Tomb of the Unknown Racist

by Blanche Mccrary Boyd

  The car following me wasn’t Furman’s, so I punched #1 on my phone to make sure I was okay. Furman said the man in the car was Special Agent Brownell. Then I pulled onto the side of the highway again to call Blake. The unknown car pulled over ahead of me, and I watched the back of this stranger’s head while Blake and I talked. Blake said that Claudia was going to be all right but would stay in the hospital for a few days of observation. “She seems pretty excited by what happened, your protégée.”

  “How did they find her?”

  “My guess is she stopped in one too many places asking for help to find the Elohim City compound. Somebody gave her bad directions and put the word out that she was poking around. Hatred of Jews is very big with these Christian Identity folks. Maybe there aren’t enough Natives or black people around here to hate.”

  “Are you doing okay? You sound like you aren’t.”

  “I’ll be glad when this is over. Claudia gave excellent descriptions. These were young, inexperienced people, and we’ll get them. The man punched Claudia once, and she went right down. We think the woman did the carving because it was so hesitant. Claudia didn’t even need stitches. I think she was hoping for scars.”

  At the prison, Sister Irene sat erect in her metal chair behind the metal desk in her small, windowless office. She wore her dowdy blue habit, and her hair was flat and severe. Only her eyes signaled the quality that drew so many toward her. I told her what had happened to Claudia, and she said, “You like this young woman very much, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I like her, but not like that. I’m just the fairy godmother of her writing career.”

  “And you are playing that role because?”

  “I don’t know, because people helped me. Because I wouldn’t even be alive without all the help I’ve had.”

  Her cover broke. “Ha,” she said. “Ha ha ha!” Then her laughter became real and gay.

  “What’s going on, Sister? You seem different.”

  “We’ll talk tonight. Ruby is the one who is different.”

  •

  Ruby’s gaze was open, peaceful, shining. “I am so grateful that you came to see me again.” We were sitting in the general visiting area of the prison, a low-ceilinged room with a scuffed, clean linoleum floor. Regular hours wouldn’t begin for another ten minutes, so the room was unoccupied, except for a guard at the locked door. There was a single window, high and dark, where another guard could observe the room.

  “Ruby, I’m still so angry with you,” I said. “I can’t figure out how to forgive you. I thought I knew how, but I don’t.”

  “Please don’t carry anger like that in your heart,” she said. “It will harm you, Aunt Ellen, and I’m not worth it.” She reached one hand tentatively across the gray metal table, but I didn’t take it. Her nails were bitten to the quick, her thumbnail distorted and dark with dried blood.

  “And I’ll never be able to forgive my brother,” I said. “Maybe I can put it behind me, but forgiveness isn’t even part of the goal.”

  Her other hand held a Bible against her breast, this one bound in pebbly white leather that was worn and zippered shut. “I doubt my father has forgiven himself,” she said, “so when you find him, you will have that in common.”

  “What’s happened to you, Ruby?”

  “Sister Irene has been helping me.”

  I studied her face, so much like mine. There seemed to be a faint radiance around her now, and I felt its warmth.

  “This was Sister Irene’s personal Bible, Aunt Ellen, from when she was a little girl. Let me show you.” She unzipped the Bible, revealing thin, nearly translucent pages with tiny smudged print. In the back pages for recording births and deaths, someone had written, in a child’s hand, Callie died, Nov 7, 1955. “Callie was Sister Irene’s younger sister. She was eleven years old when she died of a brain tumor. Sister Irene wants me to live.”

  I put my index finger on the penciled words but didn’t speak.

  “Sister Irene says I can be of great use here at the prison,” Ruby continued. “That I can be an inspiration for those who can’t forgive themselves. So when you find my father, Aunt Ellen, please tell him to let go of all the bad things he has done. Let go of the broom handle and of me. Tell him that we are all born forgiven.”

  “I’m so glad you believe that, Ruby, and I wish I did. But let me understand something. Are you thinking that you are one of the bad things my brother has done? That you are like the broom handle?”

  She spoke so quietly I barely heard her. “I understand that I am forgiven, Aunt Ellen, but I still don’t want to live. Sister Irene says that will come too, if I just keep holding on.”

  I could not look at her. “Does your mother come to see you? Does anyone come besides me?”

  “She came twice, but I’ve asked her not to come anymore. She’s had enough pain.”

  I thought I might cry, but I didn’t. The visiting room was as bleak as a hospital. I stood up and turned my back, nearly staggering, because something was happening to me. I felt light and heavy, warm and cold, and the motes of dust in the air were changing to gold flakes while I watched. When I turned to face her, what passed between us was as real as the table, the white pebbled Bible and the gold flakes, and my words seemed to come from somewhere else. “I forgive you too,” I said.

  10

  I stumbled out to my car without speaking again to Sister Irene. The guard at the gate needed to take my pass, so I left the complex slowly, but once I found the highway I roared back toward Sister Irene’s house with my FBI caretaker flying dutifully behind me.

  In the yard, I waved him away and raced up the stairs to the apartment over the garage, where Jesus hung, half formed.

  On the fragrant prayer bench, I dropped to my knees. “You fucker,” I cried, “people are responsible for what they do. They have to be. Aren’t we?”

  But waves of what felt like release began to pour over me, and for the next several hours I seemed to be asleep yet conscious. Wordless puzzles were flying together, the pieces soldered so well that even the seams were fading. Not since my weekend with Rama had I felt so blessed, and again I saw the edges of the world, the large reddish sandstones on the rim of time, before something thick as honey began flowing through me and I fell deeply asleep.

  An explosion woke me. It took several seconds to get oriented and realize I was face-to-face on the bed in the dark with the one-eyed cat named Sweetie. Sweetie had climbed the tree to the second-floor window and kamikaze-leapt straight into the glass. She was stinking and snarling and bleeding from several cuts. I picked up a pillow and tried to swat her with it, but she launched herself at me, latching on to my left forearm with her teeth. I hit her so hard with my other fist that she ran in circles several times on the bed, maybe from pain, maybe from the relief that someone had finally knocked some sense into her.

  My arm hurt like hell and began to bleed from the bluish-white punctures. I rolled calmly off the bed, went to the door, and opened it. “Okay, Sweetie,” I said. “Are we done now?”

  With clumsy dignity, she walked out of the door and down the steps, and I followed.

  My keeper had turned on the headlights of his car, and I stopped by his window as he rolled it down. He was young and stern and earnest. “I’ll bet you thought being an FBI agent would be a lot more exciting than this. Here’s the current situation: I’ve been bitten by a cat with a bad attitude. That’s her sulking over there. I’m going into Sister Irene’s house now to get my arm cleaned up, and I’ll probably sleep over there too.”

  Sister Irene opened the door before I could even knock. She was wearing a bright yellow housecoat, and polka-dotted underpants were wrapped around her head. The cat and I were standing side by side. “My mother does her hair like that too,” I said.

  Sister Irene cleaned and disinfected my wound, and she explained to Sweetie that she would have to stay outside because of her unpleasant odor. Then she said to me, “I told you Sweetie was a reasonable cat, on
ce she gets your attention. You’ll need a tetanus shot if you haven’t had one recently. Cat bites can develop into nasty infections, so take care of this.” She rinsed the punctures once more, slathered them with antibiotic cream, and wrapped my arm with gauze. Then she got a blanket for me to sleep on her sofa.

  “I’ve already been in bed all afternoon and evening,” I told her. “I’ve been sleeping for hours.”

  “Well, I hope you can sleep some more, because I am dog-tired.” She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek, and I smelled her face cream.

  “I figured out what it is about your eyes,” I said. “It’s forgiveness.”

  My arm throbbed in the dark.

  I wish I could say I had a premonition of what was to come next, but I did not.

  11

  Ruby ate her Bible. Lying silently on her cot, hidden under a blanket in the semi-dark cell, she tore off page after page, chewing and swallowing. The paper was so thin that she got all the way through Deuteronomy before her throat dried out enough to choke her. It must have been difficult to stay prone, because the body will fight for its own survival. That’s why I could never reach terminal velocity in skydiving. My arm would not wait for fifteen seconds but kept pulling the cord by itself. That’s why, when a drunk out in Sacramento tried to chop off his own head with an ax, he ducked at the last instant, losing part of his skull and frontal lobe. He died a few weeks later. He’s a legend in California AA.

  12

  I did not find my brother, he found me.

  I had gone into a Gallup grocery store for a twelve-pack of Cokes and more ice cream to stock the mini-fridge that had been moved to the Lana Turner room. Wally Furman’s man waited outside near the front entrance while I parsed flavors, stooping down to inspect the bottom shelf, paying little attention to my surroundings.

  “We heard about Ruby’s death,” Claude Dabley said from behind me.

  I stood up, clutching a pint of vanilla Häagen-Dazs, and tried to recover my composure. “What are you, some kind of fucking ghost? Don’t you realize an FBI agent is standing right outside the front door?”

  He handed me a cheap phone. “We’ll call you on this.”

  It was as simple as that. The phone dropped into my trout bag, and I decided not to tell Wally or Blake.

  13

  Blake returned quickly from Oklahoma, but Claudia stayed there to write. She was a minor news item herself now, so I texted this message: Go to meetings, Claudia. Go every day. Keep that sobriety blooming. When she tried to call me, I only texted: I’m glad you’re okay, but I need space right now.

  Ruby’s suicide was mildly newsworthy, so the press badgered me briefly. Estelle protected herself and my mother, but Del Mead showed up in Gallup, standing right in the lobby of the El Rancho. I emerged from the Lana Turner room and stood at the top of the curved stairway, talking down to him. “Sorry, it’s Claudia Friedman’s story now. But there are lots of other sources for you.”

  Mead did write the first national piece about Giang’s Albuquerque restaurant, because, unlike its decor, its cuisine was not at all ordinary. In the interview Giang talked to Mead in interlaced clichés, and Mead did not seem to grasp that he was being mocked. Santane had asked Del Mead for privacy, and, except for a picture of her walking into her salon, he left her alone. In the newspaper photo, she looked impassive, even tranquil, and she sounded that way when I called her once to discuss Ruby’s suicide. Ruby would be cremated, we decided, and I would take her ashes to South Carolina.

  It took four days of AA meetings, the last one sitting beside Nilda, for me to decide what to do about Dabley’s phone, which I had shut off as soon as he handed it to me.

  I reached out and touched Nilda’s turquoise bracelet, whispering. Could she arrange for a letter to be sent to me via her address? I promised I wouldn’t get her in any trouble, but I didn’t want the FBI folks who were following me to find out. I knew she’d seen them hanging around.

  Nilda gave me a long, appraising look with her calm eyes.

  I whispered, “I am my brother’s keeper.”

  Wordlessly she wrote down her last name and a box number right here in town.

  Deceiving Wally and Blake about Dabley, the cell phone still hidden in my trout bag, was surprisingly satisfying. From the pay phone in the Persimmon Street Clubhouse, I called Bertie’s Home for Funerals and spoke directly to Miss Manigault.

  “Miss Manigault, this is Ellen Burns, Ruby Redstone’s aunt and Estelle’s friend. Do you remember burying my little grandniece? Yes, I thought you would. Listen, I hate to put you to this kind of bother, Miss Manigault, but I do have a kind of emergency. I’m still out here in New Mexico with Ruby’s family, and I’m wondering if you could please call Estelle on her work number at the hospital and tell her that I need her to call me at a specific time on a certain number.” I turned Dabley’s phone on long enough to give her the number, then turned it back off. “Miss Manigault, I need for Estelle to call me at exactly ten tonight. It’s really important. And could you please ask her to call me from a pay phone? That’s kind of important too. Actually, it’s crucial. No, ma’am, I will not get her into any trouble. I swear it. I give you my word.”

  At 9:45 that night I dialed Wally and said I was going down to Dairy Queen for some ice cream. He sounded sleepy, so I didn’t know whether he’d have somebody follow me or not. Sitting in a booth with a chocolate ice cream Blizzard with pecans, caramel, Reese’s Pieces and too thick to drink through a straw, I stayed visibly occupied until just before ten, then walked into the bathroom. The phone rang just as I locked the door.

  “What is it?” Estelle said, her voice tight with alarm.

  “I only have a minute or two. I’m sorry to put you in another difficult situation, Estelle, but I may be in some real trouble now.”

  “Are you in danger?”

  “Listen, you don’t know anything about this part of my life, but in the early seventies I was a federal fugitive for a while. My girlfriend, the one who shot herself, she was the real fugitive. I just hid out with her for a few months. Do you remember when I showed you the drawer where my mother keeps all of my memorabilia? My baby pictures and wedding pictures and her signed copy of Royce’s novel?”

  “What is it you want me to do, Ellen?”

  “There’s a big black envelope where she stores the stuff that she can’t decide whether to keep. In that black envelope is, well … it’s the paperwork from when she checked me out of a mental hospital in Dallas. She has the papers for my alias when I was underground. She has the birth certificate, an old driver’s license, and a bunch of other stuff with that name.”

  “I hope you’re kidding about this.”

  When I didn’t answer she said, “What was your alias?”

  “Evelyn Roach.”

  “Oh, my God, what am I supposed to say?”

  “That you’ll do it, please. That you’ll overnight it to me care of Nilda Jamake, Box 540, Gallup. I don’t know if this will work, Estelle, but I’ve got to give it a try.”

  When she didn’t reply, I said, “How’s Momma?”

  “Not eating much. Getting frail. She’s salty but frail.”

  “I swore to Miss Manigault you wouldn’t get in any trouble, so you know that I mean it.”

  She wrote down the address, and we quickly got off the phone.

  The next day, I went to see Santane while my escort waited for me, parked in the heat outside her shop with his air conditioner running. After some initial resistance, Santane provided me with a human hair wig, streaked blond and set in a French twist, that a breast cancer client had donated to the shop. “Santane, this is amusing for reasons I can’t fully explain at the moment,” I said as I tried it on. “But I had a wig like this in college. All the women in my family did. My sister called us ‘The French Twist Gang.’ Our wigs were dark, though, and they were matched to our real hair.”

  She did not smile. “You know he might be even more dangerous.”

  14<
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  My disappearance was not all that difficult to manage. The FBI was trying to protect me and locate my brother, and the idea that I might simply vanish through my own agency was not anticipated. Within two days, I had accumulated several thousand dollars in wired cash, bought a used car that had been dropped off in the El Rancho parking lot with the keys hidden in the wheel well, and even managed to get a driver’s license for Evelyn Roach with her birth certificate by claiming I needed to go to Bocca to speak with the priest at the church Ruby had attended. The priest wasn’t around, but in Bocca I also bought a flowered dress, a bra, a flowery purse, cat-eye sunglasses, and women’s sandals. When I left the El Rancho early the next morning carrying my mother’s purple-flowered suitcase, I tried to walk more like a woman. My follower did not even recognize me.

  My instinct to head north had been right. When I turned on the phone, it rang within ten minutes. A sweet-sounding woman who said her name was Mary directed me to a small town in eastern Idaho in the foothills of the Rockies. I stopped in Boise to have dinner at a Country Crock restaurant, and before I left, I changed back into my regular clothes in the bathroom. I kept the wig on so the waitress, a heavyset white woman, would still recognize me. “I’ve got to drive all night,” I said by way of explaining the drastic change in my appearance. “I wanted to get more comfortable. Those bras, they just drive me crazy.”

  “Oh, honey, if I didn’t wear one, my boobs would reach my knees. I love your glasses.”

  The cat sunglasses were hanging out of the pocket of my shirt. I handed them to her—“You take them”—and I was still smiling when I got back on the road and pulled off the wig.

  The dealer’s plates were still on the car, which worried me, but there was nothing to do about it now, so I traveled off the interstate highways as much as I could.