Chris McCormick - Desert Boys

The truth was I, too, felt unsatisfied — a horribly callous word to use in situations like these — but not because I missed out on the full experience regarding the rifle, or the imprisoned fate of the murderer. I wish I could say my lingering curiosity had to do with the two victims, whose real names were Sabrina Muller (Allie) and Ashley Simms (Caitlyn). They were only thirteen, and deserve to be understood in more context than the roles they played in this particular story. But this particular story, being the story I was trying to understand, had me returning again and again to the question of Phil.

After a confession from Jim Durant and a testimony from my uncle, Phil was not indicted. He was free to go. But until I did the math, I didn’t know where, exactly, he went. I looked at the date of the crime, November 1999, and realized that Phil’s visits to my house came after, not before, the events of the story. My mother and uncle had put me in harm’s way. When it came to the matter of Phil’s innocence, I did not agree with the law. Toward my family I felt a kind of retroactive indignation. “You did what ?” I shouted at my mother. “You invited a man like Phil into your home when your children were roughly the same age as his victims?”

“You’re just like your father,” she said, waving me away. “He always took Jean out of the house when we had that poor boy over, as if Phil were a hungry wolf. I love your father, but he’s a real American, isn’t he? They love to talk about second chances, but only Armenians — the first Christians — understand that the only way you can change people is through forgiveness. Not prison bars, not shunning.”

I asked what it was, exactly, she’d been trying to change about our man Phil. “His stupidity, or his indifference?”

“He was a young man with nothing,” she said. “He had no family. No home. No place he wanted to be. This can fill a person with shame. He was choosing, God bless him, whether or not to die. My brother? Me? All we were doing was trying to convince him to live.”

That’s when I asked if they’d been successful.

Under her breath, my mom cursed her brother for getting me involved. Then she said, “I want to tell you a story, too, one where he fixes one of his Volkswagens and drives to a place where he can feel at home, where he can live.”

“But?”

“For some, there is no such place. Not in this world, anyway.”

THE INCIDENT

The mascot — a cartoonlike Confederate soldier known affectionately on campus as Rebby the Blue — had been defiled. Unfortunately, the African American sophomore commissioned to wear the costume at the spring pep rally didn’t notice the freshly painted Hitler mustache until it was too late. Joshua Stilt fist-pumped his way onto the gymnasium floor, where he expected to be swathed in the intoxicating energy of school spirit. Instead, he was met with a wild mixture of laughter and hissing from the overwhelmingly white audience of five hundred. Afterwards, the local news sent a camera crew and a reporter to interview Joshua Stilt and the high school’s white principal about what was already being described in the Antelope Valley as the third or fourth greatest controversy of the year.

“To equate a Rebel soldier with Nazis is ridiculous,” said the principal in his prerecorded interview. “Rebels fought for freedom, you see, and Hitler fought for power. Anyone who knows history understands states’ rights and dictatorships are like Chinese food and cheese — totally incompatible.”

Peter Thorpe, the local reporter — having already heard the joke over Panda Express takeout at the principal’s house two nights earlier — decided against challenging his old friend’s logic. They had graduated as Rebels fewer than thirty years ago.

Quickly the conversation turned to identifying the culprit. For his part, Joshua Stilt — whose last name provoked jokes about his five-foot-nothing frame — became the first suspect. “If I’d wanted to make a political statement,” he told the reporter when he began to feel accused, “I’d have come up with something more intelligent.”

The story might have ended there had the local news segment not been seen by a famous film director, who happened to be this far north of Los Angeles to shoot an explosion scene in the desert. The director, a woman whose own fight for legitimacy in the male-dominated field of Hollywood action films had nurtured in her a sensitivity to the just indignations of others, sent a brief but excoriating email to the chiefs of major news organizations across California. Word spread. Soon, reporters at every major television network wanted a sit-down with Joshua Stilt. The local interest — who sullied Rebby the Blue? — was replaced by a national interest: What young black kid in twenty-first-century California would willingly don the uniform — cartoonlike or not — of a Confederate soldier?

Interview after interview produced the same response from Joshua Stilt: “I really enjoyed being the mascot, and I couldn’t change what the mascot was.” But what Joshua Stilt felt he could not do, national media attention proved able to. Shortly after the story broke, petitions, rallies, and lawsuits were organized to replace Rebby the Blue with a less political mascot for Antelope Valley High. After consulting his conscience, his Bible, his school district, and an online national poll, the suddenly apologetic principal revealed the new mascot at an assembly on the football field. An actual desert tortoise had been borrowed for the event from the conservatory, and, released from its cage, began eating blades of grass that had been painted white with the high school’s logo, a Stars and Bars flag that had not yet been replaced.

THE MEETING

A decade later, I planned to meet Joshua Stilt at a Mission District café in San Francisco, but saw him almost an hour early, standing at the yellow edge of the Rockridge BART platform in Oakland. The weather — warm and overcast — lent a cinematic, quiet texture to the whole scene, as if we were waiting for a steam engine and not a commuter train. For a moment I considered avoiding him until our planned meeting. Checking the overhead electronic platform scrolls, however, I saw that our train had been delayed due to a post-Occupy, largely impromptu protest a station ahead. Fearing Joshua Stilt might catch me avoiding him in that time, I went over to introduce myself.

He was donning those large white plastic headphones everyone our age seemed to be wearing in transit, and I had to reach out and touch him on the shoulder to get his attention. When he slid the headphones down around his neck, I said, “I’m Daley Kushner, the guy who’s writing about you.”

He’d grown up to become a stylish, handsome young man. He’d sprouted a good eight inches not including his early-’90s-style flattop fade (an additional two inches), complete with lines shaved into the sides of his head that reminded me, for whatever reason, of the wingtips on classic American cars. He wore large-framed black glasses and, despite the warm weather, a slim-fitting suede blazer that, only when the clouds passed temporarily, proved to be navy blue. We talked about the chance of rain and the clearer skies we could already make out across the bay until our train arrived, at which point, we found two empty seats and began to talk more comfortably.

“I won’t turn this on,” I said, showing him my digital recorder, “until we get to the café. Too much noise on these rails.”

“Very strange to see another AV kid outside the desert,” he said. “I guess you and I are special.”