He was accused and then jailed and then released on a lowered, fifty-thousand-dollar surety bond with an ankle bracelet, got his old job back, and was even allowed to attend a class at the community college one morning a week. His grandparents put up their Lexington farmhouse for the bail money. All in all, not bad for a guy headed to trial in a murder case.
Hour one and Preston was already thinking of ways to get out of work, go home where no one would stare at him or whisper before he was out of earshot. How could Preston Venture show his face anywhere within a hundred miles of here? Why would he want to?
Understandable questions, Preston thought. He filled two buckets with popcorn and pinched them together at the rims, carefully lifted one drink and held it against his side with his upper arm, and gripped the other in his right hand.
“Did you put butter on these?”
He knew the girl from school. Wendy Turnbill. She hadn’t liked him even before the murder case. Now she hated him. It was easy to tell, because when she came to the front counter at the Brenn Flix Complex she silently mouthed “murderer” at him and gouged the two girls with her until they did the same.
“Yep, they got butter,” he said.
“Don’t look like it to me,” Wendy said. She waved another worker over. “I asked for butter on these and he’s refusing to do it. What are you all going to do about it? I should get it for free, if you ask me.”
She had, Preston realized now, ordered a lot with this in mind. Three large popcorns, three large drinks, three packs of chocolate-covered peanuts, and three packs of Starburst. It totaled seventy-three dollars and fifty cents.
Preston’s coworker looked baffled, then said he’d get the manager. He returned with a bespectacled man possibly in his fifties wearing a short-sleeve western pearl snap button-up and jeans so tight his unusually large kneecaps looked like kneepads about to burst through the stitching. He seemed bored and scratched absently at a poorly maintained beard riddled with bald patches.
“You forget a thing so simple as to be reflex,” the man said, then turned to Wendy and her friends. “We apologize, miss. Take your stuff and head on in.”
Wendy stretched an exaggerated wide smile that smushed her eyes into tiny slits and walked off with her bounty and one last, silent “I hate you.” Preston hated her, too.
And his hatred for Wendy didn’t start up after his arrest, though she was pivotal in the police getting the warrant issued. He disliked her before that. Disliked her for her pettiness and condescending ways, her downright disdain for her own culture. To Preston, she was nothing more than a traitor to good people trying their best to survive.
Still, a part of him couldn’t blame the town. If the situation was different and he was on the outside looking in, it was more than possible he might have the same feelings about someone else indicted for complicity to commit murder. Being honest with himself in the darkest hours of the night when sleep was a scattered thing of total imagination, he did hate himself. Because what he knew and still hadn’t told was that Ethan Hackett had killed Micca Henderson. There was no questioning it. Preston had watched it happen.
The three of them had been four-wheeling on the old mining road along Pine Branch ridge all that morning. Micca rode with Ethan and Preston alone, trailing behind. He wasn’t as sharp as Ethan on a four-wheeler, so he was always pressed to follow.
Preston had been born with the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck. It had been tangled that way for so long it altered his speech for about the first seven years of his life. His voice was a spittle-infused growl that came from the right side of his mouth. The left side remained tightly closed, the lips protruding nearly half an inch. Utterances were a phlegmy mash of syllables occasionally occurring close enough to make one full word, and the entire time Preston was miserably squinting and twitching and, to make it half as worse, stuttering.
No one could understand him except his parents and Ethan. Rather than joining the other students in tormenting him, Ethan took up for Preston, arguing with his relentless tormentors, often fighting his way through. The two stayed close during grade school and then, in their first year of high school, Micca Henderson moved in from Elizabethtown.
The next four years, Ethan exerted the full breadth of his affections on Micca. She was slender with the kind of black hair that glistened under lights, the shine flowing in sideways bars from the crown of her head to the expertly trimmed tips as she moved beneath them. Her honeyed eyes always complimentary to a wide, slightly bucktoothed smile. All this in direct contrast with Ethan, who was short and chubby enough to be noticeable and kept acne on either side of his nose and across his forehead. His teeth were tinted a dull yellow, though he never smoked, and he kept body odor year-round that permeated the room as if he had just come in from cutting grass.
Despite this mismatch, at the beginning of their junior year, Ethan had at last worn Micca down and they started dating. Seven months into their relationship, whispers began circulating of Micca sleeping around on him. Still, he treated her as if the whispers were only whispers. Buying her gifts, having flowers sent to the school on special holidays, and taking her anywhere she wanted to go before she got her driver’s license. The latter would push him to his breaking point and result in a frenzied end to the relationship
Ethan, not one for socializing outside of school, dropped Micca off at the party. He walked her in and saw three boys on the couch already drinking. One of them was Muntu Taylor, one of the several guys Micca had been supposedly cheating with over the past few weeks.
Ethan would mention it to Preston a few times a week afterward, because more rumors started up again about Micca during the party, one so heartbreaking Ethan could not say it aloud. It was told Micca had been with two of the boys, one of which was Taylor, for a threesome that took place in the living room with many watching and cheering them on.
It all changed Ethan. After graduation, he bolstered the courage to break up with Micca. He didn’t want to. He loved her and would have been willing to forgive her, but the same talk continued once they’d enrolled in community college together. The only way out was to end it, but the whole mess followed him around for two years. Everyone, even some he had considered friends joining in.
Preston was there for Ethan in the best way he knew how. Men and boys were to remain stoic. Sharing feelings was an act made up of going to shoot pool, drinking whiskey until time to switch to beer or suffer hangovers, shooting basketball. But Ethan only grew increasingly disconnected. He went full half hours without talking while they were out, in time trimming his side of conversation into yes or no responses.
What followed was an upfront seat to Ethan’s drop into a void. Before he pulled himself back together, there would two suicide attempts, a six-month stint on the mental floor in Hazard, and plenty of alcohol and drugs. He disappeared for days at a time, missing work and telling no one where he was going. Then, in reverse of a process that pulled him into depression and possibly beyond, he was Ethan again. In the final week leading up to Micca’s death, Ethan was always bright and cheery, as if he had been given excellent news.
It was a surprise first that Ethan asked Micca out for some off-road four-wheeling and, second, that she accepted. The ride was usually about a thirty-minute round trip. That day, though, about a quarter of a mile in, Ethan had taken a sharp left and popped over a small rise that led down into a small natural spring trickling about a foot wide over mossy rocks. Preston heard only the splash of the water and the high buzz of Ethan gunning it deeper into the woods. Within one or two minutes it was as if he had been riding completely alone. No sounds of any kind, which was strange, he thought then, but understood now.
Preston hadn’t known a trail existed there at all until Ethan slammed out of view with Micca loping to one side, nearly falling. And it really wasn’t a trail. Ethan followed slowly but had to dodge several slim scrub pines and various croppings of boulders. He crested another steeper rise and saw the two of them far down in a deep valley, parked on a flat piece of land around the size of a two-door garage.
He started to turn around and leave and wished now he had. There was nothing unique happening. It was disgusting, but not uncommon. Ethan was coming onto Micca at close range, his chest pushed into hers, clawing his fingers into her sides and ass. At one point going so far as to lift her leg to sit her on top of him on the four-wheeler. It had passed playful (if it ever had been) well before Preston made it there and he was doing nothing; he was a gob-smacked sentry only watching in silence at what he knew was wrong.
That was his burden to carry, seeing Ethan become more and more violent until finally he had pulled a knife from a bag attached to the side of the four-wheeler and without a moment’s hesitation sliced into Micca’s neck.
The coroner’s report would later state her neck was cut so severely she was essentially decapitated. If Preston was made to testify when all the court proceedings got going, he knew one detail the prosecutor would attempt to pull from him on the stand.
When Ethan made the cut Micca’s head fell back as if on a hinge. And if the prosecutor was going to ask him that, which the defense lawyer said would happen, there was a real chance that Preston would faint right there in the box.
What Preston did next was his hammer and nails. He spun around on his four-wheeler when Ethan made the cut and let out a short but loud scream. When he turned back, Ethan was already running to him up the hillside. He made it to him faster than Preston would have ever thought possible. Blood had gushed all over his shirt, splashed far up on his right arm, and had drenched the front of his jeans. His face was blood-flecked, primal, completely unraveled from reality.
Com’on, com’on, com’on was all Ethan had kept saying, pulling Preston down the hill toward Micca’s body. While being pulled down the hill, Preston went physically, mentally, and emotionally numb in a way he’d only read about in books and heard people talk about in movies, something he never thought truly happened. But he had known when he said so during his deposition that it wouldn’t go over well. And it didn’t. It was cast in the same light as temporary insanity, a plea meant to throw off responsibility for one’s actions, most jurors felt, according to Preston’s court-appointed lawyer. Still, it was the truth, and he wasn’t going to start off by lying.
However, in the weeks following the deposition, Preston gradually began to face his own weakness. He did remember. He remembered helping Ethan, bending to the boy’s will in a way that Micca had been brave and strong enough to fight against. He might have felt wholly numb during it, but he remembered. He had seen Ethan make that sweeping cut. He had helped Ethan clean things up. He had thrown away the knife.
The line for snacks grew thinner. A few couples filtered in minutes apart, bought only tickets and nothing else, and scurried past the velvet ropes hoping previews were still going. When after the allotted five minutes went by with no moviegoers, Preston restocked candy and popcorn. He hoped to get up to the projection booth, take a shift in the new A24 movie. He got lucky and Dave stepped out for a smoke, asking for coverage.
As a kid he had gone with his dad to a drive-in where his uncle worked. They had all sat in the projection booth and watched the movie, but Preston was mesmerized by the canisters full of film, how his uncle marked the frames now and then, how he always allowed the last frame to flip and flip and flip for a few seconds before pulling it all loose to start again for the second showing.
He was thinking of those days as he nearly jogged through the hallways of the Brenn to the booth. After a sweep check, he settled in. Hugh Grant was at a table with board games spread across it talking to two girls on the verge of crying. After watching for ten or so minutes Preston made the slow transition from attentive to that blurred state of not-quite daydreaming. The movie took on a dissolving pattern, the square screen going soft at the corners, rounding off. In that state, he thought not of what he’d done, but what he hadn’t done. And more about what he still could do to balance all that had happened.
Somewhere off-screen he heard his echoing yelp into the woods, softened in the dark and stretched into one, long exhale. On the blurred screen, the girls and their tormentor spread in kaleidoscopic magnification like algae beneath a lens, flattened by the pressure of one thumb.
Then in all the clouded obscurity, appearing bright and clear, was Ethan in the dead center of the hazy screen, covered in blood from his waist up. He looked like a tooth pulled too soon, his legs extended fangs, his chest up evidence of a violent uprooting from the body. It reminded him that Ethan sat in jail right now with nothing to do but think and worry. Maybe plan? At the last bond hearing Preston had appeared, Ethan looked rumpled and disarranged somehow, his hair grown out and unwashed, the tattered prison garb hanging from him like a failing second skin. What Preston remembered most was that Ethan had looked capable.
The longer Ethan remained the centerpiece of his vision, the more his first moments of confusion at what he had seen rose up in him. What had caused his childhood friend to do something so revolting? Had he missed something in Ethan’s personality over the years? Had there been a gradual escalation Preston might have noticed sooner? These contorting thoughts led him to believe he might have failed Micca twice. It was surely possible, because a person didn’t do what Ethan had done without there having been a seed and then growth over time far before the culminating act.
Preston realized he was numb again, as he said he had been in the woods that day. He was able to consider now just how powerless he was then. No, he was numb in plenty of ways but in the projection booth he still caught the scent of buttered popcorn, the amalgam of scents rising from the theater below, a stale mix of floor wax and hundreds of dropped snacks and spilled pops. There was the whirring of the camera and an occasional soft chatter from the audience like seventeen-year locusts half-buried in valleys far away vying upward to breed. And he could still see Ethan as the looming, on-screen focal point leaning forward in his decay.
Those days when his uncle ran the drive-in, Preston might have snapped fully back when the reel started spinning, but it wasn’t those days. He accepted the certainty he’d never see a day like that again.
When the theater was empty, he was able to shake loose from his stupor, and, slowly, his surroundings began to level back out. Everything except the on-screen Ethan. Preston leaned forward, narrowed his eyes to see out from the porthole and mouthed Wendy Turnbill’s three words to the bloody image three times, each time with more conviction. Then he covered his face with his hands and bent over, elbows pinned to his knees, and said the words again, rubbing and gouging his eyes with his knuckles.
