The doctor leaned forward in his tipping chair. He rubbed his knuckles absently against the two-a.m. stubble on this chin. He drew in a deep breath as he thought. His lips rounded to blow out the air in slow, measured release. “So what do we say?”
The deputy looked down at the floor. “Whatever we decide, it needs to be the same thing coming from both of us, okay?”
“And Merton too?”
The deputy nodded. “Merton knows what’s going on here.” The deputy closed his eyes. “The families — they don’t have to know. It just adds shit to all their grief.”
“I agree.”
The deputy continued: “The boys had had too much to drink. Two pals went for a drunken joyride and didn’t make it home.”
“So nobody had any idea that they were…?”
“Merton knows Findley — knows him pretty well. He’d never mentioned any suspicions about his son.” The deputy sighed. “Of course, that’s not the kind of thing a father would be all that eager to talk about.”
“You’re right.” The doctor scratched the top of his head. “We’ll never know what the parents know. We’re just going to have to assume that they don’t know anything. That’s usually the way it is, right?”
The two men sat for a moment in the quiet, brightly lit conference room, each processing his own thoughts while waiting for the other to say something that would put the whole matter in a more personal light.
“Some boys grow out of it,” said the deputy, finally.
“Some boys have to,” said the doctor. The doctor came very close to touching the deputy’s hand. The deputy moved his head as if he would shake it, as if he would negate that impulse that the doctor suddenly wished to act upon.
Obligingly, the doctor retracted his hand. The deputy slipped two fingers of his own hand into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small, colorful rectangle of paper. “Merton and I went through the boys’ pockets and their wallets. Didn’t find anything on the Findley kid. But this was on the Robinson boy. In his wallet.”
It was a photograph of Sal Mineo, the actor. It had been carefully cut from a magazine. The size was a perfect fit for a wallet.
“For what it’s worth—” said the deputy.
“Huh?” The doctor was studying the picture.
“For what it’s worth, the car — the Findley boy’s car. Well, it was a ’49 Mercury coupe. Just like the one James Dean’s character drove around in that movie last year.”
“The boys — they were playing something out?”
The deputy sheriff shrugged. “Looked pretty real to me.”
The doctor got up. “I don’t like to put this sort of thing off. Worst part of my job. Yours too, I’m guessing. We shouldn’t keep the families waiting any longer.”
The deputy nodded. “Merton’s been staying tight-lipped on my instructions.”
Both men left the room, the doctor switching off the light on his way out. The corridor was empty — the bright illumination was again broken by the pop and flash of another fluorescent rod in its death throes above their heads.
The deputy reached over and touched the top of the doctor’s hand. The doctor turned his hand around, hungrily grasping the deputy’s hand, palm to palm.
After a couple of seconds, still alone in the corridor, the men broke their clasp. The doctor squared his shoulders. The deputy cleared his throat a couple of times.
Each man prepared himself to deliver the sad fact of the teenage boys’ deaths and then the lie that went along with it. It was the same lie that the doctor and deputy sheriff would have wanted told if they had found themselves in the same situation.
It was the lie that permitted the boys to take their secrets to the grave.
1957 LOYAL IN UTAH
Sanpitch Academy was founded in 1875. Located one hundred miles south of Salt Lake City, it sat in the dead-eye center of the state. Its twenty-five-acre, sixteen-building campus lay in the scenic Sanpete Valley, where alfalfa grew in abundance, sheep grazed in fat, fleecy flocks, and thousands of farm turkeys, it was said, tried very hard not to think about Thanksgiving. A boarding school, it was built by Mormons in the largely Mormon town of Mount Pleasant. In 1957, most of its day employees (that is, locals who didn’t live on campus) were Mormons. Most everyone else — its administrators, its teachers and students — were Gentiles (as western Mormons in 1957 referred to non-Mormons, that latter group even including the school’s music teacher, Julius Lafer, who was, in fact, Jewish). The school was affiliated with the Presbyterian Church, and a good many of its teachers and students were more than just non-Mormon; they were Protestants, and more specifically, Presbyterians.
This is somewhat important when one considers the political leanings of Sanpitch. The eighty-seven-year-old boarding school had a racially integrated student body (remarkable for the time). It boasted a student organization devoted to debating issues of international import (this in an era of monochromatic Cold War politics). Even more controversially, it used the recently published Revised Standard Version of the Holy Bible in its religion classes — a bold move that generated no small protest from parental proponents of the King James (penned, it has been said, by God’s own hand). While Boston was banning the Everly Brothers’ Top 100 single that autumn, “Wake Up, Little Susie,” it was played with defiance and impunity in Sanpitch’s Tiger Den snack bar, the kids agreeing with most of their contemporaries that “Susie” wasn’t about teenage fornication at all, but told the rather benign story of a teenage couple who happen to fall asleep at the drive-in because the movie was so boring.
In the same way in which its teachers and students lived a soundly insular and familial existence (weekends as observed at Sanpitch were Sunday and Monday, so that its male students would have less opportunity to interact with roughneck townie youths), the school was allowed to go its own way in terms of policymaking and day-to-day operations. There was a governing board that oversaw things from a distance, but the board rarely involved itself in matters that onsite school officials — the superintendent, the director of academics, the separate deans of boys and girls, and the pastor and director of Christian education — could handle.
On Monday, December 16, shortly before the Christmas break, that changed. As it did twice a year, the Board of Oversight met in the conference room of the school’s administration building to review the first few months of the school year and to be apprised of what to expect in the months that lay ahead. It was also time to gather up signed contracts for the next semester.
Three new members had joined the board since its last convocation — members not so willing to remain hands-off, members far more conservative in their political ideology. What came out of the meeting was a dictate that was perceived as both intrusive and, well, apocalyptic.
“There have been mumblings and grumblings,” said Vince Sprawley, the youngest and most vocal of the new troika, “about your decision this year to replace the King James with the Revised Standard. Though most of us have had misgivings about it, we — the board — have done, I think, a rather good job of mustering support for your decision, Tim.”
“And I thank you for that, Vince,” replied the superintendent, who was sitting next to the school’s pastor, Howard Claxton, both men tensely clinching their shoulders with mention of this potentially contentious matter and then instantly relaxing them when the matter was defused in a single breath.