“Mr. Folsom sends him over?”
“If I need somethin’, sure. Always with a note.”
Always with a note. Well. Laura Anne turned that one over.
How much should she tell Annie? Laura Anne, after all, was only a substitute. She had already been told to drop the matter by her boss. Still—
“Annie, Mr. Folsom thinks there’s nothing to this. There may not be. But there’s a little fifth-grader, Isabel Hernandez?”
Annie nodded. “I know her.”
“I’m virtually positive that Jerry’s been taking pictures of her on the bus without Isabel’s permission. She also claims he was in the bathroom with her on one occasion. Taking pictures.”
“Oh, Lord.” Annie frowned. “Well, I’m glad you told me. Why didn’t Alton send her teacher a note? Or all of us, for that matter? He wouldn’t even have to specify a name. Something to get us looking.”
“I think he’s hoping there’s not a problem,” Laura Anne said lamely.
“Well, I’m going to talk to Isabel today,” Annie promised. “Her teacher, too—Brenda Starling. You know Brenda? And we’ll keep our eyes open from now on.”
“Thanks, Annie.”
“No ma’am. The thanks goes to you.”
The subject changed, then, to the new library. Annie was thrilled with the construction, the computer bay, access to Internet resources. “We need more books, of course. And the periodicals are pitiful. But it’s a start.”
Laura Anne found herself warming to her friend’s enthusiasm. The two women were chattering like bluejays by the time they reached the library. The restrooms were accessed from exterior doors just around the corner.
* * *
Isabel Hernandez had asked if someone could go with her to the bathroom. Señora Starling had smiled to say that Isabel was a good and trustworthy girl and that all she needed was this little pass and she could go.
Sometimes it was hard for Isabel to understand Mrs. Starling. The English went very fast and the señora did not speak Spanish. But Isabel accepted the little piece of paper pressed into her hand, marched resolutely out of her classroom, and took the breezeway past the library to the bathroom.
She used to like the bathroom. It was clean. Big. Cool inside.
A metal door opened to a stall and commode. She stepped inside. It was hard to close the door. You had to turn a little wheel and sometimes the bolt did not line up with the hole. But Isabel managed.
She felt safe then. Surrounded by walls of steel in this clean, cool place. She hefted her skirt and dropped her panties to squat over the commode.
“Hey, conchita.”
Isabel’s head jerked up to see Jerry Slade and a silver lens.
* * *
Laura Anne was not present when Mrs. Starling referred the matter to the principal. By the time Brenda and Annie got to the restroom, there was no teenage boy present. Only a little girl whom the principal dismissed as hysterical, soiled over her little legs and canvas shoes, shivering in her closed stall.
“Jerry Slade could not have been over there,” the principal insisted. “He was working at the office. To leave he’d have had to get a pass. I didn’t give a pass to anyone during third period.”
When Annie relayed that portion of the conversation, Laura Anne was flabbergasted. “So since the principal didn’t issue a pass, Jerry couldn’t couldn’t have been on the elementary side? Is Alton an idiot?”
“Careful, Laura Anne,” Annie responded in hushed tones. “He may be a fool, but he’s the fool who hires us. Hires me, anyway.”
“So what happened?” Laura Anne pressed in exasperation. “What are we doing to protect this little girl?”
Annie shrugged. “Alton told us always to send somebody with her to the bathroom. As if. And he said he’d speak to Jerry. Just to make sure, naturally, that on this occasion Mr. Slade was grinding brake pads or knives or whatever they do over there.”
Laura Anne shook her head. “Why in the world would he choose to thick a fifth-grade girl would make up a story like this? Why would he choose to believe Jerry Slade about anything?”
“Because Jerry’s dog kin, for one. He’s family. And his sorry daddy’s on the school board. And, as you well know, Laura Anne, because no one wants to side against homies on the side of Mexicans.”
“It’s not right, Annie.”
“No, it’s not right. But that’s the way it is.”
Laura Anne tried to remember the days before the county’s school was integrated. What her mother had told her of separate schools, separate lunch counters. Separate bathrooms. Here was the pattern repeating.
“And now here I am, with this thing, sitting on my two hands,” she said aloud.
“But Laura Anne—what can you do?”
Ten
The puppy was waiting when Laura Anne got home. Cricket Bonet was the hero of the hour, acquiring a short-haired Heinz 57 from an animal lover’s litter in return for spaying and shots. She did not flinch at the coins Cricket rattled in a can. She played like a cat with the rawhide and tennis ball he brought. She rolled onto her back and let you scratch her belly, her pink tongue hanging to one side as if to say, I’ll give you an hour and a half to cut that out.
She was, Barrett agreed, the perfect mascot for boys born a day apart. Ben, taking after his father’s love of the classics and “old stories,” named her Penelope, a combination of loyalty and love. Tyndall was not much interested in Ben’s explanation of the allusion. Fraternal twins, Tyndall was born the 17th of November, Benjamin the 18th. The family alternated celebrations of that unusual circumstance. This year was Ben’s, and the extra day’s wait, you would have thought by listening, had driven the boys crazy.
“He’s perfect!” Tyndall bounded into the carport like a shot from a cannon to leap into Barrett’s arms.
Bear scooped him up in one arm.
“Daddy!”
And he snagged Ben in the other.
“Feel like I’m loading watermelons.” Bear grinned widely as he climbed the stairs, a boy under each arm. Laura Anne and Thelma just shook their heads from their vantage in the kitchen.
“Look at those boys.” Thelma wagged her silver head. “Thinkin’ they daddy’s some kina’ teddy bear.”
“That’s fine by me, Auntie.” Laura Anne found Aunt Thelma’s ways a little too biblical, on occasion, to suit. She could have been a matriarch, Aunt Thelma, with her silver hair and cotton dress, belted at the middle, that fell to thick ankles. She was vain about her ankles, loved to show them off. “I got a nice turn, I do,” she would say when primed with a little peach brandy. Running shoes had only recently replaced the black loafers that could no longer be found in the Emporium or Sears catalog.
She was strict regarding the boys’ behavior. Demanding in matters of respect and reverence. She had never married. Her ways could be trying, but Laura Anne decided early that whatever inconveniences Thelma imposed were trivial in comparison to the treasures she brought to Ben and Tyndall.
Through Thelma the boys had a view, even if removed, of their heritage, their past. Aunt Thelma had become the repository of the family genealogy and history, a storyteller, matchmaker, and moral compass. She was an education, was Aunt Thelma, raised in a time and place about which Ben and Tyndall needed to know and appreciate.
She came from the line of old MacGrues, a distinguished and tragic family who began, some said, as virtual slaves on the old Buchanan place and wound up after the war (by which they always meant World War II) with a sawmill and property and God knows what-all. There were children, accomplishments. Respect. Some recalled, though Laura Anne never knew if this was true, that the elder MacGrue even piloted airplanes!
Flew in the war, Thelma insisted. Yes, ma’am, he did.
That dynasty did not last, of course. Hard for any family of color to hang onto businesses and property with Jim Crow and the Klan running the county. But children were born in those hard years to keep the line alive. Those offspring grew to marry and have ch
ildren of their own. And then those children married. Or at least got pregnant. Laura Anne herself was related to the MacGrues, of course, in a chain of genealogy left for Thelma and a few other ancients to recite over holidays and funerals, like Icelandic scalds recalling in verse the arcana of some nearly lost and dimming saga. Thelma was a real and living link to a time rich in pain and triumph that Laura Anne wanted her boys to know “from the mouth.”
Sometimes the aging spinster was a little rigid in her ways. She kept a switch on her kitchen counter, though Laura Anne forbade her to use it. The sight of that instrument was in itself a reminder to the boys of how things used to be for little boys growing up—and still was for too many others.
Barrett dropped the twins to inspect Thelma’s cake.
“Got anything to lick?”
“Icing in the bowl for the boys.” Thelma doled out her favors imperiously. “You can have the egg-beater.”
“But you better hurry,” Laura Anne cautioned. “We’re going to have a house full of fifth-graders in just a few minutes.”
By midday the Raineses’ modest home was indeed spilling over with boys and girls shouting gleefully, ignoring the afternoon’s chill as they climbed all over the rope swing out back, played tag and Red Rover, and ran, ran, ran—all around the house. An unfamiliar vehicle stopped on the county road out front, a rusted pickup arrested on the blacktop distant from the Raineses’ brick-laid driveway. Its exhaust manifold leaked. It sounded like a Model-T. It was filled cab to bed with migrant workers.
Laura Anne saw a young girl slide off the tailgate. A woman of indeterminate age joined the girl, clutching her skirt modestly to climb over the bed’s sideboard. The pickup sputtered away leaving a small, brown woman frail as a sparrow and a little girl dressed in white with shiny black shoes and bright ribbons in her silky hair.
“Isabel!” Laura Anne walked out to meet the newcomers.
The fifth-grader averted her gaze, but a smile just about split her face. Laura Anne saw a bundle wrapped in newspaper in the mother’s arms.
“Señora Hernandez? Cómo está?” Laura Anne greeted the woman warmly and saw her eyes widen.
“Hábla español?”
“Sí.” Laura Anne took the offered gift.
“(This is the teacher, mama. Señora Raines.)” The shyness vanished. “(Raines—like in English the ‘rain’ comes. She is the one who helped me.)”
“(I tried.)” Laura Anne smiled. “(But I hope to do more.)”
“(No one believes her.)” The mother’s eyes filled in a blink with tears. “(No one knows what she says.)”
“(I know,)” Laura Anne declared. “(I believe. Now, come in, won’t you? My house is your house.)”
The humbly wrapped bundle brought by Isabel and her mother turned out to be the hit of the party. Barrett himself was the only celebrant present who had ever actually seen a piñata. The papier-mâchéed likeness of an owl was homemade, Isabel’s mother modestly explained. It was filled with cookies and sweets made over the single propane stove available in the Hernandez’s camp.
Barrett tossed a ball of cord over a crepe myrtle’s smooth limb to raise and lower the piñata’s bright-painted target. Laura Anne blindfolded each child in turn, and a broomstick became the bat that boys and girls swung blind in an effort to burst the hoard of candy from its owllike keep. Barrett made sure that every child had a chance to hit the target.
The honor for the blow that broke the piñata went, predictably, to Tyndall. One whack and a wealth of sweets scattered beneath the smooth-barked tree. Laura Anne and Barrett saw to it that no one hogged the bounty; every child got something sweet to eat. Thelma took over, then, with the help of visiting parents, to supervise a game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. That gave Bear and his wife a space of time to visit privately with Isabel’s mother.
They shared coffee in the yard, watching the children. Dolores sipped her coffee carefully, as if hoarding the precious cup.
“(I have plenty,)” Laura Anne volunteered.
“(I have enough, thank you.)”
“(But I want you to have more than enough,)” Laura Anne chided, and the smile she got from Isabel’s mother let her know that the ice between them was finally beginning to thaw. A conversation ensued. Barrett’s Spanish was much weaker than his wife’s, so frequently Laura Anne served as translator for her husband and Isabel’s mother.
Barrett began indirectly, with general questions, most of them not directed at Isabel’s recent trauma.
“(Where do you live?)” he asked. “(How many are in your family?)”
There were around a half-dozen families living together, Dolores answered. Fifteen children. A camp near town.
“(What work have you found?)”
“(We are waiting.)” Dolores answered.
“(For what?)”
“(Word of the straw.)”
“(The straw?)”
“(The men bale. The women rake. Sometimes.)”
“(And who hires you?)”
Dolores averted her eyes with that question. “(I don’t know. The men know.)”
“(Have you heard of Señor Loyd?)”
“(Oh, yes. He is a big man. He has much money.)”
“(Did you know that Señor Loyd hires men to work in straw?)”
She smiled coyly, as if amused at Bear’s pronouncement.
“(Am I wrong in this?)” Barrett asked. “(Am I wrong when I say that Señor Loyd hires the men?)”
“(He pays them,)” Dolores responded patiently, as if explaining something to a child. “(But he does not get the work.)”
“(Who does?)”
“(El Toro,)” Dolores replied, and Barrett reached to squeeze honey into his coffee.
“The Bull?” Laura Anne asked her husband. “Have you ever heard of a man by that name?”
“It’s a sobriquet, I’m sure, and yes, I’ve met the man. Ask the señora if all the work comes through the Bull.”
Laura Anne asked.
“Sí,” she replied. “(Everyone who works must pay him.)”
Barrett leaned forward. “(Must pay him? How?)”
She seemed amused.
“(With money. The money you make from the bale; he takes the little bite.)”
The little bite, or mordida, translates from Spanish as “bribe.”
“(Why can’t you refuse?)” Laura Anne asked. “(Why can’t you keep your money?)”
She seemed astonished at the question. “(You say ‘no’ to the Bull—!)” She drew her hand across her throat. “Muerte.”
“We’ve heard that something like this might be going on,” Barrett confided to Laura Anne. “There are only a couple of balers in the county. A virtual monopoly. What’s most likely happening is that Gary and Linton Loyd and the others are using this El Toro to twist arms and break legs. You either work for the wages they offer, or you don’t work at all.”
“That’s outrageous!”
Barrett nodded. “Not to mention illegal. But hard to prove. Unless we can get this El Toro to turn on his straw-boss, which I don’t think is likely.”
“Or unless you can get these people,” Laura Anne inclined her head to Isabel’s mother, “to testify against him.”
“Be hard,” Barrett frowned. “We’d have to gain their trust. And convince them we can protect their families from El Toro. It would take something pretty major to accomplish that.”
Laura Anne placed her cup on a milk crate that doubled as a server.
“Maybe I can help.”
“You?” Barrett shook his head. “You stay out of this, Laura Anne.”
“Why? Will it hurt your chances at sheriff?”
Dolores began to feel uncomfortable. “(I did not mean to begin a dispute.)”
“(There is no rancor,)” Laura Anne assured her. “(I can disagree freely with my husband.)”
Señora Hernandez greeted this last in an attitude of muted skepticism.
Laura Anne turned to Barrett. “You need this wo
man’s trust and the trust of her family. They need you to protect a little girl who is being stalked, who may even be in danger of assault by a young man showing signs, I believe of being very disturbed. You don’t have to be a politician, Bear, to see how this can work.”
“The problem isn’t me, Laura Anne. It’s Lou Sessions. He is the lock on the law in this county and he’s not going to arrest Jerry Slade, or even seriously investigate the boy. Not on my say-so or yours. Not in an election year. Not without evidence so plain it can’t be ignored and thick enough to insulate him from a goddamn barn-fire.”
“That’s the problem?”
“It ain’t football, honey. I can’t run an end-around.”
Laura Anne rose from her chair.
“No,” she said. “But I can.”
Somewhere the puppy barked. Then the high laughter of children. The party wound down not long after. The same pickup that deposited Isabel and her mother came back to get them, remaining, as before, at a distance on the blacktop road.
* * *
Monday came with the flourishes of a busy family heading off to work—Barrett to his Live Oak office, Laura Anne and the boys to school. If Laura Anne had dwelled on the matter she might have realized she was tired. She was, after all, still working full-time over the weekend at the restaurant while finishing the last of her tenure as a substitute teacher for Deacon High. Thanksgiving was right around the corner, which brought other obligations—a recital, a church service. Not to mention the demands left over from a birthday party, a houseful of guests, and two high-voltage twins.
But the truth was, this morning Laura Anne was pumped. She was girded for battle. She had not told Barrett what she planned.
“Better you don’t know,” she said. “Just keep your cell phone handy.”
Barrett objected. Laura Anne overruled. That was that.
She went through the first four periods of the day on automatic pilot. There were assignments to give. The usual in-class commotions to censure or break up. The constant, constant effort to keep students’ attention. Laura Anne usually enjoyed those challenges. But today, all she wanted was to hear the lunch bell.
Actually, a muted buzzer had long superseded the traditional bell to announce the end of morning classes. Laura Anne left her fourth-period band hall on the buzz to see doors bursting open in synchrony all up and down the hall, a host of students spilling into that long corridor with the boisterousness and élan of firefighters racing to a conflagration. A pair of hall monitors were caught in that throbbing stream. There was the school’s janitor and handyman, an old Appalachian, retreating to his closet for lunch, a brown bag stained with mayonnaise in his liver-spotted hand. Laura Anne took a position near a water fountain. Students strolled or stampeded by, most without a glance in her direction.
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