by Robert White
The western slope of Pennsylvania was crosshatched in brown and sienna as far down as Pittsburgh. The Saab/Fairchild 340 followed I-79 all the way down and banked from the sunset in a steep dive that took us east of the airport. I saw Brunot Island jutting against the Ohio’s current. High above the looping, silver ribbons of the Allegheny and Monongahela, one might even think well of nature and humanity; up close I could see the dingy churning where the rivers converged. There was still the landing.
The screech of tires finally enabled me to unclench my hands from the seat rests but the taste of bile reminded me how little my stomach appreciates flying anything, anywhere. My legs shook a little from the adrenalin finally beginning to dissipate, and I wondered for the thousandth time what Neanderthal ancestor preferred tall grass to the safety of high trees.
I found her in a rundown neighborhood across the Smithfield Street Bridge. Clusters of young black males sat on porches or stood between houses drinking Colt 45s. More homeless pushed wire shopping carts down street corners and lurked in vacant lots. Children on tricycles were dodging around a group of males who cut their eyes to my taxi and then went on with their business.
Business was obviously crack cocaine. One of the Big Wheel riders, a skinny boy riding in lazy figure eights about the older teens, was probably holding for them; another, about seven years old, on the perimeter of the action, seemingly sniffing the cold spring air, was acting lookout. Easy to spot who was running the show: one male in the center trailed by an orbit of kids with a vast crescent of mocha belly hanging out of his sweat pants, saddles for hips, and three pounds of gold chain around his neck. Wherever he moved, they moved with him. Hard to tell who Fat Boy’s bodyguards were because gangs aren’t run on bulk and muscle nowadays. Most killers I busted in Cleveland were boys who weighed about 150 pounds. Some of those baby gangbangers would shoot you just to see if the gun works.
The whole place reminded me of East Cleveland with its strawberry girls, drug dealers, and systemic poverty. If anything Cleveland was worse off now: the poorest big city in America two years running, another generation of cold-eyed crack babies all grown up and ready to rock.
I remember one of the worst—one of the King’s Men from Atlanta still wearing his colors—a businessman’s suit taken from his initiation victim; he had moved up from Atlanta after the Ghost Shadows, an Asian gang, had put too much heat on him for killing five of theirs in two weeks. Another part of being jumped into the King’s Men required learning passages from the writings of Martin Luther King—these he quoted before firing into the heads of his victims. His favorite line, he told me in interrogation, was: ‘To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.’ My driver never bothered to take in the scene but he seemed to know exactly where we were heading. He braked hard, deposited me and my overnight bag in front of a brown and yellow job that looked identical to most of the houses on the street except that no one had boarded its windows and doors with plywood or slapped a red sign with black letters anywhere on the premises. He took my tip, grunted a sound that might have been thanks, and sped off.
A tall black man answered my knock. The italic script on his gray pocket flap said his name was Raymond. I badged him in one practiced move and asked him if Ingrid O’Reilly lived there. He said nothing to me but opened the door and shouted her name in the direction of the kitchen. She walked in, and I was looking at a fortyish attractive blonde. No doubt about it: Mütti was a looker—eyes edged with crow’s-feet, tousled white-blonde hair and all.
She said hello with a face that was imprinted to exude sensuality from birth. Raymond asked me to sit down and offered me coffee. I declined, and he left us alone to talk.
Her husband, she said, had to get ready for his shift and would be leaving soon. He worked at Three Rivers Stadium. She worried when he left the house and let that drift with a wave of her hand that seemed to encompass the house, the neighborhood, maybe her life. An old Bessie Smith tune was playing softly from the kitchen.
The O’Reillys’ divorce was bitter, she explained, but when Ingrid found herself a black man, her ex went ballistic. When he dropped off the copy of the newspaper clipping that afternoon, he didn’t exactly wax eloquent in his outrage about Ingrid’s progress from “slutty German bar whore” to “coon-fucking bitch.” I don’t have to like my clients and most of them I don’t.
I used a phony cop’s smile and let her talk without prompting. In accented English flavored with the hiss of sibilants, she told me how it began.
She had met O’Reilly in Mannheim in the service where he was a radio technician. She was seventeen but passed herself as twenty-one and found work in a bar frequented by US servicemen. He seemed lonely and kept to himself, a quiet drinker who never flirted or dated the waitresses. When he found the courage to seek her out, they began to date and finally, at the end of his tour, she told him she was pregnant. A week later he asked her to marry him and come to America.
She opened her hands in that same casual gesture and shrugged, as if all of it had been inevitable and there was nothing more to say. Annaliese was born six months after their arrival in Boston, where his family was from. He had an uncle in the furniture manufacturing business in Ohio who invited them out and gave him a start in the business, but after things got messy, he went back to Boston and his wife and daughter stayed in Ohio. The marriage was pretty good at first though there wasn’t much money, but he began to “make difficulties,” she said with a moue of distaste at the memory. Soon, she said, there was nothing more between them; he grew violent, abusive, began to hit her and accuse her of adultery and when she had had enough and could find no reason to save the marriage, she divorced him.
Then I asked my questions:
“Do you know where Annaliese is now?” She didn’t. “Did your husband beat you because he thought you were cheating on him or— ” I let the question hang in the air. She drilled me with her pretty eyes.
“No.”
“Did you file a complaint with the police?”
Yes, when he went from slaps to the side of her head to rolled-up newspapers, then his fists. Sometimes he threatened me with knives, called me whore, slut other disgusting names I won’t repeat.”
“You were pregnant when you came to America, right?”
“Yes, I was. I said I was.”
“Was O’Reilly Annaliese’s father?”
She looked nervously off toward the kitchen. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, were you made pregnant by your ex-husband?”
“Y-yes, of course. I don’t understand what—”
“Let me save us some time. I don’t want to be in your life any longer than I have to. But I’m not going to go away with answers that you could have given me on the phone. Let me tell you what I think, OK? You were pregnant with Annaliese, but O’Reilly was not the father. You didn’t know what prejudice was until you came to America. You dated black servicemen in Mannheim, right? You had a black lover. You were just a girl, and you wanted to come to America. You told your lover you were pregnant, and he refused to do anything about it—maybe he wanted to give you money for an abortion—but he wasn’t going to take you back to America for whatever reasons. You panicked. You picked the quiet guy in the corner who never made a fuss, never groped any of the girls when they passed by. You began to flirt with him—”
“Th-That’s not true!”
“How is it not true? Shall I ask Raymond to come in and tell us how it’s not true?”
“Leave my husband out of this! He is a good man.”
I decided to play the trump card. “What do you mean, ‘your husband?’” I pointed a finger in the direction Raymond had gone. “You mean that man in there? Your ex-husband says you have a pattern of doing this. You get into trouble, you find some sucker to pick up the pieces for you and off you go. John says he gave you everything and you cheated on him with every man who looked at you. Says you’re
still just a serviceman’s pick-up, giving horny soldiers all that deep-dish cleavage until their eyes fall out of their heads, a cheap thrill he says, a quickie—”
“How—how dare you speak to me like that! You know nothing at all, you cheap—”
Raymond called from upstairs: “Hey, babe, everything OK down there?”
She answered him without looking at me. “Yes, yes. Everything’s fine.”
She had that true blonde’s pellucid skin that shows color and mapping of blue veins easily, and her face blushed crimson right in front of me—shame, anger, fear, maybe all at once—but I felt her aching, tortured loveliness in that frozen moment, hair a cornsilk halo and eyes like blue lasers boring into me.
Well, here it comes, the truth now . . .
I was wrong. She wrung her hands, muttered something in German and then said something in English but I heard only the words hate and women. Her hands were reddened and sore-looking. I let her wrestle with her own private demons for a while until she calmed herself, eyes squeezed tight, her blonde head nodding on her swelling chest as if, like a narcoleptic, she had suddenly dropped off to sleep in the middle of a conversation. Her emotions were hers alone; no one feels anything for anybody else’s pain, not really. So I waited. Then, as she brushed a strand of hair from her eyes, I asked her to tell me how it really was so that I could find her daughter.
She nodded as if convincing herself of something. She looked me in the face again, reliving the pain and terror of her youth. An old torch song from the forties was playing in the kitchen. I knew she had made a decision. She awoke one day, she said calmly, and knew without really knowing that she was pregnant. The baby’s father was a black soldier, a missile technician, and she was deeply in love with him. She had been a virgin. He was her first lover. But he didn’t want to marry her because he intended to go to college and study engineering at Florida State; she didn’t want to get an abortion because she was Catholic. Desperate and alone, she found the drunken hilarity of the soldiers mobbing the bar in their frenzied drinking binges too much to bear. Their own homesickness gave her loneliness and terror a keener edge; apparently, she was marked as an easy lay too because the black soldiers in particular were coming on all the time. There was no going back home to Gdingen with a black soldier’s child swelling her womb. When an obnoxious, hirsute staff sergeant from Oklahoma pinched her ass really hard, she burst into tears. (She drew a deep breath here.) Suddenly she found herself being comforted by the quiet soldier. His pidgin-German was hopeless, but soon she learned all about him: he was a second-generation Irish-American from Boston. He was flattered by her attention and soon they were spending time together whenever he could get off-base. She could not hide her pregnancy forever, so soon after they made love for the first time she told him she was pregnant. He said it didn’t matter, that he loved her and wanted her to be his wife. She agonized about telling him, but finally decided that there would be time later . . .
Back in America, it all changed after Annaliese’s birth. The baby, thank God, took after her except for the tight blonde ringlets and the slightly dusky pallor of her skin. The early years of struggle to make a living kept them both busy and content. He was moody but a good provider and dedicated to their welfare. Then his drinking worsened, and he began calling her the filthiest names in fits of seething rage: gutterwhore, nigger fuckbitch. The next day, after the booze fog lifted, he would apologize and beg her to forgive him. Then the beatings—first head slaps, then punches, and finally the all-out fury of fists and kicks—left her marked and swollen for days. Sometimes he forced her to perform fellatio after these outbursts subsided. He began treating Annaliese differently too, colder, shunned her presence and once physically recoiled when she put her hands on his face. Finally, after one beating which caved in the bones of her cheek and left her face a bloody mask, she confirmed his suspicions. She told him the father was black. She never knew the father’s last name. O’Reilly wept and sobbed uncontrollably. She knew she had to get out.
Two weeks before she left O’Reilly, she took Annaliese aside and told her the truth about her birth. She showed no reaction, the mother said, but became very quiet around the house. This secret was never discussed again between mother and daughter. Annaliese disappeared a month later.
I asked her if she had any papers, letters, or personal items of her daughter’s that might reveal where she went. She had nothing here. Annaliese had moved out when she turned eighteen and was sharing an apartment in Jefferson with another girl she knew from high school. Her mother had given her ten thousand dollars from the sale of her father’s house after the divorce. But she had visited her mother only once in Pittsburgh before disappearing.
Was there anything, anything at all, that she might have said then that seemed unusual or unlike her? Did she talk about any plans she had? Nothing. Zero. Zilch point shit. The mother and daughter, now a grown woman burdened by a terrible secret come to light, had turned a corner and neither could express her feelings to the other. It was a bad visit, she said, because things were so unsettled just then. Annaliese had begun working for a law firm in Jefferson and she herself had only just agreed to move from Jefferson to Pittsburgh after Raymond, whom she met at a beer joint on the Strip a month earlier, had convinced her to make a new start.
Her life’s destiny was in bars. She said she had not been inside a bar since her marriage to O’Reilly. He wouldn’t permit her to go and threatened to kill her if he ever found her in a bar. She was thinking of suicide, she told me, and she wanted one last drink, as much to defy him, as to stiffen her resolve to kill herself. Maybe she wanted to feel human contact one final time too before she stuck her head in the oven. She was composing her farewell note to Annaliese in her head when she must have let out a sob while sitting on the stool inside the darkened Boar Room because the next thing she knew she was being comforted by a tall, soft-spoken man who introduced himself as Raymond and said he was passing through Jefferson-on-the-Lake, visiting friends, on his way home to Pittsburgh and thought he’d stop and have one for the road before the long drive down Interstate 79. I thanked her, and as I held her hand in mine on the way out the door, I felt its rawness like an open wound. She wished me good luck in finding her daughter and squeezed my hand hard.
“Please don’t let anything happen to her, Mister Haftmann.”
As if I could do anything about that. I remember sucking down boilermakers in Tico’s Place, sitting alongside a local drunk and part-time philosopher, when I heard him blurt for all to hear: “God should never have put love in the mind of an animal . . .” Then he seemed to cave in; his head sunk to his chest, and with a one long suspiration, withdrew into a stupor that lasted until Tico’s wife Marta escorted him out the door at two in the morning.
Raymond gave me a ride to the airport on his way to work. We never spoke on the way, but he looked at me with smoldering eyes that said I was not getting another invitation anytime soon. Spring was dirty everywhere this year. I boarded a Fairchild Metro for the ride back to Erie; the pilot, a real air jockey, found all the chop there was to find. I finally threw up on the landing at the airport.
I had some hunches, and it was time to play them. I called O’Reilly and left a message on his machine requesting him to see me as soon as possible. I left some convenient times and said I’d be in my office.
I drove to Tico’s for a chat where I found him mixing Acapulco Screwdrivers. Afterward, I headed for the gym for a workout where I busted muscles for an hour before my ringtones chimed. It was O’Reilly. He said he would meet me at my office at seven. I finished my workout with ten laps, a shower, and drove back to the office.
I considered my strategy on the ride back. The air was cold, a few fat drops of rain hit the windshield, but I was conscious of sweat beads on my forehead. We were in Daylight Savings now and the extra light was welcome. Lake Erie had been iced over most of the winter except during the occasional thaw when a bright blue channel showed through the whiteness. No
w ice-free, the lake boats were beginning to churn through the pewter gray murk on their way up the Great Lakes to Duluth and Taconite Harbor and the emerald-green of Superior—too big to ice over. You could see Erie easily from Tico’s; he never closed for the off season, and we used to look out over the water as the chunks broke off, reformed in the periods of thaw, and created a shifting horizon of bizarre shapes as the pounding waves chiseled ice sculptures out of the sand and water. I had known Tico, an ex-welterweight from Youngstown, for fifteen years, and I never once saw him outside his bar. Back in my heavy drinking days, we used to bet on the number of floaters the spring thaw would bring. The county nursing home was overstocked with Alzheimer’s patients and over the years many had preferred the iron embrace of waves to the misery of their own rotting minds.
I have seen fathers in grief, real bone-breaking sorrow, and my Pittsburgh visit only confirmed my impression of O’Reilly as a weak man—a cruel, self-pitying bully hiding behind that poetic drivel in the newspaper. A bully is the most loathsome of nature’s creatures.
He walked into my office carrying a London Fog trench coat over his arm five minutes after I arrived. I turned on the banker’s lamp behind the desk so that my face would be in partial shadow. I had a turquoise worry stone in my left hand and I worked at it while he positioned himself. The greetings were disposed of without much pretense at sincerity, and in that way that knowledge instinctively imparts, I knew he did not like me much either.
“Let’s not waste any more of my time or your money, Mister O’Reilly, shall we?”
Blood pumped through a vein in his neck. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, don’t ever tell me another thing that isn’t true. If you do, I’ll quit now and you can have my bill for services rendered.”