Drowning of Stephan Jones (17 page)

As they wordlessly observed Stephan’s genitals, anger
began to rise up within the boys that was both unexplained and unexpected. The problem was, although they needed to find something that marked Stephan as an inferior male, the evidence they searched for just wasn’t there. Andy, like his men, believed there would, by necessity, be clean, clear lines of demarcation between splendid he-men specimens like themselves and limp-wristed fairies like Stephan Jones.

Finally it was Doug’s girl, Donna, who broke the silence. “Boy, aren’t they something else? Damn if those aren’t the biggest dingdong-a-lings I’ve ever seen
and
that’s a fact!”

Suddenly the Ironman, with his cheeks puffed in anger, gave Donna a watch-your-tongue pop on the arm before issuing his first-ever command: “Okay, that’s enough of that! Get some clothes on that faggot before I puke!”

“Wait a fucking minute! Not so fast!” countermanded the
real
leader. “Seeing as how Stephan here is almost ready for a little skinny-dipping, maybe that’s what he’d enjoy doing.” Andy’s voice then dropped to a lower, more intimate register. “That right, Stephanie? You want to go for a refreshing little swim?”

Stephan’s eyes popped wide open. “
What?!
”

“Oh, I just thought you’d enjoy a swim.”

“No! No! Please! PLEASE! Listen to me. I’m begging you—I don’t know how to swim! I can’t swim! I
never
learned to swim!”

Andy shook his head slowly, but firmly, a little reminiscent of a kindly old family doctor who’s about to insist that, for the patient’s own good, the nasty-tasting medicine must be swallowed. “Oh, you shouldn’t ever say
can’t
’cause I believe you can swim. Everybody can swim. At least every
real
man can swim.”

All five snickered knowingly as Andy barked out the orders for Spider and Ironman to “take up your positions at the north and south of the prisoner.”

“No! No! Honest, you’ve got to believe me! No! Don’t do this! DON’T!!!” Spider and the Ironman again began to slowly swing the frantic man. “I’m aquaphobic!”

“Oh, bless your precious little heart,” Donna cooed, attempting to imitate the sounds of sympathy.

The five’s robust laughter was an eerie counterpoint to Stephan’s screams for mercy.

“I’m terrified of water! Please, please, oh, please, I’m begging you, don’t do this!!!”

But the closest thing to an answer they gave him was their mocking laughter. That and the swings—the ever-higher swinging back and forth. With tears running down his cheeks Stephan cried out, “Oh, Dei Mater! Mother of God. Blessed Mary Mother of God, help me, HELP ME!!!”

For a moment Ironman’s broad features registered indecision and discomfort. “Andy, hey, like what if the guy’s telling the truth? What if he really
can’t
swim?”

Andy scoffed. “That’s a bold-faced lie.” He turned to throw him a look of disgust, reminding Doug that he himself had been swimming ever since his old man threw him into Baxter Pond when he was five.

The Ironman’s well-developed arms began to lose the momentum of their swing as he asked Andy again, “Yeah, but what if this one
really
can’t swim?”

“What if! What if!” lambasted Andy. “What if you’re not one of
us,
but one of
them?
What if you’re not an Ironman but only a half man? What about that, eh?!”

Andy and the Ironman’s eyes connected, and then Doug looked away as he once again began to fall into the rhythm of the swing.

Like a sheet caught hanging on a clothesline during an unexpected storm, Stephan was now whipped back and forth, back and forth, and with each swing his half-naked body was falling and rising. Faster and faster, higher and higher. “Oh,
help me! Help me! Blessed Mary Mother of God! Help me! Help me! Blessed Mary Mother of God! I CAN’T SWIM!!!”

With Stephan’s body approaching the height of the guardrail, Lisa, remembering a now obscenely appropriate nursery rhyme, began singing with a honey-sweet soprano voice. Immediately the others joined in, and with surprisingly good harmony the handsome party-goers swung and sang into the night:

Rock-a-bye baby,

In the treetops

When the wind blows,

The cradle will rock,

When the bough breaks,

The cradle will fall,

And down will come baby

Cradle and all.

As they sang out the words, Stephan Jones was sent sailing up and over the bridge’s iron railing, up, up into the moonlit sky, crying and calling, calling and crying, “BLESSEDMARYMOTHEROFGODPRAYFORUSNOWANDATTHETIME OFOURDEATH.” His anguished cries pierced the otherwise silent night.

As Stephan screamed his tortured cries heavenward, “BLESSEDMAR—” there was a splash, and he slipped soundlessly beneath the moving waters.

With their heads bowed over the railings, the five formally attired promgoers stared almost transfixed at the dark and brooding water of the Pascaloosa below. Wordlessly five sets of eyes scanned the river for a sign of life. They watched as the moments became minutes and the minutes ticked by.

Suddenly Donna broke the collective trance by asking, “Hey, isn’t it about time for him to come up for air?”

Nobody answered, they merely continued to gaze at the river
and feel the passage of time. The passage of more and more time.

“Maybe ...” Doug sputtered, “maybe he was telling the truth. Why wouldn’t you believe him, Andy! He told you he couldn’t swim!”

Andy Harris’s voice spewed venom. “Oh, come on, you mean to tell me that he’s got you believing that a grown man could actually drown in that
little
river? Why, he’s down there laughing at you, hiding from you! Man, don’t you know
anything
?”

In the distance the not-quite-of-this-earth wail of a siren startled the five so severely that they dumbly sought each other’s reassurance, hoping that someone would explain that what they were hearing was just some strange group hallucination. But instead of the siren going away, it grew louder and more insistent. One of them yelled, “Let’s get out of here!”

They were all running, running like a flock of frightened chickens back to the Olds, and even as the ignition was turned on and the car was lurching forward, the back doors were being slammed closed. Jerking the Olds into drive, Andy glanced to his right and then to the rear seat before calling, “Carla! Hey, where is she?”

“Drive!” Spider demanded. “Just DRIVE!”

Andy’s right foot pushed hard against the accelerator and the big car roared across the Pascaloosa, but just as they reached the opposite side, he stomped hard against the brake. Coming up on them were lights, flashing emergency lights.

Then, like an ace fighter pilot who knows precisely when it’s time to turn tail and run, Andy spun the automobile around and once again struck out across the bridge. No sooner were they gunning for the opposite bank did the terrible truth begin to crash down upon them. Not only were they being hotly pursued from behind, but there were also sirens and flashing lights coming toward them. “Oh-h-h, no-o-o,” Andy moaned, bringing
the sedan to an abrupt stop. “That other one! That other son of a bitch, son of a whore faggot! He did it! He brought the cops!”

With his fist, Ironman struck his own forehead as though he were finally trying to knock some life into brain cells that had long since died. “Why did I listen to you? I should have fucking known better than to listen to you, Andy! My folks are going to kill me!
Kill
me!”

“Well, I
sure
didn’t have anything to do with it,” interjected his pretty prom date, looking horrified that anyone could, even for a moment, consider pointing an accusatory finger at her. “Now you all know that’s so!”

“And neither did I!” sweetly sang out Lisa as though she were the lead singer in a celestial choir.

With his bare fists, Andy violently banged the steering wheel. “Shut up! Can’t you see we’re all in this thing together? Don’t you stupid asses understand anything at
all
?” The ever-louder and more piercing wail of the sirens, both behind and in front of them, made the five feel as though they had been helplessly snared into a trap that was not of their making.

The double wailing sirens made it necessary for Andy to raise his voice and shout, “Listen to me! We—none of us—had anything to do with that faggot jumping off the bridge, understand that? Remember the
only
reason we’re here at all was to ask those queers to quit the lewd screwing they were doing out on the bridge, where anybody—even young kids and all—could see them. So that’s the only reason we stopped—got that? Get it!”

Then amid flashing lights, screeching brakes, and the migraine-producing whine of its unrelenting siren, a police cruiser with the ironic lily of the valley crest of Parson Springs, Arkansas, came to an attention-getting stop directly behind the Olds.

“This is Chief Marino,” called out an electrically amplified
voice from inside the cruiser. “Everybody out of the car, keep your hands up, nice and easy now. Nobody’s going to get hurt.”

But even as the young people reluctantly piled out of the luxurious automobile, Chief Marino, with his uniformed deputy at his side, was already out of the cruiser, throwing questions at them. “Hear you all have been beating up on a man tonight. Where is he?”

“Beating up on who?” Andy replied, answering the question with a question of his own while smiling his most winning smile.

“Son, don’t go getting me in a bad mood,” cautioned the chief, his voice almost a full octave lower than Andy’s. “The game is simple enough. It’s played this way: I ask a question; you answer that question, now you got that?”

But in the next moments, the second cruiser, this one bearing the name as well as the insignia of the town of Rachetville, Arkansas, roared to the scene of the crime.

Throwing open the door and leaping from the backseat, a frantic Frank Montgomery charged through the sparse scattering of people. It was hard to believe that he was wearing the same clothes that looked so crisp on him at the beginning of the evening. Now his suit coat was wet with perspiration, and the neck of his shirt looked ripped open. His linen trousers, with their combination of caked mud and dried blood, hinted most vividly at the nightmare that he was living.

Grabbing Andy by the elegant lapels of his rented dinner jacket, he jerked him forward, screaming, “Where is he?! What have you done with Stephan?”

Andy squeaked something unintelligible while looking pleadingly over at Chief Marino for help, but the only response was an agonizingly slow but expressive shrug of the chief’s broad shoulders, which nobody present had the slightest difficulty interpreting.

As soon as Andy realized that there was no help forthcoming,
he began to quickly and loudly squawk. “Nothing! We did nothing to him! Hey, we were just horsing around, having a little fun. Look, it’s my graduation prom night! Don’t you think we deserve a little fun?”

“Where is he?” Frank exploded, his hands moving up from Andy’s jacket to his throat. “Answer or, so help me, I’ll wring your neck!”

Andy’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down before his head gestured toward the river. “We were just having fun—nobody asked him to dive in, as Jesus Christ is my witness! Nobody! Honest!”

“Oh-h h, my God! My God!” Frank’s voice cracked with heartfelt anguish. “Where did he go over?
When
?”

Helpfully Andy pointed a trembling finger toward the center of the river. “Not long, only a few minutes. He surprised us all by diving in over there, about midstream.”

Kicking off his shoes, Frank hand-vaulted over the rusted iron railing, but it was Andy’s voice that accompanied him on his leap into the waters below. “Hey, I don’t know why he jumped! Nobody asked him to—as Jesus is my witness!”

As soon as Frank’s head emerged, he treaded water as he furiously turned his body around and around in a circle, calling out, “Stevie! STEVIE! STEVIE!” But he heard no response, no human voice at all except the sharply staccato shrieks of denial from Andy that kept echoing down to him from the bridge. “Nobody asked him to go swimming! Nobody!

Ducking again and again and still again below the black-brown waters, Frank attempted through the sheer force of his will
and
his need to command his eyes to see what they could not possibly see. No matter how desperately he tried, his eyes could not penetrate the cold and murky waters.

Stretching out his hands and legs, Frank kept praying, praying, always praying that the next reaching out and grabbing would be the one that reached out and grabbed Stevie, grabbed
Stevie alive, grabbed Stevie alive and well.

Skipping and shimmering across the river’s dimpled surface were dollops of lights from two or three handheld spotlights. Also from topside came the radio-transmitted voices that, between bursts of static, could be heard calling for emergency personnel and equipment.

Emerging from a radio-dispatched ambulance, two uniformed attendants raced down the embankment pushing a stretcher. The next person to arrive wasn’t one of the emergency personnel at all, but Eddie Jameson, the editor of the weekly
Rachetville Banner
, wearing his red-and-white candy-striped pajama top under his buff-colored windbreaker.

Back on the bridge, a great white van with the call letters WABT-TV EYEWITNESS NEWS was attempting to park on the bridge in spite of a sheriff’s deputy who angrily waved it on.

A few hundred yards below on the east bank of the river, Chief Marino with spotlight in hand paced nervously back and forth while barking out orders to Pete, his slender, eager young officer, who was working the radio transmitter. With his bullhorn, he spoke to the lone man in the water. “Frank Montgomery, I want you out of the water! You’ve already been in there too long. Divers are on their way from Fayetteville, Harrison, and Fort Smith, and a police helicopter should be here momentarily. Come on out now, you hear?”