That’s how I find myself seated in the cab of an old Ford pickup, Ben beside me and his older brother behind the wheel. The Kansas sunrise is like nothing I’ve ever seen, a dappled spew of lavender and pink that reaches to the heavens and seemingly beyond, exploding the earth into an almost obscene show of beauty. I am nearly dumbstruck by it and by the thought that the people in the buildings we are speeding past have this beauty before them every day. How many different kinds of lives there are. The buildings, too, surprise me. None is taller than two stories, three at the most, and though they look run-down with their neon-lettered signs turned off for daylight, there is nothing to compete with the gorgeously alive sky. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Ben’s brother asks. I nod mutely.
For a week, we stay with his family. Ben’s father is legendarily difficult, outspoken with strong opinions. But he is tall and thin and holds no opinion as strongly as he does his hatred of fat people—so he likes me. Ben’s mother seems always to be watching me, and she treats me with such delicacy I could be made of spun glass. His brother is friendly. His brother’s wife is just a few years older than Ben and me, and I learn that her first name is Roberta, but no one ever calls her that. They just call her his brother’s “bride,” even though the wedding was two years ago.
It’s Roberta who finally gets through to me. Not something she says, but who she is. She seems lovely, kind and always smiling, content to live in this tiny town and not work and be referred to by the name of the guy she married.
But though the thought makes me feel small and mean, I know I wouldn’t be happy with a similar life. I am sick, I realize, and if I do not find a way to make myself better, I am going to end up married younger than I want to be and living somewhere I do not want to because the truth is right now I do need someone to take care of me. How would Ben or anyone else know that this isn’t my real life, that I’m still waiting for that to begin? How would he or anyone else know that in my real life, I don’t need anyone to save me?
That summer, I break up with Ben, taking the cowardly phone call route. “But, but,” he says, and I can hear his bewilderment turn to indignation like a newborn calf finding its legs, “I’m the one who should have broken up with you.”
I flinch, but his words are true. In them I hear the conversations I’d never considered, the conversations he must have had with his friends.
I set about getting better with a single-minded devotion to the problem: If the problem is that I wasn’t eating, I will eat. My body gets bigger. It softens. Summer passes, and when I come back to school, everyone can’t stop telling me how good I look.
But I can’t stand it. I can’t stand how visible I feel. How unsafe.
I drop out.
* * *
I have wanted so badly to empathize with Ricky in Indianapolis, as he stands in the pouring rain in front of Ruth’s car door, his hoodie pulled over his head, one hand shoved deep into his pockets and the other holding his blue duffel, his head ducked forward to keep the rain out of his eyes. In that moment, his life had spun off the rails of what he imagined for himself. He was trying to find something to save him, to make him normal. I understand that wish. In Ricky’s files, there’s a therapy intake sheet from the years after the Calcasieu Center days. On it, Ricky says he is no longer a virgin. He had a girlfriend once, he says. I came across this mention and that the Georgia girl—whom he touched when he was twenty—was fourteen.
And I thought of Colorado Luke.
Luke, who at twenty-two must have had his own reasons for having courted a sixteen-year-old on the Internet. For having assembled for her careful packages of photographs and curated mixtapes, for having flown across the country to see her while she was still in high school, a life he’d left behind years ago—except that he hadn’t really, still living in his childhood bedroom, still as lost as a teen. Luke, who, no matter where I am in the country, still finds me online every few years and sends me an e-mail telling me we had a special connection, one he hasn’t found since, and can we please, please get in touch.
I never write back.
I was sixteen. I didn’t know I was too young for him. I just thought his attention meant that I was worthy of love, could be loved, and that I wasn’t broken. When a lifeline comes, you don’t evaluate whether it’s the right one. You just grab for it, and hold on.
So I wondered, when in the files I reached the story of the Georgia girl, if this was what had happened. If that was who the girl was. If, when he took her mother’s ’69 Chevy to escape to Indianapolis, it was possible that maybe she hadn’t known. If, when he described her telling him that she liked when he touched his tongue to her and could he please, please do it again, maybe there could be some truth to that. If at least for this one moment in Ricky’s life maybe the relationship had been inappropriate, ill-advised, ill-chosen, unwise—but something short of my grandfather. Something more like Luke.
I let myself think that, because it made it possible to read the files. It made it possible to spend this time with him. To try, as I must try, to understand.
Not until I got the transcript from Ricky’s first trial, at which the Georgia girl testified, did I realize my mistake.
She was fourteen when she testified at the trial. In 1986, she was five.
Nineteen
California, 1990–1991
California greets Ricky with seemingly unbound potential. He’s free out here, free from Georgia, free from Iowa, free to invent his own life. A life that’s new but that also makes good on the unfulfilled promise of Bessie and Alcide’s move so many years before, and of his own attempt to stay as a teenager. He likes the open landscape, likes the palm trees, likes that the long coastline’s always nearby even if he’s not technically living on it. The stories Bessie used to tell him about the wildflowers, and how the Hollywood sign up on a hill was there for anyone to see it, even her, come back to him now, and the city seems all possibility. The shiny new cars on the boulevards! Everywhere he looks, people making money! Los Angeles is a city of people from elsewhere, come to make their fortunes. Just like him.
He finds work as a handyman with a contractor named Mike. Mike’s girlfriend’s name is Ellen, and the three of them take to spending their free time together, sharing a few beers and a couple of jokes after the day’s work is done. Mike seems familiar to Ricky—he’s from a barely-hanging-on working-class background like Ricky—but Ellen’s people have money, and Ricky must find himself watching her. Not because she’s pretty, though she is, but to learn. When she calls him up and asks him if he’d like to join Mike and her at one of her parents’ parties, he knows enough to ask her what he should wear.
“Just wear something appropriate,” she says. “No need to get fancy.”
“Like what?” he asks.
“Oh, you know, just something appropriate.” She’s distracted, he can hear it, and for an instant he thinks it must be Mike distracting her and he feels something approaching jealousy. He’s too embarrassed to ask her again. He doesn’t know what she means by “appropriate.”
I see him standing under a grove of palm trees. Someone has strung a strand of white lights off the slatted leaves, and the rays bounce off Ricky’s hair. He’s slicked it back with a can of Dep gel from the dollar store. He’s not smiling—he’s too nervous—but in his eyes and the tightness of his fingertips as he checks and straightens and checks again the powder-blue polyester suit Ellen Smith will describe four years from now at his first trial, when everything has changed, you can see he’s thrilled to be here. The lights glint and his hair gleams and the black dress shoes he bought at Payless (“It’s a California shoe chain,” Ellen Smith says helpfully, the chain not having yet reached Louisiana in 1994 when she’s testifying at the first murder trial) glow where he polished them. Even the black leather vest he got from Goodwill and is wearing now, incongruously, under his powder-blue polyester suit—even that vest shines. He’s polished it, too. He’s too skinny, the suit too big for him, a kid playing d
ress-up. Underneath the suit he vibrates with nerves. He’s twenty-six but he’s never been to a party like this before: little round tables dotted over a spacious yard, crisp white tablecloths over them. Somebody has ironed the tablecloths, he can tell. Even the grass looks like someone manicured it, the bright green so even it shouldn’t be real. Ellen’s parents are smiling big, real, relaxed smiles and pinching long-stemmed wineglasses. They clutch their guests’ hands to their chests heartily and say how good it is to see them, how good. When they said it to him he froze like a possum playing dead. So now he’s hiding out under the grove, watching.
But Ellen’s in her element. She flits among the guests, answering questions. No, she and Mike have no plans to get married. No, they’re not ready to have children just yet. She loves that her parents will invite anyone to parties like this. Would invite anyone. She’s sure of it. That’s why she brought Ricky. She hasn’t told them Ricky was convicted of a sex crime. That’s all he’s told her: a “sex crime”—and what, she privately thinks, could be so bad about sex? But even after he’s accused of murder a few years from now, she’ll swear on the witness stand that if her parents had known what he was guilty of, they’d still have wanted him there. They’re that kind of people, California people. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done, what the past is; it matters who you are now. And Rick—what Ellen calls Ricky, the name he’s adopted since coming out here, loving the cool hardness of that k at the end, how it says he’s finally grown up—Rick is a hard worker. Like her Mike.
Mike. At the party she must look for him, catch his eye, smile. He’s standing off to the side, not talking to her parents’ friends, a bottle of beer in his hand. Ricky’s with him, a bottle in his. The two of them angled in under the tree, keeping themselves out of the way of her parents’ friends. Like brothers, those two. She smiles again, then looks more appraisingly, noticing Ricky’s clothes. Noticing them so carefully she’ll be able to describe them years later. She must wonder about his life for a minute, about the life that has brought him to those clothes. What does she write in her head for him? What, in this instant, does she imagine and forgive?
* * *
Summer passes, then fall. One night, Ellen, Mike, and Ricky are sitting around a bar, and talk turns to what they’ll be buying for Christmas. Ellen says she’ll get her father a golf shirt. Mike will get his mother flowers.
“The real question,” Ellen must say, lowering her eyes at Mike over her drink, “is what this one’s getting me.”
Mike winks at Ricky. “Now Rick, you’re not going to tell her, are you? We’ve got our secrets.”
“No fair!” says Ellen. “He already knows what I’m getting you. He knows too much, I think.”
This moment here? Ricky would nail this moment up like a fishing trophy if he could, mount it on the wall where he could look at it every day. In this moment, he has friends.
“What are you going to buy, Rick?” Ellen asks.
He gulps his beer and the beer makes him brave. “I’ve been saving up money.” He doesn’t even think of everything they don’t know about him. About where he’s from. “My mama, they took off her leg fifteen years ago and she’s still on crutches.” He must think of Bessie slinging her body through the space of the trailer, trying not to catch the crutch against the couch or a table leg. Those crutches are bad enough at home. But to try to go anywhere else he knows she cringes inside. “I’m going,” he says, and he likes the taste of the word going in his mouth, how definitive it feels, “I’m going to buy her a wheelchair.” The words taste right. They taste true.
“All right, man!” Mike claps him on the back. “That’s a good son your mama’s got.” He raises his beer. “To your mama. What’s her name?”
“Bessie.”
“To Rick’s mama, Bessie,” Mike says, “and her wheelchair.” The three of them clink glasses.
For two weeks, this idea fuels him. When Friday payday comes, maybe he takes his check and cashes it and folds a couple of bills into a coffee can before he takes a bill to the liquor store and buys a smaller bottle than he did before. When he pushes the bills into the can, he feels proud. He can see the shiny chrome the wheelchair will have, the big easy wheels. The first week, he sees himself polishing the chrome before he presents Bessie with the chair. He’ll make it gleam. He’ll tie a big red ribbon around it into a bow, the way they do in the movies. By the second week, he’s got an even better idea. Maybe he could put a payment down on a wheelchair with one of those joystick things. Make Bessie’s life one of luxury, the first luxury she’s had. He pictures being with her in Iowa when she first sees it. How tentatively she’ll lower herself onto the seat. He’ll show her how to work the joystick and she’ll try and misjudge and crash the wheelchair into the couch and oh, they’ll laugh and laugh.
But by Christmas, his dreams have dissolved. Maybe work with Mike dries up, maybe he’s just so used to leaving that he doesn’t know how not to, or maybe something happens and Ellen and Mike don’t want him around anymore. He leaves and the records hold no reason why. Ellen, later, will not say why on the witness stand, only describe how badly he wanted to get the wheelchair for Bessie, and that he then left. He never sees Mike again. Sees Ellen only at the trial. Bessie never does get her wheelchair. He moves to a different part of California, but after a few months he’s back on the road. He returns to Georgia, to live with his sister Judy. There he goes to see a psychiatrist privately, as ordered by the Georgia court—but those records were never found, either because they were destroyed or because they never existed. In December 1991, he leaves Georgia and moves back in with his parents in Iowa, Louisiana.
* * *
A few months from now, Ricky will murder Jeremy. And after he does, his lawyers and the experts and Ricky himself will all talk about how he’s been good “for a year” now, that he has not molested anyone in a full year.
But he was released from the Georgia prison not a year ago, but a year and a half. And before his release, he was in prison for four years—where he presumably didn’t have the chance to molest a child. So the number could be five years, not one year. There’s something unaccounted for here, something the law can’t concern itself with because there is no evidence, no record. Are Ricky and his lawyers leaving something—someone—out? One year’s when he left Ellen and Mike’s. One year’s when he left California.
* * *
When Ricky moves in with Bessie and Alcide in Iowa one final time he is twenty-six. Still scrawny, not much bigger than a preteen, with the emotional maturity, the doctors say, of an eleven- or twelve-year-old—but enough grown-up smarts to understand how he’s perceived by others and to hate it. He understands he’s a pedophile now. At his exit interview for parole in Georgia, he satisfies the officer that yes, he can move to Louisiana and live with his parents. They’ll be responsible for him. Bessie attends and I picture her in one of the pastel day dresses my grandmother used to wear, this one nicer than the housedresses—Bessie would be a little nervous—with knitted lace around the collar and maybe the cuffs. She sits in a folding chair opposite the parole officer, her crutch leaning on the wall behind her and the stump of her missing leg angled in, so that her ankles, if she had both, would be crossed demurely.
“Ma’am, I want to make sure that you and your husband know what you’re getting into.”
She just looks at him. Thinks, maybe, of Ricky when he was a boy, the call she got from sixth grade when he said he saw Oscar. Thinks of the family reunions where he always headed off so willingly to look after the children. There is one note—only one—in the files that Ricky once molested a family member. It doesn’t say whom. She must know. Maybe she remembers telling the counselor at the Lake Charles Mental Health Center five years ago that looking after Ricky had become a burden, that she couldn’t leave him alone for five minutes without worrying that he was gonna go off and “molest somebody.” Now, five years later, after probation and a prison term for Ricky, she knows that to be even more true.
But Bessie believes in the crosses one bears in life, and Ricky is both her love and her cross. Would she take it back now, the decision not to end her pregnancy with him, now that he’s molested three children she knows of and who knows how many she doesn’t? You don’t think that way. She doesn’t think that way. Likely she can’t feel those children’s—those strangers’—hurt the way she feels Ricky’s presence beside her. Her son. You take family in.
So she looks the officer in the eye. “Yes, sir. His father and me, we understand.”
It’s in this interview that Ricky says, “I got me a preference for blond boys. Maybe six years old,” and he must be proud that he can describe it now, that he understands himself enough to know this. The officer records Ricky’s words but doesn’t write whether Bessie’s in the room then. Does she hear what Ricky says? Do his words pass over her with a chill? Does the officer’s pen pause on this harbinger, or does he not even notice, the appointment perfunctory? No one—not Bessie, not the parole officer, not even, by all accounts, Ricky—notes that just a few miles away from the trailer where Ricky will stay, a little blond boy lives. He is six years old, he loves his BB gun, and he stays with his mother in a house where they struggle to keep on the heat.
The Fact of a Body Page 16
