Drowning of Stephan Jones (19 page)

During the course of the trial, whenever Spider, Ironman, Lisa, Donna, and especially Andy could capture Carla’s eye, they would throw poison arrow looks from their seats at the witness stand or their chairs at the defendants’ table. Carla absorbed their disdain with barely any visible response. How many months, weeks, days ago had it been since she had craved their approval?

She speculated that Donna and Lisa must have agreed upon not only the clothes they would wear for today’s session, but also exactly what expressions they’d exhibit. Their almost identical twin pouts as much as their pastel-colored suits made them look as though they had both emerged from the same birth canal.

Privately all five of the defendants blamed Carla for all their troubles with money, the law, and their families. Carla Wayland, they complained, was the fink who went and ratted on them; supposedly she was a friend. “We’ll get you for it, too!” they had threatened. “We’ll get you good!”

The fierce and mean-spirited glances were messages that
silently cried out, “We are together. We are the still proud members of the now and forever famous Rachetville Five. Churches take up collections for us; lawyers defend us; newspapers quote us; photographers snap us; our relatives pray for us; friends embrace us; and our whole town—and yes, even far, far beyond this town—celebrate us! But you, Carla Wayland, you are an outcast.

“You Carla, are different. You act different than folks in Rachetville. If our most deeply held beliefs aren’t good enough for you to believe, then go someplace else. Why don’t you find some hole under some rock where you can hide? Some place where they can stomach your liberal stuff.

“You’re alone, Carla Wayland. Until our dying days, we’ve made each other a solemn, unbreakable promise: We’re all going to stick together faster than Scotch tape while making certain that you always are all alone.”

Andy’s lawyer, Chip Burwick, sported slightly shaded prescription aviator glasses. His square jaw was set as he drawled, “Now, Andy, in the first place, some of us still have a little trouble understanding why you—a young man who took his obligations to his studies so seriously as well as his obligations to his family’s business so seriously—would find the time or the interest to mess around with the likes of Stephan Jones.”

“Well, sir, looking back now ... it’s like real hard for me to understand, too.” Andy Harris was seriously suited in well-tailored navy-blue with a pale blue oxford cloth shirt and a silk tie with enough regent stripes to be cherished by an army of preppies. “I mean, one thing’s for sure, we—none of us—ever
meant
to hurt him!”

Chip rapid-fired a question: “And how
do
you feel now about what actually did happen?”

“Oh, I feel very, very bad about that accident. Yes sir, I sure do. I mean there’s not a day that passes that I don’t feel bad about what happened, as Jesus is my witness. Know something?
I’d give my own life gladly—and you can ask my dad, he’ll tell you that I’d give my own life gladly if that would help bring that guy back to life.”

“Well, since you obviously didn’t want him to drown, what was it that you really did
mean
to do?” Chip’s manner and voice was calm, reassuring, and strongly reminiscent of an older, more responsible brother lovingly helping his foolhardy sibling.

Without needing even a moment’s worth of contemplation, Andy spewed forth his reply just as though the teacher were giving a pop quiz for which he had already been supplied the answers. “The only thing I wanted to do, sir, was to rough him up a little—just enough of a roughing to teach him a lesson, if you know what I mean.”

“When you say you wanted to teach Stephan Jones a lesson,
exactly
what kind of a lesson did you have in mind?”

“Trying to teach him that he ought not go around flaunting his evil ways.”

“Objection!” called out the chief prosecutor, Wayne Dillman. “It is not Mr. Jones who is on trial here!”

“Sustained,” echoed Judge Morris Bernhardt. “Mr. Burwick, I have reminded you repeatedly, and I do not expect to remind you or your client again that this jury has not been convened to sit in judgment on the deceased Mr. Jones, now is that clear? Perfectly clear?”

“Perfectly,” Chip Burwick responded, snapping to attention. “Sorry, Your Honor. Now, Andy, without characterizing Mr. Jones in any way, would you please give us the facts, the complete and unvarnished facts on how you came to be so upset by Mr. Jones.”

“Well, sir, personally—even though I am a born-again Christian—I have what you might call a live-and-let-live philosophy with respect to the way other folks might want to live their lives. So I want to explain that I’ve never hated the sinner—never
in my life, ’cause the only thing I ever hate is the sin.

“Now if a man goes in for that perverted stuff, then I think that’s his business as long as he behaves himself, especially when it comes to little children. I don’t think it’s ever right to flaunt your homosexuality in front of little children. And that’s something that I feel very strongly about ... and that’s for sure!”

Carla glanced over at Mr. Dillman, expecting to witness another one of his outbursts over Andy’s suggestion of what nobody had ever suggested before: that Stephan somehow and in some way bothered small children. But if the learned prosecutor was busy doing anything at all then, it was playing with the metal clip on his A. T. Cross ballpoint pen.

Chip Burwick lifted his wire-rimmed glasses up to mid-forehead and slowly massaged the inner corners of his eyes before gazing at Andy Harris with what could pass for a heavy dose of sensitive concern. “Andy, I know what I’m going to ask you to relate next is going to be both very hard and very difficult for a red-blooded, American boy like yourself to answer, but it’s important for you to show your usual spunk and explain to this court exactly what you had previously told me. How and why, precisely why, you developed this uncontrollable anger toward Stephan Jones.”

Nodding his head in slow, short bobs of agreement, he replied thoughtfully, “Well, yes, sir, you sure are right about that ’cause it
is
real hard for me to talk about it.”

Leaning even closer toward his client, Chip spoke in a low and intimate voice as though nobody would ever hear his words, nobody but the two of them. “I can appreciate, and it does you credit, this natural reluctance of yours to say anything bad about the deceased, but all the same, Andy, it would help immeasurably. Sort of help this court, if you will, understand how a peaceful and otherwise nonviolent, churchgoing young
man like yourself was provoked into behaving in such an uncharacteristic way.”

“I have done a lot of praying over it, sir, and I’ve asked for deliverance from my sins, and just last night Jesus did come to me in the spirit and he told me that I have been forgiven and from that moment on, I will have complete dominion over the devil.”

“Andy, please try to tell us what happened—help us understand what was the event that pushed you over the brink?”

The quiet of the courtroom seemed to grow quieter still as the judge, the jurors, and the standing-room-only spectators strained to catch the young man’s words.

Andrew Anthony Harris, dampening his perfectly formed lips with his tongue, replied, “Well, what he did was ...

“Yes?”

“What he did was what I hated!”

“And what exactly was it that you hated?” soothed Chip.

“Well, sir, what he did was ...”

“What, Andy, what?”

“Stephan Jones wouldn’t take no for an answer! He kept on pestering me and pestering me for sex!”

There was a sudden and communal sucking in of breath before a great gasp echoed throughout the chamber. At first, even a stunned Carla wondered why she had never heard anything before about this startling piece of information. But on second thought, it began to dawn on her why, and the reason was oh-so-very simple. It had simply never happened. Never ever happened!

It wasn’t until the fifth day of the trial, on a Thursday morning, that Carla Wayland was called to take the stand by the chief lawyer for the prosecution. This came as as much of a surprise to Carla as a karate chop across the throat. She knew, of course, that she was scheduled to be the state’s star witness
against her former friends, but she was also promised plenty of advance notice.

Right from the beginning, Mr. Dillman had made it a point to advise her not to go “fretting your pretty head” about testifying. Long before that happened, he had pledged, “I’m going to have you so well prepared that you’re going to be like a racehorse chomping at the bit, all ready and raring to go!”

Carla hadn’t felt compelled to correct the district attorney’s assumption, but she knew instinctively that she’d never feel “raring to go.” In spite of her officially being on the side of the prosecution, she was not so much resolved that the Rachetville Five got punished; rather, she fervently hoped that they would develop understanding about the tragedy they had committed. Without understanding, she had come to believe, nothing would change. Without understanding, the Rachetville Five, the citizens of Rachetville, as well as much of the world beyond would continue to be convinced that because Stephan Jones was a homosexual, his murder was somehow something less than murder.

Right from the opening day, the drowning of Stephan Jones was talked about by the local people in unfair terms. These “friendly, God-fearing young folks” were treated as if they’d engaged in nothing more than a foolish prank that somehow got out of hand rather than anything resembling murder. The district attorney’s office received more than sixty letters’ worth of pressure demanding that the state drop its case. Some of the letters were from people who identified themselves as religious, and several were from clergy who stated that these defendants were “good kids” and even went on to quote the Bible “proving” that homosexuality was sinful.

It sometimes seemed as though the local sentiments were entirely on the side of the five young people, but several letters received by the DA’s office begged him not to be “either too timid or embarrassed to pursue justice just because the victim
was gay.” In the last paragraph of one of these letters, the Bible was also quoted. The writer made note of the sixth commandment, which states: Thou shalt not kill.

Carla was in a state of the highest possible anxiety as she wound her way across the pews of the glaring spectators toward the witness stand. Once she seated herself on that chair and swore to “tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” the rapid-as-a-machine-gun interrogation did nothing to help cool her down.

The man the great state of Arkansas paid to prosecute this crime shot out questions sounding as though they had been manufactured by a munitions factory. The DA’s abrasive manner made Carla want to cry out to him: Hey! I’m not just a necessary evil! For God sakes, I’m
your
witness, your only eyewitness!

As she sat there high in the witness chair above everybody besides the judge, she was bound and determined to keep her eyes focused as far away as possible from Andy and the other defendants. She also needed to shield herself from looking into her mother’s eyes as well, lest she see reflected there some of the selfsame terror that even now was already gnawing at huge chunks of her own heart.

Suddenly the chief prosecutor’s voice shook the courtroom. “Did you not
hear
the last question put to you, Miss Wayland?”

“Hear your question?” repeated Carla, playing for a moment of time. Maybe a moment is all she needed to forge a measure of control out of the mindless confusion charging through her brain. The question, now what was it about? About Andy ... something about Andy and Stephan ...

“The question you were asked, Miss Wayland, was really a very simple one, so please try to concentrate. To the best of your knowledge, did Stephan Jones ever do anything to Andy or the others to account for the violence perpetrated on him?”

“I’m sorry ... I guess I was trying to remember what it was
about Stephan that made him so hated. The big thing, of course, was that Stephan Jones—was—gay. There was nothing about him that Andy didn’t hate. His breathing in and his breathing out—his thinness, his paleness, everything bothered Andy. All those things at one time or another Andy mocked.”

“Listen to my question,” the district attorney replied. “What, if anything, did Stephan Jones do—do—to cause such a reaction from Andrew Harris?”

A quizzical look floated across her face. “Do?” But then, rolling in behind that uncertainty, was a kind of hard-won decisiveness. “What I have been trying to explain is that this doesn’t have anything to do with anything that Stephan Jones did, but this has everything to do with what Stephan
was
!”

For three quarters of an hour, Carla answered questions as best she could. Questions regarding actions as well as the motives of the Rachetville Five. Increasingly, she felt fatigue seeping down deep into the very marrow of her bones. Three quarters of an hour wasn’t such a terribly long period of time unless it is spent on a tightrope a hundred feet above the circus spectators. Or answering the questions of a skilled and angry prosecutor!

Although Carla thought that she and the prosecutor were supposed to be on “the same side,” it was becoming clear to her that something between them wasn’t right. The prosecutor acted the opposite of Andy’s defense lawyer, who treated his client with all the respect due a Rhodes scholar. Was she doing something wrong? Wasn’t she answering quickly enough? If only he’d stop cutting off her answers every time she paused, she was certain she could give him answers all right, answers that could reach beyond and beneath the superficial, way down to the very soul of the case. Why, oh why, the girl asked herself, would he go clipping off my answers, as though clipping off so many dirty fingernails?

The lawyers and journalists who wrote about the trial insisted
that it would be the DA’s devastatingly difficult job to make a homosexual neither cartoon character nor devil, but
real.
Carla had heard all about that, but frankly, she thought that nothing should be easier.