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  FAVORITE SONS

  FAVORITE SONS

  A NOVEL

  ROBIN YOCUM

  ARCADE PUBLISHING

  NEW YORK

  Copyright © 2011 by Robin Yocum

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  Arcade Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or [email protected].

  Arcade Publishing® is a registered trademark of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.

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  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN: 978-1-61145-004-0

  Printed in the United States of America

  Acknowledgments

  This book would not have been possible without the women in my life.

  The first is Frances Kennedy, who found the sample chapters of my manuscript on the slush pile at the Doe Coover Agency. Frances, bless her Irish heart, liked what she read and passed them on to Colleen Mohyde.

  There are many talented writers out there who are never fortunate enough to find an agent like Colleen. What a gem. She has been a warrior on my behalf and I am extremely appreciative.

  Colleen put the manuscript into the very capable hands of Lilly Golden, who wisely snatched it up. Her deft touch in editing my manuscript made it a much better read.

  In Columbus, we are fortunate to have a terrific literary center— Thurber House. The executive director is Susanne Jaffe, who has been a friend and constant motivator during my journey to get a novel published.

  Prologue

  My entire professional career has been spent prying secrets out of the accused. When it comes down to it, it’s not a complicated job. The path to learning the truth is simply decoding lies and uncovering layers of secrets.

  The lies are easy. Every accused in the history of the criminal justice system has lied. Big lies. Little lies. White lies. Monster lies. It’s a given. Fortunately, most criminals are not Harvard graduates. It is relatively easy to sort through their statements and pick out the improbabilities and impossibilities. What remains is a semblance of the truth.

  It’s the secrets that cause police detectives and prosecutors heartache.

  Secrets can be fragile. Their structure can be torn apart by a whisper, a faint betrayal into the ear of another. Secrets also can be powerful, for they can control and haunt lives for many years.

  In 1983 a woman showed up in the lobby of the Summit County Prosecutor’s Office and said she wanted to report a homicide. These were the types of water runs that the new guys got sent on, and as I had been there less than a year I was summoned to the lobby. Her name was Angela Swan and she claimed to have witnessed the homicide. She was fifty-two years old and had deep creases running away from tired, rheumy eyes. As I walked with her to a nearby conference room, Swan nervously rubbed her hands together and said that even at this late juncture, she was feeling guilty about what she was about to tell me.

  The homicide had taken place when she was six years old. She had been out with her father, riding in the passenger seat of his pickup truck. He bought her a bottle of pop and told her that he needed to stop and talk to a man. She remembered that he pulled off the road into a parking lot and gravel crunched under the truck tires; bright orange and red leaves adorned the trees. Her dad patted her on the knee and said, “You wait here, sweetheart,” then got out of the truck to talk to the man. When the talk turned loud, she strained to look over the dashboard as her dad pulled a pistol from under his jacket and shot the man, maybe in the chest. The blast scared her and she spilled orange pop down the front of a blue and white dress embroidered with butterflies. The gun exploded a second time and a thin line of blood squirted across the windshield. The man fell and her dad fired the gun three more times. She didn’t know what triggered the argument or where the parking lot was located. The truck fishtailed and she slid hard against the door as they sped from the lot, gravel pelting the wheel wells, and the panicked look on her father’s face brought her to tears. Somewhere on the way home he pulled to the side of the road and wiped the blood from the windshield with his handkerchief, then stuffed it between the steel grates of a storm sewer. When he jumped back in the truck he cupped her face in his hands and said, “Angie, sweetheart, you can never tell anyone what happened today. Not your friends, your teacher, your grandma and grandpa, not even your mommy. It has to be our secret. Do you understand?” She nodded, and had faithfully kept the secret for forty-six years.

  When she was young, Angela said she and her dad occasionally spoke in whispers of that day, and each time she renewed her vow of silence. Her dad told her the man he shot was a very bad guy—just like the desperados in the westerns they watched at the Paramount Theatre. It was a great game.

  But as she grew older, she witnessed other disturbing actions of her father, which she didn’t want to discuss—more secrets. She began to wonder if the dead man had been, in fact, a very bad man. She wondered who he was, wondered if he had a little girl who missed her father and was tormented by not knowing why he had been murdered. Angela couldn’t get it out of her head. But she could never betray her father. Wouldn’t even consider it.

  Her father had died a week before she showed up in the lobby. Now that he was gone, she felt obligated to report the homicide. Her father’s name was Philip Economos. She doubted that anyone was around who remembered the dead man, and didn’t know if anyone even cared, but she had to get it off her chest.

  Since she didn’t know where the shooting had taken place, I went to the library and searched the newspaper microfilm for the fall of 1937, the year Angela Swan was six and the time of year when the leaves would be changing color. On October 13, a story appeared on the front page of the Beacon Journal about a man found dead in a roller-skating rink parking lot—shot once in the chest, once in the shoulder, and three times in the back of the head. His name was Willie Backus and he owned the roller rink. He had no criminal record. Neither his lone surviving brother, his ex-wife, nor his only son could shed any light on what may have precipitated the shooting. The reason Willie Backus died, it seemed, was itself a secret that died with Philip Economos.

  Angela was a rarity. She kept her secret, smothering the information for forty-six years. Most people can’t keep a secret for forty-six minutes. Those who commit crimes without witnesses quite often cannot keep their own secrets. They precipitate their own undoing because they feel compelled to talk. They tell a friend or a girlfriend, who one day becomes a former girlfriend, and soon it is no longer a secret.

  I kept my secret, not as long as Angela kept hers, but for a formidable number of years. I didn’t tell my mother, or my now ex-wife, or any of the friends and girlfriends who passed through my life. I could never reveal my secret and relieve myself of its crushing burden. To do so would not only have destroyed my life, but the lives of those who were once most dear to me.

  Secrets are central to misdeeds, infidelities, and betrayals. Without wrongdoing, there would be little need for secrets. The consequences, whether you’re a six-year-old girl with an orange Nehi, a teenage boy running with his buddies, or a man sworn to uphold the law, may not be realized for decades. There is no way to project to the future and know what
those consequences will be. You wait and wonder, not if, but when the rogue asteroid that is circling your life will make its fiery reentry, and with each passing year, the consequences grow, lives become intertwined, and the pain in the chest refuses to subside.

  Hutchinson Van Buren

  Akron, Ohio

  October 14, 2004

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Part1

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Part2

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eightteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  PART I

  Chapter One

  Petey Sanchez was a troubled human being, a stewpot of mental, emotional, and psychological problems manifested in the body of a wild-eyed seventeen-year-old, who cursed and made screeching bird noises as he rode around town on a lime green spider bike with fluorescent pink streamers flying out from the handlebars. Mothers could never relax when Petey was in the neighborhood. He had been banned from every backyard in town, but that didn’t stop him from pedaling through the alleys and around the blocks, watching, staring, circling like a wolf on the lighted fringes of an encampment. Occasionally, an angry mother would shoo him off with the gentleness normally reserved for stray curs. “Get out of here, Petey. Go on, git. Go home.” He would scream like a wounded raptor and flee, only to return a short time later, circling from a safer distance—pedaling and watching. Crystalton was a little less than two miles long and only about five blocks wide, squeezed hard between the Appalachian foothills and the Ohio River, so even when Petey wasn’t in view, he was never far away, a wispy, ubiquitous apparition looming in shadow and mind.

  From an early age, I learned the difference between Petey and the other kids who rode the little yellow bus out of town each morning to the school for the handicapped and mentally retarded in Steubenville. To my mother, most of them were objects of pity. There was a girl who lived down the street from us, Sarah Duncan, a frizzy-haired little kid who was cross-eyed, wore bulky, metallic braces on her legs, and struggled to the bus stop every morning, swinging each stiffened leg in an awkward arc. When she passed our open kitchen window you could hear with each footfall the clack of the steel braces and the squeak of the leather restraints, which would cause my mother to sigh, push an open palm to her breast, and say, “That poor little thing.” Then, she would turn and glare at me, the corners of her eyes and lips crinkling in anger at my apparent lack of appreciation for the gifts I had been given, and say, without pause for a breath, “You should count your lucky stars that you were born with ten fingers, ten toes, and a good mind. Don’t ever let me hear that you were teasing that little Duncan girl. Do you understand me, mister?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You better. If I hear a word of it I’ll knock you into tomorrow.”

  And she would have. Miriam Van Buren was a sturdy, humorless single mother who meted out discipline to her three children without impunity. She had strong wrists and heavy hands, which I had felt everywhere from the back of my head to my ass. Never mind that my various infractions had never once been for making fun of any handicapped kid. Mom always felt duty bound to forewarn me against potential indiscretions.

  But she had no such sympathy for Petey Sanchez, of whom she said, simply, “Stay away from that boy; he’s not right in the head.”

  I didn’t need the warning. From an early age I had both detested and feared Petey Sanchez, and bore a J-shaped scar on my chin that I received in the fifth grade after he shoved a stick into the spokes of my bicycle, locking up the front wheel and sending me hurtling over the handlebars face-first into the asphalt parking lot at the elementary school. On our way back from the emergency room my mother stopped by the Sanchezes’ to talk to Petey’s mother and show the gash that had taken eight stitches to close. When Mrs. Sanchez saw us standing on her front porch with a gauze bandage taped to my chin, she sighed and shook her head, weary of the steady stream of neighbors and police officers knocking on the door with complaints about their feral son. “I’m awfully sorry, Miriam,” said Lila Sanchez, a sickly thin woman with train-track scars along the base of her neck from a bout with thyroid cancer. “I know that boy’s out of control, but I can’t do a doggone thing with him.”

  As we climbed back in the car, my mother reiterated her early admonitions. “Stay away from the boy.” That seemed to be the solution offered by most parents. Unfortunately, staying clear of Petey had its own challenges. He cruised the streets of Crystalton with more regularity than our police department. Throughout elementary and junior high school, if I saw Petey pedaling down the street, or heard his screeching cry, I would duck between houses or hide behind trees to avoid him. If you made eye contact with Petey he would call you a queer and a faggot, his favorite words, and try to run you over with his bicycle.

  Petey was the second youngest of the nine children born to Lila and Earl Sanchez, who worked as a coupler on the Pennsylvania Railroad and had lost four fingers and a thumb to his job. The Sanchezes lived at the far north end of town in a paint-starved Victorian house with chipped slate shingles and sagging gutters that was wedged between the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad tracks and the water treatment plant, where following each heavy storm, effluvium overflowed into the drainage ditch behind their house. They were all skinny, pinched-faced kids with stringy hair the color of dirty straw and the unwashed smell of urine. Petey had a similar look, except he had bad buckteeth that were fuzzy and yellow, rimmed with decay, and foul-smelling. However, the feature that overwhelmed his narrow face was a calcified ridge that ran from the bridge of his nose and disappeared into his hairline, the result of a botched birth during which the doctor grossly misused a pair of forceps. If all this wasn’t misfortune enough, his forehead ran back from the calcified ridge, giving his thin face a trout-like quality. This battering of the skull and brain was most likely the genesis of Petey’s cocktail of problems. Lila had told my mom that there were times when Petey would roll around on the floor of their living room, sometimes for hours, squeezing his temples between his palms and crying like a fox in a leg trap.

  My first introduction to Petey Sanchez was when I was six years old and riding my new bicycle with training wheels down the sidewalk from the house. Behind me, I heard someone making a noise like a police siren and soon Petey flew by me on his bicycle, head tilted upward, mouth agape, howling away. He stopped broadside on the walk, blocking me. I was terrified. He was wearing a dime-store police badge on his T-shirt and carrying a small pad and the stub of a pencil in his hip pocket. Pointing a grimy index finger at my face, Petey slobbered down his chin while admonishing me in a tongue I did not comprehend for a violation I could not fathom. He then pulled the pad and pencil from his pocket, wrote some nonsensical drivel on the paper, ripped it out and handed it to me, then continued down the sidewalk in search of his next traffic violator. When I returned home and showed my mother the “ticket” and told her of my encounter with the strange boy who talked but couldn’t say words, she shook her head and for the first time in my life I heard, “That was Petey Sanchez. Stay away from him. He’s not right in the head.”


  Petey’s traffic cop antics continued for several years. It seemed harmless enough at first, but after a while Petey started demanding that the young violators pay their fines with whatever change they had in their pockets. Parents complained, but it didn’t stop for good until the day Chief Durkin walked out of Williams Drug Store and saw Petey making a traffic stop with a very realistic-looking .38-caliber revolver stuck between his belt and pants.

  “Helping me with some speeders, huh, Petey?” Chief Durkin said as he approached Petey and a terrified little girl on the verge of tears.

  “Uh-huh,” Petey said.

  “Did you get the license plate number of her bicycle?” the chief asked, pointing to the rear fender of the girl’s bike.When Petey turned his head, Chief Durkin snatched the revolver. Petey screamed, called the chief a queer and a faggot, and lunged for the weapon, which looked realistic because it was, and fully loaded. A highly agitated Chief Durkin put Petey in the back of the cruiser and took him home. “What the hell is wrong with you, Earl, leaving a loaded gun around where a boy like that can get his hands on it?” the chief asked. “Why in hell do you even own a gun? You don’t have enough fingers left to pull the damn trigger.”

  It was one thing after another with Petey. For a while he ran through the streets at night with a black cape, pretending to be a vampire. During another stretch he lurked in bushes and behind fences, pretending to be a tiger, leaping out and scaring young and old, then running off, growling. Twice he got angry with his parents and set his own house on fire, though miraculously the tinderbox was saved both times.

  Parents in Crystalton worried that Petey would someday badly hurt or kill another child. Still, most would not reprimand Petey for his misdeeds because they feared he would return in the night and set their houses on fire. Thus, there was a silent but collective sigh of relief among these parents when on the evening of Tuesday, June 15, 1971, a berry picker found the body of Petey Sanchez on Chestnut Ridge.