11.
The third suspect in Lindy’s rape was the adopted boy named Jason Landry. One of the slew of children that Mr. Landry and his wife, Louise, fostered on Piney Creek Road, Jason was the only one who stuck around. He’d been in their clutches since he was an orphan, a toddler, and was two years older than me. He was not a pleasant boy by any stretch and, just as the people of Woodland Hills wondered if he could have been involved in the crime, we also wondered why he, out of all the children the Landrys cared for, became the constant. Through a little research of my own, I’ve since learned that it is not unusual for a family like the Landrys to keep one individual child with them throughout their fostering years, to adopt him, so that the other children they host will have a playmate. This is called anchoring, in the literature, and is the benevolent interpretation of this process.
The truth, I believe, in the case of the Landrys, is that Jason was kept around for a different purpose. Erratic and troubled, Jason was used more as a normalizer than an anchor. He was, in the technical sense, a socializer for the other foster kids. To put it more simply, his well-fed existence, no matter its quirks, was empirical proof to the other orphaned children who came in and out of their doors that a life could be made with the Landrys, that you could survive it. This, of course, was also proof to Child Services. So if a young boy or girl felt uneasy during his or her first weeks at the Landrys’, if they thought perhaps there was something amiss, Jason could tell them, “Cut it out. Suck it up. This is normal.”
A relative term if there was one.
Jason Landry had thin white hair, even in his youth, yet he was not an albino. His eyes were the color of clean river sand and he had gaps between all of his teeth. I have no idea what tribe of man he was birthed from, no idea of his origin. Perhaps no one does. His skin was yellow, in how I remember him now, and he smelled constantly of the cigarettes his mother smoked in their kitchen. He had been kicked out of the Perkins School in eighth grade for reasons that were never disclosed to me—rumors about him and another boy in a bathroom. Rumors that he’d sexually threatened Ms. Gibson, a fragile Spanish teacher who had lupus. And since he did not attend any youth soccer or swim leagues, he did not play with the rest of the neighborhood kids often. Whenever he did, it ended poorly.
Jason once fought with Bo Kern, for example, over a ten-dollar bill they found in the street, and he was beaten soundly. He ran home screaming. Later, when we had finished up that afternoon’s game of tackle football and forgotten about the skirmish entirely, Jason Landry returned to us with a knife. He didn’t speak to us, or confront Bo, but instead stood on the opposite side of the road and jabbed the knife into a pine tree, again and again. He wore camouflage pants and a green T-shirt as if he couldn’t be seen and ducked to the ground when cars passed between us.
This behavior was neither new nor isolated.
Jason was also known to tackle the neighborhood girls in strange ways that they complained about. He would lie on top of them a bit too long, perhaps. He would press himself against them. Artsy Julie held sticks in her hand like a crucifix when Jason appeared. Lindy refused to let him cover her on pass plays. Whenever we rode go-karts around in the summers, Jason would beg us for a chance at the wheel. When we would finally relent, he would take off down the road and not return. He had inexplicable scars, shaped like dimes, on his back.
Some days, when he was trying to be friendly, he’d pull out clumps of his thin white hair and say, “I bet you can’t do that,” and we hated him. It was easy to.
Even before Lindy’s rape, his behavior looked like evidence.
Yet one day, or perhaps on many days, in the year before the crime, I sat with Jason Landry on the top of the hill behind his house. He lived next door to Randy, two doors down from me, and we rested our backs against a steel storage shed. I have no idea what brought me there that afternoon. What level must the boredom have reached? We picked at the grass, dug around at the dirt, and played with roly-polies that curled fearfully in our hands.
After a while, Jason nudged me on the shoulder and pointed out into the woods.
“Jackpot,” he said.
At the edge of the trees stood a dog, peeking around the corner at us. I have no idea the breed. It looked like it lived in the swamps, if that were possible, as its fur was matted with mud and its rib cage visible against its skin. One of its ears was also forked, apparently from some scuffle long ago, and hung awkwardly from the side of its head. We watched it trot from tree to tree.
Jason reached underneath a tarp.
“This is what I’ve been waiting for,” he said.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Relax,” Jason said, and pulled out a rusty tin bowl from the shed.
He then got up and proceeded to dig through the garbage cans in their driveway. He produced several scraps of food, some pork bones, chicken skin, some old pasta, and walked the bowl of food out into the grass, where he called to the dog, although he didn’t have a name for it. “Here, mutt!” he said. “Come here, you dumb hound! No one’s going to hurt you.”
I remember the high sun on that day; the oak shadows raked across the lawn like stripes. “Whose dog is that?” I asked. “Where does it live?”
“It’s nobody’s dog,” he said. “It’s just a lousy cur. It digs through our trash and shits in our yard. It drives my dad nuts. He spends all day looking for it.”
I watched the dog approach us, stopping every few paces. It looked like a worried soul with its tail tucked between its legs, and Jason laughed at its posture.
“Come here, you stupid mutt,” he said, and rattled the bowl in his hand.
“Why don’t you tell your dad you found it?” I asked. “You guys could keep it.”
Jason looked at me like we had just met.
“That’s not what he wants to do with it,” he said.
I could fathom no other option.
“I’ll keep it, then,” I told him. “We could give him a bath.”
“You better not touch my fucking dog,” Jason said. “I’ll kill you if you touch it.”
It was hard to tell if he was serious. That was perhaps the defining characteristic of his personality. Jason Landry had a way of making you feel uneasy, as if you never really knew who you were dealing with. When you shared a laugh together, for instance, and he seemed a normal boy, he would then repel you with some phrase not likely to come from a child—a threat of premeditated violence, a vulgar joke. And these moments would create in you a sense of distance, chasmic at times, that you knew better than to try and bridge. In this way, Jason was at least predictable in his unpredictability, and so I was never truly afraid of him the way I was of Bo Kern, who was all action and little talk. Still, I surely didn’t trust him.
So, I stood up off the grass while Jason coaxed the dog to, and I tried to prepare myself for some emergency. Jason set the bowl on the ground and backed away. He made kissing noises with his mouth.
“Come on,” he said. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
The dog trotted a wide perimeter around us. It sniffed at the grass and inched closer.
“Eat, boy,” I told him. “Get you something to eat.”
“That’s right,” Jason said. “You better eat up while you can.”
The dog nosed the bowl and then slowly, carefully, lifted a piece of meat with its mouth and began chewing. It licked like a beggar at the bones.
“That’s a good boy,” I said.
Then, after the dog began to look comfortable, after it really began to dig in, Jason ran toward it.
“Get the hell out of here!” he yelled. “Go on, you stupid mutt!” He kicked at the dirt and clapped his hands. “Go on!” he said.
The dog paced around in confused circles. “You worthless stray!” Jason said. “Get the hell out of here!” He picked up a stick and threw it at it. He waved his arms in the air. He kicked over the bowl of food. The dog then sprinted away into the woods, whimpering, with a noticeable hitch in its hind leg.
“Stupid mutt,” Jason said. He then tipped over the garbage cans in their driveway. He spread out the trash like it had been rifled through.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“We better get out of here,” he said. “My dad’s going to be pissed.”
So I followed him. I made no stand about the dog.