Neil Kenady

I decided to make my next stop Kenady and Son, which was indeed six blocks away from the school administration building where I had just finished talking to Mr. Friedlander. The real estate office was in a small shopping center, that is, three or four offices adjoining a 7-11 store and sharing its dozen parking spots. Their window showed a few photos of houses with some accompanying description, and the inside had three desks, one near the door, the other two separated from the front by a short wooden partition. A secretary was alone in the office, but she said Neil was due back in a few minutes and did I want to wait and look at a few listings in the meantime. Assuming quite naturally that I was a customer, she led me to a chair next to Neil's desk and handed me a large, flat loose-leaf binder, on each page of which was a house for sale similar to those on display in the window. The top of his desk fully bore out Mr. Friedlander's report on the size of his family. There were two group photos, then studio-style portraits of each of the four kids in a connected series of metal frames, and next to that an 8x10 of Neil and Amy taken at our Senior From, and in the corner of that a smaller wedding photo. There were about ten pictures in all spread around the desk.

It was terrific seeing that Senior From picture. I tried to remember where mine was. I think I tossed it out as part of an attempt once to destroy my past, when I finally unburdened myself of a whole pile of photographs and letters that I used to cart around with me from city to city. Maybe I just got sick of seeing that cardboard box at the top of my closet in at least three different time zones. Anyway, my photo was identical to this except for the faces - the rented tuxedos, the girls' overly formal long taffeta dresses and pale pastel high heel shoes, the constructed arboretum under which we posed rather stiffly arms-around-waists, the paste-up gilded lettering announcing "Polynesian Paradise 1965" just above our heads. It's surely too obvious a cliche to talk about a last frozen moment of innocence, and it probably wasn't all that innocent, but the power of a photograph like that is hard to explain unless you have pictures of your own that make you feel the same way. The time I had been thinking about so much never seemed as remote.

I switched to the house photos left on my lap, most of them looking to me like just the sort of place I might have been in now had I never moved away. I could be ten years into a mortgage on this 4 bdrm, 2 l/2 ba, right near the city limits next to walnut groves, with kids of my own getting close to the age of the Prom participants in the frame on the desk. If I felt a connection to Michael in anything right now, it was a sense that whatever happened then did make us different, that there must be more than two of us out of step with everybody else in the normal processes of accepting that you got older and changed and the world around you might change too. The people living in these houses now, having the kids, holding down the jobs, I wish I knew if I envied them or hated them. The more I did this going around town, looking at old haunts, talking to people I knew, the more unsure I was becoming about anything.

Fortunately, I could see a car pull up, of course a good-sized station wagon, and I recognized Neil Kenady right away. He still wore his hair in a thick patch brushed to the right, a halfhearted imitation begun in high school of the president whose name he almost had. Getting out of the car, his resemblance to either the Kenady or Kennedy of old lessened considerably, due to what must have been at least thirty-five pounds more on him than was there the last time. He spotted me too, smiled broadly, but looked somewhat hesitant when we shook hands and briefly hugged. I started to tell him why I was in town. He cut me off by saying we should go across the street to the park, where we could talk a little while without interruption, away from office distractions. On the way over, I explained about the tape recorder.

Q: I have to admit I nearly forgot about you until Mr. Friedlander mentioned to me that you worked close by. It's good to see you!

A: I'd heard you were in town, It's good to see you too, but I wish it wasn't because of this thing with Michael Willetts.

Q: I wish it was for some other reason too.

A: I don't think you quite understand what I'm saying. If you're here to help Michael, you might have chosen to stay away. We can handle him and what he's done. This town has taken lots of trouble before, we know how to deal with it. We'd just like it to be over and done with Your coming back isn't going to help that.

Q: When you keep saying "we", who are you talking about?

A; It has been awhile since you lived here. That's not the kind of question someone from here would ask. "We" is "we" The people who live here year in and year out. If you show up only when a thing like this happens, it means you don't really care about us, so why should anybody talk to you differently from the other outsiders? There's been plenty of other times you could have come back if the people here mattered to you. Instead, it takes what, thirteen or fourteen years and a horrible situation like this before you decide to show up again. It makes me sort of disappointed in you, if you really want to know.

Q: You're right Neil. I should have been back here before, and I'm only here now because I was asked to be by Michael. I always meant to come back sometime. I'm sorry it's now.

A: How you can miss our ten year class reunion and then show up now is really beyond me. You should have been there. If you felt roots here, that would have been the time to come back and demonstrate you cared a little for this place, for all the people who were your friends. You got your notice about the reunion didn't you. I'm sure you must have gotten one. I was on the Organizing Committee. We did our best to get those things to everybody. Lots of people came from out of town. You're not the only one living someplace else. When you care, you make an effort.

Q: Look Neil. If I could have come, I would have been here. I understand how you feel, but I wasn't here for the reunion, and I can't do anything now to make up for it. I see it was important to you, but I wish you'd stop chewing me out about it. If you're too pissed off at me to talk now, then just say so and I'll go. I'd like to talk about more important things than why I wasn't at the class reunion.

A: There was also a funeral here when the glee club accident happened. You knew the families. That would have been an

appropriate time to show your respect.

Q: I'm lucky I didn't know any of the migrant workers Corona was supposed to have killed.

A: Don't get funny. I didn't mean to go on about it, but you should know I don't much like why you're here now. A mass murderer asking you to come back is less of a reason than being invited by all the friends you went to school with or when a genuine tragedy be falls us. It makes clear what side you're on, who you're with. I'll talk to you in order to say a few things you should be told, but it's hard to feel like I'm talking to an old friend, so don't give me that "great to see you" shit and expect me to pour my heart out.

Q: I appreciate your being honest with me, and if anything I ask you is out of line, I hope you'll tell me.

A: Oh don't worry about that. I'll tell you.

Q: OK. First I'd like to correct your impression that I'm out to help Michael. No matter what you've heard, and even though it's true that I'm here because Michael asked me and I have spoken with him, I'd really just like to find out about what's happened here. Whether you think much of me anymore, I do care about this town. These killings have upset me a great deal, as they have a lot of people. I'm not here to exploit you. I'm not entirely sure why I'm here, to be honest. Probably nothing will come of these tapes. But if I am here, I want to find out whatever I can, and the best way I know to do that is to depend on friends I knew here who are in a much better position to shed light on the parts of this story that haven't come out. So please help me if you can.

A: Then let me say something right off. You know as well as I do that Michael Willetts killed all five of them on his own, and it bothers me the rumors that have gotten back that you've maybe been saying that either he didn't do it or that other people might have been in on it. That kind of talk doesn't do your staying here one bit of good.

Q: It hadn't occurred to me that I'd be the reason for any rumors.

A: Then you really have been gone a long time. You forget fast. Don't think you can shoot your mouth off and not have it get around.

Q: Then you might tell me why you're so sure it was Michael Willetts all alone who did this.

A: For one, if more people were involved, there's no way they could keep it quiet. You just don't have conspiracies in a place like this. Soon as two, three people are in on something, word gets out. Maybe not before it happens, but definitely after. It would be impossible to keep a lid on it. Yuba City isn't like Los Angeles or New York, thank God. You couldn't have a little group of killers getting together and planning some sort of commando raid. Hell, two guys unloading a box in their driveway would get noticed by a neighbor, people not showing up when they're supposed to or standing around places they don't usually go would be bound to attract attention. Nobody here would look for unusual goings-on, but if they're around when it happens, they sit up and take notice. That's what makes a small town what it is. At least that's what I think.

A reason I like better, though, for why Michael is the one and only, is because he tried so hard to make it look like more people, as if there were other fucking idiots out there like him. If you ask me, all the different weapons were so that it seemed as if everyone was doing their hit in the bib scheme, like some Army unit I guess. That would just be Michael's way of doing it. Also, getting from place to place in time would be easy. Everybody's saying you can't go from here to there and back again in this amount of time, but anyone who figures that either hasn't tried it himself or doesn't know the town very well. What surprises me is that it took him so damn long, even if flying a plane happened somewhere in the middle. In one hour in Yuba City with all those weapons, he should have been able to knock off a lot more than five old bozos he figured he had a grudge against.

Q: You've been giving this thought, all right.

A: It happens in your community, you have to care about it. You think you're the only one who remembers that they went to school with Michael Willetts. I was ready to give him the benefit of the doubt. There's no doubt here, no way.

Q: You sound awful sure about this. Why don't the police agree?

A: That's for you to ask. Nobody I've spoken to thinks any different from me. Maybe most of them haven't thought about it as carefully as I have, but that doesn't make their conclusions any less on the ball. It's just the more you look, the more you see that the version that makes the greatest sense is the one that really happened. It's as simple as that.

Q: Any idea where all those weapons came from? You really think Michael could have handled all that himself too?

A: I don't have it all figured out. Just enough to be satisfied that our old friend Michael is a killer. He's a helluva smart guy. He worked it out. I don't know how, but he did.

Q: So you think I shouldn't be here getting in the way.

A: To be honest, I don't give a damn one way or another. Bigger people than you have been nosing around here and it hasn't made any difference, except to give us a lot of gory publicity and undue notoriety. If you wanted to do any good at all, it would be to make people outside realize we're not like Michael. A crazy killer could happen anywhere. We're not responsible.

Q: Do you think it matters who the people were he killed and the manner in which they died?

A: You mean, was it some kind of Vietnam protest thing. It must have meant something that way for Michael or else he wouldn't have done it, but why it should have any effect on other people sure beats me. If you do a crazy thing, it doesn't make other people start thinking rationally. What's the point? Do you know? I wish you'd tell me that one.

Q: I'm still trying to find out. I really can't answer now. I don't know if I ever will.

A: Then how can you defend him? He murders people for a purpose that even you say is unclear, and still you sound like you're trying to explain it away and make excuses for him. Maybe he cracked somewhere along the line and maybe he didn't. I'm no expert. All I know is five more are dead and Yuba City has another horrible black mark against it. The rest doesn't seem to make much difference.

Q: You didn't go in the Army, did you Neil?

A: What's that supposed to mean? You know me well enough to remember I wasn't one of those super-patriot crazies. If Michael didn't want to go in, I'd be the last guy to tell him he should do it anyway. I was out for myself, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. My father helped me arrange a hardship deferment. I had my family to think of. If you think that cuts me down a couple of notches, then you go ahead and think so.

Q: I wasn't trying to judge you. I'm glad you found a way not to go.

A: Don't get me wrong, though. Our country was right to be there. This life is worth protecting, and I'm damn proud of the contributions Yuba City made in the war. We were lucky too, out of everyone from here who went, only one killed. Marysville had four, but from here, only one.

Q: Who was it?

A: You must remember Dennis Reicher. Big, dumb football player a year behind us.

Q: Oh yeah. His father had that used car lot on Coulter.

A: Still does. Dennis got blown up or something, I don't recall exactly. There's plenty of guys around with horror stories about the war, a few of them with real bad injuries, but Dennis was the only one who didn't come back. A real shame. They were gonna rename Peach Bowl Stadium for him. Nothing ever came of it. You'd think they would have done something.

Q: I guess you could say there's been five more casualties now due to the war.

A: If you want to put it that way, you could say when Michael goes to the gas chamber, that will be one more to chalk up. It hardly seems fair.

Q: Fair?

A: He kills five, but they can only kill him once. They just better be sure and do that one and not buy any of that insanity shit.

Q: If Michael did it, you don't think he could have been crazy?

A: He could have been cracked a little, but anybody who could figure out a plan like that has it together enough to pay the penalty. What he did gives fresh meaning to the word premeditated.

Q: Did you know any of the men who were killed?

A: Well I did have to go in front of the Board when my deferment came up, but I can't say I knew any of them.

Q: Was it the same five when your deferment was handled as the five who were killed?

A: I'm pretty sure they were. I don't believe the Board changed much. They'd done it a long time. It wasn't a rotating thing. They were all World War II veterans or something like that. They volunteered, I suppose. At least that's what it said in one of the Independent-Herald stories after the killings. There's other people who know a lot more about this than I do. I was only around them long enough to get what I went in after.

Q: Do you know if deferments like yours were pretty unusual around here? Were there a lot of other people who had them?

A: I'd guess it was about the same as anywhere else. They were probably tougher on guys who tried to weasel out like Michael, claiming they had some kind of principles, than on guys with legitimate reasons.

Q: What were legitimate reasons?

A: You know what I mean. Guys like me, with families to support, or important businesses they were responsible for.

Q: Businesses?

A: Sure. One way was, there was supposed to be some kind of basis for getting out of serving if you were needed on your family farm. That was a pretty common one, I heard, for those who wanted to go that route. There was a special deferment classification for that, just like there was for the kind I got. It was one thing, though, to be entitled to a special deferment, another to take it. There were lots of guys who could have gotten out if they wanted to, but they went in anyway. That's just like enlisting, maybe even better.

Q: I don't think I follow.

A: I just think a guy would have special reason to be proud if he could have avoided the draft, but chose not to.

Q: That sounds a little funny coming from you, if you don't mind my saying so, since you found a way out.

A: All I did was take advantage of my legal rights. That doesn't stop me from being appreciative of those from here who answered the call.

Q: I'd like to ask you about something a little different, if it's OK. I'm a little curious about the general way you seem now, compared to how I remember you. It sounds like, well, I'm not sure the words, settled in. When we were friends in high school, you didn't entirely strike me as, I'm not really sure what I want to say.

A: Do you mean, I didn't seem like somebody who would have four kids and go into my father's real estate business?

Q: Yes, that's part of it. The rest, it's wrong for me to ask because it sounds again like I'm making a judgement when I'm really not, believe me, but are you surprised how you turned out? You just seem like somebody who hasn't been very affected by the time you've grown up in. You seemed different when we

were friends, that's all.

A: Different how?

Q: Well, like I remember you were one of the only people our age who seemed really stunned when Kennedy was shot, even worse than Michael. I think it was more than just your name that did that. It was like you cared about things. Or I remember how I drove all the way to Sacramento with you once because you had to find that first Beatles album, just from hearing the one song on the radio. You used to seem more plugged in. I'm not trying to be critical at all, but do you ever wonder if you might have turned out differently?

A: That is a pretty presumptuous question to ask, and I don't see what this has to do with Michael and everything that's happened and the reasons you're here.

Q: I don't really either, and if you don't want to answer, I certainly understand. I shouldn't have asked.

A: No, it's OK. I guess I have thought about things like that every once in awhile. Not for a long time. What can I say? I just started taking more of an interest in what was right around me. That must be what happens when you get married and have kids. The other way, taking everything hard or getting excited over some radio song, that's fine when you're in high school. You'd be a fool to stay that way the rest of your life. You'd go nuts. I've got more important things to be concerned about now. Making a good living for my family is enough to worry about, whether you think so or not. It's how I am, and I certainly wouldn't apologize to you for being that way. Amy and I have both been close to our parents, doing family things has always been important to both of us. I still read the paper, I keep interested in things, but they're out there, they don't really affect me the same way as personal things. I'm lucky I've got the kind of life I have, I don't see what I've got to complain about. I've got a great stereo, you should really come listen to it sometime, that station wagon over there isn't my only car, I've got a great Austin Healey sports car, the kind they don't make any more, I cook a lot, me and my Dad go out skiing a lot. What more should I be doing?

You might think I'm hypocritical because I got out of being drafted. I can tell by some of your questions that's how you think, but I was never a radical type. I got what I wanted my own way. If my Dad could help me, what was so wrong with that? And I pull my own weight in our business, believe me. I'm not along for a free ride. I earn every dollar I pull in. I did it at first to help him, but now I'm glad I'm in it. Yuba City is still a growing community, and real estate is an important part of that. I've got no complaints about how it's all turned out. I might have done other things, but I might also have turned out a hell of a lot worse.

Q: I appreciate your giving me an answer. I wonder if I can ask you something else about Michael, since it would seem like his time after high school was sort of similar to yours, at least for awhile. When he came back from Reed, he was at Yuba College during the time you were. He must have gotten married around the same time, and your first child was probably born about when his was. From there, you seem to go off in entirely separate directions. What do you think was the difference?

A: There were probably a lot of us in that pattern you're talking about, not just Michael and me. Still are, I would guess, maybe even more now than then. I don't know. It's funny. One thing nobody talks about anymore, but sure seemed important at the time, if you graduated around when we did, about '65 when we went to high school, it wasn't the same sexually as it is now. This sounds off your track and real obvious, but you'll see where I'm getting. We seemed to come right before real serious birth control, where every girl is on the pill or at least knows what's going on and is doing something. We all used rubbers, didn't we, that's all there was. I think it was because of rubbers that I got married, if you want to know the truth. That doesn't mean I don't thank my lucky stars now for my wife and family, but back then, all I wanted was sex regular without having to use those damn things. Well, that was more important to me than going off and conquering the world. I could have gone to Berkeley like you did, my grades were as good as yours, but everything I wanted at the time was right here. So I stayed here, like plenty of others did too, as you know. With Michael, going away and then coming back, even though he was happy to marry Sharon, it was like he had gotten a taste of a different life. It made him realize there were things going on out there he was giving up to be here. He should have gone away and stayed away, like you did. We did see each other a lot back then, the married students at Yuba College often hung out together, especially the ones with kids, but you could already tell that Michael wasn't all there. He'd get angry at things real easily, and always be starting arguments about stories in the newspaper or on TV that nobody wanted to argue with him about.

Q: Could Michael have tried for one of those hardship deferments like you got, if he had wanted to?

A: I'm not really sure. I don't think he ever tried for an easy way out. It turned into some damn cause for him real fast. We had more than one argument about that at the time, I'll tell you. I gave up arguing with him pretty quickly. It wasn't worth it. He turned into a real pain, and we just stopped seeing him. I know most of our circle did the same. There was no point in trying to fight with the guy, he wasn't real into listening to you. He'd rather act like he had all the answers, completely superior to everyone around him. He must have been murder to live with. No wonder Sharon left him.

Q: What would he want to argue about?

A: It's funny. It wasn't just what you'd think. It was more than the idea of the war, more than things like that. He'd love to argue about incredibly technical things. He did have a mind for small detail, there's no getting around it. Obsessive is the only word. Whether it was tactics of the Cambodian invasion, the types of bombs that were being used over there, picking apart some line from one of Lyndon Johnson's TV speeches - he was so aggressively involved with that stuff. For somebody who kept saying how much he hated the war, you never saw anybody more caught up in following it. You didn't really see any of that, it was pretty much after you left, but I doubt if you could have gotten along with him either. Whether you agreed with him or not was almost beside the point. If you didn't share his fascination with all kinds of trivia, it was like you weren't in the room. That's real dangerous behavior, if you ask me, and that certainly turned out to be true. He took everything so personally, like it was being done against him.

Q: I'm a little surprised, Neil, that you could have known him as closely as we did, and you even longer after I left, and still now talk so harshly about what should be done to him. Doesn't ever being his friend matter? You don't feel something should be done to help him?

A: I told you how I felt about that already. I'm a lot more angry than if it had been some total stranger. Michael was better than this. He could have turned out some other way. You want to know so much about how I feel I am now, well I could have wound up an even bigger zero and still be better than what's happened to Michael. Don't you have any sense of what he did? You should have been here the day it happened. You should have heard the sirens everywhere, gotten the first terrible reports. You'd feel a lot differently, friend or not. It was a horror to be here. I thought of Michael that day. I knew it must have been him. I'm sure I'm not the only one who realized that. But that day, my God, I hope I'll never see another its like as long as I live.

Q: Can you say more about that day? When did you know something had happened? Was it just the sirens that told you?

A: No, the sirens going every direction at once were the scariest moment, that's when I knew something really bad had happened. Usually you hear a couple of sirens here, you know there's a fire someplace, a big one might involve a couple of fire engines and an ambulance. But usually when you hear it, they would all be together, going the same way. With this, the noises kept going in different directions, like they were looking for a place and couldn't find it. Yuba City isn't that big across. It sounded like we were all under attack, which isn't that far from the truth. Also, and I admit I may be imagining it now, I could almost swear I heard Mitchell Ferguson yell from the football stadium. It must have been right at the moment he fell in the pit. It's not that far from here, and I remember hearing something strange, some scream, only I'm not really sure. I remember enough to dream about later over and over, but I can't honestly say what I heard at the moment. Apart from that, I think I heard the plane, at least I heard some plane flying low nearby around the time he must have done it, but I never heard bullets or anything. I guess this office isn't close enough. What you could hear is the sound not just of sirens but telephones, telephones everywhere, first local, everybody giving each other the news, then real quick, calls from everywhere. It was unbelievable the calls. Reporters were calling everybody, then they started arriving, Sacramento, Chico, Davis, then San Francisco, and by late afternoon from all over. The Juan Corona business was nothing compared to this. It's just a thing you had to see for yourself, genuine pandemonium. The time after was no better, the funerals, all the different kinds of cops, more reporters and writers, film crews. It felt like the town doubled, or as if some cancerous growth had gone out of control. Complete disruption of everything. In church, wherever you went, whoever you ran into, this was all that got talked about. Everybody had some idea about it, some extra bit of information they heard from a relative of a friend of a cop on the case, some notion of who did it. I'm just telling you how it felt to me. There were plenty of others closer to it than I was. When they finally did arrest Michael, you don't know what a relief it was to everybody. We're all real glad this thing is on its way to winding up. I'm sure ready to have it out of my mind, I can tell you that. I'm getting worn out talking about it all the time. Everybody knows I was close to Michael, so naturally I have to tell all this stuff a lot. I'm surprised none of those writers or reporters have taken an interest in talking to you. You knew him as well as I did, at least for the time you were here, I guess it was because you haven't been around in so long, nobody's wanted to talk to you. I'd have thought the police, though, might have wanted some information, or one of those Time or Newsweek people. Jesus, a gal from one of those two had me talking for hours, any little detail I could come up with. Did you see the article in there? There wasn't any picture of me, but I got quoted a lot. Not always by name, but a lot of things I said wound up in there Good story. Anyway, I'm damn near talked out over this thing.

Q: If I can just ask you one more thing, do you think there's anyone else in particular I ought to try to talk to?

A: Do I think there is? Not especially. I don't even know what you're doing here. It's been too long. You're out of touch. Coming back now, you re no better than anybody else. You probably had to stop at a gas station to get directions to find me. Who should you talk to? If you're busy wasting your time, it doesn't matter much, does it? One person's as good as another. What you find out won't amount to anything. It's all been said by now, every rock's been turned over. You've talked to me, so I can't think of anybody who could add more. If you're here because Michael sent for you, go ask him who you can try to get to alibi for him or who you can cry in your beer with about how tough he's got it. You're dragging out a process we'd rather have over and done with. Don't you think you should just go back to wherever you're from now? You must have better things to do.

Q: You're not too encouraging, are you?

A: Why should I be? Come back when we do another reunion.

Maybe I'll be in a better frame of mind towards you. Of course, if you ever decide to move back here, I better be the guy who sells you the house or I'll kill you.