Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes (20 page)

Boy, ain't it a trip where heroes come from.

Sarah Byrnes went home with Lemry, and I got out of the hospital officially a day and a half later. It took Brittain a couple days to get up the courage to come back to school, which is two or three days before
I'd
have made it, so we showed up together. Two TV trucks set up at the edge of the parking lot to tape my return, but Mr. Patterson ordered them off the grounds and all they got were pictures of me and Ellerby driving into the parking lot. Ellerby had the Cruiser washed and waxed so it shone like it really was from heaven, and he gave them a couple of blasts of Mahalia Jackson belting out “Bless This House” on the speaker system before he shut her down. I believe Ellerby may have the power to bring Mahalia back, or at least bring on some righteous
letters to the editor.

I caught Brittain watching me several times in class and a couple of times in the hall, and finally I walked up to him and asked if I could help.

“Gotta do this on my own,” he said.

CAT class was still a study hall, with Mautz monitoring, because Mr. Brittain lodged a formal protest, and even though Mr. Patterson told Lemry he could lodge all the protests he wanted and CAT class would roll on, Lemry was on paid leave. She was home with Sarah Byrnes in a kind of protective custody until the cops figured out what Mr. Byrnes's next move might be. It seemed smart to not place his targets in the middle of fifteen hundred kids. So Patterson didn't need to worry about taking Mr. Brittain on until Lemry got back.

About fifteen minutes into study hall, Mark Brittain raised his hand and asked Mr. Mautz if he could speak to the class.

I think Mautz thought the fat kid with his arm in a sling or the handsome renegade preacher's kid might turn study hall into a verbal free-for-all if Brittain said the wrong thing, but the part of him that thought all kids should hear Mark Brittain won over. “Sure, Mark. You can talk.”

Mark stood and cleared his throat while everyone
turned in their seats. You could hear his heart beating from across the room. “I need to clear some things up,” he said, “or I'm not going to be able to show my face for the rest of the year.”

We stared in silence.

“I'm a liar,” Mark said. “I think the last words I said to this class were that Jody Mueller was a liar. Not so. Jody got an abortion just like she said. It was my baby. I was too scared to face what I'd done and too ready to protect myself, so I let her go up to the clinic alone and get an abortion alone and go home alone. Then I tricked her into thinking it was her fault. On one of Jody's good days, I couldn't have done that, but after her abortion she didn't have any good days. Everything she's said about me is true.”

Mark took a deep breath. Then his voice cracked and tears ran down his cheeks, and he turned to Jody. “I'm sorry, Jody. I'm
so
sorry.” He turned back to us. “I don't know what this does to my feelings about abortion or about God or about myself, but I'm going to find out.” He looked at Mautz. “And now I'm going home, because I don't feel like talking anymore or being around anybody. I'll be back tomorrow.”

Mautz started to protest, but Mark said, “If it means detention, it means detention. Somebody should
have put me in detention a long time ago.” If I don't remember another thing about that moment, I'll remember how relieved he seemed.

For a moment, there was only the sound of Mark Brittain's heels against the hardwood as he tucked his books under his arm and walked toward the door. Then there was the sound of Jody's heels following him.

Ain't it a trip where heroes come from.

 

Carver wasn't spending many waking hours at our house. He's an accountant by trade and the tax season had him by the short ones, as he put it. He came over late to sleep with my mother so she wouldn't fret about Mr. Bogeyman Byrnes sneaking in and nabbing her dumpling, and a couple of nights we all stayed up and drank hot chocolate and talked about what it must have been like for Sarah Byrnes to grow up the way she did. When I talked about the burning, or the horrible restraints, Carver seemed edgy, and when I said no one believed Sarah Byrnes when she tried to tell, he got so quiet Mom changed the subject.

One night he told Mom he had to go out of town on a week-long audit for a company over in Moses Lake.

“You're just tired of being under seige,” she said. “You want a vacation.”

“If I wanted a vacation, would I go to Moses Lake?”

That settled, he was on his way.

The next time I saw him was on Channel Six. A cop protected Carver's head with his hand as he bent into the back of a police car. His hands were cuffed behind him.

Wayne Haverly, live and on the scene, announced that in a strange twist in the Virgil Byrnes case, a local accountant had gained entry to Mr. Byrnes's home, where he lay in wait and subdued him. Byrnes was in serious condition at Sacred Heart with multiple fractures, his face so badly beaten as to be unrecognizable.

Mom visited Carver several times in the next couple of days, but said surprisingly little and never invited me along. Mr. Byrnes recovered steadily in the hospital as more and more charges were heaped on him. There is no statute of limitations on his kind of indecency. Sarah Byrnes stayed out of sight, as did Lemry. It was all very bizarre.

The next time I saw Carver was also on television, in an exclusive interview with Elaine Murphy, taped at the county jail. Carver was dressed in slacks and an open white shirt, his sleeves rolled up as if ready to dig into an audit.

Elaine introduced Carver and gave a summary of the case. Then she said, “Mr. Middleton, the prosecutor's
office is considering charging you with assault with intent to commit bodily harm. What is your response?”

Carver sat back, looking cool and calm. Mom sat beside me, her fingers absently playing along my good arm. “Well,” Carver said. “I assaulted him, though I certainly didn't intend to commit bodily harm—not at the outset. Everything I did after our initial confrontation was in self-defense. I realize I hurt him, but I foolishly didn't have a weapon, and I truly believe he'd have killed me if I hadn't put him out.”

“So how will you plead?”

“Well, I gained unlawful entry, so I have no problem pleading guilty to breaking and entering. Beyond that I only did what I had to do to stay alive.”

“So you would plead guilty to breaking and entering?”

“I am guilty of breaking and entering.”

Elaine Murphy nodded. “Mr. Middleton…”

“Please call me Carver.”

“Okay. Carver, why do you think the prosecutor's office is so vigorously pursuing more serious charges against you? You did, after all, apprehend a dangerous criminal.”

“They've told my lawyer they intend to prevent any further such vigilante activity; that a clear statement has
to be made to the public.”

“How do you respond to that?”

“I have no problem with it. Virgil Byrnes is out of the way. That's all I care about.”

Elaine Murphy pauses, checking her notes. Then, “Carver, research into your background indicates you spent two tours of duty in Vietnam. Is that correct?”

“That's correct.”

Mom lurched forward. “I didn't know that,” she said. “He never said a word to me. That's strange. I did an article on athletes who fought in Vietnam once, and he never said a word.” She sounded betrayed.

“And is it true,” Elaine Murphy continued, “that you were part of a Special Forces unit engaged in top secret duty? And that on three separate occasions your unit suffered greater than seventy-five percent casualties?”

“Yeah,” Carver said. “That's all correct.”

“I understand you're quite a decorated soldier.”

Carver nodded, his expression unchanged. “That was a long time ago, Ms. Murphy.”

She nodded. “I see. Isn't it possible, Carver, that you could use your war history, and the possible trauma that came from it, to mount your defense?”

Carver smiled. “Ms. Murphy, my participation in
the Vietnam War makes me sad. It doesn't make me crazy.”

I watched my mother's head in her hands, and watched her gently shake as tears leaked between her fingers.

Elaine Murphy was silent a moment before breaking for a commercial. The Eveready Rabbit kept truckin' while I held my mother, then Elaine Murphy began the second segment: “Carver, can you tell us how you tracked Virgil Byrnes? The local police mounted a massive dragnet, all of the principals were under close surveillance, yet there was no sign of him. You found him at his home.”

“I found him
in
his house,” Carver said. “There was no evidence of his coming or going that the police could have seen from their vantage point. An old potato cellar leads into Byrnes's basement from underground. The cellar itself looks like nothing more than a mound of dirt at the edge of the backyard. You have to understand that the police are severely limited by manpower, and their main focus was protection of those principals you mentioned. I had no considerations but to find him. I knew he wouldn't leave town because of things his daughter had said about him, and I knew he had no friends and certainly didn't know the street network.
He had to eat. He had to sleep. He had to do those things at home. I simply went in through a basement window and waited. Had I known about the underground entrance, there'd have been no violence. He took me by surprise.”

“Did you wait long?”

“About nine hours.”

“And your intent,” Elaine Murphy went on, “was simply to apprehend him and let the law take its course?”

Carver was quiet a moment, then leaned forward, placing his elbows on the simple gray metal table between himself and his interviewer. “Yes, that was my intent. But when that didn't work out, when I saw the power of his instincts, I have to admit I wanted to hurt him. And I want everyone out there to know that under normal circumstances, I would never, never advocate for that. But I sat by for several months, watching the fallout from this man's actions. His daughter, who is severely scarred for life, was in the psychiatric unit at Sacred Heart, completely shut down. My girlfriend's son was in a constant state of hopeless turmoil, trying to repair what was beyond repair. That was before Mr. Byrnes stabbed him with a hunting knife—with intent to inflict bodily injury, by the way. People were falling
in his wake like flies. An attorney friend of mine estimated he might spend seven years in prison.

“But Virgil Byrnes is nothing if not patient. He didn't commit any of his crimes out of greed or any kind of personal gain. He committed them because that's the way he is. In seven years he will still be the way he is, and people I love and care about will have to worry about him all over again. So I didn't let up once we were locked in combat.”

“Wait, Carver,” Elaine said, putting up her hands. “You need to know you may be hurting your case…”

Carver put up his own hand. “I'm on a roll here. You asked about Vietnam. I fought in Vietnam because of other people's beliefs. I joined the service when I was twenty-one years old and the first protester hadn't burned the first flag. I participated in operations I'm convinced cost the lives of hundreds of innocent people. Mothers and children, grandfathers and grandmothers. Yeah, and some soldiers, too.

“And I didn't go just once, I went twice. And then all hell broke loose over here and I discovered I'd been a warrior for nothing more than stubborn men's beliefs. All that cost to Vietnam, all that cost to America. All that cost to me.

“Well, this time I was a warrior for my own beliefs.
I did not intend to lay a hand on Mr. Byrnes if he merely came with me, but I'd be lying to say there was no sense of satisfaction in rendering him harmless once he did come at me. I'm not asking for acquittal, or even leniency, but I am asking for fairness. I did what I did and I knew the possible consequences. In the eyes of the law, I was wrong. And make no mistake about it, I
believe
in the law, and I expect to be punished by it. It could cost me irreplaceable time with the woman I love and time away from her son, whom I would give anything to know better and to gain his respect. But sometimes sacrifices have to be made. This seemed like a good place to make mine.” With that Carver stood, put his hand out to Elaine Murphy, who took it in surprise, probably wondering how she was going to fill up the rest of the half hour, and disappeared from the camera's view.

I looked over at Mom's tear-streaked face and took her hand. “Use my college money to get him a lawyer,” I said. “He's got all the respect I have.”

Boy, ain't it a trip where heroes come from.

So there it is. I think I feel good about the way things turned out. The pizza was great.

I didn't get back in the water this year, had to go to Regionals and State as team manager. (That hacked Mautz off because it meant the school had to pay my expenses without exacting their pound of flesh—or in
my case, ten pounds.) Ellerby won the hundred fly and Brittain placed third in the hundred free. I like to think I could have placed in the top six in the five hundred, but I'll just dream on. I got a scholarship to swim at a small NAIA school over on the coast, so I've got another four years of cramming the barrel of my body into a tank suit and stepping onto the blocks to the chant of Mo-
by!
Mo-
by!
When I visited the campus, the coach told me he'd have me down to sprinting weight after the first four weeks. I said, “Yes sir.” Better men have tried—and she was a woman.

Ellerby's going to the U, so we'll be on the same side of the state and should be able to keep in touch, but I know our lives will go the way they go, and we'll end up friendly strangers. Sarah Byrnes will live with the Lemrys and go to the community college for at least a year until she decides what to do with her life. That means she'll be taken care of better than she could be anywhere else in the world, and she'll be here every time I come home. She's still fascinated by that group home she read about in
Life,
and that makes me feel good because it means she still has dreams. God, I love her.

Carver was sentenced to six months on work release, which basically meant he spent nights and weekends in the county jail for a little while. He pleaded
guilty to a lesser assault charge, and the judge gave him the full sentence allowed by the law, along with a severe tongue-lashing about vigilante justice, then suspended most of that time due to the fact that too many lives had already been tragically affected and he wasn't about to add to that. The judge got both heavy criticism and loud support in the press, but I think he couldn't have cared less. Carver's going to be on parole for a while, but that's no big deal, he's never even had a parking ticket. I told my mother I was sorry I ever called him Boo Radley, and that from now on I'd call him Dad, whether she has the guts to marry him or not.

She just cried and said that was nice. If I told her cronies down at the paper what a Class A wimp she's getting to be they'd take her off the sports page and put her on the Food section.

Jody and I had a good spring, and I think we'll have a great summer. She's going to school on this side of the state, so we'll just have to play things by ear. One of the toughest things in the book—in my mind—is to test a relationship by splitting up, but it's probably as good a test as there is. Except for Lemry and her husband—and I don't know a lot about them—I don't have many models for how men and women are supposed to be together, and I figure I better take my time finding out
for myself. One thing I do know: Families can get pretty messed up while they're looking pretty good. Look at the Brittains. If I'm ever going to have a family, I'd like to avoid that.

It's a scary thing, moving on. Part of me wishes life were more predictable and part of me is excited that it's not. I think it's impossible to tell the good things from the bad things while they're happening. Once I thought being a fat kid was the worst thing that could possibly be, but if I hadn't been fat I would never have known Sarah Byrnes—I mean Sarah—and that would have been a true tragedy in my life. And what is a worse thing than living like she lived for all those years? Nothing I can think of, but someday some kid in a group home somewhere in Kansas—chronicled in
Life
magazine more than five years ago—may be touched by her courage, and I guarantee that will change his or her life forever.

So I'm outta here. My thing for this summer is leisure. Ellerby's coming by with Jody and Sarah in a few minutes, and we're headed for the lake in the Cruiser with a few tons of junk food, to sit out on Jody's houseboat and get into some major ingestion. I've gotta bulk up; give my new swim coach something to work off me.