I Am No One You Know: And Other Stories

by Joyce Carol Oates

  ABOUT FORTY MINUTES later I heard them enter the house. The kitchen. I heard the refrigerator door being opened and shut, the sound of beer cans being opened. Eagerly I left my room to join them. I was a scrawny weed of a girl who adored her big brothers, basking in the most meager glow of their careless attention. And they loved me, I believed. I’d always believed. Calling me, like Daddy, “Curly”—“Curly Red.” When they were in the mood.

  “Hey guys! What’ve you been doing, fighting?”

  They stared at me as if for a shivery moment they didn’t know who the hell I was. What to do about me. They were both drinking beer thirstily. They were breathing through their mouths as if they’d been running uphill. I felt their excitement. Their jackets were unzipped, wet in front. Mario’s big-jawed face looked raw; a small cut gleamed beneath his right eye. Leo was rubbing the knuckles of his right hand as if they pained him. But he’d taken time to dampen his longish, lank, sand-colored hair and sweep it back in two wings from his forehead. His skin, like Mario’s, was slightly blemished, but he had a brutal handsome face. He had Daddy’s young face.

  Leo said, with his easy smile, “Some sons of bitches over at the Falls. But we’re okay, see? Don’t tell Mom.”

  Mario said, “Yeah, Curly. Don’t tell Mom.”

  No need to warn me against telling Daddy. None of us would ever have ratted to our father. Even if we hated one another’s guts, we wouldn’t. That was a betrayal so profound and cruel as to be indefinable, for Daddy’s punishment would be swift and pitiless; and for a certain space of time Daddy would withhold his love from the one he’d punished.

  I asked who it was they’d been fighting. How badly I wanted to be like them: a brother to them. Though I knew it was hopeless; they’d shrug as they always did when I asked pushy questions. Leo said quietly, “You got to promise you won’t say anything, Curly. Okay?”

  I shrugged and laughed. “Gimme a sip of your beer.”

  Leo handed me his can, then Mario. It wasn’t beer but Daddy’s favorite ale. I hated the taste, even the smell, but was determined to keep trying to like it, until one day I would like it just fine. I swallowed, I choked a little. I said, “I promise.”

  NEXT DAY, news of the beating of Jadro Filer spread through Perrysburg. Even in junior high no one was talking about much else. I heard, and I knew.

  A Negro boy, basketball player at the high school. Beaten by several not yet identified white boys. Left unconscious by the side of Route 11. Sometime after midnight. In critical condition in intensive care at Perrysburg General Hospital.

  I was frightened for Leo and Mario, I was in dread of their being arrested. I would tell no one what I knew.

  But already the Perrysburg police were making inquiries about Leo, Mario, Walt, and Don Brinkhaus. They had the first three digits of Leo’s license plate and a partial description of his car. Leo was picked up at work. Mario had gone to school groggy and nervous, trying to behave as if nothing was wrong, but he was called out of third-period class and taken downtown to the police station. I would learn later that Daddy had accompanied Leo and Mario to the police station; he’d arranged for a lawyer to join them. My mother, at home, was agitated, preoccupied. I knew it was expected of me to ask, “Where’s Mario, Mom? Where’s Daddy? Is something wrong?” But my mother turned away.

  In silence Mom and I watched the local TV news at 6:00 P.M. The lead story was the “severe beating” of Jadro Filer, a “popular basketball star” at PHS. I saw my mother’s lips move wordlessly as sometimes in church, at mass, she knelt, shut her eyes, moved her lips as she said the rosary like an exhausted woman in a trance. Such public behavior embarrassed me now that I was a teenager. Everything about my mother embarrassed me. I hated her for her spreading hips and flaccid upper arms, the creases in her face, her scared shiny eyes. That night, seeing her praying as she stared at the TV screen, I was filled with raging contempt.

  How much did my mother know? How much did she refuse to know?

  That night I was wakened from exhausting dreams by voices. At first I thought it was the wind, then I understood it was Daddy talking with my brothers in the kitchen. His voice was low and urgent, and their voices were murmurs. Occasionally Daddy’s voice would be raised, but I couldn’t hear any words distinctly, and I didn’t want to hear. I was sick with the knowledge of what Leo and Mario had done. I had no desire to eavesdrop. Never would I eavesdrop on anyone again. I lay in my room in my bed hunched beneath the covers. I knew that, if anyone questioned me as they’d been questioning my brothers, I couldn’t lie. I could lie to my brothers and sisters but to no adult. I would have to tell the truth. In confession, I listed the sins I’d committed, which included sins of omission. Usually these were small, venial sins. But this was different. If the priest asked me…If one of my teachers asked me…All day I’d been thinking of Jadro Filer. His face on the front page of the newspaper. On TV. I can’t be like my brothers. I hate them.

  Daddy, Leo, and Mario were in the kitchen much of the night. I lay with my hands pressed over my ears. I seemed to know that, upstairs in her bed, Mom was lying awake, too, not-hearing. I seemed to know that Daddy was asking my brothers what they knew about the beating, and my brothers were insisting in hurt, aggrieved voices that they knew nothing. The police had questioned them for hours, and hotly and angrily, like the other two boys, they’d denied everything. My father must have been exhausted by the ordeal of the police station, and humiliated, because he was friends with a number of Perrysburg police officers. Each time he asked Leo and Mario, their replies were more vehement. Of the four boys under suspicion, Leo would probably have been the most convincing. Mario, the youngest, would have been least convincing. Mario with the scabby scratch beneath his right eye. Mario, shifting his shoulders, sweating as he lied to Daddy, yet like a tightrope walker venturing across the rope, in terror of falling, he couldn’t walk back. We don’t know nothing. We didn’t do it! They just want to arrest somebody white.

  I wondered: Did Daddy believe them?

  JADRO FILER DIED in the hospital on April 11.

  There was a rumor that Jadro had been “involved in drugs.” He’d been beaten by “black drug dealers” from Niagara Falls. There was a rumor he’d been killed by his girlfriend’s older brother. Or: it had been a random attack, white racist skinheads from Niagara Falls.

  These rumors came to nothing. Leo, Mario, Walt, and Don Brinkhaus were summoned back to the police station. And Daddy went with them again.

  The phone rang repeatedly, and Mom refused to answer. Finally I took the receiver off the hook.

  But Leo and Mario weren’t yet arrested. Their names had not been released to the media. Daddy insisted Leo move back into his old room; there’d been “racist” threats against him, and he wasn’t safe in his apartment downtown. Mario was told by the high school principal he should stay home for a while, feelings were running high between whites and blacks at PHS and Mario’s presence was “undesirable.” Mom wanted to keep me home from school too, but I refused. I didn’t care if my teachers and the other kids looked at me strangely. I needed to be at school. I loved school! The thought of being kept home panicked me. I couldn’t bear to be trapped here where my parents and my brothers were waiting for—what? What would save them? For somebody else to be arrested for the crime? (As my mother said, “The people who did this terrible thing. The guilty people.”)

  There was the hope, too, never uttered aloud, that the evidence police were assembling would be only circumstantial, not strong enough to take before a grand jury. This was what the boys’ lawyers insisted.

  Neighbors, friends of Daddy’s from work, relatives, dropped by our house to show their support. Rick, Mariana, Emily, came to supper. It was like old times: nine of us Dellamoras at the table. Mom’s older, favored daughters helping her in the kitchen. There was no subject of conversation except Leo and Mario and the injustice of what the police were doing to them. The name “Jadro Filer” was never spoken, there was reference onl
y to “the Negro boy,” “the black boy.” No more did my brothers refer to Jadro as “nigger.” My brothers didn’t speak of Jadro at all. It was the Perrysburg police who were reviled, held in contempt. And some of these men had called themselves friends of my father! There was the “anonymous” driver who’d supplied the police with Leo’s partial license-plate number, to throw them off the track…Our household was under siege, the very walls and roof buffeted by ferocious winds. We Dellamoras huddled inside, clutching one another. Daddy would protect us, we knew.

  With so many people around it wasn’t hard for me to avoid my brothers. Still, they sought me out. “Hey Curly: what’re you hearing at school?” Their eyes snatching at mine. You promised, remember? Not to tell. They had no idea that I knew about the bat. Only that I knew they’d been fighting that night, with some guys from the Falls. And I’d promised not to tell Mom. Meaning I’d promised not to tell anybody. I shrank from Leo’s gaze. He saw something furtive and guilty in my face. You wouldn’t rat on us, right? Your brothers?

  Only years later would I wonder what Leo and Mario might have done to me if they’d guessed all that I knew.

  I WAS THE girl who never cried, or rarely. But now I started to cry easily. My outer skin hurt like sunburn, my eyes filled with moisture. At school, at home. Watching TV and seeing Jadro Filer’s mother and older brother interviewed, seeing Mrs. Filer clutch a tissue to her face, dissolve into tears, I began crying, too. He really is gone. Somebody’s dead. It’s real. The taste of it was like copper pennies in my mouth.

  Angry, my mother switched off the TV. “They’re just doing that for the TV cameras. All that attention, to make people feel sorry for them.”

  I followed Mom out into the kitchen. I said, “Mom? It was Leo and Mario. I saw them with the baseball bat. They were the ones.” But my mother was at the sink, running water hard. She stood with her back to me, furious, shaking. Somewhere close by the telephone began ringing; we waited for Daddy to pick it up, in another room.

  NEXT DAY IN homeroom I was crying, sniffling. Wiping my nose with my fingers like a small dazed child. This was the third day after Jadro Filer’s death. My homeroom teacher called me to her desk to ask cautiously, “Is there something wrong, Lili Rose? Are you upset about something?” She knew the rumor about my brothers. “Are you sick?” I shook my head no. But the woman peered at me worriedly, touched my warm forehead with her fingers, decided I had a fever, and sent me to the school nurse, who made me lie down on a cot, took my temperature, noted that my teeth were chattering. Gently she scolded, “Lili Rose, you’re a sick girl. Your temperature is 101 degrees, that’s fever. Your mother oughtn’t to have let you out of the house this morning.”

  These words, like a curse, made me cry harder. The alarmed nurse called in the school principal, Mr. Mandell, who asked me what was wrong, why was I crying, and somehow it happened that I was telling him about Leo and Mario and the baseball bat; I was telling Mr. Mandell how afraid I was, how angry my father would be, I didn’t want to go home…Within a few minutes plainclothes police officers, one of them a woman, had been summoned to speak with me.

  That was how it began. And once it began, it couldn’t be stopped.

  It would become a matter of public record: the unsolicited, uncoerced, purely voluntary information provided police by the thirteen-year-old sister of two suspects in the Jadro Filer beating death.

  I WAS MOVED across town to live with my aunt Bea and uncle Clyde, who hadn’t any children. This was a practical move, better than a county foster home. None of the other relatives wanted me. My sister Mariana and her husband, my sister Emily. Never want to see her face again. She makes me want to puke.

  I had to change schools, too.

  I would live with my aunt and uncle for four years in their prissy little house on Pearson Street. Aunt Bea was my mother’s older sister. Uncle Clyde was a bricklayer. So boring, my mind drifted out the window when they spoke to me. In the beginning my aunt hugged me a lot, mistaking my passivity for sadness. She told me I’d learn to be happy with her and Uncle Clyde, I’d get used to my new home, my new room, things would “settle down” and after a while my parents would forgive me—all of which, and I knew so at the time, was bullshit. The first few days I was stunned. I was too young to realize how the only life I’d known had been taken from me. Those swift uncalculated minutes in the school infirmary. The nurse gently scolding. Your mother oughtn’t to have let you. In my dreams in years to come I would mistake the school nurse for my mother. And there was Mr. Mandell crouching beside me. Lili Rose? What is it? Is there trouble at home? I had to tell them what I knew. I had no choice.

  In AA they tell you: nobody starts out thinking, as a kid, he’s going to wind up an alcoholic or a junkie. Add to that an alcoholic twice-divorced with no kids, age forty-three and counting. Add to that a daughter denounced by her family for ratting to the police on two brothers. Nobody starts out thinking she’ll be so defined, but there it is. Blunt and irrevocable as a headline.

  13-YEAR-OLD SISTER OF SUSPECTS

  PROVIDES INFORMATION TO PERRYSBURG POLICE

  Filer Death Investigation Continues

  So they moved me away. In an afternoon. I wouldn’t speak with Leo and Mario; I was spared seeing the loathing in their faces. I wouldn’t be informed but would read in the Perrysburg Journal that a police search team had found Leo’s baseball bat, buried amid litter about two hundred yards from our house. The bat, its handle wrapped in black tape, had been washed to a degree, but bloodstains and partial fingerprints remained; most incriminating, wood splinters matching those in the bat had been embedded in Jadro Filer’s scalp. I would read that, faced with this incontrovertible evidence, the lawyers representing my brothers and their friends advised their clients to plead guilty, not to murder charges but to manslaughter. The lawyers negotiated plea bargains with county prosecutors, first-degree manslaughter for Leo, who’d actually wielded the bat, second-degree manslaughter for Mario, Walt, Don. Because he was sixteen, Mario was sentenced to five years at a youth facility; he was released after three. Leo received the stiffest sentence, seven to fifteen years at Red Bank Correctional, a medium-security prison. The black community protested that these were overly lenient sentences, considering that Jadro Filer had been killed in an unprovoked attack; this was further evidence of racism and bigotry in Perrysburg. Some members of the white community denounced the sentences as too harsh, evidence of racism and bigotry in Perrysburg.

  For a long time I’d wake in my new bed in my new room confused and hopeful. Thinking, Maybe it hasn’t happened yet?

  At least there was no trial. I was spared having to testify against my brothers in court.

  NOBODY EXPECTED DAD to live to see the new millennium. But he did. So Mariana marveled, “He has so much courage.”

  They’d called me back, and like an eager dog I returned. On a windblown March morning, light flashing off the river like broken pieces of mirror, I brought my dying father a bouquet of white carnations from a florist in town. White carnations! As if Daddy had ever been a man to admire or even take notice of flowers, but what else? I could hardly have brought him a bottle of whiskey. I could hardly have brought a man dying of emphysema a handful of those fat foul-smelling Portuguese cigars he’d loved.

  “Daddy, I’m Lili Rose. I guess Mom told you I was coming?”

  Daddy nodded at me, frowning. It was all he could do, sucking oxygen through a plastic nose piece. His eyes careening onto me, and away. The truth was he’d never intended to get old like this. He’d been contemptuous of sickly, self-pitying relatives. I’d heard him say to whoever was listening, Jesus! Take me out and shoot me, I ever get like that.

  Daddy had become a sunken-chested man with drooping eyelids and trembling hands. And the veins bulging in those hands, frightening to see. The hospice nurse had said, if there’s bitterness between you…I wanted to lean close to Daddy to whisper, Is there bitterness between us? After so long? It was up to him, of course.
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  My mother had forgiven me, I guess. Those years she’d avoided me, saying her heart was broken. Well, what of my heart? I’d given up explaining. No one cared. You made your choice, now live with it. Ruined your brothers’ lives. My sisters were the ones who’d urged me to return, now Daddy was sick. They’d told me it had come out just recently: Daddy had given, over a period of years, more than five thousand dollars to Jadro Filer’s mother. (“He wanted it anonymous. He didn’t want it known.”) They’d prepared me for the changes in our father, yet somehow they had not. This strangeness! Not just John Dellamora was an old, sick man but he was in a hospital bed in our house, in my former room. He hadn’t been able to climb stairs in a while, so this was a practical solution. I wondered if he resented being in my old room. Or if he even remembered whose room this was. From the window, the river looked unchanged. It was slate-colored, so turbulent you couldn’t have told which direction the current was flowing in. In a drowse of morphine Daddy’s droopy-lidded eyes held more puzzlement than anger or judgment. He had trouble keeping them lifted to me, but I believed he was listening as I spoke of my life with the earnestness of one who must take it on faith that her listener cares for what she’s saying. “…Teaching, in Boston. This summer I’ve been invited to Venice…” But there was the hospice nurse, Yolanda. She was cheerful, young. Half my age. I saw Daddy watching Yolanda, too. Possibly he thought that Yolanda was his daughter. His favorite daughter, who’d never left home. Never betrayed him. Never “ratted.” The hospital had discharged him and sent him home to die. It wasn’t just emphysema, it was heart congestion. Exhaustion. My father hadn’t been a placid man, yet his ending would be placid, we were grateful for this. I was speaking softly. “Daddy? I had to do it. I didn’t have any choice…” I wondered if this was true: don’t we always have choices? Even a child of thirteen has a choice. I knew what was right, I did what was right, I’d do it again. I was stubborn, defiant. This was my truest nature. Maybe I’d ruined my brothers’ lives and maybe even my own, but I would do it again.