My Sunshine Away (6 page)

W
hen we arrived at Jason’s house, his father was picking up the trash cans I’d seen Jason overturn. He was grumbling to himself, a blue sweatband around his head and dark prescription glasses concealing his eyes. Again, was this all the same day? Was this a pattern? How much time could I have shared with the Landry boy? The specific truth is impossible to mine for you here, except for what I know the large man said.

“You boys see a dog running around out there?”

“Don’t you think I’d tell you if I did?” Jason said.

“Don’t be smart,” Mr. Landry said.

Jason held up his palms like an innocent. “What?” he said. “We didn’t see anything, did we?”

Mr. Landry looked at me.

“No, sir,” I said.

Jason led me into the garage and, as soon as we got out of sight, he did a little dance of joy. He gave me a high five. He had just won a round of some oedipal game he’d created, I imagine, and he shot his father the bird with both fists.
Fuck you,
he mouthed.
Fuck you!

We entered his house through the back door, and the place was as dark and quiet as if nobody was home. We then walked to the kitchen to see his mother sitting silently at the dim breakfast table, cigarette smoke lifting from her hand without drama. To the left of her sat the foster girl Tin Tin, a sickly thin child of mixed origin. She was quiet, unresponsive, and did not last long at the Landrys’. When she heard us enter the room, she stared in our general direction like the blind might. This was one of the few times I ever saw her.

Jason’s mother, Louise Landry, was not an attractive woman, although she may have been, had everything in her life been different. But in the world in which I knew her, she wore her hair in a tight braid pulled over her shoulder and to the front. She had deep wrinkles near her eyes, spoke in a rasp, and picked at the gray-and-yellow ends of her braid while she smoked.

She was from a large Pentecostal family in rural Mississippi, if you can believe what my memory tells me, and she’d left both that brood and that religion when she married her husband. As such a strange pair, the giant and his country wife, the neighborhood often speculated about the Landrys’ courtship. It was rumored that he was once her psychiatrist who stepped over the line, or that he had kidnapped her off her farm in Tupelo, or that she was sold to him by some righteous cult.

At large, we were afraid of them. We didn’t bother to ask.

Back then, our only evidence to the character of Louise Landry was that she rarely ventured outdoors. Whenever we saw her, she was toting an obligatory plate of deviled eggs to a party in the neighborhood. Then she was sitting out on the back porch, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes in her long denim skirt as the rest of us swam. She kept little company, and she and her husband showed no public affection that I ever saw, neither to each other nor to Jason, nor to
any of the other children they currently held in strange hospice. So, if you didn’t know, you would be hard pressed to guess that they were a family. The only time they spoke at these functions was after Mr. Landry had too much to drink and began blustering about local politicians, or making inappropriate comments to the women and children.

To Artsy Julie once, she told me, at a Fourth of July party when she was twelve:

Come over here, girl. Let me get a whiff of you.

But we will deal with him later.

As far as Louise goes, my mother claims that she tried to befriend her for years, all to no avail, especially in the days that followed the fights we’d hear on our back porch. She’d invite her to luncheons, to play tennis, to go shopping, anything she could think of to get her out of her husband’s earshot. But every attempt at friendship was met with the same response, my mother said, delivered to her in Louise’s Mississippi hill-country accent, when she’d furrow her brow and say, “Now, Kathryn. Don’t be silly.”

Kathryn, my mother’s name. After all these years, it’s still strange for me to think of her as a person. An adult. Separate from me in the world.

Yet there was no doubt as to the distance, the separation, between the Landry household and my own. It was not just the darkness, the foster kids, the history; it was also the tension. When Louise saw Jason and me tromp into the room, she snapped as if caught. “What have you boys been doing?” she said. “Jason, what’s going on?”

“Nothing,
Louise
,” Jason said. “I was just going to show him my knives.”

“Did you change your sheets?”

“I’ll do it later.”

“But you won’t, will you?” Louise said.

Tin Tin laid her head on the table as if falling asleep.

Jason grabbed the back of my shirt.

“Come on,” he said, and I followed him toward his room.

Jason didn’t bother to flick on any lights as we navigated the cluttered living room and passed into the narrow hallway. And since our house and the Landrys’ house were both designed the same way—four-bedroom, three-bath ranchers, large and functional, with windows galore—I recognized the fact that this could easily be my own home we were skulking through. Their den was simply set up in the opposite direction, their fireplace laid in a different brick. Instead of the scented candles my mom kept aglow on the end tables, they had ashtrays, overrun with spent butts. All the same. Totally different. How easily, I wonder now, could we have switched addresses and been changed?

When we passed what in my house would have been my older sister Hannah’s room, Jason stopped and pointed at the door. “That’s the mother lode,” he said.

I looked up to see a series of latches on the door, each run through with a combination-style Master lock.

“What’s in there?” I said.

Jason smiled his gap-toothed smile.

“Wouldn’t
you
like to know?”

I then followed him into his room, where he finally turned on the light.

“Pretend to be doing something,” he said. “Tell me if
Louise
comes.”

Jason walked into his closet, got on the floor, and riffled through the dirty clothes.

I looked around his room. It was full of posters that seemed too
young for him. Nothing embarrassing, exactly, but apparently decorated years prior and never thought of again. There were Transformers posters, Winnie-the-Pooh posters, and the wallpaper had a border of clowns. His chest of drawers was also something like I might have, pasted with Star Wars and Hot Wheels decals, while on his desk stood a small fishbowl, murky and green. Its only inhabitant was a dead tetra, molting in a castle.

I sat down on Jason’s bed and watched him fiddle with a knife in his closet, prying open a panel in the wall, and I felt something cold begin to seep through my shorts. I put my hand on the bed and it was wet. I stood up and wiped my hands on my shirt.

“Why is your bed all wet?” I said.

“Shut up and listen for my mom,” he said. “Play Nintendo or something.”

I walked over and flicked on the small TV screen in the corner. I pressed the power button on the Nintendo. As the television warmed, and the images came to, I heard his mother walking down the hall.

“Jason,” I said, and she walked in.

She held a bundle of sheets in her arms.

“What are you boys doing?” she asked. “Where’s Jason?”

Jason walked out of the closet with the knife in his hand.

“What are you doing in here?” he said. “This is my room.”

“You know what I’m doing,” she said, and walked over to his bed. She pulled off the sheets and crumpled them onto the floor, exposing a plastic mattress with a large circle of dark yellow in its center.

“Get out of here,
Louise
,” Jason said. “I told you I was going to show him my knives.”

“You can do that while I’m here, can’t you?” Louise looked over at me. “Is that really what you two are doing?” she asked.

“I was just playing Nintendo,” I told her.

So Jason feigned a presentation as Louise changed his bed. He brought out a box full of knives, some Swiss Army, one Rambo, and a slew of bowies. He pulled them out of their leather sheaths and used the blades to cut the thin hair on his arms.

“Look how sharp,” he said. “Imagine what this one could do.”

“This one has a bottle opener,” I said.

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

Louise then finished with the bed and gathered up the soiled sheets. She stood in the doorway and watched over us. “How’s your mother?” she asked me.

“Fine,” I said.

“That’s good,” Louise said. “Has she been dating?”

This was a while after my father had left us, a couple years, and I knew that she had. Men called our house on the telephone and my mother told me they were just plumbers or electricians but then had me hold the phone for her while she went into the other room to pick it up. She’d also begun sending me over to Randy’s to spend the night when she went to “dinner parties” and “socials,” and I’d later watch through Randy’s bedroom window as these men brought her back home around ten o’clock or eleven. They often sat in the idling car for several minutes and on some occasions walked together to our front door, where I could see these men kiss her hand, her cheek, perhaps touch her hair before leaving. She never told me their names or what they did on their dates or in their cars or what she thought of them. I don’t blame her for this.

Some things are better left unsaid.

“I don’t know,” I told Louise, but I suppose I’d waited too long to respond.

“She’s a lucky woman,” she said, “to get a fresh start like that. You tell her that when you see her. You tell her how lucky she is.”

“Okay,” I said, and Louise walked out of the room.

Jason slammed the door behind her.

“Open that door!” she said.

“Make me!” Jason yelled, and offered me another high five.

“Showtime,” he said.

I sat down on the corner of the bed as Jason retrieved a manila envelope from the hidden compartment in his closet.

“Check this out,” he said, and sat next to me.

Jason unclasped the envelope and revealed a stack of professional-looking photos in black and white. “You like that Lindy girl?” he asked me. “Take a look at this.”

He began riffling through the pictures in his hands, all of which I immediately recognized as photos of the neighborhood. There were pictures of women walking with strollers down the sidewalks, a photo of Mrs. Kern pulling weeds. I saw pictures of Artsy Julie doing cartwheels, a candid shot of my mother driving down Piney Creek Road in her car.

“Wait,” I said. “What are these?”

“My dad left his office door open a few months ago,” Jason told me. “I nabbed what I could.”

“The locked door?” I said. “What’s in there?”

Jason looked up at me. “You want to see the good ones or not?”

“Okay,” I said.

Jason separated a stack of about ten photos from the bunch. He quickly looked them over and then handed the stack to me. “Merry Christmas,” he said.

These photos were a dream.

And the subject, of course, was Lindy.

The first three shots were of Lindy laid out on a blanket, sunbathing in the front yard like she sometimes did. Lindy leaning back
on her elbows. Lindy looking up at the sky. The photos were all taken from the same angle, but zoomed at different distances, as if the artist had taken his time. One shot of just the collarbone, I remember, the straps of her childish bikini. The next group was of Lindy on her bicycle, a slight grin on her face as she hopped a small bump. Then the flex of her thighs as she reverse-pedaled to stop. The frame of the bike between her legs as she stood atop it, no longer riding, and talking to someone off camera. This was a perverse miracle, I knew. But I didn’t care.

“Who took these?” I asked.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Jason said. “Hurry up. No time to jack off now.”

I flipped through the next few photos and they were all of equal value.

Lindy in a handstand. Lindy singing to herself as she walked.

What words, I wondered? What thoughts?

How could a boy like me know them?

“Can I keep this?” I asked.

“You perv,” Jason said. “You’re just a fucking perv, aren’t you?”

I was thirteen years old at the time. I didn’t even know what that meant. Chalk it up to another time he put a distance between us.

But after much begging, Jason told me I could keep the photo of Lindy singing because it wasn’t in his regular rotation. He warned me not to get it all sticky. He made me promise to return it the minute he asked me to, and he was serious.

“If my dad finds out you have that,” he said, “he’ll kill you.”

I was willing to take the chance.

This was Lindy we were talking about. For once I was not afraid.

With her photo in hand, her mysterious song in my grip, his father would have to sprout wings to catch me.

P
erhaps growing wings is what fathers do.

Maybe it is written somewhere that, at an undetermined time, every father will feel an ache in his back. He will sleep uncomfortably, tossing around in bedsheets that used to feel warm to him and soft. He will spend his private time craning his neck toward the mirror, trying to catch a glimpse of what’s been itching him lately, perhaps only two small nubs at first, right on his shoulder blades, and later the look of two feathered joints. I can’t imagine the fear in these men. I can only imagine their choice. A creature with wings must use them, of course, or else go the way of the dodo.

So these men finish up that last cup of coffee. They wait until no one is watching.

They take to the sky.

Like Lindy’s father, for example, who sprouted his wings far too late. He became an unfortunate hawk, the poor man, circling the blue above Lindy’s head from the night that she was raped until the moment she left him. He was a strange sight soaring over the movie theater parking lot. A distant squawk from the branches of Piney
Creek Road. All of this to ultimately become a rueful and bitter bird, a tattered and woeful-looking thing plucking out his own feathers when he finally returned to his perch and found Lindy gone.

But he is not the only example.

The terrible Mr. Landry is who I’m thinking of now, sitting squat and thick-winged on the storm gutter of his dark and musty house. He was like a fat owl who allowed none to pass, a hunter with a head that spun completely around. And yet the true danger of men like him is that they are so still, so quiet, that you forget that they’re out there until late at night, perhaps, when you are waiting for something to cook on the grill or enjoying a peaceful time with your family. It’s in times like these when you hear the owl’s call and it chills you, like a voice at the far end of a tunnel.
Who cooks for you?
the owl says.
Who cooks for us all?

This is a question left unanswered until it’s too late, because predators like him are mere shadows gliding across the dark lawn. In your ear, maybe, the suspicion of wind. Then you are gone, swooped up and eviscerated before you reach the birds’ nest. Make no mistake. He will chew you up in this place, the owl will. He will cough out your spent bones.

All of this imagining just to get around to my own father, I suppose: a canary who felt a need to escape his clean wire cage. A man who, like so many others, flew the very coop that he himself had made.

How else to describe it?

Thin and tall, my father started going bald before I knew him.

In the pictures I’ve seen from right after my birth, from the hospital, his thin hair is swept neatly to the side and gelled, already concealing the truth of him, I suppose. And there are people out there who will claim to remember moments like these, when they were
just an infant in their father’s embrace. I have friends who’ve told me stories from when they were one or two years of age, and recited to me the tender beauty of it.

Impossible. Ridiculous.

I was ten years old when my father left, and I have few substantial memories of him living with us at all, as if it was in fact his departure that flipped on the switch of my consciousness. Maybe some vague image of the two of us washing his car, sure. Maybe the both of us standing by the pool in our swim trunks. Still, these visions were likely given to me only by the old photos that my mother kept in our albums. Nothing real in them. No connection to the moment as it happened. I understood that.

Yet, as if to convince me otherwise, my mother would often say things like
Surely you remember the time you two fell asleep in that hammock? Surely you remember when you caught that catfish at False River? Surely you remember horseback riding with him, snug in the same saddle, at that business convention in Butte?
I didn’t.
Listen,
she’d say,
surely that pool party where he taught you to swim?
No.
The time you locked yourself in his car while he was washing it?
Not at all. So
Here, here,
she would say, and scramble around for the album.
Let me show you the pictures.

Yet the closest I ever felt to my father in the years right after he left us were the times I would walk through a department store, dragged along by my mother on a shopping trip after school, when we would pass through the men’s section on our way to the mall. The smell of shoe leather. Yes, there was something in that. The whiff of a specific cologne. There was memory there, too. So I would raise my head vaguely at these scents, something deep in me stirred, and look around.

I would expect nothing. And I would receive it.

But it is too easy to crucify men like this. If every disappointed
son and daughter got their shot at revenge, I imagine, there would be only a handful of men above fifty left walking the Earth. Who would be president? Who would we blame? So what we must do instead, when we deal with our fathers, is stick to the facts. When the legions of us (and there are legions of us) stitch back together the men who once held our mothers, who once made them promises they surely intended to keep, we must not let emotion get in the way.

So I can tell you this. My father was a realtor.

Having a hand in the suburban sprawl of places like Woodland Hills, he was wealthy by the time he hit forty. With this wealth came the American Dream as it existed in the 1960s and ’70s. The big house. The three children. The country club. The tennis wife. The Mercedes.

Then, the brightly colored wings.

My father’s feathered pair led him out of our picture window to a familiar place not too far away—the Fairview Golf and Tennis Club, where he perched on top of a cash register manned by a perky eighteen-year-old girl.

Laura, a name that has been forever soiled for me, was blond and flawless.

A freshman biology major at LSU at the time, she must have found something scientifically interesting about the canary that appeared on her register whenever she worked. I can’t blame her for this. Her job at the club, I’m sure, was unfulfilling. The bird’s song, I know, was persuasive. He was, after all, a salesman.

There’s no mystery as to how these things happen.

And other than those times when she innocently provided me with golf balls at the driving range, with sno-cones at the club’s snack window, my first real contact with Laura was in 1990, about five
years after my father left us. This was during the time that Lindy was not speaking to me, the tail end of that dreadful year of silence, when my mother called my father back to duty. He’d moved to a small town called Prairieville, Louisiana, since their divorce, a place maybe fifteen minutes away from Baton Rouge that was just beginning its own housing boom, but he might as well have moved to Wisconsin. I rarely saw him, and when I did it was for some holiday or special occasion where there was enough distraction (presents to be opened, a cake to be cut, a song to sing) to keep us from talking deeply about anything. I didn’t know what he thought of me in those years and I didn’t know what to think of him. I knew only that he’d hurt my mother and my sisters, and that he’d hurt me. Yet I had no idea how to change any of that. What child does? So, I didn’t try.

Instead I spent my energy on things I believed I could change, like my appearance, and like Lindy’s opinion of me. This preoccupation led my mother to confess to my dad that she’d become worried about the music I listened to, the way I moped about the house in black T-shirts. She told him a boy needs a father around, and that the holiday visits and gift cards stuffed with money were no longer cutting it. So my father showed up one Saturday morning.

I should have seen it coming, as my mother had been cleaning house for a week. She’d gone to the beauty parlor and gotten a new haircut. She’d woken up early that Saturday and walked through the house fully dressed, dusting end tables and putting on mascara in the reflection of the kitchen window. I ignored her, of course, and was so unprepared for his arrival that when his Mercedes pulled up in our driveway, I almost didn’t recognize it.

“Okay,” my mother said. “Okay okay okay.”

The two of us watched him through the kitchen window, now
bald as a stone and looking fit, as he walked up to the front door like an appraiser. He stopped and kicked at a piece of the walkway that had apparently come loose since he’d last seen it. He stared at the roof as if checking for damage.

We opened the door without waiting for a knock, my mother and I, and he said, “Hello, Kathryn. Hello, son.”

I’d like to think now that I returned him a zinger.

I’d like to think now that I was fully aware of his lack of interest in me as a teenager, and that I was angry about how easily he’d released me from his daily life. “Hello, sperm donor,” I should have said back to him, or, “Hello, ghost.” But in reality, I only remember feeling awkward about my strange and new hairstyle when my father first saw me, the way I’d shaved the sides of my head to impress Lindy. I remember feeling uncomfortable in the new rock-and-roll clothes I’d been wearing since Lindy went dark, too, about the silver hoop earring in my left ear, and about the way I hadn’t really thought of my father in months.

And so I only said, “Hey, Dad.”

His plan was to take me fishing. He said he knew a place.

My mother had already packed a bag of outdoor clothes, unbeknownst to me, culled from some laundry she had been doing, and mentioned to my father that she was planning on cooking a roast that evening. “I’ll have it stewing in the pot all day,” she said. “If you’d like, you could eat dinner with us when you get back.”

My father patted me on the shoulder and said that he was taking me for the night instead. He said we had some serious bonding to do, and not to expect us back until we’d caught every single fish in Louisiana.

“Oh,” my mother said. “Okay.”

After all those years, she still loved him. All three of us knew it. So, no need for me to recount for you the look I saw unfold and lie dead in her eyes when she realized that yet another meal she’d imagined between them would have to be eaten alone.

My father and I spoke little on the way to the place. It was nearly a three-hour drive. He asked me about soccer, which I told him I’d quit. “What?” he said. “You’re the best player they’ve got. I thought you loved soccer.” He was right about this. I did love it. But that seemed irrelevant compared to what I thought Lindy might like in those days. So “I don’t know,” I told him. “I guess I kind of grew out of it.” My dad looked somewhat disappointed to hear this news and, as if to change the subject, asked me about girls. I told him there was one girl who was all right, but she had some baggage. “Well, there you go,” he told me. “That’s all you need is the one, right?”

My father smiled blankly as he said this, and I guess this was my trouble with him.

Was he stupid?

This is a legitimate question not often asked about fathers.

To the outside world, I know the answer was no. Here we were trucking down the highway in a Mercedes, a couple of expensive fishing rods bent like hooks in the backseat, an ice chest I could hear sloshing around in the trunk. He wore a nice collared shirt, some khaki shorts, and a pair of tan leather boat shoes with the laces tied up in the beehive fashion I’d tried so hard to master without him. So here was a man who balanced his checkbook. A man who knew which fork to use when. He told jokes and shook hands and sold homes for hundreds of thousands of dollars, all evidence of a person with an active and working brain.

But to me it wasn’t so simple.

And in order to stick to the facts, I’ll try not to dwell.

All you need is the one,
he’d said to me, his own son, a child of divorce.

What was I left to think? Was this a man who didn’t understand irony? Was this a man so devoid of perspective, so unaware of the craters he’d left in his wake, so oblivious to the fact that I
knew
, that my sisters
knew
, that everyone
knew
what he’d done, that he thought a comment like this was acceptable?
Really?
I’d wanted to ask him.
All a man needs is the one?

Or was the truth of it more depressing than that?

Was he a man neither smart nor stupid, but merely unremarkable? Was he the most inconsequential kind of man, the one who just says something because it pops into his mind? A man who attaches no meaning to his thoughts, to his voice, or to his present situation, all so that he can seem quick-witted and steady? Was he the type who, time after time, has trouble recalling the most important things he’s said to you, things he promised you, because he was actually somewhere else when he said them? When he took you by the shoulders and said,
Listen here, son. I’m not going to leave you. I’m not going to hurt you. Nothing’s going to change.
Was he a man who was already gone?

I knew the answer even then.

So, the facts.

I smelled that good cologne in the car. I saw my chin in his profile.

He asked me how my sisters were doing, a common refrain when we spoke.

“Tell them,” he said. “Tell them I’ve been meaning to call.”

And because of moments like this, because of the way I often imagined a better version of him lurking quiet and remorseful beneath
the surface, all my spite toward my dad would turn to pity one day. A day we’ll get to soon enough.

As for this day, we drove to a place called Cocodrie, a fishing village near the Gulf of Mexico. We passed rows of wooden camps built on pilings and finally cruised into a parking lot paved in oyster shells. We parked by a dock.

We had a good time, I guess, for an hour or so, casting artificial baits toward the grasses opposite the old dock, yet we caught nothing. And after a while, a carload of young men pulled into the parking lot. These were guys in their mid-twenties who reminded me of Robert, Alexi’s old boyfriend, in that they wore LSU baseball caps and T-shirts with the names of various campus bars like
The Chimes
and
Murphy’s
on them. And since I had recently posited myself as a rebel of sorts, a troublemaker at school, these fellows looked like clichés to me now. They were good old boys with similar sunglasses and haircuts, everything that Lindy’s music raged against.