My Sunshine Away (21 page)

I sat in the fort with my feet dangling out of the opening and was immediately overcome by the heat of the place. It was so stifling and focused that it made me forget why I had come out there. I felt a quick desire to take off my shirt and go crazy in the old woods, to wipe my face with mud, to pour water all over my head. I began to have truly outlandish thoughts and felt nauseated and confused until I realized what was causing it all—the overwhelming smell of gasoline. I picked up a flashlight sitting by the entrance and looked around the dark and spare fort. I saw a pillow and yellowed blanket on the floor. In one of the corners, I saw stacks of instructional and pornographic magazines like
Popular Mechanics
and
Hustler
. Next to those, nearly half a dozen dismantled flashlights. And there, lining the far wall, a series of oil cartons and gasoline cans. The cans were gallon-sized,
with ribbed spouts, striped red and yellow and made of metal in those days. I recognized them immediately, as I had seen every inhabitant of our block lugging them around at some point in my youth. The oil was primarily the two-stroke type, used for small engines, and the cardboard cartons they were sold in were already soiled and greasy near their mouths. I thought back to the last time I had heard a lawn mower in the neighborhood, the last time I’d heard a leaf blower. How could they run, I wondered, when all of the fuel of Piney Creek Road had been stolen? What did our neighborhood even look like anymore? How far had we let it go?

I noticed our own gas can along the wall as well. It was dented and scratched along its side from where I had accidentally dropped it, years ago, while bringing it out to my dad as he mowed the largest part of our property. The cap had popped off when it hit the ground and quickly spilled enough gas to soak and eventually kill a large swath of grass by the driveway. I was young, maybe eight years old, and upset with myself. I just stood around, watching the gas pour out. My dad saw me standing there and got off his riding mower to approach me. He put his hand on the back of my neck as we watched the last bit of it soak into the ground and he said,
Now, if we only had some salt, we could finish the whole yard off.
He was trying to be kind, but I was inconsolable. Later that night, after a few drinks from a Styrofoam cup, he came into my room and stood in the doorway as I flipped through some comics.
You’re going to have a hard time in life if you let every little mistake bother you,
he said.
Life is good, son. Enjoy it.

Okay,
I said.

He was gone two years later. And it is hard for me not to wonder what he had already done at that point, when he told me how good life was. Was he already cheating on us? Was he with other women before Laura? Was he waiting until we all went to bed to make some
clandestine phone call? If so, then did he mean that the good life, the life like he was living, was a life without virtue? Was that his advice? Or, as I like to think now, whenever we are together as men, was he just being honest? Was he possibly still in love with our family alone, but then life changed without his permission? I mean, was he saying that we should enjoy what we have because nobody, not even a person in love, knows what’s coming? What was he telling me? What was I learning?

Down below, Jason asked if I could pass him the gas cans.

I’d almost forgotten where I was.

“Try not to breathe too much up there, man,” he said. “Those fumes will mess you up. I thought I saw a fucking unicorn last night.”

So I pulled my shirt up over my mouth and carefully dropped the cans through the hole in the floor to where Jason was standing. None of them were full, and as I pictured the shelf in our garage where my can should have been, I felt some strange guilt that it was empty. What else from my past could be missing? I wondered. What else were people just taking from me?

I watched Jason consolidate the gas into one master can.

“What are you doing with all this stuff?” I asked him.

“It’s a science project,” he said. “I want to keep up my grades so Mom and Dad will let me take Buffy to the prom.”

He was joking, but neither of us laughed. Jason had been missing from home for at least a week. I’d no idea how long he’d been missing from school, nor did I know how many schools he’d attended since he got kicked out of Perkins in the eighth grade. I knew so little about him at that time, so little about anyone, really. It stuns me, now, the limited information kids operate with. I watched as Jason began to mix the oil and gas in specific proportions outlined for him in his
book and I began to feel an accomplice to something. “Jason,” I said, “why did you bring me out here?”

“Two reasons,” he said. “The
first
is in a blue envelope in the corner. Take a look.”

I set down the flashlight and walked toward the corner of the small fort, where a blue envelope sat on a stack of magazines and spiral-bound notebooks. I picked it up, lifted the flap, and shook out a small key. And although there were hundreds of possibilities in that square mile, thousands of locks in our lives, I knew what that key was for as soon as I saw it. It was the key to Mr. Landry’s private room, it had to be, and the immediate danger that it represented, the possibilities it created, twisted my stomach.

“I snatched it the night I split,” Jason said. “My dad passed out with the door open. I almost smashed up the fucking place, I was so pissed. But what good would that have done? I just unlocked the window instead. Now we can open it from the outside so it doesn’t matter how many combo locks he puts on that stupid door. I just wish I could have opened the shed.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “If you can get in that room through the window, then what do you need this key for?”

“I don’t need it for shit,” Jason said. “
You
do. That’s the key to his safe.”

I held the key between my thumb and index finger as if it was a lit match and I knew that Mr. Landry, if he hadn’t already, would check the window of his private room soon. I knew the match would not have long to burn. Then, through one of the cut-out windows in Jason’s fort, I saw something I never expected to see. Across the woods from us, maybe half a mile away, sat the Perkins School. I understood it was close, of course. I’d walked or biked to it thousands of times,
but always on the sidewalks, always on the prescribed paths. And even though I’d ventured this deep into the woods before, I’d never achieved this particular vantage point. Yet there it was, glowing like a city in the darkness. The school buildings I knew so intimately were now rendered strange to me by their security lights and the grand old oaks of its quad were up-lit and beautiful. The football field and track were also lit, as if it was homecoming weekend, but the place was deserted. The sudden order of the manicured campus seemed a bizarre affront to the madness of the woods, and the school looked, from this angle, less like a school than a brochure for the school. It seemed an ad campaign for unattainable progress and it surprised me that Jason chose this view for his window.

More surprising, perhaps, was that I began to understand something important about humans and trees at that moment. I began to understand our shared history. To look at the world from a tree, as I had done so often in those years, is a fundamentally different way of seeing. It is contemplative and detached and the objects one studies from that height are rendered, at the same time, both majestic and small. A generally commonplace item, in other words, may stir admiration and mystery when viewed from that vantage point. Or, at worst, it may breed jealousy, desire, and contempt. It all depends on the viewer. And so, I have to wonder, what kind of viewer was I? What
was
that, exactly, up in the oak trees of Woodland Hills? An animal? Some sort of Peeping Tom? A sensitive boy racked with love and guilt?

Maybe.

My point is that climbing a tree to look at the world is primal. It is ancestral. So, as I imagine it now, the eyes in my head on that night were as dark and unreadable as an ape’s. This may not have been the case, of course. I may have been only a nervous kid with a key in his hand. Still, it makes me wonder. Where is that missing link in
our human history? Isn’t it strange we can’t find it? Australopithecus? Homo erectus? What was the exact moment we hopped down from the branches? When we said
Enough with all this looking
and became emotionally engaged with the world? When we became vulnerable? What dream were we so compelled to pursue? What was the prize? What was the hope? What was the goal?

“Hey,” Jason said. “Come back down here. I need you to help me bury something.”

T
he soil of the Earth is made of horizons.

Beneath our feet, intricate layers of matter lead down to the core. The first layer is known as the O Horizon and is where most of your visible activity takes place. This is the domain of the earthworm and mole, of rotting leaves and flower root. It is called the O Horizon because it consists of primarily organic material, all of it still closely connected to the living or dead. Lean down and muss this stuff with your hand, kick it around with your feet, it is of little consequence. There is so much life traffic here that your tracks will be covered in no time. Below this is the A Horizon. This is the place where hardy trees and perennials tap and grow and go dormant and then wake again the next year, a place the weakest vine and weed roots never reach. It is settled and weathered and dark and rich and so long established that it will forever be a part of this ecosystem. Drop a geologist out of an airplane and, rather than orient themselves with the stars, they will dig for the A Horizon. It is so abundant with life-giving energies that even the falling rain, I’d imagine, is hoping to settle there. Below this is the B Horizon, where only trace
elements of life still remain. The stuff of this place is ancient and cool and so entirely leached of desirable nutrients that it has collapsed upon itself and become too dense to scoop or sift by hand. It is instead thick like earthen clay and, once excavated, must be molded, formed, and often cooked in hot ovens for long periods of time to become something that we can once again recognize: a bowl, a plate, a human face.

Beneath this is solid bedrock, where no shovels go.

All to say that it is only by digging through the many horizons of my memory that I’ve come to understand how this particular night of my youth evolved into the one in which it all went down. It has taken me a while, in other words, to understand how a day that started so benevolently—with my genuine interest in the welfare of Lindy Simpson and Chris Garrett—could turn into a night in which I stood in the dark woods with Jason Landry, looking down at a corpse.

The fork-eared dog had been shot through the head in a manner I would later hear described as execution-style. As it lay on its side, the one eye visible to us was sheared of its lid and made it seem as if the dog were in perpetual amazement, perhaps witnessing some miracle ahead of us in the woods. Its dark tongue had bloated and fallen through the bottom of its jaw, which was gone, and the onset of rigor mortis had stiffened the legs to make it look as if it was stretching for a nap. It looked healthier, in a strange way, than the only other time I had seen it, which was when Jason fed and chased it away from his house those years ago.

Still, it broke my heart like life does.

“Jason,” I said, “who did this?”

“Damn,” he said. “You really don’t get it, do you?”

I didn’t.

Of all the permutations in my head on that occasion, none
conjured the scene that I later learned to be true: that of my mother with a pair of gardening shears in her hand, a bucket full of clippings at her feet. And on a hot day in the yard while her son was at school for orientation, when she had perhaps paused to sip from a glass of lemonade on the wrought-iron table near the swimming pool, she heard the strange sound of a whimpering. Another sound, then, of a man’s voice. And it was only a casual curiosity that led her to the fence of our yard, where she pushed aside the branches of the althea and azaleas that had grown so strong in that light. And once there, she saw through the chain-link fence the enormous body of her neighbor, Jacques Landry, dragging a dog by the scruff of its neck to the woods behind their properties. And wherein as soon as she recognized this dog as the fearful stray she’d stumbled across on occasion, one she’d felt a torn sympathy for, toggling between calling Animal Control or perhaps bringing it into her own home to share with her son and surviving daughter who could use some cheering up themselves, she saw her neighbor straddle the dog between his legs, pull a pistol from his belt, and shoot it in the head. And as she was still so stunned by what she had seen, still held motionless, the moment her neighbor with a bandaged hand made his way up the hill and glanced casually in her direction, meeting her eyes with his own, she was unable to keep yet another small part of her once hopeful nature from dying. And so she backed away from the fence and ran into her house, where the only remaining space left to retreat was inside of her mind. And this is where she found me, I suppose, in her memory, mentioning a dark room full of pictures in that large neighbor’s house.

I didn’t know any of this then. I only knew that my mom had been frightened that day and that Mr. Landry was frightening. I also knew that Jason Landry was old enough to be working in a
convenience store, to be venturing out in life, and yet there he was pissing his blankets at night, sleeping alone in a childish fort. I knew that he had scars on his back shaped like dimes because I had seen them. I also knew there was a part of me that believed Jason himself could have killed the dog. And so, now that he had chosen me to confide in, to team up with, I also knew that our views of the world were so wildly disparate that the fond way I thought about Randy Stiller, my pal, my best friend in the good old days, was likely the way Jason Landry thought about me. Over all the other mounting evidence, it may have been
this
strange idea, that I was possibly the closest friend Jason Landry had, that convinced me of his father’s guilt.

Jason handed me a shovel.

“Do you pray?” he asked me.

“No,” I said. “Not in a long time.”

“Fine,” he said. “I’ll do it.” Jason stuck the blade of his shovel in the ground and squeezed the hilt like a microphone. “Dear Whatever,” he said. “Please let my dog get lots of horny bitches in heaven. Or, if not that, let him come back to Earth infested with rabies and finish the job that he started when he was just trying to protect me from that asshole who is probably your biggest mistake. Or maybe just go back in time and switch life around so that my dad is the one that gets hunted for years and locked in a shed and then shot in the face by my dog. I’m good with any of these options. Okay, then. Fuck you very much. Amen.”

“Amen,” I said. We began to dig.

I like to think now that I was biting my tongue as we dug that hole, trying not to ask Jason for more details about his obviously horrible personal life. Or that I was trying to skillfully negotiate a way to offer some help without insulting him. I think the truth, though, is that I was already envisioning myself as some sort of local hero. The
more we labored and sweat and slapped at the mosquitoes on our arms in the darkness, the more I imagined what Lindy might say if I crawled out of the Landrys’ window with handfuls of evidence. I had no idea what that evidence could be, other than perhaps some more photos, but if I could find something to link Mr. Landry to the crime, something to put Lindy and her family at ease, something that would allow us all to move on and let me assuage my guilt without ever having to tell her about what I had done and seen while sitting in the branches of her water oak, then that would be nice. I imagined holding this evidence up like a trophy while my parents congratulated me. The Perkins School might even throw some sort of catered reception and invite Lindy back to the track team, give her a standing ovation. And by the time my fantasy had evolved into a vision of me traipsing across the stage to accept my Medal of Honor, Jason and I were covered in dirt.

“I think that’s deep enough,” he said, and he was right.

After we covered the hole back up, Jason encircled the grave with random junk as if to mark it: a rusty toaster, an elbow of PVC pipe, a birdcage, a broken speaker. It looked like the crown of some buried and monstrous king. He then gathered the bottles he’d filled with fuel, wrapped them loosely in a T-shirt, and put them in a backpack he slung over his shoulders.

“I guess that’s it,” he said. “Just make sure you’re out of the house in an hour. Don’t start whacking off in there.”

“Aren’t you coming with me?” I asked.

“Fuck no,” he said. He then looked past me toward the neighborhood, as if he could see straight through the woods and up the hill and into the living room of the home he’d fled from. “I’m never going back inside that house.”

“Should we meet back here, then?” I asked him.

“Don’t ever come back here,” he told me. “I’m serious. Someone could follow you. This place is sacred ground now.”

Jason tightened the straps on his shoulders and walked in the opposite direction of our neighborhood. I felt a quiet sadness that he was leaving, like we should shake hands or something. I suppose part of me knew I might not see him again.

“Jason,” I asked him, “where are you going?”

“To the prom,” he said. “You’ll thank me later.”

Then, after a few more steps, Jason stopped and tapped at his pockets like he was looking for something. He finally pulled out a lighter and flicked it twice in the darkness to make sure it worked. And I wonder, now, if I could go back in time and freeze that moment, how much would be lit up in those flint strikes? What else besides us was out there? Oaks? Owls? Mangroves? Gods? Could they tell any difference between me and Jason? Was there any difference? I don’t know. Yet as I watched him disappear into the night, I felt pretty sure that something bad was about to happen.

And, possibly, something great.

So I ran. I broke back through the clearing and into the woods and felt no fear as I crossed the fallen tree over the canal. When I neared the edge of my property, instead of continuing toward the street, I took a sharp right and stayed hidden behind the tree line until I could see the lights from the back patio of the Landrys’. Their house, like all of ours, stood on a hill but was almost totally obscured by the metal storage shed Jason and I had leaned against the day I first saw that cur. I ducked behind an oak to catch my breath, and it struck me that I was likely hiding behind the same tree that fork-eared stray had hidden behind.

How long ago had that been? I wondered. It was before Lindy’s rape, I knew. It was before my sister died. It was before I was in high
school, before I ever did any drugs or drank alcohol or smoked cigarettes, and so we were truly just kids then. We sat in the grass and played with roly-polies and my life was so tremendous and simple that it hurt me to think about it. The more I considered the distance between these two moments, how much we had all changed since then, the angrier I became. I suddenly had no choice but to empathize with Jason Landry and, in many ways, this destroyed me. I knew, for instance, that what I had seen that day behind his shed was not an isolated event and when I began to do the math I realized that Jason had been caring for that dog for years—not weeks or months—by feeding it in secret, by petting it and then cussing it, and by doing everything he could imagine to protect it from his father, who would inevitably return home from work each day and try to kill it, who would stalk the woods for it, who would refresh bowls of antifreeze like others refilled their bird feeders, only because some part of his inexplicable nature was inexplicably offended by an undocumented animal on his property. Or, worse, that he was offended by it because his son loved it.

This horrible idea led me to think about the length of dog years, too, the old saying that dogs age at the rate of six or seven years to our one. And so where, I had to wonder, did our cur find shelter all those decades it lived alone in the woods? How often had it seen us play? How could it, while surrounded by well-to-do families, find no better situation than this one? How could it watch us eat and laugh and ignore it, day after day, and yet remain hopeful?

I suppose that it didn’t.

So my anger expanded.

I was angry at Jason for letting it live like that and at Mr. Landry for being so cruel and at the dog for being so unfortunate and at myself for seeing it all those years before and not doing a single thing
about it. And this brought to my attention that I had not done a single thing about any of the terrible events in my life. I had not dealt with my sister’s death. I had not comforted my family. I had not dealt with my father’s leaving us. I had not comforted Lindy. And, despite my inexhaustible attention toward her, I’d yet to even honestly deal with my own role in her sadness. Up until this point in my life, I understood, I had not been a person of much integrity and I wanted this to change.

So I moved up the hill toward the Landrys’. I jogged in a half squat like a movie soldier and had ludicrous thoughts of violence. Perhaps Mr. Landry would be waiting for me on the back porch, ready to beat me to death with his walking stick. Maybe he would pounce on me from the bushes, wrestle me to the ground, and shoot me through the back of the head. Or, perhaps he was already in his owl form and watching me, preparing his stinking nest for my bones. If this was the case, then so be it. I didn’t care. I was out of my mind with adrenaline. I was rendered to nothing by guilt. My goals were simple. My ego was zero. It felt, very much, like my life was beginning.

I got to the top of the hill and hid behind the storage shed. I glanced inside the open door of it and saw dog feces all over the concrete, puddles of piss from where the cur must have been kept those last days, and the depth of my rage multiplied. It made sense to me now why Jason said he wished he could have unlocked the shed. It made sense how this particular assault on Jason’s heart, of what I was sure had been one of many such assaults perpetrated by his father, had finally given him the courage to leave. Who could blame him.

I left the shed and entered the open garage. I moved slowly around the Landrys’ cars, still on the opposite side of the house as the room I’d been called to loot. I wanted to make sure they were asleep
before trying the window, and I needed a good look inside. I bent to all fours and crawled through the garage to the backyard, where my hands and knees got soaked from the grass. I didn’t mind. I wanted it that way. I felt so much a part of the Louisiana landscape that I could sense the dew falling around me. It was a beautiful night and I know this because nearly everything that I remember so clearly—the corpse, the shed, the wet grass beneath my fingers—was lit only by the moon and I was a part of it, snaking up their yard to the back patio, where I could finally see through the big windows of their den, just as I would have been able to see through the big windows of mine. And sitting there, passed out in an armchair, was the enormous Mr. Landry.