Chapter 19: Jeff

THE BIG BREAK came later that spring, right after Easter, and from someone I never expected to hear from, Jeff.

“Motherfucker. Asshole.” I almost got up and left, before I realized Jeff’s first words were not directed at me.

We were sitting in a coffee shop kind of off the beaten path. No one was likely to bother us there, and I was pretty sure Dale didn’t even know where it was. Jeff was furious, although he was pretty much under control. It had taken a bit of negotiation to get this far. I didn’t trust him any farther than I could throw him, and since he was somewhat overweight that wasn’t going to be very far at all.

Jeff had sent me an email the previous week. He said he had something he wanted to talk about. Something I should know. My first thought was this was a trick somehow to get me back in the hands of Dale. “Make it somewhere public,” I told him. We agreed on the mall, at one end where he said Dale never went. Anyway, I added, Dale was out of town with his parents on some kind of family thing.

We met after lunch on a Saturday afternoon. The place was sill fairly busy, which I figured meant safety for me. We sat opposite each other at a table in the back of the coffee shop. Marginally a better choice in case a friend of Dale’s happened by.

When we both had our coffees I sat back and waited. Jeff scuffed his hand on the tabletop and looked down, to the side, everywhere but at me. Finally, I’d had enough. After all, I was there at the guy’s request. I hadn’t asked to meet him, and I had no reason to believe he’d have anything useful or helpful to tell me.

“OK, Jeff, what’s going on?”

He looked up at me and I swear I saw tears in his eyes. Pain, as well. His forehead was knotted or furrowed and when I looked down his knuckles were white around his container of coffee. Without thinking I moved back a little to stay out of the way in case he squeezed it too hard.

“It’s Dale.”

“Well, fuck, Jeff, what about Dale? What’s new with him, anyway?”

“He made a play for my sister, Robin. Swear to god I’ll kill him one of these days. He got her alone and told her how pretty she is and all that blah blah blah. You know, she’s not stupid, not really, but she’s in Special Ed. I don’t know how Dale got her alone.”

I’d never met Robin but I’d heard about her. She was borderline, but disabled enough to need the extra help.

“Fucking asshole. He’d talked her into getting undressed. He said he’d been sent special by the school to check her vital signs.” Jeff snorted. “Vital signs my ass.” He took a long hit on his coffee and I expected him to spit it out, it was that hot, but he didn’t. “His only instrument was his dick, that’s a fact.”

“So, what happened?”

“Thank god I had to go back to the house to pick up something I’d forgotten. Mom’s library books that I’d promised to drop off at the library on my way. The two of them were in the living room, not even in Robin’s room. He had his cock out and Robin was eyeing it like it might bite her.”

He took another hit off his coffee.

“Swear to god, he’s bigger than me but I could take him if I had to. ‘What the fuck!’ I must have screamed. Scared the crap out of Robin and she began to cry. I went over and hugged her and told her it was going to be all right. No one was going to hurt her. I sent her off to her room.

“When I turned back to Dale, he had this big smirk on his face. ‘Nothing happened, man. Nothing.’

“‘You call getting my sister naked, nothing?’ You’re an asshole, Dale.’

“‘It’s your word against mine, buddy, that’s all. Who is going to believe you over me, anyway?’

“‘You’re a fucking idiot Dale. Look over there.’

“I pointed to the large ceramic cat my mother loves and has had on our living room shelf for as long as I can remember. She adores that thing. It has a glass eye, only the eye is a camera lens. Wide-angle, so it captures the whole room. Wifi-enabled, so it transmits wherever we want it to go. You can break it apart but you can’t get the video. It’s already gone to the Cloud.

“You should have seen his face, man. Whiter than I’d ever seen him.

“He got up to leave. ‘Stay away from Robin, asshole,’ I said. ‘Don’t even come here ever again. Don’t you speak to her at school, got it?’

“He shrugged. ‘I’ve got the video, dumbass,’ he said, ‘and you’re on it.’ With that he took off.”

Shit. This was news to me. I mean, I suspected Dale, no brainer on that one, but I hadn’t thought very much about Jeff. I stood up. So did Jeff. I wanted to hit him. I wanted to throw the table in his face. Or at least throw my coffee at him. I looked ready to fight. Or maybe to run, or maybe both, I don’t know.

“Fuck, you, Jeff. Asshole. You mean you--,” I couldn’t finish the sentence. Didn’t want to. “Son of a bitch,” I finally managed.

Jeff stood there. He looked truculent. That’s the word. I remembered it from reading Jane Austen for one of the courses I took at San Quentin. I had no reason to trust Jeff. It was totally the opposite. He hadn’t been as obvious in his taunts as Dale had been, but I didn’t hear him criticize or separate from Dale, either. That’s what made this encounter so weird. Until he told me about his little sister, Robin, I figured he was hoping to finagle something, but what?

“So, what’s the deal now with Dale, Jeff?”

He shrugged. “I dunno. I haven’t heard from him.”

He was quiet for the longest time. I saw his mouth work, his lips move, as though he was fighting himself or something inside him. He shut his eyes tight. To my astonishment I saw a tear or two roll down his cheek. It almost made me sympathetic, for about three seconds, until I shifted back to knowing this is one of the two guys who raped my girlfriend and framed me for it and sent me to prison for over a year.

After a minute or two Jeff opened his eyes. I don’t think I’d never seen such misery on another person’s face. I was still totally skeptical, I mean, here’s the guy who stripped off and fucked Ellie, I kept telling myself that. He spread his hands and shrugged, but it wasn’t a shrug of indifference. It was a shrug of defeat.

“I was drunk, man. Drunk and high. That’s not an excuse, I know that, and if I could possibly take it all back I would.”

I saw another tear or three. Either this guy was a super actor or he really was distraught. Whether he was distraught over what he’d done or distraught over having to confess, I don’t know.

“Look, Christopher?” He sounded uncertain. I nodded for him to go on talking. “I know Robin is friends, sort of, with Ellie’s sister, Deborah. I don’t think she knows your sister very well. They talk, although you can guess they weren’t very close for a long time after it happened.

“Robin and I talked a lot after her encounter with Dale. ‘Jeff, I thought Dale was kind of cool,’ she told me. ‘When he wanted to hang out that sounded real good, like maybe we’d get to be friends or even something else.’

“‘He wasn’t the first guy I’ve ever kissed, either,’ she said. I was kind of freaked out a little by this, man, but I figured it wasn’t really my business today. ‘But then he kept pushing me and pushing me,’ Robin said. She was crying by now, and I knew I was going to make Dale pay, no matter what happened to me.

“‘Robin, it’s OK,’ I kept telling her, and she kept shaking her head.

“‘No, it’s not OK, Jeff, it’ll never be OK.’

“I asked her a couple of different ways to find out what Dale had actually done to her. He’d gotten her to pretty much undress all by herself. He didn’t touch her except for the kissing, and he didn’t take any of his clothes off. He waved his dong around and tried to get her to touch it or suck it, but hadn’t touched her with it. I was kind of surprised, but Robin said he never ejaculated on her.”