Читать книгу The Shyster's Daughter - Paula Priamos - Страница 8

PRISON WITHOUT WALLS

I am twelve years old when Kevin Cooper escapes from the California Institution for Men less than three miles from our home. That it is late and a school night doesn’t matter. My mother is six months pregnant, and I help her drag our royal-sized dining room chairs in front of the sliders, blocking the glass with lumbering wood. Of course these heavy chairs will not stop him. But they may slow him down and give us those few seconds to either get out of the house or give my father time to aim.

My father is outside in his T-shirt and boxers, barefoot, yet armed with a hunting rifle. He checks the front and back doors, and inspects the garage, to make sure it holds nothing more than his diesel Mercedes and our Schwinn bicycles.

On the loose for less than seventy-two hours, Cooper is already suspected of bludgeoning a family in the hills. The carnage, the bodies, the blood, are all too grisly for the local networks to show. We only hear the details, which somehow makes them worse. Cooper has used a knife and hatchet. These are hands-on murders, the personal kind, though Cooper is a stranger to this family.

We see his mug shot—a black man in an orange prison jumpsuit with the start of dreadlocks springing from his head. I’ve seen enough prison photos from the files my father brings home to know that Cooper’s smirk is nothing more than a pose. What I see is the face of a coward.

A weakling who rapes a woman with a screwdriver against her throat.

He is no man.

My mother must see it too because she turns off the TV. Her face is pale but it’s always that way against her dark hair.

We live in a ranch-style home surrounded by oleander bushes, perfect for hiding.

My mother parts the curtains.

“He could be watching us right now,” she says.

At age forty, her pregnancy is high-risk in more ways than one. An accident, she and my father say, but I know having another child is a last ditch effort at keeping our family together. My older sister and I are no longer enough.

It was my father’s idea to move us from L.A. to Chino. He’s moved his law practice too. A change is supposed to do us good.

“An alarm should’ve sounded,” my father says, coming back into the house. His shoulders are nearly as wide as the doorway, and his neck is as thick as a linebacker, which he was, having once been recruited to play for Stanford. My father is not a man to be messed with. “It’s supposed to go off every fifteen minutes when someone’s escaped.”

My mother laughs at this, at him, and places a protective hand over the hard mound of her belly.

“Who’s supposed to hear it? Other prisoners?”

“What the hell kind of comment is that?” The gun lags at my father’s side. “I’m doing my best.”

“I know, Paul. I know. While that sick son of a bitch is hacking up me and the girls, you can hand him your card. He’ll need a slick pro like you to spare him from the chair.

On that first night I sleep between my parents. Too frightened to stay, my sister Rhea is given permission to visit some family friends in San Diego. Sixteen and with a driver’s license, it’s easier on my parents if they just let her go. The house feels empty without her, consumed with the sound of my father’s snoring that even the tissue crammed into my ears doesn’t muffle.

Leaning against his side of the bed is his .300 Savage, fully loaded. If I reach over I can touch the cool barrel.

My father is a generic lawyer, taking on everything from divorces to drug offenses. I doubt if he is a good shot, considering he only hunts on occasional trips to Wyoming or Montana with one of his clients, the business ones, the ones he courts—like the handsome restaurateur from Bel Air who used to cart me on his back, table to table, making the candle-lit rounds, checking on things in the kitchen, until one night during dessert he returned me to my family’s table, my breath smelling of wine from my first tasting, a trace of white dust in the man’s dark mustache. Months later, his mind spun from all the cocaine and alcohol, he rolled his Jeep into a sand dune and never came out from the wreckage. My father also represents criminals and typically visits them behind the safety of bulletproof glass.

As I lie in bed, I think of the boy, a few years younger than me, who the night before lay awake in his parents’ bedroom—only his mom and dad weren’t sleeping. They were dead. His sister and a neighbor friend who was sleeping over had been murdered, too. They were ambushed in their sleep by a man with a hatchet in one hand, a knife in the other.

The boy was stabbed in the chest. He was stabbed in the head. Then his throat was slit. The only way he made it through the night, the eleven hours it took until help found him, was by plugging four fingers in the slash to stop the bleeding. He was airlifted to ICU at Loma Linda Hospital. I wonder who’s sitting with him now while he fights to breathe. How hard it must be for him to want to live, knowing the rest of his family has been killed.

The next morning at school, there is no talk of Cooper’s escape. Yet the door to the classroom isn’t propped open with a doorstop. Instead Mrs. Lincoln pulls on it after the first bell, making sure it’s locked. None of us are allowed to use the restroom by ourselves. Not even with a buddy system. We have to be accompanied to and from there in a small group by the teacher’s aide.

Recess is on a rainy day schedule, as if it’s not clear and warm outside. After lunch, we sit on the floor in the multi-purpose room and watch the animated mice movie, The Rescuers.

When we return to the classroom, we’re stuck watching another film. This one is very different. We needed to get our parents’ signatures for it. The boys are sent to Mr. Kroger’s class to watch their own. The movie is actually a slide show with a drawing of a woman; her insides are reduced to a wide tube that leads to two narrow pouches on either side of her hips. These are her ovaries.

Mrs. Lincoln flips the slide. It’s the same drawing, only now there’s a tiny circle with a curvy tail in the middle of the woman’s tube. Mrs. Lincoln narrates from a stapled packet.

“The sperm swims up the canal and breaks through the woman’s egg, fertilizing it. A man and woman have intercourse when they want to produce a child.”

In the next slide, the egg has suddenly come to life and bats a set of long eyelashes. The tiny head of the sperm grows a face and puckers up for a whistle.

All the girls giggle, except for me.

I picture something else. I picture my parents naked in bed, my father sweating and heaving on top of my mother, purposely releasing microscopic live things hidden in slime. While my sister and I may not have seen them, we heard them in our room late one night at the Desert Rose Hotel in Palm Springs when they thought we were asleep. We heard our father’s heavy grunts, our mother’s thin cries. He was smothering her in the sheets. When I tried to get up out of bed to help her, Rhea pinched my ear hard and whispered that I needed to go back to sleep. It was no big deal. Mom was all right. They were just making a baby.

Apparently it’s an act of love. It’s called making love, having sex. In time it will no longer sicken me. It will be something I’ll want to do when I’m older, when I’m in love. But as I sit listening at my desk, even in Mrs. Lincoln’s clinical terms, it still sounds unclean.

My mother seems dirty for letting my father do that to her, especially since they spend most of the time arguing.

After the slide show, Mrs. Lincoln informs us about our monthly friend who will likely appear in the next year or so. She holds up a small cylinder of cotton with a string and instructs us on how best to insert the plastic applicator so that after its removal, what’s left inside will soak up the blood.

My best friend Tomoko makes a face at me. Although she’s Asian, her mother tells her she’s a Japanese girl before she’s anything else. We’re not allowed to play at each other’s houses, not because I’m Greek, but because I’m white. Her mother doesn’t see the difference. Tomoko’s hair is hard to manage, so her mother braids it into two thick pigtails. This style doesn’t make her feel very pretty, so at recess she’ll take a couple of tiny white flowers from the weeds in the grass and tuck them behind one ear.

She points at Mrs. Lincoln and the dangling tampon.

“We have to leave that inside our vagina?” She mouths this part of our anatomy as if it’s something secretive, something bad.

I shrug and pretend that the idea doesn’t panic me.

“Guess so,” I say. “It’s better than wearing a miniature diaper.”

When school lets out, we’re still in lockdown mode, and my mother must waddle through the entrance and past the administrative offices and upper grade playground to Mrs. Lincoln’s room to pick me up.

My mother wears a T-shirt with the word “baby” and an arrow pointing downward in neutral yellow, just below her breasts. Neither of my parents wants to find out the baby’s sex. It will be a surprise, as if my mother getting pregnant isn’t enough of one for the family. She smiles self-consciously because of the slight space between her front teeth or maybe she’s reacting to me. Although I try and smile back, I wind up looking somewhere else. It’s impossible not to be embarrassed by her big belly, that hardened hump of proof she and my father had sex.

The bedtime ritual doesn’t change once my sister is forced to return home a week and a half later. My father puts her to work placing the rest of the dining room chairs against the other slider, the one in our parents’ bedroom. That’s how Cooper entered his victims’ home—through an open slider. For forty-eight hours he had camped out in the abandoned house next door.

He was in no hurry. Running too fast is how most escaped convicts are caught. If he stayed in Chino long enough, he knew the cops would figure he was farther away and stop looking for him here. He was patient and smart about it because he’d done this before. Using his prison contacts, my father learns Cooper had escaped a year earlier from a psychiatric ward in Pennsylvania. Cooper had gotten a real California driver’s license under an alias and had been arrested under this false name. He faked an illness too, so he could be transferred to a minimum security prison.

With a manual bicycle pump, my father inflates the mattress we use for camping. My sister will sleep at the foot of the bed.

“This is stupid,” she complains, pushing the last of the chairs against the glass. Her face is plastered salmon pink in Calamine lotion to avoid breakouts. “He’s long gone to Mexico or Siberia by now.”

My parents’ bed is big, a California King, and I climb up on it and slide under the covers. I’m getting used to sleeping between them, and I like how it’s my presence that helps them get along better.

“How do you know he’s gone?” I ask.

My sister doesn’t bother answering and instead looks for support from our mother, her strongest ally.

“The cops found that family’s station wagon in Long Beach. There’s no way he’s . . .”

My father pulls out the pump, adds a couple puffs of his own air, then plugs the hole.

“Enough, Rhea.”

He drops the air mattress and it skids at her feet, looking more like it should be floating out on the pool than resting on the bedroom floor.

My mother stays quiet. She is too uncomfortable, too pregnant, to argue about something as trivial as sleeping arrangements. Sleeping through the entire night is her only objective. She props up three pillows where she’ll doze off practically upright. If she lies flat, the baby’s bulk cuts off her air.

A tall glass of ice water sweats on the nightstand. Lately, she can’t drink enough liquids, and sometimes in the middle of the night I hear her getting up to fill her glass at the tap in the bathroom. She’ll stand at the sink and down it in a couple gulps, then refill the glass before returning to bed.

As she stretches a sheet over the mattress, my sister groans loud, exaggerated groans. Where did her fear go? The fear that sent her crying and stuffing clothes in a duffel, insisting she be allowed to stay someplace else. Cooper’s escape was just an excuse to get away from our own house for a while.

“She’s right, Paul,” my mother finally says. “We probably should let the girls sleep in their rooms.”

My father clicks on the safety of his Savage and looks at my mother as if she’s betrayed him somehow. It’s the way he always looks at her when she sides with my sister.

Sometimes it feels like we’re on opposing teams—my father and I left with no other choice but to pick each other. We’ve always been the odd men out, and, as a consequence, he has raised me as both his son and daughter. He has taught me how to throw a baseball, straight and hard, and every summer he buys us season tickets, and together we sit drinking Cokes, cracking peanut shells and cheering on the Angels at Anaheim Stadium.

“Give it a couple more nights, June.” My father says this with the kind of care and caution that makes it clear who he’s really protecting. But he can’t ever keep me safe. I know this now. I know that no amount of locks on the doors, chairs at the glass, or rifles by the bed will change the fact that we’re defenseless in our sleep.

The boy is going to make it, he’s going to survive.

This news told to me again and again does nothing to rid the image I see every night of him left for dead on the floor of his parents’ bedroom—wide-eyed in his struggle to keep the life from leaking out of him between his fingers.

My mother turns out the light, my sister squeaks around on the air mattress, fidgeting to get comfortable.

My father settles on his side, settling in for some raucous snoring.

In the dark, my eyes snap open. This is when he comes, just as he would much later in life, for my father—that malaka in the guise of a black ski mask and gloves. I’m the only one in the family who is still spooked by the bogeyman.