12.
When we arrived at Jason’s house, his father was picking up the trash cans I’d seen Jason overturn. He was grumbling to himself, a blue sweatband around his head and dark prescription glasses concealing his eyes. Again, was this all the same day? Was this a pattern? How much time could I have shared with the Landry boy? The specific truth is impossible to mine for you here, except for what I know the large man said.
“You boys see a dog running around out there?”
“Don’t you think I’d tell you if I did?” Jason said.
“Don’t be smart,” Mr. Landry said.
Jason held up his palms like an innocent. “What?” he said. “We didn’t see anything, did we?”
Mr. Landry looked at me.
“No, sir,” I said.
Jason led me into the garage and, as soon as we got out of sight, he did a little dance of joy. He gave me a high five. He had just won a round of some oedipal game he’d created, I imagine, and he shot his father the bird with both fists. Fuck you, he mouthed. Fuck you!
We entered his house through the back door, and the place was as dark and quiet as if nobody was home. We then walked to the kitchen to see his mother sitting silently at the dim breakfast table, cigarette smoke lifting from her hand without drama. To the left of her sat the foster girl Tin Tin, a sickly thin child of mixed origin. She was quiet, unresponsive, and did not last long at the Landrys’. When she heard us enter the room, she stared in our general direction like the blind might. This was one of the few times I ever saw her.
Jason’s mother, Louise Landry, was not an attractive woman, although she may have been, had everything in her life been different. But in the world in which I knew her, she wore her hair in a tight braid pulled over her shoulder and to the front. She had deep wrinkles near her eyes, spoke in a rasp, and picked at the gray-and-yellow ends of her braid while she smoked.
She was from a large Pentecostal family in rural Mississippi, if you can believe what my memory tells me, and she’d left both that brood and that religion when she married her husband. As such a strange pair, the giant and his country wife, the neighborhood often speculated about the Landrys’ courtship. It was rumored that he was once her psychiatrist who stepped over the line, or that he had kidnapped her off her farm in Tupelo, or that she was sold to him by some righteous cult.
At large, we were afraid of them. We didn’t bother to ask.
Back then, our only evidence to the character of Louise Landry was that she rarely ventured outdoors. Whenever we saw her, she was toting an obligatory plate of deviled eggs to a party in the neighborhood. Then she was sitting out on the back porch, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes in her long denim skirt as the rest of us swam. She kept little company, and she and her husband showed no public affection that I ever saw, neither to each other nor to Jason, nor to any of the other children they currently held in strange hospice. So, if you didn’t know, you would be hard pressed to guess that they were a family. The only time they spoke at these functions was after Mr. Landry had too much to drink and began blustering about local politicians, or making inappropriate comments to the women and children.
To Artsy Julie once, she told me, at a Fourth of July party when she was twelve: Come over here, girl. Let me get a whiff of you.
But we will deal with him later.
As far as Louise goes, my mother claims that she tried to befriend her for years, all to no avail, especially in the days that followed the fights we’d hear on our back porch. She’d invite her to luncheons, to play tennis, to go shopping, anything she could think of to get her out of her husband’s earshot. But every attempt at friendship was met with the same response, my mother said, delivered to her in Louise’s Mississippi hill-country accent, when she’d furrow her brow and say, “Now, Kathryn. Don’t be silly.”
Kathryn, my mother’s name. After all these years, it’s still strange for me to think of her as a person. An adult. Separate from me in the world.
Yet there was no doubt as to the distance, the separation, between the Landry household and my own. It was not just the darkness, the foster kids, the history; it was also the tension. When Louise saw Jason and me tromp into the room, she snapped as if caught. “What have you boys been doing?” she said. “Jason, what’s going on?”
“Nothing, Louise,” Jason said. “I was just going to show him my knives.”
“Did you change your sheets?”
“I’ll do it later.”
“But you won’t, will you?” Louise said.
Tin Tin laid her head on the table as if falling asleep.
Jason grabbed the back of my shirt.
“Come on,” he said, and I followed him toward his room.
Jason didn’t bother to flick on any lights as we navigated the cluttered living room and passed into the narrow hallway. And since our house and the Landrys’ house were both designed the same way—four-bedroom, three-bath ranchers, large and functional, with windows galore—I recognized the fact that this could easily be my own home we were skulking through. Their den was simply set up in the opposite direction, their fireplace laid in a different brick. Instead of the scented candles my mom kept aglow on the end tables, they had ashtrays, overrun with spent butts. All the same. Totally different. How easily, I wonder now, could we have switched addresses and been changed?
When we passed what in my house would have been my older sister Hannah’s room, Jason stopped and pointed at the door. “That’s the mother lode,” he said.
I looked up to see a series of latches on the door, each run through with a combination-style Master lock.
“What’s in there?” I said.
Jason smiled his gap-toothed smile.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?”
I then followed him into his room, where he finally turned on the light.
“Pretend to be doing something,” he said. “Tell me if Louise comes.”
Jason walked into his closet, got on the floor, and riffled through the dirty clothes.
I looked around his room. It was full of posters that seemed too young for him. Nothing embarrassing, exactly, but apparently decorated years prior and never thought of again. There were Transformers posters, Winnie-the-Pooh posters, and the wallpaper had a border of clowns. His chest of drawers was also something like I might have, pasted with Star Wars and Hot Wheels decals, while on his desk stood a small fishbowl, murky and green. Its only inhabitant was a dead tetra, molting in a castle.
I sat down on Jason’s bed and watched him fiddle with a knife in his closet, prying open a panel in the wall, and I felt something cold begin to seep through my shorts. I put my hand on the bed and it was wet. I stood up and wiped my hands on my shirt.
“Why is your bed all wet?” I said.
“Shut up and listen for my mom,” he said. “Play Nintendo or something.”
I walked over and flicked on the small TV screen in the corner. I pressed the power button on the Nintendo. As the television warmed, and the images came to, I heard his mother walking down the hall.
“Jason,” I said, and she walked in.
She held a bundle of sheets in her arms.
“What are you boys doing?” she asked. “Where’s Jason?”
Jason walked out of the closet with the knife in his hand.
“What are you doing in here?” he said. “This is my room.”
“You know what I’m doing,” she said, and walked over to his bed. She pulled off the sheets and crumpled them onto the floor, exposing a plastic mattress with a large circle of dark yellow in its center.
“Get out of here, Louise,” Jason said. “I told you I was going to show him my knives.”
“You can do that while I’m here, can’t you?” Louise looked over at me. “Is that really what you two are doing?” she asked.
“I was just playing Nintendo,” I told her.
So Jason feigned a presentation as Louise changed his bed. He brought out a box full of knives, some Swiss Army, one Rambo, and a slew of bowies. He pulled them out of their leather sheaths and used the blades to cut the thin hair on his arms.
“Look how sharp,” he said. “Imagine what this one could do.”
“This one has a bottle opener,” I said.
“You just don’t get it, do you?” he said.
Louise then finished with the bed and gathered up the soiled sheets. She stood in the doorway and watched over us. “How’s your mother?” she asked me.
“Fine,” I said.
“That’s good,” Louise said. “Has she been dating?”