16.
The binoculars first: In 1988, the year before Lindy’s rape, the Landrys fostered a young criminal by the name of Tyler Bannister. He arrived shortly after Tin Tin’s quiet and unexplained departure and was sixteen, the oldest child they’d ever fostered. As it turned out, his years of bouncing from one family to another had done to him what it did to many other young boys in that limbo and made him distrustful and cruel. His presence in Woodland Hills was unwelcomed. There were several reasons for this.
Tyler Bannister introduced a new set of problems to the neighborhood that the younger kids, myself included, had yet to develop. And since we were already dealing with our own budding messes in Bo Kern and Jason Landry, his sudden appearance seemed overkill. He brought to our streets the knowledge of drugs and vandalism, and he did not even look like a child. He kept his head shaved bald in all seasons and had blue tattoos on his wrists, neck, and ankles. He once claimed he’d done these to himself with a needle and Bic pen. Another time, he said they’d been put there against his will. He was a perpetual liar. All we knew for sure was that one of these tattoos, crudely drawn but recognizable, depicted a boy with a gun in his hand. Another was of a dark blue cloud with a lightning bolt through its center. And the one on his neck, just below his right ear, was of a bird with one wing.
In the times he found his way into our yards, Tyler told us stories we weren’t prepared to hear. One I remember about his exhausting sexual relationship with the middle-aged mother of a previous foster home. He talked about how she “loved it up the ass” and about how she would come into his room and give him blow jobs when the father fell asleep. Another anecdote of the way he once put a lightbulb into the vagina of a girl he shared a group home with. We rubbed our eyes and couldn’t believe it. “Chicks are freaks,” he told us. “Don’t let them tell you any different.”
But Randy and I, and even Jason, who seemed totally enamored with Tyler, remained skeptical of some of these stories. They were so wildly inconsistent, so foreign from our experience on Piney Creek Road, that we had little to say in response. When he told us of letting a black guy touch his penis so he could score some blow, for instance, we just covered our faces and thought, What in the world is blow? We were too nervous to ask. Or when he told us that he’d once lived with a band of gypsies who pimped him out for sex in the back of the Kmart parking lot on Plank Road, we thought, Hey, that doesn’t sound so bad, because all we heard was the sex. But the devil was in his details. “It was the truckers that were the worst,” he told us. “Just the smell of their nuts.”
Luckily for us, other stories cast doubt on all this grotesquery.
Like when he told us about his real father, his biological father, who he said was abducted by aliens right in front of him. He told us they were nothing like you saw in the movies, “none of that big-headed little-green-men shit.” He instead said they looked like trees and squirrels and “all this stuff you see around you.” We laughed at this thought. “Laugh all you want,” he said. “It’s not so funny when it happens to you.”
Everything had happened to him.
His mother, he once told us, sold him to the circus to pay for doctor bills. Another time he said she died while playing William Tell with some famous actor. “I won’t even tell you which one,” he said. “There’s no point. That guy’s got serious hush money.” But he’d also once told us his mother had fallen overboard off a millionaire’s yacht and was lost at sea, which confused us, and that she was probably just raising some other guy’s kids now, all “amnesiaed out.” He figured she might come looking for him one day, but he wasn’t holding his breath. Still, Tyler liked to spray-paint his name on things, he said, “in case she ever wakes up from her coma.”
The boy’s dreams were all over the map.
Despite the inaccuracies of these stories, however, there was nothing confusing about Tyler’s actions. Although he was there for only a few short months in the year before Lindy’s rape, Tyler carried out an impressive campaign of terrorism and left a permanent mark on Woodland Hills. He destroyed mailboxes with homemade explosives and M-80 fireworks that he had apparently stockpiled. He stole all the street and yard signs in the neighborhood and stuffed them into the storm drains along Piney Creek Road. We found this out weeks later when it rained and we flooded, the Parkers’ long-lost “It’s a Girl!” yard sign suddenly bobbing its head out of an open manhole. He toilet-papered houses and salted yards. He graffitied images that matched his tattoos on the light poles and oak trees. He let neighborhood pets out of their fences. He stuck garden hoses through open car windows and turned on the water. He also smoked the first joint I had ever seen, sitting in my backyard.
This was a big day. I had been outside playing with a remote-control car my mother had bought me as a surprise. It was a complicated machine called The Hornet that we’d struggled to put together. It ran on expensive yellow-coated batteries that you had to recharge every night, and the motor required constant maintenance. It had become a thing I hated in many ways, as it was too fast for me, and rarely worked when I wanted to play with it. My mom took me to a store called The Hobby Hut most Sundays to get it tuned up, where she talked to the guy that owned the place as I fiddled around with airplanes made of balsa wood. When we got back home I would take The Hornet out in the street and try to drive it, where it would crash and roll over on the pavement. Inevitably, these times would end with some wire burning out and a puff of smoke curling up from the battery.
“I’m sorry,” my mother would say. “I should have gotten a different one.”
“Don’t say that,” I’d tell her. “I love it.”
On this particular day, I was out in the backyard, running the car on the grass, where it was slower and more manageable, when I saw Tyler and Jason walking around in the woods. They came up to me, smiling and out of breath, and Jason said, “We just saw two frogs getting it on in the creek. Tyler blew them up with a firecracker.”
I laughed and struggled with the remote control.
Tyler watched me for a moment and then removed a bag of weed from his pocket. He sat on the grass and began expertly tossing out seeds and rolling it up in some papers.
“Now we’re talking,” Jason said, and rubbed his hands together.
Tyler flicked open a Zippo and lit the joint that I honestly thought was a cigarette.
“You smoke?” I said.
“This place is so fucking boring,” Tyler said. “What would I do if I didn’t?”
I sat next to them in the yard and made the car do loops around the trunk of an oak tree. The scene was quiet but for the buzz of the motor.
“See what I’m saying?” Tyler said, and offered me the joint.
I told him I had allergies. I told him I “just say no.”
“Don’t be so gay,” he said.
“He’s not gay,” Jason told him. “He’s got a hard-on for the Simpson chick.” He made stroking motions with his hand. “He jacks off to her like thirty times a day.”
“I do not,” I said.
“Then where’s my picture?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I forgot about it.”
“Right,” Jason said.
“What fucking picture?” Tyler said, pulling a bit of dope off his tongue.
Jason told him the story.
Tyler smiled until he found out where the picture had come from, the locked room inside their house, and then he took on a look I’ll never forget. It was intense and solitary, and he looked pained, as if balling his mind into a fist. He held the joint beneath his nose like it was a precious thing. He breathed in the yellow smoke.
“You going to share that or what?” Jason said.
“Why should I?” Tyler said, and he didn’t.
He instead removed a couple of M-80 firecrackers from his pocket and lit the fuse of one with his joint. He threw it toward my racer. It missed but blew up a clod of dirt by the tree stump.
“What the hell?” I said.
“Those Hornets suck anyway,” he said. “The batteries are always burning up.”
Was there anything he didn’t know?
“Still,” I said. “My mom gave it to me.”
“I’d give it to your mom,” he said.
“I would, too,” Jason said.
“I’d give it to your little girlfriend, too,” Tyler said. “Lindy what’s-her-name. I’d give it to her right there in her room with all those stuffed bunnies and New Kids on the Block posters.”
“What are you talking about?” I said. I was enraged.