A Brilliant Death Read online

  I miss my hometown and those simpler times. But the Brilliant I grew up in no longer exists. The steel mills up and down the river have folded, and the once-proud communities that lined the Ohio River have been reduced to decaying shells of grander days. I don’t get up the river much anymore. As editor and columnist for the Morning Journal, most of my working day is spent in the office in Wheeling. My two young daughters seem to gobble up whatever time is left. My parents moved to the Outer Banks of North Carolina a few years ago and, except for an occasional class reunion, there is no reason to go back. But, when I do go visit, I always take the back road by way of Hunter’s Ridge.

  At the spot where the car left the road, at the entrance to the park, the adult Bible study class from the Brilliant United Methodist Church placed a white cross made of four-by-fours, with the initials “T.F.B.”—Travis Franklin Baron—on the crossbar. I helped Jim Gilmartin haul the cross to the park entrance in the back of his International Harvester pickup truck. We took turns working through the rocky earth with a post hole digger to get below the frost line, and dumped a bag of quick-drying cement into the hole, along with water he brought in empty milk jugs. When he was sure the cement was set and the cross true, he asked me to bow my head, and he said a brief prayer, asking God to give Travis a better life in heaven than he’d had on earth. Two days later, I left for college. As the years passed and Travis Baron grew distant in the memories of many, the letters faded, the cross bleached out, and it was eventually claimed by the hillside.

  Like the steel mills, Travis is gone. The loss of the mills and my friend only serves to remind me of the fragile state of life, whether it was a hulking, smoke-belching steel mill or an auburn-haired kid with a crooked smile.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Saturday, June 12, 1971

  The Colerain Coal & Gas Company bought the mineral rights to Tarr’s Dome in the early 1950s. Within a year, it was a dome no more. The dozers and power shovels stripped it clean, grading flat the crown of the hill, leaving it cratered and looking like the surface of the moon. Over the years, the grass and foxtail returned to the top of the hill. Wild blackberry and locust bushes and assorted other brambles took root and sprouted, followed by some sickly pines and maples that could never get solid purchase in the scarred earth. The craters left behind filled with water, forming a chain of interconnected ponds that stretched across the top of the hill. For reasons that are unknown to me, they were referred to as the Tea Ponds.

  The Tea Ponds were shallow and a heavy rain would send water streaming over their banks and down the east face of the hillside. Over the years, the falling waters had created rutted paths that one minute could look like a dried creek bed and the next be home to a torrent that could dump tens of thousands of gallons of water down the backside of Brilliant, filling the air with the pungent smell of sulfur. After the spring thaw or a late summer downpour, the muddy swill would rush down the streets, washing gravel out of parking lots and driveways on its way to the floodplain. The Brilliant Church of Christ was built in the 1920s, three decades before Tarr’s Dome was stripped. Now, however, the old stone church had the misfortune of resting on a small plateau between the steepest part of the hill and the floodplain, square in the middle of the water flows. The heavy spring rains annually flooded the basements of the parsonage and church and made a lake of the parking lot.

  Such was the case on the Saturday afternoon of the memorial service for Travis Franklin Baron. The gravel parking lot was under six inches of water. Those attending the memorial service were forced to park down the street or in the Miners and Mechanics Bank lot. As the mourners tiptoed across the squishy turf at the back of the property, or danced from one exposed rock to another in the church driveway, three shoeless, bare-chested boys of about ten frolicked in the temporary sea surrounding the church, throwing mud balls at each other, blithely oblivious to the somber mood of those around them. I wanted desperately to join them. I was consumed by the desire to strip off my shirt and shoes and do a running belly flop in the puddles. What a wonderful diversion it would be compared to the simple, yet painful task to which I was duty-bound—attending the memorial service for my best friend. Sitting on the stone wall that sloped downhill from the parsonage toward the bank parking lot, I stared alternately from the playing boys to the water that flowed through the ditch along Campbell Avenue. My world smelled of dead night crawlers and fetid mud. The humidity being pulled from the earth dampened my shirt and salted my upper lip. Unrelenting static filled my ears, and a headache that pounded with each beat of my heart had settled in behind my right eye. I wanted to vomit, hoping that the violent expulsion of the acid and bile that had settled in my throat would somehow cleanse me of the overwhelming sadness and pain that had engulfed me for seven days.

  I sat on the uphill end of the wall, nearest the church, with my friends Snookie McGruder, Urb Keltenecker, and Brad Nantz, and my cousin Nick Ducheski, whom everyone called Duke. He wasn’t one of the Brilliant gang. He lived in Mingo Junction, our rival community to the north, but Duke, Travis, and I had spent hours together in our youth, and he came to support me.

  None of us wanted to go inside, but as the organ began to play, low and soft, we all stood as though controlled by the same puppeteer and started toward the sanctuary.

  After three days, the torrential rains had finally quit the morning of the service, though low, slate-colored clouds stretched across the valley, clinging to the hilltops to the west, as though merely granting us a brief respite, a subtle reminder to the valley below that their work was not yet complete.

  The doors to the church were brass and every bit of ten feet high. They had been propped open to allow for some circulation in the muggy church, and Mr. Janowicz was ready to close them when he saw us walking up the steps, our shoes all damp from the dance across the gravel drive. He smiled a faint smile and waited until we had passed to pull the doors shut.

  Frank Baron was taking up a generous portion of the second pew, sitting next to his brother, Leonard. Big Frank was hunched forward, his elbows resting on his knees, an ill-fitting olive sports coat stretched tight across his back. His pants were black and too short, revealing a pair of white socks and worn black dress shoes. His face was ashen and drawn, battered by nearly a week of little sleep. My natural cynicism made me feel certain he was more distraught over the loss of his beloved Chevy than that of his son. Between his teeth he rolled a toothpick, while nervously twisting a pinkie ring on his left hand. We walked across the back of the church and slipped into one of the last remaining seats, about halfway up and against the wall. But I could not do so without being seen by Big Frank, who had turned to scan the sanctuary.

  “Is that his dad up front?” Duke asked.

  “Yeah, that’s the fat man,” I whispered.

  “Why is he staring you down?”

  “Because I’ve been ducking him ever since Travis died.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s a horse’s ass, and he has questions that I can’t answer.”

  “Two good reasons,” Duke said.

  The day after the accident, Frank told Snookie and Urb to tell me that he wanted to talk.

  “About what?” I had asked.

  “What else? The fight,” Urb said. “He cornered us at the Coffee Pot. He said he wanted to know what you and Travis were fighting about before the crash.”

  “What’d you tell him?”

  “I said I didn’t know,” Urb said.

  “Me, too,” Snookie added. “I didn’t want Big Frank breathing down my neck.”

  They both had lied. They had been there and knew perfectly well what we had been fighting about.

  “I’ve already explained it to the police and my parents, and I don’t want to talk to Big Frank.”

  “I figured you didn’t, but I wasn’t going to tell him that,” Snookie said. “That guy scares the ba-jeesus outa me.”

  I didn’t like Big Frank Baron. Never had. He had been a miserable father to
Travis, who everyone around Brilliant had referred to as “the orphan” because Frank paid him so little attention. Travis had practically raised himself, and his dad was never there for any of the important events in his life. He was not there when Travis won the conference cross country title, or the district wrestling championship, or the Jefferson County Oration Competition, which he won for a critical analysis of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. I don’t think Big Frank ever made a single parent-teacher conference. He could not be bothered, and I despised him for the years of abuse—a lifetime, as it turned out—he had heaped on Travis. And, frankly, like most other people in town, I was terrified of him, too. You really didn’t want to piss off Big Frank Baron.

  As I took my seat, I could feel his eyes on me, but I avoided his glare. I looked at the service bulletin and pretended to mutter to Snookie—anything to avoid looking up.

  As the organist finished the last strains of Amazing Grace, I saw Big Frank turn around in his seat. I took a breath and looked toward the front of the church as Reverend Horvath stood before the congregation and in his booming voice said, “Lord, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is; that I may know how frail I am. Psalms. Thirty-nine: four.” He smiled faintly. “Let us pray.”

  The lower sanctuary and the balcony were full. Nearly all of the Brilliant High School class of 1971 was in attendance. Even Margaret Simcox, who had fought with Travis nearly every day for twelve years of school, sat amid our classmates, sobbing. Travis, I thought, would love this. I half expected to look up in the balcony and see him taking it all in, gleeful, his brows arched, that lopsided grin consuming his face.

  Reverend Horvath spoke of how only God could make sense of such a tragic death. I wasn’t paying much attention. Nothing Reverend Horvath had to say was going to make me feel any better about losing my friend. Ever since the accident, people kept approaching me like I had lost a member of my family. And, in a way, I had. They offered their condolences, but ultimately they wanted to know if I thought our fight had caused Travis to commit suicide. No, I told them. It had been an accident. That’s all. The fight had consisted of Travis popping me once in the nose and the two of us falling into a heap in Mrs. Robinson’s peonies. Actually, he also gave me a head butt when we hit the ground, but that was all. I didn’t even hit him back. In the six days since then, it had grown to a battle of Biblical proportions. I was tired of the questions and tired of the waiting. I just wanted it all to be over. The organ music was a drone in my ears, and Reverend Horvath’s words had no penetration. After the final prayer, several adults went up to offer condolences to Big Frank, and Duke and I slipped out.

  But once he had me in his sights, Big Frank was not about to let me go. He hurried past those lined up to speak to him and went out the side door, slogging through water in the parking lot that was over his shoes, his belly jiggling out of his dress shirt, and then running down Campbell Avenue after me. We were almost to Third Street when Duke said, “You’ve got company.” I turned to see Big Frank lumbering down the road, and I stood at the corner of Campbell and Third, waiting.

  He was sucking for air by the time he got to me. “You been duckin’ me, boy,” Big Frank said between breaths. “We need to talk.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  I can’t remember a time when Travis wasn’t around. In my mind’s eye, he was always there, a permanently ingrained part of my youth, with a smudged face, a mop of shaggy auburn hair, and a dirty, oversized T-shirt falling off one shoulder and hanging around his knees. He had a glint in his eye that teamed with a lopsided grin as though they were partners in mischief. Travis was a little guy—“puny” or “scrawny” as my dad called him, though my mother preferred “sickly.” Mom was forever shoving food at Travis, trying to fatten him up.

  “Travis, would you like a sandwich?” she would ask.

  “No, thanks,” he would respond.

  “Sure you do. You know, you wouldn’t have that runny nose all the time if you’d put on a little weight,” she would say, pressing a fried bologna and cheese sandwich into his hand. Travis always resisted the offer, claiming he wasn’t hungry, but he would wolf down the food like he hadn’t eaten in days, which, given his home situation, was entirely possible.

  My dad watched in amazement as Travis ate lunch one day and said, “That boy eats like he just got out of a concentration camp.”

  There were times when I don’t think Travis left our house for a week. He had the run of the neighborhood, but he seemed to like our house best. To Travis, my family was a caricature from a Norman Rockwell painting. “You guys are like normal people,” he often said. “You eat meals at the table and talk to each other without screaming.”

  Travis was less than a year old when his mother drowned in the boating accident that was the scandal of the century in Brilliant. Big Frank was out on the road in his tractor-trailer, delivering a load of sheet metal in Arkansas, and, according to the most popular version of what occurred that night, she apparently seized the opportunity to take her lover out on Big Frank’s cabin cruiser for a late-night rendezvous. The couple became so impassioned that they forgot to anchor their boat, and it drifted into the path of a coal barge. The horn and spotlights of the towboat pushing a flotilla of eighteen barges apparently forewarned them of the impending disaster, and a naked Amanda Baron and her equally naked partner were seen jumping overboard just before the barge made kindling of Big Frank’s boat, Lady Luck. Common logic stated that both were killed in the accident, but since neither body was ever found a popular theory among romanticists was that the couple was able to swim to shore and disappear. There had been wild speculation around Brilliant ever since as to the identity of the mystery man, and the rumors ranged from the improbable—Big Frank’s brother and the mayor—to the impossible—Clark Gable and Dean Martin. Gable had grown up in nearby Hopedale, and Martin, the former Dino Crocetti, was from the south side of Steubenville, but how they became linked to the case was as much a mystery as Amanda Baron’s disappearance. For years after the accident there were reports of Amanda Baron sightings in Chicago, Columbus, Nashville, Myrtle Beach, Richmond, and Las Vegas, where she was purportedly working as a showgirl named Iris Jubilee. Residents of Brilliant argued over whether she was dead or alive, and she became a local folk legend, a kind of Amelia Earhart of Brilliant, Ohio. A day after the memorial service for Amanda Baron, Big Frank dropped Travis off at his parents’ house, promising to pick him up “later.” “Later” turned out to be nine years. Grandma and Grandpa Baron lived just down the alley from us, where they shared an old frame house with their two youngest sons, Crazy Nick, an established lunatic who once killed the neighbor’s cat because “it kept looking at me funny,” and Tony and his roughneck wife, Trisha, who once sucker-punched the principal and carried the distinction of being the only girl ever expelled from Brilliant High School. Travis’s Uncle Tony was found shot to death in an alley in Pittsburgh in 1959. This fueled speculation in Brilliant that it had been Tony on the boat with Amanda, and Big Frank had him rubbed out for his indiscretion. In reality, Tony had been subsidizing his income as a mechanic at McKinstry’s Sunoco by running numbers for Staten’s Tobacco & News in Steubenville, which was a front for the Antonelli crime family’s gambling operations in the Upper Ohio Valley. Apparently, this wasn’t quite lucrative enough for Tony, who developed a plan to skim the bets and help himself to a share of the profits. This ill-conceived plan was discovered almost immediately, much to the chagrin of his Sicilian superiors, including the head of the family, Salvatore “Il Tigre” Antonelli. Tony was found with a single .22-caliber bullet wound behind the left ear. From the stories I heard about Antonelli and his normal punishment for those disloyal to him, Tony got off easy.

  Travis’s Aunt Trisha remarried and had her new husband and stepdaughter move into the house with Travis, Crazy Nick, and her now-former in-laws. This arrangement lasted about a year, until the newlyweds were sent to prison for their part in an insurance scam that
involved stealing cars and selling them to chop shops to be cut down for parts. This coincided with the collapse of their marriage. They divorced about the time they were shipped off to prison, leaving Grandma Baron to raise her former daughter-in-law’s former stepdaughter. Trisha moved to Arizona after getting out of prison and was killed in a motorcycle accident a few years later. According to the sketchy reports that got back to Brilliant, she was on the back of her boyfriend’s Harley when a pickup truck pulled out in front of them at an intersection and she was launched from the bike and into the grill of an oncoming semi.

  Grandma Baron died when Travis was nine. She had a stroke while eating a sardine sandwich. Her sister found her slumped over the kitchen table, an orange tabby straddling her forearm and eating the fish from between the slices of bread she still held in her hand. Finally, Travis went back to live with his dad, who by that time was in the process of divorcing wife number two and was passionately involved with the woman who was to be the third Mrs. Frank Baron. From that point on, Travis raised himself. He was the neighborhood waif. The mothers of all his playmates took turns looking out for Travis, making sure he had the essentials—food, school clothes, a winter coat, and shoes without holes in the soles. Since Big Frank had little time for Travis, he became community property, not unlike Primo, the three-legged mutt who lived in our neighborhood and who everyone took turns feeding. If he wasn’t planning a marriage, or the subsequent break-up thereof, Big Frank was either on the road with his semi or tinkering with his 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air, a jet black, two-door sports coupe with red leather interior and a 283-cubic-inch V-8 engine, a Ramjet fuel injection system, and a Turbo 350 transmission, a Holley, four-barrel carburetor, dual exhaust, and chrome that was polished to blinding intensity. Big Frank loved that car more than anything on earth, including his own son and any of his various wives—current or ex. The home Travis shared with his father was a dump—a small frame house in the floodplain that was badly in need of paint and repairs. But the cement-block garage behind the house was spotless. Each door was triple-locked and bars covered the windows. Frank had given the Chevy the nickname “The King” because he believed it to be a vehicle without equal, and he referred to the garage as the palace. He never went to the garage to take the Chevy out for a spin. Rather, he went to the palace to take the King out for a spin.