Favorite Sons (11 page)

A cluster of sweaty teenage boys splintered in all directions. Adrian jumped over the benches and ran toward the fence. I pushed Deak to get him to the side of the court. One of the Crystalton cops, Flip Durkin, the brother of the chief, was running right toward me. And then, he kept running. Four of the officers charged through the side door while four others ran to the front.

I looked at Adrian, who also looked like he was near tears. They hadn't been after us after all. I had no idea what they were looking for, but I didn't care so long as it wasn't us. I had to sit down. That moment of abject terror had left me spent, my knees wobbly and drained by the adrenaline surge that had ramped up my heartbeat. It was a relief not unlike being jolted awake from a dream to learn that you were not actually falling off a cliff, or that you were not standing naked at the chalkboard struggling to diagram a complex sentence in Mrs. Hesske's English class.

As soon as the officers disappeared into the school, the Mingo Junction boys ran to their cars. We Crystalton boys sat on the benches next to the court and waited to see what the excitement was about. Four of us were just relieved, grateful that we were not the center of attention. Adrian, Pepper, and Deak joined me on the bench, elbows resting on our knees, sweat rolling down our faces and dripping from our noses, leaving a pattern of bright dots on the asphalt. People living along Third Street began streaming out of their houses, some talking in small clusters in front yards, others congregating in the shade of the Big Dipper's overhang. Within a few minutes, Denny Morelli came running over from Connell's Market, dressed in a white butcher's apron, a T-shirt, cut-off blue jeans, and leather work boots. “That's a good look you've got going there, Denny,” Pepper said.

“What's going on?” Denny asked.

“Holy shit! You mean the town crier doesn't already know?” Pepper asked.

“There's a switch,” Deak said.

“Seriously, what's going on?” Denny asked again.

“Don't know,” I said. “We were in the middle of a game when the light brigade showed up.”

“Are they going to arrest someone?”

“It certainly doesn't look like a damn social call, does it?” Pepper asked.

“Who are they after?”

Deak said, “Denny, are you deaf, or just stupid? We already told you that we don't know.”

“I'm just asking. Who do you think it is?”

I could see the top of Deak's jaw tighten. “What part of ‘We don't know' don't you understand?” Deak asked.

He looked at Deak and said, “Your uncle's in there, isn't he? Are they after him? What do you think he did?”

Deak stood and fired a two-hand chest pass, drilling Denny in the face with my basketball. It ricocheted back into Deak hands. “Get out of here, Denny. You make me sick. Go back and gossip with the old women at the grocery store.”

It was the first time in my life that I ever saw Deak Coultas show any degree of aggression. Denny ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth, then wiped his lips and inspected his fingers for blood. “Goddammit, you dick. I was just trying to find out . . .”

Deak again hit him in the face with the ball, harder than the first time. It slammed off Denny's forehead and sent him stumbling backward. He reeled for several steps, trying in vain to regain his balance before momentum claimed victory. He sprawled, his tailbone hitting just before the back of his head bounced with a dull thud on the asphalt. Deak said, “Get out of here.” Denny teared up and a stream of blood ran from his left nostril. Several drops fell from his lip and stained the front of the white apron. “Don't say another word, Denny, just go away. I mean it.”

When Denny got to the edge of the parking lot, cupping the lump that was sprouting on the back of his head, Deak turned and bounced the ball hard against the court, catching it with both hands.

Pepper grinned and said, “Well, that was certainly out of character for you, preacher.”

The muscles in Deak's forearms strained as he dug his fingertips into the ball. “That guy really rubs me the wrong way.”

“Apparently,” Pepper added.

Deak sat back down on the bench, and we all stared at the side door, where the news crews congregated. Our relief at not being the targets of the invasion was tempered, but only a little, by the fact that Deak's uncle—One-Eyed Jack, as we called him—was the only one in the school. The indicator was his sky blue, first-generation Plymouth Valiant, which sat across Third Street, rust eating away at its doors and wheel wells.

Jack Vukovich was Deak's mother's only surviving brother. An older brother, Paul, who had been an All-Ohio halfback at Crystalton High, was killed in the Korean War. A black-and-white photograph of Paul Vukovich stiff-arming an imaginary opponent hangs in the Crystalton High School Athletic Hall of Fame. The American Legion Post is named in his honor.

As Paul Vukovich was revered in Crystalton, Jack was looked upon as the underachieving younger brother of the war hero—the piteous janitor. He was two years younger than Paul, worked a few menial jobs after graduating from high school, and disappeared from Crystalton for more than a decade, during which he had very little contact with his family. When he resurfaced in the mid-sixties, it was the first time Deak had ever seen him. Jack moved into a garage apartment down the alley from our house and took a job as janitor at the junior high school. During his second winter on the job, Jack put a cot in the subbasement so he could sleep between rounds of stoking the coal-fired furnace and watching over the boiler. Over time, he slowly began moving furniture into the subbasement until he had a dungeon-like, two-room apartment forty feet below Third Street, where he lived year-round. He showered in the locker room, used the restrooms for other business, and seemed quite content with the accommodations. The school board thought it odd, but then Jack was a little odd, so they shrugged off any concern, joking that it gave them an unpaid security guard. It was the sort of smalltown arrangement that was usually overlooked as harmless, so why cause waves?

He wore white T-shirts with an omnipresent pack of Kools wrapped in the sleeve. His salt-and-pepper hair was greased back in a fifties-style ducktail. During his absence from Crystalton he
had gotten into a bar fight and taken a beer bottle to the right side of his head, causing the eye to permanently roll into the southwest corner of the socket, which led to the nickname of One-Eyed Jack. Deak rarely spoke about his uncle, which didn't strike me as particularly unusual since he smelled of cheap booze and lived in the subbasement of the school.

One of the reporters said, “Here they come,” and the cameraman and photographers spread out and began shooting the instant the door opened. An erect, stone-faced Sky Kelso emerged with his right hand grasping the elbow of Jack Vukovich, who was handcuffed behind his back, his shoulders hunched, the hair of his signature ducktail falling forward over his bowed head. The photographers walked backward across the lot, dragging their shoes against the asphalt and clicking away. Two deputies wrapped yellow crime scene tape around the Valiant. The remaining officers filed in behind the sheriff. Watching from the sidewalk across Third Street, women in housecoats and bedroom slippers nodded to each other in agreement that they always knew Jack Vukovich to be no good. Certainly, he was nothing like his brother.

Deak put his face in his hands and groaned, “Oh, not again.”

“What do you mean, ‘again?'” Pepper asked.

“He was in all kind of trouble before he moved back to Crystalton. Mom and my granddad helped get him out of a couple of messes. He's kept his nose pretty clean since he came back. This is bad.”

“Not to play Denny Morelli, but what kind of trouble was he in?” I asked.

“I don't know. They would never talk about it. They just said he made some bad decisions and needed a fresh start.” He stood up. “I better hustle over to the house and tell Mom before she hears it from someone else.”

T
he fire whistle blew at five twenty that evening and the emergency squad went past our house a few minutes later, disappearing onto Third Street, heading south from Ohio Avenue. When the whistle first sounded I knew it would only be a few minutes before one of my mother's friends who owned a scanner or spotted the emergency squad within their purview would call with an update. We were finishing our dinner when the phone rang about ten minutes later. Normally, Mom enforced a strict no-phone-calls-during-dinner rule. This rule, however, was null and void if the call arrived within a few minutes of the fire whistle. I walked into the family room where the phone sat on an end table between the couch and Mom's recliner.

It was Pepper, who began talking without introduction. “Hey, the emergency squad is down the street at Deak's granddad's house. His mom and dad are standing in the front yard; his mom's crying.” Deak's grandfather lived a few doors down and across the street from the Nashes. “Okay, they're hauling him out of the house on a stretcher.”

“Is he alive?”

“Must be. He's got an oxygen mask over his face and they're hurrying. Have you heard anything about his uncle?”

“No.”

“Okay, I'll talk to you later.”

And the phone went dead.

“It's Deak's granddad.”

Mom's face puckered up, her lips squeezing into a ball and deep furrows lining up between her eyes. “That's not good. He's had heart problems,” she said. “I'm sure that whatever is going on with that worthless Jack triggered it again.”

“Maybe I should go over and see how Deak's doing?”

“I think that would be good. If Deak or the girls haven't eaten, bring them back and I'll fix them something.”

As I walked up Labelle Avenue to Deak's, I watched the emergency squad carrying his grandfather speed north on Route 7, its siren and lights bouncing off the hills as it raced for Ohio Valley Hospital in Steubenville. The echoes died before I reached his porch, where I could hear the television in the Coultases' front room. I cupped my hands around my eyes and leaned close to the screen to see if Deak was in view. His three younger sisters were playing school in the front room, the eldest, seven-year-old Katie, standing in front of the two younger ones and using a ruler to point to words she had written on a little chalkboard. Deak was in the kitchen cleaning up paper plates on which were a few bun stubs, all that remained from the dinner of hot dogs and potato chips he had prepared. I let myself in. The girls ignored me. Deak peeked around the corner. “Not a good day,” I said.

“The whistle was for my granddad.”

“I know. Pepper called. Is he going to be all right?”

Deak shrugged. “Mom called the power plant and had Dad meet her at Grandpa's to tell him about Uncle Jack. I guess Grandpa started crying and having chest pains, so she called the squad. She said she'd call me later from the hospital. That's all I know.”

“Heard anything about your uncle?”

“Nothing.”

“I wonder what he did.”

Deak looked at his watch. It was five fifty. “We'll find out in ten minutes. Whatever it was, it was enough to bring five cruisers, two unmarked cars, and three news crews to Crystalton.”

“Drugs?” I offered.

He shook his head. “Don't know.”

Sometimes I wasn't happy about my own selfishness. Deak was my best friend and for more than two weeks had been trying to deal with what he believed to be a morally corrupt decision, leaving the Sanchez family to wonder why their son had been murdered and who was responsible. Now his entire family was in crisis. His uncle was in jail and his grandfather on his way to intensive care. But I was not thinking about the plight of Deak and his family. Rather, I was thinking that Jack Vukovich's arrest was an excellent diversion. Whatever he had done was causing a major distraction for the sheriff's office, eating up valuable hours that prevented detectives from searching for Petey's killer, and allowing the case to grow colder still. It was undeniably selfish, but that's what I was thinking—thank you, Jack Vukovich.

We stood in front of the television, watching the credits roll on a game show, when the screen went black for an instant, then lit up with Don Redley, the reporter we had seen at the school earlier in the day, staring hard into the camera. “A Crystalton man is being held at the Jefferson County Jail tonight being questioned in connection with the murder of a seventeen-year-old mentally retarded boy earlier this month. Channel Nine was on the scene when he was arrested this afternoon. This story, coming up next.”

My gut seized up with such ferocity that a backwash of city chicken, gravy, fried potatoes, succotash, and stomach acid surged into my throat and mouth. The vacuum sucked my balls into my chest cavity and every molecule of air escaped from my lungs in a death groan. I was almost afraid to look at Deak, who continued to stare at the television as the intro to the news rolled. When I caught my breath I said, “Holy shit.”

“How can that be?” he whispered.

“Beats me.”

As the anchors began to introduce the lead story, a video of Jack Vukovich being led from the school to the cruiser ran across the screen. Katie began leading her sisters in the ABC song. “Katie, hush for a minute. I need to hear this,” Deak said.

This got their attention as the video continued to roll and Lucy, the five-year-old, squealed and pointed at the screen, “Lookie, Uncle Jack's on the telebision.”

“You can't talk out in class,” Katie said, pointing her ruler at young Lucy. “Sit down.”

“Girls, quiet,” Deak yelled.

Don Redley read from the narrow notebook he held in one hand. “The suspect has been identified as Jack C. Vukovich, a thirty-five-year-old custodian at Crystalton Junior High School. What we know is this: Sheriff's deputies, armed with a search warrant, swarmed over the school this afternoon, taking Vukovich into custody and impounding his car.” The video showed the blue Valiant in a lot surrounded by the chain-link fence of the police impound lot. The doors were open and deputies in rubber gloves were seen dropping items into paper evidence bags. “Sheriff Sky Kelso said Vukovich is being held in connection with the Sanchez boy's death, but he has not released specific information pertaining to the charges.”