Alligator Candy Read online

  The first fuckup happened not far from my house, just across the street from the woods that claimed my brother. Lizard Man (a skinny kid who collected lizards), Metal Mouth (a hulking, metal-mouthed kid from Texas), and I were crouching behind a bush with handfuls of kumquats. The fruit, which grew on a tree by a neighbor’s house, tasted awfully sour but made for awesome projectiles. They were just small and hard enough to gain speed when you chucked them, but pulpy enough inside to leave a nice sticky splatter.

  We were leaving plenty of splats as we chucked the kumquats at the cars speeding down the road. One by one, we took turns chucking the little orange fruits at the passing rides, the muscle cars, the pickups, the occasional Mercedes. Once in a while, a car might slow down in response, but we were adept at grabbing our bikes and peeling off unscathed. After I hurled one kumquat at a little sports car, we heard the wheels screech, and we took off as usual for the bikes. But halfway down the block, I checked over my shoulders to see that I was alone.

  Lizard Man and Metal Mouth hadn’t made it to their bikes, I realized. Instead, they were being screamed at by a giant man who, on closer inspection, appeared to be the quarterback of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. “Holy shit, it was Doug Williams!” Lizard Man shouted as they finally caught up with me. “You hit Doug Williams’s car!” I felt filled with regret, both for getting busted and for missing out on the opportunity to meet Doug Williams in person.

  A more serious fuckup came soon after when Lizard Man, Metal Mouth, and I hurled smoke bombs into the creek behind my house. Fireworks had become a passion, both for the pyrotechnics and the illicit nature of the stuff. They were illegal in Florida, and we got them only when someone brought them down from South Carolina. Metal Mouth was a reliable supplier: bottle rockets, M-80s, black snakes, Roman candles, and so on. Smoke bombs I could score myself. Some old ladies somehow got away with selling them in a gift shop in Tarpon Springs, the Greek fishing village outside town.

  The smoke bombs were about the size of the kumquats, but came in different colors: red, green, blue, yellow. We lit the end of the short fuse and then chucked the little sizzling balls, waiting for the sulfuric gush of smoke to come out. Metal Mouth, Lizard Man, and I fired our balls into the creek, and delighted in the gust of smoke filling the air. What we didn’t anticipate was the giant flame that suddenly licked the sky. Then another flame. And another. Something had caught fire in the creek, and I ran.

  I ran until I couldn’t run anymore, and didn’t even care or turn around to see what had happened to my friends. Later that night I got a call from Lizard Man asking me where I had gone and why I hadn’t stuck around to help them put out the flame. Someone had called the fire department, which took care of the blaze before it got out of hand. But we never got blamed or caught. I was starting to get more accustomed to this feeling that came with my increased freedom: guilt. Guilt for fucking up and guilt, I suppose, for being free and alive in the first place. Jon wasn’t free. He was dead. And he was dead, I still felt in my dark private moments, because he had gone to get candy for me.

  I couldn’t take it anymore, the guilt, the not knowing. I had grown up not talking about Jon’s murder, walking away in silence whenever the subject came up, but the fears and feelings, the mystery and madness, it was all still there and triggered easily. This happened once in ninth grade at Tampa Prep, the private school I was attending on the campus of the University of Tampa. After school, I’d hang out with my friends Vince and Doug, brothers who shared my affinity for comics and the group Rush. After school, we’d debate the merits of the first side of Rush’s album Hemispheres versus side one of 2112 while heading off downtown, walking past the homeless guys and hookers, making our way to the Greek sandwich shop with the Galaga arcade machine. We didn’t have to tell anyone where we were going or leave a note—we would just go.

  One of those days, though, I couldn’t go with them. I had to get back home for some reason. But the next morning, they told me, with flushed faces and excited voices, that I should have come along. “We found a dead body,” Doug said. They had been wandering around campus, when they strolled into a warehouse for the hell of it. That’s when they saw her: a dead woman, decomposing in a pile of garbage in the back. Next thing they knew, the cops were there, and they were giving statements, but they didn’t know what happened to her, and probably never would.

  I could see Doug’s and Vince’s faces change as they recalled their discovery, the mix of fascination and repulsion, but the one thing I didn’t see was the emotion I was feeling at that moment: fear. All I could think about was how easily I might have been with them, and how I might have stumbled on the body, and how awful that would feel, how scared I’d be, how I’d think that maybe that she was killed, and if she was killed, who killed her, and where were they, and were they there now, and could they be coming for us—for me. Fear shot through me in a way I couldn’t control or understand. I had no idea what post-traumatic stress disorder was, or that I was surely suffering from it. And the fact that I was feeling this fear at all, even though I was standing safely in the hallway outside my ninth-grade English class, didn’t matter. Everything they were telling me was just hitting way too close to home, and the fact that they didn’t seem to know my backstory—or perhaps didn’t let on—only made me feel more isolated.

  I still didn’t have the will or nerve to grill my parents on the details of Jon’s death. I was close with Andy, but he was now off at college, and I rarely saw him outside of the occasional holiday. I let it all pass. Maybe I was still just protecting them, hesitant to ask them to relive such a dark chapter of their lives. Or maybe I just couldn’t deal with acknowledging the reality of Jon’s murder with my parents—that somehow, by not discussing his death, we could survive more easily. But I was growing up. I needed answers. And I knew where to find them.

  20

  WHERE CAN I see the Tampa Tribune from October 1973?”

  When I asked this question of the librarian, I probably seemed like any other thirteen-year-old researching a report. During lunch at school, I wandered into the library of the nearby University of Tampa one day. But I felt like I was transparent, as if just uttering the request, particularly the date, was some dead giveaway to her. After spending so many years at IDS, where everyone knew our family’s story, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the story had followed me everywhere, like a sign taped by a bully to my back.

  Of course, the librarian had no clue why I was there, as she handed me the small blue box of microfilm. It seemed remarkably light for something so heavy. I had never read the newspaper reports about my brother’s death, beyond catching the occasional headline when a story was left on the kitchen table. Part of me didn’t want to spool the reel through the microfilm reader, didn’t want to know what I didn’t know, didn’t want to learn what I hadn’t learned. But there seemed to be an inevitability to the moment, some fated flow of movement, a lifting of the arms, a maneuvering of the microfilm, a squinting of the eyes as the projector lamp shone through the membrane, as my thumb and forefinger adjusted a knob, and the past snapped into focus on-screen. I felt like a Hardy Boy amateur detective searching for clues to a murder mystery.

  With a twist of the knob, the microfilm began to blur by in black horizontal streaks, like the threaded clouds of an approaching storm. Periodically I would release the knob, let the film come to a halt, check the date with anticipation and dread, and then resume the inky rush. The closer I got to October, the slower I turned the spool, and the more discernible the newspaper copy began to be. I saw headlines about Watergate, the unbeaten Vikings, the movie Shaft. I passed ads for discount tires and boxy televisions and banana-seat bicycles. It seemed so long ago, another era, another world—not even my own, really—but the one I remembered only in glimpses. The days of getting up from the couch to flip the channel on the TV, the banana-seat bike of Jon’s, the mushroom decal on the back of our station wagon.

  At first I stopped at October 28, the day Jon wa
s killed, scanning the headlines for a few moments until I realized that, of course, there would be no news of him that day. No one knew what had happened yet or that he was missing. The news, I suspected, would start the next day, October 29, and it did: “In Woods,” read the headline, “Hunt Is On for Boy, 11, Feared Lost.”

  “A massive search party of some 150 firemen, police and residents was formed last night to comb a wooded area north of Carrollwood where an 11-year-old boy is believed to have disappeared,” the story began. “Hillsborough County’s sheriff officials said the boy, Jonathan Kushner . . . was last seen around noon yesterday near a 7-Eleven store . . . The search for the youth ‘officially’ began after 6 p.m., deputies said, and at 12:05 a.m. was called off until 7 a.m. As darkness settled over the area, the Tampa police helicopter, equipped with a powerful search light, was called into the area. Conducting the ground search for the youth were several sheriff’s deputies, members of the Armsdale and Odessa volunteer fire departments, and over 100 residents. Searchers reported finding the boy’s bicycle at 11 p.m. behind the 7-Eleven store, just off a path used by children to ride to the store.

  “As the search progressed into the night, the store’s parking lot became the hub of activity, packed with vehicles and volunteers. Wives of the searchers brought coffee, as night temperatures began dropping. Officials said there had been no positive indications that foul play was involved in the youth’s disappearance. Officials could release no clothing description. The boy is described as being about four feet 11 inches in height and has auburn, wavy hair. The youth is the son of Gilbert and Lorraine Kushner. Kushner is chairman of the department of anthropology and associate dean of behavioral sciences at the University of South Florida. Residents of the area said the area in which the youth is believed lost is pocked with caves.”

  I felt sick as I read over the words. It was my life, my family, my brother, but at the same time, it didn’t seem real. There was his name, my parents’ names, my dad’s job description, but how could this really be us? I felt dissociated, as if in a dream. I had been learning in my English literature class how details bring a story to life, and every single detail in this story was exploding with color before my eyes.

  All my life, I had grown up with just that handful of memories, scattered frames of broken film. But now each sentence brought more frames of the film to light. When edited together with my own fleeting recollections, they formed lengthier strips of film, segments of memory that I saw in my mind’s eye, as if they were now blurring before me on the microfilm machine screen:

  My memory of talking with Jon on the sidewalk . . . 150 people begin a search around six at night . . . My memory of standing outside my house giving a description of Jon’s clothing to the police . . . Women serving coffee to the volunteers . . . My memory of playing whirlybird with Jon in our room . . . A real police helicopter flying over our house with a searchlight . . . Jon and me twirling the VertiBird plane around his room as we tried to rescue the orange plastic astronaut in his orange plastic raft . . . Someone finding Jon’s bike behind the 7-Eleven store . . . Me at the controls, lowering the helicopter toward the astronaut’s raft . . . The light of the police helicopter switching off at midnight, and the volunteers going home . . . Jon watching happily as the astronaut dangled from my VertiBird in the air.

  My time in the library sitting at the microfilm reader became a blur. One by one, I read the newspaper accounts and looked at the accompanying grainy photographs. “David sits in the kitchen with his parents, trying to understand what is happening.” I read this line in one of the old newspaper stories from 1973. It was written by a reporter who had come to our house the day after Jon had disappeared, and it felt so weird. There I was in the moment, this four-year-old kid struggling to make sense of the chaos, and here I was now, some nine years later, still doing the same thing.

  Each story gave me details I didn’t have before: the way our house looked, comments my parents made to reporters, how the police and community organized the search, and so on. I drank them in thirstily, as my brain organized the details into scenes, images, dialogue, moments. I wanted to know what I didn’t know, understand what I didn’t understand, feel what I hadn’t felt. Perhaps more than anything, I wanted to feel connected to this central experience, to my family, to Jon.

  How long I was there, how many stories I read, I wouldn’t recall. Maybe I was just there for one afternoon. Maybe I trudged back there several times over the course of a week. I didn’t tell anyone what I was doing, didn’t discuss it with my friends, my parents, or Andy. It was my own private wormhole. The screen became a portal to the past, just like one of my favorite sci-fi TV shows, The Time Tunnel. That short-lived series was about two guys who got stuck in their time machine, a spinning black-and-white spiral from which they couldn’t escape. Each week, they’d end up in a different place—maybe the Old West or the French Revolution—and struggle for a way back. But now I was at the controls, twisting the knobs as I disappeared inside and watched the diorama materialize around me.

  “It was a good scene when he left,” my dad told a reporter. It was October 29, 1973, a day after Jon had gone missing. Dad was sitting in the kitchen, long hair and beard, smoking a cigarette, and staring at the floor. Friends and family milled around the room quietly. “He had just finished mowing the lawn,” my dad went on. “He earned his buck and went to get some candy.” Jon was a good kid, my dad said, not the kind to get into a car with a stranger. Before my brother left, he told me he’d call if it rained so that our dad could pick him up at the store. “The rains came at 3 p.m.,” the reporter wrote. “The call never did.”

  At some point, my dad went out in the woods to search, but called the Sheriff’s Department around five after having found nothing. Volunteers and police combed the woods for hours. Andy was out there searching too. It wasn’t until eleven o’clock that someone saw Jon’s bike “half-hidden,” as the reporter wrote, behind some bushes a ways off from the main path. Though the discovery of the bike led the police to suspect foul play, they initially dealt with it as a missing-person’s case. The 7-Eleven clerk said that she might have seen Jon at her store, but couldn’t recall. It seemed clear, however, that Jon—given his history, and that he had left his wallet at home—hadn’t disappeared on his own. “From all outward appearances,” said one official, “he is not a runaway.”

  By the next morning, the case was making headlines, and volunteers came from across the city to help search. A photographer shot a group of men and women gathered outside the 7-Eleven, dressed in jeans and sunglasses, some holding walking sticks, as a police officer pointed where to go. Officers rode horses through the woods, as members of a water rescue team waded through swamps and lakes. The wilderness that had long been a source of freedom and adventure became foreboding. “We used to run around a lot back there,” one searcher told a reporter, “Kids used to dig up underground forts. One could cave in on you, and no one would ever know.”

  By later that day, however, Sheriff’s Major Walter Heinrich told the crowd that “quite frankly, I think we have exhausted every technique in searching the terrain in this area.”

  By the next day, Halloween, the search expanded farther around north Tampa, with hundreds of volunteers going door-to-door distributing pictures of my brother and seeking clues. Many of the volunteers were from the University of South Florida, where my dad taught. Mitch Silverman, a colleague of my father’s who chaired the Criminal Justice Department at USF and was a close family friend from the synagogue, told a reporter, “Large numbers of students, many of whom did not know Kushner, volunteered to join the search.”

  Mitch was a hulking, sweet man with an easy laugh whom I’d often see around our house. His wife, Cindy, was the therapist who had worked with Jon on his auditory processing difficulties. As I read his name in the paper and read the stories of the volunteers, another side of the story appeared to me, one I had not been seeking but found nonetheless: the volunteers, the people f
rom across town who came to help and support my family.

  In one article, my dad told a reporter about the two passersby who were just taking a walk when they saw the search party and joined in. I looked at the faces of the people in the woods, women pushing aside palm fronds, somehow finding the strength to do something so unthinkable for the sake of someone else. For years, I had built up a wall between myself and others when it came to Jon, a defensive fort against rumormongers and bullies. But by doing so, I had kept out, or at least not been aware of, the strangers and friends and neighbors around me who had done so much for us.

  Another one of those mentioned in the articles was Arnie Levine, a close family friend and attorney who became, I discovered, instrumental that week. Up to this point, I had known that there was a special relationship between Arnie and my family, one that I didn’t fully grasp other than that he was a lawyer who had helped us out. I had known Arnie’s kids from IDS, and we spent many long, playful, and memorable Sundays at their house on the bay, swimming in their black-bottomed pool and having pillow fights. The Levines had a boat named Olive, and on other days, we’d sail off into the bay, climbing the mast and listening to Jimmy Buffett while everyone ate freshly boiled shrimp and laughed.