Arizona and Louisiana, 1964–1965
The year is 1964, and twenty-four-year-old Alcide Langley, the man who will be Ricky’s father, steers a station wagon along a highway in Red Rock, Arizona. Maybe to understand is to go back to the beginning, and for Ricky I must start here. I imagine the station wagon my parents had when I was a child, but that was the early 1980s, so subtract, now, the faux-wood paneling, the power steering. Give this family a smaller car, and in the back, five children crammed in, four across, with the baby balanced between her sisters’ kneecaps. The car’s trunk holds their belongings in cardboard boxes bound with twine; beneath the girls’ feet are smaller boxes that make their little legs stretch almost straight out. Beyond the car, out into the distance, rises the eponymous rock, blazing red and orange, more like fire than any horizon that Alcide, born a child of the Louisiana swamp, has ever known. The earth glows as though lit from within.
As though it is scorched and barren. As Alcide drives, he aches for—he senses like a memory behind everything—the lush greens, the hopeful blues, of California. The sight of a palm tree silhouetted against the sky made even his life feel like a movie. He never wanted to leave. But his job at an auto plant, arranged for him by his uncle, was what had allowed him and Bessie to move just outside Los Angeles five years before. That job supported all of them: him, Bessie, and the five children she now turns around in her seat to shush. Alcide lost the job. Without it, there’s nothing for them in California.
“Quit that!” Bessie says to Oscar. He’s teasing his little sister Darlene again, poking her until she squirms and laughs, and if he keeps it up she’ll drop Vicky, the baby balanced between Darlene’s and Francis’s knees. Oscar, the oldest, is a freckled boy of five, with hair Bessie cut with the aid of a mixing bowl and a gap-toothed, ready grin. Someday a lawyer will hold up his picture next to a photo of another little boy with that smile, and make a point about how similar they look, but not yet—it is still February 28, 1964, and for a few moments, at least, Oscar is still alive. He pokes Darlene one more time in the side, and she says “Mommy!” and the baby laughs. The baby, too, has only a few more minutes to live.
Bessie ignores Darlene. The children will work it out; they always do. She’s not happy they’re going home, either, but it sure will be easier to have relatives around.
They’ll settle in the small clot of towns around Lake Charles, Louisiana—Hecker, LeBleu, Iowa—where Bessie’s brother lives and where Alcide’s father is buried. Bessie and Alcide courted in these towns. Maybe they necked behind the pecan trees that ring the old graveyard, or laughed together in the gas station’s parking lot. They’d both left school after eighth grade, Alcide a local boy and Bessie new in town, from Indiana. He was seventeen, she was sixteen when they tied the knot. They married for love, not for need; Oscar wasn’t born until ten months later, the following April. When the local paper ran its annual May announcement of spring births, it listed Bessie and Alcide’s son as “Baby boy Langley.” They hadn’t settled on a name yet, that was how badly they wanted to get this new family right. Finally they chose the name Oscar for the history it had on both sides: Bessie’s father’s name and the name of the brother Alcide had lost when he was just a boy, dead in a car crash at eighteen. Alcide had been eight at the time. His brother was a god to him. Then a lost one.
A year later, Bessie was pregnant again. This time the baby was a girl and the name Francis came more easily. Darlene the year after that. Then Alcide had finally gotten it in his head that maybe they could try their luck in Los Angeles. Bessie had always wanted to go—she was used to the idea that the sprawl of a country was something you could cross. No more living amid his parents and eight brothers and sisters and their families, roots so strong they bound you. A new life. New adventure.
But it turned out to be harder than they had thought. Lonelier, too. And now there’s no choice but to go home with no money, no prospects, Alcide driving the whole way back like a dog with his tail between his legs. For seven hours now, on unrelenting highway, Alcide has been driving. For twenty hours still, he will. Beside him, Bessie rests, and if her seat has a lap belt (which in 1964 has only begun to come standard in the front decks of cars, and are rarely in the back) she has left it undone.
Almost thirty years from now, when the lawyers tell this story at the murder trial of Bessie and Alcide’s unborn son, they will move what happens next to the pitch-black middle of the night, as though it is unthinkable in bright midday light. But in 1964 it is two o’clock in the afternoon, and Alcide sweats in the sun. There is no air conditioning, and the air outside the rolled-down windows blows as hot as a heater. Under the windshield, the sun’s heat must concentrate and beat down on Alcide. The children need food; the children need clothing; the children need. He cannot give the children what they need. Maybe now the sweat stings his eyes and he reaches one hand up to wipe the sweat away, and this—just this instant, when his hand cups his eyes, when his eyes are not on the road and his hand is not on the wheel—maybe this is how it happens. At the trials, the lawyers will question whether Alcide in this moment was drunk. Does he now have a flask hidden under his seat, a flask that holds liquor he must balance the wheel to gulp down, but that makes all the long hours of giving up—of steering his family right toward giving up—possible? For some acts the heart must be steeled. But as he is about to lose so much, I must find a kinder way to tell this story. Alcide sweats in the heat.
He does not see the bridge abutment.
The car slides off the road and into the abutment. The windshield shatters, throwing the family into the air. Oscar, the only boy, the beloved boy—his head is severed clear off. The baby girl dies. The middle sisters—Francis, Darlene, and Judy—live. Alcide lives; the sisters will have a father. And Bessie, who right now lies unconscious at the bottom of a concrete ditch, is falling into a coma that will keep her in a dark sleep for days to come—but she, too, will live. The sisters will have a mother.