Five years old. Daley was barely three and Daley lived in shadow. He hovered in corners and hid beneath tables, sucking his thumb, dragging behind him a worn baby blanket covered with faded orange giraffes and yellow ducks. If Daley heard his mother and her various boyfriends fighting and yelling, he disappeared into the shadows to suck his thumb. He rarely laughed and he never smiled. He demanded little care or attention. Daley was too young to demand anything from life.
Nick, however, was coming of age, and much too soon. He noticed everything, even things he could not understand. Things like his mother being nice to strange men who came to stay the night and who were gone before morning. Things like bloody sanitary napkins left open and drying on the floor in the bathroom until, with other litter, they were swept into a pile and finally discarded. Things like loneliness and hunger, for a touch, a hug, a genuine smile turned his way.
It was not a happy time for either child, but for Nick it was worse because he knew things were not as they should be. Somewhere in the back of his young mind were the images he saw on TV, images that were different from his home and family. On TV he saw clean, neat homes where the mom and dad spoke in low, soothing voices to their children. No one screamed or broke dishes or slapped in fury. Some images flickering on the screen were violent, but they were the violence of the streets, where gangs fought, policemen shot criminals, and sheriffs in white hats got outlaws. The violence was far away from the pretty houses. He came to realize, instinctively, that his own world with its dirt and clutter and utter chaos was all wrong. It was a place where grown-ups drank beer and cursed, a place where strangers followed his mother to the bedroom.
Nick did not like seeing these things. He began to pout and sulk more often. He cried when he was not being punished, and his melancholy deepened.
Mrs. Ringer’s constant criticism sank into him like insidious poison that shriveled whatever was good and golden about him. He believed every word his mother said. If he was called a cry baby, well then that was what he was. If he was shouted at and pushed aside, then he must be in the way. If he was called ugly, then surely his own mother should know what she was talking about because, after all, she knew him well.
When Nick was five years old, something happened that convinced him he was totally unloved and unwanted. This feeling stayed with him forever.
It was a Friday and his mother had just taken a perfumed bath and was dressing in her bedroom. Nick wandered to the doorway and tried to make himself unobtrusive while he watched her. Suddenly spying him, his mother began to talk.
“I’ve got one hot date tonight, sonny boy,” she said, smiling as she drew on new, silky stockings. “Met him at the checkout counter today at work.” Nick came into the room, but still kept a respectable distance away.
“I’ll show these Bloomington women,” his mother continued, hooking the top of her stockings to her garter belt. “They won’t let their men be seen with me, oh no, they’d lock ‘em out cold if they caught ‘em running around with Mary Ringer. All those good husbands and fathers won’t even take me out for a hamburger, they’re so afraid of being seen. The bastards,” she added, slipping her arms through the straps of a faded pink lace bra. “But tonight--tonight, I got a stranger in town taking me out. Gonna buy me dinner, treat me right, you wait and see.”
Nick barely paid attention to what his mother was saying. All he knew was she intended to go out and leave him and Daley alone again, and he felt terrible all over. His head ached and he had the sniffles. He often caught cold and ran fevers for days. His mother called him sickly and, when she thought of it, gave him doses of the dreadful-tasting Black Draught to wash his system out.
“Those spineless slobs,” Mary Ringer continued, getting into a half-slip. “But I’ll show ‘em tonight. You just wait and see what I show ‘em.”
Nick rubbed his burning eyes and felt his chest tighten until it felt like a pack of cards with a thick rubber band around them. He was hot, even the bottom of his feet were hot. “Mama? Mama, I’m sick.” He stared at her hard while she donned a party dress. “I’m hot, Mama, and I hurt.”
“Stop your whining and come zip up my dress.” She stooped to the floor, her back to Nick. Impatient with his clumsy, five-year-old attempts, she cursed and reached over her shoulder, grunting as she zipped the dress up.
“Look how pretty your mama is,” she said, standing up and preening for him. She had one hand on her hip and she parted her slick, red lips to show the tip of her tongue. Suddenly her expression changed as she looked down at him. She motioned him forward. “What’s that all over your face, Nick?” Cautiously he sidled closer to her, his gaze lowered.
“Don’t you know when to blow your nose? Don’t you know when to wipe your face, for crissakes? Jesus, you’re disgusting. Here, wipe yourself.” She handed him a square of torn sheet she used for polishing her one pair of high heels.
Nick wiped and stood looking at a mess on the cloth. There were streaks of dust and bits of dried mud from her shoes and he wondered how that could have come from two little holes in his nose. She was right. He was dis…dis…whatever she said, that’s what he was.
“I don’t feel good,” he said, seeing she had forgotten him. She stood before the old waterfall veneer dresser brushing her hair. “I don’t feeelll good,” he said louder, coming up behind her so that his reflection was beside hers in the mirror. “I can’t breathe good,” he said with a bit of a lisp so that it sounded like “bweathe.”
Mary Ringer was not listening to her son. Her mind was thirty-five miles away at the Longhorn Steak House and Bar where her date promised to take her for a meal. Although Nick’s pleas fell on deaf ears, his presence did not escape his mother’s attention completely. Her preoccupied gaze lowered in the glass and she almost smiled at the little towheaded boy she saw reflected there. Impulsively she reached for him, drew him to the bench, and made him sit. Looking in the mirror again, she said, “I wish you’d’ve been a girl. Now wouldn’t that’ve been nice? See your hair?” She lifted his straight, too long hair and let it fall against his neck.
Nick sniffled. He squinted at his reflection in concentration. Yes, he could see it. A girl. A girl with long blond hair, his mother’s polished nails on her shoulders, his mother’s lips smiling at her, approving of her.
“Your hair’s perfect for a girl. It would need curling, of course, and a…a…” She eagerly looked over the stacked and scrambled cosmetics on the dresser. “…a ribbon! That’s what we need. If I had a little girl, I could put a ribbon just like this one in her hair.” She lifted the front of Nick’s hair and made a bunching motion while she wrapped the length of red ribbon around and around. Deftly she tied a tow and looked in the mirror for the effect.
It was grotesque. Nick hated it. His mother hated it, he saw it in her eyes. With his hair pulled back from his naked forehead he looked puny and feverish. His pale blue eyes were too wide and staring. The red bow stood up from his rounded head, and the bunched hair was an uneven mass that sprayed out like a handful of tattered feathers.
Nick reached up and pulled at the ribbon. One of his eyes was tearing and his chest hurt. He was going to cry and he did not want to.
His mother slapped his hand and yanked the ribbon from his hair herself. The face that had been dreamy and soft only moments before was now twisted with anger.
“You’re so goddamn ugly,” she said, pushing him back onto the bench when he tried to get away. She fiddled absently with the ribbon, untying it. “It wouldn’t have mattered, boy or girl, you would’ve been ugly as a stick. I didn’t want you. I didn’t want Daley neither, but I got knocked up because I was stupid. I didn’t know no better.”
Tears ran down Nick’s cheeks. He was hot and sick and alone.
His mother had the ribbon undone and she was snapping it between her hands, tight, then loose, tight, then loose. Nick would never know if it was pure hatred, or frustration over her own lost chances, or an unfortunate impulse. But suddenly his mother
whipped the thin red ribbon around his neck as he sat beside her, looking into the mirror. She jerked him around until his head hit her pelvis, then she kneed him to push his body forward again, letting the ribbon loosen around his throat. She kept talking to him, her voice rising to a shriek. “Why’d I have to have kids, can you tell me that? What’d I ever do so wrong I got saddled with two brats to support all by myself in this goddamn rinky-dink town?” The ribbon snapped tight once again.
Nick’s head hit her pelvis, her knee in his back, then the ribbon mercifully loosened.
Nick was choking, his lungs gasping at the air, his face in the mirror looking bug-eyed and horror-stricken.
He could not see his mama and the nightmare went on and on, the awful words his mama spoke, the red ribbon tightening, jerking, loosening just enough for him to take a half breath, then tightening again, jerking…
“Mama! Mama!" It was Daley clutching at his arm, then beating at Mama with flailing fists.
And it went on and on. She was strangling him because he--because he was not a girl, because he was not pretty, because she hated him.
Finally Mary Ringer dropped the ribbon to the floor and stepped away from the mirror where she saw what she had done. Nick slumped to the floor gagging and crying. His nose was running and he struggled for air.
Daley knelt beside him and dabbed at his brother’s face with his favorite blanket.
Mary Ringer turned her back on her young sons and left the house to wait outdoors for her date. She did not come back to the house all night. It was the first time Nick did not miss her. It was the first time he felt safe being all alone in the big, shadowy house with his little brother curled up next to him. He would never feel safe around a woman again because they did not like little boys. They did not like them at all.
In three days he got over the cold and fever, but he would never get over what his mother had done.
Never.
#
Nick sat up on the hospital bed in Tacoma, Washington, his eyes wide open and frightened. He felt his throat, massaging the place where the ribbon had choked him. Was Shakey right? Was he insane?
Finally his pulse slowed, and he could swallow. He lay back on the bed. What was the difference? He had done nothing wrong, nothing immoral, nothing to be punished for. Didn’t anybody understand? If he was insane, then the whole world was insane. All he needed was Daley to help him. He needed to be free. Free to be where he belonged, free to roam Houston where no one would notice him.
CHAPTER 5
Houston, Texas
Summer 1976
John Marcus Deshane, known to everyone as Jack, awoke before the alarm sounded and lay staring at the ceiling. He could hear his ten-year-old son, Willie, snoring from the other bedroom, but that was not what woke him. He had gone to bed the night before upset. He still believed he and the other policemen could have taken the butcher knife from the Chicano youth without killing him. Why did the boy have to die in a rain of bullets as if he were a mad dog foaming at the mouth?
Jack was one of four patrolmen who had arrived at the scene. There were three others from the precinct and a total of eleven men altogether fanning out around the sixteen-year-old. He had escaped from the psychiatric facilities of Ben Tabb Hospital, and he still wore a starched white hospital gown over a pair of ragged jeans. He was barefoot and dancing in small circles around the grass. His dark hair was plastered across his smooth forehead, and his eyes gleamed craftily as he looked from one man to another. They knew he was on a hallucinogen. Every few seconds he screamed a high piercing scream that made Jack’s hair stand on end. Chills crawled down his back like spiders down a bean pole. They tried to talk the boy into giving up his knife.
“Come on, kid. This isn’t going to get you anywhere. Hand over the knife and we’ll talk about it,” Jack urged.
The boy screamed again, but it was cut off sharply when Jack’s partner tried to close in from the circle. Bill Lorenza, a four-year veteran, kept speaking in soft Spanish.
Jack had not drawn his gun from the holster. He did not believe for a minute that weapons would have to be used. The kid was having a psychotic episode, and no one could predict his actions from one second to the next, but what could he do with a single butcher knife against eleven armed men?
Bill and a detective from homicide took turns talking Spanish to the boy, but Jack did not think they were getting anywhere. The boy’s reality lay elsewhere and he continued to scream.
Jack would never be able to say who was responsible for the first shot. Bill Lorenza had edged in toward the boy and stood ten feet from the brandished knife. Bill had holstered his gun to come toward the boy with both hands out in a gesture of help.
Suddenly the youth gave a shattering cry that rooted Lorenza to the spot, and as he lunged forward with the knife, the shots rang out in a thundering hail, bringing the boy to his knees. He was sent sprawling, bleeding on the dry summer grass. The knife lay at Lorenza’s feet.
It would not be the last time Jack would see things that were unjust. He knew that. It was simply the first time he had witnessed it.
Jack rolled from bed and shut off the radio an instant after it started to blare. Six A.M. Usually his best time of day, but now sullied with leftover images of vague nightmares he could not recall and a pervading feeling of defeat he could not shake.
The young man’s death triggered a refrain in Jack’s mind as he showered. It might be Willie some day, he thought.
He knew that was farfetched but enough of a threat to frighten a father. Right now Willie was a good boy, bright, obedient, and loving. But after a year as a patrolman on the Houston Police force, Jack had seen plenty of good kids influenced by their peers who got into trouble with the law. Every thinking parent in the country feared for their children’s future. Drugs were in the grade schools. Juvenile offenses were on the rise. Violence was becoming an accepted part of everyone’s life.
Jack dried himself roughly with a towel as if to rub off all memory of the day before. He glanced at the clock radio to see he had spent twenty minutes in the shower. Jesus, the kid’s death was getting to him. He knew he was going to have to forget it. Maybe if he talked to Sam about it. After work tonight, maybe Sam could tell him how to erase the guilt he felt for the eleven men who were only doing their jobs.
On Jack’s return from duty in Vietnam, Willie had asked him why he wanted to be a cop, but Jack had no pat answers. It was a combination of things, and to say one ideal or one ambition made a man want to be a policeman was too simplistic. He had not been able to answer Willie then, so he had said something silly, trying to bring a smile to his son’s face. “To keep you in line, jock, what do you think?” And Jack had to admit part of the reason he had joined the force was to set an example for Willie. They had been alone since the divorce when Willie was two. Being a single parent was not easy, and his responsibility sometimes weighed heavily on Jack.
“Hey, Dad. You gotta run that thing with the bathroom door open?” Willie stood in the hall scratching at a recent mosquito bite behind his ear. His sleepy eyes looked up at his father. Jack turned off the electric razor and grinned.
“Okay, sport, you tell me how to get my whiskers shaved without a little noise?” Willie shrugged and grumbled all the way back to his bedroom.
“Time to be up and at ‘em anyway,” Jack called as he turned the razor back on. “I’ll have to leave soon.”
Willie groaned and pulled the pillow over his head.
Jack finished shaving and stroked his cheeks. The three-inch raised scar that ran horizontally below his right cheekbone always looked inflamed after shaving. Within minutes the redness would fade, but the ridge of skin still bothered him. He often caught himself tracing the scar with a fingertip while thinking. A Viet Cong sniper grazed his cheek, the open gash hastily sewn up with a field medic who had two severely wounded men awaiting his services. It was not the worst wound Jack might have received. It was far less of a battle scar than some of h
is friends would carry with them the rest of their lives, but it served as a daily reminder that life was a precarious business—a reminder that served him well as a rookie patrolman.
He looked at his wristwatch: 6:45, Mrs. Lawrence, his housekeeper-babysitter, would be arriving in another few minutes. She would raise holy hell if Willie was still in bed.
“Willie!”
“Yessir, I’m getting up,” came the muffled voice.
“Five minutes or I drag you up.”
“Okay, Dad, okay,” Willie burrowed farther into the pillow and prayed for sleep to return. No kid he knew had to get up at seven o’clock in the morning during the summer.
#
Mrs. Lawrence was a punctual woman. When her employer expected her at seven in the morning, she arrived at seven on the dot.
She knocked smartly on the DeShanes’ door before entering. As she closed the door behind her, she announced in a loud voice, “Mrs. Lawrence is here and on time. Jack, ready yourself for breakfast. Willie, outta that bed, boy. It’s a brand-new day!”
Jack grinned into the bathroom mirror when he heard his housekeeper’s voice. When was she not on time?
And when had she failed to announce it?
Willie grumbled and slid from his bed. “Oh, geez,” he muttered, blinking away sleep. “Dad?”
The call brought Jack to his son’s bedroom. “What, son?”
“Never mind.”
“Yeah, I know. You don’t want to get up. You don’t want to be cheerful and polite. You think it’s unfair.”
Willie smiled. “Yessir, how’d you know?”
“The eggs are breaking and the coffee’s perking. Come on now,” Mrs. Lawrence called from the kitchen.
“Since when was life fair? Let’s go, jock.” Jack turned and headed for the kitchen.
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