Go home, Ricky’s uncle tells him. There will be no new life. He can’t stay in California. The uncle buys him a bus ticket, undoing the whole journey he’s just made. When Ricky gets to Louisiana, he calls his parole officer. The officer says, “Next time you’re going to leave, tell me first.”
The thoughts start again. When he sleeps he sees a child. The child is naked, and he touches the young, unmarked skin, and not until afterward, after the touching, does he wake, the sheets twisted, his panting guilty. Which means he’s done it again, if only in the dream. When he tells the caseworker about these thoughts, he describes them as nightmares—not wishes, not fantasies. But once a week he masturbates. He can masturbate only by thinking about young children, he says. Ricky has never been on a date. He is a virgin. His only friend now is a sixteen-year-old girl and he says the friendship is platonic. Sometimes, he tells the caseworker, he’s made young children, boys and girls both, take off their clothing and perform fellatio on him. Then he’s removed his own clothing. He’s performed it on them. Last time the boy refused and he told the boy he’d shoot him. “I don’t know what I wanted to do that for.”
But all of that is in the past, Ricky says; all of that is over. He is done with that life. (He must be. He is only nineteen. If he is not done, what will his life hold?) He would have a job now if he’d stayed in California, he tells the caseworker, he tells his mother, he tells anyone who will listen. “Long as I got something to do, I’m all right.”
He begins a correspondence course in small-engine repair. He wants to acquire a trade, he says. He wants to move out of his parents’ trailer and live alone. It’s not right that a grown man should live with his parents and baby brother. His brother Jamie is sixteen years old and Jamie is normal. Ricky must know this the way he knows that he himself is not. Years from now, after the trials, when the state penitentiary prints a list of the nine names he has requested be allowed to visit him, Bessie, Alcide, Darlene, Judy, Francis, and even the sisters’ husbands will be on the list, but Jamie’s name won’t be. Nine is an odd number, short of the round numbers the prison system tends to prefer. Likely Ricky could have asked for more. But his brother’s name won’t be on the list.
A month passes before his next appointment at the clinic. He has just turned twenty. He reports that he finally did take a job. It was at an auto dealership but then he quit it two weeks later. He tells the caseworker he doesn’t know why he quit; he just felt like quitting. The caseworker asks again, why. This time he tells her: Each day he walked to the job, he passed schoolchildren playing, then passed them again on his way home. He’d see the children and he’d want. He’d want. Ricky wants to stop wanting. He quit the job just to never walk by those children. Long as he’s got something to do, he’s all right—but now he does not have something to do. He is not all right.
Bessie comes with him to the next appointment. I imagine she has on her good housedress, but, self-conscious, she’s wearing a coat open over it despite the heat. She’s glad her son’s home again, she tells the caseworker, but it’s draining to have him there. “I feel like if I leave him alone for a minute, he’s gonna go off and molest somebody.” She has forbidden him from running off to live by the river, but he’s an adult. What can she do? Alcide’s no help.
Picture Ricky, as he sits next to Bessie. They’re in two hard metal chairs, the caseworker on an office chair turned catty-corner to them. It must be humiliating to sit here with his mama, she with the one leg and still carrying that old crutch ’cause they can’t afford anything better. It should be him accompanying her to the doctor, not the other way around. A person can be angry and still feel shame. A person can burn with hate at his mama and still love her enough to want to be something that will make her proud. A person can feel overwhelmed by all he wants to be and see no way to get there. “I been thinking about dying or getting someone else to kill me,” he blurts out now. He’s drinking more these days, living with Bessie and Alcide. Whole bottles of peppermint schnapps. Last week he drank fifty dollars’ worth. “I warned him that drinking might impair his judgment,” the caseworker writes.
There is one last sheet in the file, titled “No Suicide No Homicide Contract.” I, the undersigned, do hereby voluntarily agree that I will not intentionally attempt to harm myself or anyone else during my therapy (treatment) at this center. Ricky signs. The agreement is standard—likely given to every patient—but looking at it now it is hard not to notice the word “during.” The last therapy session Ricky attends is October 1, 1985. On February 24, 1986, his case is recommended for closure. On May 16, 1986, it’s closed. Ricky leaves home again, for Georgia.
Sixteen
New Jersey, 1994–1996