My Sunshine Away (4 page)

B
ack then, I was not the only one in this Lindy fix.

In middle school, a boy named Brett Barrett fell so hard for Lindy that he mowed lawns for two summers just to buy her a ring. It was thin and gold-plated, with some blue stone in its center. Legend goes that she had bested him in a round of kiss-chase years before, a game we played in our youth, and planted one on his cheek. Then, as if this peck were a promise, or the culmination of some ancient courtship ritual, Brett Barrett assumed that he and Lindy were meant for each other, and he got immediately to work. He saved every penny. He thought of little else. Finally, in the eighth grade, he presented her with the ring underneath a live oak near the center of campus.

“Why would I want this?” Lindy said.

She wasn’t being mean.

The thing was, during his years of steadfast pursuit, Brett Barrett had forgotten to speak to her.

A boy named Kyle Wims also fell for Lindy when she stood up for him during a pickup basketball game at lunch hour. Chubby and pale,
Kyle didn’t run much, and hovered instead near the three-point line, waving his arms. He fancied himself a three-point specialist, I imagine, and to be honest I remember him being decent. Still, he rarely got the ball as the more athletic kids drove the lane and made improbable layups. Lindy sat near the court in a row of girls who would later turn out to be the type to play volleyball, softball, and soccer, and together they watched the game. In the middle of their conversation, Lindy got so flustered that she called out to the boys, “Hey, dipwads! Why don’t you pass it to Kyle? He’s wide flipping open!” and Kyle lost his mind.

He dropped thirty-two pounds in the coming year, either through puberty or devotion, and asked Lindy to the back-to-school dance. She said yes to him out of pure kindness, which made it all worse. Lindy was beautiful and athletic, and at this time, she was still popular. There was never a chance between them. So when she posed for pictures with him in the gymnasium and asked him to hold her shoes while she danced with her friends, Kyle ate it up. The rest of us laughed. I believe it was Tommy Gale who eventually told him to open his eyes and get real, and so Kyle just stood in the corner for the rest of the night. Lindy rushed up to grab him for the last dance, however, and pulled him into the crowd. She put her soft hands on his shoulders, and Kyle flipped us the bird behind her back. That next week he taped their pictures up on the inside of his locker, but we never heard him speak her name again.

A boy from across town was also affected.

He had seen Lindy compete in a cross-country meet when they were both in the eighth grade, and he fell in love with her, too. She had won her heat easily, as he had his, and so he assumed it would be a natural fit. In his defense, at this time of her life, Lindy was easy to imagine yourself with. She seemed to walk that perfect line between
a person you suspect you might not deserve and the prize life would be if everything turned out just right. She was playful but not silly, pretty but not exotic, and close but just out of reach. So, after the race, this boy took to frequenting the malls and movie theaters, looking for her. If he saw us wearing our school uniforms around town, he approached us as well.

“Do y’all know Lindy Simpson?” he’d ask us. “Tell her the guy that won the mile is looking for her.”

He gave us little slips of paper with his parents’ phone number on them and so we prank-called his house for years. We figured he deserved it, like some trespasser caught fishing our pond, and made sure nothing ever came of his love.

But not all of her suitors were so virtuous.

Clay Tompkins, an awkward boy with dandruff, was known to spend all his free time scribbling in a green composition notebook. He had few friends at school and didn’t seem to want them, although I know now that this couldn’t have been true. The last semester of our eighth-grade year, Clay made the mistake of leaving his notebook underneath his desk when he went to the bathroom, and since it was a burning mystery to all of us, we riffled through it. The first page contained a list about twenty names long, all girls at our school. The page was titled
GIRLS I’D LIKE TO BANG
, and was apparently a scientific ranking. I saw Lindy’s name at number 7.

A crowd gathered around the book as one of the boys flipped the pages. Each page had a detailed sketch devoted to one of the aforementioned girls in some pose that they had surely never assumed. Anna Jenks, for example, was drawn swinging from a vine with her breasts hanging out, a pair of skimpy animal-print panties barely concealing her backside. Katie Comeaux, number 2, was nude on her knees, her hands behind her head. She looked to be dancing to some
pulsing music in the background, and her pubic hair was trimmed into a neat and thin strip. May Fontenot lay on her back with her legs spread before us, her hands gripping her inner thighs, and touched the tip of her tongue to her teeth. It was incredible stuff, all of it, and spoke to an imagination few of us appreciated at the time.

I squirmed in my seat at the sight.

When we finally got to Lindy’s page, there she was, more tastefully rendered than the others. Her back was to the artist, as it often was when she ran, and she peered over her shoulder at us. Her hair, pulled back into a ponytail, traced the soft valley between her shoulder blades, and she was topless. Below this, her gym shorts were pulled down to her knees, as were her panties. The only colors on the page were two bright splashes of blue: her Reebok running shoes.

I would have emptied my pockets for the document.

The boys kept flipping on, though, wondering what new miracles awaited us, and we eventually got to pages where Clay had practiced with anatomy. We saw detailed drawings of erect penises from all angles, numerous workups of vaginas with various patterns of hair. I learned more in those few minutes than in all my previous experience. And since we were currently blind to any other world but this one, none of us noticed Mrs. Berkowitz approaching to see what the fuss was about. Once she did, we surrendered the notebook instantly. We chattered to her of our innocence.

I was never the same after this, nor was Clay.

He was pulled out of school that day and did not return. I don’t know what happened to him, whether he was expelled or just could not face us, but we never saw Clay Tompkins again. We talked to people at other schools to see if he transferred, we looked around for him at sporting events and restaurants. Nothing. I long wondered where he went. How does a boy just disappear?

Decades later, I saw Clay Tompkins in
USA Today
. He was living in Seattle and, together with a partner, had started a company that designed video games. It was cutting-edge stuff, the article said, meant primarily for adults. These games are now called first-person shooters and are popular, so I know he makes no end of coin. I hope he’s happy. I feel sorry for people like him. He was just a curious boy then, with genuine talent, and his only mistake was expressing it.

But Clay Tompkins had also given me a strange gift, which was the inexhaustible joy of pornography. I was an immediate fan. When I got home that night, I rushed my way through dinner and ran to my room. I got to work beneath my sheets with a pencil and sketchpad and drew Lindy in every way I could imagine. Most of these early sketches were unrecognizable, of course, merely a collage of inappropriate stick figures, but the act of creation gave me tremendous satisfaction. I had her right where I wanted her, I figured, in my room, in my mind, at the tips of my fumbling fingers.

And then, in one of the first rushes of lustful inspiration I would experience in my life, I drew thought bubbles above Lindy’s head to get her emotion across.

The things I made her think. The things I made her want.

These would come back to haunt me.

I
believe Louisiana gets a bad rap.

I don’t want this story to add to it, though I know it will, because people often discount what we say here. We are relegated to a different human standard in the South, it seems, lower than the majority of this great nation, as if all our current tragedies are somehow payback for our unfortunate past. You may hear, for instance, something like, “Yes, it is a shame those folks in New Orleans drowned. But why didn’t they just evacuate?” Or, “It is terrible about that boy being shot, but I’m sure you’ve heard about the race problems there.”

Another catastrophe? Another injustice? Forgive me if I don’t look surprised.

This bothers me. It bothers everyone in the South.

So, in case you don’t yet know, let’s get this out of the way.

It’s hot here, yes. It rains and it floods.

If you say, “It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity,” it’s because you’re from some other sunny place where you thought it was hot. It’s
both
the heat and humidity. It’s okay. You’ll survive. There are ways to get along.

One thing you do is amplify the pleasure of meals. Three times a day you sit down with friends or family who, if you’re lucky, are often the same. You take a break from the heat. You set a napkin over your lap and you can’t believe the utter joy. This tomato might just save your life, the cool fruit of it, that cold beer or iced tea your salvation. This is not gluttony.

You eat this way for a reason.

When everything else is burning, sweating, beaten down by a torturous sun, only your tongue can be fooled. So you tease it with flavors like promises, small escapes from a blatantly burdensome land. You offer it up sharp spices, dark stews, iced cocktails. Anything you can think of to do.

There is a saying in South Louisiana that “when we eat one meal we talk about the next,” and this is true. Who wouldn’t? In this imagined menu lies a future, a forecasted life, a community, perhaps even a weekend full of cheer and good food. What should we cook on Saturday? you wonder. Yes, honey, yes, darling, believe me when I say that sounds good. And at the house across the street, a similar family is doing the same. Perhaps a Sunday spent over a pot of beans. A lunch of hot po’-boys wrapped in butcher paper. It is also an unwritten rule that we don’t talk politics at the table. This is not because we’re dumb or old-fashioned or just too polite, but rather because we see right through it.

Middling stuff, the world. Nothing worth mucking up a fine meal.

And so the soul of this place lives in the parties that grow here, not just Mardi Gras, no, but rather the kind that start with a simple
phone call to a neighbor, a friend. And after the heat is discussed and your troubles shared you say man it’d be nice to see you, your kids, your smile. And from this grows a spread several tables long, covered in newspaper, with long rows of crawfish spilled steaming from aluminum pots, a bright splash of red in the blanketing green of your yard. It is food so big it must be stirred with a paddle. You gather around this. You worship it. There is nothing strange about that.

Only the unfortunate don’t see it this way.

When I was in my twenties, I had a short-lived friendship with a fellow from Michigan. He had moved here for college, and so I bragged to him the way that all of us down here do, about our food, our hospitality, those mantles we cling to. I invited him to a friend’s party in the Garden District of Baton Rouge, a neighborhood full of old majesty and wraparound porches. Our host, one of the cavalry of great unknown cooks in this state, slaved all day over a steaming pot of crawfish. He offered my friend local beer and iced watermelon, anything to ease the day’s scorch. Then, when the table was piled high with boiled corn and potatoes, spicy crawfish from a pond not too far away, my friend backed away from the crowd. Dig in, we all said. We’ll show you how to peel.

He was polite but did not budge, insisting that he just wasn’t hungry.

“Your loss,” we said, and we meant it.

Later, in the car, he told me that he couldn’t believe I had eaten that.

“They’re mudbugs,” he said. “You guys were just eating a pile of insects. It’s more disgusting than I thought it would be.”

I did not begrudge him his idiocy. Instead I explained to him that the crawfish is technically a crustacean, no different biologically than the lobster he’d likely ordered at the finest restaurant in Ann Arbor,
the term “mudbug” a misnomer. What he’d witnessed, I told him, was great luxury on a miniature scale.

“All I saw were bugs,” he said. “All I saw were drunk and sweaty people, sucking on the heads of dead insects.”

This is no small point.

It is this type of wrong-ended telescoping that gets Louisiana in trouble.

When I was a boy, for example, I played football with Randy behind his house. We set up end zones between twin oak trees in the back lot and used rows of bright yellow ragweeds as our boundary lines. We drew up plays by tracing our fingers through the thick grass and imagined scores of rabid fans there watching. We hiked, spun, dodged, and threw tight spirals to each other through the hot and heavy air. We dove and we caught. We scored and we celebrated. On one particular day, Randy punted the ball and it careened off his foot. It hit a tree and bounced into the small swamp behind our properties, covered at the time by a thin layer of green algae. Together we stood at the banks of this swamp, a place our parents told us not to go, and we were wary of snakes. We watched the football float in the still water, a child-sized football, mind you, for we were children, and we knelt in the mud to catch our breath. We tried to think. Before we could devise a way to retrieve it, we saw a nutria, a large swamp rat that looks like an otter, swim up to our ball through the muck. It nosed the thing, watched it spin around in the dark water, and it ate it.

Now go into the world and tell this story.

No one will ask you the rodent’s history, how legend has it that they were brought here from Argentina by the McIlhenny family, the founders of Tabasco, to be bred for their fur on Avery Island. So you will not get a chance to tell the epic tale of the hurricane that is said
to have followed this event, allowing two of these rats to escape their cages like some brave and famous lovers and start a family in an unfamiliar land. The listeners are not interested in that. They do not see these animals setting off into the wetlands like pilgrims, like our own ancestors, to whom we owe a great debt. Nor will they see the two happy boys like me and Randy in this story, with bright glowing eyes and big hearts, witnessing a spectacle as bizarre to them as it would be to you. Instead, your listeners will only reaffirm to themselves what they previously thought about Louisiana: that it is a backwoods place with huge rats in the algae, some wild nightmare they’re glad not to face.

As another example, it once rained so hard in my youth that the swamps behind Woodland Hills backed up. It looked like we lived on a lake. Piney Creek Road itself also flooded, and our proud houses stood like chalets on some muddy gulf. For two days we watched snakes cruise the water. We watched our family dogs splash about like children. We threw fishing lines from the tops of our driveways and we waded with our poles into the lawn when the hooks got stuck on the concrete. We ate canned foods and drank warm Cokes. When the rain stopped, Old Man Casemore launched his aluminum boat right from his carport and trolled up and down the street like our own private Coast Guard, delivering us food that he’d made. Then the water receded and normalcy returned.

I imagine that many children in South Louisiana have stories similar to this one, and when they grow up, they move out into the world and tell them. This is not the problem. It is the way these stories return that dog us, the way they are altered by the outsiders who hear them. A man from California once asked me, for instance, if I rode to school in a boat. A woman from Des Moines said, “What was it like? Growing up chasing gators off your porch? It sounds horrible.”

It isn’t like that. I promise.

Even in the summer of Lindy’s rape, for instance, there was joy.

We played baseball in the street. We chased the ice-cream man from two blocks away.

Lindy was a part of this, too.

In fact, in the weeks immediately following the crime, after the police had made their rounds, the only difference we noticed in Lindy herself was a change in her schedule. No more piano lessons, to my dismay. Lindy went to therapy instead. No more bicycle ride out to the track at five o’clock, but rather a ride to and from the track with her parents. Small stuff. She looked the same to us then as she always had, bright and smiling, although all of this would soon change.

And so, terrible as it was, the summer of her rape carried on, bright and blue-skied, and full of immense pleasure. Even our parents, who had taken the news of this crime and the lack of a subsequent arrest the hardest, eventually came back into the fold, bonded together by the appearance of late-summer whiteflies in the neighborhood.

Tiny and prodigious creatures, whiteflies look like lint.

Alone, they are easily squashed, nothing more than a bit of dust on your fingers. In great numbers, however, they are disastrous, and feed indiscriminately on anything green. They colonize beneath the leaves of the flora available to them and work their tiny jaws to extract sap from the plant. This is not the trouble. The waste they subsequently excrete attracts a type of mold called black sooty, and this name speaks for itself. A dark color grows over the plant life, eventually growing so thick that it divorces the plant from the sun and a botanical sadness takes over. Irises lie down in their clumps. Trees drop their leaves out of season.

So, when Piney Creek Road came under siege that late summer,
the neighborhood formed an alliance. Kids sprayed soapy water all over the gardens while their parents called one another to talk about successes and failures, progress and setbacks, any subject
other
than Lindy and the possible suspects in her rape, and were happy to focus on the more manageable problem at hand.

That Labor Day, when the infestation seemed under control, there was a party at my buddy Randy’s house, the Stillers’ house, and everyone there was in good spirits. Parents drank margaritas and iced beer as their kids ran around like lunatics in swim trunks. Lindy Simpson was there, too, without her parents, who had since withdrawn from these types of affairs. She wore a blue one-piece bathing suit, and I followed her around the yard with a water gun. It was all laughter and cheer until around six o’clock, when we heard a chain saw revving up in the distance and a group of us went out to see.

In the farthest bend of Piney Creek Road stood a common area, a spot of land that was not technically on anyone’s lot. It was obvious now that despite their best intentions, no one had taken it upon themselves to treat the large live oak that stood there, and so this tree remained the last bastion of whiteflies. As such, the oak had apparently just given up, dropping all of its leaves on that Labor Day like some defeated sigh. So, while everyone else was at the party, saying good-bye to a summer they’d like to forget, Lindy’s father had sprung into action. He wore goggles, shorts, and a T-shirt, and laid into the ancient tree with his chain saw, an act so strangely violent that none of us knew what to say.

Two of the neighborhood men left the party at full trot to try and stop him, to explain to him that the tree was not dead, that it would come back next year, and that he had no right to do what he was doing. Then, when they got halfway up the street, they halted dead in their tracks. It turned out that on closer inspection, these men could
see something that we hadn’t seen from the party, something that only Mr. Simpson had seen, after the tree dropped its leaves and went bare.

On the third-lowest branch of the live oak, slung around a tangle of sticks, a faded blue Reebok hung from its laces.

So the men returned up the street to us, solemn, and let Mr. Simpson continue his work with the chain saw. When we asked them what they’d seen up there, why they hadn’t stopped him, the men put their large hands on our heads as if we were their own sons, their own daughters.

“Let’s all go back to the party,” they said. “Let’s all get something to eat.”

So we did, and this is the last day I remember seeing Lindy happy.

Yet it had nothing to do with the sight of that shoe.

No. I admit it.

This time, I was to blame.