The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas (38 page)

A
S THE CAMPAIGN
to save Stroman had unfolded, Rais sent word to the daughters of his attacker that they should let him know if ever he could help. It was a genuine offer, but it was also his manner of speaking. The Stroman girls had remembered.

Not long after the execution, Rais drove to meet Amber at a Starbucks in Arlington. She brought some friends along for support. Amber wanted to be honest with Rais: “I said, ‘I’ve been mad at you; I’ve been mad at the people my dad shot.’ Because in my head I’m thinking I don’t have the right to be mad at Dad.” She felt fear crawling all over her, but the man before her calmed her down: “I was scared and I said,
‘How can you sit across this table, buy us coffee—from Starbucks on top of that, and y’all know Starbucks isn’t cheap—buy us coffee, everybody, sit across the table and look me in my eye and tell me that you forgive me?’ He said, ‘Because I do.’ ”

Amber continued, “He was telling me about his religion—is it Muslim? And I asked him, ‘I know you had to be somewhat mad in the beginning.’ He said, ‘You know what, I was for a short amount of time,’ and he said, ‘Does being mad really solve anything? Not only am I a victim. I believe that you and your brother and sister are victims just as well.’ ” Amber had never thought of it like that, and it gave her relief. Ever since her father’s war, Amber’s rage had fired unpredictably in every which way. She was mad at her father for getting into this mess, but she also seethed at the dark-skinned Them he was after: “I found myself mad if they were from Pakistan, if they were from India. I don’t know if it was because I didn’t want my dad to think I was a traitor. I don’t know.”

They went afterward to a nearby Chipotle, and Amber again appreciated Rais’s generosity in paying.

A month or so later, Amber called Rais. “I asked her, ‘How are you doing? How’s everything going? Everything fine? Do you need anything? Any help?’ ” Rais said. He could sense her reticence: “She was not feeling easy to come out. I said, ‘Do you need anything? Is there anything I can do for you?’ But then she said that, yes, she needs some help, but she feels shy to ask for it. I said, ‘No, don’t feel shy.’ ”

Amber poured out her troubles, which involved (a) the grandmother of her daughter’s father taking the toddler away from her; and (b) the grandma’s insistence that Amber go to rehab in Fort Worth, which she had; and (c) Amber’s now lacking the money to go visit her daughter back in Stephenville. Rais shuddered to imagine what a solitary, uneducated woman must have to do in America to come by money: “I said, ‘No, women should not live a life like this, especially in this country. If it would be one of the poorest third-world countries, I understand; there is no other means. But a human
being in this country living a life like that—no. I was crying in my heart. I said, ‘What do you need? How much do you need?’ ”

Amber thought for a moment. How about $50?

Rais’s extensive effort to wire the money that night was more than simple kindness. It reflected the postexecution strategy that was slowly gelling in his mind. The immediate cause had been to save Stroman’s life; the larger cause, to use Stroman to deter others like him from shooting other Raises and Waqars and Vasudevs. Now an even broader mission was coming to Rais. He had observed in his years here that the American dream had stopped working for people like the Stromans in the way it had worked for him. He saw a dream threatened by a rot at its core, and he realized that for his project truly to succeed, he would need to help others live the dream as he had. “Once I came to this country, I did not take things for granted, though most of the people here, they take things for granted,” he said. “So I was thinking that in one part of the world, there are people with so much less, and this part of the world, people with so much. Still, why they don’t make the best use of their lives, of the resource they have? It’s not like back home, that there is nothing. There are a lot of opportunities here. But you just don’t see it.”

He wanted to challenge this habit of not-seeing, and the generation-to-generation transmission of selfish, isolated, anarchic lives. “The people I saw in this country need help,” Rais said.

This was, of course, far too much for one part-time activist to take on. So Rais figured he would begin with a test case—the Stromans. Could he prevent Amber, Erica, and Robert (whom Rais hadn’t met, because he was in a maximum security prison for aggravated robbery) from going down their father’s path? “I was thinking that let’s break the cycle here,” Rais said.

“Now if Amber doesn’t get any help, if the boy, once he comes out of jail, doesn’t get help, they’re continuing in the path that Mark Stroman and his predecessors laid for them—nothing but the SAD life, and not doing anything in their life,” Rais said, reprising his
acronymed critique of sex, alcohol, and drugs. “If Amber doesn’t get help, her daughter will follow the same lifestyle as her.”

Rais had come to a country that nearly took his life and then generously gave him the means of retrieval—a country that seemed to him ever to contain the cures to its own ailments. But it was a country whose own people seemed to Rais to have lost their life force, ceased to see their potential, ceased to value the connection to other lives, ceased to look into the future and see the truth that made people like Rais come here—the knowledge that here, more than anywhere, they could die differently from how they’d been born. Rais wanted to wake them up. It was part of his idea of service. He wanted to tell them that if he, then they: if a foreign-born, half-blind ex–gas station clerk could make it here, they could, too. He wanted them to know life’s preciousness without having to go through what he had to discover it.

“We immigrants, when we come to this country, we feel pressure to be successful, to do something good, because of our family teaching that we have to make our parents happy,” Rais said. “But here Amber never felt that she had to make her mother or father proud, right? So there is no urgency—there is no need—to do good. There is no pressure.”

To Rais, this was one of the differences between the poverty of Texas and the poverty back home. It was an argument that immigrants sometimes made toward their less fortunate new compatriots, without fully understanding their realities, and it was a doubly complicated stance for Rais: a devout Muslim telling the Americans to become more like some supposed previous version of themselves, which also happened to mean their becoming more like him. For now, though, Rais’s ambitions were modest. All he wanted was to help the Stroman children escape their trap.

For Amber, the arrival of that $50 was a shock. She couldn’t believe it, just couldn’t. Fifty dollars from the man her father tried to kill. She felt now that she’d been stupid, allowing her father’s
prejudice to become her own. Why did Rais deserve her wrath? She got the feeling that he would be there on the other end of a phone line if ever she needed him. And she knew that she just might someday.

Amber kept thinking of something Rais said to her on the day of their first meeting. It rang in her ears still. She couldn’t really understand it—couldn’t fathom the depth of the heart it came from. “You may have lost a father,” he said, “but you’ve gained an uncle.”

M
ARK STROMAN’S DYING
wish was that his children would not become him. But it wasn’t so easy.

Amber’s temporary address these days was in a forlorn section of Fort Worth, on a street lined with well-used trucks and overgrown lawns seemingly mowed once per foreclosure. She emerged from the house, a dead ringer for her father, albeit a rounder version, with chipping black nail polish on her hands and flip-flopping feet. Her face was quick to smile but could easily switch to nervous.

Amber was like her father in more than appearance: she, too, was a convicted criminal, having done time for burglary and forgery—committed, she said, in pursuit of meth. She had known her father only in glimpses. He had always been someone to conjure more than savor. His death some weeks earlier made that truer. Amber was haunted by his being gone, though gone was what he’d always been, one way or another. She was rearranging her memories the way one redecorates a room, trying to make him more understandable in death than he had been in life.

Amber was headed to Stephenville, seventy or so miles away, where her sister, Erica, was waiting for her. Joining Amber was Maria, a stout, heavily constructed, silent young woman who vaguely gave off an assassin’s air. The glare coming out of her eyes was omnidirectional, singling no one out. She was Amber’s girlfriend, reflecting a switch from men to women that had come to pass after the baby’s
birth. She stepped into the car and began staring silently out of the window, which she would continue to do for the next hour and a half.

“My dad was a very hateful man in the beginning,” Amber said, “I guess to where he was so hateful and miserable, he probably hated himself.” As she processed him now, she realized that losing a father was especially complicated when he hadn’t really been a father. She remembered his taking them to the biker bar he loved, the Texas Trap: “Back then, that was all we could get with him—we took it.” They would sit at the bar, drinking Cokes and eating peanuts, and he’d have his Budweiser, and for a time all seemed well. He took them to the state fair sometimes, and to Celebration Station once in a while, or brought them Christmas presents or fireworks in garbage bags. Then he would disappear again, either to a girlfriend or to his new wife and daughter, or to some other unknowable pastures. Amber gradually grew bitter about playing second or fourth or fourteenth fiddle in her father’s life, or whatever fiddle it was.

“I was more, I guess, a titty-baby,” she said. “Or I felt like I deserved his full attention. I guess because he never gave us his full attention.”

Stroman’s elusive presence had given even the smallest act of generosity the glow of heroism. Amber remembered the night, years ago, when her father had been kind enough to let her sleep in his bed, instead of his girlfriend of the moment. The girlfriend was there all the time; Amber was in Dallas only briefly; it was only fair. “He had his arm like this,” Amber said, sprawling hers out for the narration, “and I remember putting my head in his armpit. And, oh man, it was the awfullest, awfullest smell. To this day—that’s kind of gross, whatever, call it what you want—but I’ll remember that forever. I’ll remember that forever.”

Sometimes she asked herself if he ever loved them; sometimes she went a step further to wonder if he even knew what loving was. He certainly didn’t show it. But maybe it was she who had blocked him out. Maybe it was her blinders.

She knew, despite everything, that she was “his pick,” his favorite. “I’m the only one that looks identical to him,” she said; that had to count for something. It also made her proud that her daughter, Madyson Michelle, had Mark’s combustive red hair.

Amber was still grappling with her father’s transition from bare-bones presence to surefire absence. Now he would be a thing to define yourself by, and also define yourself against. She was still sorting out what would be the “by” part and what would be the “against.”

She didn’t know how she felt about him: “Let me tell you this: I love my dad.” Her tears broke through. “But for instance, when I talked to him the last time, I lied to him. I told him, ‘Dad, I don’t blame you for nothing. I’m not mad at you.’ And I was. But I didn’t want that to be the last thing I said to him. I didn’t want him to know how disappointed I was or mad. I mean, it just hurts.”

Amber added, “It’s shitty the way he done us, really.”

Should she have seen “that stunt,” as she called her father’s war, coming? It was hard to say. Most of the times that she saw him, he was just a wild, fun-loving dad. She remembered chomping those weed brownies with him and not waking up until 6 p.m. the next day and her father having pizza waiting for them. She was thirteen, maybe fourteen. She remembered when he got her a bracelet made of pot seeds, and her mother and stepdad seized it and threw it in the trash. She remembered how when she was giving birth to her baby girl, her father kept calling and calling on his smuggled cell phone, waiting to see if it had happened, and then finally heard her wail in the birthing room. In his last hours on earth, he said to Amber, “I’ll never forget hearing my grandbaby cry for the first time. That was the best feeling in the world—until I got to talk to her today.”

Still, yes, there were many things she’d known, many things she’d seen. She didn’t know, for example, that he loathed Middle Easterners, but she had known since childhood his feelings about the blacks. He hung around with bikers, for God’s sake. It was only after he went away that she realized what a figure he’d been among Dallas-area
racists: “I’ve met people in the free world that they found out who my dad was, and they had me on a pedestal.” People he had been in prison with, people in the Aryan Brotherhood. She might run into them at a bar, and tell them her name, and they’d tell her how much respect they had for her old man, how he was a “true American.”

She confessed that she was struggling to reach Rais’s level of forgiveness for her father. She told Rais, “I’m not a good person like you, I guess. Because I still do have hate and animosity towards him.” Part of her still thought he had manipulated his little international tribe of holy rollers, made them think he was what he wasn’t: “That’s what pissed me off about him, too, because in so many ways he was so fake—I mean, so fake.”