Fire Drill Part 3.1- Jasper Kirk
Jasper Kirk
March 11th, 2031. 0840h. The email I received yesterday during my interview sit down with Chief Felix Carlyle turned out to be from one Jasper Kirk, one of the Delta 26 whom I first reached out to back around the time of my very first interview, with Tabitha Crowell. He was the principal of Delta Heights High School for thirteen years at the time of the Massacre, and of all of the survivors, he was the most severely injured in the incident. Caught by the edge of one of the blasts, he suffered third-degree burns over 70% of his back, as well as shrapnel damage that severed part of his spine, paralyzing him from the waist down. According to newspaper records at the time after the incident, he also suffered damage to his eardrums, resulting in his requiring the use of hearing aids.
Principal Kirk spent eight months in the hospital in recovery before being released to the care of his wife, Katheryn. They did not remain in Deertrack long after, selling their home and moving to Storkhaven, a mid-sized town about an hour south. Kirk has agreed to speak to me, so long as his wife is allowed to be present for the interview, to assist. I replied immediately that this, of course, would be perfectly fine.
I had to go through several files on my little OneNote digital tablet notebook in order to find the questions I had jotted down to pose to the former principal, which killed enough time for the tiny coffeemaker in my hotel room to do its duty. No more single-serve packets from the front desk for me, no; I swung over to Tennison’s Market downtown to grab myself some basic supplies for my stay here after leaving the police station yesterday, and the scent of Dunkin’ Donuts brand ground coffee fills my little rented room.
It’s no Caribou Coffee, but I’m not in the comfort of Minnesota right now, so I have to make do with what I can get my hands on.
I’m looking at a drive of approximately an hour to get to Storkhaven, so I’ll have to be moving along quickly here, but not without a few quick observations from my trip to Tennison’s. You may not think that anything exciting or interesting could come from a simple visit to a grocery store, and in most instances, you would be absolutely correct. This isn’t a Stephen King novel, after all, so it isn’t like I found myself trapped inside the store with a bunch of relative strangers while a menacing fog rolled in full of monsters to trap us inside the building.
But I experienced something there that, while not as menacing as the tales woven by that genre master, may he rest in peace, was still nevertheless partly unnerving.
As I have informed you, I was born and raised here in Deertrack. The majority of the town has remained unchanged in the years between my departure to college and today, retaining a kind of rustic, American Southern quaintness. One doesn’t need to travel long or far to the outskirts of town to find vast stretches of rural farmland, and it is these farmers and ranchers whose income supports the downtown area and businesses.
Tennison’s parking lot, when I arrived yesterday afternoon, was moderately filled. Locals around these parts tend to do their shopping for a few days at a time, stopping in after work and school to not only pick up what they need, but to see who else might be there, so they can stop with their creaking carts and visit for a spell.
It is charmingly ‘small-town Americana’, relying on face-to-face interaction, as opposed to finding everybody with their eyes half-glued to their smartphone screens.
When I walked inside the store, I found the rows of carts lined up to my right, as they always have been. Most of them looked rusted and worn down, as if they hadn’t been replaced in the fifty-plus years that the family-owned market had been in business. Given the lack of child safety straps on any of them, I suspected further that this was the case.
When I pulled a front-most cart from its column, I noticed that the lighting in the entryway of the store possessed the telltale flicker of fluorescent bulbs overhead that have come close to giving up the ghost. A brief look upward showed me several uncovered light tubes, covered in a thin film of dust that had likely not been tended to in months. Surely a stockboy or cashier could be asked to get on a ladder and get that taken care of at some point, right?
The entryway of Tennison’s is a wide, deep squared area of flat brown tiling on the floor, the massive produce section immediately to the right in the store’s southeast corner, stretching the entire depth of the building to the back. Aside from the pleasant lighting arranged for the shelves along that stretch, the second thing that stood out to me was something that I never thought I would see again; rather than having a system of automated sprayers hooked through the shelves, a young man in a dark green apron, black shirt and black slacks stood halfway down the stretch, a spray bottle of water in hand, manually misting the fruits and veggies spread out for sale. He wore the expression of the perpetually bored, someone who has been assigned a menial, repetitive task that is largely thankless, but which is, at its core, absolutely essential.
There are dozens of these kinds of small, mindless activities which I think people go through every day without giving them a second thought. They are unrewarding, unfulfilling, and at times, make us feel exhausted to consider having to go through. Yet if we didn’t all know about them, and find ourselves having to do them as well, we might well discover we have less empathy for our fellow man. The mundane and routine, while fertile ground for misery and boredom, are also fundamental components of our shared humanity.
When the young man in the apron gave me a cursory look, I offered him a brief smile and nod, which he returned in kind before returning to his task. It was a small thing, almost taking no time or effort at all, but when he returned to his misting duties, he did so with a trace of that smile still on his lips.
Worth it.
The scent of clean, fresh produce in a grocery store in busier markets has often struck me as somewhat uniform, an almost sterile aroma that puts one in mind of cleanliness, rather than food. Here, though, the faint scents of various fruits and veggies held a kind of subtle richness that almost forces you to recognize that this is not the ordinary, everyday experience that you take for granted in a chain store.
A few aisles later, I found my initial irritation at the cart’s habit of veering unerringly to the left all but gone. Whether from suddenly remembering all those years growing up that I’d been forced to contend with this problem whilst shopping with my mother, or from simply having the presence of mind to accept that nothing could be done about it, the disappearance of that trickle of annoyance buoyed me, lightened my step. Of course, that wouldn’t last long.
It was as I rounded a corner into the cereal and breakfast toaster pastries aisle that I encountered the most memorable moment of that little errand run. Perhaps ten feet away from me, leaning doggedly against her cart for support, stood a woman whose girth and choice of gray cardigan sweater over baggier gray sweatpants put me in mind of a tractor trailer given human form for a day. She stood chatting with an older gentleman, whose back was to me at the moment, dressed himself in faded blue jeans, a dark blue denim jacket, and a dark blue baseball cap bearing the words ‘Navy Veteran’ in yellow stitching on the back. To refrain from being too insulting in describing her, I will simply say that she possessed a face that the Brothers Grimm might have seen fit to illustrate for one of their many tales about witches living in the deep, dank woodland, waiting to feast on any children foolish enough to take her woods as a shortcut back home.
Whatever this older gentleman said as I took a step further into the aisle, it caused the large woman to cackle, the shrill, cartoonish sound of it nearly exploding my ears from its volume and pitch. Worse still, the violence of her laughter caused movement amid the droops and folds of her clothing such as I had only previously imagined was physically possible from an animated version of Santa Claus when immersed in a fit of mirthful laughter. Coupled to this was the unmistakable sound of released flatulence, which mingled with the already acrid smell of days-old sweat coming from her direction, and I thought for certain I had turned the corner not into a small town grocery store aisle, but a peculiar pocket of Hell.
I tell you all of the above in order to tell you this; I was the asshole in this moment. Take a moment and consider just how uncharitable I have been with my description of this woman, and then set it against the fact that I recognized her after a few moments as one of the absolute heroes of my adolescence. Standing ten feet away from me, right there in Tennison’s cereal aisle, is Ms. Tara Willow.
Miss Willow had been my Honors English 9 and 10 teacher in high school, as well as my Introducing Journalism course, one of only five electives offered at Delta Heights that came with two credit hours good toward a student’s college degree, thanks to its association with the University of Georgia’s English Department. She had seen my desire for using the written word and my passion for getting all available information on a story, and nurtured them in my formative years.
And here she was, many years and at least eighty pounds later, her eyes flashing wide as she recognized me with my creaky little cart past her conversation partner. When he turned around, I didn’t immediately recognize him, but knew that if I spoke to him, I wouldn’t be long in remembering who he was. I had been hoping that the recognition in Miss Willow’s eyes would bring her my way, that I might actually enjoy a mini-reunion with one of the few people still in Deertrack who I have missed so terribly since my departure from these parts.
But instead of a smile and approach, what I was treated to was the whipping about of her cart and a dash out of sight that were so swift and lacking in any kind of clumsiness that they defied my presumptions about her physicality. I stood there, shock still, for almost a minute, until finally, the gentleman approached me gingerly, favoring his right leg, the knee of which didn’t appear to want to bend.
“Don’t take any offense, Matty,” he said to me with a crooked smile. The moment he flashed those teeth at me, with the silvery upper-right canine, I remembered who he was- John Kellog, of Kellog’s Garage.
“Mister Kellog,” I said with a nod, taking the hand that he then extended to me. His grip was still firm, but had lost a great deal of the power it used to possess. “Still running the best shop in town, sir?”
“Naw, had to shut ‘er down about five year back,” he replied wistfully, shaking his head. “The Walmart put on that automotive center, and everybody just started taking their cars there. Suits me fine, though. I was getting’ a bit long in the tooth to keep the place running. S’a Pizza Hut now.”
“Well, at least grease is still involved,” I quipped, which got an appreciative chuckle. “I don’t understand, though. Miss Willow was one of my favorite teachers.”
“Yeah, well, some folk ‘round town been talking about you bein’ here, why you come. Lots of folks are already kind of puttin’ their guard up, what with the anniversary and all.” This troubled me, but I didn’t want to let on to Mister Kellog. He’d been a longtime fixture in Deertrack, a hard man from a bygone era, and looking every bit of his seventy-plus years of age. I bade him a quick farewell, and resumed my errand run.
Looking back on it now, I think what disturbed me most about the incident was that, despite being a native of this town, and having had a wonderful student-mentor relationship with Miss Willow, I was now an outsider, a source of potential pain or stress. I didn’t think it would feel so strange, but it is genuinely distressing to realize that I am now a stranger in a strange land, even though I know this town down to my bones.
But enough of that for now. I’m off to Storkhaven.
**
1025h. Sitting in the car across the street from the home of Jasper and Katheryn Kirk, I take in the street that I’m on. Storkhaven is as sparsely spread out and dispersed as a town can get without becoming something strange. In small suburbs like Deertrack, which are only a little over half an hour’s drive from a major metro, the homes tend to still be relatively close together. Here, it looks to be at least an eighth of a mile in either direction until one comes to a neighbor’s property, with the exception of the house across the road.
There are trees all down the street, providing a kind of canopy that covers entirely the roadway in speckled shade, which pleases my own visual aesthetic tastes.
I’m stalling, and I know that I’m stalling. Something holds me here, in the car, keeping me from going up that concrete ramp to the front porch of the house. Whatever it is, however, it isn’t going to keep me here forever.
Best to suck it up and do my job.
**
[Previously established interview with bracketed notations and observations soon to follow.]
The first thing I noticed as the door was pulled open for me was the soul-punching layer of shadows under Katheryn Kirk’s eyes. Though she smiled up at me and invited me inside, that smile couldn’t penetrate its way up into her eyes, the colour of which I don’t even recall now that I fill in this section of detail.
The entryway of the Kirks’ home was wide and open, devoid of accoutrements beyond a stout kind of coat rack. The top of this cherry wood rack only reached my chest height, but I recognized immediately that it had been altered to suit the needs of Jasper, who, being bound to a wheelchair, would nonetheless still need a place to put his coat whenever he came home.
Katheryn offered to take my jacket, which I handed to her gratefully, my messenger bag now in my left hand, held by the frayed handle. She then guided me through an archway to our right, down a medium-width hallway decorated with numerous family photos set in beautiful decorative frames. I recognized the children and young adults in these pictures, as well as the patronly figure in them; Jasper Kirk had also been my principal at Delta Heights.
The Kirks had three children; Jacob, Stephen, and Molly. Stephen had passed away in Afghanistan while serving in the Marine Corps. Jacob, their oldest, works proudly in the same field as his father had, a superintendent for a small school district in the Jacksonville, Florida area. Molly, their youngest and only girl, works for the state of Georgia as a corrections officer.
Of their living children, the most recent photograph appears to be of Molly, standing in her uniform on a stage, saluting a man dressed in a similar but slightly more formal uniform, the salute returned as a host of similarly dressed officers sit on black metal folding chairs just behind them. Her graduation day from the training academy, I assume.
The hallway terminates into the living room, at the far end of which, situated on a dark red motorized wheelchair, sits Jasper Kirk. Jasper was angled, as we entered, toward an enormous flatscreen television, from which I can hear commentators talking in hushed tones about a professional golfer lining up a vital opening shot for some tournament or other. Looking at Mister Kirk, dressed this day in a cozy gray knit sweater with a black-and-red plaid blanket covering his lower half, I was struck by the visual parallel he invited to David Huddleston, he of ‘The Big Lebowski’ fame.
Katheryn cleared her throat loudly, at which Mister Kirk turned his head, the tiny white blinking of his embedded hearing aids just barely visible as he directed his eyes at us. He broadly smiled at us, and started to maneuver his chair toward me, using the stubby control stick with his left hand.
He gave me a long up-and-down, and without hesitation, proclaimed, “I knew you’d do well for yourself, Matthew. It’s good to see you again.”
**
MH: I’d like to start by thanking you for inviting me to your home, Mister Kirk.
Jasper Kirk [JK]: Well, it isn’t exactly like I can go jaunting off to meet people in exotic locations now, can I, son? [well-meaning snicker]
MH: I suppose not, no. I have to say, I’m a little surprised you seem to remember me so well.
JK: Matthew, you were a very promising student in your class, certainly one of the brightest of the bunch. In all my years serving as the principal at Delta Heights, I kept an eye on the boys and girls who were going to make something of themselves outside of the scope of the Department of Defense. Don’t get me wrong, [incline of head, one hand held up as if to stop me from protesting or interjecting] I am quite thankful for the Armed Forces and everything its members do for a grateful nation here. I just wish they didn’t claim quite so many of the young people from around here with lesser prospects at getting an affordable post-secondary education. [JK clears throat and coughs for nearly half a minute, finally waving off his wife, Katheryn, who had started to get up as if to retrieve something for him] Not just yet, Kat, not just yet.
MH: I’ve always remembered you as a direct communicator, not one to mince words.
JK: I’ve rarely seen the point of beating around the bush, particularly if what you’ve got to say or ask is important.
MH: In that vein, I want to ask what you remember most prominently about Aaron Sitanski and Brandon Norris. [JK grins softly and nods, head inkling slightly toward the floor in reflection. His wife looks away, wringing her hands anxiously]
Katheryn Kirk: I’m going to step into the kitchen, Jasper. Holler if you need me. [She departs hastily]
JK: It was those boys’ sophomore year, and they’d been chumming around together quite a bit. I remember thinking it was probably a good thing, since both of them had spent most of their freshman year highly isolated, ostracized by the rest of the student body. Tanya Prestman, one of the guidance councilors at the time, had sent me a few worrisome emails about Aaron in his freshman year, said he seemed completely locked away in his own head. He had teachers who were very deeply concerned about his shyness and reticence.
MH: But nothing along the lines of outbursts or confrontations?
JK: Not Aaron, no. He wqs quite frequently the target of bullying and harassment from his classmates, but he seemed to just let it all slide right off, even when I had instructors sending students to my office because they’d been violently shoving or even slapping him around. Aaron just took it all, never fought back except to say a few choice words.
MH: Choice words?
JK: He was sent to see me about halfway through his freshman year after a faculty member overheard him muttering something about using a flensing knife to peel another student’s eyelids off. It was so out-of-character for him to even imply something so violent or hostile that it was brought to my attention, immediately. But all of this is rather besides the point.
Close to the end of their sophomore year, I received an email from Hank Hagstrom, their Economics teacher. He informed me that I needed to have a word with the boys about their callous and cavalier use of certain terms and phrases, which had apparently stirred up their classmates and offended them immensely. He gave me the gist of what had been said, and I replied that I’d make a personal appearance to their next class to pull them each aside for a conversation.
MH: Did they have a lot of the same classes together?
JK: Several, but unfortunately, I had to go to opposite ends of the school to fetch them each. [JK laughs amiably, shaking his head as he pats either side of his midsection] Bear in mind, I was even bigger in the middle then than I am now, so it was no mean feat to make that trip swiftly!
Anyhow, I got them back to my office and asked Brandon to shut the door, which he did, and they both sat across from me. I cleared my throat and asked them plainly, ‘Did one or both of you, during Economics last period, use the term faggot in conversation with your classmates’? [There is a pause here as JK raises one eyebrow at me.] I’m sorry, Matthew, I’m just trying to relate what was said.
MH: It’s not a problem. I’ve heard and been called far worse.
JK: [sitting up straighter in his wheelchair, clearly troubled] Even when you were at Delta? [I nod] I’m so very sorry, Matthew. I didn’t even know you’re gay.
MH: I didn’t come out until I got to college. It doesn’t matter, Mister Kirk. It’s not my place to censor or edit reality, so please, continue.
JK: Very well. [clears throat] It was, as you might have guessed, Brandon who answered the question, half-yelling at me that yes, he’d said it, yelling at their classmates that he and Aaron were no faggots. Apparently, quite a lot of their classmates had been spreading rumors about the two of them, teasing and poking fun. Had I known about this, I would have put a stop to it immediately; the entire district had a zero tolerance policy.
MH: I can’t imagine you were a fan of that. Certainly I wouldn’t have been.
JK: I thought it was overreaching, to put it politely. Those kinds of programs and ideas are well-intentioned, but end up laying waste to any kind of actual discussion or nuance. Anyhow, young Mister Norris proceeds to inform me that he and Aaron, quote, ‘Ain’t no fags’, to which I ask him to please refrain from continued use of such hateful language.
I then asked he and Aaron if they felt they were being unfairly mistreated by their peers due to their perceived relationship. And this, Matthew, was when Aaron finally spoke up. He was always softspoken, and usually this lent the boy an air of fragility, timidity. At that moment, however, it struck me as nihilistic, devoid of any kind of feeling or soul, as it were. He didn’t even turn his eyes to me, and said, ‘It might be easier if we were gay. At least then you people would do something to help us. Guess it’s too bad we’re just a couple of straight white boys’.
MH: Did that rub you wrong at all?
JK: Internally? No, Matthew, it did not. It did not rub me wrong, because at the time, and even now, there was a kernel of damnable truth to what he said. Neither boy was an ethnic minority, neither was transgendered or a girl, and neither identified sexually as anything but straight. In short, nobody among their peers or in the online spaces they frequented was going to stand up for them, because if they did, they would have been labeled a racist, mysoginist, or transphobic.
Externally, however, I had to put on a mildly upset face for the two of them. ‘Regardless of whether or not what these students are saying about you is true, it’s behavior that can’t be tolerated. If you want to lift a charge of harassment, we would need the names of specific students.’
Now, Brandon just flapped his hand at me and left the office, but Aaron took a spiral notebook out his backpack, wrote something on it, and handed it over to me.
MH: Was it a list of names?
JK: It was more than that, Matthew. First, he’d written down four students’ names. Underneath those names, he wrote me a brief message. [There is a pause here, as JK directs his motorized wheelchair over to a bookcase standing against the west wall of the living room. He reaches to a shelf at his own knee height, and pulls out a thin, battered looking green folder. He wheels back over to me, opens it, and plucks out one of only a few sheets from within. On the sheet of torn spiral notebook paper are four names, underneath which Aaron Sitanski had written the following- ‘If you try to discipline them, you’re going to be threatened with a lawsuit, or come to the edge of being fired. Mark my words.’]
MH: That seems a bit paranoid. [I offer him back the sheet]
JK: Paranoid, or, in Mister Sitanski’s case, nearly clairevoyant. I had these four sent to my office the very following morning to address the charges of harassment raised against them, and tell them that they would be asked to wait out in the waiting area until their parents could arrive, so that we could discuss their punishment. No sooner did those parents show up than almost all of them were howling about how they were going to sue the school, the district, and me personally for discrimination against their children.
MH: Based on what?
JK: For two of those students, based on their race, for one of them based on her being a girl, and the last one for having some sort of middle-class ‘grudge’ against people who come from wealthier homes. It was all bunkum, of course, but in order to appease those parents and those kids, the school board suspended me, without pay, for two weeks.
MH: So Sitanski was right.
JK: Yes he was. But don’t think for a minute, Matthew, that that perception or awareness is admirable. [A shadow falls over the former principal’s expression, oily, ominous] It was that very perception, that insight into the patterns of human behavior and reactions in certain circumstances, that allowed him and Brandon to cause as much death and havoc as they did.
MH: Do you think, then, that it was a kind of revenge for them? That they wanted to reciprocate all of the pain, all of the nastiness that they felt had been thrown on them over the course of their time as students?
JK: I believe that summarizes Brandon’s rationale perfectly, yes.
MH: And Aaron?
JK: Not entirely, no. I think that was part of Aaron’s motivations, don’t get me wrong. But I think, even if he hadn’t had a partner to work with at Delta Heights, that he would have gone on to become a killer anyway. Spree or serial, I couldn’t say, but there was always something so, damaged, so disconnected, from the human spirit in him. I don’t believe Aaron Sitanski really understood, by the time he reached his senior year, how to be a complete and functional human being. People like that, they almost universally become something monstrous.
I believe it was just a matter of time before he did something like the Delta Heights Massacre.
[The interview, unfortunately, had to conclude moments later, as another fierce coughing fit took hold of Jasper Kirk. His wife Katheryn came in to assist him, and asked if I didn’t mind calling it a day with our conversation. I assured her that this was fine, that I would be on my way, and saw myself out of their home.]