Favorite Sons (10 page)

“No, Deak, their lives have been thrown into turmoil because their crazy-ass son stirred the shit with the wrong person. They're in turmoil because they let him roam like a wild animal for years. It's not our fault.”

He shook his head. “You know, Hutch, your level of compassion is simply overwhelming. I hope to God that you or no one in your family ever has to go through life looking at the world the way Petey had to look at it. You have no idea what the world looked like through his eyes.”

I wanted to punch Deak in his smug, self-righteous mouth.

We were in the alley behind my house. “This is sickening,” he said. “I'm telling you this, Hutch, if they charge someone in the
Sanchez family with Petey's death, I'm calling the sheriff, and I'm going to spill my guts. I don't care if I do go to juvenile hall, and I really don't care if Adrian Nash spends the rest of his life in a juvenile detention center or prison or wherever else they want to send him, and I don't care if he throws another touchdown pass as long as he lives. This is wrong and you know it.” He spun and continued down the alley.

“Deak . . .”

He waved an arm in the air and didn't look back.

*    *    *

We were at the diamond at one that afternoon to begin warming up for the first game against Mount Pleasant. Adrian and I, the pitcher and catcher, sat in the dugout, staying out of the heat until it was time for him to get loose. When Deak showed up and put on his cleats, Pepper asked him, “Want to throw?”

Deak just glared, walked past him, and ran up the steps of the dugout. “What's the matter with you, Coultas, are your ovaries hurting again?” Pepper asked. Deak ignored the comment and ran to the outfield to stretch. Pepper looked at me and shrugged. “What's up his ass?”

“He's just having a bad day,” I said. “He'll be all right.”

*    *    *

The headline stared at me through the screen door, and the knot that had been locked in my intestines for nearly a week winched up tighter. The morning paper had landed neatly on our doormat and the bold headline stretched across the top of the front page.

Sheriff Searches Home of Murdered Crystalton Boy

A photo that covered three columns was inset under the headline and showed Sheriff Sky Kelso and a deputy leading a handcuffed Earl Sanchez Junior to a cruiser while Lila Sanchez bawled in the
background, one spindly hand clutching her breast while the other reached out for her son. I made no pretense of being interested in the sports page and began reading the article as I walked back to the kitchen.

As the family of Peter Sanchez prepared to bury their youngest son yesterday morning, Jefferson County Sheriff Sky Kelso and a team of four deputies swarmed over their home in the north end of Crystalton in an apparent search for a murder weapon.

According to the search warrant, deputies were searching for “a ball-peen hammer or mallet with a rounded end, a ball bearing, or implement of similar size.”

Or roughly, I thought, the size of a granite Indian maul.

Mom was fixing breakfast. The kitchen smelled of coffee and fried bacon and eggs. I poured myself a glass of orange juice and sat down at the table.

Although the search warrant clearly indicated that deputies were looking for a murder weapon, Kelso refused to comment when asked if a member of the Sanchez family was considered a suspect in the boy's death. “We're just trying to cover all our bases and eliminate all possibilities,” the sheriff said.

One member of the Sanchez family, Earl Sanchez Jr., 27, of Steubenville, was arrested and charged with obstructing official business and assault after he attempted to stop deputies from entering the house and scuffled with the law officers. The charges were later dropped and Sanchez Jr. was released from jail late yesterday.

“It was an unfortunate encounter in the midst of a terrible situation,” Kelso said. “There's no reason to make things worse for the family.”

Hearing about the search warrant from Denny Morelli was one thing, but to see details of it spread across the top of the Sunday morning paper took things to a different dimension. It was, as Deak said, sickening.

Kelso would not reveal what had been removed from the house, but said that deputies found several “items of interest.”

Sanchez, 17, was found dead Tuesday in a wooded area west of Crystalton. He died of a massive head injury and his death is being investigated as a homicide.

Mom slid a plate of bacon and over-easy eggs in front of me. The headline caught her attention and she began reading over my shoulder while she waited for my toast to pop up. She set the toast on the side of my plate and shook her head, saying, “I just can't believe that it could be Earl or one of those boys.”

“It says they were just trying to eliminate all possibilities,” I said.

“They wouldn't waste their time searching the house if they didn't think the murder weapon might be there.” She sipped her coffee. “That's terrible, just terrible.”

I faked a stomachache and didn't go to church. I didn't want to face Deak.

I
t stormed Monday night and Deak called about nine to see if I wanted to search for arrowheads Tuesday morning. It was the first time that I had spoken with him since our ugly departure in the alley Saturday. He had managed to play both ends of a double-header against Mount Pleasant without uttering a word to Adrian, Pepper, or me. But when he called Monday night, all seemed well. I was anxious to go and glad to have the uncomfortable silence behind us. He said, “Great. I'll pick you up at eight.” Adrian and Pepper were out at the family cabin at Clendening Lake, so it was just Deak and me hiking up to search Marty Postalakis's corn field again. I asked if he wanted to search the glass house field, figuring he wouldn't want to walk past the place where Petey had died, but he said no, that there were more and better arrowheads on the hill.

For most of my life I had always associated Chestnut Ridge with the smell of cherry blossoms. As a young boy, I spent untold hours exploring every square foot of the hills west of town, enjoying the solitude and my imagination. On one of these sojourns, I discovered a pathway, a narrow trail though a mazy thicket of briars that only a nine-year-old could slip through. On the other side of the thicket I found stone foundations protruding from the rocky earth like the bones of long-dead animals. When I described the find to my mother, she said it was likely the remains of the mining community of East Berlin, a turn-of-the-century coal town of German immigrants that disappeared after
the Hudson Mining Company's nearby deep shaft mine was closed in the 1920s. “You didn't go in there, did you?” she asked.

“No,” I said, a quick, defensive lie.

“Don't let me hear you've been up there running around. It's dangerous. There are old mine shafts and sinkholes everywhere.”

“I won't,” I said.

I returned often to my new hillside discovery. I climbed the foundations and searched for bottles and coins and other traces of East Berlin, and told none of my friends about the lost society. On a graceful slope east of the community, there was a cherry tree that I would climb, wedge myself into a bough near the top, and scan the valley far below. I imagined that after creating the world, God had stood at this very site and surveyed his magnificent work of hills and river, watching the water as it turned the bend north of Crystalton and flowed south to Hopewell Island, where barges hugged the West Virginia side to avoid shallows near the Ohio banks. In the spring I would sit in the tree and breathe in the heavy scent of the cherry blossoms, an aroma so wonderful and thick that it stayed with me long after I had walked off the ridge. Lying in my bed at night, I could close my eyes and imagine myself back up on the hill, sitting in the tree, the sunshine warm on my face, and the aroma of those blossoms would mysteriously fill my nostrils.

Chestnut Ridge would never again evoke thoughts of cherry blossoms. I could no longer go to bed and conjure up images of my tree, nor would the sweet smell of blossoms come to my nostrils. Chestnut Ridge now evoked a different memory, one of blowflies dancing around a cratered wound.

All morning, Deak didn't say a word about Petey, even when we walked within a few feet of the spot where he had fallen, and where a strand of yellow crime scene tape remained dangling from the branches of a mulberry tree. It was a good hunt. I found six excellent pieces and Deak found nine. When we came out on the path at the elementary school playground, Deak said, “I still haven't made up my mind about going to the sheriff.”

“You're killing me, Deak.”

He shrugged. “I know what God wants me to do, and I know what you, Pepper, and Adrian want me to do. I'm praying on it.”

I didn't want to argue about it. I said, “Let me know when God gets back to you.”

“You'll be the first to know.”

That evening, I was catching a game at Harrisville. At the end of the fourth inning, I asked our coach for the time. He frowned and asked, “What the hell, you got a date tonight, Van Buren? Don't worry about the time. Get your head in the game.” When I went out to catch the bottom of the fifth, I sneaked a peak at the umpire's watch. It was seven thirty-two. The first week was behind us.

Tick-tock.

*    *    *

On Wednesday morning, the Wheeling
Intelligencer
blared a story that a family of four had been shotgunned to death in their home in Dunglen, a decrepit coal-mining town that lined an orange sulfur creek in the southern end of the county. I am not so coldhearted as to say that I was delighted to see a family slaughtered. However, I was glad that the sheriff's department would have more to worry about than Petey Sanchez.

When the sheriff's detectives hadn't shown up on my doorstep within the first week, I was sure that no one had seen us heading up the path to Chestnut Ridge. No one could place us at the scene of Petey's death. Without that bit of information, there was no reason to suspect that we had any involvement. If that was the case, then it was simply a matter of continuing to keep our mouths shut.

T
here were four basketball courts in Crystalton—two at Community Park overlooking the quarry, one behind the Lincoln Elementary School, and one built into the asphalt parking lot at the side of the junior high school. The court at the elementary was laced with cracks that played havoc with ankles and occasionally caused a dribbled ball to bounce sideways. The steel backboards at the park were rusty and the rims loose. The favored court was the one at the junior high, which stood on the northwest corner of Ohio Avenue and Third Street. South of the school building there was a smooth asphalt parking lot where a basketball court had been laid out. It was in the center of town, across the street from the Big Dipper Ice Cream Shop, where you could get a fountain Coke between games.

On days when we didn't have summer league baseball, the junior high court was full of kids playing shirts and skins, sweating, arguing, and playing for hours at a time. Guys from other communities up and down the river knew they could usually find a game at the junior high and would often show up in a couple of cars with six or seven players. Two weeks and two days after Petey's death, we were playing at the junior high against some guys who had driven down from Mingo Junction.

Our third game was stopped by first the whine and then the roar of wide-open engines coming from the east. The din echoed off the hills and between the store fronts. Within a few seconds a
sheriff's car—a black, 1970 Plymouth Fury with a 440-cubic-inch V8—led a cavalry charge of cop cars through the intersection on Ohio Avenue, red lights flashing, its grill lifting as it roared toward the junior high parking lot. Another sheriff's car followed, then another, and then two Crystalton police cruisers. Pedestrians froze in mid-step to watch; red lights bounced off the walls and windows of Nero's Barber Shop, Connell's Market, and Mehtal's Auto Motors. When the lead car hit the edge of the parking lot, the others fanned out and crossed the empty asphalt like a squadron of fighter planes forming up. They squealed to a stop, forming a semicircle barrier beyond the court, entrapping us between the cars and the school.

My heartbeat sounded like thunder in my ears. I looked at Deak. He was getting teary-eyed and his lower lip was starting to quiver. Pepper, too, was looking at Deak. I wondered if he had gone to the sheriff. Adrian appeared to be in survival mode. His eyes darted from side to side as he sought an escape route.

Two lawmen emerged from each sheriff's car, and one each from the Crystalton cruisers. As they exited their cars they holstered their nightsticks and unholstered their service revolvers. Two unmarked cars sped down the alley behind the school, spitting gravel into the basketball court and throwing up a plume of dust. Following the squadron onto the parking lot was a fleet of news vehicles—a van adorned with a giant peacock from the Steubenville television station and two sedans, from which emerged photographers and reporters, including Reggie Fuschea, from the Steubenville
Herald-Star,
and a television reporter named Don Redley.

Sheriff Sky Kelso slid from behind the driver's door of the lead car and held a pistol in the air, a tacit signal of restraint, as though holding back the attack while his troops at the flanks fell into line. Actually, he was posturing, waiting for the television cameraman and the news photographers to catch up with the officers. Sheriff Kelso was never one to miss a good photo opportunity. When they were in position and the television camera was rolling, he surveyed the landscape before him, smoothed his black moustache with the webbing between a thumb and index finger, then pointed his pistol toward the school, like a Union general aiming a saber toward enemy
lines, and eight armed law enforcement officers charged toward the basketball courts.