College Freshman (Winter Break)
Pledged Beta (same as Dad)
Date parties rule!
Danced with ladies at old folks home on Halloween—smelled bad but was more fun than I thought it would be. Frat more than drinking and puking.
Wisdom in Beta house bathroom: “No matter how hot she is, bro, someone somewhere is sick of her shit!”
Trying to stay in touch with Jeff and Phil harder than I thought it would be. Made all kinds of new friends at school but also realizing how much of my life I owe to Jeff and Phil and how much I actually miss them. We played it cool in September, but now I feel like my life is getting super-slowly torn in two. Talked to Dad about it and he smiled and said “You’re becoming an adult.” We played golf after. Mom no longer on me
about changing my room—I try to be more patient with her. Patty engaged to Luke but I don’t want him as a bro-in-law.
College Freshman (Summer Break)
Saw Denise working at supermarket & pregnant!!! by some guy I don’t know, older. Looks like she decided to go way blue collar (white trash) which surprised me. I knew she grew up in an apartment but still I thought she’d go to City College at least.
Good news! Luke broke off engagement with Patty. She’s devastated but Dad and I agree she’s better off. Dad told me he thought Luke was a fag probably, which I had not thought of.
College Sophomore (Winter Break)
Short break—going back early to ski more. All okay at home. Fun with Dad at club. Mom seems lonely, obsessed with cleaning my room. Patty dating everything that moves. Saw Reggie Erb in a dog food commercial. Laughed my ass off for a day and a half.
Things going great with Andrea. She’s showing me the ins and outs of her home state. Lots of great places
way off the beaten path. She has a built-in sense of adventure I really like. Have not used the L-word with her but probably will when I get back to school. Told her the other night on the phone that I was lucky to have found someone like her. She is very sweet but a ball-buster if pushed to her limit. I never thought I would find someone that sweet. She also makes things easy and doesn’t complain about shit.
Patty seems to be over Luke. She didn’t bring a guy home for Christmas but says she has three lined up as potential candidates. I don’t even want to know, but she keeps pestering me for my opinion. Says she has to pick “the one” before she ends up alone forever.
College Sophomore (Summer Break)
Patty’s looking for a new job, interviewing with biotech firms. She says she’s a good candidate like she’s running for president. I bet she’ll get the job if she can focus. She finally found someone who wants to marry her, but he’s older, a doctor, and he keeps giving her gifts without expecting anything in return, or so he says. She won’t marry him.
Can’t believe I’m only halfway through college. Then business school, probably. School never ends for me.
Only one week to go before Junior Year and Andrea called to tell me she has been seeing someone else in her hometown. Supposedly they just started up, but I bet it’s been going on all summer. This really sucks. I can’t stop remembering all the places we used to go. It’s like a slide show in my brain, running alongside everything I’m seeing and doing.
I talked to Andrea and asked her what about us—didn’t any of that matter to her? She says she loves me but that she also loves him. I will not be played like that. I am miserable. My heart is broken. Much drinking, golf with Dad. Mom sympathetic but useless.
The real unfairness is that she is the first girl I was ever ready to say LOVE to. I was gearing up to it. And now I’ve been dumped. The worst part about getting dumped like this is that I can see how she’s played me, I can see what she was up to, and how weak and cowardly and lame it was, but I love her even more now than when we were going out. I want her so bad.
I couldn’t be going back to school on a more miserable note. Mom is very angry on my behalf. Dad says that time will heal the hurt, and that everyone has to feel this way at least once. Some days I visualize returning to school and starting fresh—it’s a big school, there are lots of chicks. I imagine what it would feel like if I had broken up with her. Other days I think I’ll just revisit
all the old spots we used to go and be depressed for a while. Let my system work it out. Or maybe I should just stay here and surf it off. Who wants to go back to school and explain everything to everyone anyway?
College Junior (Before Winter Break)
Well this has got to be the ALL TIME CLASSIC move! Home for a few days because PATTY GOT MARRIED without telling anyone and now Mom and Dad are throwing a party to make it seem legit. No one’s even heard of the guy. She said they “just hit it off” on a ski trip and she knew right away that “he was the one.” She found her iguana!!! Mom couldn’t be happier. Dad thinks it isn’t going to last. I think it shouldn’t last but it will because Patty’s so fucken stubborn.
Patty Patterson. I swear to god I laughed for a minute straight at that one.
At the party, Owen was crying and hugging everyone and going on and on about his “new family.” I swear she must have found him in some animal shelter somewhere. He hugged me and called me “brother.” I didn’t want to ruin his big day so I hugged him back.
Back to school tomorrow. Up late drinking with Dad. World Series postmortem etc. I brought up Owen. Dad
said that it wouldn’t break his heart if things didn’t work out, but Patty had made her choice, and whether or not we think the guy is a dipshit doesn’t matter.
Calvin Stocking Junior went back to school and was murdered nine days later, having been abducted, along with his car, from behind a roadside bar in the Rocky Mountains. I have been there. I sat at the counter at Diana’s Grill and sipped a beer, pretending to watch the baseball game, thinking this was the last CJ saw of civilization; this was his jumping-off point. The bar was full of locals. A few hours later, the first Boulder sweatshirt arrived, and behind it, a steady trickle of Calvins and Andreas, looking for an authentic place to get drunk for the night. Raven’s shadow fixed permanently on the wall. While writing Lily-letters, I returned again and again to the fertile ground of his journal because of one thing: Reggie Erb had been right. CJ had been a cliché, right down to the varsity letter. I don’t mean to strip him of his right to be a complex human being—there were glimpses of that even in some of the later entries, but it has always amazed me how well-defined he was as a person, even to himself. On the big issues he was uncomplicated. He knew who he was, knew what he wanted, and knew how he felt. There was no doubt in him.
I was all doubt, and coming face-to-face with CJ in the mirror-texts of his journal threw me into a whirlwind at the most fundamental level. I had no idea what came next. I couldn’t help but admire CJ’s sense of certainty. It made me wonder how he faced death when in those final moments he knew it was coming for him.
About a week after I first read CJ’s journal—I read it many times, as an object of study, as a motivator—I walked into our living room from the kitchen and found that Patty was no longer in front of the television, where I’d left her, but absorbed with something in the front window. She had pulled the curtains back (we always kept them closed once the sun was down) and appeared to be concentrating intently on something outside.
“Everything okay out there?” I asked.
“Sure,” she said. “I’m looking at the window, though, not out of it.”
“You’re looking at the window?”
She turned to face me. “Which one of these panes did the baseball go through?”
“The baseball?”
“Yeah, my mom told me some story about a baseball breaking one of our windows. Which one was it?”
“One of the middle ones,” I said.
“Which one?” Patty’s tone didn’t seem suspicious, just curious. Still, I was wondering where this was going.
I pointed out one of the panes. “That one, I think.”
“The window guy did a good job,” she said, examining the mullions.
“He seemed like a pro. Quick, too.”
She was looking into the pane now, watching me through the reflection.
“Did you tell my mother you thought CJ had broken the window?”
“I told her I couldn’t find the ball.”
“You didn’t tell her you thought it was CJ?”
“She has a way of suggesting things. I didn’t want to contradict her.”
Patty rolled her eyes, returned to the couch, de-muted the television. I sat down next to her, asked her if everything was okay.
“I don’t need you encouraging her,” she said.
I apologized, and we watched television, but the tension remained in the background. Not wanting a lecture on CJ, I didn’t mention it the next day, and neither did she.
Soon afterward, we were at a friend’s brunch, sitting around a large picnic table, when a girlfriend of our host burst into tears. Her mother was dying. As soon as the subject came up, Patty was poised for action. The rest of us said “sorry” and “our thoughts are with you” while Patty said “losing someone really sucks” and then told the story of her little brother’s murder.
Only then did I realize that she had begun using the same words to tell the story every time, that I knew every twist and
turn, knew the way she held the trump and waited until the last second to play it.
Murder trumps cancer.
Brother trumps parents.
Patty had no idea how automated she’d become. Only someone like me, close but outside, could see the patterns. A marriage fails or succeeds based on what one does with those patterns. An average wife has to listen to fishing stories, an average husband has to hear about the latest shoes, and we learn to respectfully tune out our spouses’ pet fancies. But this was no fishing, no shoes. This was a major traumatic event, as big as big deals get. And she’d turned it into rote. Her shields were going up. No amount of analysis or discussion is going to change us. Life is a plane crash—you know you’re going down but you can do nothing to stop it. Patty was curdling. I was trying to bring my wife back from the world of unfeeling.
I drove to the Mailboxes Store, in search of my antagonist, all the while thinking that this project, this bringing-Raven-to-his-knees, would be the icebreaker to crack Patty’s frozen seas before they icified forever. I was trying to save our marriage. I was trying to rescue CJ from the pat stories that threatened to eclipse him as he was. I was trying to wake everyone up. I was running around a burning house in the middle of the night, screaming “get out” before the whole thing came crashing down. I was poised for battle, my steed Lily Hazelton snorting steam in the early morning air, cantering toward the inner chambers of the murderer’s heart, cold blood meets colder, to blow it up from the inside. Again at the mailbox, again turning the key, becoming the key, opening the lone envelope. I
am the man who penetrates hearts. Patty’s, to nourish it. Raven’s, to destroy it.
Dear Lily
When you have a bigger heart than other people you have to be a private person. Otherwise you’re just going to end up in trouble. Don’t worry about getting to know me. I am private but I am not all closed up inside like some people I know. I have been careful with you. I will not fall for the same trick twice. I mean my ex. I am happy you got rid of Clancy.
You will never know me and I will never know you. But we all try don’t we. You asked me what happened to land me here and frankly I probably wouldn’t have told you unless you asked because it is a sad stupid story.
I am not much of a storyteller unlike some friends of mine. I have never liked to boast or make things out to seem more to my benefit. I’ve seen too many liars in my life and I have always considered bending the truth to be an ugly quality like having a rotten tooth.
I didn’t kill anybody.
Now that I have spoiled the ending of my story I will tell you the rest. You know what they convicted me of but I wasn’t the one who did it. If I was going to kill someone NOW it would be Hoden B Murray aka the asshole who put me in here by falsely snitching.
We were drinking and rolling from bar to bar and generally being up to no good. I see now how I took my life for granted even if trouble does follow me around it’s a lot better than being caged up. We were up to no good anyway but we didn’t mean anyone any harm. My pickup wasn’t working right so when we tried to leave Diana’s Grill we couldn’t get it started. That’s the pickup you saw in the picture—a good and reliable truck except that night. Murray says hey let’s go back to the bar and see if we can borrow someone’s car. I say sure.
Well nobody wants to lend us their car. Time for Plan B I said. Now you’ll see that I mean to tell the truth always because I’m not afraid to face the shameful things I’ve done. I look at those things face to face and I consider them real hard. Prison isn’t made for rehabilitation at all but that’s what I’m trying for. We went around back of the bar and waited just outside the light there. Guys were always coming back there to drain the weasel because there was only one can inside and the college kids who came to Diana’s generally could not hold their beer. So we waited there in the shadows watching the bugs fly into the light and bounce off. I said fuck it Murray let’s go back in and drink some more. But Murray had hatched a Plan B of his own after hearing me say Plan B. I never had a Plan B really.
The music got loud for a second then I looked up to see this college kid coming out the back door. He
stumbled down and stopped to let the wind hit his face. He staggered over out of the light to where everyone used to take a leak and I’m standing there waiting for the right moment. Murray runs up and tackles the guy as soon as he’s standing in the dark. This should give you some idea as to how fucking stupid Murray was. He brings the kid down in a puddle of piss and the kid is pissing all over himself and Murray asks the kid if he has a car. The kid says fuck you so I walk over and point the gun at the kid. The three of us walk to the kid’s car and Murray drives while I hold a gun to the kid in the back. He stinks like piss so we drive with the windows down. He wants to know where we’re taking him but I don’t know and Murray’s not telling. Again I know that this was criminal behavior and stupid on top of that. We would have left the kid in the parking lot of Diana’s Grill except we would have gotten caught too quick. We were just looking to have a little fun. We drove upstate a ways. The kid threw up a few times and cried for a bit. But he could see we were just having fun and I think he figured that if he helped us have fun we wouldn’t shoot him. He started telling jokes. He told all kinds of jokes. Helen Keller Polack Nigger Fag Beaner Leprechaun. You name it. He wasn’t funny at all. He couldn’t tell a joke but we laughed anyway because we couldn’t believe this piss-soaked kid thought telling jokes was going to get him out of this. Murray kept driving until the kid ran out of jokes. He must have told us every joke he ever heard all the way
down to the Vampire ones. My favorite one of all came near the end. It gets funnier the more you think about it which is the opposite of most jokes: Why did the cow roll down the hill?
Because it didn’t have any legs.
Who the hell knew where we were when the kid ran out of jokes and Murray pulled over. I tell the kid to walk out into the forest. It’s pitch black except the light from the car. We walk through some trees and there’s an open meadow. The kid was crying again. He thought I was going to cap him but all we wanted was use of his car a little longer and this was the best way to keep him occupied. So I say to the kid Run but he doesn’t run anywhere. Don’t shoot me he says. Run I say and I point into the darkness. He starts off kind of slow which was too slow for my taste so I shot the gun into the air. Nowhere near the kid. He hauled ass into the woods. I could hear him stumbling. I laughed real hard until I heard the tires screeching away.
Murray thought I shot the kid which I did not.
What happened next was that I walked for a long ways by the road until a trucker gave me a ride into the nearest town. I don’t know if you know towns out here but it was not the friendliest place. When I woke up in their park in the a.m. the Sheriff was already riding my ass. My head was pounding cause of too much drink. I was sure the Sheriff was going to take me in for stealing the car or dropping that college kid in the woods but to my surprise and relief he hadn’t heard anything
and just drove me to the bus depot and told me they didn’t need my type around their town. Little did I know I would see him in court later and the whole morning would become public record.
From there I bussed it home where I eventually got my pickup and fixed the problem aka the alternator. When I found out I was wanted and Murray had snitched and the kid was dead I did what any sane person would do and took off hoping they would clear it all up before they found me. Which as you know is not what happened. The deed got pinned on me because of circumstantial evidence. I know what I did was wrong and I’m fine doing the time for what I did but I don’t need to be doing someone else’s time on top of that. I also know the evidence against me was strong enough to convince a jury and if I had been in that jury I would have been convinced too. Stupid Murray got scared and made things sound worse than they were. He probably still thinks I shot the kid out there but who in his right mind would kill that kid for no reason in the middle of the woods? Not me. I liked his jokes even though he wasn’t funny. I think he got hit by a stray hunter’s bullet. I threw my gun in a lake when I was on the run but they didn’t try to fish it out to prove that the bullet wouldn’t match my gun. Instead they planted bullets at my house to match the bullet they found in the dead kid. They call this BALLISTICS. I call it framing an innocent man with hocus-pocus. The system doesn’t want to prove my innocence. I bet it’s too
late anyway and the gun has rusted away otherwise I’d ask for your help in getting it out of the lake and clearing my name once and for all.
I told you it was a sad and stupid story. Sad cause a college kid got killed. Stupid because a little goofing off with no harm meant to anyone ended up with me being incarcerated. That’s my story and since my hand is cramping I’m going to sign off for now.
Love
Henry
PS Next time I’ll write more about my past like you asked. But first you have to tell me more about yourself specifically something to help this lonely inmate get through the night if you know what I mean.