Alligator Candy by David Kushner Page A

network of friends, family, and colleagues. I knew how much they loved to laugh and eat and celebrate the good times, how passionate they were about their work and the community around them. But even so, I had no idea how much of this was in place at the time Jon disappeared or, perhaps, how much of it had come as a result of that tragedy. I just knew that as much as I was searching for clues to my own story, one mystery seemed unfathomable: how they got through that week.
    The reporter gave one account of my dad’s answer during that interminable week. “ ‘We’ve been surviving on chemistry,’ Kushner said, referring to the number of tranquilizers, stimulants, and coffee they’ve taken to hold up under the pressure. ‘We get along, alone together,’ Kushner said, ‘and you cry and then you go back.’ ”
    But that was just a part it. In the story, my dad went to great lengths to talk about the incredible support that came from the most disparate places. “The one colossal good is that there has been a tremendous coming together, that lumps together the cleavages that separate each other,” he said. He spoke of the university crowd coming together with the police, the Jewish community with the non-Jews, the rich with the poor. My dad also spoke of the motorcycle biker who came to our house to help. The biker told my dad that he had his newly tuned cycle outside and wanted some “rough ground” to search. Later that day, the man returned, covered in mud, and told my dad, “Give me rougher ground.”
    My dad was not just a father who was missing a son. He was an anthropologist, filtering this experience through his trained eyes and mind. “I have come to realize fully,” my dad went on to the reporter, “if we adults present [people with] alternative ways of being human and applying their humanity, then they’ll use it.”
    The entire time I was reading the microfilm at the library, I knew what was coming. I didn’t know all the details, but I knew how this story ended: with Jon’s murder. But seeing the oversize headline on the front page of the Tampa Tribune from November 6, 1973, felt like a shock. “Body of Kushner Youth Found in Lonely Grave,” it read.
    I recoiled at the sight of the photos: the shot of the shrouded stretcher being carried into an ambulance, the photo of one of the two suspects being led somewhere in cuffs by the police. I absorbed enough of the story to confirm the few horrible details I knew, and perhaps, wanted to know: that Jon had suffocated on a gag and had been mutilated after he was dead. But I was too repulsed by the images of the killers to keep my eyes on the pages for very long.
    Instead, I quickly twisted the black knob of the microfilm machine, blurring the subsequent days of headlines and pictures as they scrolled by. At one point, I passed a photo that caused me to stop and rewind. The headline of the story was “Jonathan Is Laid to Rest.” It was a picture of my dad in his suit walking into our synagogue for the memorial service. I was walking beside him in my brown vest, slacks, and a checkered long-sleeve shirt that I recalled feeling like satin. I seemed to be looking up at my dad toward his downcast face, a face that I might have been scanning for clues. I was holding my father’s hand.

21
    T HE NEWSPAPER stories confirmed at least some of my haziest recollections: that Jon had, in fact, gone to the store for candy, and that he had promised to call home if it rained. I returned to that last memory I had of my brother: the two of us on the sidewalk. I remembered how I made him promise not only to call if it rained, but also to call so that I could remind him to get me the candy. Because he never phoned, I had always assumed that he never made it to the 7-Eleven at all, and that the killers had gotten him on his way in. Knowing that my memories were grounded in