This excising of Bessie and Alcide. It’s easy to read a young man’s anger between the lines. From appointment to appointment, his responses to questions grow shorter and shorter. Easy to imagine his hand cocked into a fist in his lap, his head ducked low, as though if she can’t see his eyes she won’t see him. He won’t have to answer. He tried to molest a seven-year-old boy in Allen Parish. “Attempted molestation,” the charge says. When the boy resisted, Ricky told him he’d shoot him. The boy’s father reported Ricky to the police. That’s why he’s here now.
Just more proof that everyone thinks there’s something wrong with him. He doesn’t know what burns more badly, the shame or the anger. Sometimes he can’t even tell the two apart, just knows what it feels like when his ears prick red and his heart thuds hard in his chest, whooshing inside him. He can’t hear can’t see can’t think. That feeling—not wanting that feeling—is why he doesn’t have a high school degree. There was a misunderstanding over a school car when he was in ninth grade. He’d been told he could use the car to run an errand for the school—Ricky swears it, but there’s no need to take his word, the auto repair teacher backed him up—but someone forgot to tell the school officials, who reported it missing. Ricky was arrested. Grand theft auto. Everything was cleared up before charges were pressed—a mistake, everyone agreed—but it made Ricky burn so badly he never went back.
Because here’s what he realized: They thought he would steal a car. You can bet if one of his sisters had taken the car, they’d have believed his sister.
He dropped out. When the other kids were in school, he’d be down by the river, fishing. He’d never had many friends, but dropping out was the last snip in that thread. It’s like they all went in two different directions after that. Everybody else in one direction. Then him.
The caseworker drums her fingers against the desk. “So you didn’t earn your degree, Ricky. Lots of people don’t. But do you have a job?”
“I done gave up on jobs.”
In these forms from the Lake Charles Mental Health Center in the mid-1980s, Ricky denies ever having been physically abused. He denies ever having been sexually abused. But ten years after these sessions, a social worker will put together a report that is heavily relied on at trial. The report will say his sister Judy said that Lyle and Alcide both beat Ricky. Ricky gave up on Alcide but, either unable or unwilling to give up on his family entirely, kept running back to Lyle. Once, Judy said, when Ricky showed up at Lyle’s door, Lyle beat him so badly she had to pull a gun on him to make him stop. Judy told the social worker, who wrote it down for the defense, who gave it to the expert, who described it at trial, and the court reporter wrote it down—this is a game of telephone I am playing with the past.
Ricky is scheduled for five appointments in July and comes to every one. Last month, after his arrest, he says, he took forty over-the-counter aspirin and waited to die. The only way to get the bad feelings out was to kill himself. But the pills just gave him a stomachache and made his ears ring. So he’s here. Angry but trying. Sometimes he carves long slashes into his arms and watches himself bleed. He drinks household cleaners and walks into traffic, daring the cars to hit him. Now he tells the caseworker he wants to be hospitalized so he can’t molest anyone. “It seems like the harder I try not to do it, the more I do it.”
But they won’t hospitalize him. He is clean and kempt, the caseworker checks off. He acts appropriately. He is not that sick. Rather than being hospitalized, he is assigned to outpatient therapy.
*
So Ricky runs away. He’s not going to keep sitting in a chair and talking about this; they’re not listening to him. He’ll hurt somebody. He needs to be locked up, but they won’t even take him seriously for that. Twitchy in his body, unable to sit still, a failure at holding a job and a failure when he tries to kill himself and a failure at getting treatment, he flees. He hitchhikes his way across the Louisiana swamplands, through the piney woods of Texas and into the dry Arizona desert, where vistas of red rock burn more like the sun than any rock he has seen before. His skin burns crisp red, but he does not care. The blaze of color is beautiful, the dry air light in his lungs. He keeps going west. It is like he needs to find the beginning.
When he reaches California, he will stop. California is where the happy photographs come from, the photographs his mother kept hidden in the heavy trunk when he was a boy. From before what makes Bessie drink, before what makes Alcide angry. He’ll live with his uncle in California. He’ll make for himself a better life.
*
These notes from the caseworkers are some of the first I ever read of Ricky. The Christmas after I read them, I went back to my parents’ house. I drove there thinking of him, of his desire to get away and of his hope.
Usually I see my family in neutral settings: hotels and restaurants. But at Christmas, I like going back to the gray house. My father and Andy tack lights up all over the gingerbread trim. Each year my family has lived in the house, they have added at least one lit plastic figurine, and now the front yard is a battalion of Santa Clauses and gingerbread men, toy soldiers and snowmen. Time has otherwise dragged the house into a shambles, the repairs Greg made so many years ago now failing, but the lights transform it into something both new and familiar.
They were having a Christmas party and the whole neighborhood was invited. That night I was walking down the staircase, a glass of wine in one hand and the other gripping the banister. Around me, mingling with carols from the speakers, rose the voices of people I’ve known my whole life. And above them, holding court, a single voice: my father’s. I heard him tell a group of people that I was writing a book about something that happened in the past. “But if you ever hear about it, don’t worry,” he said, his words a little slurred by drink. “Alexandria’s the only one who remembers it.”
On the stairs, I froze. My family had always been silent about the abuse. But no one had ever implied that it hadn’t happened.
My father kept talking. This moment that had changed everything inside me had changed nothing for him.
*