by M. O. Walsh
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.
“Hey, fellas,” my father said to them, and they returned to us the same, unloading ice chests and fishing poles out of their trunk. One of these guys pulled out a portable radio that was playing Run-DMC’s “Walk This Way,” which I liked at the time but wouldn’t admit. He walked up next to me and threw a line out into the water.
“Anything?” he asked me.
“Nothing,” I said, and glanced back to see my father talking to a few of these guys and laughing, leaning on the hood of their car and drinking a beer. I rolled my eyes at him, embarrassed that he would assume some camaraderie with people half his age.
And then, as is often the case when fishing, my lack of concentration earned me a strike and a redfish turned over the top of my bait. I saw the black spot of his tail fin rise from the water and, like a novice, I yanked my line right out of his mouth. The bait shot back toward the dock and hooked itself into my jeans.
The guys had a good laugh at this, my father included, and mimicked my panicked reaction. “Take it easy, sport!” my dad said, and raised his beer at me.
I turned back to the water.
“You take it easy,” I said, and the guy standing next to me heard.
“Hey, little man,” he said. “He doesn’t mean any harm.”
I shot this guy a ferocious look. “You don’t get it,” I told him. “That idiot’s my dad.”
The guy laughed.
“I know who he is,” he said. “He hangs out at my apartment, like, every day.”
14.
Laura showed up shortly after.
She wore a faded Tri-Delta sorority T-shirt over a green bikini top and stepped out of the backseat of a car with two other girls just as sun-kissed and heart-crushing. They sported pink cotton shorts with dolphins on them, flip-flops that exposed their painted toes. They had just conquered and finished up college, you could tell, and the world was in front of them. And in the moment before I recognized Laura, the second or two it took, I had already bent her in every pleasurable shape imaginable to me. I was a pubescent boy at the time, remember, my mind a brothel, and nothing more. And now that I’ve had the years to think on it, I wonder if part of my initial attraction to these sorority girls was that they fit the shape I’d once imagined Lindy would grow to. Back when she was ponytailed and athletic, when she was bright and popular, I’d envisioned the two of us one day lying naked and spent in my disheveled mess of a dorm room. I’d forecast us some glowing and all-American future.
But due to the crime against her and the enormous guilt I’d felt about it, the way I’d followed her into this thrift-store posture of suburban rebellion, I knew that I was already cut off from these twenty-something debs in their blossom. And, therefore, when I saw them arch their backs from the car ride and wave their half-empty wine coolers at the boys who had met up with my father, I realized how ugly I must already look to them, and I wanted them all the more for it. So I will spare you the many nights that followed this, when I fantasized mightily about my father as some quivering cuckold to me and his college-age sweetheart.
Instead, I merely watched as he and Laura greeted each other, hugging nervously, and I acted as if I couldn’t care less. I turned my back to the whole scene and eventually heard them approaching behind me, their steps amplified on the oyster-shell parking lot.
“Are you sure it’s okay?” I heard Laura whisper. “Glen, are you sure?”
“It’s fine,” he told her. “Hey, son,” he asked me. “You remember Laura.”
I looked back at them, my hair hanging over my eyes.
My father had his hand on Laura’s back, up near the shoulders, like she could be some friend of the family, some aunt I hadn’t seen in years, someone he cared for.
“Hi,” Laura said to me, gently. “It’s been a long time. It’s good to see you again.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s a real Kodak moment.”
And then, in one of the few times something lucky happened to me in those days, that redfish gave my bait another strike. I looked back to see my line moving away in the water.
“Oh, Glen,” she said.
“It’s okay,” he told her. “He’s just got a fish.”
The two of them walked up to the dock and stood beside me.
“Bring her in, son,” my father said. “Don’t lose her.”
Then, as if there was nothing else to say, they watched me fight it.
You should know:
Louisiana is the Sportsman’s Paradise.
This is our state slogan.
We have it on our license plates here, our billboards. And though I’d normally felt separate from this as a child, though I’d been the type to stay silent as people talked about shooting a deer or blasting baited ducks from the sky, I felt I understood it all then. Because when I was engaged with that redfish in Cocodrie, the rest of my world fell away.
The fish tugged at the line with an urgency I’d not expected. It was a heavy thing, dashing around for its life down there, and it cared nothing about my awkward situation on the dock. It would happily pull me in the water and leave me for dead if it could. It would drag me beneath some ancient and salt-bleached stump. I had no other choice but to fight it. Don’t you understand? Life is complicated.
It’s a form of joy to have no other choice.
So, I set the hook. I dug in. The span of our fight would be a respite, I knew, from the people standing behind me, from my worries, from every place I did not want to be. As long as that fish wanted to get away, and as long as I was unwilling to let it, we would have each other.
I could therefore imagine people with big problems seeing this type of sport as a paradise. A wife sick at home, perhaps, a paralyzed child. I could see why these husbands and fathers would venture out in cold mornings to drink coffee in a duck blind, why they would revel in being single-minded. Why they would designate entire days to this pursuit and how these days could turn easily into seasons. I began to feel Louisiana itself making sense to me, in a way it hadn’t before, and yet finally landing that redfish, the first trophy I’d ever captured, felt like an ending rather than a beginning.
The fish was a beauty and I was congratulated. Water dripped from its skin.
Then it was weighed and gutted.
After this, the sun fell and my father’s friends did not leave.
It turned out we were all staying at the same camp that night, and the details of how this came to be were never mentioned. I had several ways to interpret their presence, of course, b
ut none of them mattered. All I knew was that my father, when given the opportunity to be with me, to set me straight in life, had chosen to sacrifice nothing. He had altered no plans, nor did he consider the wild impropriety of this situation from my point of view. Rather, when told by my mother that I was in trouble, that I needed his help, he chose to simply endure me for an evening.
And since this is not about me, since the goal is to uncover what happened to Lindy, I’ll spare you the total depression of this event. Just know that the night fell to heavy drinking for my father and his cohorts, and then to poker. In times they forgot I was there, the young men and women kissed one another openmouthed at the table. They hit up my father for beer money. Laura remained nice enough, and my father, in his own version of therapy, I suppose, drank several bourbon and Cokes out of a Styrofoam cup.
When they later turned up the music and took to dancing in the wood-paneled cabin, I slipped outside, unnoticed, and walked to the far end of the pier, where I skipped oyster shells like rocks into the still and black water. After an hour, I heard someone walking up to me. It was my father. He stood underneath a floodlight and steadied himself on a wooden beam, his shirt untucked.
“Hey, son,” he said. “Everything all right out here?”
I looked at him but said nothing. He shifted his weight from foot to foot and slapped clumsily at a bug by his ear. I could hear music still playing in the cabin, the swell of girlish laughter.
“It’s dark out here,” my father said. “There’s bugs.”
We stared at each other for a long time. And although scenes like this now strike me as heavy and important, replaying like loops in my mind, I had no deep thoughts on this occasion. I instead listened to fish moving in schools along the shallow banks and watched my father try to stifle his hiccups. After a moment, one of his friends returned from a beer run and the glow of headlights lit us up on the dock, where I imagine the two of us standing there in the spotlight looking totally unrelated, as awkward as strangers in a hospital elevator. We both blocked our eyes from the glare, and then it got dark again. I could hardly see.
I heard my father take a deep breath through his nose.
“I’ll take you home in the morning,” he said.
“Okay,” I said.
I eventually fell asleep on a pull-out couch and my father passed out on the front porch of the stilted cabin, sitting in a lawn chair with the Styrofoam cup in his hand. Laura slept alone in her room.
The next day I pretended to feel sick.
I barely spoke to anyone and feigned sleep the entire ride home. My father, now sober and guilt-ridden, tried to explain life to me in the car, to give me some eloquent bit about how love finds you when you’re not expecting it, how it doesn’t bother with age or situation, and how it doesn’t always play fair. He told me repeatedly to take good care of my mom because she was a special woman he would always love, and she deserved the best. He continued to talk even when he thought I was asleep and yet surprisingly little was revealed. Or perhaps I just didn’t listen.
I had my reasons.
Earlier that morning I had overheard him tell Laura that he was just going to drive to Baton Rouge and drop me off and that he’d be back to the camp that evening. I heard him tell her that she’d done great, that I was just an angry teenager, and that they would have some “real fun” upon his return. So I had heard enough, to be honest. I had nothing to say.
When we got home, my father told my mother that something was wrong with me. He said he would call her later that week to check up, but that he had an appointment to get to that afternoon and couldn’t stick around. My mother, we both could tell, had been crying.
“Kathryn,” he told her, “don’t be so dramatic. He might just have a cold or something. I tried talking to him, but he slept the whole way home in the car.”
“Glen,” my mother said, “that’s not what makes him sick.”
My mother looked over at me and, for the first time in my life, I did not recognize her expression.
“You need to see something,” she told him. “You need to see what I found in his room.”
15.
I’ve imagined this day to death, the day I became a suspect.
In the first version, a child’s version, my mother is a wreck. As soon as I left the house with my father, she cried over a teapot. She cried over her laundry. She took off her fancy clothes and put on pajamas, poring over old photos of my father and me. She thought about us entirely, and wondered why men act the way they do. She still considered me a good boy in this fantasy, the same swaddled infant who once nestled up to her breast in the delivery room, and so she planned out my meals for the upcoming week. She tearfully sliced up that roast so I could have sandwiches the next day. She double-checked to make sure we had the potato chips I liked. Then she walked into my room with a load of freshly folded clothes under her arm and, by total accident, stubbed her toe on a wooden box underneath my bed, with a latch on it that I had mistakenly left unlocked.
In the second version, the one that came to me when I grew up a bit, I see my mother as a complicated person, a woman lonely and in need. In this version she recovered quickly after my departure and suddenly saw her empty house as a palace where she could finally rule. She poured herself a glass of wine before lunch. She lay on the couch and unbuttoned her blouse. She fell into adult dreams and dialed up her numerous gentleman suitors to say, I’m here, now, I’m alone, I’m normal for a change. And whether they came over or not, whether she took out her frustrations in a way that so many of us would, this is beyond the reach of our business. But after night came, and she was alone again, she stumbled tipsily into my room. She dropped some half-folded laundry on the floor and, exhausted, decided to make a pillow of my black T-shirts and baggy jeans that now smelled of fabric softener. And then, before passing off to sleep, she noticed a box beneath my bed with a latch on it that I had mistakenly left unlocked.
In the final version, the one that still comes to me intermittently, in times when I want to feel innocent, my mother began snooping as soon as I walked out the door. She did not wait to see me wave to her from my father’s Mercedes, nor did she even bother with cooking that roast. Instead she stomped straight into my room and flung the clothes out of my drawers. She dumped my schoolbag out on the desk. She flipped through my notebooks. She called up Randy and Artsy Julie to grill them about my character. She stood on footstools and riffled through the items at the top of my closet. She looked underneath my mattress. And just when she was about to give up, when she was a second or two from realizing that my rebellion was only a quick rite of passage, nothing to be alarmed about, she sat on the floor to assess the damage she’d done. Then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw a box underneath my bed with a latch on it that I had mistakenly left unlocked.
Regardless of how it all happened, what she found in the box was this: five poems; twenty-seven pornographic drawings of Lindy and myself; a green bracelet made by Lindy’s Christian pen pal in Jamaica; two hair barrettes; six pages of pornography torn from a magazine called Cherry that a guy named Ronnie Gibbs had brought to school; seven wallet-sized school photos of Lindy (two with her face cut out and pasted to the aforementioned Cherry pages); the condoms and sex pamphlet that my mother herself had given me; four mix tapes; a small bottle of Astroglide personal lubricant (half empty); six packets of vending-machine condoms with names like Mud Grips, French Tickler, and Lambskinz on them; the photo of Lindy singing to herself as she walked that I’d gotten from Jason Landry; a page ripped from the back of my yearbook that Lindy had signed for me in the seventh grade that read Hey you! Have a great summer! Hugs, Lindy (the i dotted with a heart); a pair of cheap plastic binoculars; and, finally, unfortunately, a blue Reebok running shoe.
Most of these items had easy explanations.
I dabbled, for instance, in poetry. The majority of my verse was so vague, however, that if
it weren’t for the accompanying visuals, my mother likely couldn’t have pegged my muse. One poem I remember was called “106 Steps” and detailed the amount of walking it took for me to get to Lindy’s house. Step number six, I bet you taste like Pixy Stix, and so on. Lindy’s name was never mentioned, of course, as I substituted words like heaven, nirvana, and paradise for the Simpson house. It was awful stuff. Another was called “Roses in My Hand” and made a series of veiled innuendos about every red part of her that I would like to touch. I wasn’t trying to be coy, though, I was just a kid to whom everything seemed unclear. I wanted to fondle her heat, her aura, her soul, none of which I’d physically know how to locate if she allowed me. The last one I remember was written in violet Crayola for effect and was titled, simply enough, “My Blood Is You.”
This was not so bad. I’ve heard more malice in pop songs.
Much of the incriminating memorabilia could also be explained by my habit of pacing the sidewalk in front of Lindy’s house. This was fairly innocent stuff as well: the barrettes, the green friendship bracelet that had unraveled and fallen off in the rain. Surely a boy can’t be blamed for that. Think of men who walk along the beaches in sunglasses and full-brimmed hats, scouring the sand with metal detectors. These are not felons. Think of our parents, even, holding on to some gold-plated brooch their mothers once wore, or stowing away a box of ribbons their father garnered in war. We are all small historians, aren’t we? We are all private treasure hunters, every one of us. So what was I supposed to do when, after the crime, I happened upon that lone Reebok sitting in a pile of trash at their curb?
Yet I was no fool. The homemade pornography was hard to defend. Stick figures or no, the lusty intention was there. My erotic thought bubbles had recently evolved into diatribes, as well, bursting out of Lindy’s head as she knelt in front of me on a piece of construction paper torn in a fit from my school binder. She spoke in long sentences in these scenes and said things like, I have always wanted this since that time you tackled me last summer. Or, This is the way I like boys to give it to me. Or, in the one I really regret, when she was on all fours, screaming, Yes! Please! Again!
