Alligator Candy (14 page)

Then I thought about the strangulation. For years, my family had been told that Jon didn't suffer, that he had been knocked unconscious and suffocated in the trunk, that he didn't know what was happening to him. But this didn't seem to be the real story. Perhaps my family had been spared. Perhaps in a moment of incredible sympathy, in an impulse of humanity, the cops had gathered to discuss how much to tell my mom and dad, and they chose to leave out the hardest part of all: that the boy had been aware, if only for seconds, that he had struggled, that the large and murderous hands gripped his small neck.

Now that I had this information, what was I going to do with it? I felt horrified at having to share it with my parents. The roles now felt reversed. They had spent years protecting me from the details, sparing me from learning things that might haunt me. They loved me dearly, so dearly that they thought sparing me would make life easier somehow, less terrifying, less paralyzing. And now I was the parent, and they were the children. I was in the blinding sun, and they were in the shadows.

I wanted to keep them there. I wanted them to live the rest of their days just as they had done so far, taking sanctity in the comfort that their boy had not suffered. Because to have suffered was to have been aware, and to have been aware was to have known that—in that familiar thicket of woods so close to home, while his little brother waited, and his father watched football—he was being killed. I decided not to say anything; at least, not unless they asked. And if they asked, I supposed, I would figure out what to do then.

But in that decision, I felt a kind of loneliness I had never felt before. The loneliness of the protector. The loneliness of being an adult, stuck inside your own head, aware of things that you cannot control, aware of details altering your biochemistry, lacerating your insides, rearranging that which had already seemed to be arranged, reassembling you in a new form, like some Cubist painting, your eyes and ears shifted on your face, your foot where your head should be. It was the loneliness of returning to the world you had always known in a form you did not recognize or desire. And the only thing that felt lonelier was that to everyone else, you most likely looked the same.

I returned to Brooklyn as a transparency. I was clear through, like a paramecium, a thinly perceptible outer layer, gelatinous and elastic, a swirl of images folding upon itself inside me—trees, limbs, blood, bicycle, two men—a spinning tornado of nightmare scenes, like the vortex in
The Wizard of Oz
—pieces of a broken home, a cow, a witch on a bike, spinning into the darkened sky.

And because I felt so stirred up, I felt almost incapable of keeping my story to myself. I wanted to talk, to tell others, friends I hadn't told, my in-laws. And to the ones I had told, I wanted to tell more. For years, I had spared telling others my story, partly because I didn't know the whole story and partly because it felt too terrifying to tell. I chose my listeners carefully, requiring that friends earn my trust and make me feel safe before I let them into the storm.

I chose the moments to tell them the story even more carefully, plotting for a time when we would be alone, when we would have time to sit, to soak, to be humble. One time in high school, I sat under the night sky and told the story to a girl I had a crush on, watching her face slacken and eyes well. In that moment, I felt both close and guilty—guilty that I was enjoying feeling close to her; that I had somehow used my brother's story to win her affection.

But now there was no editing, no restraint. I cried with my wife as we sat in our apartment and relived the horror. I ordered beer after beer at a bar in the East Village, as I told a friend for what purpose the killers had used their knife. I sat around the white Formica table in the kitchen of my in-laws in New Jersey and recounted everything, taking pleasure in rendering them silent. I wanted the world to quiet. I wanted the world to stop. I wanted people to stop what they were doing, to hang up their phones, to put down their forks, to turn off their TVs, to log off the internet, and listen.

I wanted them to see the evil my brother had seen, I wanted them to feel the grip of the hands around their necks, I wanted them to feel afraid, I wanted them to be humble, I wanted them to admit that life was not orderly, that endings weren't always happy. I wanted them to live without denial, without darkness, without dissociation. It was almost aggressive on my part, emotionally murderous, violent. I wanted to shatter the sanctity of the worlds around me. I wanted them to feel what I was feeling. I wanted them to feel Jon. I wanted them to feel death. I wanted to feel less alone.

In my small home office, I sat at my desk and tried to write the statement that I would read at the parole hearing. It came in fits and spurts. Andy had been doing research, and been advised that we should describe our suffering. We should talk about how the murder affected us, how it debilitated us, how we experienced this loss. It was the ultimate writing assignment, and I felt like I was failing. I thought about the person who'd written the police report: how dispassionately he told the story of Jon's death; how he asked all the right questions and noted the answers dutifully on his page. I was nothing compared with him. I was not that writer. That writer had the courage to face and report the facts. I could not face anything.

I began to see the color red everywhere I looked. Not a hallucination but a reminder of Jon. I thought about how my mother had once told me that she decorated each of our bedrooms in colors that expressed our personalities. My room was blue. Andy's was brown. Jon's was red, red like the color of his hair, red like his bike. Red, I thought now, like his blood.

I began keeping a journal in a red notebook, writing only with a red pen. I saw redheads walking the street. One night, with the hopes of distraction, I went to Brooklyn's Prospect Park to see a performance of Spalding Gray, the monologist, but red followed me there. Spalding usually told his own stories, but on this night, he was going to take some selected audience members onstage and interview them about theirs.

The first interviewee was a clean-cut guy in his thirties whom Spalding had chosen because he had seen the man eating a protein bar called Smart. Spalding was fascinated by this product's name and assumed that it somehow made its consumer more interesting. It didn't. The guy didn't have much to say beyond his one- or two-word answers, and Spalding, and the audience, shifted in their seats. The next person was even less memorable, and Spalding seemed restless.

Then he called his final interviewee on stage. With each person, the overhead lights shifted color, and this time they bathed the band shell in red. A small boy bounded onstage and took a chair opposite Spalding, who asked his age. “Eleven,” the boy replied—the age of my brother. Spalding asked him a few questions about life at his age, and all I could think of was Jon. This is what Jon was like. This age. This brain. This consciousness. And then Spalding asked him one last question: “What do you think happens when you die?” Whatever the boy's answer was, I wouldn't recall, but I would remember that when he gave it, everything was red.

P
RIOR TO
the hearing, Andy and I learned that despite the high-profile nature of this case, the state attorney's office didn't even know that Tillman was up for parole. When Andy spoke with the lawyer down there, the lawyer couldn't believe the news and was disgusted that this had somehow fallen through the cracks. People began coming out of the woodwork and retirement to help us prepare: deputies, lawyers, a representative from the state attorney's office.

The media found out and reported with astonishment how Tillman could possibly be up for parole. Reporters tracked down my parents. Andy, too. The spotlight was back on and, with it, our irrational fear. To protect our privacy, Andy and I wore hats low down over our faces when we got off the plane in Orlando, Florida.

But we were not in this alone. The police and investigators were right there by our side. They, too, were caught by surprise that Tillman was even eligible for release. At our hotel the night before the hearing, Andy and I met with Captain James Walker, a compassionate older man who'd worked with Sheriff's Major Walter Heinrich on the investigation following Jon's murder. “Heinrich called me into his office,” Walker recalled later, “and said he wanted me to go over and represent him, and I said, ‘It's been a long time; I'm going to need to get the reports.' He said, ‘Go get them all.' ”

He told us that Jon's murder was the most horrible case he and his colleagues worked on in the history of their department. They had never been involved with anything so brutal. “Was there anything else you wanted to know?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. I told him how I remembered, as a kid, giving a deposition to a cop about what Jon was wearing and how I had asked him to go to the store to get me the candy. I told him how my father insisted years later that that wasn't the case; that
he
was the last to have seen him. Walker's eyes looked sympathetically at mine. “No,” he said, “you're right.” I had given a deposition that week, he recalled, in which I described standing with Jon on the sidewalk before he rode off into the woods.

My mind reeled, and the next question came without my even thinking about it. “What about the candy?” I asked. “We heard that they found it in Witt's trailer.”

“Yes,” he said, “Witt had given it to his son.”

It took a few moments for this to sink in. I had been on the sidewalk. I
had
had that conversation with Jon. He had gotten me the candy. Witt had killed him and taken it. And given it to his son? He had a son? He gave my brother's candy to him? The candy of the boy he had just killed?

It was too much, too real, too terrible. At once, I felt connected and disconnected, heartened by the fact that my memory had not been a lie, but disgusted at the new knowledge I had obtained. I was angry. Furious. Vengeful. I was so caught up in my emotions that I barely heard the deputy when he said he had a question for us. He wanted to know how dramatic we wanted him to be at the parole hearing the next day. Plenty, we said; we wanted to do whatever we could to keep this guy in prison. The deputy reached into a gym bag and pulled out a large, heavy metal rod—the exact kind of drill bit that Tillman had used to strike my brother. He said that, during his statement, he could take out the drill bit and crash it on the table to show the parole board what Jon had endured. We told him to go for it.

Andy and I returned to our hotel room and stayed up late talking about what we had learned, going over our speeches for the next day. At one point, the room was dark and Andy was sleeping, but I still felt awake. I looked over and saw the closet door open, and the blur of two people running inside it: Jon and Tillman. I couldn't move, couldn't scream, could only feel some invisible force pulling at my feet, the blanket peeling off of me as I floated off the bed toward the darkness of the closet, midair, shutting my eyes. When I opened my eyes, I realized I had been dreaming. The closet door was shut. The darkness was gone.

The next morning, we woke to newspaper headlines about the hearing. The hearing had brought back the coverage, and memories for those who had worked on the case. “The way some longtime residents remember it,” wrote the
St. Petersburg Times
, “the murder of 11-year-old Jonathan Kushner was when Tampa seemed to lose its small-town innocence.” Heinrich, now retired, told the reporter, “We've had some other major cases, but I think in this particular case the emotions of the community were unbelievable.” He went on, “I guess I've seen so much of it over the years. But I think I got caught up in the emotion of this one. There's only a few cases where that happened to me. He was so innocent, you know?”

The room of the parole hearing was packed. A camera crew was set up with lights. It was hard enough for Andy and me to have to make our statements at all, let alone while being filmed for the evening news. I asked a reporter if he could please not film us. He said his boss wouldn't let him get away with that. But maybe he could just shoot us from behind, showing only the backs of our heads.

We listened to the testimony of Tillman's mother and brother. They didn't have much to say beyond that Tillman was working hard on his studies, and they hoped the parole commission would let him out. Their attorney followed by recounting all the rehabilitation programs that Tillman had been involved with, how he had gotten good grades in prison classes. He was leading a Bible study group. He was studying to get some kind of degree and had gotten good grades.

Prior to the hearing, Andy had discussed the order of our presentations with Walker, so that we would have maximum impact. It was decided that Walker would go first, mapping out the crime and the case against Tillman, followed by Andy, then me, and, finally, the prosecutor. Walker stood beside us and addressed the court, calling the case “the most brutal and sadistic homicide of a child that I have ever been assigned to.” He recounted the abduction, the attack. When he got to the part about the drill bit they had hit Jon with, he held up the long metal rod as the room looked on in horror—and then he slammed it on the table for emphasis. He also noted that, months after incarceration, he was transporting Tillman along with a lieutenant when the prisoner told him he had a list of people he wanted to kill, including the assistant state attorney at the time, a detective on the case, a chaplain, his attorney, and a sergeant in the jail. “Eleven-year-old, eighty-five-pound Jonathan Kushner didn't get a chance at life because of Gary Tillman's brutal and sadistic acts,” Walker concluded, saying that Tillman should never be released.

I watched Andy next, leaning forward toward the microphone on the table as he held his speech in his hands. Andy and I had always been best friends, and going through this experience together had brought us even closer. Our experiences with Jon's murder were so different—given our own personalities and our difference in ages at the time of his death—but we were united in our grief, and anger.