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me. “Well, sure, he was a person, had a soul and all—just not in the right place, but he had one. But you gonna tell everyone alive that?” “Sue told me that things changed when she came up with a plan for him to communicate,” I said. “Is this true?” Barry stared out at nothing for a long time before answering. “He could’ve learned Morse, and he could’ve said something. Yeah, that would’ve made it different. This was two months after the incident. Don’t know if Suzie had put any thought into this, but I had. What the hell would he say? Forget what a freak it makes him. Yeah, I said the f-word. We wanted to think otherwise but that’s what he was. You follow?” I nodded. “Well, we tried to pretend otherwise, but we couldn’t’ve pretended if he had a say in it, and that’s what made it different. I did what I think he would’ve wanted but I spared Suzie having to hear it. What I know he would’ve wanted.” Barry took Jake out into a clearing far into the deep woods. “He let me leave him there. He doesn’t have to eat or anything. He’ll be there a long time. He lay down and gave a final squeak of that horn and let me bury him. I cried my eyes out while I was doing it but I knew I had to. Eventually those chains are gonna rust through. Soul leaves a body when the body’s damaged enough, right? So I figure that’ll let him free. Wasn’t murder ‘cause I didn’t do anything ‘cept let Nature take her course, except I left him in a quiet place for it to do it. Away from being laughed at and called a freak and all that. You believe in God? Doesn’t matter, I do. I don’t think God’ll leave him alone down there. He’ll be safe and quiet until those chains fall apart and he goes to Heaven.” “Did you think to maybe hurry it up?” I asked. “It might’ve been quicker if you’d—” “No. No I didn’t. You about done? ‘Cause I got somewhere to be.” I called my editor after that interview and told him there was no story. I lied, of course, and he knew it, but I stuck to my guns and got a re-assignment. The fact is that I couldn’t have told the most important part of it. I don’t believe Barry Kleinman’s story of how he gently buried Jake’s 8
odd new body and prayed to God to send his merciful angels to keep him company, any more than I believe he had somewhere to be when he ended our interview. If he did as he says he did, then he is a monster; that soul, that consciousness, will sit down there for hundreds of years, buried alive and going mad. I believe Barry had more sense than that. I believe he took a pair of metal cutters with him and dispatched his son’s soul to wherever it is meant to go. But if I print his story as it stands, it sounds like he consigned his child’s soul to horror. If I suggest what I think, then it is technically murder, and although there may be no legal precedent for such a case, I’m sure Sue Kleinman will pursue one—not to mention how it could complicate the divorce. Sue, for her part, will keep trying to figure out what Barry did with Jake, which will give her a purpose. (The burial story is new, and he only bullshitted it to me because he was drunk, and his lawyer wasn’t present. Officially, he refuses to answer, and the authorities have thus far wisely left it at that.) After having weighed the possible results of printing the story I had, I finally came to the same conclusion that Dotty at the Longview Diner had: that they’d been through enough, and should be left to suffer what remains in peace. 9
Page 1: esprit spring 2010
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