3.
At 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.