Promise Me (10 page)

Grayson came to my door before I was ready.  He seemed reluctant to enter the trailer but slowly stepped inside, looking around at the checkered curtains and sparse but comfortable furniture acquired from Goodwill. 

“Good job,” he said, “look like a shithole before.” 

I tucked my shirt into my jeans, feeling a little off balance by how near he was and how large he loomed in the confines of the small trailer.  “I’m ready,” I said, grabbing a small purse Rachel had given me and crossing it over my shoulder.  As Grayson followed me out I felt his hand rest lightly on my back for a split second before he quickly removed it. 

Grayson saw my hesitation when it came time to climb on the back of his bike.  The last time I’d ridden there seemed so distant, yet it had been only ten days. 

“Pull your strap tighter,” he said, pointing my helmet. 

The group met in a classroom of an elementary school in Parker.  Grayson dropped me off out front and casually said he would return in an hour.  He rode off without a second look. 

I was nervous going inside.  The other women seemed to have known each other for quite some time.  There were about a dozen of them of various ages.  A grandmotherly woman with gray hair secured in a bun reached me with a smile
and I guessed her to be Mia. 

“You must be Promise,” she said, taking my arm and leading me to a chair.  “Now
, you can participate at whatever level you feel comfortable with.  There’s no pressure here.” 

A few of the other women looked at me with curiosity as I crossed my legs at the ankle and stared into my lap.  For the first half hour all I did was listen.  One woman, Genie, talked about her fears as her attacker came up for parole.  A teenage girl named Jasmine popped her knuckles nervously and described how she’d begun being homeschooled since it was too difficult to return
to the place where the classmate who had assaulted her remained. 

As these women spoke I was struck by their bravery, by the candid way they shared the most awful details of the things which had happened to them.  I listened to their voices become stronger as they shared their horrors and I remembered Rachel telling me to let it out. 

When I stood, everyone in the room looked at me with quiet expectation.  “Hello.  I’m Promise.”  I paused, looking at each of them in turn and drawing strength from their kind faces.  “I was coerced into marriage to a man who already had four wives.  And then, over the course of several days, I was repeatedly raped and beaten by him.  I got away.  I was lucky.”

They didn’t gasp or widen their eyes with shock.  They listened as I spilled out all of the ugliness.  The horrors of my time with Winston.  The cruel discovery of my sister’s fate.  

And when I finished speaking each one of those women hugged me in turn as I cried.  But then suddenly I was finished crying.  I raised my head and wiped my tears away and thanked them. 

Grayson was already waiting for me.  He sat on the curb next to his bike, idly playing with a pocket knife.  I wondered how long he’d been there.  And if he’d actually any business in Parker. 

“Hey you,” he smiled gently.  “Did it go well?”

I drummed my fingers on the leather of the motorcycle seat.  “Yes.”

“You hungry?”

“I’m fucking starving.”

He laughed out loud.  “Since when do you talk like that?”

“Since I fucking can.”

He continued to laugh.  “Well, don’t fucking overdo it.” 

I sat next to him, suddenly serious.  “Thanks, Grayson.” 

“You can call me Gray, you know.” 

“Okay, Gray.  You know, it’s another night.”

He folded up his knife. “What?”

“You said you would tell me about yourself on another night.  It’s another night.” 

“So it is.”  He got to his feet and reached out, pulling me up.  “All right, Miss Promise, I’ll buy you a fucking pizza and tell you all about my fucking self.” 

***

Grayson had a constant habit of toying with nearby objects, as if he couldn’t bear to stop moving completely.  He turned the glass salt shaker over in his hands again and again as we waited for our food at a local pizzeria.  He seemed almost shy as we quietly sat across from one another. 

“So what does it mean?” I asked. 

He was confused.  “What does what mean?”

I pointed to his left shoulder.  “The
cross tattoo under your shirt.  ‘No man can judge me.’ Right?” 

He lifted up his shirt and peered at the dark cross as if he’d forgotten it was there.  “Yeah.  It means that once upon a time I was a teenager with big ideas about who I was and where I was going.”

I took a sip of my soda.  “In New York?”

“In New York.  Queens.
  You ever hear of Queens?”

I was exasperated.  “Yes, I’ve heard of Queens.”

He flashed a grin.  “Sorry. Wasn’t a bad neighborhood to grow up in and my folks kept a pretty close eye on us anyway.”  He started to roll the salt shaker back and forth across the table as he grew more comfortable talking.  “My mom, she was the daughter of a cardiac surgeon out on Long Island.  He wasn’t too pleased when she took up with a Dominican immigrant from the Bronx.  But my mother didn’t let anyone keep her from her heart.  She had my dad had a good thing together for all their years.”  His face suddenly fell and his voice grew hoarse.  “They were driving up to the Catskills a month before my high school graduation for a long overdue anniversary trip.  The other car was going the wrong way down the Taconic State Parkway.  My dad was dead at the scene and my mom died later that day.” 

I swallowed.  “That’s horrible
, Gray.  I’m so sorry.” 

He was quiet for a moment, not looking up when the pizza arrived at our table. 

“Did you have any brothers or sisters?”

The question seemed to pain him.  “A
sister.  Callista.  She was, is, three years younger than I am.  She went to go live on the north shore with our grandparents.  My mom’s dad never really took to me.  Thought I looked too much like my father and that I would bring trouble.  But it was gonna be all right.  I had an academic scholarship to NYU.  I could live on campus and everything would be fine.”  He looked out the window in to the descending sunlight.  “Everything would be fine,” he repeated. 

But I knew it hadn’t turned out fine.  “What happened?”

He started playing with the salt shaker again. Neither of us had touched the pizza.  “A guy from the old neighborhood turned up one night. Yeah, I knew he was into shit I didn’t want to touch but he was a friend.  A friend,” he shook his head.  “He was dealing bad bricks and stashing his garbage at my place. A man died from the crap he was peddling. When the heat started turning up under his feet he gave them my name.”  He stopped talking suddenly and smiled at me.  “This is sort of alien language to you, isn’t it?”

“What, English?  No.”  I took a slice of pizza.  “So I get it.  You were wrongfully convicted.”

He made a derisive noise, looking away with a grim expression.  “No man can judge me,” he said darkly.  “Until one did.” 

I didn’t like seeing him like this.  Bitter and sad.  “This was in New York though, right?  How did you end up out here?”

He smiled without any humor.  “Even prisoners get fucking outsourced in today’s corporate aristocracy.  State of New York discovered it was cheaper to ship a bunch of theirs out to a private facility in a low cost part of the country.” 

“And that’s where you met Casper.”

“Yup, that’s where I met Casper.” 

“
So do you ever talk to your sister?”

The question hurt him
.  He shifted in his seat and looked down.  “She doesn’t talk to me,” he said tersely.  He sat up straight and abruptly turned the salt shaker over.  I let my hand cover his, a gesture of comfort and friendship. 

“
You know, that pizza isn’t going to eat itself,” I finally said.

Grayson shook his head with a smile.  “My mom used to say shit like that.”   He met my eyes suddenly.  “She’d have liked you.”

“Was she white?”  I’d just blurted it out.  I didn’t mean anything by it, but it once the words hung in the air they sounded terribly rude.  I took my hand away and retreated to my side of the booth. 

Gra
yson, however, laughed.  “Yeah,” he said.  “But that’s not why she would have liked you.”  He appraised me for a moment.  “You’re tougher than you seem.  You’ll make it, Promise.”   He finally took a bit of pizza. 

“Gray?”

He raised his eyebrows and swallowed.  “What?”

“What were you studying at school?”

“Archeology. Like
Indiana Jones
.”  He snickered.  “I’ll be you don’t know who the hell that is, do you?” 

It sounded vaguely familiar.
I stared him down.  “Fuck you. You could teach me.” 

His smile faded as he searched my face.  “Yeah,” he said, “I could teach you, Promise.” 

We didn’t linger long after that, eating quickly and then heading for home.  Grayson pointed to a rising dust cloud in the west as we departed Parker. 

I stared at the thing.  It w
as an ominous dark wall which looked to be miles high and moving in quickly. 

“Haboob,” he
said, starting the engine. 

“What?” I shouted, keeping my eyes on it fearfully.  Once I’d seen a picture from one of the Great Depression’s famous dust storms as
it bore down on a sleepy town in Oklahoma. The monster was heading our way looked eerily similar.

“It’s what those big dust storms are called. 
We can outrun it back to Quartzsite if we move.  Hold on.” 

He barely waited until I tightened m
y arms and then he accelerated smoothly.  I pressed my face into his back, closing my eyes to the wind.  I didn’t open them again until I felt the bike slowing and knew we were approaching Quartzsite. 

The dust wall, or
haboob
, was bearing down rapidly.  Grayson pulled the bike in front of Riverbottom and I hopped off, staring at the seemingly impenetrable cascade of brown dust which appeared to swallow everything in its path. 

I couldn’t look away.  Indeed, I felt as if it were magnetically pulling me forward as it towered a good mile straight up and several miles wide.  I realized I was walking quickly towards it, past the trailers and beyo
nd the dry wash.  When I paused abruptly, Grayson nearly crashed into me.  I turned to him in surprise.  I hadn’t heard him following. 

“Look at it,” I pointed
, spellbound. 

He nodded, “It’s quite a sight.”   He pulled at my sleeve.  “Hey, you shouldn’t stand out here when it hits.  That dust brings all kinds of shit with it, makes some folks sick.” 

“In a minute,” I whispered, hypnotized by the billowing reaches as they grew closer and more finely visible. 

Gray shuffled at
my side, kicking the sand.  I wanted to tell him he should go ahead without me but I knew he wouldn’t.  I looked up as the brown cloud began to blot out the sky.  He was right; I shouldn’t stay out here.  I had no doubt the thing would try to swallow me whole in its thick fog.  The thought both frightened and exhilarated me. 

He didn’t pull away when I sought his hand.  His fingers laced th
rough mine and his grip grew firm.  We watched as the winds began to sift through the sand at our feet.

“Now,” I turned to him with a smile, “how about you buy me my first drink?”

He considered.  “Now’s as good a time as any.” 

We walked quickly and quietly back toward the bar.  Gray continued to hold my hand.  But only until we reached the threshold. 

I turned around and looked at him when he backed away.  It seemed like I should say something.  Or that he should say something. 

But in the end we only stared at each other mutely as the
hot winds began to kick with ferocity, rapidly obscuring everything around us. 

“Land of extremes.  Land of contrasts.  Land of surprises.  Land of contradictions.  That is Arizona.”   -
Federal Writer’s Project, 1956

“And none but Love to bid us laugh or weep.” -
Willa Cather

“God, it’s beautiful…Love. Sex....Owning this impossibly strong man and making him forget his name when you get him to the end again and again.”  -
Kira Tolleson