The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas (22 page)

Bob Templeton, young as he was, had long suffered from heart trouble, and his health updates filled Mark with gloom: “Say, Bob, I’m so sorry to here about you being so sick and if I could give you my heart and body parts—I’d do it today to save your life—I’d do it for anyone in the Templeton family.” In the fall of 2004, Stroman received word that Bob’s dad now had health troubles of his own—his kidneys. The compassionate Mark he’d written of seemed to surge forward at this news, inspired as well by the anxiety of awaiting an execution date that seemed never to come. He made Mr. Templeton an offer: “I swear this on all my children souls—if Id be able to and the state would allow it—I would give you my kidneys and take my execution ASAP. And I mean that and the offer stands—I’m not sure what the laws are—but I am more than willing to do this for you—if it’s possible—I am serious Pops—I love you that much and owe you more than that.”

W
EEK AFTER WEEK
, Stroman wondered if Tena, his ex-wife, would visit. He occasionally wrote her letters or sent pictures: “Tena,” he scribbled on a Polaroid once. “Happy Birthday … I wish I could spank ya.” Sometimes Tena wished that, too. Sometimes not.

By the time Mark launched his war, they’d been separated for many years, but the way Tena talked about him you’d think she was still his woman. “Man, I loved me some Mark Stroman,” she said many years later. “I loved me some Mark Stroman. I’d lay down in a mud puddle just to keep his Tony Lama boots from getting wet. I loved me some Mark Stroman.”

She was fourteen when it happened. She was living with her parents in Pleasant Grove, where Mark’s grandparents also lived. The first time she met him, he nearly ran her over with a riding mower just for fun. She was together at the time with a slightly built Mexican boy named Pablo. She was part Mexican herself, into the whole low-rider thing, and drawn to a boy whose Mexican blood came even more purely distilled than her own.

All she knew about Mark was that his grandparents lived at the end of their street and that they were people with “money and horses.” Their five-acre property was surrounded by quarter-acre plots like her own. Mark, who didn’t live with these grandparents all the time, “didn’t know nobody and nobody talked to him,” Tena said. The little rat—and she called him that with love—always wanted attention, though. Tena, Pablo, and Mark would sit together eating pizza and talking. “When that little boy I called myself going with would go home, Mark would start coming over, and we would talk,” Tena said. “I was fourteen, and we just talked and talked. He would let me brag on my clothes, he’d bring me over rings and jewelry, and paper dominos, and he made me feel really important—you know, pretty. He made me feel like I was the shit. I know that’s hard to understand being fifteen and me fourteen, and if you would have told me that I
would have had his three kids and his grandbaby in the end, I would have said you’re nuts.”

She had liked the Mexican, but now she fell for contrast. Mark was a rambunctious but silent redhead cowboy of what she figured to be good breeding; she was a simple girl from a working family. She felt herself falling for him. A few months after he almost ran her over with that mower, they got together. She would sneak over to the main road from her quiet, leafy street and into his grandparents’ house, and they would talk and talk, and do that thing, “and then, you know, I got pregnant with Amber.”

Mark responded in the way that boys of that age will: by professing to be too young for the effect of a cause for which he seemed altogether ready. Tena fired back, “Well, you weren’t too young to turn off the security code to let me in!” He disappeared for the duration of her pregnancy. She had Amber, by cesarean, on a Monday, and came home that Friday. Mark called that night, as Tena remembered it:

“I was fixing Amber a bottle, and I was walking through the kitchen, and the phone rang, and I said hello, and he said, ‘Tena?’ and I said, ‘Who’s this?’ and he said, ‘It’s me. I heard you had the baby, and blah blah blah,’ and I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘Is she pretty?’ I was trying to act tough, this bitch mode, and I said, ‘Yeah, she’s pretty—she’s mine.’ And he said, ‘Well, can I come and see her?’ ” Tena invited him to come over on the following Monday. Though it was only a moment’s walk from his grandparents’ place, the redheaded cowboy showed up two hours early.

The fleshy reality of that baby affected Mark. Two weeks after the birth, he came around to Tena’s house full of mission: “It was outside, and I was sitting on a swing, and he got down on his knees and asked me to marry him.” At first, she swatted him away like the housefly he was. “I told him he was just trying to get in my pants again: ‘I already found out who you were.’ ” Not for the last time, Mark would convince her that the bad him wasn’t the real him. They married less than four months later—on January 8, 1986.

By that time, Amber was no longer with Tena. Right after the birth, Tena’s mother had behaved as though unperturbed, even relaxed, about her fifteen-year-old daughter’s destiny. Tena remembers her saying, “Go out. You’re a kid. Do what you do. I’ll take care of the baby.” Tena accepted the deal and went out a few times. She returned one night to discover her mother gone. She had taken Amber with her, to a town a few hours’ drive away called Stephenville. Amber would spend the rest of her childhood there, away from Tena. Years later, Tena would explain it to Amber like this: “I was a kid. I was chasing your dad, and I couldn’t just jump in a car and go to Stephenville and get you.”

Tena’s idea of Mark was different from her own children’s, or from Tom Boston’s, or from that of the psychologists who had testified at his trial. Her struggles colored her vision of him—and could be clarifying or occlusive, depending on your own. She thought of him less as a man divided against himself, ricocheting between states of rage and levity, and more as a man whose good traits were also his bad ones.

Mark was sweet, Tena said; was homey; was a rebel; was a fighter: “He’d go through spurts. He’d be at home and then get a ‘wild pair,’ like my grandmother called it, and he’d wanna take off.” He wouldn’t have appealed to every woman, but he might have to a woman raised on honor-culture ideas of a man’s love as being fundamentally about protection, about the cultivation of a fearsome reputation that kept trouble at bay.

“He was that type that if he loved you, if he cared about you and loved you, then you didn’t want to mess with this” was how Tena put it. If her sister came home telling of a stolen purse or busted eye, Mark took care of that. If someone looked at Tena at the wrong angle, Mark took care of it. It became possible for Tena to think of his violence and love and sociability and life-lust as being cut from a single cloth: “He always said his two favorite things in life was fighting and F-ing—but not in that order. Everybody loved to be around
him. If the party was boring or whatever, as soon as he got there, it would lighten up. Everyone would start laughing, having a good time. People thought they were cool to be around him.”

When more children came along, Mark showed little interest in fatherhood. Tena, instead of condemning him, became a master of making excuses for him even more articulate than those he made for himself: “I think Mark loved as much as he knew how to love. Part of the reason that I don’t think he wanted to settle down and be a family man after we got married and stuff was because he didn’t know; he’d never seen it. You can’t be something that you don’t know about. I cook hamburgers and work at a hamburger joint. You couldn’t put me in an office and expect me to do any secretary work. If I don’t know nothing about it, I can’t do it, and Mark never had that. He never had a dad to learn to be a dad.”

There had always been harbingers of his fate. Tena saw much of it. Most of the time, it didn’t rise above the level of drinking and fighting. But there were instances when he just evaporated for days, and she knew he was up to something, and she’d find out all about it only when he returned. There was, obviously, the drug use. It started, as it so often does, with pot. Then it evolved, as it was starting to do in these parts, into meth. Mark had already done it but was angry when Tena told him she tried it. The drug blew her away: “Just gives you this euphoria, this energy, makes you think everything’s OK, makes you feel good about yourself, gives you lots of energy. And it’s like that for a while, until—I guess, after using it for a while, it becomes to where you have to have it.”

Meth conquered Tena more fully than it did Mark. “It’s not a good life,” she said. “It makes people live a hard life. A lot harder than their lives were supposed to be.” In Tena’s case, the meth stripped her of basic functionality and left her no better than a vagrant at times. Mark’s problem was always his resilience. No matter how much he did, how much he drank and smoked, he never became a helpless junkie. Everyone who knew him said they couldn’t remember him
without work, which in his milieu was a trait more commonly associated with rich people.

Tena’s pride over this latter attribute of Mark’s was still palpable: “Always worked. Always had money. Always had cigarettes. Always had beer.” (It was a defining line where they lived—who had ready stocks of such things, and who bought as they went.) “Always had nice apartments in Garland-Mesquite area. You know, he never lived in any slum. Or one time he had an apartment at Lake White Rock that had a fence around it—so it was, you know, a security gate. Always had nice apartments with nice furniture.”

These were the things that made Tena feel safe and valued, and that somehow distracted her from everything else—including the things, like stealing and living in other people’s property, that contradicted the nice things. Mark knew how to play a woman like this, knew how to be doting in the ways that would satisfy Tena. Like when he convinced the court, in the autumn of 1988, to delay the start date of his prison term so that he could see his baby Erica being born. That she wasn’t, purely speaking, his baby didn’t curb his desire to be there—nor cause him to treat the child any differently thereafter. The court delayed the term as long as it could, and then at last he turned himself in. Erica was born shortly after he surrendered.

Tena, in bearing another man’s baby, was violating the letter, but hardly the spirit, of their marriage. Mark was, as she tells it, a worse offender: “There was no problem with mine and Mark’s sex life. He just wasn’t always getting sex with me—that was the only problem.” She was from a world where women often accepted that the talents by which men won them were portable—that what worked on them would naturally work on others. “He charmed them women,” Tena said. “He could talk to them and make them feel like they were pretty.”

When he came out of prison the first time, after a matter of months inside, they were still together. But between then and returning for a second stint, Mark’s runaway “F-ing,” as Tena called it, which she had tolerated, graduated into that other thing that women like her
mortally fear, and the fear of which makes them tolerant of mere F-ing: love. He fell for a waitress named Shawna, whom he would eventually marry and have a daughter with. “It was out of nowhere,” Tena said. “I thought that we had worked on us, and I just had Erica and everything.” They drifted asunder. By the time he returned from prison the second time, his beloved grandfather had died—and Tena had finally gone.

All these years later, it wasn’t lost on Tena that—as far as she heard, at least—Mark Stroman proved a stabler father and husband to the next woman, despite all they’d gone through together. She heard that with Shawna he was regularly at home, that he changed diapers and made bottles—that he became, unhesitatingly, a dad. But Tena heard that eventually he also ran around on Shawna, and he didn’t stop with the drugs, and one day she just left. (“Karma’s a bitch,” as his daughter Amber said.) Tena and Mark spoke from time to time after that. She knew how broken up he was about the split, about Shawna’s not wanting her daughter to grow up around his lifestyle and friends and antics. “I think Mark thought that everything he cared about and loved left, whether he had anything to do with it or not,” Tena said. Betrayal was something Mark had struggled with since boyhood, and now it flared again: “He just put on that ‘screw-it’ mode—either I’ll hurt you first, or I get hurt. Life’s all about hurt or get hurt.”

Yes, Tena loved Mark Stroman. Yes, she would lie down in a puddle to keep his boots dry. But when she got that phone call from her sister, telling her that Mark Stroman had killed someone, it was as though she finally got it. So Mark waited year after year to be called to Visitation to see his Tena. His Tena never came.