shoes

I don't know when I discovered as a kid that East Lake Park is usually empty in the wee hours of Sunday mornings. Like a great many things in life, I find it to be best without people. There's something peaceful, even in this messed up enema insertion point of Tennessee, about a still pond with an errant swan slumming it with us ghetto folk under the same moon that all the rich fucks have to share with the rest of us.

 

The walk is vastly different from when I was a kid walking to school. I'm not constantly looking in every direction for possible attackers, but nearly every corner is replete with the memory of a fight or tense encounter with one or more of our local cast of crackheads. It's like walking through a mile and a half of the should'ves, could'ves, and why-didn't-yous that plague me in the shower. The brilliant comebacks that my brain took a few years to generate. The punches I regret throwing, and those I regret not throwing.

 

I was in the middle of such thoughts as I crested the hill where East Lake Elementary used to stand, now a field of grass reclaiming what used to be a parking lot and a playground made almost exclusively of OSHA violations and hostility toward children, when I saw two small shoes emerge, on their own, from a pile of leaves.

 

Just shoes.

 

I couldn't tell the color. They slowly meandered down 14th Avenue. The leaves followed as if carried on wind behind them, and then I remembered.

 

They found him in the leaves. He was ten.

 

He was the youngest of four brothers I knew about. I'd maintained a tense friendship with the middle brothers, wanting to be friends but never sure how they felt back, and then after his funeral, I never spoke to them again because I was a judgy prick and I was offended on his behalf that his brothers were playing tag at the funeral home.

 

I was thirteen at the time. My brother suspected his oldest brother had something to do with the murder (or at least with the motive--apparently he owed someone a lot of money), but the police investigation seemed to care more about the mystery and resulting publicity than asking the questions, and honestly it might be best anyway. We felt it heavy in the air, an open secret that the cops only pretended to care because this particular dead kid was white. Even if my brother was right, there can never be justice anyway and the suffering his older brother will experience for the rest of his life is more than can be wished from any prison.

 

I really, really fucking hope he was wrong, though.

 

The reports were beyond awful. He was suffocated, he was cut everywhere as if by pocket knives, they poured acid on him and tried to hide his tiny, sixty-pound body in leaves. I don't even know if they found his red bike.

 

I'd only met him twice in life, and all I could recall was that he loved his shoes. He even slept in them and he'd get pissed discovering in the morning that his parents took them off in the night.

 

It's been a quarter century. You're supposed to be 35 now, balding and fat, with a job you hate but kids you love more.

 

I'm sorry this happened to you. You never deserved anything like this.

 

I hope you found peace.

 

I hope your family found peace.

 

And I hope they buried you in your shoes.