much he could do for him.

  Danny, on the other hand, couldn’t get over the fact that the Grant kid picked that night to “sneak” into his house right before they showed up to rob the place. He was angry about his rotten luck, didn’t think life had given him a fair shake, and refused to discuss his real feelings with the prison psychologist or anyone else who might have helped him. There were a few other guys in the prison who were equally angry about their situations, and they fed each other a steady diet of resentment. They all agreed they were entitled to their bitterness because it helped them to keep their dignity, which was one of the few things they had left—and they were not about to let anyone take that away.

  After Danny was relocated, Tony started to write to him to encourage him to make the best of his time in prison, and to try to admit that what they did was wrong, really wrong, and that he was lucky he hadn’t hit that Grant guy three inches higher on his head, because he would have killed him. At least now he had a shot at getting out and another chance to make things right.

  Danny wasn’t convinced, and told Tony that he was going to play along with the system because it benefited him, and earned him certain privileges that made life a little more tolerable. He resented having to take the classes on anger, and thought the psychologist he had to see was a sucker. So he enjoyed pretending that he had seen the error of his ways and was going to change. He tucked a Bible under his arm when he went to his sessions, and started to quote scripture. Every once in a while something he read would strike him as a real truth, but then his inner voice would tell him he was being played for a fool, and he’d quickly reverse himself. No, all he wanted was to get out and stay out. In that respect, he learned something: crime really didn’t pay and he needed to pick up some skills. One of the things his voice told him was that he shouldn’t listen to Tony: if he hadn’t done his bidding in the first place, he wouldn’t be sitting in prison.

  He discovered that he was naturally good at auto repair, and so he learned as much as he could about that subject. He even took a class that was offered, and decided it was something he could do when he got out—if only that day would come.

  Steve and Debby Turner visited as often as possible. Debby always told herself that she was not going to cry, but then she would spend a good deal of the visit tearing up, blurting out things like “What did I do to cause this?,” “If only we had gone to church more often as a family, but your father had no interest,” “Anthony and Daniel were such good boys when they were young,” and, her favorite, “It’s really a shame you boys got mixed up with that bad apple, James Bagneski.”

  Most of the time, Steve would just sit quietly, unable to say what he thought because he really didn’t know what to think. He preferred to stick to his memories of his two sons playing ball in the front yard until it was so dark they couldn’t see a thing. He remembered leaning over Tony’s shoulder as they sat at the kitchen table and diagrammed the plays they invented. It was satisfying to watch their excitement, but it was the love Tony and Danny had for each other that truly gave him confidence in a secure future. Getting them to do their homework was another matter, but Steve didn’t care too much, because some part of him bought into the fantasy that his kids would one day play pro sports, or at worst get athletic scholarships to college.

  Life was so simple then. Pajamas, football, family dinner, more love than any two kids could expect from the best mother in the world—and yet here they were, sitting in jail. Steve was planning to retire early because he just couldn’t stand the way people looked at him down at Jayomar. Either they smirked and whispered to each other or gave him a look of pity. But what Steve didn’t realize was that most of the decent folks didn’t like to think about what had happened to Steve and Debby, because, as parents, it frightened them. If this tragedy could happen to the Turners, maybe it could happen to them. So, if they thought about it at all, it was to tell themselves that this horror came about because of something that lurked behind the walls of the Turner home, which would never invade their household. It was sort of like asking if the person who died of cancer had been a smoker.

  Tony and Danny endured these visits from their parents, but except for the small items they were allowed to receive, such as toothpaste and books, there weren’t too many positive things that came out of these sad get-togethers. Both sons hated to be reminded of the pain and shame they had brought upon their parents, and they were truly perplexed as to how their lives had gone from good to bad to horrible so quickly.

  As Tony grew in his faith, he was able to see that things had gone downhill little by little, because of the numerous bad decisions he had made. Pride had played a big role in his decline. After all, by the time he was a junior in high school, he was used to being the most popular kid in school; he believed this was his due and expected it would continue throughout his life. One day, when his mom came alone for a visit, he told her about some of the lessons he had learned, and honestly asked her to forgive him. It was the first time he saw her truly smile since that night in January. That’s when Tony realized these visits were for his mother and his father, not for him and Danny, and he needed to see them in a new light. He also saw that the truth was very powerful.

  Danny, too, felt a responsibility to try to cheer up his parents when they met. He could always get his dad to talk about the rivalry between the Browns and the Steelers, or gripe about how poorly the Indians were doing, but it was a mistake to go near reality. Once he slipped and said, “The first thing I’m gonna do when I get out of here is go down to Cleveland Stadium to see the Indians or Browns. Whatever time of year it is.” The awkward silence that followed spoke volumes, and then his mom began to weep.

  The topic of just how long they would have to stay in jail always brought the discussion to a sad ending. The reality was that it was possible they would be in prison for another twenty years. To young men in their twenties this prospect was horrifying. While other young men their age were starting families and building their careers, they were stuck in this place, for “one stupid mistake,” as Debby often said, concluding with “it’s just not fair.” The prospect that they might not be free until they were in their forties was daunting.

  And so it went for several years. One of the reasons Tony was able to change and grow was thanks to the regular visits from Joe Hamilton, Carolyn’s father. He knew the boys from coaching them in baseball and, as a man of faith, felt it was his obligation to visit them and, by his presence, let them know that someone cared about and forgave them. He visited each of them and encouraged them to find the strength every day to get the most out of life, despite their situation, and never to give up hope, because miracles were always possible. Both Tony and Danny
appreciated his visits, and even Danny, who was usually uncomfortable talking about his feelings, would sincerely thank him for coming. Mr. Hamilton never failed to bring each of them a few copies of Sports Illustrated, and they would pore over these pages again and again.

  Then one day that miracle Mr. Hamilton had been talking about happened. They each received an identical letter from Kevin Grant. Yes, the very same Kevin Grant whom Danny had clubbed in the head, whose pregnant wife had been shoved to the floor, whose parents’ house they had robbed, and who had spent a month in the hospital and another year recovering from the wounds they had inflicted.

  He wrote that after years of hating them, he had come to the conclusion that the only way he could be free of his misery was to forgive them. He wanted to write to their warden and ask for a meeting with them, so he could personally forgive them. He needed to do this for himself, not for them, and he wanted their permission before he wrote to the warden.

  Imagine that, thought Tony. Here we beat the crap out of this guy and, four years later, he’s asking us for permission to come and forgive us! There was honesty in that letter that was undeniable. Jesus taught that unless you can forgive those who have harmed you, you will never be free. Tony remembered the verses as: “And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors” and “forgive our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” He realized how powerful these words were when they were lived, not just recited, like he had done in church as a little boy. Tony wrote back to Kevin to tell him how touched he was, and that he would, of course, be happy to see him.

  Danny read the letter over about six times. He couldn’t believe his eyes. Why would a guy he almost killed want to come to see him to forgive him? At first he was touched, and he even found himself holding the letter and tearing up a bit. He started to talk to God, and a newfound sense of freedom began to come over him. But then the voice began to whisper: There was something fishy about the whole thing. This Grant guy must want something. Maybe he was just doing this to make himself look holier than thou. Maybe he wanted to go to the press and say, “Look at me! Look at what a great guy I am.” Just because Danny was in prison didn’t mean that anyone was better than him. But Kevin Grant could be useful, the voice advised him. Meet with him. Maybe he’ll help you earn a “get out of jail early” card. Danny thought using some of the scripture he’d learned might do the trick. Always mix in some truth with a lie. He looked in the mirror. Never forget who you are, Danny, he said to himself, and never again let anyone take advantage of you.