* * *
Since that first time I heard the story, I knew what my curious but informal research would later prove to be true, which was that the gunshots meant the end of the two girls. For months afterwards, however, when I retold the story to people I wanted to count as friends, people I thought I could impress with a certain proximity to tragedy (here I’m not proud of myself), I was shocked to find that most felt unsatisfied by story’s end. The sound of two gunshots, apparently, couldn’t convince anyone that the two girls were killed. People wanted a clearer picture of the scene. They wanted to see the girls struggling to survive, fighting over the Marlin rifle in the cramped cab of the truck, which must have felt — someone once told me in a kind of prodding voice—“like a kind of coffin, no?” People expressed cautious, politically ambiguous doubt regarding two girls willing to leave home at midnight to meet a strange man. They would never blame the victims, they were quick to point out, but wouldn’t it also be likely that girls like these seemed willing — eager, even — to have sex? What else had they gone that night to find? Which precise sequence of events, these people wanted to know, had the power to transform Jim Durant — a creep, to be sure — into a killer?
These cravings for gruesome variations on a story surprised and saddened me, and then stopped surprising me and only saddened me, at which point, I stopped telling the story altogether.
The truth was I, too, felt unsatisfied — a horribly callous word to use in situations like these — but not because I missed out on the full experience regarding the rifle, or the imprisoned fate of the murderer. I wish I could say my lingering curiosity had to do with the two victims, whose real names were Sabrina Muller (Allie) and Ashley Simms (Caitlyn). They were only thirteen, and deserve to be understood in more context than the roles they played in this particular story. But this particular story, being the story I was trying to understand, had me returning again and again to the question of Phil.
After a confession from Jim Durant and a testimony from my uncle, Phil was not indicted. He was free to go. But until I did the math, I didn’t know where, exactly, he went. I looked at the date of the crime, November 1999, and realized that Phil’s visits to my house came after, not before, the events of the story. My mother and uncle had put me in harm’s way. When it came to the matter of Phil’s innocence, I did not agree with the law. Toward my family I felt a kind of retroactive indignation. “You did what?” I shouted at my mother. “You invited a man like Phil into your home when your children were roughly the same age as his victims?”
“You’re just like your father,” she said, waving me away. “He always took Jean out of the house when we had that poor boy over, as if Phil were a hungry wolf. I love your father, but he’s a real American, isn’t he? They love to talk about second chances, but only Armenians — the first Christians — understand that the only way you can change people is through forgiveness. Not prison bars, not shunning.”
I asked what it was, exactly, she’d been trying to change about our man Phil. “His stupidity, or his indifference?”
“He was a young man with nothing,” she said. “He had no family. No home. No place he wanted to be. This can fill a person with shame. He was choosing, God bless him, whether or not to die. My brother? Me? All we were doing was trying to convince him to live.”
That’s when I asked if they’d been successful.
Under her breath, my mom cursed her brother for getting me involved. Then she said, “I want to tell you a story, too, one where he fixes one of his Volkswagens and drives to a place where he can feel at home, where he can live.”
“But?”
“For some, there is no such place. Not in this world, anyway.”
NOTES FOR A SPOTLIGHT ON A FUTURE PRESIDENT
THE INCIDENT
The mascot — a cartoonlike Confederate soldier known affectionately on campus as Rebby the Blue — had been defiled. Unfortunately, the African American sophomore commissioned to wear the costume at the spring pep rally didn’t notice the freshly painted Hitler mustache until it was too late. Joshua Stilt fist-pumped his way onto the gymnasium floor, where he expected to be swathed in the intoxicating energy of school spirit. Instead, he was met with a wild mixture of laughter and hissing from the overwhelmingly white audience of five hundred. Afterwards, the local news sent a camera crew and a reporter to interview Joshua Stilt and the high school’s white principal about what was already being described in the Antelope Valley as the third or fourth greatest controversy of the year.
“To equate a Rebel soldier with Nazis is ridiculous,” said the principal in his prerecorded interview. “Rebels fought for freedom, you see, and Hitler fought for power. Anyone who knows history understands states’ rights and dictatorships are like Chinese food and cheese — totally incompatible.”
Peter Thorpe, the local reporter — having already heard the joke over Panda Express takeout at the principal’s house two nights earlier — decided against challenging his old friend’s logic. They had graduated as Rebels fewer than thirty years ago.
Quickly the conversation turned to identifying the culprit. For his part, Joshua Stilt — whose last name provoked jokes about his five-foot-nothing frame — became the first suspect. “If I’d wanted to make a political statement,” he told the reporter when he began to feel accused, “I’d have come up with something more intelligent.”
The story might have ended there had the local news segment not been seen by a famous film director, who happened to be this far north of Los Angeles to shoot an explosion scene in the desert. The director, a woman whose own fight for legitimacy in the male-dominated field of Hollywood action films had nurtured in her a sensitivity to the just indignations of others, sent a brief but excoriating email to the chiefs of major news organizations across California. Word spread. Soon, reporters at every major television network wanted a sit-down with Joshua Stilt. The local interest — who sullied Rebby the Blue? — was replaced by a national interest: What young black kid in twenty-first-century California would willingly don the uniform — cartoonlike or not — of a Confederate soldier?
Interview after interview produced the same response from Joshua Stilt: “I really enjoyed being the mascot, and I couldn’t change what the mascot was.” But what Joshua Stilt felt he could not do, national media attention proved able to. Shortly after the story broke, petitions, rallies, and lawsuits were organized to replace Rebby the Blue with a less political mascot for Antelope Valley High. After consulting his conscience, his Bible, his school district, and an online national poll, the suddenly apologetic principal revealed the new mascot at an assembly on the football field. An actual desert tortoise had been borrowed for the event from the conservatory, and, released from its cage, began eating blades of grass that had been painted white with the high school’s logo, a Stars and Bars flag that had not yet been replaced.