My Sunshine Away (13 page)

I
t is easy to gloss over agony.

They say this happens with women and childbirth, when they experience pain off the charts. Ask them how it feels during the process and you’ll get daggerlike stares, answers in a sailor’s vocabulary. Ask them a few months later, when they are holding the child, or after they’ve put him or her to bed, and they’ll say, “I remember it being bad, but not
too
bad.” Then give them a second, wait for a smile.

This is not the only example.

Even when we talk about youthful summers and strange uncles and front porches, it’s easy to not recount the many hours we spent furious. In my case, I’d written Lindy a flurry of passionate and apologetic letters, never mailed. I’d tried to cut my own thighs with a Swiss Army knife but gained neither pleasure nor scars from the experience. I’d dialed up teen help hotlines in the middle of the night that we’d been given by guest lecturers at my school. “What is your emergency?” they’d ask me. “I don’t know,” I’d say. “Do I have to have an emergency?” and they’d be quiet until I hung up. I did things like push-ups when I couldn’t sleep. I thought, constantly, of Lindy.

Yet when I found myself asked to actually speak of her I realized how long it had been since I had. My uncle Barry was looking for a simple description, I’m sure, maybe just a name and a face, but the task seemed impossible to me. And if it had been my mother or sister who’d asked me to talk about Lindy, I would have ignored them. But with Barry, a person who didn’t know her history, our history, and who didn’t know that to speak of her was to speak of a before and after, of two lives wrapped into one, I felt I might as well tell the truth.

“There’s this girl,” I told him. “And when I look at her, I don’t know what to do.”

Barry smiled as if he understood, as if he’d known this exact feeling himself. He leaned forward in his chair. “Well,” he asked me, “what do you
want
to do when you see her? Let me guess: cook her a steak? Protect her from danger? Rip off her bra?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “All of those things, I guess. But I think what I’d really like is to not have to do anything. I’d like to just kind of stand there and look at her, maybe, watch her laugh. Maybe she could tell me something funny.”

“Okay,” Barry said. “Then what? I mean, that’s just a start. What comes after that?”

“I don’t know,” I told him. “Then maybe she could tell me something sad.”

“Ouch,” he said. “You’ve got it bad.”

“She never talks to me,” I said.

Evening soon fell on the porch that night, and we first knew this by the way we began to scratch at our ankles, wave at mosquitoes buzzing our ears. Next door to us, we saw the Stillers’ floodlights click on automatically. We heard a neighbor pull their trash out to the curb. Finally, the sky began to purple.

“Listen,” Barry said. “I wish I was even half as smart as you when
I was your age. Back then I thought the way to pick up girls was to rev a car engine and stuff a sock in my jeans.”

“Does that work?” I asked him. “I’m willing to try anything.”

“Yeah.” He smiled. “It works, but not in the way you want it to. It’s like turning on a bug zapper. You get a lot of action, but all you’re zapping is bugs.”

I unfurled the Duncan and let it spin. Its bottom ticked the concrete slab of our porch.

“When it comes to women,” he told me, “what you want to do is just like you’re doing. When you get a chance to talk to this girl, just be there and listen. Don’t believe all that ‘you gotta be tough’ or ‘you gotta be sensitive’ shit. Just let the girl think whatever
she
wants to think. If you do that, then the good ones will see something good in you and the bad ones will see something bad. See what I mean? You’re a blank canvas. Let them do the painting. Just don’t go prancing around like some phony. It’s like my buddy Carl. He wears this toupee and it looks all right. But when he picks up a girl and she likes him, he’s miserable.”

Barry looked off in the distance like he was thinking fondly about Carl, some friend of his from where? What state? What life? I didn’t know.

“Why?” I asked him. “If Carl’s getting all the girls, then why is he miserable?”

“Because,” he said, “he knows one day she’s going to want to hop in the shower with him. What’s he supposed to say to that? There’s not a woman on Earth who respects a man that won’t take a shower with her.”

“Really?” I asked.

“I think we’re getting ahead of ourselves,” he said. “Pull up that Duncan.”

So I did, and then I spun it again.

“Did it always work out for you that way?” I asked him. “I mean, just letting them see what they wanted to see?”

My uncle Barry sat up in his chair and checked his watch. He scratched his chin. I think now that he was likely wondering what time it was in Arizona, a few zones over, and what his wife may have been doing at that hour, but I didn’t consider it then. “No,” he told me. “It doesn’t always work out that way, because
we’re
painters, too. I mean, we can be wrong about them like they can be wrong about us. I guess that’s what complicates it. We’re not perfect, either.”

This comment made sense to me, yet I’d no clue how to use it to my advantage. It ultimately sounded like all the other advice about love sounded to me in my teenage years, like it was pointed in some different direction or meant for someone else.
Just be yourself,
they all said. Yet there I was,
myself
, and I was miserable.

“So,” I said, “I guess all you’re saying is that I should be careful.”

“Nah,” he said. “You’re going to love who you love. Being careful won’t solve anything.”

And it was after this that we saw a strange thing.

Across the street and two doors down, Mr. Simpson, Lindy’s father, stumbled from his driveway and onto the Kerns’ front lawn. The sun was still low in the west and gave everything an ominous glow, the last moment of clarity before dark, and there was no mistaking that Mr. Simpson was drunk. His feet crossed before him as he walked and his arms looked loose in their sockets. His head hung heavy. We heard him yell Bo Kern’s name.

I knew this meant trouble.

When no answer came, Mr. Simpson picked a small piece of loose concrete off the sidewalk and threw it through the Kerns’
dining room window. My uncle Barry stood up from his chair. “Stay here,” he said. But I didn’t.

Instead I followed him at a trot up the street, where we saw Bo Kern and his father barging out of their house, examining the damage, and then turning to Mr. Simpson. The dynamics of the whole affair were so abnormal for Piney Creek Road that I didn’t understand a bit of it. All I remember is that Mr. Simpson looked nothing like the man I’d seen happily drinking Kool-Aid on his front porch those years before, the one I’d seen tightening up the seat on Lindy’s bicycle and giving her a good-bye kiss before her daily trip to the track. The man I watched now was anguished and he cursed venomously at Bo and his father, slurring his words past the point of comprehension. Still, we all knew the subject was Lindy.

As it turned out, Mr. Simpson had never gotten over his suspicions about Bo, despite the number of times Bo had been questioned, and, for some reason, on this night in 1991, two summers after the crime, he had made up his mind to deal with it. He was awful and raging and yelled primarily at Mr. Kern as if Bo wasn’t there. “Your boy’s going to prison,” he spat. “I’m telling you right now, I aim to kill him.”

Mr. Kern stood in a crooked manner. He was a person we rarely saw in places other than Bo’s football games, and I’d never even heard his voice before. All I knew was that his story was a sad one, as he’d crushed his hip in a fall at work years earlier. And when he walked in front of his son on that night, the limp from his work accident was obvious. He told Bo to stay calm and spoke deliberately, as if he was in control, as if the last thing any of us wanted him to do was raise his voice.

“Dan,” he told Mr. Simpson. “This is a grown man you’re talking
about. And he’s sober and you’re drunk. So I suggest you go back to your house before the whiskey says something you might regret. We can all talk like men in the morning.”

Behind him, Bo Kern was turning in circles. He had the body of a tree trunk, and the brain. He put a wad of Skoal in his cheek. “Goddamn, Simpson!” he yelled. “We’ve been through all this a million times! I wasn’t even home when that happened!”

Still, Mr. Simpson carried on as if he was alone in the world, and I suppose he was.

He pointed at Bo. “That boy is a felon!” he said.

Mr. Kern shook his head and started back to his house. “All right, Dan,” he said. “Go ahead and tell him that to his face.”

So Mr. Simpson did, and it was only a matter of seconds before Bo Kern knocked him to the ground. He cracked him twice, that I saw, with his fists, and Mr. Simpson was reduced to a puddle on the lawn. Bo Kern stood up, crazed. He spat black tobacco on the grass as a way of controlling himself. What he could have done to Lindy’s father that day, my God. What his strength could have done to any of us there in the neighborhood. I’m sure he realized it.

He kicked at the grass and looked over at my uncle Barry and me. “She ain’t even got no titties!” he told us. “What would I want her for, anyway?”

And with this simple statement, as odd as it seems, Bo Kern’s name was cleared from Lindy’s rape. The obvious sense it made, coming from Bo, and the dumb earnestness with which he said it made all of us, probably even Mr. Simpson included, finally believe him. I never heard anyone mention him and Lindy again.

After Bo left, slamming the door behind him, my uncle Barry and I ran up to Mr. Simpson. He was sobbing on the lawn. I’d never
seen a thing like this, a grown man crying, not even at Hannah’s funeral, where my father sat as still as the furniture. There was only one other time, I suppose, decades later, when I helped a buddy take his dog to the vet to be put to sleep. We sat in the car for a good half hour after they said their good-byes, the man and his dog, his throat clutching and jerking with grief. On the lawn that night, Mr. Simpson did the same.

“She’s my daughter,” he cried to us. “She’s just a kid. What am I supposed to do?”

We had no answer for him.

The three of us squatted there for a while, my uncle and Mr. Simpson complete strangers, until we heard the low whine of the mosquito-abatement truck coming through the neighborhood, spraying chemicals from the back of its bed. I looked up and saw the Simpson women, Lindy and Mrs. Peggy, watching us from separate rooms of their two-story house. My uncle Barry noticed them, too, and when he saw that I was smiling at Lindy, he shook his head for me to stop. When I glanced back, Lindy had closed her curtains.

So, we helped Mr. Simpson to his feet. We dusted him off.

My uncle Barry looked upset about all of this mess, like he knew the whole story about Lindy’s rape and her father’s decline, though I don’t believe that he did. Still, that was the thing about Barry. You just got the feeling that whatever was out there in the world, no matter how great, no matter how awful, he had seen it. I admired this about him.

“Go on inside,” he told Mr. Simpson. “Have one last drink but no more, and get to bed. You can’t fix it all tonight.”

Mr. Simpson stared at the two of us, his lips and nose already swollen, and he nodded. Then my uncle Barry tapped me hard on the
shoulder and we set off across the street. We passed right in front of the mosquito-abatement truck and covered our mouths with our shirts. We waved at the driver.

When we got to the porch, I said, “Holy shit.”

I’d never seen anything so exciting as that.

My uncle Barry took me by the shoulders. His voice was urgent and sincere.

“I want you to listen to me,” he said. “I know that girl over there makes you want to be in love and get married and be a grown-up, but what you saw just now, that’s
what being a grown-up is. That man out there crying on his lawn. So you just do what I told you and be yourself. I’m serious. Don’t wish any time away.”

“Okay,” I said. “I won’t.”

“Let’s not mention this to your mom, either,” he said. “She’s got enough to do without worrying about the neighbors. Now, come on,” he said, “let’s get in the house before we’re both gassed.”

Once inside, my uncle Barry and I slunk off to different spaces as if it were midnight, though it was barely suppertime. After we eventually ate, saying nothing to each other while my sister Rachel droned on about some new organ they had gotten at church, I went to my room and got in bed. I slept poorly, thinking about that choking sound Mr. Simpson had been making, crying like a man does, and I had a dream that night that would reoccur many more times in my life, one where I am driving a car with no steering wheel but rather a large set of strings coming out of the dashboard. I feel the tires sliding all over the road in this dream, sending me in and out of oncoming traffic, and the only method of navigation available to me is a tangled mess of twine in my lap. I pull one string and the radio comes on. Another string and the wipers wave. I push on pedals that have no effect. And in the dream that night, the first dream, my uncle Barry
sat beside me in the car but said nothing. He looked as if he thought I was doing a perfectly fine job of driving, as if he trusted me with his own life, and this made me feel worse. And as the years have gone by, the passengers sitting beside me in this nightmare have changed, but never my total surprise at the strange problem I’ve inherited, and never my inability to solve it.

When I woke up the following day, my uncle Barry was gone.

For some reason, I wasn’t surprised.

I could tell he’d been shaken by what he’d seen in Mr. Simpson’s eyes the night prior, but I hadn’t the tools to assemble the connection between the men then. It wasn’t until a week had passed and I’d bothered my mother so much about Barry’s departure that she finally told me some things I didn’t know. The first was about the man who used to pull up in our driveway to talk to him about work. And what she told me was that Uncle Barry’s wife, Sharon, had been cheating on him, and that she’d gotten pregnant from some other guy, a professor in her new department in Arizona. And so the man Barry was talking to in our driveway was a liaison for a private investigator in Arizona, my mom said, who Barry had hired to give him all the details of what she was doing while he was away. The whole scenario seemed improbable to me, and so weak-minded of my uncle who I adored that I was upset with my mother for even suggesting it. I didn’t believe her.