Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel (30 page)

“Say that again?”

Moe got up from the table and squeezed her hand. “Be nice to each other,” he said. “But be nice to yourself first. Out here, people don’t die. After they’re used up and don’t have any box office value, they get jobs as doorstops.”

F
OR HER BIRTHDAY,
I gave Rosita a customized 1946 cherry-red Ford convertible, one with whitewall tires and a starch-white top. She loved her car and found every excuse to drive it. One Friday while I was at the office, she drove out to South Main to visit the library at Rice University. On the way home, she stopped at Bill Williams’s drive-in restaurant, right across the boulevard from the university. Just before turning off South Main, she saw a Houston police cruiser in her rearview mirror. The cruiser turned with her and parked under the canvas awning, six spaces down. She thought nothing of it.

She ordered a box of fried chicken and a carton of French fries and a carton of coleslaw to go. Thanksgiving was one week away. A marching band was practicing somewhere across the boulevard, the bass drum booming behind the hedges and live oaks on the Rice campus. The sky was a flawless blue, the sunlight in the trees like gold dust sprinkled in the branches, the wind balmy, the awning flapping above her head. The jukebox was playing Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood” through the loudspeaker on a silver pole that supported the canopy. She flashed her lights to get the carhop’s attention and ordered a bottle of Lone Star to drink while she waited on the chicken.

After she finished the beer, she set the bottle on the metal tray the carhop had placed on her window. The policeman got out of his vehicle and went to a pay phone attached to the side of the restaurant and made a call. He seemed to be looking at her from behind his shades, the receiver small in his hand. He pulled a cigarette from a package of Pall Malls with his lips.

After she paid for her order, she started the convertible and drove back onto South Main. Within seconds she saw the police cruiser in her rearview mirror. She turned off the boulevard and went through a residential neighborhood and entered Hermann Park. The cruiser followed. The park was shaded by pines and live oaks and landscaped with dales and small hills and wildlife trails; it was curiously empty. She knew she had made a mistake leaving the boulevard. She looked again in the mirror. The cruiser was ten yards from her bumper. She pulled off the asphalt onto the grass and got out. The cruiser stopped also. The patrolman cut his engine, flipped away his cigarette, and opened his door. “Get back in your vehicle,” he said.

“Why are you following me?” she said.

He was standing behind the open door of the cruiser. His sleeves were rolled, the tops of his arms covered with swirls of dark hair, his brow furrowed, like that of a man whose temper and passions were on a short leash. His eyes moved up and down her body, seeming to take note of her slacks and rayon shirt and the bandana tied in her hair, as though he were looking at an alien or an aberration. “Get in your car and stay there, with your hands on the steering wheel.”

“Not until you answer my question.”

He closed the door to his cruiser and walked toward her. She could see her reflection in his shades, trapped, small, insignificant. “You’ll either get in your car or be arrested,” he said.

“What is the matter with you? Why are you doing this?”

He stepped closer, his body blocking out the sun. “Put your hands on the fender.”

“Do you have me mixed up with someone else?”

He fitted his hands on her shoulders and turned her sideways. “Lean on the car.”

“No.”

He slid his right hand down her spine, flattening his fingers on her shirt, pressing it against the sweat that peppered her back, moving her forward. “Now spread your legs,” he said.

“What?”

“Do as you’re told. Spread your legs.”

“I will not. You will not treat me like this.”

The thumb and index finger of his left hand tightened on her shoulder bone. “Are you carrying any weapons?”

“No. You’re hurting me.”

“Lean against the car.”

The pain traveled along her shoulder into her neck, causing her left side to wilt. She felt her eyes watering. “Let go of me,” she said. “You’ve mistaken me for someone else. I haven’t broken any law.”

“You made an illegal lane change. You went through a red light. You smell like you’ve been drinking.”

She widened her feet, her hands now on top of the fender. He loosened his left hand but let his thumb rest on the back of her neck, kneading her skin. Then he ran his right hand inside her thighs. “You bastard,” she said, turning around.

He grabbed her by the shoulders again and shoved her against the car, hard, jolting her teeth. “What’s that on your breath? Mouthwash?”

“I had one beer at the drive-in. You saw me drinking it.”

“Do you want to empty your pockets, or do you want me to do it for you?”

“You have no right to do this.”

“Last chance.”

She pulled her pockets inside out, her face hot with anger and shame.

“That’s a good start,” he said. “Now give me your driver’s license and registration.”

Her hands were shaking when she took her wallet from her purse and removed her driver’s license and handed it to him.

“Thank you,” he said. “Now give me your registration.”

She leaned over the seat to open the glove box.

“Hold on there,” he said, leaning on top of her, his hand reaching past her, his loins touching her buttocks. “I don’t want you pulling a surprise on me.” He popped open the glove box and raked the contents on the floor. “Pick it up.”

“Pick what up?”

“Are you deaf? You don’t speak English?” he said, his breath on her neck.

“You’re not going to get away with this.”

He backed out of the seat and came around to the other side of the convertible. He opened the door and grabbed her by one wrist and dragged her onto the grass, twisting her arm. “You think you can threaten a police officer?”

“I did no such thing.”

“Oh yes you did, lady. You were asking for this when you turned in to the park.”

“Liar.”

“Just keep talking,” he said, rolling her onto her stomach, pressing his knee into her back. He cuffed her wrists, pushing the steel tongues deep into the locking mechanism, bunching her skin. He pulled her to her feet, his fingers sinking deep into her upper arm.

She fought with him and tried to kick his shins. He wrapped his arms around her and lifted her into the air, his mouth against her cheek, close to her ear, his phallus hard against her rump. “You’re quite a handful,” he said. “Maybe after this, you’ll learn not to drink and drive.”

Chapter

19

M
Y ANGER DIDN’T
serve me well at the police station. Rosita had been placed in the drunk tank. The charges included driving under the influence, resisting arrest, and threatening a police officer. Her bail had not been set. I couldn’t get her out of the tank, and I had been allowed to talk to her through the bars for only five minutes.

“She has to stay in there until tomorrow morning?” I said incredulously to a desk sergeant.

“She has to be arraigned. That’s how it works. She’s from overseas?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Maybe they do things different there.”

“What are you saying?”

“If you don’t agree with the system, change it,” he said, resuming his paperwork.

When you live in a democracy, there are certain things you believe will never happen to you. Then a day comes when the blindfold is removed and you discover the harsh nature of life at the bottom of the food chain. I could hear myself breathing; my skin felt dead to the touch; I had never felt as inadequate in dealing with a situation. “What’s the arresting officer’s name?”

The sergeant looked up again. “Slakely,” he said.

“Is he in the building?”

“Possibly.”

“I want to talk to him.”

His eyes drifted down the hallway to a coffee room that had a Coca-Cola machine and a table where several cops were sitting. “He’s a hard-nose, but the people he brings in usually deserve it,” the sergeant said. “Do yourself a favor. Get a lawyer. Don’t pick a fight with the wrong guy.”

“Thank you,” I said.

He didn’t answer, nor did he look up from his paperwork again. I walked to the doorway of the coffee room. I didn’t have to guess who had put my wife in jail. He was eating a sandwich, his long legs splayed, his fingers covered with grease and crumbs. He was the only man in the room whose eyes immediately met mine.

“Are you Officer Slakely?” I said.

He stopped chewing and set down the sandwich. “What can I do for you?”

“Why did you make up those lies about my wife?”

“Who says they’re lies?”

“I do.”

“This is a restricted area.”

“The city attorney’s office is right down the hall. I come here all the time.” I dropped a nickel in the Coca-Cola machine. I pulled a Coke out of the slot and stuck the neck in the bottle opener and pried off the cap and set it in front of him. “Do you other fellows want one?” I asked.

They looked at me, blank-faced.

“Your wife is in jail for a reason. You’re not making things easier for her,” Slakely said.

“I pulled her out of a pile of corpses in a Nazi death camp. She spat in the face of an SS colonel. The only reason she didn’t do it to you is she didn’t want to bring down trouble on me.”

“Who do you think you’re talking to?”

“A cop who’s for sale.”

“You’d better haul your ass out of here.”

I nodded. A jar of tomato sauce sat on the table in front of him, a steak knife inserted in it. I looked at his throat, the malevolence in his eyes, and the ignorance and hostility and fear that lived like a disease in his face. “You violated her person, didn’t you?”

“She told you that?”

“She didn’t have to. It’s written all over you. I’m going to expose you for what you are, bub. I’ve never met a cockroach that did well in sunlight.”

I heard his chair scrape back as I walked out of the room. But he didn’t follow me into the hallway, and I knew I probably would not see him again. Like all of his kind, he would disappear and be only a footnote in a script written by someone determined to ruin our lives. I wished Grandfather were with me. I wished he could tell me what to do. I wanted the moral clarity and violent alternatives available to him when he took on John Wesley Hardin in 1881. The advent of modernity had empowered the bureaucrat and the coward and the bully, and I would not see my Jewish girl from the Book of Kings until morning, when she would be led into court handcuffed to a chain, her hair in disarray, her clothes grimed from sleeping on a floor stained with spittle and cigarette butts and the overflow from a broken toilet.

H
ER BAIL WAS
three thousand dollars. Her car had been towed to an impoundment, the bumper bent out of shape, the fender scratched by the wrecker’s steel hook. When we came home, she immediately went into the shower, and I put her soiled clothes in the washing machine. I opened all the windows in the house, inviting in the sunshine and the wind and the smell of burning leaves as a way of counteracting the pall that seemed to be settling on our lives.

Our attorney, an old family friend named Tom Breemer, found out that during the Depression, Slakely had worked private security for a fruit company in California and had been involved in the shooting death of a labor organizer.

“How’d he get out of it?” I asked.

“The records disappeared. He was a chaser in a navy brig during the war. He’s been divorced twice. Colored people get off the street when they see him coming. He worked vice in Galveston. That’s the long and short of it.”

“Somebody is paying him to hurt us,” I said.

“Maybe, maybe not. This is going to be a tough one, Weldon. There’s a witness. A woman riding a bicycle said she saw Mrs. Holland try to kick Slakely.”

“That was after he brutalized her.”

“I’ll try to get the charges reduced,” he replied. “That’s about as good as it’s going to get.”

After I hung up, Rosita came out of the shower, a towel wrapped around her.

“How do you feel?” I said, trying to smile.

“I’m fine.”

I sat with her on the side of the bed. Through the window, we could see the tops of trees swaying above our neighbors’ roofs and a plane towing a Burma-Shave ad across the sky. “We may have to pay the fine and be done with it,” I said.

“Do you know where he touched me? Do you want to know what he did to me with his penis?”

“We’ll get him, Rosita. We’ll get the person who hired him, too. We just need to get the court situation out of the way.”

She pulled her hand away from me. “By giving in to it? That’s how we get it out of the way?”

“I’m trying to be realistic. Rhetoric doesn’t help. Those charges could get you up to a year in jail.”

“You don’t realize how your words hurt me.”

The doorbell rang downstairs. Our bell was an old one, installed in the 1920s, the kind you twisted. I don’t know why I thought of that; maybe I associated it with an earlier time, when I delivered newspapers in a small Texas town and I had no consciousness of the evil that men can do to one another.

The bell rang again. I went downstairs and opened the door. No one was there. I saw a kid on a service cycle drive away, his lacquered-bill cap low on his eyes, his cavalry-like breeches puffed around the thighs. A flat cardboard mailer addressed to Rosita lay on the doormat. I carried it upstairs, tapping it against my leg.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“It’s for you. The return address says ‘Blue Bird Record Company.’”

Her face showed no recognition. She removed the towel wrapped around her body and dressed with her back to me.

“You want me to open it?” I asked.

“No, I’ll do it.”

“I confronted Slakely yesterday. If I had my way, I’d shoot him.”

“He’s a functionary.”

I had run out of words. “I’ll fix us something to eat,” I said.

I went downstairs and began making sandwiches and a salad. I kept hoping she would join me of her own accord, slicing tomatoes and bread crust and cucumbers, smiling and talking at the same time, ignoring my cautionary words, as was her way.