My Sunshine Away (2 page)

A
t the beginning of that same summer, in 1989, all of our crepe myrtles shed.

This is not uncommon. Gluttons for the heat, these trees line all the major roads and boulevards of East Baton Rouge Parish. You can cut them down to nothing each year if you like. They are unbothered. This is their home, and our Junes are filled with pink, red, and purple flowers because of it. During this time, however, when they are in full bloom, long shards of bark peel off their trunks. They lie in circles upon the roots like skins.

As a kid, it was my job to pick these skins up when I did yard work. Where I’m from, this is how children help out.

So, once a week, I’d rake the spiky gumballs that fell from the sweetgum trees. I’d pull up the centipede grass that crept over our sidewalks like tentacles. And, more often than not, other boys would be in their own yards doing the same. A few doors down, for example, were the Kern boys, Bo and Duke. These were guys who worked on old cars, guys with useful knowledge I had no clue how to gather. Bo Kern, nineteen years old at the time, had a harelip and a fierce crew
cut. He was cruel to his younger brother, Duke, who was seventeen and the type of guy who did well with girls.

As either the result of or reason for this success, Duke Kern was rarely seen with his shirt on. His body was hairless and trim, muscled and lean, and he was vain. Looking back now, I realize that I idolized him. Whenever I glanced over to watch him laboring shirtless on the lawn and pictured myself at his age, our bodies were indistinguishable. Yet it never turned out that way. He and his brother worked with heavy equipment, weed eaters and push mowers, and I raked. They cleaned out carburetors and replaced spark plugs. They stopped often to argue and have fistfights.

I didn’t have any brothers to fight with, but rather two sisters, ten and eleven years older than me, who’d already moved out of the house. At fourteen, I was too young to drive. I’d no idea what a carburetor even looked like and I had never in my life been punched. So, we lived in the same neighborhood, sure, the Kern boys and me, we saw each other often, but we inhabited different worlds.

The same could be said about our neighbor Mr. Landry, a man who needs much mentioning later, who I would often see on these days of chores riding his lawn mower through the large acreage behind his lot. An enormous person, some six-foot-five and three hundred pounds, he wore dark glasses and high cotton sweat socks and would sometimes stop the mower for no apparent reason and walk into the woods. I’d then see him, often hours later, return. He and his wife had an adopted son named Jason, a troubling character who is also on our docket.

But most important to me was that across the street and two doors down, Lindy Simpson also worked in her yard. She plucked weeds from the flower beds and swept off the sidewalk. She bent over, stretched out her muscles, and gave me ample reason to sit beneath
the blossoming crepe myrtle trees and cool off. Her parents, still a beautiful couple at the time, would place cold pitchers of water and red Kool-Aid on the railing of their porch. They would then stand on the lawn with their hands on their hips and watch carefully, like I did, as Lindy climbed the ladder to pick leaves out of the storm gutters. They would laugh over some family joke that I could not hear and they had no idea what was coming. Lindy wore homecoming T-shirts, sports bras, and pink running shorts. She had a green friendship bracelet tied around her ankle, sent to her by a Christian pen pal in Jamaica.

She was a sight.

On one particular day, in the weeks before the crime, I fiddled with the shedding bark of the crepe myrtle trees as I sat in the grass watching Lindy. I saw a golden shade of brown in this one piece of bark that resembled the color of her hair, so I shredded it into fine strands. I saw a piece as lean and small as the curve of her nose in another, so I laid it on the lawn before me, as well. I then found a knotted shard, a likeness of her eyes, and put it in place. A curly wooden ribbon, her chin.

I searched the surrounding area to find shavings to match her breasts, a soft
W
shape, as well as her proud body and raised arms, a capital
Y
. I found an upside-down
V
to signify her legs and put it to my nose, inhaling what I thought would be the scent of her knee (a Band-Aid), her inner thighs (a vanilla candle), and finally the part of her anatomy that seemed to me the greatest mystery. I was mortified to see my mother standing behind me.

She looked down at what I’d done.

I felt discovered. I felt exposed. I felt ashamed.

“Oh, honey,” my mother said. “Is that me?”

It wasn’t her fault.

She simply underestimated the distance already between us.

S
ummers before this, when I was eleven and Lindy twelve, a group of us kids spent the day gathering moss. We were back in the unkempt part of our properties, where we often played soccer and shot garden snakes with our BB guns. There were five of us: Randy Stiller, my next-door neighbor and best friend, a girl we used to call Artsy Julie (because this is how our parents referred to her when she did things like draw dragonflies on her arms in permanent marker or conduct elaborate wedding ceremonies for her cats in the front yard), Duke Kern, Lindy Simpson, and me. None of us were in high school then, and so tribes like this weren’t unusual. The idea on this day was to make the biggest pile of moss we could, and we did this by taking running leaps at the long beards hanging off the trees. We pulled down handfuls at a time.

I later found out that these lots of land were eventually developed for residential use, that there is now a Woodland Hills East, and I wonder about those trees. These were oaks that likely stood when Jean Lafitte was around, exploring territory along the Mississippi
River. These were oaks that hid dark-skinned Coushatta Indians, stalking meals of rabbit and deer.

For us they were a jungle gym.

Duke Kern, always tall, could climb any of them he pleased by grabbing the lowest branch and swinging his legs over his head like a gymnast. He had access to moss that we didn’t, so he sent down scores of the stuff. Randy and I collected it all in a pile as Lindy handled and shaped it. Meanwhile, Artsy Julie sat in the grass and made necklaces out of clovers, as if we weren’t even there.

When the gang of us had stripped every tree in sight, we had a pile about six feet long, maybe five inches deep. We stood around it, confused and breathing heavily, not having considered what to do once it was made. After a moment, Lindy suggested we jump over it.

Randy agreed.

“Whatever part of your body touches it,” he said, “gets eaten by alligators.” He tapped the moss with his toe and then limped around in pained circles. “So, you have to walk around like this.”

Artsy Julie laughed. We all did.

Duke Kern said that he thought it looked like a bed.

This idea struck me as so unimaginative, so uninteresting, that I was disappointed to see him and Lindy lie in it. The story now was that this was the Royal Bed, fit only for the king and queen of the yard. There had been no election to this effect, no discussion among the rest of us, but there was also no argument. If we were to couple up at this age, this would be the only thing to make sense. We understood that. And so Randy, always a trusty sidekick, took up his station as an imperial guard.

“Be careful, Your Highness,” he said. “If you step out of bed you’ll get eaten by sharks.”

Artsy Julie soon fell into the scene as well, tossing clovers at the
feet of the royal couple and strumming an invisible harp. Duke and Lindy smiled. They pretended to drink from jeweled goblets, orchestrate the world with their scepters, and feed each other grapes.

Duke said, “Lindy, we must have an heir.”

Then Randy stood at attention. He said, “Intruder alert!” and cast an imaginary sword toward the edge of the woods.

I looked over to see Mr. Landry lumbering toward us. He wore a green T-shirt and blue shorts, both drenched in sweat, and had a long walking stick in his hand. I was terrified of this man. We all were. We had our reasons.

One of mine was that on rare occasions, back when my father still lived with us, or later, when my sisters would come home from college to visit, my family would sit on our back patio longer than originally intended. Night would fall and there might be a piece of meat on the charcoal grill, a solo light glowing from the deep end of our swimming pool, all made comfortable by the lilt of my mother’s laugh in family conversation. It was like paradise.

Rarer still, but too often, these moments were disenchanted by the booming and indecipherable fights of Mr. Landry and his wife, Louise, two doors down. And though kids don’t know, I could tell by the concern on my family’s up-lit faces that adult business was going on over there, and I was lucky to have no part of it. I remember once the sound of a bottle breaking in the Landrys’ driveway, another time a car engine being revved without purpose. I remember the force in his voice. And it was here I first heard a phrase I’d never heard before, that I didn’t understand the literal meaning of, uttered by my mom, I believe, when she said, “I shudder to think.”

So, I was glad Mr. Landry kept his distance.

He called to us out on the lawn.

“Have you kids seen a dog running around here?”

“No, sir.”

He looked as if he didn’t believe us.

“If you see it,” he said, “don’t go near it. If you see it, come and tell me.”

“Yes, sir.”

I watched Mr. Landry walk back into the woods and cross a small creek. He stabbed at the water with his stick. He had a mop of black hair and was, by profession, a psychiatrist.

When I turned back to my friends, Lindy and Duke were again lying on the bed of moss, the conversation with Mr. Landry already forgotten. They giggled and whispered to each other and I watched Lindy rest her hand on Duke’s stomach, where she fiddled, playfully, with his belly button.

A few days after this, our telephone rang. My mother pulled me into the bathroom and riffled through my hair with her fingers, a small flashlight between her teeth. Wiry and gray, she told me, Spanish moss is a living thing, and among the many creatures that reside in its wig are lice. So, by lying in a bed of it, Lindy and Duke were infested. My mother explained to me how they had them all over, nearly microscopic, and feasting on every inch of their bodies. I replayed the scene in my head, the way they had eventually helped each other up off the bed, as if some new allegiance had been formed between them, and tried to recall swarms of tiny bugs on their skin.

“I didn’t see anything,” I told her.

“That’s why you have me to look for you,” she said.

But the whole story, I suppose, is the shared history that this event established between Duke and Lindy. From there out they often stood to the side at times when the rest of us played. Duke, with his head shaven the next day, took to calling her Queenie. Lindy, who would not have allowed anyone to shave her head in those years, wore
Duke’s baseball cap to cover the overwhelming smell of vinegar that her mother had used to delouse her hair. She drank from his Gatorade bottle, he ate from her Twizzlers, and it became the assumption that Duke would pick Lindy for his side in tackle football every single time, as if there she could never be hurt.

A couple years later, after the crime, when Lindy and I stayed up late to talk on the phone, she confessed to me that she often snuck out of her parents’ house in the weeks that followed the bed of moss and met Duke Kern in his driveway. She told me they kissed on the hood of his father’s ’57 Chevy and that she let him put his hands beneath her shirt. Oddly, I was neither jealous nor angry.

They were young. They were both beautiful.

Duke Kern was never a suspect.

B
o Kern, on the other hand, was a suspect.

He had graduated from the Perkins School, but just barely, the year before the crime. He was well known around town and, with his unsettling harelip and crew cut, immediately recognizable. Teenagers and school friends knew him as the guy always willing to go one step beyond what any of them dared to do and, as such, he was the wild card of every social event. House parties screeched to a halt when Bo Kern knocked over some antique table in a fit of dancing. Young hostesses cried when he dented a parent’s car hood while wrestling and drunk. He was the guy who would publicly accept any challenge volleyed forth, trying desperately to impress girls the world knew had no interest in him.

The football coaches at the Perkins School knew Bo Kern as the slow-witted boy who had ballooned into a formidable blocking back in the summer before his senior year. This was the only position he could play, fullback, or blocking back, as it requires zero agility. The sole purpose of this position is for the athlete to turn himself into a missile, a battering ram, and destroy whatever obstacle steps in his
way. His sacrifice makes room for the more skilled running back to show his stuff and light up the scoreboard. It is a position of little reward, fullback, yet Bo Kern had so distinguished himself in the first few games of his senior year that he drew the attention of scouts from Millsaps and Belhaven College, a pair of Division III rivals in Mississippi. This was big news. Banners that read
Bo Knows Blocking
and
Geaux Bo
were written by pep squads and taped up around the chain-link fencing of the football field for the game the scouts were attending. It was October and still warm.

Before this game was finished, Bo Kern had committed two illegal procedure penalties, three personal fouls, and had been ejected for fighting with a player from our opponent, Dutchtown Catholic. Parents and fans alike looked over to explain to the well-dressed scouts that this was surely the product of nerves, some unfortunate anomaly, but they had seen enough. So, kids my age thought about Bo Kern whenever we flirted with failure. The notion was that if
he
could graduate, there was hope for us all, and he was a legend in this capacity. He was therefore a guy that many people pretended to know all about, as people do, if only to nod gravely at his name.

As far as the neighborhood was concerned, when it came to Lindy’s rape, he was also a person of interest.

The fact that physical abnormalities were so rare at the Perkins School, so rare in Woodland Hills, didn’t help. There were no disabled children that I remember. There were no wheelchairs or deformities. We were all middle- to upper-class white kids, all the products of our parents’ success, and when we played with one another at school we played in the mirror.

In this environment, Bo Kern’s harelip rattled you.

He was a stocky guy, impossibly so that senior year, and the jagged turn of his lip bared constantly the gums above his front
teeth. He rarely smiled, and even when he did you couldn’t be sure. So, I have to wonder about people like him, about children perhaps doomed from birth by circumstances beyond their control. What chance did he have among us? How early is the future defined?

I can think of others like him as well, such as a boy named Chester McCready.

Thin and pale and a classmate of mine, Chester did not shave the dark hairs that appeared on his upper lip in high school. He wore shirts with stains on them, sneakers that stank up the classroom, and had the look of some apprenticing con man, a boy who would rather be left alone in the dark. During our sophomore year, a girl named Missy Boyce claimed that Chester tried to feel her up at the concession stand during a football game that previous Friday. Desperate to be desired as well, other girls soon pretended the same, and the name Chester the Molester followed.

When we originally asked him about this Missy incident, Chester told us, “Some guy pushed me into her. It’s not my fault Super Bitch was there.”

He was emphatic about this and, I believe, honest.

Regardless, many of us who knew him began to pretend that we didn’t, and he was known only as Chester the Molester throughout the rest of high school, a time that must seem to him like an excruciating string of years. Even at our ten-year reunion, his name was still on our tongues, as he had recently been accused of sexual harassment at a local sandwich shop where he worked. This didn’t strike me as irony, as it did some of the other people at the reunion, but rather as the inevitable end we had sent him to in our youth. Even as children, you understand, we set our paper boats on a stream. We watch them go.

After hearing about this, I went to the public library to look up
the newspaper article about this event. I stared at Chester’s picture when I saw it, pasted among the other criminals’ photos in the Metro section, and I barely recognized him. He had a goatee now, sharp and trimmed, and his hair was thin and brushed forward. His mouth was small. The article said the girl was sixteen at the time of the incident, and it struck me that this was likely Missy’s age when this whole thing began, as if his troubles had never matured. I felt an accomplice to the words as I read them that day and a surprising pity for the man he’d become.

Still, it was hard to feel sorry for Bo Kern despite the hand he was dealt.

Unapologetic and mean, Bo took his anger out into the streets beyond Woodland Hills, even in high school, and had a reputation for violence. One time, Bo was brought home by the police for assaulting a boy at Highland Road Park with a stop sign he had pulled from the ground. He was let off with a warning. Another time I saw him put his fist through the window of a car in the school parking lot for no discernible reason.

After gym class one day, all the talk at school was about a brawl that had taken place in the Taco Bell parking lot the night before, where Bo Kern had beaten a boy from across town so badly that he had to be hospitalized. My friend Randy told me that after this fight, he heard that Bo had tried putting the unconscious boy in the back of a friend’s pickup truck before the cops showed up and he fled. This was only a rumor, he admitted, but it stuck with us.

“Where was he taking him?” Randy asked me. “Where the hell was he taking him?”

We shuddered to think.

Yet in the year after he graduated from Perkins, Bo grew even wilder.

He had not been accepted to any colleges, had no athletic scholarship offers, and instead worked nights as a bouncer at Sportz, a local eighteen-and-up club near the LSU campus. He still lived at home in these months and would drunkenly return down Piney Creek Road at three and four a.m., squealing around the curve in his father’s ’57 Chevy. After only two months of employment at this place, Bo had a restraining order issued against him by a college girl, an English major, who was a regular at the bar. She won the case and he was fired.

In the court document, a public record, she described Bo Kern as “a menacing figure” and complained of having nightmares about his face.

She summed it up for all of us.

The evidence mounted.

In the months immediately before the rape, Bo Kern totaled his father’s ’57 Chevy in broad daylight. He broke the finger of a boy in the next neighborhood who pointed at him and accused him of cheating at basketball. He gave his own brother a black eye on the front lawn. He told us stories about breaking into cars at LSU football games and stealing credit cards. When anyone else in the neighborhood spoke, Bo Kern asked them, “What the fuck are you looking at?”

Where were the consequences? Where was it all leading?

I imagine this must have been the worry of our parents, as well, when the news spread about Lindy’s rape. So, recently, when I began revisiting all of this, I asked my mother if she had originally suspected Bo.

She told me that after the police had gone door to door asking people in the neighborhood if they had seen any suspicious activity, Lindy’s parents had themselves gone from house to house. She said they were teary-eyed and supportive of one another. She said they
looked tired and old. The story went that Dan Simpson, Lindy’s father, was particularly suspicious of Bo, despite the fact that he had an alibi and witness to say he wasn’t home that night, and when the Simpsons finally visited the Kern house, Betty Kern, Bo’s mother, sat down with them in the kitchen. Then, before Mr. Simpson could even mention that he wanted the police to question Bo again, Betty Kern burst into tears.

She was inconsolable.

“I’m so sorry,” she cried. “I know what you’re thinking. It kills me. He was the first person I thought of, too.”

So, “Yes,” my mother told me. “We all did.”