The man at the center of this trial, endlessly discussed and debated, endlessly documented and dissected in what will turn out to be nearly thirty thousand pages of documents, will remain an enigma in this way. What you see in Ricky may depend more on who you are than on who he is.
But released from prison in Georgia in 1990, clear and free except for needing to check in with his parole officer, his whole life suddenly seemingly opening up before him, Ricky faces a choice. He’s been dreaming of the Calcasieu River, yes. But all these years of therapy have made Ricky interested in his past, and in the history of his family. In the questions of where he came from and how he became who he is. There’s no record from these years of his saying that his dead brother, Oscar, has visited him or that he has heard Oscar’s voice; it’s not like that. It’s more, now, the historian’s interest, the genealogist’s interest, and a personal interest. Through his prison stays he’s carried copies of Oscar’s and Vicky Lynn’s birth certificates, secreted out of Bessie’s truck in Hecker. While he was imprisoned at Valdosta, he wrote to the coroner in Red Rock, Arizona, the site of the crash that led to Bessie’s hospitalization and his birth. His letter received no response the first time—not even a note telling him whether he’d addressed his request correctly—but in prison he had nothing but time, so he went to the prison library and he looked up addresses and forms and he tried again. Eventually, copies of Oscar’s and Vicky Lynn’s death certificates arrived by mail. Over the years to come, he’ll amass others this way: those of his parents’ parents and their parents, census records and news articles and death certificates. He’ll become so thoroughly the historian of his family that twenty-five years later, when I am digging into this story at the genealogical society just a few miles from where Ricky was born and a few miles from where Jeremy Guillory died, I’ll happen upon a book about the history of the Langley family, self-published by a Louisiana hobbyist. In the book’s acknowledgments section will be this: A very special thank you to Ricky Langley, who was instrumental in obtaining and providing the majority of obituaries used in this book. To Ricky I wish all the best.
In 1990, Ricky, carrying sheaves of the photocopied past around with him, makes a decision. He’ll go back to California. California is still where the happy stories come from, the stories Bessie told him when he was a boy. That June, he hitchhikes there, searching for the past he never knew.
Eighteen
Chicago, 1996
For college, I invent a new life. I’ll pretend the past never happened. Chicago feels far away from the gray house, far enough to be free. The tall Gothic buildings of the University of Chicago look like my dreams of a college quadrangle: Ivy twists up the sides of stone archways and turrets, while at the buildings’ center is a clearing girdled by the gnarled roots of trees, perfect for lying back and reading on, and sheltered by a canopy of leaves. Campus legend has it that because ivy doesn’t grow naturally in Chicago, the Rockefeller family endowed a separate fund to keep it growing. Now, with the city of Chicago sparkling across the wide blue waters of Lake Michigan, and the green ivy climbing through the wind that rustles the tree leaves, the quad seems testament that you can be whoever you want to. Walking across it each day, I embrace my new role as diligent student. I never cut class. I sign up for the maximum number of classes allowed and I go to the sessions prepared, not because I have to but because I am in love with the ideas coming at me and I do the homework so soon after each class session that I do it over again before the next one. My grandfather dies in my first weeks there, and when my parents tell me I hang up the phone and don’t tell a soul. That life is gone. I don’t even look like the old me anymore, the girl in her loose, ripped clothing and Crayola hair. I have bought a wardrobe of tight skirts and tight sweaters and dyed my hair back to brown, going for something between a retro, safe can-do Mary Tyler Moore look and, with one pair of black vinyl pants, Uma Thurman’s character in Pulp Fiction, minus the syringe through the heart. What I am really going for is happy.
And somebody notices. In the dining hall one day a boy approaches. He’s on the football team, he says. His brown hair falls over one eye, and now he looks at me from under it. His frat house is having a party. Do I want to be his date?
He actually says that word, date. It is like a movie, a movie I have dreamt for myself, and when Friday comes I queue up a funk CD and dress while singing along. The theme is seventies, and I choose a low-waisted pair of tight flare pants and a turtleneck that skims my curves. I blow-dry my hair straight, then fit a plaid woolen newsboy cap onto it, turning the cap around so that it looks, I imagine, a little jauntily unexpected.
The party is at one of the stone-and-brick frat houses on South University Avenue, houses I’ve walked by but never thought I’d go into. I don’t drink. It’s a point of pride with me. I don’t want to be like my father. And what else does a person do at frat parties? In the house, couples make out against door frames. People in bell-bottoms and long hippie wigs sprawl across the living room couches and on the floor. Something silver gleams from the corner—a keg, I recognize, and only then do I realize that all this time when classmates have talked about kegs of beer, I’ve pictured them lugging around a wooden barrel.
The boy has shown up wearing a ball cap and a flannel shirt open over a white T-shirt. Now he fills a red plastic cup, tilting it to cut down on the foam, then holds it out to me.
“No, thanks.” I’m happy to be here but I’m still not going to drink.
His face falls. He doesn’t look just disappointed, but confused, and I know instantly I’ve done the wrong thing. This is not what the movie teenager would do. He takes the cup in one long swallow, then fills another and downs that, and then he wanders off and when he comes back to check on me later I’m pretty sure he’s drunk and he can definitely tell I’m not and there doesn’t seem to be anything else to do but leave. “I’m not feeling so well,” I say. I have spent the hour sitting primly on a couch, trying to avoid other people’s elbows. “Maybe I’ll just go home.”
“I’ll walk you.”
This is as far as my memory gets, except for the memory of the trees, which stab out of the dark grass sea of the Esplanade and pierce the black sky. There is no light in my memory. There are no stars and there are no people. There is barely him, and the knowledge of later—of another boy’s hand on my arm, pulling me up, and his voice asking, “Are you OK? Are you OK?”