Lovesick (28 page)

So to the director and the scriptwriter, if you want to show how it was, write it like this: Lon would show up at my back door like I said, ask if I had anything to drink—he knew, of course, that I kept beer in the fridge for him—then after knocking back a couple he would ask to use the toilet. Generally, he would leave the door open, and when he was finished peeing, I knew he was ready for me to make my move.

“Looks like you could use some help there,” or “Why don't you let me take care of that for you.” And so we fell into a rhythm, a pattern—like a real couple. When I got more comfortable, I would push the boundaries: “It's pretty hot—you're welcome to take a shower if you want. I think I might have a pair of jeans and a shirt that would fit you”—since
I ordered them especially for you
. Slowly, slowly, slowly our courtship progressed from me blowing him in the bathroom with his jeans and boxers down around his ankles. Soon, he would arrive, drink his beer (after helping himself), take a shower (without asking), and leave his dirty clothes for me to launder. While he would shower, I would make him a sandwich (bologna and olive loaf with mayonnaise were his favorites) or heat up something I had made for dinner the night before (meatloaf, pot roast, chicken—no casseroles) because I knew he would be hungry later. After covering his plate of food and leaving it on the table in the kitchen, I would stand outside the bathroom—waiting, watching. Soon, he would step out of the shower, naked, glistening like a seal pup, dry off, and comb his hair. Sometimes, he would shave. I will confide that he loved my toiletry products—the lotions, colognes, the hair tonics. He would liberally douse himself with whatever; slick back his blue-black hair so that it shined like wet ink. He would pat the remaining wetness from his chest or along his shoulders and saunter nonchalantly past me into my bedroom where he knew his fresh clothes would be laid out for him. That was my cue. I would find him reclined on the bed, waiting. And I would kneel between his legs, the soft heaviness of his balls beckoning me to the tower of his manhood. And so you do not have to wonder, I will answer the question for you. No, I never once undressed, never once touched myself, never once asked Lonnie to touch me or hold me or regard me in any way beyond what he did. And I would pleasure him, and he would give himself to me, and in those soft, quiet moments, even though there was no golden sunset, or claret-filled goblet, or romantic conversation, it was perfection. It was life like it is in the movies.

2

You have undoubtedly formed opinions about me. Certainly enough has been written. And
Nancy Grace,
good Lord, she has featured stories about us almost every night. You must have seen her—how she gets positively googly-eyed when she recounts some of the more sordid rumors: “We hear from the owner of the Peach Bottom Motel, a Mr. Rex Galloway, that Flowers and Vale never left the room after they bought a chicken bucket from a local drive-through, so are we to
assume
that they
slept
in the
actual room
with the
body
of the
murdered boy
—Sammy Hutchens?” True, Nancy, we did not leave the room. Lonnie invited Sammy back to the motel with the promise of money, drugs, sex, and a bucket of fried chicken. Then Lonnie fucked him, broke his neck, and ate the chicken while watching reruns of
Cops.
And yes, we slept in the room with the body of the murdered boy. Get someone to tell you about the smell sometime. It isn't something you forget easily. Now, thanks to the free publicity, Mr. Galloway and his wife are giving tours at the motel—the “Death Room,” as they call it, has been cordoned off with red velvet ropes borrowed from the local mini-plex. A real trailer-trash version of an estate tour if you ask me.

But I am hoping you, dear friend, will keep an open mind. And though this is not an apology, I never did intend for things to turn out like they did, had no inkling that the night in the motel was going to end up like it did. I could only see as far as what Lonnie was asking me to do. Believe that or not—it's the truth. Good purpose can have the same horrific results as bad. I loved Lonnie. Wanted only to please him. And if we can never know the impact, then should we not be judged solely on our intent? If a blind man, reaching for the light switch, breaks a vase, then is it really his fault? But, you say, why would he need to turn the lights on anyway? So, let me give you an example a little closer to home.

There was a woman who worked for my mother and me after Mother had her first stroke—a woman very near my mother's age, but of lesser circumstance. Her name was Lois Bell. She came three days a week and did the chores that I did not have time (or the inclination) for. She vacuumed and dusted, polished silver, washed and ironed. If nothing else, Mrs. Bell was worth every cent we paid her just to iron. She could put a pleat in a trouser leg or a point on a collar like nobody's business. If truth be told, she wasn't really very good at much else. She was also addicted to the soap operas on CBS—
As the World Turns, Guiding Light,
in particular. She had watched them all her life, she said. For her, it was like spending time with friends, and she could recount in great detail the minute miseries of each of the characters. “Now that one, Abigail, is a sweet girl, really, though, she has had her share of trouble. She was one of them Amish people and was hard of hearing, so she left so she could have an operation and be normal, but then Roy attacked her and put her in a coma. When she came to, she shot him dead, and even though she didn't go to jail, I think she still suffers from the incident. Why she ever got involved with that Roy, I just don't know. He was bad business from the get-go.”

The other, newer shows like
The Young and the Restless
and
The Bold and the Beautiful
were too brass, too brazen for her—which I interpreted as too sexy—and she would have nothing to do with them or the afternoon talk shows where people sang their perversions and woes to the world. I wonder what Mrs. Bell would have thought about Nancy Grace's commentary on me. I can see her standing at the ironing board, pressing down on a freshly starched pleat. “Nancy, you have to believe me when I tell you he was a nice boy, really. Devoted to his mamma, and could put flowers together like nobody's business. About all the other, I wouldn't know.” She liked to watch her shows while she ironed. She also liked to chew ice and kept a small bowl on the end of the ironing board, cracking ice cube after ice cube with her back teeth, sucking the cold, melted slush down with a slurp. It drove Mother crazy.

But there was one problem. Mrs. Bell didn't drive. Which meant that someone always had to fetch or deliver her from where she was coming to where she needed to go. So two years after the stroke, when Mother finally admitted that she would not be driving again, she thought it would be a kind gesture to offer the Rambler to Mrs. Bell. So we did. Mother even paid for Mrs. Bell to go to driving school. Mrs. Bell was overjoyed. A car meant she wouldn't have to depend on her daughter for rides. And she could go to church on Wednesday evenings without having to wonder if she would have to take the bus home after at night. Then on Christmas Eve, as Mrs. Bell was on her way to church for the Nativity Play and song service, she hit a strip of black ice out on Highway 905. Went sideways smack into a telephone pole and was killed instantly. Mother was distraught, said that if she had not provided her with the means, then Mrs. Bell might not have been killed. I only thought that it was oddly appropriate that Mrs. Bell had been killed by ice, and it was not until later that I understood what Mother had felt.

You see, I killed my own son.

Now before you run off and call Nancy Grace and start hollering, “He's got another one,” Byung Hun Lee was not really my child. You should know by now that I could never, would never do such a thing. I adopted him from the back of a magazine.

It was Mother's
Better Homes and Gardens,
to be specific. You know the type of thing—one of those ads sponsored by a relief agency to foster a child. The picture of the smudged toddler with a shy, raggedy smile and innocent, imploring eyes.
For less than twenty dollars a month you could make a difference in this child's life.
The child in the ad was not my child, of course. But I did clip out the coupon, write a check, and mail it in. In a few short weeks I received a very official-looking packet decorated with the authorized seal of the charity containing all the information on the child who was depending on me to make a difference: Byung Hun Lee, an eight-year-old South Korean with much the same expression as the child in the magazine. I wondered if someone had pinched them just prior to the photo being snapped. I had heard of such things happening. A letter explained to me that Byung lived with his mother on the outskirts of Daegu in the central part of the country. They had exceptionally limited resources. My money would allow him to go to school instead of working with her full-time in a tailor's shop. While he would still help out on Saturdays and after school, my support would provide books, a school uniform, and a hot meal every day. They also informed me that Byung himself would write to me once a month. I was ecstatic.

Because the letters had to be translated from Korean, it took several months to receive the first one. It read:

I figured they must have had an older student in the school learning English translate the letters as an exercise. It would appear even charity isn't beyond exploitation. Included with the translation was the actual letter from Byung—a nearly transparent piece of light blue paper, the tiny foreign symbols scratched in his tentative child's script. A treasure. I commandeered one of Mother's old stationary boxes and stored his letter—a record of what I imagined would be a long and rewarding relationship. And for a time, it was. Each month I received a letter:
Dear kind sir, most generous benefactor . . .
Byung was doing well in school. He hoped one day that he might open a shop like his uncle who lived far away in Pusan. He enjoyed playing tops with his friends. He could also run very fast. But was sure not to play tag when he was wearing his uniform.

And then one day—almost a year from when I first clipped the coupon in
Better Homes and Gardens
—I received another official letter from the agency: Byung was dead, they told me. Drowned while on a trip to visit relatives. So sad, so sorry, would I like to replace him with another deserving child? I wrote back that a child was not a light bulb or a defective radio part and they could go and fuck themselves. I did not want a replacement.

But someone forgot to inform the translator. After all, he probably still needed the practice, and who had time to sort out a letter from a dead boy? And because of the time delay, Byung's letters continued to reach me for three months after the news of his death—strange, sad songs from my ghost child.

In the last letter, Byung wrote of his plans when school would be out for the term.

Guilt overwhelmed me. If it had not been for me, he would have been working in the tailor's shop, unable to afford the luxury of a vacation. What had I done? What was my part in the death of this small boy who only depended on me for a hot meal and tuition?

After that, I began to dream of Byung. The dream was always the same. I would run through the rail station looking for his train, but inevitably I was unable to find it—my feet would become heavy, my legs turned to jelly, the rail platform would move away from me in a mist. But always, always in the instant just before I awoke I was able to see Byung sitting in the railroad car, his shining face framed in the window. And when I would awake from the dream, I could still see him—so absolutely alive—so impossibly dead. What would have happened if I had ever caught the train? Would I pull Byung from the moving train? Would I tell Sammy not to come back to the motel? Would I beg him to take the money that Lonnie had offered him and run far, far away? Or would I only inform him how sorry I was that things had turned out so badly?

And even more troubling perhaps, I wondered if, as the train began to heave from the station that day, did the slow, soft pull of the engine's wheels call to Byung like the dark depths of the ocean? Did he know? Did he blame me?

Or was he clueless as a cow—like the murdered boy Sammy Hutchens, he was doomed—Sammy, who thanked Lonnie for buying extra-crispy chicken because it was his favorite, who was reaching for the chicken, his back to Lonnie, so that I could see Lonnie standing behind him. And then the moment. Lonnie's massive hands gripping Sammy's head in that relentless grasp. Lonnie commanding me not to look away. “You need to appreciate this,” he growled. I could see the confusion that turned to fear and then to hatred and finally to understanding as Lonnie held Sammy's head in his hands, lifting it up and away from Sammy's shoulders, twisting it around back and forth, front to back so the bones in Sammy's neck began to creak, and the gurgle in Sammy's throat became a sad, high-pitched whine. Until the bones, unable to stand the strain, began to splinter and the only sound was a low, guttural sigh that was Sammy's final breath. “Now you know,” Lonnie said. “Now you know, and you'll believe what I tell you.”

Dear Byung, my dead son, did you recognize death when it came for you? Were you afraid? Did you understand what it meant to die? And did you blame me for it? Or, as the wheels slipped from the platform toward the inescapability of the ocean, did you simply close your eyes, and whisper, “Thank you, kind sir. Generous friend. Benevolent benefactor. Father.”