A Credible Threat

by Janet Dawson

  “Tell me about Martin’s father.”

  “What’s to tell?” She got up from the sofa and moved restlessly around the room, stopping at the double windows on the side wall. She stared through the glass, not really seeing the sunny spring afternoon. Then she turned to face me. “He’s Haitian. I met him at U.C. Not all Haitian immigrants are poor boat people. His family is rich and light-skinned. They’re the ones who’ve spent the last fifty years sucking up to the Duvaliers and oppressing the poor boat people. I think they’re living a luxurious exile in Paris. If I had to describe Etienne, I’d say he is Eurotrash. Just a few shades darker than the usual.”

  “So he was a student.”

  “Until he got bored with it.”

  “Did you love him?”

  Sasha laughed, but there was little humor in the sound. Bitterness, definitely, tinged with regret. “I prefer to think of it as being infatuated with him. Maybe it was the accent or his elegant looks. It certainly wasn’t his politics. He was such a charming reactionary, so sure of his place in the world. He liked American people of color, but he thought the Haitian peasants were one step above mules. So much cattle to be controlled by the ruling class.”

  She returned to the sofa and sat, head back, her profile highlighted by the sun streaming in the front window. “Martin wasn’t supposed to be born. He was an accident, but I love him dearly. So did my parents.”

  “Does he look like his father?” I asked.

  “A little bit. Not enough to make me feel uncomfortable. He’s dark, like me. Actually, he looks a lot like my grandfather on my mother’s side.” She gathered her legs under her and sat cross-legged on the upholstered cushions of the sofa. “From what you say, I’d better have a talk with Martin’s teacher and principal. About these kids who are harassing him. Kids can be so damned cruel.”

  “Maybe you’d better ask Martin first,” I said. “He might not want you to get involved.”

  “If they were kids his own age, perhaps I wouldn’t. But you said several of them were older than he is. And much bigger. He’s small for his age.”

  She looked over my shoulder and smiled. I turned my head and saw Martin standing in the doorway leading to the back of their quarters. “Mama, you better come eat your cookie, or Nelson’s gonna.”

  “Oh, no.” Sasha laughed as she stood up. “He wouldn’t dare.”

  “Yes, he would,” Martin assured her. “Nelson’s hungry all the time.”

  “It seems I’d best go defend my cookie,” she told me.

  “From what I’ve seen of Nelson, that sounds like a good idea.” I got to my feet. “You’ve taken quite a risk, haven’t you? Opening your house to these roomers.”

  “I prefer to think of it as a leap of faith,” she said, smiling. “I haven’t had any problems. Until now.”

  I followed Sasha and Martin back to the kitchen. Three of the housemates were grouped around the big table, Nelson’s hands swooping toward the white bakery sack as Ben blocked one arm. Vicki swatted Nelson’s other arm and chuckled. Emily was at the counter, making another pot of coffee.

  “All right,” Sasha said in a firm no-nonsense mother voice as she stood with her hands on her hips. A smile twitched her full lips. “What’s this I heard about a stated intent to consume my cookie? In the legal biz we call that conversion.”

  The phone hanging on the wall next to the refrigerator rang. Sasha reached for it with her right hand and held it to her ear. “Hello.”

  Then her face froze. The smile congealed into a frown. Without a word she handed me the receiver.

  Seven

  NOW HE WAS TALKING.

  The anonymous caller was definitely a man. An adult voice, not that of a child. Even though I’d heard children using those words, this was not one of the young hooligans who had been tormenting Martin. There was laughter amid the words, but it was ugly and menacing, as threatening as the words themselves.

  I tried to disassociate myself from the chill I felt at hearing this invective, from the urge to respond with words of my own or by banging the receiver back in its cradle. I’d had anonymous phone calls before. Who hadn’t? There had probably been crank calls ever since the invention of the telephone. Receiving one always filled me with a sense of outrage, violation, invasion. The same emotions I felt now, even though this wasn’t my phone and the venom wasn’t directed at me. Coming as it did on the heels of the destroyed plants, this call represented yet another escalation of hostilities.

  Concentrate on the voice, I ordered myself, wishing I had a tape recorder. I moved the receiver quickly from my right ear to my left, reaching for a pencil and a pad of paper from the plastic holder affixed to the side of the refrigerator. I forced myself to listen, asking myself questions.

  Is there anything identifiable about this voice, such as range, tone, timbre? A speech impediment? Is there any background noise that would give a clue as to the caller’s location? Any static that might mark the use of a cellular phone? And what exactly was he saying? Did it have a pattern, substance, meaning?

  The man at the other end of the phone must have been used to the house’s residents hanging up on him. He didn’t expect to be listened to, at least not as long as I held the receiver. Finally, with a crescendo of obscenities, he hung up. I stood with the phone against my right ear until I heard a dial tone. Then I slowly moved the receiver to the cradle.

  I looked at the words I’d scrawled on the pad of paper, my own notes and the ugly epithets the voice had spewed forth, about black people, Hispanics, Jews, women, and gays. He’d covered most of the hot-button hate speech bases, presumably with a wide enough spread to encompass all the residents of the Garber Street house. His voice was somewhere between tenor and bass, sounding like thousands of other men. There was no sibilance, no discernible accent. Not much background noise either. The caller could have been shut up in a room or a phone booth. Or in a car, with a cellular phone. I’d heard just a bit of static, the kind I’d heard before when people called me from cars.

  These days, millions of people had cellular phones. So did I, a Christmas gift from my father. However, I didn’t much care for the possibility that the harasser had one of the gadgets. That meant the creep could be parked outside on Garber Street, on the curb right in front of this house, getting his jollies while he terrorized the occupants.

  I looked up from the paper at the assembled housemates.

  “He’s never talked before,” Sasha whispered.

  “What did he say?” Ben scowled and moved toward me for a look at the notepad. His frown deepened as he read what I’d written.

  Nelson got up and looked over Ben’s shoulder. “Articulate, isn’t he? Should we sit up all night with baseball bats?”

  “I don’t think baseball bats would do the job.” I surveyed the housemates, noting the look of uncomprehending alarm on Martin’s face as the little boy picked up on the mood of the grown-ups. He moved closer to Sasha and crowded against her hip, seeking comfort in his mother’s touch. “First thing you do is call that Berkeley cop, the one who was here yesterday. Tell him what time you received the call and ask him to contact the phone company, to see if the tap picked up the location of the call. Make sure the doors are locked all the time. You’ve got to keep up your guard. This guy sounds dangerous.”

  “This is so frustrating,” Sasha said, suddenly furious. “There’s nothing to go on. It’s like grasping at shadows.”

  “Yes, it is. But you’ve given me some shadows to investigate. Such as this guy Macauley who’s been hassling Vicki and Emily because neither of them will go out with him.”

  Vicki nodded, looking preoccupied. I didn’t know whether she was thinking of this morning’s encounter with Ted Macauley in the library or debating whether to tell her father the Oakland cop. We both knew how Sid would react.

  I looked at Sasha. Since the caller didn’t seem to have an accent, that presumably ruled out her ex-lover, Etienne, Martin’s father. Still... I shook my head and moved o
n.

  “I know Rachel’s out of town this weekend,” I said. “She’ll have to wait till Monday. Tell me where I can find Marisol.”

  * * *

  The corner of Fruitvale Avenue and East Fourteenth Street is one of the busiest intersections in what is known as East Oakland. As I stood waiting for the light to change I heard a BART train go by on the elevated tracks two blocks to my right and glanced that way, seeing the end of the silvery line of cars as the train slowed on its approach to the Fruitvale BART station. Just beyond that a freight train on the tracks that paralleled San Leandro Street had traffic stopped, temporarily blocking access to Interstate 880, the freeway all the locals call the Nimitz.

  The light changed and the walk signal flashed. I stepped off the curb and joined the pedestrians in the crosswalk. Many of the people around me were Hispanic, and the signs in the windows of the shops reflected the demographics of the neighborhood. This part of Oakland frequently spoke Spanish first and English second, shopped in the many bodegas that lined the neighborhood’s business section, and ate at the tacquerias that drew people from all over the East Bay to sample the authentic Mexican cuisine.

  On the other side of Fraitvale I turned left, sidestepping a group of teenagers holding signs advertising their high school fund-raiser car wash at a nearby vacant lot. My destination was Farnam Street, one block up. It paralleled East Fourteenth for a couple of blocks, and the counseling center where Marisol volunteered was in the middle of the first block. It was a plain storefront with glass windows that were partially obscured by plain unpainted shutters. A sign over the entrance bore words in Spanish and English. LAS HERMANAS, I read. THE SISTERS.

  I opened the door and walked inside, my shoes whispering across linoleum that had once been white but was now faded to gray, speckled with bits of color that looked like spent confetti, forgotten and now adhering to the floor. The front part of the center was open, with the rest of the long narrow space walled off with framing and Sheetrock that looked a good deal newer than the building itself. Directly in front of me a hallway led to the rear of the building, with doors at intervals down this passage, most of them closed, from what I could see.

  To my left I saw an old wooden office desk decorated with a phone and a bouquet of colorful freesias, their spicy scent tickling my nose. An older woman sat behind the desk, presiding over a mug of coffee and a stack of pamphlets. She appraised me carefully. I didn’t look like I belonged here. But neither did she. Her short gray-blond hair didn’t go with the neighborhood clientele and she wore laugh lines on her wrinkled face, instead of makeup. She was wearing a flowered peasant blouse, and I was willing to bet that behind the desk the rest of her was clad in a long skirt and Birkenstocks.

  “May I help you?” she offered tentatively.

  “I’m looking for Marisol Gallegos.”

  “Marisol isn’t available right now.” She gestured toward a long bench against the opposite wall. It looked as though it had spent its previous life as a church pew. An older woman huddled by herself at one end, head down as her hands busied themselves with some needlework. “Would you care to wait? There’s coffee over there.”

  In the corner next to the bench a rickety-looking table held one of those institutional-sized stainless steel coffee makers and a mismatched collection of mugs and cups. I thought about it, then decided against it. After drinking Peet’s finest earlier at the Garber Street house, I didn’t want to chance my taste buds on coffee that had no doubt come from a can.

  I took a seat at the unoccupied end of the bench and surreptitiously examined my companion. She appeared to have a short sturdy figure, clad in a plain blue house-dress and a black cardigan sweater. She was in her fifties, I guessed, with black hair, copper skin, and a profile one might see in a museum display of pre-Columbian art. She held a small round frame in her left hand as the fingers of her right hand punched a needle back and forth through the snowy white material stretched tightly in the frame. Bright red embroidery floss moved in the wake of the needle, sketching some intricate design.

  She saw me watching her and glared at me, eyes full of affront at this intrusion. I looked away as the phone rang. The woman at the desk picked it up, answering, “Las Hermanas.” She listened, then spoke again in Spanish, with the accent of someone at ease in the language.

  I heard voices echoing in the hallway leading to the back and turned to look in that direction. Marisol and another woman appeared at the head of the passage. The woman could have been anywhere between twenty-five and thirty-five. She was visibly pregnant, her high round belly pushing against the oversize shirt she wore over her brown maternity slacks. She looked enough like the woman on the bench for me to guess that they were mother and daughter, but the younger woman had two features the older lacked. Her left eye was discolored with a fading bruise and she had a cut on her lip.

  Marisol walked a few steps behind the other woman. She was doing all the talking, in quick and crackling Spanish. I could only pick up a few words here and there, enough to guess that Marisol was exhorting the other woman to do something she wasn’t planning to do. The pregnant woman jerked her head toward the woman who sat on the bench. Now my companion put away her embroidery, tucking the frame into a big canvas purse at her side. She got to her feet as the pregnant woman put her hand on Marisol’s arm, stopping Marisol’s flow of words. She said something in a low voice, then she and the older woman moved away, toward the door.

  As Marisol watched them go through the door to the sidewalk outside, she threw up her hands and spat out some Spanish epithets I understood all too well.

  The receptionist sighed and stood up. “I need to go to the bathroom, Marisol. Would you listen for the phone?” Marisol gave a curt nod and the receptionist moved away from the desk, her long skirt swirling around her legs and the sandals on her feet I was right. Birkenstocks.

  “She wouldn’t take your advice,” I said as I stood up.

  “She won’t take anyone’s advice.” Marisol radiated anger and frustration. “He beats her up, she goes to her mother’s. She comes here to talk to one of the counselors. All the time she’s at her mother’s, he’s oh-so-sweet and apologetic. He pleads with her to give him another chance. Then she decides it must be her fault because she hasn’t been a good wife. So she goes back to him, and a few months later he beats the shit out of her again.” She shook her head, as if trying to dispel the bitterness of her words. “One of these days he’s going to kill her.”

  “You’ve been there, haven’t you?”

  Marisol folded her hands across her chest and narrowed her wary brown eyes. Then she favored me with a tight reluctant smile. “How did you know?”

  “It was a good guess,” I said. “We need to talk.”

  Eight

  WHEN THE RECEPTIONIST RETURNED FROM THE bathroom, Marisol helped herself to a mug of coffee from the urn in the corner. Then she motioned me to follow her through the doorway, to one of the cubicles that had been constructed at the rear of the storefront.

  It was a stark windowless square, one wall enlivened by a poster, its bright colors and lettering advertising Oakland’s Festival at the Lake, held in June at Lake Merritt. The desk was a twin of the one the receptionist was using, scarred brown wood decorated with nicks and dings. It, and the swivel office chair, looked as though they were donations or had recently spent time in a surplus furniture store.

  There were a couple of other chairs in the room. One was the hard plastic kind with the seat supposedly molded to fit the human posterior. Whose posterior? I wondered. Not mine. Since I’d never found them comfortable on my rear end, I sat down in the other chair, a plain wood ladder-back with a thin pad on the seat. It looked like a refugee from someone’s dining room.

  Marisol set the mug on the desk and grabbed the arm of the swivel chair. It moved on casters across the dingy linoleum floor as she positioned it so it was facing me. She sat down, slumped in her blue jeans and sweater, and crossed one leg over the other. “What
do you want?”

  I wanted to talk about Marisol. Maybe this counseling center environment would loosen her tongue. Confession is good for the soul, and all that. Provided I could push the right buttons.

  “Have you had any more trouble?” I asked. “With the angry husband you told me about?”

  She shook her head. “No. He seems to have backed off for now.”

  I looked at her, with her small regular features and the coil of dark hair at the nape of her neck. Vicki had told me that Marisol was a junior at U. C. That meant she was in her early twenties at most.

  “You’re young,” I said, “to have been in an abusive relationship.”

  “Get real,” Marisol scoffed. “It happens all the time. As soon as the kids hit puberty. Elementary school these days.” She reached for her coffee, drank a mouthful, and grimaced, confirming my theory about the quality of the brew. “Mostly it starts in junior high. I’ve seen it. Girls just barely into puberty. They think they’re women because they’ve started their periods. They think they have to have boyfriends, because all their friends do.”

  Her brown eyes, usually so wary, took on a different cast, softened, became vulnerable. She looked as though she were remembering.

  I remembered those days too. My brother once described them as the days of hormones and acne. I felt gawky and awkward because I was taller than most of the kids in my class. My hair wouldn’t behave, I had spots on my face, I was unsure of myself. And more than anything in the world I wanted one of those coltish adolescent males to pay attention to me. I pushed away the thought of the girl I once was and focused on Marisol, whose experiences were more recent than mine.