Alligator Candy (10 page)

Each story gave me details I didn't have before: the way our house looked, comments my parents made to reporters, how the police and community organized the search, and so on. I drank them in thirstily, as my brain organized the details into scenes, images, dialogue, moments. I wanted to know what I didn't know, understand what I didn't understand, feel what I hadn't felt. Perhaps more than anything, I wanted to feel connected to this central experience, to my family, to Jon.

How long I was there, how many stories I read, I wouldn't recall. Maybe I was just there for one afternoon. Maybe I trudged back there several times over the course of a week. I didn't tell anyone what I was doing, didn't discuss it with my friends, my parents, or Andy. It was my own private wormhole. The screen became a portal to the past, just like one of my favorite sci-fi TV shows,
The Time Tunnel
. That short-lived series was about two guys who got stuck in their time machine, a spinning black-and-white spiral from which they couldn't escape. Each week, they'd end up in a different place—maybe the Old West or the French Revolution—and struggle for a way back. But now I was at the controls, twisting the knobs as I disappeared inside and watched the diorama materialize around me.

“It was a good scene when he left,” my dad told a reporter. It was October 29, 1973, a day after Jon had gone missing. Dad was sitting in the kitchen, long hair and beard, smoking a cigarette, and staring at the floor. Friends and family milled around the room quietly. “He had just finished mowing the lawn,” my dad went on. “He earned his buck and went to get some candy.” Jon was a good kid, my dad said, not the kind to get into a car with a stranger. Before my brother left, he told me he'd call if it rained so that our dad could pick him up at the store. “The rains came at 3 p.m.,” the reporter wrote. “The call never did.”

At some point, my dad went out in the woods to search, but called the Sheriff's Department around five after having found nothing. Volunteers and police combed the woods for hours. Andy was out there searching too. It wasn't until eleven o'clock that someone saw Jon's bike “half-hidden,” as the reporter wrote, behind some bushes a ways off from the main path. Though the discovery of the bike led the police to suspect foul play, they initially dealt with it as a missing-person's case. The 7-Eleven clerk said that she might have seen Jon at her store, but couldn't recall. It seemed clear, however, that Jon—given his history, and that he had left his wallet at home—hadn't disappeared on his own. “From all outward appearances,” said one official, “he is not a runaway.”

By the next morning, the case was making headlines, and volunteers came from across the city to help search. A photographer shot a group of men and women gathered outside the 7-Eleven, dressed in jeans and sunglasses, some holding walking sticks, as a police officer pointed where to go. Officers rode horses through the woods, as members of a water rescue team waded through swamps and lakes. The wilderness that had long been a source of freedom and adventure became foreboding. “We used to run around a lot back there,” one searcher told a reporter, “Kids used to dig up underground forts. One could cave in on you, and no one would ever know.”

By later that day, however, Sheriff's Major Walter Heinrich told the crowd that “quite frankly, I think we have exhausted every technique in searching the terrain in this area.”

By the next day, Halloween, the search expanded farther around north Tampa, with hundreds of volunteers going door-to-door distributing pictures of my brother and seeking clues. Many of the volunteers were from the University of South Florida, where my dad taught. Mitch Silverman, a colleague of my father's who chaired the Criminal Justice Department at USF and was a close family friend from the synagogue, told a reporter, “Large numbers of students, many of whom did not know Kushner, volunteered to join the search.”

Mitch was a hulking, sweet man with an easy laugh whom I'd often see around our house. His wife, Cindy, was the therapist who had worked with Jon on his auditory processing difficulties. As I read his name in the paper and read the stories of the volunteers, another side of the story appeared to me, one I had not been seeking but found nonetheless: the volunteers, the people from across town who came to help and support my family.

In one article, my dad told a reporter about the two passersby who were just taking a walk when they saw the search party and joined in. I looked at the faces of the people in the woods, women pushing aside palm fronds, somehow finding the strength to do something so unthinkable for the sake of someone else. For years, I had built up a wall between myself and others when it came to Jon, a defensive fort against rumormongers and bullies. But by doing so, I had kept out, or at least not been aware of, the strangers and friends and neighbors around me who had done so much for us.

Another one of those mentioned in the articles was Arnie Levine, a close family friend and attorney who became, I discovered, instrumental that week. Up to this point, I had known that there was a special relationship between Arnie and my family, one that I didn't fully grasp other than that he was a lawyer who had helped us out. I had known Arnie's kids from IDS, and we spent many long, playful, and memorable Sundays at their house on the bay, swimming in their black-bottomed pool and having pillow fights. The Levines had a boat named
Olive
, and on other days, we'd sail off into the bay, climbing the mast and listening to Jimmy Buffett while everyone ate freshly boiled shrimp and laughed.

But here was another Arnie before me now, the man telling the reporter about the search party's door-to-door campaign. I pictured the long-haired college students walking up to houses around town, houses decorated with pumpkins and witches for Halloween. In a dark twist, the search was called off that night to, as the paper put it, “avoid confusion with Halloween festivities.” Mitch, for one, was wearing down. “I never worked so hard and felt so useless,” he told a reporter.

By the next day, November 1, the door-to-door search, which had covered thirty square miles but failed to turn up evidence, was called off. However, Mitch told reporters that they were not giving up. This was a grassroots effort, the kind of which the city hadn't been seen before. Over five thousand posters were being passed out to over forty businesses and government offices, and they were now being distributed as far as a hundred miles away, and soon made it as far as the borders of Georgia and Alabama. Volunteers raised $5,000 to offer as a reward for clues to Jon's whereabouts. The FBI was now on the case as well. The US Air Force dispatched planes with heat seeking equipment to scan the area.

On November 4, a week after Jon went missing, and still with no apparent leads, a
Tribune
reporter came to our house to interview my parents. The story ran with the headline “Missing Boy's Parents Keep Their Hope Alive.” As I sat there in the school library looking at the page, numbness washed over me. There before me were pictures of my parents, pictures I'd never seen taken in the moment, grainy shots of black and white, showing them in our house, waiting. The photos made everything seem so real.

There was my mother: nine years younger, her dark hair a bit longer, her face slack, her eyes a bit puffy from what must have been a lack of sleep, or just the strain. “Every Day Is a New Day,” read a quote from her underneath. Below it to the left was a close-up of my dad: tired eyes behind his glasses, curly, dark hair twisting above the frames, puffing a cigarette as a long ash hung. “Kushner Shows Tension of Waiting for Word from Son,” this caption read. To the right was another shot of him, sitting on our striped recliner, the one that was still in our house all these years later, his hands crossed as he looked down at some papers, including a child's drawing of a smiley face, on the floor—papers identified in the caption as the letters of support from students at the Boys Academy.

The question the reporter and readers had then was almost certainly the same question I had now as I read the story: How could my parents survive this horror, this interminable wait, this nightmare? I had my own suppositions at thirteen, just from having grown up around them. In the years after Jon's death, I knew that they remained sensitive and open to life, that they cultivated a large support network of friends, family, and colleagues. I knew how much they loved to laugh and eat and celebrate the good times, how passionate they were about their work and the community around them. But even so, I had no idea how much of this was in place at the time Jon disappeared or, perhaps, how much of it had come as a result of that tragedy. I just knew that as much as I was searching for clues to my own story, one mystery seemed unfathomable: how they got through that week.

The reporter gave one account of my dad's answer during that interminable week. “ ‘We've been surviving on chemistry,' Kushner said, referring to the number of tranquilizers, stimulants, and coffee they've taken to hold up under the pressure. ‘We get along, alone together,' Kushner said, ‘and you cry and then you go back.' ”

But that was just a part it. In the story, my dad went to great lengths to talk about the incredible support that came from the most disparate places. “The one colossal good is that there has been a tremendous coming together, that lumps together the cleavages that separate each other,” he said. He spoke of the university crowd coming together with the police, the Jewish community with the non-Jews, the rich with the poor. My dad also spoke of the motorcycle biker who came to our house to help. The biker told my dad that he had his newly tuned cycle outside and wanted some “rough ground” to search. Later that day, the man returned, covered in mud, and told my dad, “Give me rougher ground.”

My dad was not just a father who was missing a son. He was an anthropologist, filtering this experience through his trained eyes and mind. “I have come to realize fully,” my dad went on to the reporter, “if we adults present [people with] alternative ways of being human and applying their humanity, then they'll use it.”

The entire time I was reading the microfilm at the library, I knew what was coming. I didn't know all the details, but I knew how this story ended: with Jon's murder. But seeing the oversize headline on the front page of the
Tampa Tribune
from November 6, 1973, felt like a shock. “Body of Kushner Youth Found in Lonely Grave,” it read.

I recoiled at the sight of the photos: the shot of the shrouded stretcher being carried into an ambulance, the photo of one of the two suspects being led somewhere in cuffs by the police. I absorbed enough of the story to confirm the few horrible details I knew, and perhaps, wanted to know: that Jon had suffocated on a gag and had been mutilated after he was dead. But I was too repulsed by the images of the killers to keep my eyes on the pages for very long.

Instead, I quickly twisted the black knob of the microfilm machine, blurring the subsequent days of headlines and pictures as they scrolled by. At one point, I passed a photo that caused me to stop and rewind. The headline of the story was “Jonathan Is Laid to Rest.” It was a picture of my dad in his suit walking into our synagogue for the memorial service. I was walking beside him in my brown vest, slacks, and a checkered long-sleeve shirt that I recalled feeling like satin. I seemed to be looking up at my dad toward his downcast face, a face that I might have been scanning for clues. I was holding my father's hand.

T
HE NEWSPAPER
stories confirmed at least some of my haziest recollections: that Jon had, in fact, gone to the store for candy, and that he had promised to call home if it rained. I returned to that last memory I had of my brother: the two of us on the sidewalk. I remembered how I made him promise not only to call if it rained, but also to call so that I could remind him to get me the candy. Because he never phoned, I had always assumed that he never made it to the 7-Eleven at all, and that the killers had gotten him on his way in. Knowing that my memories were grounded in some truth, as awful as the truth was, helped me feel more connected to Jon.

But all the new details, the descriptions and scenes that I read in the paper, stirred up another familiar emotion too: guilt. I couldn't help imagining what might have happened had I not pressed him so hard to get me the gum. Maybe he wouldn't have gone. Or maybe if I had protested more loudly, complaining that he wasn't going to let me go, he would have given in and stayed home. This game of what-if was easy and addictive to play, and I twisted every possibility around in my head like a Rubik's Cube. What if Jon had agreed to let me go with him? What if they wouldn't have attacked had they seen two of us? What if they'd gotten us both? What if, somehow, I could have saved him?

I felt guilty about feeling guilty, ashamed to draw attention to my feelings even if they were just inside my head. We spoke a lot about guilt in my house, but not related to Jon. Guilt was something that we joked about as a trait of being Jewish, how parents and grandparents would lament “You don't call, you don't write!” and so on. We had a gag gift in our living room: a small can of aerosol labeled Mrs. Rubenstein's Guilt-Remover Spray. It smelled like roses.

Beyond stirring up my guilt and confirming some of my vague memories, the articles had an unexpected effect too: creating even more mystery for me. Now that I knew some details surrounding Jon's disappearance, the empty pages of my book seemed even more barren. What exactly did these guys do to Jon? Who were they? How'd they get caught? Where were they now? I did gather, either from the stories or from my parents, that the killers were in prison, and that the older one, Witt, had been sentenced to death. But rather than upset myself or my parents by asking more questions, I left that alone.

The mystery didn't grow just over Jon's death. My questions concerned his short but full life. Ordinarily after someone dies, you talk about him or her eventually, sharing stories, laughs, memories, feelings that keep the person alive in your heart and mind. But because of the horror of Jon's death, that ability was almost completely erased in my family. The pain was too great for idle memories. Instead, the silence prevailed. I felt doubly challenged, however, because I didn't have the well of memories to dip into myself. I envied Andy and my parents for the memories of Jon that they had in their heads. I wanted those for myself. I wanted to know him. To feel him. I wanted to know who he was when he was alive. But I resigned myself to, at least for the time being, not knowing more at all.