Free Alligator Candy by David Kushner

brothers.”
    I had no idea what passage it referred to; it just struck me as strange that there were two friends in the Bible with the same names as us. I also felt a bit guilty that there wasn’t an Andy up there too, although I knew that this was not intentional; it was just part of the Bible story. Alongside the border were Hebrew words that were translated on the plaque: “. . . and the Lord be with thee, as He hath been with my father . . . and Jonathan caused David to swear again by the love that he had for him: for he loved him as he loved his own soul.”

18
    A T SOME POINT , I saw their faces. The older one had short, dark hair and a high forehead, buggy eyes, a thick mustache. The newspaper photo of the younger one showed him with his eyes shut, thick hair swept low over his right eye; he wore a dark T-shirt. As far as I could recall, no one sat me down and showed me the pictures of the men who murdered my brother. I would just occasionally see the photos in a newspaper left on the kitchen table alongside the comics, the sports, the weather. Apparently something was happening—something in the court system—that was keeping the story in the news, even years later.
    I could bear to look at the pictures only for so long before I had to turn away. Part of me wanted to know more about these men: Who were they? What exactly did they do? They knew the answers to everything that haunted me. How long had they been in those woods? How long had they planned this? Was there a reason they selected him?
    But the part of me that wanted to know all this was small. The rest of me felt sickened, frightened, horrified that there were actually real people behind my brother’s death. Before seeing their faces, I had consoled myself by keeping their images in the abstract; by not visualizing anyone at all. All I saw was my own edited filmstrip of Jon’s final day: our conversation, his departure, the blur of the red metal bike, the banana seat, the high handlebars, twirling pedals, the woods, and then a curtain of darkness dropping forever. I didn’t want to see the faces that were watching Jon that day. I certainly didn’t want to know their names. All I caught was the last name of the older one, Witt, and the moment I saw it, I tried to erase it from my mind.
    Though I was just a child, the older I became, the more my mind struggled with the looming mystery of Jon’s murder. Of course, in one sense, there was no mystery at all. The facts were out there somewhere. The case, as far as I knew, had been solved. But because the facts were beyond me—beyond my courage or ability to ask the questions that would reveal them—the mystery festered and grew. The most mysterious thing of all to me was how something like this could happen in the first place. And, more terrifyingly, if this could happen to Jon, then—and this fear could not be assuaged—it could happen to someone else: my friends, my family, me.
    Kids grow up hearing fairy tales, but the biggest fairy tale of all, I realized at the age of four, is that life is safe. Life isn’t safe, I learned. It’s crazy. Evil is real. One minute you could be riding your bike on the way to get candy, and the next, you’re dead. Anything could happen anywhere at any time. So now what? How was I supposed to live without giving in to the fear? Every kid fears the bogeyman, the creature in the closet, the monster under the bed. But my bogeyman had a face—two faces—and they couldn’t be dispelled by someone telling me he wasn’t real.
    Unfortunately, I was an imaginative kid, and the less I knew, the more terrible things I invented in my mind. With so many holes in the central story of my life in tatters, I filled in the blanks myself, like scribbling in a giant Mad Lib.
    â€œMy brother Jon was biking through the woods when a man hit him with a _____ [NOUN] and then gagged him with a _____ [NOUN]