The Best American Crime Writing (24 page)

There have been a number of developments in the Pearl case since a Pakistani court sentenced Omar Saeed Sheikh to death last July, and handed down 25-year prison terms to three codefendants. (Sheikh and his confederates will be presenting their appeals sometime in 2003.)

Four other men—all of whom were charged as participants in the plot and were said to have guarded Danny during captivity—were arrested shortly after the discovery of Danny’s body last spring and currently are awaiting trial
.

Meanwhile, police continue to investigate five Yemeni Al Qaeda operatives who were arrested in a raid in Karachi this past September as being involved in Danny’s murder. Among them is Ramzi Binal-shibh, who is suspected by the United States of being a coordinator of the 9/11 terrorist attacks; and Umar al-Gharib, a brother of the suspected mastermind of the 2000 bombing of the USS
Cole
in Yemen
.

The most recent and by far biggest break in the case was the capture in early March of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Al Qaeda operations chief who planned the attack on the World Trade Center. Mohammed is suspected of being present when Danny’s throat was cut, and may even have wielded the murder weapon
.

T
here is nothing on this earth so terrible as a terrible boy. A terrible boy has learned the specifics of cruelty without learning the generality of mercy. A terrible boy worships what is worst in himself and despises what is best. A terrible boy is alienated by his own sense of enmity and seeks connection through the certainties of slaughter. A terrible boy makes even ants his enemies, for he wishes above all to make his enemies ants—and to entertain himself by squashing them both. When a terrible boy closes his hand, he finds a fist; when he opens it, he finds a rock. So terrible are terrible boys that armies the world over have discovered the utility of using them to do their bidding. So terrible are terrible boys that aboriginal tribes used to dispatch them on impossible and solitary missions, hoping they would come back tempered by quest and grown into men. We, who demand something softer from our civilization, have no such uses for terrible boys and no such rituals. Instead, we call them bullies and by new and coming consensus seek to outlaw them.

Was Jonathan Miller a terrible boy? Was he mean enough, hard enough, heartless enough? Did he
hate
enough? Maybe not. Probably not. Unlike many a terrible boy, he had his sympathies. He loved animals. He loved his family and his friends. He loved the downtrodden and was known to stand up for them when the terrible boys came calling. He was a Boy Scout, for God’s sake. He just didn’t want to go to school, and, more particularly, he didn’t want to go to school in Cherokee County, Georgia. He was from New York,
you see. He’d lived happily near Kingston, just upstate from New York City, where he was born. When his father, who worked for a large computer company, transferred to Woodstock, on what used to be the outer edge of Atlanta, he asked to stay in New York with his grandparents. When his parents refused his request, he took on the trappings of the terrible, hoping somehow to achieve by negative means what he couldn’t by positive—hoping to force his parents’ hand by getting kicked out of the seventh grade.

What did he do? Oh, the usual, his parents say—kid stuff. He shot spitballs. He mouthed off to teachers, often profanely. He farted in a kid’s face when he was at the blackboard. He flicked at a kid’s ears with a sharp snap of his fingers. He slapped a gym ball out of a girl’s grasp. He took up residence in the principal’s office, then sampled both forms of suspension, “in school” and “at home.” Thirty-odd times, Robin and Alan Miller were called with regard to their son’s behavior, but never did they concede that he was a terrible boy, and though he came damn close to getting kicked out of E. T. Booth Middle School, Jonathan seemed to calm down when he moved on to Etowah High, except on the school bus. He didn’t like riding the bus, for his brother had a car, and so he adopted the same strategy with regard to the bus that he had once employed with regard to middle school: He pursued the possibility of forced exile. He sat in the back and raised hell, causing the rest of the riders—who were generally students at E. T. Booth rather than Etowah and a year or so younger than Jonathan—to cringe when he got on. Indeed, for the purposes of achieving a triumphant suspension, he carried in his pockets mustard and ketchup packets he obtained from the school cafeteria, and on November 2, 1998, he may—or may not—have thrown one at the head of a boy sitting a few rows in front of him, an eighth grader named Joshua Belluardo.

It was not, in and of itself, the offense—even in light of what was to happen—of a terrible boy. First of all, the boy who was sitting next to Jonathan swears to this day that whatever was thrown at Josh
was thrown by someone else. Second, Josh didn’t like Jonathan any more than Jonathan liked Josh. They lived one house away from each other on a cul-de-sac called Shallow Cove, and though they were friendly enough when Jonathan first moved in—Josh Belluardo being in Jonathan’s recollection the first boy he met when he moved to Georgia—they quickly accepted the terms of mutual estrangement. They were just very different, and out of difference grew dislike. Josh was established in the neighborhood; Jon was new. Josh was quiet, while Jonathan had, in the words of his mother, “a mouth on him.” Josh was athletic; Jon preferred those activities in which he could keep to himself—camping, swimming. For reasons only they could know, they had been edging toward a fight for years, and on this day, when Josh accused Jonathan of throwing the mustard packet, Jonathan challenged him to fight, and Josh answered by inviting him to fight in his yard. When the bus stopped at the corner of Shallow Cove and Driftwood Drive, Josh got off first and cut across a neighbor’s lawn on the way to his house. Jonathan, following behind him, closed his right hand and found a fist. He took five or six accelerating steps to close the gap between them. Then, with gathered momentum—and without a word of warning—he smote Josh Belluardo in the back of his head and became in that one terrible instant a terrible boy. No, he became more than that: For the purposes of the school, for the purposes of the state, and for the purposes of the media he became a bully, and as a bully, he became, barely one month past his fifteenth birthday, a man who committed murder.

This is a story about cruelty and mercy. It is a story about the mercy
available
to the cruel, and how it—or its absence—shapes not only the lives of American boys, terrible and otherwise, but American boyhood itself. We in America today are deciding not to extend mercy to boys in their common cruelty, and as a result, a boy perceived
as cruel—Jonathan Miller—is, in the eyes of the law, no longer a boy at all. When I was a boy, we were at the mercy of the cruel, for the cruel were only at the mercy of, well, themselves. There was no stopping them if they didn’t want to be stopped. Our freedoms were genuine, but they were achieved at terrible cost: the cost of terrible boys. This is a story, then, about what we disallow when we try to disallow terrible boys. It is a story not just of one terrible boy but of two, and of the mercies lost when we assume that terrible boys must be terrible forever.

Jonathan Miller is one of this story’s terrible boys. I am the other. For a brief time, I was a terrible boy. I was a terrible boy to a boy named, for the purposes of this story, Timmy Titimski. I wasn’t terrible to anyone else; I wasn’t big enough or strong enough or powerful enough or scary enough. I didn’t even know that I was a terrible boy until Timmy Titimski sat in front of me in the fifth grade. I was smart, I was studious, I was
obedient
in a particularly Catholic way. When Timmy Titimski sat in front of me, though, I was transformed. It wasn’t simply that he was smaller than I was, or that I was bigger, stronger, more powerful—scarier—than he was. It was that he made me
feel
bigger, stronger, more powerful—scarier. He was new, if I remember correctly. He was scant on friends, so I had him all to myself. He asked me one day what my favorite song was. He volunteered that his own favorite was “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron,” and I remember still the distaste he aroused. Timmy Titimski? Timmy Titimski was just a
baby
, and from that observation—that information—I deduced what it was that Timmy Titimski did … what it was I could make him do. Timmy Titimski was a baby, and so I could make him do what babies do. I could make him cry.

It took me a while to test my thesis. For most of the year, I kept it to myself, as my own little secret, until one day a spitball fight broke out in my class. We had a lot of spitball fights in the fifth grade. Our teacher had died of a heart attack before Christmas, and so we were often stewarded by substitutes. Fifth grade was one frenzied cross
fire, but on this day, when I saw Timmy Titimski standing against the blackboard, the chaos dimmed and clarity took over. The crowded classroom consisted suddenly of me and him, and so what I did was stand in front of him and methodically paint his face with spitballs. He didn’t fight back or raise a straw of his own. He just stood there, as if counting on the extent of my mercy, and what he faced instead was the compass of my cruelty. He did nothing to stop me, and for some reason his lack of resistance stoked not pity in me but rage. I just kept going, framing the blackboard behind his head with threads of spit—my spit—that in time ran like black tears. He didn’t cry, though, not at first. A teacher was returning to our class after lunch, and to protect me—yes, me—and my terrible endeavor, a group of boys closed around me—us—in a semicircle. Thus insulated, I was emboldened and inspired, and when I found a wad of tinfoil, I twisted a piece between my fingers and with a mighty puff of breath shot the silver spur at an imagined bull’s-eye at the center of Timmy Titimski’s forehead. The shot hit its target, and the tinfoil bounced off the little red mark it had imprinted in Timmy Titimski’s skin. It must have hurt a little; he must have felt something of a nip, but that didn’t explain what happened next. No, as I think of it now, he was not so much a baby as he was an innocent, with as little resistance to true cruelty as an American Indian had to smallpox. He simply had no immunity to what I was all about, and when he
saw
what I was all about—when he saw the face of the terrible boy before him—well, he didn’t merely cry, and I didn’t merely make him cry. I hit a gusher.

What began that day lasted at least a year, or maybe as long as a year and a half—well into sixth grade. I had never known that I was a predator, but now I had found my prey. I was a bully in the truest sense of the word, which is to say the modern sense of the word, which is to say the sense of the word as now defined by activists and experts whose studies have helped frame the debate about the justice deserved by Jonathan Miller. I selected a victim based on what
I perceived as a disparity in power, and I measured my power by the pain I could inflict. Indeed, the more I’ve come to understand about bullying, the more I’ve come to understand that I was more of a bully in my relationship with Timmy Titimski than Jonathan Miller ever was in his relationship with Joshua Belluardo, and so, when it came to the question of mercy for Jonathan Miller—the question of mercy for terrible boys in general—I decided to call the one expert whose qualifications I personally accredited. I decided to call Timmy Titimski.

You remember them, of course. You remember the bullies; you remember the terrible boys. If you were unlucky, you remember your own personal terrible boy, the one designed for you like a bullet with your name on it. How could you forget him? He
made
you. He helped form you, and for all his cruelties, he helped you grow up by standing like a sentry on the road to adulthood. Once you made it past him, you were home free.

What you don’t remember is a school like Etowah High, in the town of Woodstock, in the county of Cherokee, in the state of Georgia. Etowah is where Jonathan Miller went to school. It is where Josh Belluardo—as a student at E. T. Booth Middle School—
would
have gone to school if Jonathan’s punch hadn’t killed him. Etowah is a large school in what used to be a rural community, turned now, like the rest of America, into a shopping opportunity. Occupying the center of what might be termed a sprawling educational complex, it is flanked by, and shares school buses with, both E. T. Booth Middle School and Chapman Intermediate School. Because it is riven with some of America’s trembly little fault lines—between the people who have lived there for a long time, the people who have recently moved there, and the people just passing through—Etowah is institutional in feel and corporate in intent. It is a school that prides itself on giving its students choices, and so it is a school
where many students choose to remain insulated by nothing but their own anonymity. It is, in other words, absolutely average, a school not unlike, say, Columbine, outside of Denver. Its homogeneity accentuates disparity, and disparity presents the terrible boys their opportunities to be terrible. It is at schools like Etowah—not to mention Columbine—where bullying mutated from individual incidents to a social and political issue, because it is at schools like Etowah where the nature of bullying is said by activists and legislators to have changed. It is at schools like Etowah where bullies went from being objects of dread and nostalgia to objects of necessary quarantine, because it is at Etowah High School where bullying, in fact, turned into a fatal exercise, not just in the case of Jonathan Miller, but before him, in the case of Brian Head.

You remember Brian Head, and if you don’t, you remember someone just like him. If the bully was eternal, so was he; he was the kid the bullies picked on. At E. T. Booth and then at Etowah, he was not only a victim, his victimization was accepted as part of the natural order. He was overweight, and he wore thick glasses. He was quiet, clumsy, and kindhearted. He attended special-education classes and hurried home. His father, Bill Head, thought that Brian loved being home simply because he loved his family, loved the outdoors, and loved his life. He did not suspect what he would find out later—that “Brian loved being home because school was such a nightmare.” In the fall of 1993, when Brian came home from school bloodied, his father accepted a teacher’s explanation—that Brian was a boy, and boys got into fights—and did not suspect that Brian had gotten bloodied because Brian was considered prey at Etowah. And of course Bill did not suspect that one morning Brian would secret his father’s gun in his book bag and take it to economics class. How could he suspect something like that? Brian was not a terrible boy; he was intent on taking a stand
against
the terrible boys. He was in class when one of the terrible boys—a “well-known bully,” in Bill Head’s words—slapped a kid in the face. Brian came
to the kid’s defense, as perhaps he had hoped someone would come one day to his. “Hey, pick on someone your own size,” is what Bill Head says his son said to the terrible boy. The terrible boy complied and slapped Brian. Brian responded by taking the gun out of his book bag. As his classmates scattered and fled, Brian pointed the gun at the terrible boy and pulled the trigger. The gun did not go off, no bullet was chambered. Brian pointed the gun at his head. “I’m sick of it,” he said and once again pulled the trigger. This time, a bullet was chambered. This time, the gun went off, and Brian Head, 15 years old, fell to the floor, dying.