My Sunshine Away

by M. O. Walsh

  He did a lot for me, though, during this time, and maybe that was his mission all along. I’ve never asked my mother about this, if maybe she’d secretly called him to duty the way she’d done my father the year prior, and I won’t. But he quickly became a friend of mine that hot summer, when I’d drifted away from so many others and still wasn’t speaking to Lindy, the one I thought of most often.

  From the moment my uncle Barry walked in the door, I felt the two of us to be in on a secret together. There was something about his face, I suppose, his enormously blank and unassuming smile, that attracted me. He made me feel unafraid of the world and, in this feeling, let me realize how afraid of the world I truly was. When my mother was tense and unapproachable, for example, he’d do things like joke with her that he and I were stepping out for cold beers when all we’d really do was sit on the front porch and talk. I’d watch him unfurl his Duncan and let it spin an inch above the ground without ever pulling it up and I felt older around him, without feeling the discomfort that I did around other men of his age, like my father. When I later told my mother about this, after he’d left and I complained to her that I wished that he’d stayed, she said this was likely because Barry himself had never grown up, that he was still probably about my age in his mind.

  Her evidence to this effect went unspoken, unexplained, but I saw it in the way she rolled her eyes whenever I recounted an anecdote of his, like the time he ran a friend’s car into a ditch in El Paso and then, trying to pull it out, crashed a forklift on top of it. Or the time he said a parakeet followed him around for a year, perching on his shoulder and being protective of him for no discernible reason. Or the winter he spent in Alaska, where he said the dogs were all beautiful and the women all rabid. These were just a few of his improbable stories, mind you, yet my mother acted unimpressed by it all.

  Still, my uncle Barry had lived what seemed to me this enormous and unpredictable life, the exact opposite of what a teenager feels, and I came to idolize him. And although my mother told me to take everything he said with a grain of salt, I never doubted his tales the way I did those of people like Tyler Bannister or Jason Landry or even my own father, really, because he was not trying to be funny or cruel or impressive when he told them. Instead he recounted these stories as if they were still as surprising to him as the day they had happened. “I couldn’t believe it, either,” he’d say, “but there I was.”

  Yet there were some days on the porch when a car would pull into our driveway and Uncle Barry would leave me to go talk with the man that drove it. Often for only a minute or two, sometimes laughing, other times exchanging what appeared to me to be only a handshake, and other times banging his fist against the car as if in pain. When I asked him about this, he shrugged the visit off as being that of an old friend, somebody telling him about a possible job.

  And since Barry was a handyman of sorts, he often disappeared for days, working on “construction jags,” as he called them, because the suburbs of Baton Rouge were booming back then. I spent those days without him feeling especially lost and confused, like the only sane man in a house full of crying women. What made this all worse was that when Barry returned from these jobs he would always act more philosophical and resigned. A woman would drop him off in our driveway, never coming inside the house, and I’d ask him who she was. “Who, her?” he’d say. “That was mistake number three hundred and eighty-four.”

  I laughed at this until I realized that the next time it was mistake number three hundred and eighty-five, then eighty-six, and so forth, and I got the feeling this was an accurate count. And during these times our jovial talks on the porch would stray from the visible things around us to questions that had no obvious origin or answer. He would sit for long minutes, crickets calling out in the distance, and utter what seemed to me to be impossible truths. One, I remember, about sleep and love.

  “Do you like to sleep?” he asked me. “I mean, do you like to just lie in bed all day? Maybe spend a whole weekend just sleeping?”

  “Not really,” I said. “I mean, I don’t think so.”

  “Me neither,” he said. “So, here’s the deal: what you need to do is get you a woman who loves to do that. Because if you like to sleep all day and so does she, then y’all won’t ever get anything done. But what’s worse is if neither of you like to sleep, if both of you can’t stand lying around idle.”

  “Then what?” I asked him.

  “Then you’re never in bed at the same time,” he said. “Then you end up like me.”

  I had no idea what he meant by this, as being like him appeared to me a wonderful possibility. Still, at that moment he seemed to be working out some problem in his head that had nothing to do with me or my mother or Piney Creek Road, and he looked sad. So, I said naïve things. I tried to be encouraging.

  “I’m sure it’s different for different people,” I told him. “I mean, I’m sure sometimes everything works out all right.”

  “Nope,” he said. “That’s the thing. Love is always the same for everybody.”

  This, you must understand, was the opposite of all that I’d heard. I’d watched movies where the goodhearted got together. I wrote love poems to a girl who wouldn’t speak to me. I believed, without sarcasm, in soul mates. I was a private-school kid in America, by God, and felt that nothing was off-limits to me if I tried. True love and happy marriage and healthy children were inevitable.

  “Love’s the same for everybody?” I said. “That’s depressing.”

  He sat around thinking about this.

  “I think you might have misread me,” he said. “Let’s put it this way: are you in love with a girl right now?”

  I smiled, or maybe I grimaced, and this gave it away.

  “Okay,” he said. “All I’m saying is this: that girl you’re in love with right now, you’re always going to be in love with her. In some way or another. Her or someone else just like her. Love never changes. You might be fifty years old and find yourself doing the craziest things for a woman who you think is nothing like that first one, but she is. There will always be some connection, I promise. Love never changes. So the trick is to pick a good one to start with. If you do that, then there’s nothing depressing about it.”

  I leaned over in my chair and thought about this. I put my elbows on my knees like an old man on a fishing pier.

  “But what if you don’t pick a good one?” I asked. “What if the person you base all your loves on is the wrong one?”

  “Well, then,” he said, “you end up being what they call the vast majority.”

  I looked at the house across the street and two doors down from us and didn’t say anything for a while. My uncle handed me his old Duncan yo-yo.

  “Go ahead, man,” he said. “Talk about her. I’m listening.”

  23.

  It is easy to gloss over agony.

  They say this happens with women and childbirth, when they experience pain off the charts. Ask them how it feels during the process and you’ll get daggerlike stares, answers in a sailor’s vocabulary. Ask them a few months later, when they are holding the child, or after they’ve put him or her to bed, and they’ll say, “I remember it being bad, but not too bad.” Then give them a second, wait for a smile.

  This is not the only example.

  Even when we talk about youthful summers and strange uncles and front porches, it’s easy to not recount the many hours we spent furious. In my case, I’d written Lindy a flurry of passionate and apologetic letters, never mailed. I’d tried to cut my own thighs with a Swiss Army knife but gained neither pleasure nor scars from the experience. I’d dialed up teen help hotlines in the middle of the night that we’d been given by guest lecturers at my school. “What is your emergency?” they’d ask me. “I don’t know,” I’d say. “Do I have to have an emergency?” and they’d be quiet until I hung up. I did things like push-ups when I couldn’t sleep. I thought, con
stantly, of Lindy.

  Yet when I found myself asked to actually speak of her I realized how long it had been since I had. My uncle Barry was looking for a simple description, I’m sure, maybe just a name and a face, but the task seemed impossible to me. And if it had been my mother or sister who’d asked me to talk about Lindy, I would have ignored them. But with Barry, a person who didn’t know her history, our history, and who didn’t know that to speak of her was to speak of a before and after, of two lives wrapped into one, I felt I might as well tell the truth.

  “There’s this girl,” I told him. “And when I look at her, I don’t know what to do.”

  Barry smiled as if he understood, as if he’d known this exact feeling himself. He leaned forward in his chair. “Well,” he asked me, “what do you want to do when you see her? Let me guess: cook her a steak? Protect her from danger? Rip off her bra?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “All of those things, I guess. But I think what I’d really like is to not have to do anything. I’d like to just kind of stand there and look at her, maybe, watch her laugh. Maybe she could tell me something funny.”

  “Okay,” Barry said. “Then what? I mean, that’s just a start. What comes after that?”

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “Then maybe she could tell me something sad.”

  “Ouch,” he said. “You’ve got it bad.”

  “She never talks to me,” I said.

  Evening soon fell on the porch that night, and we first knew this by the way we began to scratch at our ankles, wave at mosquitoes buzzing our ears. Next door to us, we saw the Stillers’ floodlights click on automatically. We heard a neighbor pull their trash out to the curb. Finally, the sky began to purple.

  “Listen,” Barry said. “I wish I was even half as smart as you when I was your age. Back then I thought the way to pick up girls was to rev a car engine and stuff a sock in my jeans.”

  “Does that work?” I asked him. “I’m willing to try anything.”

  “Yeah.” He smiled. “It works, but not in the way you want it to. It’s like turning on a bug zapper. You get a lot of action, but all you’re zapping is bugs.”

  I unfurled the Duncan and let it spin. Its bottom ticked the concrete slab of our porch.

  “When it comes to women,” he told me, “what you want to do is just like you’re doing. When you get a chance to talk to this girl, just be there and listen. Don’t believe all that ‘you gotta be tough’ or ‘you gotta be sensitive’ shit. Just let the girl think whatever she wants to think. If you do that, then the good ones will see something good in you and the bad ones will see something bad. See what I mean? You’re a blank canvas. Let them do the painting. Just don’t go prancing around like some phony. It’s like my buddy Carl. He wears this toupee and it looks all right. But when he picks up a girl and she likes him, he’s miserable.”

  Barry looked off in the distance like he was thinking fondly about Carl, some friend of his from where? What state? What life? I didn’t know.

  “Why?” I asked him. “If Carl’s getting all the girls, then why is he miserable?”

  “Because,” he said, “he knows one day she’s going to want to hop in the shower with him. What’s he supposed to say to that? There’s not a woman on Earth who respects a man that won’t take a shower with her.”

  “Really?” I asked.

  “I think we’re getting ahead of ourselves,” he said. “Pull up that Duncan.”

  So I did, and then I spun it again.

  “Did it always work out for you that way?” I asked him. “I mean, just letting them see what they wanted to see?”

  My uncle Barry sat up in his chair and checked his watch. He scratched his chin. I think now that he was likely wondering what time it was in Arizona, a few zones over, and what his wife may have been doing at that hour, but I didn’t consider it then. “No,” he told me. “It doesn’t always work out that way, because we’re painters, too. I mean, we can be wrong about them like they can be wrong about us. I guess that’s what complicates it. We’re not perfect, either.”

  This comment made sense to me, yet I’d no clue how to use it to my advantage. It ultimately sounded like all the other advice about love sounded to me in my teenage years, like it was pointed in some different direction or meant for someone else. Just be yourself, they all said. Yet there I was, myself, and I was miserable.

  “So,” I said, “I guess all you’re saying is that I should be careful.”

  “Nah,” he said. “You’re going to love who you love. Being careful won’t solve anything.”

  And it was after this that we saw a strange thing.

  Across the street and two doors down, Mr. Simpson, Lindy’s father, stumbled from his driveway and onto the Kerns’ front lawn. The sun was still low in the west and gave everything an ominous glow, the last moment of clarity before dark, and there was no mistaking that Mr. Simpson was drunk. His feet crossed before him as he walked and his arms looked loose in their sockets. His head hung heavy. We heard him yell Bo Kern’s name.

  I knew this meant trouble.

  When no answer came, Mr. Simpson picked a small piece of loose concrete off the sidewalk and threw it through the Kerns’ dining room window. My uncle Barry stood up from his chair. “Stay here,” he said. But I didn’t.

  Instead I followed him at a trot up the street, where we saw Bo Kern and his father barging out of their house, examining the damage, and then turning to Mr. Simpson. The dynamics of the whole affair were so abnormal for Piney Creek Road that I didn’t understand a bit of it. All I remember is that Mr. Simpson looked nothing like the man I’d seen happily drinking Kool-Aid on his front porch those years before, the one I’d seen tightening up the seat on Lindy’s bicycle and giving her a good-bye kiss before her daily trip to the track. The man I watched now was anguished and he cursed venomously at Bo and his father, slurring his words past the point of comprehension. Still, we all knew the subject was Lindy.

  As it turned out, Mr. Simpson had never gotten over his suspicions about Bo, despite the number of times Bo had been questioned, and, for some reason, on this night in 1991, two summers after the crime, he had made up his mind to deal with it. He was awful and raging and yelled primarily at Mr. Kern as if Bo wasn’t there. “Your boy’s going to prison,” he spat. “I’m telling you right now, I aim to kill him.”

  Mr. Kern stood in a crooked manner. He was a person we rarely saw in places other than Bo’s football games, and I’d never even heard his voice before. All I knew was that his story was a sad one, as he’d crushed his hip in a fall at work years earlier. And when he walked in front of his son on that night, the limp from his work accident was obvious. He told Bo to stay calm and spoke deliberately, as if he was in control, as if the last thing any of us wanted him to do was raise his voice.

  “Dan,” he told Mr. Simpson. “This is a grown man you’re talking about. And he’s sober and you’re drunk. So I suggest you go back to your house before the whiskey says something you might regret. We can all talk like men in the morning.”

  Behind him, Bo Kern was turning in circles. He had the body of a tree trunk, and the brain. He put a wad of Skoal in his cheek. “Goddamn, Simpson!” he yelled. “We’ve been through all this a million times! I wasn’t even home when that happened!”

  Still, Mr. Simpson carried on as if he was alone in the world, and I suppose he was.

  He pointed at Bo. “That boy is a felon!” he said.

  Mr. Kern shook his head and started back to his house. “All right, Dan,” he said. “Go ahead and tell him that to his face.”

  So Mr. Simpson did, and it was only a matter of seconds before Bo Kern knocked him to the ground. He cracked him twice, that I saw, with his fists, and Mr. Simpson was reduced to a puddle on the lawn. Bo Kern stood up, crazed. He spat black tobacco on the grass as a way of controlling himself. What he could have done to L
indy’s father that day, my God. What his strength could have done to any of us there in the neighborhood. I’m sure he realized it.

  He kicked at the grass and looked over at my uncle Barry and me. “She ain’t even got no titties!” he told us. “What would I want her for, anyway?”

  And with this simple statement, as odd as it seems, Bo Kern’s name was cleared from Lindy’s rape. The obvious sense it made, coming from Bo, and the dumb earnestness with which he said it made all of us, probably even Mr. Simpson included, finally believe him. I never heard anyone mention him and Lindy again.

  After Bo left, slamming the door behind him, my uncle Barry and I ran up to Mr. Simpson. He was sobbing on the lawn. I’d never seen a thing like this, a grown man crying, not even at Hannah’s funeral, where my father sat as still as the furniture. There was only one other time, I suppose, decades later, when I helped a buddy take his dog to the vet to be put to sleep. We sat in the car for a good half hour after they said their good-byes, the man and his dog, his throat clutching and jerking with grief. On the lawn that night, Mr. Simpson did the same.

  “She’s my daughter,” he cried to us. “She’s just a kid. What am I supposed to do?”

  We had no answer for him.

  The three of us squatted there for a while, my uncle and Mr. Simpson complete strangers, until we heard the low whine of the mosquito-abatement truck coming through the neighborhood, spraying chemicals from the back of its bed. I looked up and saw the Simpson women, Lindy and Mrs. Peggy, watching us from separate rooms of their two-story house. My uncle Barry noticed them, too, and when he saw that I was smiling at Lindy, he shook his head for me to stop. When I glanced back, Lindy had closed her curtains.