My mother started to cry and that made me want to cry. She said you are so unfair, sitting there on your high horse. When was the last time you had to do 40 hours of sweat-labor to bring home groceries? He said this isn’t about me, Mrs Compson. You have lost one child because of poor choices, don’t lose the other. This hearing is closed.
2
At some point during that summer – his season of many identities – Billy re-reads the story of Bob Raines’s death and the hearing that followed. Then he goes to the window and looks out at the courthouse, where a sheriff’s car has pulled up to the curb. Two cops in county brown get out of the front seat. One opens the back door and they wait for the man in there to climb out. The prisoner is rangy and skinny, wearing carpenter’s jeans that bag in the seat and a bright purple sweatshirt – too hot for this day – that has the Arkansas Razorback on it. Even at five hundred yards he looks to Billy like one sad fucking sack. Each cop takes an arm and they lead him up the wide steps toward whatever justice awaits him. It’s exactly the shot Billy will have to make when （and if） the time comes, but he barely sees it. He’s thinking about his story.
He set out to tell it as the dumb self, but it turned into something else and he only realized it after reading it cold. The dumb self is there, all right, any reader （Nick and Giorgio, for instance） would say the man who wrote it sticks mostly to Star magazine, Inside View, and Archie funnybooks, but there’s something more. It’s the voice of the child self. Billy never set out to write in that voice – consciously, at least – but that’s what he did. It’s as if he has been regressed under hypnosis. Maybe that’s what writing is, when it really matters.
Does it matter? When the only people who’ll ever see it are him and a couple of Vegas hardballs who may already have lost interest?
‘It does,’ Billy says to the window. ‘Because it’s mine.’
Yes, and because it’s true. He’s changed the names a little – Cassie instead of Cathy, and his mother’s name was Darlene, not Arlene – but mostly it’s true. The child’s voice is true. That voice never had a chance to speak, not even at the hearing. He answered the questions he was asked but no one asked how it felt to hold Cathy with her crushed chest. No one asked how it felt to be told take care of your sister and fail at the most important job in the whole round world. No one asked how it felt when you held your wet hand in front of your sister’s mouth and nose, hoping even though you knew hope was gone. No one ever knew that the gun’s recoil had made him burp as if he had done no more than drink a soda fast. Not even the cop who hugged him asked those questions, and what a relief it is to let that voice speak.
He goes back to the open MacBook and sits down. Looks at the screen. He thinks, When I get to the Stepenek House part – only I’ll call it Speck House – I can let that voice be a little more grownup. Because I was a little more grownup.
Billy begins to tap the keys, slowly at first, then picking up speed. The summer rolls on around him.
3
After the hearing me and my mom went back home. We buried Cassie. I don’t know who buried the boyfriend and don’t care. In the fall I went back to school where some of the kids started calling me Bang Bang Benjy and I got held back that year. I didn’t get in trouble for fighting but I skipped school a lot and my mother said I had to smarten up if I didn’t want to get taken away and put into a foster home. I didn’t want that so next year I tried harder and passed my courses. When I got sent to Speck House it wasn’t my fault, it was my mom’s.
She started drinking heavy after Cassie died, mostly at home but sometimes she would go out to bars and sometimes bring a man home with her. To me those men all looked like the bad boyfriend, assholes in other words. I don’t know why my mother would go back to the same types of men after what happened but she did. She was like a dog that pukes and then laps it up. I know how that sounds, but I will not take it back.
Her and those men, there were three at least and maybe five, would go in the bedroom and she said they were just rassling around but of course by then I was older and knew they were fucking. Then one night when she was drinking in the trailer she went out to the 7-11 for a box of Cheezits and on her way back she got pulled over. She was charged with drunk driving and put in the jail for 24 hours. She got to keep me that time too, but she lost her license for six months and had to take the bus to the laundry.
A week after she got her license back she got stopped for drunk driving again. There was another hearing, this time just about me, but what do you know, that same man who told the story about the scorpion and the frog was sitting at the table along with 2 new ones! He said you again. My mother said that’s right, me again and you know I lost my daughter. You know what I’ve been through. The man said I do know, and you don’t seem to have learned your lesson, Mrs Compson. My mom said you have never walked in my shoes. She had a lawyer that time but he didn’t say much. After, she gave him hell and asked what he was good for. The lawyer said you haven’t given me much to work with, Mrs Compson. She said you’re fired. He said you can’t fire me because I quit.