Authors: Robin Yocum
“Quite a feast,” Deak noted.
I washed my hands, arms, and face in the outside spigot and sat down. The patio was rimmed by the same wooded hillside that led up to Chestnut Ridge. Thousands of fireflies danced along the tree line. Crickets chirped and blue bug lights hissed with the corpses of dive-bombing insects. The dinner conversation was cordial and focused mostly on the championship game and the approaching football season. Conditioning was scheduled to begin the following Monday and Mr. Nash was excited about the prospects of the coming season. He told some stories of his playing days with the Royals and, touching the tip of a slightly twisted nose, described them as, “the days before facemasks were popular.”
When the carrot cake was mostly gone, Adrian and Pepper got up and helped Mrs. Nash clear the table. I started to do the same, but was waved back into my seat by Carson. He pulled a dark brown cigar from a breast pocket, snipped off the end with a silver cutter, and rolled it in his mouth for several seconds before striking a match and drawing the flame into the tobacco. He talked a little more about football, quoted Winston Churchill concerning the pleasure of a good cigar, and said he had high hopes that President Nixon would end the mess we had gotten ourselves into in Vietnam. As he spoke, the engine of the Buick Wildcat roared to life and Mrs. Nash, Adrian, and Pepper pulled away.
When I saw the lights disappear down the hill I asked, “Where are they going?”
“Oh, they've got a few errands to run.”
“At nine forty-five at night?” Deak asked.
“I wanted to talk to you boys for a few minutes, anyways,” Carson said, dispelling a laser of blue smoke over the table. “So, how's your grandpa doing?” he asked Deak.
“Pretty good. He's back home. Weak, but coming along.”
“Good. He's a good manâdone a lot for this community, I can tell you that for a fact. I imagine this mess with your uncle hasn't done him a lot of good.”
“Mr. Nash, it hasn't done any of us any good.”
Carson nodded, the cigar wedged between two fingers and dangling in front of his chin. “I heard some good news today up at the courthouse. At least, I expect you'd think it was good news. I heard from a pretty reliable source that the county prosecutor is going to let your uncle plead out.”
“What's that mean?” Deak asked.
“The prosecutor is going to drop the first-degree murder charges and death penalty specifications, and your uncle will plead guilty to a lesser charge in Petey's murder and the sexual assault charges. He'll still do some considerable time, but he'll avoid the death penalty and the time he'll spend in prison won't be much longer than if he was convicted of the original sexual assault charges.”
Deak's face took on the confused, slack jaw of a third-grader trying to comprehend the realities of procreation.
“So, he's going to plead guilty to killing Petey?” Deak asked.
“It'll all be wrapped up in one neat plea agreement. You hadn't heard this?”
Deak shook his head. “No, not a word.”
“Well, maybe I was a little out of line for telling you before it's been made official, but I thought you'd like to know. I imagine it's been weighing heavy on your mind. I mean, for your grandfather's sake we don't want your uncle going to the electric chair.”
“When is all this going to happen?”
“I was told within the week.”
“Who told you about this?”
“Just a friend of mine up at the court. You wouldn't know him.”
“I don't understand how this works. He won't go to trial?”
“No, everything will be settled before he walks into court. The judge will ask him if he agrees to the reduced charges, he'll say yes, and the judge will give him a sentence that your uncle and his lawyer and the prosecutor have agreed to. It'll be all cut and dried.” He rolled his cigar on the edge of his dessert dish, sharpening the end of the ash on the glaze. “I know this has been difficult on your family, Deak, but it's also been difficult on the entire community. This plea arrangement that your uncle has agreed to is a good thing for all of us. It's important for Crystalton to put this in the past. The
Sanchez family will be able to put a face with the evil that took their son, and we'll be able to get this ugliness behind us. Once he pleads guilty we'll all be able to get on with our lives. We can start concentrating on football, huh?” He smiled, and drained the last of his whiskey. “The thing I wanted to talk to you boys about was your futures.” He let those words hang in the air for a minute, spinning the ice in his tumbler. “You boys have been great friends to my sons, and I appreciate that. Friendship, true friendship, is rare and should be treasured. It does my heart good to have seen you boys grow up together, and now you're becoming young men and playing ball together for the Royals. I get a great joy out of that; so does Mrs. Nash. So, what are you boys thinking about doing when you're out of high school?”
He looked at me, shrugged, and held out an open palm, a tacit signal to start talking. “I don't know, Mr. Nash. I'll probably pick up a trade, go up to the tech school and study welding or plumbing, or something like that.”
“You're not interested in going to a four-year school?”
“I am, but Mom doesn't have that kind of money. She can't afford to send me to college.”
Carson nodded and looked at Deak. “I'm thinking about seminary school. Maybe college. I haven't decided.”
Carson scratched his chin with the thumb of his cigar hand. “Well, what I want you boys to know is that I'm in a position to help you out with college, both financially and from an admissions standpoint.” He paused, tilted his head back, and looked over the bridge of his nose at me, then Deak. “You're both good boys, so I'd like to make sure you get the same opportunities as other kids. I'm going to be talking to my board of directors about setting up some funding for scholarships. Two bright boys like you would make excellent candidates. And, I sit on the board of trustees at East Liberty University, and I know many influential people who could get you into a good school and possibly find some scholarship money. You'd be surprised how creative some schools can be if they want a student bad enough.” He winked, struck a match, and put a fresh flame to his cigar. “I want you fellas to keep that in mind, and don't ever hesitate to ask me for help. Glad to do it. I know you've
been good friends to Adrian and Pepper and I want you to know how much I appreciate it.”
We both said, “Yes, sir,” as though on cue. Then Carson Nash said, “Thanks for stopping over, boys. That was a nice win tonight.” It was our signal to leave.
We walked down Hudson Hill, watching our shadows overtake our bodies and sprint ahead in the glow of the streetlights. “What just happened up there?” I asked. Deak shrugged, but said nothing. “Do you think he knows what happened with Petey and now he's trying to buy our silence?”
Deak said, “I don't know, and I don't care. Maybe it was coincidence, maybe not. But if that's what he's trying to do, congratulations, Mr. Nash, you succeeded. I'm never saying a word. I'm glad they're going to put Uncle Jack away, and I hope it's for a long, long time, so I wasn't going to say anything, anyway. If he wants to think he's buying my silence and help me pay for my college, that's fine with me. But I'm not the one they're concerned about anymore. You're the wild card, now. You're the one who's suddenly developed a conscience.”
“Excuse me for not wanting to see someone go to the electric chair for a crime he didn't commit.”
Deak looked at me, his brows knit together in the middle of his forehead, and said, “I heard my grandfather and mother discussing my uncle the other night. My grandfather said he hoped that something could be arrangedâI'm assuming it was the plea bargain Mr. Nash was talking aboutâso that my uncle could someday get out of prison and make a new life for himself. My mother said, âYou mean get out and molest another child? I hope he rots in prison for the rest of his life.' You see, Hutch, you were okay with hiding the truth when it meant protecting Adrian. I'm okay with hiding the truth if it means protecting some kid from being molested twenty years from now.”
T
he Pennsylvania Railroad tracks ran through the coal yards of the power plant south of town, then angled up a grade toward the foundation of the old glass house and Del Cafferty's field before crossing over a graffiti-covered steel bridge that spanned the Little Seneca Creek and passing the loading shoots at the sand quarry. It continued through town on the western edge of the flood plain, running a tight squeeze between Labelle Avenue and the lumberyard. The tracks came within a hundred feet of my bedroom, where with each passing freight the windows hummed like a nest of angry hornets. Near the lumberyard, the tracks angled by the old headquarters of the Redhead Oil Company and back to the river flats, where they straightened out and headed north toward Mingo Junction.
At the final curve in Crystalton, between the gravel ballast and the muddy riverbanks, there was a natural amphitheater of sandstone, the remains of a once-proud hill scoured down by millions of years of wind and rain. Surrounding the rock was a covering of towering sycamores and shagbark hickories, warriors in their own right, having survived decades of Ohio River floods. Hidden in the middle of this covering was an area of the softest, greenest grass I have ever known. The little enclosure was called Hobo Camp, a name that had survived since the days of the Great Depression when tramps would hop off the trains and start cook fires in the protection of the rock and trees. They could drift to sleep on the sandstone boulders,
feeling the quake of passing barges and listening to their wakes slap against the muddy shoals.
My youth was not filled with the traditional fears of childhoodâ vampires, witches, or monsters. Rather, I grew up terrified of hobos. The days of hobos riding into Crystalton on the rails had long passed, but parents still told stories of evil, cannibalistic hobos who lingered near the rails seeking succulent children on which to dine. They all told a similar story, a tale of a young boy, a wispy image of a lad whose name no one could quite remember, who one day disobeyed his parents and wandered down by the railroad tracks where he was captured and eaten by the hobos. Want to be eaten by the hobos? Fine, young man, just you wander down by those railroad tracks and see what happens. It didn't matter that I had never seen a single hobo in Crystalton, I was certain they were down there, a campfire ready under a boiling cauldron, just waiting for a tasty seven-year-old to parboil and serve over wild onions and stolen potatoes.
By the age of eighteen, however, I had lost my fear of hobos. Hobo Camp was a secluded refuge where I could go to be alone with my thoughts. On this day, I stretched out on the sandstone, which was still warm from the afternoon sun. Barges passed on the river; a single train of a hundred coal hoppers headed north out of town. I loved the sounds and smells and vibrations of the Ohio Valley, but I was ready to leave. It was an hour before dusk on August 16, 1974. At six o'clock the next morning I would leave for football camp at the University of the Laurel Highlands. I would drive out of town, leaving behind Crystalton, my youth, my friends, and my secret.
It had been nearly three years since Jack C. Vukovich was led from the Jefferson County Jail across the third-floor skywalk to the courtroom of the Honorable Harvey T. Fitzmorgan, judge of the court of common pleas. After Prosecutor Alfred Botticelli and Vukovich's court-appointed attorney conversed in whispers in front of the judge's bench for several minutes, the courtroom was called to order. Judge Fitzmorgan, looking down over a pair of half-reader glasses, pointed at the accused with the handle of his gavel and asked, “Mr. Vukovich, do you understand the terms of the plea agreement that has been entered on your behalf?”
Seated at the defendant's table, his head bowed, Jack said, “Yes, sir.”
“You will plead guilty to the charges of second-degree murder, rape, and gross sexual imposition with a minor. Do you agree with the terms of the plea agreement?”
Jack nodded, but still didn't look up. “Yes, sir.”
Judge Fitzmorgan made a few laps around the inside of his mouth with his tongue, then signed the documents that had been placed before him and handed them to his bailiff. Judge Fitzmorgan was a dour-looking former prosecutor who was known to be lenient on offenders of what he considered victimless crimes, such as gambling and prostitution, which led to wide speculation that he was taking kickbacks from the Youngstown mob. However, that didn't mean he couldn't rev up some disgust for a child molester and murderer, particularly when the courtroom was full of reporters. He took off the glasses and let them dangle against his robe by a gold-link chain. “Do you have anything to say before I pass sentencing?” he asked.
Jack said no and again avoided eye contact.
“Well, Mr. Vukovich, let me tell you that I am normally not inclined to accept a plea agreement for such an egregious act, and I am not bound to this plea agreement as far as sentencing is concerned.” He held up a copy of the agreement, shook it twice, then let it fall from his hand. “I could sentence you here today to whatever term I deem appropriate. However, I am told by the prosecutor, and I must admit that I am a little perplexed by the agreement, that your actions have put the entire village of Crystalton under great duress. In fact, those actions have pitted neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend. I guess some people take exception to a child molester living in the basement of a school, and I can't say that I blame them. The prosecutor states that the agreement will enable Crystalton to begin healing by permanently removing you from its citizenry without further delay. Therefore, I am inclined to accept this agreement. You understand, sir, that by this agreement, should a day come when you are eligible to be released from prison, that you are never to return to Crystalton?”