The Tape That Cleared My Grandson
In the office, which was really just a back room with a desk, a gun safe for the register cash, and a bank of four small screens showing different angles of the store, Phil sat down and started scrolling back through the footage from aisle nine, the aisle with the hunting and fishing gear and the pegboard of pocketknives along the endcap. Rusk stood with his arms crossed, not looking at any of us, looking instead at the screen like he was certain it would prove him right.
“There,” he said, when the timestamp hit 4:12. “Right there, that’s the boy, standing at that peg.”
On the little screen, grainy and a touch too fast because Phil had it on some kind of review speed, I watched my grandson stand in front of the pocketknives for maybe four seconds, the way any thirteen year old boy stands in front of pocketknives, looking without touching, and then walk on toward the bins with his backpack hanging open behind him on the cart handle, exactly the way I had just told Rusk it would be.
“He didn’t take anything,” I said. “He looked. Looking is not stealing. If it were, every boy in this county would be in jail.”
“Keep it rolling,” Phil said, quiet, and I could hear in his voice that he was starting to see what I already knew.
Rusk’s jaw was tight. I am not going to pretend he was a villain out of a storybook, because he was not, and I would be lying to you if I made him into one just to make this easier to tell. I found out later, from Phil, that Rusk had only been at Tanner’s three months, that he had come over from a bigger chain store two towns away where he had been written up twice for missed theft, and that Tanner’s district office had been riding every store manager hard that quarter about shrink numbers, the dollar amount of goods that walk out of a store without being paid for. A young man under that kind of pressure, new to a job, scared of losing it, sees a boy with an open backpack standing in front of a knife display and a box missing off the peg a few minutes later, and his mind does the fastest, laziest arithmetic there is. It was wrong arithmetic. It was still arithmetic a scared man can talk himself into doing.
That does not excuse what he did in front of that checkout line. It only explains it, and I think there is a real difference between those two things, and a decent person tries to hold both of them at once.
The footage kept rolling. At 4:16, a boy I did not recognize came into frame from the other end of the aisle, tall, maybe fifteen, in a camo jacket too heavy for the weather, and he went straight to the same pegboard without so much as glancing at the fishing lures beside it, the way a person moves when he already knows exactly what he came for.