The Wrong Man (7 page)

Ramón’s story was the inverse of Owen’s. A half-Mexican who didn’t take part in the local gangs, knew only a few scraps of Spanish, and spent as little time as possible in the poor and dangerous neighborhoods. Ramón had crossed over to smoke pot and party with the white skateboarders, punks and heavy metal kids and when he spoke his English, rather than being accented like a second language, was pure
California
stoner.

I had seen Ramón at dozens of parties since high school and had watched as he coerced girls into leaving with him or discussed in a shouting, garrulous voice what girls he’d like to try at and how tormented he was by whose tits and ass. He made me think of a repulsively spoiled four-year-old, used to getting what he wanted through the tactic of making noise and asking for it over and over until he was appeased. And the astounding thing was that it worked so often.

I can call half a dozen occasions to mind when Ramón successfully attached himself to a girl that I lacked the nerve to even say hello to. I have the somehow disturbing memory of Ramón dragging a former cheerleader named Ashley Thorne through a cluster of cars parked outside a keg party. It was dark—after midnight—and a group of us stared as the girl laughed and allowed the little man to pull a door open on a tan Scout and to shove her in. I had been fascinated by Ashley Thorne through my teenage years and had had a crush on her, like most of the young men at Blackmer High, but that night I had shouted and laughed as she was destroyed for me, as the car began rocking and that princess was made use of like a glaze-eyed teenage junkie. And we all laughed harder later, when Ramón told us he didn’t even know whose car it had been.

I guess Ramón appealed to girls the way children do. His face was round, small on his head like a baby’s, and he had rather large and bright green eyes that I can’t recall ever seeing other than bloodshot. His hair was black and seemed to grow like an animal’s pelt, close and short and straight back from his hairline.

It had probably been more than a year since I had last thought of Ramón, and I may not have ever thought of him again if I hadn’t seen him park a junky little Ford in front of his mother’s house as I staked the place out. I watched him stand up and slam the door. His arrogance was obvious even as he stood out of that eight hundred-dollar car in front of that seedy and decomposing Victorian.
 
He was wearing shades and carrying a plastic grocery bag and I noticed then something I had never noticed before—how brown his skin is.

And all at once I was wildly and irrepressibly certain that he had been the Hispanic party—the brown-skinned piece of filth—who had helped Owen rape Jill. This was infinitely possible, I told myself, since Ramón existed on the fringes of the gang world and he logically had a stake in his brother’s battles. And he was such a crass, relentless little womanizer that he lived his whole life a mere nudge from simply pinning down and raping the girls he had set his sights on.

Or maybe I didn’t suspect him for even an instant. Maybe Ramón had just presented his despicable self like a clay pigeon at the very moment that I was looking for something to take a potshot at. Maybe if I was being perfectly frank with myself I would have admitted that I was looking for a raw nerve to torture. I was fraying at the edges from lack of real sleep and every minor irritation was sending me into a spiral of violent impulses.
 
Maybe if I had seen Owen’s mother first I would have found a way to rationalize skulking up behind her and kicking her in the center of the back, sending her sprawling on the sidewalk and then spitting on her, cursing her for coupling with lowlifes and spawning a rapist like Owen Ferguson.

I stood out of my car and felt the sunlight on my back and the heat rising off the street. I took off my shades and threw them on the seat and gently closed the driver’s door. The sky was a clear, blinding blue and plants and lawns were deep green. The springtime weather made even this street pretty. There was a murmur of activity in the neighborhood, kids shouting, cars giving prolonged exhales as they passed, but nobody noticed me.

I felt strange. Not afraid anymore, but high. Exhilarated. Almost in a dream state. I now could see what made these thugs tick, how they did the unthinkable without a moment of hesitation, and how it could become addictive. I wiggled my fingers in the metal holes and closed my fist on the knife-handle grip of the brass knuckles. I lifted my eyes to Ramón’s back as he ascended the tall, sun-bleached staircase of the chipped Victorian, and I started after him.

He was just pushing the heavy, wide front door open when he became aware of my footsteps clomping up behind him and deigned to turn around. He managed to look bored as he faced me, and if, when I raised my fist, his eyes widened behind his black sunglasses, I’ll never know.

I hurled the knuckles into his cheek, harder than I had planned, and his face seemed to pucker around the point of impact. Blood was already gooping from his skin as he toppled. He turned a little and landed on top of his plastic grocery bag halfway into the relatively dark room, where I could now hear a TV going.

He was starting to rise and I kicked him viciously in the seat of his factory-faded jeans, scooting him forward a foot. My voice came out as a growl. “Did you rape her, you fucking piece of shit?!?” One part of my mind stood in judgment, observing quietly, telling me that I was unhinged and I had better be careful. I tried to listen to it, even as I leered like a madman and my muscles twitched with the impulse to kill a wounded thing.

I bent, blinking as my eyes adjusted to the light inside the house, and took Ramón’s shirt collar in my left hand. I had the knuckles elevated and I felt like I could collapse his skull with one punch. As my pupils dilated I saw that Ramón’s cheek was torn wide open and the blood was coursing steadily with his pounding heart, washing down his face like water over a rock in a creek. His shades were off and his green eyes were fixed on me with an expression of utter stupidity, like a run-over dog flopped onto the hot roadside, taking its last rapid breaths with its intestines glistening in front of it.

“Answer me you little punk! Cocksucker! Answer me! You go to my apartment a couple nights ago? Huh? You and Owen?”

I became aware of whimpering and glanced up at a little Mexican girl staring at me from the couch. She was wearing a white nightgown and had bright green eyes. She had been watching Jerry Springer and the man’s smug, asinine fucking repartee and his perverted good humor made me want to projectile vomit.

“Dude!” Ramón finally said from the floor, his eyes alive again, dazzled by recognition. “Sam! Hey! Schuler! What the fuck, Sam?” He squirmed but made no real effort to get his shirtfront free of my grip.

And then the mother came in and raised a scream that made me want to leap over Ramón and knock her cold. “WHAT’S GOING ON! OH MY GOD! WHAT IS THIS?” She was worse than the picture of her I carried in my head, because she had obviously been asleep in some musty corner of the house. She wore no pants, just a huge purple T-shirt with some grotesque sparkled design on it. Her legs were skinny, paper white and bruised and the contrast with her puffy upper body made me think of Tweedle Dum. “OH MY GOD! STOP IT, PLEASE!” she bellowed. Her hair looked like moldy straw; it was lopsided, mashed upward on one side from her pillow. There was mascara smeared around eyes the same shape and shade of blue as Owen’s.

“Lady!” I said, still crouching, still poised to bang the knuckles into Ramón’s face. “Shut the fuck up! You know what kind of fucking scum you’ve got living with you? Huh?”

The little girl goggled at me. She had suctioned herself against her mother’s side.

“Oh my gaaaaawd!” the woman squeaked this time, at a low volume, sounding as if she had just learned of a dear one’s death. She was staring at the massive amount of blood now pooling on the worn hardwood beneath Ramón’s head. The blood was pink at the edge of the puddle, mixing with white and I grunted. A half gallon of milk had been in the grocery bag and had split open when Ramón fell on it. His mother looked as if she thought the white was somehow leaking from her son, indicating some unnatural, doubtlessly fatal injury. She raised both her hands to me and simpered, “I don’t know what happened, okay? But let him up, okay? We can talk about this!”

I released Ramón’s shirtfront and straightened, lifting the brass knuckles, brandishing them in front of me. “I’ll tell you what happened, lady. Someone raped my girlfriend.
Owen
—your son—raped her—”

“No—”

“SHUT THE FUCK UP! Yes he did. And maybe this little faggot was in on it! And if he was I’m gonna fuckin’ KILL him!”

“Sam!”

I looked down at Ramón, now propped on an elbow in his blood and milk. He had his hand flattened over the gashed side of his face, covering one eye. The other eye was wide, the iris blazing at me, floating in the white like a greened penny.

“Listen, dude, you’re fucking up.” The eye blinked. He sounded calm. Confident. “I’m telling you the truth, bro. I don’t know what happened with Owen. I don’t know if he did what you say. All I know is I wasn’t there. I swear to god. But listen, you know Owen. You shouldn’t have pulled this fucking shit. You’re dead now.”

I lifted my right foot from behind Ramón and took a step backward. “
Fuck
Owen,” I said, and punched the wall next do the doorjamb for emphasis. The brass knuckles dented the plaster, but I cut my own knuckles open in the process and it ratcheted up my anger again. “You just wait and see what happens to Owen.” I shook the knuckles, my index finger peeled off and pointing. I looked down. “And you better hope I never learn you had anything to do with it, Ramón, you little bitch!”

The mother was staring at me, stroking her daughter’s hair, panting like she’d just stopped jogging. But she didn’t say a word. She didn’t want to interrupt my withdrawal from her house.

“I’m sorry about scaring the little girl,” I said.

I departed with the door standing open behind me, dropped down the steps and crossed the sunny street in the indifferent neighborhood, sliding the brass knuckles off my hand.

I went back home to sit and watch the door. To wait for Owen to come, as he surely would.

8

I
started
getting
ready
at four-thirty and picked Jill up from her mother’s at six. As soon as she saw me she broke down, touching my battered face, unable to speak for her weeping. I found myself becoming sheepish, putting on an act, and then found myself lying very smoothly. I was upset so I got drunk and got stupid, I said. Mouthed off to a bunch of guys in a bar and got stomped on a little. It was nothing, nothing. Let’s try to enjoy ourselves tonight, I said. She didn’t have the emotional resources just now to explore the possibility that what I said wasn’t true and she finally nodded, took my arm, and we left.

The restaurant was called Maurice’s; a dim, determinedly classy French place. I have an aversion to these restaurants. I feel like the mark in a con operation, as if the servers and cooks will be in the back after closing, laughing and slapping each other on the back, eating hamburgers and talking about the fools they lured in and neatly extracted money from. There is something vaguely humiliating about it. The food always seems to answer to a taste I have yet to acquire, the candle light and gaudy music lay the atmosphere on a little too thick to be believable, the waiters seem to be on the verge of smirking, covering their faces and chuckling, at which point the whole facade would go up in vapor and I would stand, snarling, and ask them what the hell they were trying to pull. But the facade never cracks. You are lured in, seated, talked down to, and not until the bill is delivered do you realize how thoroughly you’ve been had.

Tonight, however, I shut up and played along. The waiter was a slim, middle-aged gay man and I didn’t comment on it. The portions were small and strange, and I ate all the bread in the basket and dabbed the butter from my mouth with the cloth napkin and said how good everything was.

It wasn’t, in truth, all that difficult with Jill across from me. She had made a job of dressing for the evening, with that pride and resourcefulness that certain girls take in their appearance, and it made me feel like we were on a first date two years ago. Men’s eyes lingered on her as we entered the restaurant and our waiter seemed pleased with her, wishing, I guess, that he could look just like that. Her shirt was snug and scooped low at the neck and her skin glowed. Her makeup was subtle, applied cleverly so a face I had looked at a million times became a brand new distraction.

With my bruised face and general lack of style I felt like a panhandler she was treating to a meal. I took off my old brown derby jacket, hoping my button down shirt would be somewhat more appropriate. When I hung the jacket on the back of my chair, it hung oddly and the weapons clumped against the chair legs.

Jill smirked at me. “You got rocks in your pockets?”

“I’m just happy to see you,” I said, then tried again: “Yeah, rocks. You know, in case the waiter takes too long, I can nail him—”

“He’d probably like that,” she said, and I laughed. The good humor was slightly forced, but better than the alternative. But her eyes held me and the juice went out of her smile. “So what’s in your pockets?”

“Nothing.” I shook my head. “Don’t worry about it.
”

“Okay, then . . . what happened to your knuckles?”

I looked down. Two of my knuckles were scraped, the middle one bruised as well. I sighed. My mind raced ahead and I knew I couldn’t bring reality crashing down on us right now.

“The cash register at work,” I said. “You know the little springs on the little metal things that hold the money down? Well you reach in there at the end of the night to get all the bills out, and the end of the spring goes right under your fingernail. Never fails. It gets a nerve under there, hurts all the way up to your shoulder.”

She was looking at me a little too hard, trying, it seemed, to see around my lie.

“So,” I said. “When it happened last night I got pissed and punched the edge of the counter.”

“Sam! You need to control your temper.”

“I know.”

“And I’m not even going to ask you what’s in your jacket pockets.” Her eyes glittered. “I’ve forgotten all about it.”

Our eyes remained locked for several seconds and that look had more meaning than any of the conversation. That look said that we were both here pretending and it was okay.

 
It was a relief, that moment of speaking with our eyes. I had been worrying on some level that she was damaged so profoundly she would never quite touch down on the real world again.

The movie was an idiotic hottest-new-slapstick by a team that had made one genuinely funny movie a few years ago the way a drunken, blindfolded man with a pistol might nail the bull’s eye on a shooting range. Now they were squeezing off random shots in every direction, not even sure, evidently, where the target was anymore. The movie afforded us possibly two real laughs in two hours, for twenty dollars. Afterward we drove out to the cliffs overhanging the Pacific and parked and had sex in the backseat of my Fairlane to the static-crashing of waves. Jill was lively and horny, determined that our sex be good, and she managed to banish all ghosts of her rape from the inside of the car. The windows fogged over and after a while she pushed me down so I lay on my back and then climbed on and grounded me deep into her until she reached orgasm. Then she lay down and pulled me over her and I began that last sprint to the top of the mountain, where you finally run up and jump off and freefall for a moment and then land back in your skin again, gasping. She let me come inside her because she was pregnant anyway and she clung to me as I did, groaning with me and stroking the back of my head while I convulsed against her damp, lithe body.

I left her at her mother’s at two in the morning, and she told me that whatever I was doing with whatever was in my pockets I had better be careful. I had better remember how much she needed me.

I had turned off my cell phone in the movie theater and didn’t turn it back on until I was driving home. There was one message from a number I had never seen before. No name. I dialed in and played the message and the Brando voice said, “You’re dead, motherfucker,” followed by a click.

My heart exploded to a gallop. The terror was back and shutting down my body. The black freeway slipped by outside and I flew along in hurtling and surreal motion but if I had been standing on my own two feet I would have been groping for support. My evening with Jill, getting out of Blackmer, had made the lunatic violence of the morning like something I had dreamed. Our normalcy, our sex, had made the rape feel insignificant. A mere speedbump, already behind us and forgotten. But that was a fiction. It was a spell cast by Jill’s cleverness and female instincts. I was crossing back over now as if my car was passing through some force field that surrounded Blackmer, and fear began burning in my stomach as I reentered the world of dirt and gangsters where I felt the need to weigh myself down with brass knuckles and the mean little revolver.

My mind was leaping ahead, and I had the foresight to leave my car across the street from my building in the parking lot of a darkened shopping center. I crossed
Murdock Avenue
, went down the walkway, and crept up the cement steps with my back to the wall. I felt like a fool, imitating the hundred thousand cops & robbers programs I’d seen, but I took the thirty-eight from my pocket and cocked it, held it up next to my shoulder, at the ready, just like my TV had taught me.

There was no sign of anyone as I reached the landing. I thought ahead once more and saw myself maybe finally sleeping. I would put the door chime in place again and there would be no way anyone could get the drop on me so tonight, finally, I would relax.

I passed the gun to my left hand and fished out my keys. I slid the correct one into the slot and turned it, but felt looseness, realizing with disgust that I had left the thing unlocked. But would I do something that stupid? I frowned, feeling amused, even, as I tried to remember if I had remembered to rock the knob, to check that the lock was set when I left this evening. But the black dizzying horror rose up behind my eyes. I heard or felt or sensed the presence on the other side of that dense door—as if, I thought, my key snicking in the slot had stirred someone to action. A noise reached my ears—a male voice—
“He’s here! He’s here!”
—and I was already flinging myself away.

Later I would berate myself in the vilest language. Where had all my fantasies of heroics gone? Wasn’t this my chance?
 
I stumbled once on the steps, caught myself on the iron railing in mid-tumble and kicked my legs out before me and kept moving. I hit the walkway and could hear them coming now, their shoes slapping the cement stairs as I darted ahead and all but dove between another set of buildings and down another walkway.

A half dozen of the ground level apartments have miniature back yards enclosed by five foot wooden walls and I dove over the first wall, hardly touching it in my adrenaline high. I landed like a cat and flattened myself to the damp grass. Beside me there was a tarp draped over some bicycles and I inched underneath it, cringing at its deafening crinkling but pulling its corner down until I was halfway hidden. I kept the gun raised, hugging myself against the cool bike frames and releasing my breath in shuddering gasps.