Mexican Hooker #1

by Carmen Aguirre

  No longer soaring, my spirit plummeted back to terra firma, a bird shot by a hunter, back through the canopy of the rainforest trees, landing with a resounding crash in my split-open, hollowed-out carcass of a limp body. I jumped a foot off the ground and my mouth emitted a shout, like one sometimes does when about to fall into a deep sleep. But where was he? Where? Impossible to know if he was lying next to me now, or standing, or tearing through the woods, clothes back on, gun in his jacket, leaving us behind. There was a ringing so loud I feared my eardrums would explode, and then, two feet away, Macarena’s weeping.

  Every seat, wall, and inch of the floor was taken, the women and girls with their supporters talking in hushed tones or staring into space. We stayed by the door, discussing this third chapter of the thread of our lives entitled Rape. The first had been the rape itself, the second the aftermath, his being caught the third. The key question was, how could we identify him if we’d never seen him? Throughout the three-hour ordeal, Macarena and I had either faced forward while he held the gun to the back of my head or lain face down while he held the gun to our lower backs, or I had had my head covered with my own shirt during the rape itself.

  In the weeks after the rape, we had spent countless hours with two undercover detectives. They had taken us to a hypnotist to see if we could get a description. The sessions revealed that I had caught a glimpse of the rapist’s face while I tied the shirt around my head, the look lasting only a millisecond. The image was stored in my subconscious mind, they explained. Once I’d been able to provide my hypnosis-induced description, the detectives had taken us to soccer games to see if we might see someone there who looked like the rapist, had us pore over twenty-five hundred mug shots at the police station and retrace step-by-possible-step in the forest, and had gone back to different parts of our account in order to look for a new angle every time—anything that might lead to the Paper Bag Rapist, who at that time continued to terrorize the city, always attacking groups of two or three, always getting the victims to cover their heads with a piece of their own clothing or a paper bag. During the hypnosis, a clear picture of his hand and then his face had surfaced, a silent ship materializing through the fog. The hypnotist, the best in the business, had swung a crystal back and forth in his Gastown loft while I sat on a leather chair, feet resting on a tiger skin, trying to divert my eyes from a life-sized black-and-white picture that hung behind him. In it, he was naked on a Santorini beach, a lotus flower held up to his privates.

  In my suppressed memory, the rapist’s hand was white, freckled, and covered with reddish hair. The face was white, the hair brownish red, and there was a moustache. He was in his thirties, about six feet tall, and had a medium build. He looked like half the white men in Vancouver.

  I stood at a window and looked at the lineup. We had waited for two hours, watching the women and girls emerge, the colour drained from their faces, whispering to their parents, husbands, and children in shaky voices. We’d been the lone group left sitting in the emptied-out waiting room, the only evidence of the victims’ presence their fingerprints on the seats and vending machines. The very last to go in, I now faced twelve men, each with a number pinned to his chest. They wore the exact same attire: jeans, a white T-shirt, and bare feet. They were medium-built, six-feet-tall white men in their thirties with light-brown hair and moustaches. It was a hopeless situation. Holding the pencil to the sheet of paper I’d been given, I was at a total loss.

  Each man, starting with Number One, walked up to the mirrored window he could not see through, stood about three feet away, and stared right at me. A male voice barked out orders in a drill-sergeant timbre. At each order, the man would turn to the left, then to the right, and then present his back to me. I studied each face, each body, each set of eyes with as much objectivity as I could muster, trying to decipher any hint of a clue.

  I had thrown in the towel when Number Twelve arrived at the window. Up until then I had been grounded, present, focused with every filament of my being on the task at hand. One could even say I was relaxed. Number Twelve changed all that. From the second he reached me, goosebumps erupted on my skin, the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end, my knees shook, and my stomach got queasy. Grinding his jaw, his palms formed fists, then opened, formed fists, then opened. My heart galloped at top speed, cold sweat covered my body. I wrote 12 on my piece of paper. I wanted to smell him, though. Sick as that would make me, if I could smell him, I would be one hundred percent sure. I wondered why they didn’t make them talk, for surely if he spoke, I would recognize his voice.

  He walked away and joined the lineup again. I handed my sheet to the cop outside and joined Macarena, chain-smoking with the others in the waiting room.

  “Give me one of those,” I said, demanding a cigarette.

  After lighting up my du Maurier, I asked, “What number did you write down?”

  “Ten.”

  “Oh.” I exhaled, my stomach sinking. “I wrote down twelve.”

  “I wrote down the one with the hands that kept making fists.”

  “That’s the one I wrote down. How did you know it was him?”

  “Gut instinct.”

  She exhaled through her nostrils, a tremor in her hand.

  Years later I’d learn that between each victim they would change the numbers on the men’s chests.

  On the way back home that day, a small smile graced my lips. They’d got him. They had finally got him. I didn’t wish him dead. I wished him cured. I didn’t know then that he would be diagnosed as a psychopath, a condition for which there is apparently no cure.

  A month later, Mami appeared at my school and pulled me out of my grade twelve class. Holding the Province newspaper, she took me to a nearby café and unrolled it. On the front page was a photograph of Number Twelve. Below it, a list of victims. Not by name, by location and date. Our attack was there: University Endowment Lands, April 26, 1981.

  On that day in 1985, the Province newspaper proclaimed that the Paper Bag Rapist had been caught. His name figured prominently on the front page: John Horace Oughton. My mother and I sat in stunned silence. I could breathe easy now. For the four years he’d been at large, I’d walked around Vancouver wondering if he was watching me, sat on buses asking myself if the man next to me was him, made my way home with my heart in my mouth when I’d heard sirens in the neighbourhood, distressed that my family might be dead at his hands, for I had defied his orders and told about the rape. Macarena and I had told in the immediate aftermath.

  One morning in May 1995, my mother phoned me. I was at my computer writing on deadline for Chile Con Carne, set to receive its world premiere that fall.

  “Go get the Vancouver Sun,” she instructed.

  When I did, I saw on its front page a story regarding John Horace Oughton. One of his victims was calling on fellow survivors to join her at his upcoming parole hearing. In the extensive interview, she explained that she’d been going to all his hearings, which happened every two years, as mandated by Canadian law. She had always wondered why she was the only victim there, and had come to realize that most victims didn’t know he was eligible for parole, or that we were allowed to attend his hearings. I decided on the spot that I would go.

  In the fourteen years since I’d been raped, I had only seen him through the window at the lineup, though a part of me still wondered if it was really him. During the trial in 1986, there had only been enough evidence for eighteen victims to bring their cases forward. They were the ones who had seen him during the attack and could thus point him out from the witness stand. In the end, he had been convicted on fourteen counts of rape and assault. Bob, still very close to me, had collected all the newspaper clippings covering the sensational case and mailed them to me in Neuquén, when I was still with Alejandro and working for the underground.

  Sent in a large manila envelope, a note accompanied the cut-outs:

  “Carmencita, I don’t know if you’re interested in looking at these. You may just want to
burn them. But here they are if you want to read. I love you.”

  I had devoured all the articles, featuring titillating headlines such as PAPER BAG RAPIST ADMITS HE RAPED 180 CHILDREN, alongside a mug shot of John Horace Oughton, and THE CHAMELEON: THREE FACES OF J.H.O.; HOW THE PAPER BAG RAPIST CHANGED HIS APPEARANCE, with a sketch of him. He’d begun using a paper bag or a piece of the victim’s clothing as a blindfold once he’d refined his procedure to make sure his face was never seen, and before he used a gun, he’d lured his victims with a story about a lost puppy. At the beginning of his eight-year reign of terror, in the late 1970s, he’d dressed as a police officer or letter carrier, and had dyed his hair on a regular basis, changing his facial hair as well. I read that two of the victims at the trial were boys. I pored over the stories at my kitchen table, going numb, shaking my head at the irony of ironies: My mother and Bob had sent Ale and me back to Canada in 1980 in order to keep us safe from the perils of life in the underground in Bolivia. Within nine months of our return, I’d been raped.

  “Okay, so here’s what’s gonna happen. I just had a really interesting chat with your cousin Carmen here. And she told me she wants to see you die. She wants to see me chop you up into pieces with an axe and bury you in the forest here where your parents will never find you. Okay, so I’m gonna be honest with you. Your cousin brought you here on purpose. She’s a hooker, you know. Bet ya didn’t know that, Macarena. Well, she is. She’s a hooker, and she made a date with me here in the woods. That’s why she brought you here, that’s why she was smoking with you. This is all on purpose. And she did it ’cause she wants to see you die. She just told me that, whispered it in my ear. She whispered, ‘Kill my cousin. In fact, chop her up.’ And then she laughed.”

  Macarena’s huge brown eyes darted towards me. I met her gaze with mine and saw terror in hers. Terror and that look of falling into a void when you think you’ve been betrayed, when the rug has been pulled out from under your feet. She believed him. He’d been psychologically torturing us for hours and he’d broken her, this twelve-year-old girl who looked nine. The crux was here, and it had broken the back of her sanity. He’d spent the afternoon wondering out loud what he was going to do to us, and had several times decided to abandon us, walking away, twigs cracking under his feet. When he’d done that, we’d waited for eternal moments before starting to get up. Then he’d pushed us down onto the forest floor again, placed the gun to the backs of our heads, and asked:

  “Whatchu doin’? Tryin’ to run away from me? Why? Dontchu like me? I don’t like ingrates. I don’t like brats. I don’t like being left, you fuckin’ little cunts.”

  Now I knew the end was near.

  “So. Your cousin’s such a fuckin’ little liar that now she doesn’t want to make love to me, even though that’s what I’m paying her for. ’Cause she’s a hooker and she gets paid for what she does. Dontchu, Carmen? I’m paying her good money, and now the slutty little brat’s changed her mind. She’d rather see you die than hold up her end of the bargain. But here’s what we’re gonna do. I’m a good, understanding guy. So I’m gonna give her one more chance. I’m gonna give her ten more seconds to decide. I’m gonna count to ten and when I reach ten, it’ll be her last chance. Either she makes love to me or I chop you up into pieces.”

  It wasn’t the first time I’d been sexually assaulted. The first time had been on a bus sixteen months earlier, when I was twelve years old and eleven-year-old Ale was sleeping in the seat next to mine. Ale and I had arrived in Chile from Bolivia via rail, accompanying Trinidad, an MIR member who was on the central committee and on the most-wanted list in Chile. She’d crossed the border with us under an assumed identity, put us on a bus that would take us from Arica, the northernmost city, to Santiago, and waved her hand from the curb as the bus pulled out of the station and started the journey through the Atacama Desert and on to the capital, twenty-four hours away. The three drivers had been given strict orders to keep their eyes on us and to hand us over intact to my abuelita Carmen, waiting at the Santiago station. It was our first time back in Chile.

  In the middle of the night, I’d been woken up by one of the drivers. He was bald and in his forties. One hand between my legs, the other on my budding new breast, he’d forced his tongue into my mouth. Petrified, I’d swallowed the vomit that came up and sat still as a statue as his fingers and tongue probed, my heart pounding out of control, his hands hurting me with their force until he stopped, begged for forgiveness, and retreated. I’d sat like a stone for the rest of the night, my sister’s deep breathing soothing me, my heart a withered prune, holding my breath as I kept my eye on the Southern Cone constellations, shining diamonds in the pitch-black sky, chest caved in, crotch and breast sore, the Southern Cross framed by the window pointing to my destiny, the city of my birth, the final destination, the return to the homeland that lived in every cell of my body, now marred by the stink of the bald man, the sour taste of his slug-like tongue in my mouth.

  The next day, he ignored me completely, avoiding any possible eye contact, and the other two drivers sat for breakfast with us, patted our heads, and offered us toothpicks and sticks of gum. Again, the irony was that Mami’s precious girls hadn’t fallen into the hands of the military that guarded the border or the secret police that pulled buses over in the middle of the night, but rather into the grip of a pedophile.

  I never told anyone about that assault, for I was convinced it was all my fault and did not wish to get into trouble. I also knew that it would break my abuelita’s heart. That twelfth year, 1979, I was learning a great deal about the adult world, where things were rarely what they seemed, where one plus one did not equal two, and where one needed to stay alert to find the hidden meaning behind words, offers, and behaviours. In La Paz, Bolivia, Ale and I had been given free admission to the Sunday matinees at the Miraflores cinema. The invitation had come from the ticket tearer, and I had quickly learned that in exchange for the complimentary tickets he wanted to grope me. He was in his twenties, I was twelve. When we arrived for Every Which Way But Loose, our first matinee, he placed his hand on my butt, squeezed, and pressed his erect penis against my thigh while Ale fetched the two “free” Fantas from the concession stand and salivated at the caramelized peanuts wrapped in Cellophane. We never returned.

  Unbeknownst to Ale, who labelled me a spoilsport, my mother, and Bob, it was because I was terrified of the ticket tearer in his tight jeans and mod boots, feathered black bangs falling into his eyes. I knew it was my fault, for failing to decipher the illicit meaning in the offer, for not understanding it was to be paid for with sex. The whole incident had left me with an upset stomach and a humongous knot in my throat, so tight it was painful to swallow, my sunken solar plexus a quivering, freshly hatched bird, surrounded by broken eggshell, wet and cold in the air of the ruthless planet Earth.

  Now here I sat at my kitchen table in Vancouver in 1995, at the age of twenty-seven, reading a newspaper with the words Paper Bag Rapist in the headline for the umpteenth time in my life. As far as my experience with pedophiles went, he took the cake. And now I would be able to see him. The parole hearing was at Mountain Institution, a medium-security jail in Agassiz, a small town in British Columbia’s Fraser Valley.

  I got up at the crack of dawn and drove the ninety minutes in silence, watching the sun come up over the mountain in front of me, golden raptors gliding over the fields. The jail, with its tower and guards, lodged in a narrow crevice of the lush valley, emerald on this late spring morning, came into view. When I pulled into the parking lot, there were news vans and reporters standing around, and groups of people waiting at the front doors. A lone bald eagle circled above. It was no surprise that he watched over me on this day, the day I would be in the same room as the man who’d invaded my most intimate spaces more than half a lifetime ago, and still inhabited them.

  NINE

  The Native reserve was so isolated that in the winter the sole way in or out was by train. When summer rolled around,
only those with halfway decent four-by-fours dared tackle the gravelly road that clung to the sides of this stretch of British Columbia’s Coast Mountains. Said highway could either send you rolling down into the raging river below or deliver you in one piece onto the pavement that would lead you to the nearest town. Provisions could be bought there, as well as bumper stickers proclaiming I Survived the ______ Crossing. On the rez, deer, the staple diet, were hunted and frozen for winter meals, and the houses were nestled deep in the woods, connected by dirt lanes in such sorry states that it was the norm to spend half your day fixing flat tires.

  It was July 1996, a year after I attended Oughton’s parole hearing, and I was to spend a week facilitating a Theatre of the Oppressed workshop for the community’s youth. My contract stated that five days later, three short plays based on the issues the workshop participants faced were to be presented at the rez hall for the five-hundred-strong community, including the chief and her family.

  The train paused in front of the band office at midday, just long enough for me to step off before it continued snaking its way along the shores of the turquoise glacial lake the rez sat on. Hossein, the social worker, an Iranian exile who as a teenager had fought the Shah in the 1978 revolution, whisked me away in the band van to my cabin, hidden in the woods about a ten-minute walk from the road.

  “I managed to wangle six kids. All boys. All fourteen years old. None of the girls went for it. One of them thinks I’m a creep because I made the Iranian mistake of trying to hug her once when she was crying. She’s the ringleader, so they’re boycotting anything I organize,” he explained.

  “Oh. Shit. What convinced the boys to come?”

  “The dance party after the performance. With the MuchMusic van driving through from Edmonton with the DJ and music videos. Free pop and junk food, too. If they don’t come to the workshop and put on the plays, party’s cancelled. The girls will kill them. The boys don’t want that, considering some of them are already engaged to be married to the girls.”