from the tyranny of stratigraphy
Santo Sonnee appeared to be a heavy man. But this was misleading. He was a heavy man. But was built of good solid muscle beneath a relatively thin layer of fat which covered his entire frame like a very thick skin. He was balding and had blonde hair cut very short so as to make the balding less apparent. He drove that really enormous pickup truck. Well several over the period of time in which I knew him. He was a car salesman. A truck salesman also, of course. So he invariably drove a new, new to Santo, pickup truck. Usually white and the kind with two sets of doors. Two doors on each side you understand. When they found him he was in one of those trucks up there at the same place where we all helped. Or tried to help look for little Angelo. I remember that week very well. I was one of the first people. He called a friend of mine, Catherine Shephard. She was a friend of his as well. And it is through her that I know pretty much all I know about Santo Sonnee. That and the small amount of new information available from the newspapers. Or that had been available, at the time. The newspapers have dropped the entire thing now. Almost immediately they dropped it, after having found Santo. It was the story of the day for six weeks and then in an instance it disappeared as if it had never occurred. Fickle I suppose.
The great loser in all of this was the younger brother. They mentioned the younger quite a bit at the time they couldn’t find Angelo, as if to imply that Santo would do the same sort of thing again. I understand perhaps it was a good idea to bring the charges as they did. Or consider the charges. I guess they merely bandied them around in the press. Claiming that other fathers would be less likely to leave a child in a truck out in the mountains. The child, Angelo, was only four. The younger was about to be three at the time. The younger wasn’t with Santo and Angelo that day. Santo was doing a favor for the mother. She didn’t go by Sonnee any longer. Her first name was Teressa. Well she had been asked to do some extra work and the person who watched the boys had said that she could only take one. Something to do with the capacity of the car or something. It was the number of child seats I think. The care-giver had only two and had one other child who she routinely drove, every day, to another woman’s home. It wasn’t a formal day-care arrangement. It was simply a family needing money. The mother didn’t work but watched these children when they needed watching.
Teressa had to work that night at the grocery. So she called Santo and he agreed to take the boy. The problem was that Santo had already bought the rifle. I guess it was the new sight on the rifle that was of interest to him. He was a great hunter. Took the time off every year at the beginning of the season. People thought, because of his name, that he was new to the country. But he was really from a three-generation family right here. The name was the name of his father’s father. Santo wanted to go up then while the light was still good and check out the sight on that rifle. He wouldn’t actually be hunting for another month. But they’d had that storm and he couldn’t get very far then and he got out and went back a small ways into the woods. There where they couldn’t ever find the boy. He went into the woods, just for fifteen minutes he said. And that was that.
When they said that they were going to prosecute, at first I didn’t understand it all. It was clearly something that was an accident, the boy walking or crawling away, Santo not being able to find the boy, just then before it got too dark to look for anyone, anyone that size who couldn’t yell to let you know where they were. I’ve wondered why the boy didn’t cry. And why the man couldn’t have heard the boy. He looked into the night I guess and then drove down into town and called to have a party formed to continue looking. By that time it was dark and only thirty degrees and beginning to snow. About ten of them, Santo and boys from the Sheriffs office and a couple of fellows from the girls family were out all night. One of the deputy sheriffs said that he heard a sniffly sound out there. But they all had summer gear in their cars and couldn’t travel much in the snow which was accumulating quick. I heard that it was snowing so fast that any tracks were lost almost as soon as they were made and a couple of the Sheriffs people were lost themselves, momentarily, until they were able to get somebody’s attention and follow that person’s voice back out to the cars.
Then there was a whole week of looking with everyone out there. I was out there too. I’ve been perplexed as to how the kid could have just disappeared like that. You would think that he couldn’t get far. A couple days after the disappearance it had warmed up quite a little; there were still substantial patches of snow and the lake still had ice off to one side in the shade of the mountain. You could see large sections though without any snow and it amazes me that we couldn’t find the boy. It could have been an animal had come along.
On the day that they said they were going to file charges on the neglect business, that Santo had just left the boy in the truck with one set of the double doors wide open for fifteen minutes. Of course Santo drove up to that same spot and shot himself right through the head, sitting right in the truck where he left the boy. They said the charges didn’t amount to much. Santo would have just spent a short time on probation and probably would have had to pay a fine. So why would he have shot himself. He was at fault, he thought, for the split up of the marriage. He’s been seeing a girl and Teressa had found out about it. He was trying to patch things back up but she had gone ahead and taken another boy.
Then he took Angelo up there and lost him for dead. I’m sure he felt real bad. Him being in the papers and on television so much. I am sure he did. And I wonder some times about the boy. The other boy lost both the older brother and the father. Sad story.