On Behalf of my Brother

[Motorboat Cruiser]

“On Behalf Of My Brother”


I hate to impose upon your time like this. Each of you has your own life, your own myriad of personal conditions, and I’m sure we each have a place we would rather be at the moment. In my particular case, that place happens to be Las Vegas. I’ve every intention of packing up my old truck tomorrow, driving through the Mohave desert, and never looking back. I hear there are lots of pretty girls there in Sin City. Maybe I can hitch me a wife and get a job as a dealer in some fancy hotel. I’m pretty handy with a deck of cards, and anyone down at the local pub will begrudgingly attest to my talents.

But I’m already getting ahead of myself, and I must admit, I have the worst habit of doing that. Tomorrow, when I am asked to recall these events one last time, I must remind myself that you people aren’t here to hear about my relocation to Vegas. All you care about is hearing what happened in that little patch of woods near the creek.

Of course, nobody knows what truly happened there better than my brother. But unless you are new around these parts, you have already surmised that Cal never had much of a way with words. He was what the medical professionals like to refer to as “emotionally disturbed” and from the time he was a little boy, we could all see he was different. Apparently, so could you. You all did a fine job of keeping your distance through the years and you were probably better off for doing so. Cal had one hell of a temper. I’ve got the scars to prove it. Maybe some of you do, as well.

So, in his regrettable absence, I’ve chosen to speak on my brother’s behalf.

I never liked his choice in women much, but I must admit, Katie was hard to dislike at first. We couldn’t figure out how she was able to get him to crawl out of his shell. It was as if he kept all of his thoughts locked in a box and only she had the key. I have to say this about her: She could make anyone feel special just by looking at them with those gorgeous eyes of hers. He loved her probably as much as he was capable of loving anyone.

Which brings us to the present, and the question that I expect is festering within each of your minds; what brought my little brother to such a state of agitation that he was able to pull that trigger and kill her.

Personally, I think he just grew tired of her leading him on.

My grandmother used to warn us not to speak ill of the dead. In this case, however, I’m afraid I’m going to have to go against her wishes, bless her soul. You see, for all her pretty looks and softly spoken words, she was nothing more than a temptress, that Katie. Yeah, she could always make Cal glow like a firefly in summer, but she should have made it clear to him that she didn’t like him “in that way”. He followed her like he was a stray cat and she was holding a saucer of milk, if you get my meaning. She led him on and filled his heart with all that damn hope. And in my best estimation, something must have finally switched on a light bulb inside his head. Maybe it was something she said; maybe it was something that she didn’t say. I’ll never know for sure.

What I do know is that something caused Cal to take that pistol from my bedroom. I swore I had it hidden well enough but I guess I underestimated his abilities. If I had ever known something like this might occur, I would have never even shown it to him. At the time, it seemed to frighten, more than fascinate him, and I figured he would just as quickly pick up a rattlesnake than ever touch that damn gun. I think we can safely say that I was wrong.

On the day in question, I had come home to an empty house, which wasn’t a bit out of the ordinary. There was a message on the machine from Katie telling Cal that she was sorry for upsetting him and she wanted to see him so they could talk about it. I figured he went to meet her at Jasper’s Creek, up near that patch of woods alongside Highway 17 and I didn’t give it another moments thought…until I got to my bedroom and saw my top dresser drawer open. Then I got mighty worried.

[Motorboat Cruiser]

Whatever that girl said to him must have caused something to snap enough for him to steal that pistol before he left. I grabbed my keys and took the truck up to that creek just as fast as I could drive it. I wanted to try to prevent him from doing something he might regret, something we would all regret. I pulled over by the oak tree that he had chained his bicycle to and headed into the woods. That’s where I found the bodies, lying next to the shore. He shot her in the chest and himself in the head and left one hell of a mess for me to stumble across. I didn’t have to feel for no pulse to know that they were gone from this world.

You would think I could handle any grizzly sight like that considering what I had seen in the war. Hell, one time, I watched this crazy son of a bitch take a machete and proceed to swipe the head clear off two of the villagers. He didn’t stop swinging that thing until…

Damn, there I go again, off on one of my colorful tangents that has nothing to do with the matters before us. I can see by your disheveled faces that you don’t care to hear my combat tales, and to be truthful, they are probably better left unshared anyway. My apologies.

Let’s get back to that little patch of woods by the creek, shall we?

I cried my eyes out like a schoolgirl that afternoon, trying to make some sense of what caused him to react that way. He wasn’t evil. He just coveted a treasure that would never be his and I suppose, didn’t much want to live without it. I’m going to sorely miss him. For all of his faults, he was my brother, my blood.

So tonight, as I sit in this jail cell, thanks to an overzealous District Attorney, I’m practicing the words I will say to the twelve of you tomorrow. We both know that this evidence is solely circumstantial. We both know that I loved my brother and never would have hurt him in a million years. We know what a harlot that woman was and the anger that my brother struggled to control throughout his life. Surely, the twelve of you will see that this is all a horrible tragedy and that my incarceration is a regrettable mistake. I will tell you everything I can to make sure that you exonerate my good name.

Of course, there are some parts that are too personal, some parts that I could never tell another soul, much less a jury of my peers. You just wouldn’t understand the minor details such as the fact that I also loved Katie. You wouldn’t understand how angry it made me when she treated me no better than Cal. You certainly wouldn’t understand why I met her at the creek and pumped that bullet into her pretty chest.

She might not have deserved it, now that I’ve had a chance to think things through a bit more. At the time though, I knew she had hurt Cal, rejected him, and I could easily surmise that she wasn’t too fond of me either, “in that way”. I could harbor the sting of rejection but Cal was more fragile and whether she knew it or not, she was dangerously close to breaking him. He wasn’t going to suffer any more torment if I had any say in the matter. I shot her without giving it a second thought and I would do it again without hesitation. My only regret was that I didn’t leave the scene immediately and take the gun with me. Had I done so, none of this would have ever happened to Cal. Although, I suppose I wouldn’t have this alibi either.

Actually, I made one other mistake that afternoon when I misjudged the distance that the blood would spray from her chest. I ended up with a bit of it on my arms and shirt and that wasn’t going to look too good, should anyone happen to wander by.

I headed over to the creek to take a quick dip in the cool water. I had just got myself scrubbed up cleaner than a hospital operating room when I heard an anguished voice scream out to the heavens. I don’t believe I’d ever heard my brother cry like that. I raced over to try and calm him down, talk some sense into him, shut him up. But by the time I got there, he had already found the gun and was holding it in his right hand. He looked at me with tears streaming down his face and then slowly raised the weapon. Realizing that there was no cover to be had, I closed my eyes, resigned to the fact that my chips were a few seconds from being cashed in. I suspect that I jumped three feet off the ground when the gunshot rang out. I expected a blinding flash of pain but there was none. He must have missed? I expected that when I opened my eyes, they would be met with the fury of an emotionally disturbed madman, cursing his poor aim and anxious to give it another go. But there would be no more gunshots that afternoon. Cal was no more alive than my grandma, God rest her soul. A self-inflicted wound to the head had been his final statement on the matter.

I never meant for my brother to be hurt and that’s the honest truth. The cruel irony, I suppose, is that I killed that bitch so that she would never be able to hurt him again…or me, for that matter. And if it wasn’t for this little predicament, I probably wouldn’t be paying her no attention at all. I’m not too worried though, you good people will surely believe the tale I have weaved for you once I set foot in that witness box. How could you not? I can lie with the best of them.

Maybe I should tame my cockiness, however, and consider my good fortune. If the inept police had bothered to check my hands for gunshot residue, I would be on my way to the frying chair right now. Luckily, that gun was still gripped in Cal’s cold, dead hand when the police found the bodies. All those incompetent law enforcement yokels have is a gun that was registered to me, a hair of mine that somehow wound up on her dress, and a couple of completely understandable discrepancies from a statement I made while “in shock”. My lawyer tells me that this will be my last night in prison as long as the jury finds me believable tomorrow morning. I’m thinking that maybe it couldn’t hurt to run through the story a few more times tonight, just to be on the safe side. Diligent practice, along with an ability to lie (which has won me a good share of the town’s poker money over the last few years), should be all I need to walk away from this whole mess.

In no time at all, I expect to be pulling my old pickup truck into Sin City. I’m pretty handy with a deck of cards, or so I’ve been told. They could probably use a guy like me. I also hear that there are a bunch of pretty girls there. I wonder if any of them can hold a candle to Katie, you know, talk as softy and tell me how special I am. I bet someone like that exists and would make a fine wife. And as long as she doesn’t try to lead me along like some temptress, like that bitch out by Jasper’s Creek, I’m sure we’ll get along just fine.