The Importance of Being Kevin

by Steven Harper

  Oh shit. The focus of my fear shifted sideways. Les was pressing charges. Peter would go to jail now. Guilt mingled with the fear and threatened to overwhelm it. Peter had done that for me. It was my fault.

  “I see,” Peter said.

  “Mr. Madigan was dead,” Detective Malloy finished.

  The three words plowed through me like a charging bull. My knees weakened, and the floor wobbled. Dead? Les was dead? But Peter had only—

  “How did you bruise your hands, Mr. Morse?” asked Detective Malloy.

  Peter slipped his hands into his back pockets. “I don’t think I should talk about it.”

  “A witness who lives in the building saw a car leave the scene at about the time Les was probably murdered,” Detective Malloy continued relentlessly. “The witness didn’t get a license plate, but the description of the driver matches you, and the description of the car matches your blue Mustang, Mr. Morse. Can you explain that?”

  Peter’s face was a rock. “No.”

  “Then you leave me no choice.” She spun Peter around and whipped out a pair of handcuffs. “Peter Morse, you are under arrest for the murder of Les Madigan.”

  ACT II: SCENE I

  KEVIN

  PETER WOULDN’T look at me while Detective Malloy hauled him away, and a black feeling oozed through my stomach. Everyone freaked out at hearing that Les was dead and seeing Peter arrested, so Iris canceled rehearsal. I wasn’t in very good shape either. An image of Robbie huddled all broken on the ground came into my head and mixed with thoughts of Peter beating Les to death with those hands that had touched me. I ran out of the theater and made it all the way to the golf course on my bike before I threw up at the side of the road. This was my second barf-o-rama in two days. Shit.

  It was a long, scary ride home under lengthening evening shadows. Acid burned at the back of my throat, and I really wanted some cold water. Peter had killed Les. Over me. The guy who had attacked me was dead. It didn’t seem real. He had attacked me, and now he was gone, wrenched out of the world by a guy who had kissed me eight times. I couldn’t figure out what to do about that. Les scared the shit out of me, but I hated him too. Could I feel good about him being dead? I’d been okay with it when I thought Peter just beat him up. Shit, I’d felt great. But dead? I didn’t know.

  And what was going to happen to Peter? He killed a guy. Fear put a black lump in my chest. Peter was strong and powerful, but I remembered the awful sound my bat had made when it hit Robbie—that wet snap of wood breaking bone, the scream of pain that followed. And I remembered how angry I’d felt because Hank said Robbie thought I was gay. I was ready to kill Robbie, and I didn’t understand why. Not then, anyway. It was why I felt like a bug at the bottom of a skunk’s burrow when I stood in front of the judge and why I was ready to go to juvie, where they’d beat me and smash me like I had done to Robbie—because I deserved it.

  All this mixed up inside me, and it scared me, and it pissed me off. How could Peter do this to me? To us? What was happening to Peter right now? Fingerprinting and photographing? Interrogation in that little room in the police station? I’d been there with steel handcuffs around my wrists. So had Dad.

  I turned down Six Mile Road and coasted past the tired old houses. Dad. This wasn’t the first time someone… important to me had been arrested for murder. The same thing had happened to Dad, back when I was just little and Mom was still here and we lived in a real house because Dad had a good job as a construction worker for Morse Plastic. I was maybe four years old, but I remembered that day. I was drawing a picture with crayons at the kitchen table, and the walls were painted yellow. It was sunny outside, and I was thinking about going outside to wait for Dad to come home. He was late. Really late. And I was hungry.

  Then some other stuff happened—I don’t remember all of it—and Mom was talking to me. She looked really mad.

  “Your daddy’s in jail,” she said in a flat voice. “He killed a man.”

  I didn’t know how to handle that, so I started to cry. Mom wasn’t much help. She spent all her time on the phone. I was scared and didn’t know what was going to happen. It seemed like I was scared a lot after that. How could my dad have killed someone? I knew Dad could get mad, and sometimes he would yell. Once he punched the wall and put a hole in it, and that was really scary, but he fixed it the next day and you couldn’t see the hole anymore.

  Later I found out that Dad had gotten into a fight at work. Both of them were up high in the building they were working on. The other guy punched Dad, Dad punched back, and the other guy stumbled backward. He fell off the building and died. Some of the other workers said that Dad definitely didn’t throw the other guy off the building and that the other guy had started the fight, but the court said that Dad was still at least partly to blame. The judge sentenced him to eight years in prison for manslaughter.

  Dad lost his job when he was arrested, right? Mom’s job as a file clerk at Morse didn’t pay very much, so we lost the house and had to move into a tiny apartment. I slept on the couch and never brought friends over because I didn’t want them to know I didn’t have a bed and my dad was in jail. By then I stopped being scared. I was tired of that, and I spent a lot of time being mad instead. I was mad Dad had gotten himself sent to prison, and I was mad we had lost our house, and I was mad Mom didn’t take me to see him more often, and I was mad I had to go visit him. Being mad was easier than being scared. I guess raising a kid who was mad all the time was hard on Mom, because she didn’t talk to me very much, and I ran around on my own a lot and did what I wanted and got into trouble. Three or four times I got suspended from school, but Mom never yelled at me. She didn’t seem to care.

  Michigan’s prisons are way crowded, and Dad was a model prisoner who spent most of his time reading—a new habit—so they let him out after five years instead of eight. I was nine years old. By then I’d grown up going to visit Dad once a month. He got out of prison a week after my ninth birthday, and I thought we’d have a celebration, maybe even go for hamburgers. But Mom opened a couple cans of beef stew like she always did on Thursday. It felt weird with Dad sitting at the little table when I was used to seeing him in the visiting room with guards and other prisoners and their families. Mom and Dad didn’t talk very much. Dad tried to talk to me, but I didn’t know what to say, so I kept my eyes on my bowl and ate.

  Two days later Mom was gone. Just left. I still don’t know where she is or what happened. It was probably because I was a crappy kid. Who would want to hang around with me?

  Dad couldn’t find work. If you want to work construction, you have to be bonded and licensed, and convicted felons can’t get bonded. Michigan doesn’t give you welfare either, unless there’s something wrong with you, like you’re blind or in a wheelchair or something. Dad got some money because of me—that made me feel real good—but it wasn’t enough to stay in the apartment. One of the guys he met in prison owned a trailer on some east-side land outside of town, and he said me and Dad could stay there if we paid the property taxes and kept the place up. So that’s what we did. Dad got some under-the-table jobs here and there, enough to pay utilities and buy an occasional pizza. I didn’t know what would happen when Dad’s friend got out of prison. I tried not to think about that.

  So now both my dad and my boyfriend were up for murder. Was there something about me that attracted this shit? There had to be something wrong with me.

  A strange car was sitting in the driveway by Dad’s truck. I dropped my bike on the ground nearby. Now what?

  When I went inside, I found Dad standing in the living room with Detective Malloy. My skin went cold. They both turned.

  “There you are.” Dad’s voice was tight, and I remembered he hated the police, though mostly he was scared of them. “This is—”

  “We’ve met,” Malloy said. “Kevin, I need to talk to you, and your dad said it was okay.”

  I felt like I was going to throw up. “About what?”

  “Come on, Kev.” Dad
sighed. “About that boy Peter. He was over here the other day.”

  Malloy flipped open a notebook just like they did on television, just like the detective who had arrested me the first time. “What’s your relationship with Peter Morse?”

  “What? What?” Dad interrupted before I could answer. “He’s a fucking Morse?”

  “He is.” Malloy’s face was bland.

  “Holy shit.” Dad sank to the couch. “What the hell is he doing at the Art Center?”

  I had never heard Dad swear so much all at one shot. It almost made me forget what was going on. The trailer was growing warm despite the box fan in the window, and I wanted to hide in the forest of books.

  “Your relationship with Peter Morse?” Malloy asked me again.

  “Do I have to talk to you?” A shaky note entered my voice. “I don’t want to.”

  “You don’t have to,” Malloy replied. “I can go down and talk to your probation officer and see what she thinks about you not cooperating, though.”

  A pang went through me. “You know I’m on probation.”

  “Kid, I know everything about you. I saw the photos of what you and your friends did to that boy. Now you’re connected to another beating, one that ended in a death this time, and you won’t answer questions. That’s really suspicious in my book.”

  My insides turned to water, and my knees went rubbery. The walls closed in from all directions. I had no way out. She would find out everything.

  Malloy continued, “Maybe we should continue this down at the station—”

  “Hey, hey, hey.” Dad held up his hands. “That’s not necessary. Kevin will tell you anything you want to know. Won’t you?”

  And then I thought of Peter in a jail cell. Peter, who had taken my place at Les’s. Peter, who had defended me.

  Killed for me.

  I couldn’t figure out how to feel about all this, but I did know I owed Peter. I could at least be strong for him, like he had been for me. I made myself stand up straight.

  “Peter and I are friends,” I said. “We’re in the play together. So what?”

  “Mouth,” Dad said.

  Malloy scribbled in her notebook. “He came over here a couple days ago, and you went over to his house today.”

  “You did?” Dad said.

  I started to answer, then shut my mouth. The first time I had been in court, my public defender attorney had warned me it was dumb to say the first thing that popped into my head. He told me always to count five Mississippis before I answered any questions. So I counted—one Mississippi, two Mississippi….

  When I reached five, I realized something. “You didn’t ask a question.”

  “Why did you go to Peter’s house?”

  One Mississippi, two Mississippi…. She was looking for proof that Peter had killed Les, and she was looking to see if I was involved. But there was no connection between me and Les, or none anyone knew of. No one had seen what he had done to me, and Peter had deleted the video from Les’s cell phone.

  Hadn’t he? I hadn’t actually seen him do it. And what if the police found Les’s phone at Peter’s house and they used some kind of computer program to recover the video? They were always doing shit like that on TV. I was getting scared again.

  …five Mississippi.

  But the police wouldn’t even know to look for Les’s cell phone, let alone look for it at Peter’s house.

  “I went over there to rehearse,” I said. “He has the lead, and I have a big part. It’s a lot of lines.”

  “All you did was rehearse?”

  One Mississippi, two Mississippi…. In my head, Peter kissed me and ran his hands over my body on his bed. “That wasn’t really a question.”

  “Did you do anything besides rehearse?”

  One Mississippi, two Mississippi…. “We played some video games and went swimming,” I said. “This might go faster if I you just asked me what you wanted to know.”

  “Did he talk to you about Les Madigan?”

  One Mississippi, two Mississippi…. I couldn’t see any good way to answer this. I would have to lie or get Peter into serious trouble. The lie won. “No.”

  “What was your relationship with Les Madigan?”

  All the Mississippis went flying out the window. My heart beat hard, and I felt the blood leave my face. “My… relationship?”

  Malloy’s face was a stone. “Yes. How did you know him?”

  “He is… was… the stage manager. We did some theater games. I didn’t know him very well.”

  “We’ll be seeing a lot of each other over the summer. I’ll definitely be seeing a lot of you.”

  Les’s last words after the attack burned in my brain. I was pale and shaking, and I knew it, and what’s more, Malloy knew it. All the Mississippis in the world weren’t going to save me. Peter was going to jail because I couldn’t keep my fucking act together. Then inspiration struck. I staggered to the couch next to Dad and slumped onto it. “He’s really dead, isn’t he? Oh my god—he’s really dead.”

  “Are you all right, Kev?” Dad turned toward me.

  I put my head in my hands. “He’s dead. I just saw him yesterday, and now he’s dead.”

  “You’re freaking him out, Detective,” Dad said, but without much conviction. He was as afraid of Malloy as I was. In that moment, I hated him. I wanted him to stand up for me, yell at Malloy, throw her out of the house. But he just sat there and acted like she had a bigger dick than him. Red anger made my fingers white but also made it easier not to be scared of lying to Malloy.

  “Just a couple more questions,” Malloy said. “Where were you last night between ten and midnight?”

  One Mississippi, two Mississippi…. “That was just after rehearsal, right?”

  “You tell me.”

  “After rehearsal I rode my bike home and went to bed.”

  “Can anyone verify that?”

  “He got home at ten forty-five,” Dad put in. “It usually takes him forty-five minutes to ride here from the Art Center.”

  “Why don’t you pick him up?”

  Dad looked down at his hands. “We can’t afford the gas money.”

  “Did you go anywhere after that?” Malloy pressed.

  I shook my head. No Mississippis this time.

  “Can anyone besides your dad verify that?”

  The anger tiger roared to full power in me and devoured every Mississippi. “You think I did this? After everything I went through with Robbie? You think after all the fucking nightmares and the throwing up and shitting my pants, scared I’m going to jail, that I’d do it again? You’re a fucking moron!”

  “I think it’s time for you to go now.” Dad got to his feet and stood between me and Malloy. “We’re done.”

  Unfazed, Malloy handed him a card. “If either of you thinks of anything to add, call me, night or day.” And she left.

  Dad didn’t move until the sound of her car faded in the distance. Then he let out a long, deep breath. “Shit.”

  I didn’t say anything. Suddenly I was exhausted—but still scared and pissed off.

  We sat on the couch in silence for a long moment. Then Dad went into the kitchen and came back with a bottle of whiskey I didn’t know we had, and two glasses.

  Two?

  Without a word he poured a lot into the first glass and a thin drizzle into the second. He thought a moment, poured in a little more, and handed it to me. “Here.”

  I stared down at it. The fumes from the alcohol smelled like they might catch fire. “But—”

  “Have a drink with your old man. You can handle it. But only that much.” He knocked back half his glass and shut his eyes.

  Okay, sure. I wasn’t going to turn that down. Hank and the others in the gang had gotten drunk more than once, and a couple of times I had too, but that was cheap beer with sort-of friends. This was whiskey with my father. Feeling strange and grown-up, I knocked back the glass like I’d seen Dad do. It tasted awful, and it felt like swallowing mo
lten lava. I coughed hard, and Dad pounded my back with a broad hand.

  “Good. When you’re old enough, you’ll learn not to do that, but for now, you’re okay.”

  Warmth like Peter’s swimming pool spread all through me, and I felt my muscles loosen. The anger faded. “Thanks, Dad.”

  He sipped. “So. You have nightmares, huh? You never told me that.”

  “Oh.” Caught out, I nodded. “Yeah.”

  “About Robbie?”

  One Mississippi, two—wait. “Every night, just about.”

  “That’s why you keep his picture by your bed,” Dad said. “To try and keep the nightmares away.”

  “Kinda.”

  There was a long pause. We both stared straight ahead at nothing. For a second, time seemed to flicker. We were sitting on the same couch, but way older. I looked like Dad, and he looked more like someone’s grandpa, and we both had the same glasses with whiskey in the bottom. Then time flickered again, and everything was back to normal.

  “I get them too,” Dad said quietly.

  “Get what?”

  “Nightmares. Used to be every night, but now it’s maybe two, three times a week.”

  I blinked at him and wondered if I could handle another drink. The room looked soft around the edges. “About… that guy?”

  “His name was Mark. Mark Brown.” Dad picked up his glass and stared at it. I didn’t move. Dad never, ever talked about this, and I was afraid I’d scare him off like a shy deer. “We were on the fourth floor of the building we were putting up, and we got into a stupid argument at lunch. He shoved me, and then I shoved him back, and then he tried to punch me, so I ducked and punched him hard without even thinking about it. My stupid temper. Half a second after I hit him, I knew I’d done something wrong. He stumbled backward like he was drunk, and he tripped on a riveter. I tried to grab him, I swear to god, and my fingers brushed the front of his shirt, but he was already going over. The last thing I saw was the terror in his eyes. I heard him scream all the way down.”