by M. O. Walsh
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.
12.
When 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.
