The Spot: Stories

The Gulch

The cross was jury-rigged out of pressure-treated wood ties, the kind used for gardening, as borders on raised beds, and for retaining walls, secured at the cross point — for lack of a better term — with a hitch of cotton rope, ashen in color from exposure to the elements, stolen from Mrs. Highsmith’s yard; a clothesline that had for several years held the garments of Rudy Highsmith (involved). Fingering it in the evidence room, Detective Collard could feel the droopy sway of a line laden with wet garments, and he could easily imagine Rudy’s ragged jeans, holes shredded white, pale blue and growing lighter under the warmth of the sun, picking up the breeze on some late-summer afternoon, while a dog barked rhapsodically along the edge of the woods. The Highsmith house was on the outskirts of Bay City, Michigan, not far from the gulch, and was known — to a few locals, at least — as the house with laundry on the line, one last holdout of the air-drying tradition. The cross was set in a hole that had been dug by a fold-up trench shovel. This was admitted by Ron Bycroff, age seventeen, the oldest in the bunch. Bycroff openly confessed — after five hours of interrogation — to digging the hole and securing the cross and arranging the ropes and so on, but not to the actual pounding of the spikes, nor even to being there at that point. (He was there, he later admitted to his lawyer, but not in spirit and heart, and he had his eyes turned away most of the time. I just couldn’t look. I heard the sounds and that was enough.) During the trial, this confession was thrown out by Judge Richards because it had been obtained by coercion. (You’d have to be ashamed, boy, you’d have to be as deeply ashamed as anyone on this good earth, doing what you did, boy. How’d you feel if I took you down there to the gulch myself, right now, to take a little look around? I might just take you down there tonight.) On the other hand, the trench shovel was from the Bycroffs’ garage. During his interrogation, Detective Collard was unable to remove from his mind’s eye (is there a better phrase?) the impressive vision of the spikes in the victim’s palms, deep, dimpling the skin. The small hand, and the blood around the entry point in the beam of his flashlight, had given him a sense of the softness of human flesh and the vulnerability of hands to piercing implements. The skin on the victim’s hands — he knew because he reached out and touched one — was soft and smooth, like a chamois, or the inside of a dog’s ear.

For his part, Rudy Highsmith laid out the details of the murder between snot-filled snorts, divulging the story in breathy gushes. The whole thing was Al Stanton’s idea, he said. He came up with it. Like he was preaching to us. He was saying this weird shit about how it was time to open up the cosmos. He told us Sammy was the perfect age and all, sixteen and a half, and that it would be good for him to rise from the dead. It was all his idea, honest. He came up with it first. This claim, that Stanton was the one who dreamed up the scheme (for lack of a better word), seemed dubious to Detective Collard. The hefty, moonfaced kid — a linebacker on the high school team — seemed dense in thought, a bit slow on the uptake but also openly sweet and likable. His eyes contained a sadness that came — Collard knew — from the fact that his father had disappeared when he was eight, taking off in his bass boat onto Lake Erie. (The most likely scenario was that he drove his boat down to Cleveland, sold it, and headed to Florida to find a new way of life.) His mother, a heavy drinker and prone to violence, showed up every few months on the police blotter as a DWI and eventually became known around the station as a SAWTH, a Serious Accident Waiting to Happen. There were — any policeman could tell you — those who were preordained to fiery deaths, those most certain to be found frozen in a ditch outside of town, those whose future lay out there like a bear trap, ready to snap shut when the right amount of pressure was applied on just the right spot.

Dead faces, Collard thought, often spoke to the world, sending out final messages that were surprisingly heartfelt and concise. Dead lovers wore the betrayed smirks of the heartbroken. Dead adulterers had a worried cast to their mouths. The murdered had the silent look of the betrayed, glancing to one side or the other to indicate the direction of the perpetrator’s flight. The tortured held their lips as wide as possible at the arrogance of the living, wanting above all to arrange for a conversation with the future. But the victim of the crime down in the gulch seemed to say something else: his face was resigned and silent and nonassuming. (Collard was fully aware that it was easy to see something that wasn’t there, just as some drifter had found the Virgin Mary in a viaduct in Detroit last winter, recognizing her face in a splotch of salt and snow splatter cast up against the cement pylon by the passing snowplows.)

Collard — who was big on fishing — had a theory that the truth always sat deep, waiting to be snagged and brought to the surface. With the boys in this case, he would later think, his technique had been off. His voice had cracked, his words had arrived unstable. The boy, Stanton, was not exactly cocky. But he was unusually sure-footed and assured when he said that he had nothing to do with the crime, that he had stood to the side while the other kids performed the rites; he had done nothing except pass, at one point, the spikes over to Bycroff, who held them while someone else, maybe Highsmith, maybe not, because he wasn’t really looking, pounded them in with the croquet hammer.

Bycroff blamed Stanton, who in turn blamed Highsmith, who went around himself to point his finger at Bycroff in what most detectives traditionally call the golden hoop of blame. This three-way tag of culpability seemed particularly fine to Collard, who had gone so far as to hold the actual gag bandana up in Rudy Highsmith’s face during his interrogation. A green, snotstiff cloth that, when unknotted and straightened, still seemed to hold, in the wavelets of its hardened folds, a residue of the victim’s last words.

It was impossible to imagine such agony without inflicting some on yourself, Collard thought, and listening to descriptions of the event during the trial, he bit his nails to the quick just to find some small amount of pain from which to extrapolate the rest. Most in the courtroom did something to this effect. The jury box was stuffed with nail chewers. Lawyers snapped their fingers under the clamps of their clipboards; reporters in the gallery dug their fingers into their arms, pinching hard, as if to check their consciousness. Most imagined the suffering as a dreary succumbing to the knowledge of the pain, an almost delirious unknowing state as the nails came through, the first bloom of pain, and then a feeling of being fixed there, yielding to something soft and — at least the way Collard imagined it, still thinking in terms of the laundry on those lines — fluffy and smelling of starch. What did it mean, some of the jury wondered, to lay claim to the idea that the boy was not suffering as much as one expected? In an attempt to lighten the immensity of the crime, a pain expert was brought in to testify that the body did have certain chemicals that came to the defense of the afflicted in this kind of situation. (Torture, on the other hand, was a matter of countering the body’s natural opiates, of inducing pain incrementally, with a finesse that worked around these chemical defenses.) The boys, in their quick, careless plunge into the heart of whatever it was, darkness or evil (the prosecution couldn’t exactly decide), had nailed the boy to the cross hard and fast, producing a flush of suffering that had produced a flood of endorphins. Shock was nothing but the deepest joke on consciousness, and when this boy, on that cold fall night, was faced with spikes — through his hands and legs, as he twisted up against the face of the juryrigged cross — he flew the coop, so to speak, and became nothing but a vapor of soul stuff who just so happened to inhabit a body that was, at that moment, being crucified. (The defense argued.)

If anyone had to confront the issue at hand it was the coroner, Samuel Kelman, because Bay City seemed to produce a disproportionate number of accidental body piercings: boys fell onto implements, impaled themselves through playful jousting, and were samuraied through the gut with a frequency outside the bounds of normalcy. The coroner took care to avoid an inclination he had to find pleasure in the absurd deaths of those who lay on the slabs for examination. These stunts were generally pulled during the night. Attempts were made to defy physical law. Stupidity was like dust, or the earth itself. He drove home that evening — after the examination of the boy’s body, making note of the spike holes, the gash along the mouth, the stress fractures in the wrists; making note of the fact that the boy had died at approximately three in the morning. Driving home, listening to Schubert on the car stereo, he considered the bloodless silence of the boy’s open eyes (which he shut), fixed upward, and the paradigmatic (was that the word?) palm holes. The boy’s body — slightly glistening, with dimples of fat along the waist — seemed to hold a gentle repose, as if giving in to gravity. (Most of the time a body, during the first hours after death, lifted away from the surface of the table, as if barely tethered. A soul-empty body seemed as light as a seedpod, the brittle shell of a cicada.) Of course, he was seeing what he wanted to see in those eyes, pale and sad, somewhat elegiac, dark gray with a bit of blue around the senseless dilation of the pupils. On the way home — glancing over at the dreary waters of the Saginaw River — his thoughts ranged from puncture wounds to tetanus and then landed naturally upon the one time he had himself been impaled. This was in a town called Branford, near New Haven, Connecticut, goofing around with his buddies, walking barefoot along a breakwater of cemented boulders, enjoying the sense of being sure-footed against the wind gusts, which were coming hard off Long Island Sound that morning, when he felt something impinge upon his foot. A strange tingling sensation; nothing painful until he looked down and saw the point protruding near his toes. Then he became aware of a numb pain, remote and far off. He began running in panic, the board flopping like a wooden clog while his friends laughed and taunted him until it became clear to them what exactly was going on: He had gone into that realm few kids entered but all thought about. He had stepped on the proverbial nail. (In the car he tried to make sense of the physics of the accident, calculating the amount of force it would take to send a nail all the way through his foot, adding to the formula the fact that he had been stepping hard on the rocks at the time, doing a jaunty balancing act for his friends, until the nail sank in near the forefoot, up far enough to allow it to slide between the metatarsals.) What he could remember more than anything was the odd sense of reorientation the nail had given him, a Polaris of pain, until one kid yanked it out while another held his foot, and he, in turn, unleashed a high seagull scream that sent real gulls sweeping up off the beach and into the sky.

None of the boys attended a church or had any formal religious education. All three devoted their spiritual energies to killing time, going up to the beach to smoke hash, or over to Detroit to smuggle beer across the bridge from Canada, loading it up by the case and transporting it past the lackadaisical border guards. Into the gap these facts formed, folks inserted wedges of philosophical thought and tried to avoid the possibility that the reenactment of a two-thousand-year-old event was pure senselessness on the part of teenagers who in no way meant to crack the universal fabric and urge a messianic event on the world. One commentator on a cable news channel argued that it was important to consider the possibility that these boys, in what was certainly a scattershot approach, were trying to find a way to grace. Good boys from good families had dragged the victim — there was a double-rut line of heel marks from the main road down into the gulch — to the spot under a clear, star-filled, late-fall sky, dug a hole with a fold-up entrenchment tool, and erected a cross, without really thinking. One professor at the University of Michigan made a connection between the trench shovel, the poetry of Wilfred Owen, and the Great War, and argued falsely that the soil in Michigan — glacial gravel in the gulch, with remnants of Lake Erie bed fossils — was close in consistency to the bottom of the trenches at Verdun. Another professor, hearing the story reported on the nightly news, brought forth Walter Benjamin’s theory of a messianic cessation of happening. He tried to draw (with shaky logic) a parallel between the mock event, the young ruffians (his words) putting their friend up on the cross, and Benjamin’s concept of a “revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past.” The deep impulse these kids had was to begin a conversation with the knowable universe and the unknown, hidden part that can be seen only when you rend space-time, he said, throwing his arms wide open before the class and then, composing himself, laying his hands flat on the desk, staying like that for a moment until — as was his habit — he reached up to adjust the dimple of his tie, pulling it tight at his throat. The students, who were used to these sudden outbursts, sat back in their chairs and glanced at one another. They were close in age to the kids in the gulch and found it hard to imagine that these fuckups, probably stoned out of their minds on crystal meth, had anything grand in mind.

For her part, Emma Albee, an English teacher at Bay City High School, felt duty-bound to talk about the event in the gulch. (A team of trauma-control agents had been sent to help those students who were suffering changes in behavior due to the death of their friend — though in truth he had no friends, and was for the most part a loner who had, before his death, secured the wrath of most of his schoolmates.) She spoke carefully to the class, saying, yes, the action of the three boys was evil, in that they were free not to crucify their friend, just as you are free to do something or not to do something. Her students sat, for once, listening with rapt attention. You see, the tragedy of their action, she said, was in the fact that they made a gross error of judgment. We all think about doing things like this, don’t we? We all have these strange ideas, and sometimes we’re with our friends and we feel pressured to do them, but we do not because we are free, she said, looking for a segue into The Stranger by Albert Camus.

Several news accounts made a great deal of the fact that the dead boy’s face had been excised from several school yearbooks, cut out neatly with razor blades, removed from the grid. Even Detective Collard had smirked at the kid’s image: flyaway hair pasted to a pimply brow; a mouth locked into a grimace, caught off guard by the tired school photographer. (One professor noted a striking resemblance between the victim’s face and that of Edgar Allan Poe. The same lean jawbone, the same uncomfortable arrangement between his neck and his lower torso, a general disagreement therein, so that even though he was wearing a striped polo shirt, he still had the bearing of a man in a clerical collar.)

We just felt like doing it, was Bycroff’s statement during his confession. We was just trying it out, you know, like maybe he’d rise again and maybe not, but it was worth a shot, because he was such a lightweight in this life. Bycroff had been rejected by a series of foster homes that took him around the state of Michigan, itself the rough shape of a palm. From Kalamazoo to Petoskey, and then in a series of towns on the way back down to Flint, he proved himself deeply incompatible with several domestic situations until at last he found himself under the care of Howard Wood, a surly loner who, most thought, was abusive. We just figured we’d give it a try, the boy said, working his tongue around his teeth, staring up at Collard, who was listening carefully, tapping his notepad with the eraser end of his pencil. He listened and made notes but knew that this boy’s confession would be thrown out of court on some technicality. It was a fast-spoken confession. It came too easily to stick. The boy was speaking out of unrelated pains. It was the deeply innocent who often came up with the most honest and realistic confessions of crimes. When they had everything to lose, they often threw themselves into it beautifully, like a cliff diver — or was it a pearl diver? Those native boys who found it within themselves to go into the dark waters, their legs kicking up toward the light, flapping softly, their arms extended as they clutched and grabbed. That was the nature of being a detective in these situations; you had to go as deep as you could with the air in your lungs burning and your arms fully extended in the hope that you might bring a pearl to the surface.

He had faced this dead end before in other cases, the sense that one witness would blame the other and then the other, ad infinitum; the sense that the criminality would be smeared into something impossibly dull, that in the end, when the boys were sentenced and justice was meted out, he would still have questions about the case that would linger for the rest of his life. There was no end to it. He left Bycroff back in the interrogation room, behind the one-way glass, sitting at a wooden table with his chin in his hands. He left him there and went outside to get some sunlight on his face. He stood in the doorway and thought about it. He’d be a retired cop living up north, enjoying the solitude and silence. He’d be fishing on the middle branch of the Au Sable one day, casting a muddler into the stream, enjoying the day, and then he’d think of the gulch case, and it would all come back to him, and he’d remember storming out of the interrogation room into this bright, clear, beautiful light of a fall day in Bay City. He’d cast again into a riffle, thinking about the fish while, at the same time, trying to tweeze apart the facts of the case, remembering the voids, the gaping space between the statements and his failure to get the story straight. He’d spend the rest of the day in the river, or resting on the shore, until his creel was damp and heavy with trout. He’d lift the lid and look in and see the ferns placed around their flanks and their beautiful stripes. Then he’d stand there along the river and feel something else. He was sure of that. By the time he was retired he’d be full of lore, full of the wisdom of a small-town detective who had seen all he could see, acted as witness to the weird manifestations of the human spirit, and he’d have a suspicion that the best way to cope with the darkness of the world was to concentrate on tying flies, on clamping the hook and spinning the feathers taut with silk thread. The incident at the gulch would be the case that stood out from the others; it would be the classic, the one he pulled out of his hat when the conversations were boring, playing gin rummy or bridge; he’d pull the gulch out and present it as an example of how truly dark the times had become; he’d pull it out as an example of the limits of detective work. Every cop had one such case, the true zinger, the one around which the others rotated, and he would remember it clearly, not so much the facts around it, the words, the talk, the boys’ attitudes and posturing, their attempts to work around the guilt, but mainly the place itself, silent and gritty, with condoms curled like snakeskins in the weeds, and the ash craters, and the used needles, glinting in the moonlight, and how he went up there by himself over the course of the years, late in the night just before dawn, to shoot his sidearm into the air, taking aim at the cup of the Big Dipper, just plugging away at it like that, not because he was feeling helpless, or that the gulch itself inspired him to fire his gun, but because it was a pleasurable thing to do. He thought about this, standing outside the station house, taking in the sun. Nothing had changed in Bay City since the incident in the gulch. The media came, set up their dishes, sent the story to the world, got it moving around from head to head, and then just as quickly packed up and left it to be forgotten. On the stream at least he’d have the mercy of forgetfulness and the distance of retrospect and time; everything would be faded and somewhat obscure, except for the facts that he remembered, and he’d go back to his casting, he thought outside the police station, and he’d find mercy in the failings of his memory, and he’d let the case go, feeling his line curling around itself behind him as it swung forward, tapering out the toss of his rod, aligning itself along the point of the tip before unleashing smoothly onto the water until the leader, invisible to the fish, guided the fly to a landing at the intended spot. But for now he had to go back in and face the kid named Bycroff and try to get the facts and see who came up with the idea first, who dreamed it up and made it true.