Diary of a Misfit, page 18
Jennifer meant Roy, I realized. Roy didn’t want anyone to change his diaper.
I’d tried to steer all my interviews away from the subject of Roy’s body. Even in 2011, I knew that most transgender people didn’t want to talk about their bodies, and it felt wrong to discuss Roy’s physique without his permission. I wanted to talk about the kidnapping. I wanted to learn what Roy had been like, how he’d suffered and endured. But everyone I interviewed talked about Roy’s body at some point. They speculated. They swore they’d seen things. Jennifer didn’t do either, exactly, but what she didn’t say implied as much as what other people had.
We were silent for maybe half a minute, the longest we’d been quiet since we arrived, then Jennifer pitched toward me again.
“Right after Roy died, within like a week, these three people came up from Baton Rouge, two women and one man, claiming to be his family. As far as we knew, Roy didn’t have a family.”
Jennifer said the strangers looked like they were in their forties, and they showed up wearing suits. They were businesspeople, Jennifer thought, or at least people trying to look like businesspeople, but they couldn’t produce any proof that they’d been related to Roy. The nursing home administrator told the strangers that he could accept a family Bible, anything with Roy’s name written in the lineage, as proof, but the businesspeople didn’t have anything like that.
“How they knew Roy was there, that was the strange part, really,” Jennifer said.
The businesspeople came to the nursing home asking for a deed to Roy’s house, the house he rented. They wanted everything inside, anything personal Roy owned.
“They wanted what you’re wanting,” Jennifer said, a little too knowing for my comfort.
I squirmed on the carpet. Was I really as bad as the fake businesspeople from Baton Rouge? I did want to read Roy’s journals, but I wasn’t willing to pretend to be his family member to get them. My intentions were good, I thought. I wanted to know Roy. I wanted to understand what his life had been like, and I wanted to find his poems so people could read them.
Jennifer kept talking, unprompted. “There was a woman in Delhi, Miss King? Is there a Miss King?”
My ears went hot. I shook my head yes. There was a Miss King who knew Roy. I told Jennifer about the long, obsequious note I’d sent two years earlier, asking Cheryl and Mark King to talk to me about Roy.
“Cheryl wrote back only one sentence,” I told Jennifer. “She told me to stay away from Roy’s story.”
Jennifer’s eyes narrowed.
“That’s big red flags to me,” she said. “It really sounds like there’s something they don’t want somebody to know.”
Jennifer said Cheryl King, or at least the woman Jennifer believed to be Cheryl King, came up to the nursing home right after the businesspeople did. She told the nursing home not to let anyone have anything of Roy’s. Jennifer remembered Cheryl shouting, “Roy has no family. Roy has nobody.” The whole outburst seemed suspicious, Jennifer said. Cheryl and Mark had put Roy in the nursing home, but they’d never returned to visit him. Why did they care if people from Baton Rouge wanted the little things Roy left behind?
“The Kings might have something to hide, you hear me?” Jennifer said. “I have a bad feeling about them. There’s evil things that happen in small towns like that. I’ve always heard Delhi was the gateway to Hell. Between Tallulah, St. Joe, and Delhi, they say it makes a pentagram from an aerial view. No shit, that’s voodoo stuff, if you believe in it.”
She sat back, eyebrows raised and arms folded over her chest. I could already imagine how good she’d sound in the documentary. She was just the tension the story needed. All I had to do was find proof to bolster her claims.
“I bet the Kings took Roy’s money,” she continued.
I told her I didn’t think that was possible. The Kings lived in a single-wide trailer. It looked well maintained, but it wasn’t fancy. And anyway, how much money could Roy have left behind to steal? Jennifer had said herself he had no taxable income, and I doubted people in Delhi were paying top dollar for a mowed lawn. Maybe, I suggested, the Kings were just trying to protect Roy.
“Protect him from what?”
“Maybe they think people are out to make fun of him, I don’t know. Maybe they thought I was like the businesspeople from Baton Rouge, out to get all of Roy’s stuff.”
Jennifer exhaled hard, as if she were exasperated with how stupid I sounded. She looked me in the eyes, straight on.
“You’ve obviously connected spiritually with this person. You’ve came all the way across the country. You think anybody else has ever done that for him? You’re going out of your way, spending money on this person, trying to figure out just a little bit of what his life was like. You think anybody else did that? For Roy? No.”
She leaned back, smiled big, and told me she thought I was cool. It moved me more than I wanted to admit. I’d been telling people for the past few years that I was spending all my vacation time traveling to rural Louisiana just because Roy’s life was interesting, but Jennifer was the first person to speak a truth I hadn’t yet acknowledged to myself. I did feel connected to Roy. It wasn’t just that he felt like some kind of queer ancestor. His life felt to me like a cautionary tale. As much as I told myself that I liked living in my Portland apartment alone and away from all my relatives, I did worry I’d end up alone and misplaced. I kept digging into Roy’s life hoping some stray fact might reveal something to me. I wasn’t sure what I hoped might be revealed, but I knew I didn’t want to die feeling as if I’d never fit anywhere. I’d tried to hide that connection in Delhi because I feared if people knew, they’d judge me or pray their own versions of the “save her and take her” plea my pastor had once invoked. But Jennifer didn’t look ready to condemn me. She was staring at me with what I had to admit was admiration. I smiled a kind of bashful grin. I felt so exposed. How could this cousin I never talked to know me so well? I haven’t seen Jennifer since that evening, but a few times a year, I plug in my hard drive and watch the video of our interview, and I remember that she wanted to accept me. She wanted to be a part of my strange project, and what’s more, she wanted to affirm that what I was doing was good and right. Occasionally, I think about writing to her. We’re Facebook friends now, and occasionally she sends me a meme with an uplifting message, and I click the heart emoji, then I turn my computer off. Thank you, I imagine myself typing. Thank you for seeing me. I never write, though. It’s not that I’m scared of anything in particular; I just don’t know how to be close to my family. What would Jennifer and I talk about if I reached out to her? Roy? How long could we talk about him? Would I ever get to the point where I wanted to tell her about my life? It was obvious to me that day in her apartment that she would not reject me, but still, I hover over her name on Facebook, and I never click send.
“You’re not trying to get nothing at all,” Jennifer said. “You’re just trying to tell a story of somebody that you’re relating to.”
“Yeah,” I said. I think I felt encouraged. I was still squaring with my own unresolved guilt, still wondering if I was prying into someone’s life when I shouldn’t have been, and Jennifer’s comments assuaged that nagging fear.
“We’re going to go knock on the Kings’ door,” I said.
“Do it. Be persistent.”
Jennifer said she would call one of her old nursing home coworkers for us to see if she could get what she called Roy’s “social chart.”
“The record that you want is right behind the nursing home in the file house. If my friend won’t bring it to me, I’ll go over there and break into it for you. I’m dead serious.”
Aaron looked from behind the video camera, alarmed. He told Jennifer we didn’t want any trouble. Jennifer laughed.
“In Delhi? I wouldn’t get in trouble in Delhi, please. Bond’s twelve dollars. I promise you, there’s no security alarms. There’s nothing. This is just a house that the nursing home rented. But they destroy stuff every ten years. And what year did Roy die?”
“2006,” I said. She counted the years on her fingers, then she looked me stern in the eye.
“Okay,” she said. “You got five years left.”
* * *
—
THE NEXT MORNING, I lingered around the cabin, drinking coffee and watching white birds swoop across the lake. By the time Aubree, Aaron, and I ventured outside, it was noon, and the car door handle burned so hot I jumped when I grabbed it. I drove around town, trying to work up the nerve to visit the Kings. Downtown Delhi was clear of cars, so there was nothing to see but old houses and trailers whose aluminum siding peeled away in rusty sheets. A pack of stray dogs trotted down the middle of Main Street, and I wondered if the town had looked that desolate when my mom lived there.
I drove past the Kings’ trailer once, then I circled back and parked on the other side of the street. A man was mowing the lawn, and I figured he must be Mark. I ran my hands over the steering wheel, and I took three deep breaths. I knew I couldn’t stall any longer. We got out of the car, and whatever stinging fear I’d felt walking into Roy’s church seemed benign now. I don’t know what I thought Mark might do to me, but my legs shook as I watched him. Aaron started taping as soon as I closed the car door, so I know I waited three and a half minutes before I ventured into the Kings’ yard. The lawn mower was loud. I waved at Mark.
“Hi,” I called.
He shut the engine off.
“Hello,” he said.
His voice was friendly and contained not even a hint of suspicion. He took a few steps forward, so I did, too. He was wearing a red T-shirt and a red baseball cap and the kind of wire-frame aviator glasses people in Portland wore ironically.
“I’m Casey,” I said, trying my best to sound nonthreatening. “My grandma grew up on this street, and we were making a tribute video of Roy who used to live here. Miss Mary Rundell said you might have known Roy.”
He took off a pair of garden gloves, then used them to wipe the sweat off his forehead. All the hair showing from underneath his baseball cap was white. He was tall and slim, save for a small, rounded potbelly, and he stood straight up without any kind of bend in his back. He held his right hand out to me.
“Mark,” he said. “I know Roy. Knew Roy.”
A low-riding car eased by, blasting the kind of keyboard-heavy rap music popular in Louisiana then. I asked Mark if he’d be willing to tell us anything about Roy, and he balled the garden gloves together and clenched them in his hands. He shook his head no.
“Royce was a real private person. I didn’t really know a whole lot about her, except she told me she was an orphan. She was left on the steps of the orphanage at Little Rock, Arkansas. Her mother just left her there as an infant, and she stayed there for a while. I don’t think she ever told me how long. When I first moved here, I didn’t really see a lot of Roy because she was so busy. Roy mowed yards. At one time, she had about twenty-five yards. And she also worked at the washateria over here on this side of town for the Duckworth family. She would get up real early in the morning and go open up the washateria. A lot of times she’d stay there all day, just helping people, just watching everything to see if there was any problems with the machines.”
Mark talked for a while without stopping, and the shake in my legs subsided. I didn’t understand why he sometimes used the name “Roy” and sometimes called him “Royce,” but Mark seemed to be the kind of Southerner who just kept talking, even though he’d said he didn’t want to talk. Maybe, I thought, he’d let us see the journals after all.
“Of course, you know, she dressed like a man,” Mark said. “Of course, she worked like a man, mowing all those yards and everything. She didn’t really want people to know she was a woman because she felt like she’d be safer if they didn’t know. I taught school over here, and the kids were always asking me, ‘Who is that person who lives over next to you? Is that a man or a woman?’ I’d say, ‘It’s a man.’ ”
Mark walked away from his lawn mower and waved us to the other side of his trailer. He said he wanted to show us the plot where Roy’s house had sat.
“When I moved here, Roy had a lot of people who came to visit her. She was a very religious person, played a lot of religious tapes and stuff. We’d talk religion every once in a while, but I’m not real big on that myself, you know?”
Mark motioned around the yard as he talked, as if he were showing us exactly where those conversations had taken place. A ring of trees circled the empty plot that used to be Roy’s. I peered up at the high-arcing branches, attempting to figure out which species Roy must have seen each day. I’d been trying for months to learn the names of trees because I’d gotten in my head that I’d never be a good narrative journalist if I couldn’t describe the natural world. I’d checked out books from the library, intending to memorize every branch and shade of bark, but those guides didn’t seem useful now. None of Roy’s feathery leaves looked familiar. The wind blew through them, and I turned back to Mark.
“Did Roy still play music by the time you moved here?”
Mark shook his head in a way that suggested the answer was complicated.
“Royce played a little bit of music when I moved here, but most of that was over by that time. Roy told me she’d written music, though. And she told me that one of her songs was bought, I think, for three hundred dollars, by a group called the Whites.”
Mark told us he thought the Whites were a country gospel group, but he wasn’t sure. He said he’d collected more than four thousand records from all different genres, but he didn’t own any by the band that supposedly sang one of Roy’s songs. Mark pointed at his single-wide trailer, then he laughed and said he kept most of the records inside.
“Too many,” he said. “My wife says, ‘I’m going to throw you out, but the records might have to go first.’ ”
Mark looked around the yard, and I looked, too, hoping to buy myself some time to figure out a different way to ask about the notebooks. Mark seemed like a nice guy, open and affable, not at all the scary monster I’d imagined, but I worried he’d turn cold if I pushed him.
“When we moved here,” he said, “some lady was taking care of Roy’s affairs. But later on, the lady stopped for some reason, and I took it over. I kept the books for Roy. Every time I’d do it, I’d take it over and I’d show it to Roy, and she’d say, ‘Well, nobody discussed it like this with me before,’ and I’d say, ‘Yeah, but I want you to see every penny.’ I’d sit down and go line by line, and I’d show her everything. And God as my witness, I never took anything from Royce. As a matter of fact, I spent money on Royce. One time, right after this other lady stopped managing her affairs, Royce got in bad financial shape. She couldn’t even pay her bills.”
I was having trouble following Mark’s stories. What were all of Roy’s affairs? Which lady had been managing them, and why did she stop?
“Roy couldn’t pay?” I asked.
“No. Me and my wife took about four hundred dollars, and we took care of her. Paid all her bills, got her back in shape, but that’s when I told Royce, ‘I got to handle your affairs.’ ”
Mark talked without pausing again, and he said Roy got a monthly Social Security check from the government. Mark wasn’t sure why, but he thought the check had something to do with the fact that Roy stopped going to school after the third grade.
“She used to tell me, ‘I’m retarded,’ ” Mark said. “And I told her, ‘No, I’m a special education teacher, and you are just a little undereducated. You are far from retarded.’ ”
I winced. I hadn’t heard anyone use that word in years. Mark told me he knew Roy wasn’t what he called “retarded” because Roy knew how to write in cursive. I’d never heard of anyone using that as a measure of anything, but Mark repeated himself a few times. Roy couldn’t be “retarded” because Roy wrote letters in cursive. Roy signed checks in cursive.
“And she kept a diary in cursive,” Mark said.
Aubree shot me a look. I knew I should ask about the diaries, but my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth, and Mark changed the subject.
“Now,” Mark said. “Let me tell you what wrecked Royce, and what, till the day I die, I’m going to be agitated about. She had fourteen dogs in that house with her, and it was not sanitary, and she and I had arguments. I told Royce, ‘We got to move some of these dogs. You can keep two.’ ”
Mark said Roy pulled out a pocketknife in response.
“She started doing her fingernails, and she said, ‘No. That’s my family.’ ”
As he talked, Mark mimicked the pocketknife action. He pretended to be sharpening a blade across his own fingernails in a menacing way. So far, everyone I’d interviewed had described Roy as either a victim or an angel, and I liked this more complicated view. I liked imagining Roy standing up for himself, threatening Mark with a pocketknife, refusing to give up his pets. I asked Mark if Roy always had that many dogs.
“No,” he said flatly. “When I moved here, she had one dog, a little Chihuahua named Peanut. She had about eight cats, but they kind of went away, and that was good. Then, finally, she just had little Peanut, and I really was happy.”
Mark squeezed the garden gloves as if they were a stress ball, but otherwise, he didn’t seem nervous or annoyed or even curious as to why a group of strangers had stopped him midafternoon to ask about his dead neighbor. He just kept talking. He told me he often took meals to Roy, and once, he helped Roy paint his blue house white. He took care of Roy as long as he could.
“What happened was, one night, Royce had a little heart attack. She came over, and she was beating on the door. She said, ‘Help me. Help me.’ Honestly, I think Royce had kind of a real bad depression episode. So I had her put in the nursing home, y’all.”
