The Spot: Stories

The cross was jury-rigged out of pressure-treated wood ties, the kind used for gardening, as borders on raised beds, and for retaining walls, secured at the cross point — for lack of a better term — with a hitch of cotton rope, ashen in color from exposure to the elements, stolen from Mrs. Highsmith’s yard; a clothesline that had for several years held the garments of Rudy Highsmith (involved). Fingering it in the evidence room, Detective Collard could feel the droopy sway of a line laden with wet garments, and he could easily imagine Rudy’s ragged jeans, holes shredded white, pale blue and growing lighter under the warmth of the sun, picking up the breeze on some late-summer afternoon, while a dog barked rhapsodically along the edge of the woods. The Highsmith house was on the outskirts of Bay City, Michigan, not far from the gulch, and was known — to a few locals, at least — as the house with laundry on the line, one last holdout of the air-drying tradition. The cross was set in a hole that had been dug by a fold-up trench shovel. This was admitted by Ron Bycroff, age seventeen, the oldest in the bunch. Bycroff openly confessed — after five hours of interrogation — to digging the hole and securing the cross and arranging the ropes and so on, but not to the actual pounding of the spikes, nor even to being there at that point. (He was there, he later admitted to his lawyer, but not in spirit and heart, and he had his eyes turned away most of the time. I just couldn’t look. I heard the sounds and that was enough.) During the trial, this confession was thrown out by Judge Richards because it had been obtained by coercion. (You’d have to be ashamed, boy, you’d have to be as deeply ashamed as anyone on this good earth, doing what you did, boy. How’d you feel if I took you down there to the gulch myself, right now, to take a little look around? I might just take you down there tonight.) On the other hand, the trench shovel was from the Bycroffs’ garage. During his interrogation, Detective Collard was unable to remove from his mind’s eye (is there a better phrase?) the impressive vision of the spikes in the victim’s palms, deep, dimpling the skin. The small hand, and the blood around the entry point in the beam of his flashlight, had given him a sense of the softness of human flesh and the vulnerability of hands to piercing implements. The skin on the victim’s hands — he knew because he reached out and touched one — was soft and smooth, like a chamois, or the inside of a dog’s ear.

For his part, Rudy Highsmith laid out the details of the murder between snot-filled snorts, divulging the story in breathy gushes. The whole thing was Al Stanton’s idea, he said. He came up with it. Like he was preaching to us. He was saying this weird shit about how it was time to open up the cosmos. He told us Sammy was the perfect age and all, sixteen and a half, and that it would be good for him to rise from the dead. It was all his idea, honest. He came up with it first. This claim, that Stanton was the one who dreamed up the scheme (for lack of a better word), seemed dubious to Detective Collard. The hefty, moonfaced kid — a linebacker on the high school team — seemed dense in thought, a bit slow on the uptake but also openly sweet and likable. His eyes contained a sadness that came — Collard knew — from the fact that his father had disappeared when he was eight, taking off in his bass boat onto Lake Erie. (The most likely scenario was that he drove his boat down to Cleveland, sold it, and headed to Florida to find a new way of life.) His mother, a heavy drinker and prone to violence, showed up every few months on the police blotter as a DWI and eventually became known around the station as a SAWTH, a Serious Accident Waiting to Happen. There were — any policeman could tell you — those who were preordained to fiery deaths, those most certain to be found frozen in a ditch outside of town, those whose future lay out there like a bear trap, ready to snap shut when the right amount of pressure was applied on just the right spot.