Even in the summer of Lindy’s rape, for instance, there was joy.
We played baseball in the street. We chased the ice-cream man from two blocks away.
Lindy was a part of this, too.
In fact, in the weeks immediately following the crime, after the police had made their rounds, the only difference we noticed in Lindy herself was a change in her schedule. No more piano lessons, to my dismay. Lindy went to therapy instead. No more bicycle ride out to the track at five o’clock, but rather a ride to and from the track with her parents. Small stuff. She looked the same to us then as she always had, bright and smiling, although all of this would soon change.
And so, terrible as it was, the summer of her rape carried on, bright and blue-skied, and full of immense pleasure. Even our parents, who had taken the news of this crime and the lack of a subsequent arrest the hardest, eventually came back into the fold, bonded together by the appearance of late-summer whiteflies in the neighborhood.
Tiny and prodigious creatures, whiteflies look like lint.
Alone, they are easily squashed, nothing more than a bit of dust on your fingers. In great numbers, however, they are disastrous, and feed indiscriminately on anything green. They colonize beneath the leaves of the flora available to them and work their tiny jaws to extract sap from the plant. This is not the trouble. The waste they subsequently excrete attracts a type of mold called black sooty, and this name speaks for itself. A dark color grows over the plant life, eventually growing so thick that it divorces the plant from the sun and a botanical sadness takes over. Irises lie down in their clumps. Trees drop their leaves out of season.
So, when Piney Creek Road came under siege that late summer, the neighborhood formed an alliance. Kids sprayed soapy water all over the gardens while their parents called one another to talk about successes and failures, progress and setbacks, any subject other than Lindy and the possible suspects in her rape, and were happy to focus on the more manageable problem at hand.
That Labor Day, when the infestation seemed under control, there was a party at my buddy Randy’s house, the Stillers’ house, and everyone there was in good spirits. Parents drank margaritas and iced beer as their kids ran around like lunatics in swim trunks. Lindy Simpson was there, too, without her parents, who had since withdrawn from these types of affairs. She wore a blue one-piece bathing suit, and I followed her around the yard with a water gun. It was all laughter and cheer until around six o’clock, when we heard a chain saw revving up in the distance and a group of us went out to see.
In the farthest bend of Piney Creek Road stood a common area, a spot of land that was not technically on anyone’s lot. It was obvious now that despite their best intentions, no one had taken it upon themselves to treat the large live oak that stood there, and so this tree remained the last bastion of whiteflies. As such, the oak had apparently just given up, dropping all of its leaves on that Labor Day like some defeated sigh. So, while everyone else was at the party, saying good-bye to a summer they’d like to forget, Lindy’s father had sprung into action. He wore goggles, shorts, and a T-shirt, and laid into the ancient tree with his chain saw, an act so strangely violent that none of us knew what to say.
Two of the neighborhood men left the party at full trot to try and stop him, to explain to him that the tree was not dead, that it would come back next year, and that he had no right to do what he was doing. Then, when they got halfway up the street, they halted dead in their tracks. It turned out that on closer inspection, these men could see something that we hadn’t seen from the party, something that only Mr. Simpson had seen, after the tree dropped its leaves and went bare.
On the third-lowest branch of the live oak, slung around a tangle of sticks, a faded blue Reebok hung from its laces.
So the men returned up the street to us, solemn, and let Mr. Simpson continue his work with the chain saw. When we asked them what they’d seen up there, why they hadn’t stopped him, the men put their large hands on our heads as if we were their own sons, their own daughters.
“Let’s all go back to the party,” they said. “Let’s all get something to eat.”
So we did, and this is the last day I remember seeing Lindy happy.
Yet it had nothing to do with the sight of that shoe.
No. I admit it.
This time, I was to blame.
10.
In the weeks after it occurred, Lindy’s rape was a strange sort of secret.
Everyone in the neighborhood “knew,” but I can safely speak for Randy and Artsy Julie and myself when I say that back then, we didn’t exactly know what we knew. We knew the police had milled around for a bit, sure, we knew that we had each been asked a few simple questions, but since our parents had also asked us to be discreet about the crime (another mysterious word for me in those years) we didn’t understand much more than that. We noticed that people now acted differently around Lindy, was all, that our parents lifted their voices when they spoke to her that summer, that they let us stay out a little past suppertime if they saw we were playing with her. “Did you have a good time with Lindy?” my mother would ask me. “It’s important that you kids have fun.”
All of this just to form my excuse, I suppose, when I tell you the next thing I did.
I was not yet fifteen years old, remember, and in the first week of that school year, my freshman year, when we were all changing back into our uniforms after gym class, a few of the guys began talking of Lindy. As chronicled, many of these kids had their eyes on her since the onset of time, and our entry to high school seemed to give them a courage I was not yet feeling. They passed along rumors like scouting reports in the locker room: about how Lindy had broken up with some boy I knew she never dated, about how one guy had seen her breasts at a pool party that summer. And so, in a burst of self-serving slop I’m still ashamed of, I also offered up what I knew. I said the word low, and under my breath, because that’s the only way I’d ever heard it spoken.
Rape.
It was a word that refused to bring me an image, despite my recent relationship with it. In the weeks I’d sat alone in my room, wondering about its dark meaning, I envisioned Lindy suffering strange beatings, but yet I never saw any bruises on her face. In an attempt to increase my understanding, I went back to a poem I remembered reading in school the year before, Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock,” and the meaning became even further unmoored. I later looked the word up, just to get a hold of it, in a thesaurus my father had left in his study. I came upon these synonyms:
Plunder. Seizure. Violence.
So, I knew “rape” to ride shotgun with some grand injustice, yes, I was not dim. But I never thought of it in terms of Lindy’s virginity, her budding spirit, her body, being slaughtered in a sexual way. I never thought of a thing that could not be made right. All I knew was that the boys in the locker room wanted to talk about Lindy that day and that I wanted these boys to talk to me.
The effect was immediate.
Word shot like current through the high school circuitry. And when approached, Lindy denied it in every way. However, due to the unexpected depth of her bawling, her strange shouting, she was too obviously upset to convince them, and by the time the afternoon bell rang, Lindy had aged right in front of us. Her ponytail looked unkempt and off-center. She allowed notebooks to spill out of her backpack and spoke to no one as she trudged through the school parking lot to meet her mother, who, on this day, was waiting to drive her back home.
Later that afternoon, just before dinner, Lindy knocked on my door. I felt sick when I saw her through the peephole. All those times I’d lain on the floor and wished for this exact vision to materialize, for her to dismount from her bike and come see me, all the times I’d imagined just what I’d say; these all died, silly and unused, next to the potted plants in the corner.
I opened the door and stood there.
Behind her, I saw purple clouds slide like battleships into position, the evening rain set to get under way. She was barefoot, Lindy, she wore a dark T-shirt over her uniform, and, my God, she was already gone from me then. From all of us.
“Is it true that you’re the one who told?” she asked me.
I didn’t say anything.