Jessie smoothes his poker-straight hair, dyed regulation matte black to match his outfit: black T-shirt, black jeans, slightly swinging chains. There are two tiny gold rings encircling his lower lip, one on each side of the full central part; the snakebite facial piercing is completely against school rules. Jessie plays with the jewelry, flicking the little hoops left and right, left and right with his tongue. We’re talking, and he’s looking at me hard.
His eyes are pale, pale blue; they don’t match the flat black hair. Once I asked him what his real hair color was and he said babyshit brown, it has no personality, makes no statement; he says he thinks the black says it all. The pale blue eyes look right and left and then back at me while we talk. I know he’s processing.
His argument is that Perry and Dick were humans in the grip of destiny, and that they were, from the moment they slid from their mothers’ white trash wombs, unavoidably moving to meet each other and kill the Clutters. He says Truman Capote knows it and he, Jessie, knows it, and he wants me to know it, too. I say okay, I see your point.
But I also think the essay indicates a slight belief in nurture over nature, and when I start to tell him this, he interrupts and says you gotta play the hand you’re dealt. I say I know you don’t believe in God, Jessie, so who deals the hand? He says fate, it’s already been decided, it’s in the cards. I say let’s stop with the card metaphors, and he says well, you’re the English teacher.
By now he’s leaning toward me a little bit, still processing, eyes flicking open and shut, and moving, right and left. He reminds me of those blinking, ruminating, room-sized computers in the old James Bond films. Jessie, I say, Dick and Perry had choices, right up to the last second. He says no, their choices were taken from them. Every time the boys got their legs busted, were made fun of at school, were rejected by a pretty girl, were raped and beaten and slapped around by various males and females, sent from home to live God knows where on the whim of the mother’s current boyfriend – I stop him there and say Jessie, that last one didn’t happen to Dick or Perry.
Well, it could have, he says slowly. It could have, and if it did, it woulda made them pretty mad, and maybe it was the thing that made them mad enough to kill the Clutters, all those years later. It’s just in their nature by now; they can’t help it, he says.
Now, I know Jessie has been thrown out of his house by his mother’s new boyfriend; I know that Jessie’s dad is in the state pen at Pine Grove, and that he’s been calling and threatening to kill Jessie’s mother when he gets out of jail in the fall. I know Jessie has beautiful cursive handwriting, almost nineteenth century Victorian, which he learned at Wilgus Elementary, in the second of the four school districts he’s belonged to in his eleven accomplished grades. I know he scoffs at higher education and goes to the vo-tech for welding, and that he often tells me he’ll make more money by the time he’s thirty than I will in a lifetime of teaching.
I also know that Jessie has just given me one of the best essays I’ve ever received from a student; his philosophy and critical thinking are well presented. Though I grant him the right to his own opinion, I am interested in that little crack of light in his essay. He keeps waiting there, leaning toward me, staring at me hard, and so I ask him, well then, what? What, if anything, could have made the difference for Dick and Perry and thus for the Clutters?
He leans away from me, then steps back on his black, big-heeled shoes and lets his breath out in a slow huff. He looks relaxed now. Well, a decent English teacher, for starts, he says.
He flicks the tiny gold hoops in his snakebite facial piercings with his tongue, left right, left right. He looks at me hard, and he knows I’m processing.
Shanda Tyger Buterbaugh uses the cadence and vernacular of a western Pennsylvania speaker telling a story to someone else. She is a Purchase Line High School substitute teacher, living among the ghosts of old coal towns and country schoolhouses.
