The Site Of The Shooting

We weren't very generous in assessing our sisters or our boy-friends' sisters under any condition unless they were physically attacked. Sibling contempt was a matter of course. Of course! We were prejudiced in favor of our friends and they were mean to their sisters. We used the term "boyfriends" innocently. When I was sixteen I was warned by an older kid that "boy-friend" had a more limited use. He pointed out, by name, four guys who had boy-friends. That kind of company was discouraged.

Some of our friends had sisters who we secretly admired. But we didn't tell them what we thought we would like to do with their sisters. If the world made sense they would be the pin-ups in National Geographic Magazine.

Terry's sister was no prize. If we didn't know Terry she still would have been rated "homely" by us. Now when I look back I think that's a cruel judgement, an unfair one, and maybe a misapplied one. Our tastes were subjective and in the unknown time that followed those days, Jean, who we perceived as "ugly" might have improved nicely even by our self imposed standards (infallible perceptions) of what beauty was.

There was an incident in the neighborhood one night. Bill Pira broke the news to me the following day. He had heard that Jean was baby-sitting and some guy snuck up to the window and got a peep at her. She saw the face at the window and screamed. Somebody called the cops. In 1949 cops were on-time when alarms went out. That's considered fascist today.

Maybe the guy was a peeping-tom. Perhaps he was a would-be burglar. He might have had rape on his mind. The screaming scared him off. The law was right behind him and when he failed to heed the police order to halt, he was shot dead.

We went up to the site of the shooting. Blood spots marked his last few steps. He collapsed in an old tub in a junk-littered yard and he expired there. It was a grim place to us, fifteen year olds. We felt it was a tough price to pay for a peep at an ugly girl. It would have been no better if he leered in at a cutie, or even Bill's or my sister.

It seemed to us, at fifteen, a lousy ending. We poked at the blood soaked gravel with sticks. We threw the sticks away. We peered into the crimson smeared tub. Our curiosity had no reward. The horrible had not attained an allure of morbid gratification that later generations, dulled to shock, would thirst for.