The Fact of a Body

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The Fact of a Body Page 24

by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich


  And—the motion went further—Ricky wanted to die. Ricky, who had been suicidal for years, knew that if he was found to have molested Jeremy Guillory he would be more likely to be executed. He wrote notes to Lucky in jail. “I still think we should push for the death penalty.” He wrote notes to the newspaper. “Jeremy was sacrificed for reasons you will never understand.” But what if Jeremy had been molested—but it wasn’t Ricky who’d done it, or Ricky wasn’t the only one? The semen on Jeremy’s shirt was from Ricky. The pubic hair on his lip was not. What if Ricky was covering for his friend, the father no one suspected?

  Three months later, Terry drove himself and his son into the second car of an Amtrak train. “Anyone who knows the railroad crossing on Packing House Road will recognize that the presence of an oncoming train would be obvious to anyone from a mile away,” Clive wrote.

  So rather than rushing to convict Ricky without understanding the whole story, wouldn’t it make sense to exhume the body? Terry was dead. He didn’t have a constitutional right against search and seizure. Your rights expire when you die. Clive was careful to note at the hearing that the presence of the pubic hair on Jeremy’s lip didn’t necessarily mean he’d been molested. There were other ways the hair could have gotten there, with the blankets piled on him. But the blankets were from Ricky’s bed and, so many of them printed with cartoon characters, likely from the children’s. And the pubic hair wasn’t Ricky’s. So—wouldn’t it make sense?

  The motion was filed December 3, 1993. Jeremy had been dead for a year and ten months. Terry and Joey, a year and six months. The motion struck people as ghoulish. There was briefly talk of filing a disciplinary complaint against Clive with the state bar association. The motion was denied. Pearl took the stand tight-lipped and no one ever asked her what happened after they found Jeremy’s body in her house, or where her husband and son were now. The whole thing was wiped from the trial.

  * * *

  But there is still the problem of the body. The problem of Jeremy’s dead body in the upstairs closet of the Lawson house for three days. The problem of Pearl and Terry living alongside it. Waking their children up in the morning. Tucking their children into bed at night. When I found the accident report in the files I called a friend of mine who runs a medical school cadaver lab in Boston and asked her how long a body would last before it started to stink. Could someone really not notice that there was a dead body in the house for three days?

  “What was the weather?” she asked.

  “Louisiana in winter. The house probably wasn’t heated very well. The family had little money and there were all these blankets out.”

  She thought for a minute. “Borderline,” she said.

  “Borderline?” The word came out as a cry. How could I tell her how much I needed to understand what had happened in that house? “I need to figure this out.”

  “Borderline.”

  Thirty

  When I was eighteen years old, I confronted my grandfather. It was June of 1996 and I was about to graduate from high school. August rose on the horizon, flooding my vision with the promise of escape. In Chicago, a dorm room waited for me. A bedroom I’d never once slept in, in which I’d never had a nightmare’s visit. A whole campus—a whole city—full of buildings full of rooms in which not a day of the past had unfolded.

  But I was starting to understand just how solid the silence was. That if I didn’t say anything no one in my family ever would, and my grandfather would never have to answer for what he’d done. I wanted him to answer. I wanted him to hear me say the words for what he was. For those words to become as solid as the memories I carry in my body.

  That morning the magnolia tree outside his apartment was in full white bloom. Inside, the hallways were the silent, functional beige of space that belongs to no one. As I neared his door my nose began to burn with the ammonia stink of old urine. His body was failing him; that thought made me strong. I wonder now how it is that I didn’t pause, how I could have just kept going. But in my memory my stride is quick and unflinching. Through his door I could hear the television priest saying Mass, the long tones of the Latinate vowels. My grandfather watched this same program every Sunday morning he stayed over to babysit when I was a child. Every Saturday night, his hands. Every Sunday morning, a priest’s voice.

  He came to the door slowly. He was dressed in slacks and a tucked-in shirt, his glasses on straight. My grandfather was never like my grandmother, she in her housedresses. He was always prepared to meet the world. I’d never been to see him alone before, but when he opened the door and saw me he didn’t seem surprised. He didn’t fuss, or hug me, or ask why I’d come, or do whatever it is that grandfathers do when they see their granddaughters. He was silent. He watched me. He stood there, waiting.

  I stepped past him. The smell of the room hit me first. Then the photos. Every surface was crowded with knickknacks from my grandparents’ house: their wedding portrait in a silver frame; salt-and-pepper-shaker sets; tiny teacups and tinier thimbles. An orange clay bust my grandfather had sculpted of himself and that I used to like touching when I was a child, the hair looped into curls like mine. There were framed photographs of my mother and her brothers as children, then us as children. Across the shelves, I grew up. From the television came the priest’s voice.

  I turned to my grandfather. “You molested me,” I said. Such simple words and they’d never been spoken. “I remember.”

  I told him what I remembered. That when I was three I stood in the musty dining room in the Astoria house, the house my mother grew up in, wearing a dress. The room was darkened, my parents off somewhere. My grandfather and I were alone. I was looking at a painting that hung on the opposite wall. The painting showed a young Italian peasant girl’s face framed in a kerchief, her head turned to the side, a double cherry looped over her ear so that the bulbs of the fruit hung, glistening like earrings. Suddenly my grandfather’s hand was over my mouth, stifling my startled cry, and another rough hand up my dress. He shoved his fingers under my tights and panties.

  I told him about the doll lamp on my childhood dresser. About the doll’s yellow gauze dress, and how it had tinted his face yellow in the light. How he’d pulled out his false teeth and grinned at me. “I’m a witch,” he’d said, and scared me to silence. I stared into that yellow light as he pulled up my nightgown and pulled down my panties. He unzipped his pants. He pushed himself against me.

  I couldn’t tell him then what I didn’t yet know. That years after this day—eighteen years after he died—there’d come an afternoon when I sat in my gynecologist’s exam room and she said, “There’s scarring inside you.” I’d been told this before, but I’d always avoided it.

  This time I didn’t. “What could cause that?”

  The doctor didn’t answer. She looked at me.

  “I was abused as a child,” I said. I tried to keep my voice level. “By my grandfather. Could it be from that?”

  She nodded.

  My face was already wet from tears. During the exam she’d taken a biopsy. When the scalpel scraped inside me it had burned sharply and I’d begun to shake. I’d had no feelings—no fear or sadness or even consciousness of pain—just the shaking and a profound sense of absence, like the shaking was happening to someone who wasn’t me. Then the shaking rose up from inside me and came out in gulping, ragged sobs.

  I sobbed for a long time. The doctor rolled her little stool away from me, pulled the thin paper cover over my legs, and handed me a tissue.

  “Are you all right?” she’d asked.

  I nodded through my sobs. I tried to speak, but no words came out.

  What I wanted to say was this: I recognized the feeling. My body recognized the feeling of pain inside me. My memories had always ended with my grandfather rubbing himself against me, then the nothing of black. I’d always thought that where the memory ended the fact of the past did, too.

  But: the scarring. Is the scarring evidence of what happened after the pain, after t
he black? What happened after my memory ends? What fact does my body hold? I don’t know. I will never know.

  In my grandfather’s apartment, I made no demands. I laid out my memories calmly. I still wanted to be a lawyer someday. This was my first case.

  My grandfather listened. He didn’t turn away, he didn’t argue or dismiss me. He listened, his face impassive. Behind him, the priest droned.

  When I was finished, it was his turn.

  “What do you want?” The words had built up force inside him while he waited. Maybe through all the years. Now he spat them at me. “I know I did. But what do you want?”

  A part of me may always be eighteen, standing in that room with him. The old-man, wet rot of his breath and the stench of urine, the face I loved and the face I feared. That question.

  And the way he seized on this answer.

  “Do you want me to kill myself?” he said. “I’ll do it, if you want me to. I’ll kill myself.” He was taunting me now. He’d seen the fear on my face. “Is that what you want? I’m an old man. I’ll be dead soon. But I’ll do it if you want me to. I’ll kill myself.”

  Then he added, “Besides, what happened to you is not such a big thing. When I was a child, it happened to me.”

  Thirty-One

  I am running out of time in Louisiana, spending my hours in the cave of the file room and driving across the same flat vistas Ricky crossed, back and forth between Iowa and Lake Charles. Past the high school, past the Friendly Home Center, where Ricky worked briefly as a teenager, past the banks of the Calcasieu River, where he once dreamt of a life that would belong to him. Everywhere I look, I see traces of the people in the files. Alcide with his cap curled in his fist, standing on a dirt road in Hecker, his girls at his feet. Bessie adjusting the crutch that bit into her armpit, then bending to make the children’s beds before they came home from school. And now Bessie and Alcide under concrete, in the ground. The heat has strangled the fields and driven everyone indoors. The land has the feel of a ghost town, a place a story passed over and blew through.

  But I still have not found the house where Jeremy died. A simple, almost maddening problem: The addresses in the records contradict themselves. The police reports list the address as Route 1, Box 204. That’s what Ricky gave the police, but no one referred to it that way; they called it Watson Road. “But it don’t really got a name,” said Ricky, and the police had so much trouble finding it. Sometimes the landlord is referred to as Watson, sometimes Ardoin, but the man named Ardoin quoted in the newspaper didn’t mention being the landlord. The paper never gives the Route 1 address; instead it sometimes says the house was on Ardoin Road. That’s definitely a mistake; Ardoin Road is much larger. Sometimes the paper says Ardoin Lane. But Ardoin Lane curves the wrong way. I’ve asked at the post office, the town hall, the fire department, the genealogical society, and the police station. No one knows.

  It’s maddening that there wouldn’t simply be a map that shows the old route numbers—and there may be out there somewhere still, but if so the parish press office couldn’t help me with it and the maps office swore there wasn’t and I never found it—but over time it starts to feel appropriate, somehow, that I can’t find the house. The feeling is like chasing a memory that slips from your mind just as soon as you start to grasp it. Sure, it’s dangerous to read metaphor into life; sure, it smacks of a desire to read meaning into cold fact, but doesn’t all of this? All the facts in this case slip away from me the minute I try to grasp them. In the files Ricky is sometimes referred to as blond, yet I have sat across from him—we are not there yet—and can assure you that his hair is dark brown. Lorilei once wrote a frustrated letter to the American Press newspaper complaining that the DA had constantly said that Jeremy had blond hair and blue eyes, when his eyes were brown. Alcide wanted Bessie to have an abortion when the doctors said the baby would be so damaged, but Bessie, sick with grief, wouldn’t do it. Or Bessie wanted the abortion, and Alcide was cruel and wouldn’t let her. Alcide was a loving father, or he beat them. Lyle was a loving replacement for a father, the one Ricky was truly close to, or he once beat Ricky so hard that Judy had to pull a gun on him to make him stop. My sister Nicola decides to think of herself as someone who was never abused, when I remember the shadow my grandfather made as he leaned over her bed, the rustle of the bedclothes under his hands. I have a scar inside me but I can’t remember its cause. Ricky molested Jeremy before killing him; Ricky didn’t molest Jeremy but killed him; Ricky killed Jeremy and then molested him afterwards; Ricky killed Jeremy in an effort not to molest him.

  Three trials and even that would never be nailed down into fact. It seems right that a house would move, shift, vanish.

  * * *

  After Lorilei visits Ricky in jail, he stops saying he wants to die. He doesn’t seem to dream of release—I have many notes written in his hand, but after Georgia, he never again mentions release—and seems to accept living at the jail. His status has changed. He was on death row. Everyone knows Angola, knows he did hard time in that place of legend. Now he has opinions about how the parish jail ought to be run. The man in charge of the correctional center is Colonel Bruce LaFargue. In July of 2002, LaFargue is walking by Ricky’s cell when Ricky calls out to him and asks if the two of them can talk. LaFargue leads him into a private room. There, Ricky complains that he feels like with this new trial, he’s being used as a guinea pig by his lawyers. They want to set new precedent with his case, he says. But he doesn’t want to be released. He says he molested Jeremy and fears that if he gets out he’ll molest other children again. This is what Georgia has given him: an understanding of who he is that he can trade like a bargaining chip. He says that in Georgia he was able to get therapy for being a pedophile and it made him think about how to help other pedophiles, how to stop people from offending. That’s what he cares about now, but no one will listen to him on it. He believes that if he could just share that knowledge, he’d have something good to offer the world.

  “Uh-huh,” LaFargue says. Nothing happens.

  In October, Ricky tells another jailer that he wants to talk to LaFargue again. The man brings him to LaFargue’s office. There Ricky tells LaFargue that after Angola he has ideas for how the prison could be run better. He wants better toilet paper. He wants more time to smoke. And one more thing, he tells LaFargue. He still thinks he could help people understand pedophiles.

  “Talk to your attorney about that idea,” LaFargue replies.

  Ricky writes to his parents. “I want to share with you what has made me so happy, no, so proud. Do you remember, Mom, that in one of my letters to you I said that something good will come out of this?” If you believe that the slant of his writing on the page conveys a kind of emotion, conveys a kind of truth, you can trace a line back to his Georgia prison days for this. If you believe him. If you think he understands and that he truly wants to help.

  * * *

  Clive and Ricky decide to hold what Clive calls a “seminar” for the officers at the jail, at which Ricky will explain the mind of a pedophile. Ricky seems to believe that the seminar is his own idea, but meanwhile Clive has been putting it in place. He has his own reasons: At the last trial, the jury sentenced Ricky to death in only three hours. Clive has to find another way to tell this story. The prosecutors won’t be invited to the seminar—Clive doesn’t even let them know that it’s happening. LaFargue has agreed, Clive will say later, that nothing Ricky says is to be used against him and there would be no recordings of the day. LaFargue will say that, no, what they agreed upon was that Ricky wouldn’t talk specifically about the murder. An agreement Ricky quickly broke. That nothing Ricky said would be used against him? LaFargue says he agreed to no such thing.

  And it’s hard to know how seriously Clive intends the secrecy. He’ll tell everyone he invites that they are not to take notes, that none of the information given is to leave the room. But two of the people in the room are reporters. More likely he wants to control how the story’s presented
and make sure it’s Ricky’s version that gets the ink. The prosecutors will be spitting mad when they find out. They’ll depose everyone who was there and call the whole thing illegal and improper. But they won’t be able to undo it. Like a line that a lawyer says in court knowing it’s improper, knowing that the judge will say to strike it from the record, but knowing, too, that what the jurors have heard will lodge in their minds, harder to expunge from their memory, Clive will have what he needs: a test.

  On December 17, 2002, at about three in the afternoon, Ricky is led through the tile-sterile corridors of the Calcasieu Correctional Center with his wrists cuffed, dressed in an orange jumpsuit and having once again neatened his hair down with water. Likely he’s excited. Likely he hasn’t been able to sit still all day, or eat his lunch or even one of the ramen packets he squirrels away in his cell from the commissary shop. He’s fresh-shaven, though, with a razor he bought there, his skin rubbed raw in his excitement. Now his wiry body springs up with every step, the nervous energy and twitch that shows up on confession videos here directed toward propelling him forward down the halls, forward to what he’ll do, the chance he’s waited for so hard he quivers with it. To tell his story. The officers lead him into a small room where Clive’s waiting, and the two of them rehearse again. Is this where Clive reminds him that under the agreement he’s not to talk about the murder? Or is this where he says, never mind, talk about it?

  Outside the courtroom stand officers from the Sex Offender Tracking Unit, detectives from the sheriff’s department, and other law enforcement personnel, about two dozen people total. The hallway is abuzz with walkie-talkies, chatter, the smell of weak coffee emanating from soggy cardboard cups, the muzzled energy of holstered weapons. One of LaFargue’s assistants gestures everyone in. The judge’s bench is empty, an American flag hanging wanly beside it. After people are seated, Clive leads Ricky to the small table at the front at which the defendant usually sits with attorneys. Now the chairs are on the opposite side, so Ricky and Clive can face the audience. Clive introduces himself, then goes around the room, having everyone give their names and their roles. Then he says, “This is Ricky Langley. Ricky is the reason we’re here today. He’s going to tell you his story.”

 

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