4.
Summers before this, when I was eleven and Lindy twelve, a group of us kids spent the day gathering moss. We were back in the unkempt part of our properties, where we often played soccer and shot garden snakes with our BB guns. There were five of us: Randy Stiller, my next-door neighbor and best friend, a girl we used to call Artsy Julie (because this is how our parents referred to her when she did things like draw dragonflies on her arms in permanent marker or conduct elaborate wedding ceremonies for her cats in the front yard), Duke Kern, Lindy Simpson, and me. None of us were in high school then, and so tribes like this weren’t unusual. The idea on this day was to make the biggest pile of moss we could, and we did this by taking running leaps at the long beards hanging off the trees. We pulled down handfuls at a time.
I later found out that these lots of land were eventually developed for residential use, that there is now a Woodland Hills East, and I wonder about those trees. These were oaks that likely stood when Jean Lafitte was around, exploring territory along the Mississippi River. These were oaks that hid dark-skinned Coushatta Indians, stalking meals of rabbit and deer.
For us they were a jungle gym.
Duke Kern, always tall, could climb any of them he pleased by grabbing the lowest branch and swinging his legs over his head like a gymnast. He had access to moss that we didn’t, so he sent down scores of the stuff. Randy and I collected it all in a pile as Lindy handled and shaped it. Meanwhile, Artsy Julie sat in the grass and made necklaces out of clovers, as if we weren’t even there.
When the gang of us had stripped every tree in sight, we had a pile about six feet long, maybe five inches deep. We stood around it, confused and breathing heavily, not having considered what to do once it was made. After a moment, Lindy suggested we jump over it.
Randy agreed.
“Whatever part of your body touches it,” he said, “gets eaten by alligators.” He tapped the moss with his toe and then limped around in pained circles. “So, you have to walk around like this.”
Artsy Julie laughed. We all did.
Duke Kern said that he thought it looked like a bed.
This idea struck me as so unimaginative, so uninteresting, that I was disappointed to see him and Lindy lie in it. The story now was that this was the Royal Bed, fit only for the king and queen of the yard. There had been no election to this effect, no discussion among the rest of us, but there was also no argument. If we were to couple up at this age, this would be the only thing to make sense. We understood that. And so Randy, always a trusty sidekick, took up his station as an imperial guard.
“Be careful, Your Highness,” he said. “If you step out of bed you’ll get eaten by sharks.”
Artsy Julie soon fell into the scene as well, tossing clovers at the feet of the royal couple and strumming an invisible harp. Duke and Lindy smiled. They pretended to drink from jeweled goblets, orchestrate the world with their scepters, and feed each other grapes.
Duke said, “Lindy, we must have an heir.”
Then Randy stood at attention. He said, “Intruder alert!” and cast an imaginary sword toward the edge of the woods.
I looked over to see Mr. Landry lumbering toward us. He wore a green T-shirt and blue shorts, both drenched in sweat, and had a long walking stick in his hand. I was terrified of this man. We all were. We had our reasons.
One of mine was that on rare occasions, back when my father still lived with us, or later, when my sisters would come home from college to visit, my family would sit on our back patio longer than originally intended. Night would fall and there might be a piece of meat on the charcoal grill, a solo light glowing from the deep end of our swimming pool, all made comfortable by the lilt of my mother’s laugh in family conversation. It was like paradise.
Rarer still, but too often, these moments were disenchanted by the booming and indecipherable fights of Mr. Landry and his wife, Louise, two doors down. And though kids don’t know, I could tell by the concern on my family’s up-lit faces that adult business was going on over there, and I was lucky to have no part of it. I remember once the sound of a bottle breaking in the Landrys’ driveway, another time a car engine being revved without purpose. I remember the force in his voice. And it was here I first heard a phrase I’d never heard before, that I didn’t understand the literal meaning of, uttered by my mom, I believe, when she said, “I shudder to think.”
So, I was glad Mr. Landry kept his distance.
He called to us out on the lawn.
“Have you kids seen a dog running around here?”
“No, sir.”
He looked as if he didn’t believe us.
“If you see it,” he said, “don’t go near it. If you see it, come and tell me.”
“Yes, sir.”
I watched Mr. Landry walk back into the woods and cross a small creek. He stabbed at the water with his stick. He had a mop of black hair and was, by profession, a psychiatrist.
When I turned back to my friends, Lindy and Duke were again lying on the bed of moss, the conversation with Mr. Landry already forgotten. They giggled and whispered to each other and I watched Lindy rest her hand on Duke’s stomach, where she fiddled, playfully, with his belly button.
A few days after this, our telephone rang. My mother pulled me into the bathroom and riffled through my hair with her fingers, a small flashlight between her teeth. Wiry and gray, she told me, Spanish moss is a living thing, and among the many creatures that reside in its wig are lice. So, by lying in a bed of it, Lindy and Duke were infested. My mother explained to me how they had them all over, nearly microscopic, and feasting on every inch of their bodies. I replayed the scene in my head, the way they had eventually helped each other up off the bed, as if some new allegiance had been formed between them, and tried to recall swarms of tiny bugs on their skin.
“I didn’t see anything,” I told her.
“That’s why you have me to look for you,” she said.
But the whole story, I suppose, is the shared history that this event established between Duke and Lindy. From there out they often stood to the side at times when the rest of us played. Duke, with his head shaven the next day, took to calling her Queenie. Lindy, who would not have allowed anyone to shave her head in those years, wore Duke’s baseball cap to cover the overwhelming smell of vinegar that her mother had used to delouse her hair. She drank from his Gatorade bottle, he ate from her Twizzlers, and it became the assumption that Duke would pick Lindy for his side in tackle football every single time, as if there she could never be hurt.
A couple years later, after the crime, when Lindy and I stayed up late to talk on the phone, she confessed to me that she often snuck out of her parents’ house in the weeks that followed the bed of moss and met Duke Kern in his driveway. She told me they kissed on the hood of his father’s ’57 Chevy and that she let him put his hands beneath her shirt. Oddly, I was neither jealous nor angry.
They were young. They were both beautiful.
Duke Kern was never a suspect.