My Sunshine Away (5 page)

I
n the weeks after it occurred, Lindy’s rape was a strange sort of secret.

Everyone in the neighborhood “knew,” but I can safely speak for Randy and Artsy Julie and myself when I say that back then, we didn’t exactly
know
what we knew. We knew the police had milled around for a bit, sure, we knew that we had each been asked a few simple questions, but since our parents had also asked us to be discreet about the crime (another mysterious word for me in those years) we didn’t understand much more than that. We noticed that people now acted differently around Lindy, was all, that our parents lifted their voices when they spoke to her that summer, that they let us stay out a little past suppertime if they saw we were playing with her. “Did you have a good time with Lindy?” my mother would ask me. “It’s important that you kids have fun.”

All of this just to form my excuse, I suppose, when I tell you the next thing I did.

I was not yet fifteen years old, remember, and in the first week of that school year, my freshman year, when we were all changing back
into our uniforms after gym class, a few of the guys began talking of Lindy. As chronicled, many of these kids had their eyes on her since the onset of time, and our entry to high school seemed to give them a courage I was not yet feeling. They passed along rumors like scouting reports in the locker room: about how Lindy had broken up with some boy I knew she never dated, about how one guy had seen her breasts at a pool party that summer. And so, in a burst of self-serving slop I’m still ashamed of, I also offered up what I knew. I said the word low, and under my breath, because that’s the only way I’d ever heard it spoken.

Rape.

It was a word that refused to bring me an image, despite my recent relationship with it. In the weeks I’d sat alone in my room, wondering about its dark meaning, I envisioned Lindy suffering strange beatings, but yet I never saw any bruises on her face. In an attempt to increase my understanding, I went back to a poem I remembered reading in school the year before, Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock,” and the meaning became even further unmoored. I later looked the word up, just to get a hold of it, in a thesaurus my father had left in his study. I came upon these synonyms:

Plunder. Seizure. Violence.

So, I knew “rape” to ride shotgun with some grand injustice, yes, I was not dim. But I never thought of it in terms of Lindy’s virginity, her budding spirit, her body, being slaughtered in a sexual way. I never thought of a thing that could not be made right. All I knew was that the boys in the locker room wanted to talk about Lindy that day and that I wanted these boys to talk to me.

The effect was immediate.

Word shot like current through the high school circuitry. And when approached, Lindy denied it in every way. However, due to the
unexpected depth of her bawling, her strange shouting, she was too obviously upset to convince them, and by the time the afternoon bell rang, Lindy had aged right in front of us. Her ponytail looked unkempt and off-center. She allowed notebooks to spill out of her backpack and spoke to no one as she trudged through the school parking lot to meet her mother, who, on this day, was waiting to drive her back home.

Later that afternoon, just before dinner, Lindy knocked on my door. I felt sick when I saw her through the peephole. All those times I’d lain on the floor and wished for this exact vision to materialize, for her to dismount from her bike and come see me, all the times I’d imagined just what I’d say; these all died, silly and unused, next to the potted plants in the corner.

I opened the door and stood there.

Behind her, I saw purple clouds slide like battleships into position, the evening rain set to get under way. She was barefoot, Lindy, she wore a dark T-shirt over her uniform, and, my God, she was already gone from me then. From all of us.

“Is it true that you’re the one who told?” she asked me.

I didn’t say anything.

“How did you know?” she asked me. “How did you know about that?”

This was an odd question to me.

“Your parents,” I told her. “The police. Everybody knows.”

Lindy looked crushed.

What did she think her parents had been doing, I wondered, in the days they went door to door with the cops? Why did she think our mothers brought all that food to her house as if someone had died? I didn’t understand it. After all, this was a girl who got ill over
the death of astronauts. Couldn’t she feel the mourning in her own neighborhood? Or, by this time, nearly two months after the crime, had she just hoped we’d all forgotten?

I didn’t get the chance to ask her. Lindy turned and ran away.

She did not speak to me again for a year.

In that year, Lindy tried on different personalities, all of them false and doomed. She began by taking a strange pride in her appearance, as if the secret had never gotten out, and started running around with an elite crowd. She wore large bows in her hair at school and jingly bracelets on her wrists. She sidled up to the most coveted virgins and laughed cattily at any younger boys that walked by. When this did not work, and the virgins crucified her, she quit the track team and grew dark. She listened to the heavy and slow music that older kids listened to, The Cure, Joy Division, and she wore black eyeliner to school. If you saw her away from Perkins in those days it was hanging around in dark places like the abandoned and unfinished dorms of Jimmy Swaggart’s disgraced church in Baton Rouge, where we all knew not to go, or maybe hovering on the outskirts of the movie theater, chatting with older boys in combat boots who had no business being there.

None of these disguises suited her.

But in my guilt, in my love, I followed these personalities, too.

I got my mom to take me to a high-end clothing store for Christmas, when Lindy was still in her bows. I grew furious when my mom tried to buy me knockoff Polo shirts and discounted shoes, as if she were out to sabotage me. I became nervous and self-conscious and spent days trying to tie the leather laces of my Timberland loafers in a manner called “the beehive,” which I had seen Michael Tuminello, the leader of the Perkins School preps, do. On weekends I stood out
by the mailbox in my new pastel getups. I walked up and down Piney Creek Road and whistled, hoping Lindy might see me through her window.

And then, when Lindy went dark, so did I, shunning the expensive apparel my mother had bought for me. Instead I dragged her around to record shops and thrift stores. I got her to buy me skull rings, incense, and black T-shirts with band names I’d seen displayed in the patches on Lindy’s schoolbag. She worried about this, I know, but she did not deny me.

Yet my desire to catch Lindy’s eye grew so consuming that I began hating myself and my suburban appearance, as if this was to blame for nearly everything. After a while I even grew to hate my own curly hair, as the rockers Lindy liked all had straight hair, often cut in dramatic angles and gelled. So I slept in baseball caps to straighten my hair out. I used a hot iron to style my bangs. I shaved the sides of my head.

At the height of this period I began to get in minor troubles at school. I stuffed paper towels in the urinals and flooded the bathrooms. I wrote graffiti in Magic Marker on the lockers. Some part of me hoped that if I kept this up long enough Lindy and I might be sentenced to the same session of detention after school, where if nothing else we would be forced to speak to each other in the ridiculous roundtable confessional the teachers made us do. Yet this never happened, and Lindy was able to avoid me completely.

I therefore began to stay up late and sleep little, listening to bands I’d overheard Lindy talk about, and I hated this music. The lyrics were dark and without perspective, wrapped up in melodies that inevitably collapsed, self-aware, on themselves. Even as a kid I knew this. To get into her type of music was to sing along with a man on his
deathbed. So that’s what I tried to do. I wrote poems about Lindy in red ink. I got an earring. I hit puberty.

All this to say that when Lindy and I emerged from that year, we were changed.

Lindy was now a brooding girl who roamed the halls of Perkins alone. Any friends that she did have were meek things who may as well have been shadows. She shunned bright colors, blue included, and wore only gray boxer shorts underneath her uniform at school. She rarely shaved her legs. She became increasingly obsessed with a band called Bauhaus that I was never sure how to pronounce and scribbled things like anarchy signs on her Chuck Taylor high-tops. She cut her hair to chin length and her bangs traced her soft face like sickles.

She became thin and, most said, bulimic. Rows of small pimples appeared on her chest.

This was a hard thing to watch.

But in the following year, when we were speaking again, when we were close, Lindy explained to me how all this had happened.

She said that therapy was to blame.

Lindy told me that her months in group counseling, something her parents insisted she attend, were the worst thing that could have happened to her. It was worse even than the way her father spied on her at all hours in the year that followed the crime, worse than the way she would see his car sitting inconspicuously in the corner of the movie theater parking lot as she bummed cigarettes off of random guys. It was worse than the sheepish way he would later act as if he hadn’t been spying at all, as if he didn’t know what she was talking about, when he cruised back around to pick her up at eleven. And it was even worse than the manner in which he eventually collapsed his
remorse into hers, begging her to talk to him, and adding complicated locks on their doors.

Because what therapy did, she explained, was introduce her to a world of problems she never would have known about otherwise. The girl who cut herself; she was in her group. The anorexic. The bulimic. The nymphomaniac. They each offered rebellious possibilities to Lindy, which she explored. The girl in her group who’d watched her mother die in an automobile accident that she herself had caused. Now there was a look at depression, she said. The boy who was molested by his uncle. Good grief.

Ultimately, the scope of these ills made Piney Creek Road look obscene to Lindy, she said, the way the blossoms on our crepe myrtles bloomed. The lovely street was like an ignorant joke. Therapy had taught her this, and she wore the lesson all over her face.

So I took on the look of a troubled boy as well. I flipped my long bangs out of my eyes when adults approached me. I quit the soccer team, which I was actually good at and enjoyed, and started playing guitar instead because I thought Lindy might find it sexy. I smoked cigarettes, and later dope, in the Taco Bell parking lot on school nights. I rarely smiled.

But my image was papier-mâché.

You could poke a hole right through me in those years and all you would see fall out were items from Lindy’s closet. No blood in me then. Only the one obsessed heart. I stood for nothing. I fought for nothing. Can’t you see?

I’m drawing myself as innocent here.

Don’t we all?

T
he third suspect in Lindy’s rape was the adopted boy named Jason Landry. One of the slew of children that Mr. Landry and his wife, Louise, fostered on Piney Creek Road, Jason was the only one who stuck around. He’d been in their clutches since he was an orphan, a toddler, and was two years older than me. He was not a pleasant boy by any stretch and, just as the people of Woodland Hills wondered if he could have been involved in the crime, we also wondered why
he
, out of all the children the Landrys cared for, became the constant. Through a little research of my own, I’ve since learned that it is not unusual for a family like the Landrys to keep one individual child with them throughout their fostering years, to adopt him, so that the other children they host will have a playmate. This is called anchoring, in the literature, and is the benevolent interpretation of this process.

The truth, I believe, in the case of the Landrys, is that Jason was kept around for a different purpose. Erratic and troubled, Jason was used more as a normalizer than an anchor. He was, in the technical sense, a socializer for the other foster kids. To put it more simply, his
well-fed existence, no matter its quirks, was empirical proof to the other orphaned children who came in and out of their doors that a life could be made with the Landrys, that you could survive it. This, of course, was also proof to Child Services. So if a young boy or girl felt uneasy during his or her first weeks at the Landrys’, if they thought perhaps there was something amiss, Jason could tell them, “Cut it out. Suck it up. This is normal.”

A relative term if there was one.

Jason Landry had thin white hair, even in his youth, yet he was not an albino. His eyes were the color of clean river sand and he had gaps between all of his teeth. I have no idea what tribe of man he was birthed from, no idea of his origin. Perhaps no one does. His skin was yellow, in how I remember him now, and he smelled constantly of the cigarettes his mother smoked in their kitchen. He had been kicked out of the Perkins School in eighth grade for reasons that were never disclosed to me—rumors about him and another boy in a bathroom. Rumors that he’d sexually threatened Ms. Gibson, a fragile Spanish teacher who had lupus. And since he did not attend any youth soccer or swim leagues, he did not play with the rest of the neighborhood kids often. Whenever he did, it ended poorly.

Jason once fought with Bo Kern, for example, over a ten-dollar bill they found in the street, and he was beaten soundly. He ran home screaming. Later, when we had finished up that afternoon’s game of tackle football and forgotten about the skirmish entirely, Jason Landry returned to us with a knife. He didn’t speak to us, or confront Bo, but instead stood on the opposite side of the road and jabbed the knife into a pine tree, again and again. He wore camouflage pants and a green T-shirt as if he couldn’t be seen and ducked to the ground when cars passed between us.

This behavior was neither new nor isolated.

Jason was also known to tackle the neighborhood girls in strange ways that they complained about. He would lie on top of them a bit too long, perhaps. He would press himself against them. Artsy Julie held sticks in her hand like a crucifix when Jason appeared. Lindy refused to let him cover her on pass plays. Whenever we rode go-karts around in the summers, Jason would beg us for a chance at the wheel. When we would finally relent, he would take off down the road and not return. He had inexplicable scars, shaped like dimes, on his back.

Some days, when he was trying to be friendly, he’d pull out clumps of his thin white hair and say, “I bet you can’t do that,” and we hated him. It was easy to.

Even before Lindy’s rape, his behavior looked like evidence.

Yet one day, or perhaps on many days, in the year before the crime, I sat with Jason Landry on the top of the hill behind his house. He lived next door to Randy, two doors down from me, and we rested our backs against a steel storage shed. I have no idea what brought me there that afternoon. What level must the boredom have reached? We picked at the grass, dug around at the dirt, and played with roly-polies that curled fearfully in our hands.

After a while, Jason nudged me on the shoulder and pointed out into the woods.

“Jackpot,” he said.

At the edge of the trees stood a dog, peeking around the corner at us. I have no idea the breed. It looked like it lived in the swamps, if that were possible, as its fur was matted with mud and its rib cage visible against its skin. One of its ears was also forked, apparently from some scuffle long ago, and hung awkwardly from the side of its head. We watched it trot from tree to tree.

Jason reached underneath a tarp.

“This is what I’ve been waiting for,” he said.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Relax,” Jason said, and pulled out a rusty tin bowl from the shed.

He then got up and proceeded to dig through the garbage cans in their driveway. He produced several scraps of food, some pork bones, chicken skin, some old pasta, and walked the bowl of food out into the grass, where he called to the dog, although he didn’t have a name for it. “Here, mutt!” he said. “Come here, you dumb hound! No one’s going to hurt you.”

I remember the high sun on that day; the oak shadows raked across the lawn like stripes. “Whose dog is that?” I asked. “Where does it live?”

“It’s nobody’s dog,” he said. “It’s just a lousy cur. It digs through our trash and shits in our yard. It drives my dad nuts. He spends all day looking for it.”

I watched the dog approach us, stopping every few paces. It looked like a worried soul with its tail tucked between its legs, and Jason laughed at its posture.

“Come here, you stupid mutt,” he said, and rattled the bowl in his hand.

“Why don’t you tell your dad you found it?” I asked. “You guys could keep it.”

Jason looked at me like we had just met.

“That’s not what he wants to do with it,” he said.

I could fathom no other option.

“I’ll keep it, then,” I told him. “We could give him a bath.”

“You better not touch my fucking dog,” Jason said. “I’ll kill you if you touch it.”

It was hard to tell if he was serious. That was perhaps the defining characteristic of his personality. Jason Landry had a way of
making you feel uneasy, as if you never really knew who you were dealing with. When you shared a laugh together, for instance, and he seemed a normal boy, he would then repel you with some phrase not likely to come from a child—a threat of premeditated violence, a vulgar joke. And these moments would create in you a sense of distance, chasmic at times, that you knew better than to try and bridge. In this way, Jason was at least predictable in his unpredictability, and so I was never truly afraid of him the way I was of Bo Kern, who was all action and little talk. Still, I surely didn’t trust him.

So, I stood up off the grass while Jason coaxed the dog to, and I tried to prepare myself for some emergency. Jason set the bowl on the ground and backed away. He made kissing noises with his mouth.

“Come on,” he said. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

The dog trotted a wide perimeter around us. It sniffed at the grass and inched closer.

“Eat, boy,” I told him. “Get you something to eat.”

“That’s right,” Jason said. “You better eat up while you can.”

The dog nosed the bowl and then slowly, carefully, lifted a piece of meat with its mouth and began chewing. It licked like a beggar at the bones.

“That’s a good boy,” I said.

Then, after the dog began to look comfortable, after it really began to dig in, Jason ran toward it.

“Get the hell out of here!” he yelled. “Go on, you stupid mutt!” He kicked at the dirt and clapped his hands. “Go on!” he said.

The dog paced around in confused circles. “You worthless stray!” Jason said. “Get the hell out of here!” He picked up a stick and threw it at it. He waved his arms in the air. He kicked over the bowl of food. The dog then sprinted away into the woods, whimpering, with a noticeable hitch in its hind leg.

“Stupid mutt,” Jason said. He then tipped over the garbage cans in their driveway. He spread out the trash like it had been rifled through.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“We better get out of here,” he said. “My dad’s going to be pissed.”

So I followed him. I made no stand about the dog.

Again, this is no hero you’re talking to.

On our way back toward the street, back into the world, Jason stopped to dump over a bowl of antifreeze that had been placed near their garage. We watched it stain the hot asphalt green.

“I just saved that dog’s life,” Jason said. “Where’s my parade?”

I later stood with Jason Landry in the woods, all in this same year, maybe this same day. Who knows? My memories of the neighborhood keep no calendar but one: before Lindy’s rape and after, and this was before. That I can tell you.

We had been exploring, Jason and I, cutting trails through the brush with machetes and trying to find a good place to build a tree house. We wanted it to be a sturdy place like a fort, we decided, a place we could hole up in if there was ever an invasion against the neighborhood. We talked about finding a tree so thick that we could bore a tunnel right through its middle and into the ground so that, if the fort was ever surrounded, we could escape and pop up on the opposite side of our unsuspecting foes. In the meantime, we agreed to stock up on things like spears and Coca-Colas and bows and arrows. We should make sure the fort had windows to shoot out of, we said. Maybe dig us a moat.

This was just boy talk, the American standard.

I’d had conversations like this with Randy as well. We’d tromped the woods like scouts do. But with Jason, the tenor of the conversation was different. When he talked about Russians falling from the
skies, or packs of rabid wolves descending on us from the forest, you got the sense that Jason was serious, and prepared for their inevitable appearance.

So, when Jason sized up a tree, it was technical. He would pick at the bark of it, stomp his foot on the ground as if listening for something, and then construct the fort in his head like some primitive engineer. His eyes would scamper up the trunk where a ladder should be. He would lay 2×4s out like a deck. He’d envision impenetrable walls with long slits to fire weapons from and, when he was finished, you could almost see him all alone in his safe house, rain falling on the tin roof overhead. Then, after he was satisfied, and the place fully built in his mind, Jason would take the stance of a sniper. He’d hold an invisible bow in his hand and pull back the arrow and you could watch his eyes trace a figure in the yard below him, a large and lumbering creature that Jason had waited all this time to face.

“That’s right,” he would whisper. “Just a little bit closer.”

And with his left eye closed, his body carefully positioned in his fort, Jason would not miss.

He made me swear this location to secrecy.

“What about Randy?” I said. “He’ll want to know.”

“Is he any good with weapons?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Tell him if you want,” Jason said. “But if anyone tells my dad, I’ll kill them.”

“What about Lindy?” I asked him.

“Good point,” he said. “I guess we will need someone to repopulate the world.”

“Right,” I said. “She’s not like that.”

Jason laughed and tore a big chunk of bark off the tree to mark the fort’s location.

“What?” he said. “You like that slut?”

“Don’t call her that,” I said.

Jason laughed again, genuine and deep, as if truly tickled.

“Come on,” he said. “I want to show you something.”

So, sweaty and freckled with bites, we walked back through the woods to his house.

A piece of the puzzle about to connect.