Alligator Candy (20 page)

Jerry Smith, a colleague of my father's at USF, told me he could remember “spending a better part of the night beating the bushes and seeing if we can find something. It was late at night in the saw grass, and we had no idea what sort of beasts lived in all that stuff. But we were trying to do something useful.”

At around seven thirty, the searchers found Jon's bike about twenty-five yards off the dirt path behind the store. It “appeared to have been deliberately hidden from view,” the cops reported, and they took it for processing. The discovery of the bike was one of the few things I remembered from that week, how I had headed into Andy's room to tell him what I thought was good news: in my four-year-old brain, I thought they had found Jon. My recollection was that Andy was disappointed to learn that they had, in fact, found only his bike, but now, when I brought this up, he told me that wasn't the case. “I knew you were wrong,” he said compassionately. “I knew they hadn't found him.”

That night at our house, a reporter spoke with my father, who sat in a chair, smoking a cigarette. “The fact the bike was left there is frightening,” my father said. Then the room fell quiet for a bit. “We're grateful to all that came out,” my father added. “If we're trying to find anything good to feel about, that's it.”

D
ONNA WITT
had worked the late shift on October 27 and came home to sleep at eight the next morning. Before she went to bed, Tillman and Witt told her they were going hunting near the highway, and wanted to use her car. “Go ahead,” she said, and went to bed.

Donna was woken up at about five that evening by her boy, Troy, who was holding a long piece of saltwater taffy. “Do you want candy?” he asked. The seven-year-old showed her some other candy his father had brought home for him that afternoon, Snappy Gator Gum. Troy had two of the toys—one red, one blue—and he was snapping the alligators' mouths shut as he squeezed their necks. Donna thought it was strange that Witt would buy her boy candy, since they rarely had extra money for such treats. “It's not like him to say he spent his last penny to bring candy home,” she said later. But when Witt told her he had bought the candy, she didn't question it.

Donna came out of her room to find Tillman and Witt back from their day of hunting and watching TV. They said they were starving and asked her to fix them something to eat. Tillman seemed moody and quiet, and Witt was particularly irritable. He got even more wound up as Troy paraded around the room with his candy, offering it up. “Daddy,” Troy said, “do you want some?”

“I bought it for you,” Witt replied. “Used all my money to buy it. You eat it.”

But the boy persisted, only making his stepfather more angry. “I don't want it,” Witt said.

“John finally got irritated at him for pestering him,” recalled Donna, who appeased her son by eating some of the candy herself.

The anxiety was already starting to wear at Witt from what he had done. “I tried to block out what happened by keeping busy,” he told the police later. As Tillman sat inside watching TV, Witt told Donna it was time to go out and wash the car. This struck Donna as unusual, since ordinarily he'd take it to a car wash. He said he'd give her a hand, and the two went outside. Donna could see storm clouds gathering overhead. “There's not much use in washing the car because it's going to rain,” she told him. “Why do it now?” But Witt insisted, and they washed the car until the sun went down and even as the rain began to fall.

At around ten fifteen that night, Donna was about to drive to work when she noticed that the car's gas tank was nearly empty. Angry, she jumped out and stormed back into the trailer, demanding to know why her husband hadn't filled the tank after his hunting trip. Witt snapped back and told her they hadn't gone out to the highway in Tampa after all. They had driven out toward Saint Petersburg but were low on gas, so they ended up at an orange grove. But he swore there wasn't even a half tank of gas when he left, something she refused to believe. “I know there was because I put it in there,” she barked back as he poured himself a drink.

Donna drove to work in the pouring rain and called home from the hospital to let Witt know she'd arrived safely.

“I figured you did,” he said.

“Are you drunk?” she asked.

“I'm getting that way.”

“He was pretty well high,” she recalled later. “He was giggling, something he very seldom ever does.” Concerned that he was drinking more than usual, Donna told him to call her back later to let her know how drunk he was getting. “You wouldn't want me to embarrass you,” he told her.

Donna arrived back home the next morning to take her boy to school, but Tillman and Witt had gone to work. She began cleaning the house and then noticed something unusual as she was dusting: a patch sitting on the bookcase of
Reader's Digest
magazines. It was green and white, and had a little blue owl on it. She figured it was some Boy Scouts patch of Tillman's.

Troy was busy playing with his new toys. “He was sitting on the floor, clicking alligators,” she recalled later. “Drove me up a tree.”

O
N THE MORNING
of October 29, people around the city opened their newspapers to read of my missing brother. Among them were Stan and Madelyn Rosenberg, former neighbors of ours from where we first lived in Tampa. My mother had brought them a pot roast shortly after they had moved in, and our families carpooled together to the synagogue. When Madelyn saw the headline in the paper, however, her mind couldn't grasp it.
Jonathan?
she thought.
Jonathan Kushner?

“I get chills when I say it,” she told me over coffee at the Village Inn restaurant near their home. Madelyn had long, dark hair, and Stan, a tanned retiree in a baseball cap, sat solemnly next to her. “How do you even comprehend that headline when you know the child?” She told me, “It was a name we knew. It was just an immediate connection: ‘What can we do?' No one said, ‘Oh, you need to help.' It was a feeling that this was something you had to do. Your psyche said, ‘You need to be involved.' No one can go through this alone.”

Stan called my father, who told him there was going to be a meeting that night at the local elementary school for volunteers to help in the search. Stan worked in real estate at the time, but he had been interested in police work since having grown up on cop TV shows in Cleveland. After college, he had taken an exam to become an officer and scored among the top test takers, getting an offer to join the force in Arkansas. But Madelyn wasn't about to move to the Deep South, so he acquiesced and moved to Tampa to work in real estate.

When he showed up at the school that evening, there was a crowd of volunteers, including friends and my father's students, each of whom was assigned a block of the area to search. Attorney Arnie Levine acted as the liaison with the investigators, and Mitch Silverman, who worked in the Criminal Justice Department at USF, lent his expertise. The cops had been searching all day, using aerial photographs from local builders. They had sent out land rovers, riders on horseback, and seven members of the Florida water rescue team to search every pond and drainage ditch in the area. With Jon having disappeared in the woods, Stan knew they needed people who could traverse the rough ground in the area, and he had an idea just where to find them: a biker bar. “You can go anywhere on a bike,” Stan told me.

This wasn't just any biker bar, it was a rural hangout for the Outlaw Gang, the surliest bunch in town, and they didn't take kindly to outsiders. “If you weren't a biker, you didn't go in there,” Stan recalled. But he didn't care. He parked his car—the only car in the lot—in front of the bar and went inside under watchful eyes. He showed the bartender a picture of my brother, and explained that he was missing and the family needed volunteers to search the woods. The bartender eyed him, then reached for a baseball bat—which he slammed down on the counter to get everyone's attention. “He had 'em shut up,” Stan said, “and they listened to me. I had a picture of your brother and said, ‘It all started in the field. He might be in the field somewhere.' ”

The bikers trailed out of the lot behind Stan, who was now the unlikely commander of this unlikely search party. “I'm conducting something, and I didn't know what I was talking about,” Stan recalled. As the days wore on, he solicited off-road vehicles from a local car dealer, including the biggest in town, Bill Currie Ford.

While people searched, Madelyn and other women tended to the house, preparing food, comforting one another, supporting my family. “I was in an altered state,” my mother recalled. “People came in and took over—my parents, friends—everything was being taken care of. I was just hoisted in another dimension.” At one point, when there was nothing to do, a woman came up to Madelyn and some others and said, “Okay, ladies, we gotta clean this fridge.” As Madelyn recalled, “It was the only thing to do.”

As the news spread, more and more people began coming to our house to help. Two women showed up from a faraway farm bearing casseroles. “You don't know us,” one said. “We just thought you'd need some help.” Our house teemed with disparate people from around town: professors, cops, bikers. Stan recalled Heinrich coming up to him and mentioning that “he'd never been around people who are Jewish.”

Stan, a working-class guy, could relate, because he'd never been around so many academics. “It gave me a feeling for these guys,” he recalled. “How would I know about professors except from going to school?”

Madelyn went on, “So many different groups came together in this one common purpose,” she said of the search for my brother, “to find him.”

“It was just an outstanding outpouring,” recalled Espy Ball, the psychologist who had worked with Jon on his difficulties in school. “I have never been so impressed by a group of people supporting two of their dear ones in my life. I was floored by what I saw—your parents earned part of that, and part of that was just a huge number of people out there that have that sense of community and are ready to help, whatever happens.” Arnie Levine told me, “The community came forward in a situation that I'd never experienced before or since.”

At one point, a man in the house grew distressed, unable to grasp the possibility that Jon had been attacked by strangers. He began speaking loudly about how that just wasn't possible, that this had to be the act of someone who knew Jon, who knew my family, that there had to be a reason for what had happened. Rumors had spread that perhaps my father, who had been recently outspoken in support of Israel, could have made us a target for retaliation. Even my mother worried about this being some form of vengeance, as her mind struggled for a reason. “Your father could be really tough,” she recalled, “and I know some students probably didn't like him at all. My thought was maybe someone at the university did this to get back at Dad, and that made me mad at Dad.”

As Ball heard the man talking, he felt increasingly uncomfortable, afraid that my parents would overhear this and feel even worse. “If you're in a situation where you don't know where your son is, you don't want to be hearing this,” he recalled. But he knew that this was all just the result of frustration boiling over; of everyone's individual struggle to impose order on something that was beyond comprehension. “Everybody there was working out, in some form, their own sense of horror and fright,” Ball said.

Of course, my family was working through these emotions too. “It was a fucking nightmare,” Andy recalled. “It was hell, the weight of it was horrendous, I said I thought he was dead for sure, and believed after the first night that it was over. It was horrible.” He went on: “The week he was missing was sheer torture and incredibly traumatizing.”

“I remember looking at myself in the mirror,” my mother said, “and thinking,
How come I look the way I am, but I'm so not me?
” They had shut the door to Jon's room and closed it off while they waited. “I remember how awful it was,” my mother said, “closing off the room during that time, shutting the door.”

The fear was spreading to concern about the safety of Andy and me. With Jon missing, my parents worried about what, if anything, might happen to us. “It was scary to be in the house,” my mother told me. “We were so afraid for you kids.” They had workers set up spotlights outside the house for extra safety and kept them on throughout the night—just in case Jon, or someone else, came back. “During the search, you couldn't be out of our sight,” my mother recalled. “We felt you could be targeted.”

My father, at the same time, did his best to keep my mother insulated. “He was talking to people; he was very involved,” my mom said. “He was trying to protect me and say, ‘It's okay, let me take care of this.' He was wanting me to be sheltered.” But my mother had always been involved in everything—her work, her causes—and this was no different. “I said ‘No,' ” she recalled. “ ‘I want to be totally involved.' ”

While the visitors to our house provided tremendous support, they couldn't help but sneak glances at my family, to look for clues as to how we were doing, how we could possibly survive such impossible stress. “People were saying, ‘I wouldn't be able to handle this like that,' ” Ball observed.

My family handled it in a few ways. When the emotions became too great, we would leave the crowd and go into our rooms and cry. My father's headaches were still coming, and he would lie in bed and put on his oxygen mask until the pain went away. But they would return to the crowd, to the friends, to the strangers, and they would connect with them and their experience of this madness, hugging them, thanking them, comforting them. They were all discovering the incredible human capacity for support and love, and this, in part, was what enabled them to survive.