They found a list of names and addresses on the man. My name was at the top of the list. I will be thinking of this for years to come. Is it because my photograph was in the newspaper several times this fall when we fought the waste treatment plant? He told the police he found the names in the newspaper and the addresses in the phone book. He said he did not know why he had written them down and put the paper in his pocket.
I still cannot tell you if he was black or white. Miss Anastasia is adamant about that. She says the only relevant information is whether he was wanted or loved. She says children who are not wanted or loved grow up to be mean. She says Planned Parenthood is the long view and the short view is wariness and locked doors.
She identified him at ten o’clock the morning after Howard called the police. She picked him out from photographs and in an old-fashioned lineup. Then she asked if she could be allowed to talk to him.
“You don’t want to do that,” the chief of police told her. “You might prejudice our case. Let us prosecute him first.”
“What would you want to talk to him about?” I asked. I was there with her. I had driven her to the police station for her appointment.
“We might learn something that would be useful,” she answered. “The work of the world is never done, Louise. How often have we talked of that?”
The bad thing about Miss Anastasia is that there is no arguing with her. How do you argue with someone who has decided to view her rape as a learning experience and her rapist as someone she should counsel? On the other hand I am not a yes person. I don’t pretend to go along with a lot of left-wing hogwash and blame-the-victim thinking.
“I have to learn his history to put my mind at rest,” she continued. “I have to know the series of events that led him to me.”
“He had a list and I was on it. That’s all I need to know. I want him in jail. The way the men are talking the safest place for him is jail.”
“We must be privy to his records,” she insisted. “Who do we know who can get that information for us?”
My niece’s sister-in-law works at the police station. She copied the files that afternoon. Then my niece brought them to me and I took them over to Miss Anastasia’s house and she opened a bottle of sherry and poured us each a glass and we read the files.
It was completely depressing. He was born in south Florida and is thirty-nine years old. There are four arrests for public drunkenness and two for possession of marijuana. He worked at one of the casinos as a bellboy for a while. Now we have him on our hands in the Ocean Springs jail.
“Why would he suddenly go from being a drunk to becoming a burglar and a rapist?” Miss Anastasia asked. “This doesn’t make sense, Louise, I’ve been reading transcripts all my life. So have you. When does a person go from one modus operandi to another with no apparent cause? There’s something wrong here.”
“Gambling,” I said. “He was working at a casino, then he was fired. He must have been gambling.”
“Not necessarily. He could have been fired for drinking, but you have a point. Could a person become addicted to gambling on top of alcohol? If so, he could have wanted money to go back to the casino. I offered him money, however, and he still wanted me to disrobe.” She drank her sherry. I poured us both another glass. “I need to understand what happened,” she added.
“Well, you aren’t going to ask him and that is that,”
“I know someone who could. Isobel Madison is in New Orleans. She’s a renowned psychoanalyst. If she would talk to him we might sort this out. Perhaps there’s a treatment center where he could be sent for rehabilitation. I’ll talk to Judge Arnold tomorrow and see what he says.”
“And who will pay Isobel for driving to Ocean Springs to talk to a drunken rapist? She treats the richest people in New Orleans. She isn’t going to come over here to do charity work.”
“She would come if I asked her to.” Miss Anastasia sat back in her wicker chair and drank her sherry. Her mind raced off to a world where a great psychiatrist would come to Ocean Springs and rehabilitate the poor lost creature who had banged her head against the wall and tried to rape and kill her. I stayed quiet. I drank my second glass of sherry and poured us both a third.
“Am I getting carried away?” she asked. “Yes, of course I am.”
“My name was on that list. I don’t want to put ugly dead bolt locks on every door in my house and wear a bracelet that calls nine-one-one and go up to Woolmarket and buy a German shepherd.” The police had been trying to get Miss Anastasia to get another dog. They want to give her one of the black German shepherds the Hargrave family raises for them at Woolmarket.
“It might be better to get German shepherds than to have a man in Parchman Prison because I sent him there.”
“That’s it,” I said. “You’ve gone too far. You are not doing anything to that man. He did this to himself and I’m not listening to any more soul-searching. I am going for a walk. Put down that sherry and come along with me. It will be sundown soon. Let’s go and watch it happen.”
She put the glass on top of the copied files and we got up and left the house and started down across the lawn. We were almost to the road when we remembered to go back and lock the front door. Then we set off again. Let me describe her walking to you. She has on Nike shoes, a long skirt with a silk petticoat underneath, a dark green sweater buttoned up the front, a wool cloche she bought in Belgium thirty years ago. It is a lighter green than the sweater and comes down over one ear. Her soft white hair sticks out around the edges of the hat. She strides along the path beside the beach. Her arms swing, the wind moves in to meet her, the skies open out before her, the waves move in along our gentle, sandy shore. She moves as if she knows where she is going and who she is. Progress is being made, her walking seems to say. Much has been accomplished. Much remains.
Of course I adore her so I read a lot into her slightest whim. Which is why I have to be on guard against being caught up in her academic, ultra-liberal slant on things. She ran a small college for privileged girls. I run an integrated, understaffed, underfunded middle school. I love my job, but it is much closer to reality than the manicured lawns of Mississippi College for Women.
“I will come and lecture to your young women this week, Louise,” she was saying as we walked. “I’ll tell them to lock their doors. I’m not sure my back door was locked. I have to admit that.”
“If it hadn’t been your house, it might have been mine,” I answered. “I have a gun, you know, and I wouldn’t have been afraid to use it. I might have shot him in the face.”
“More reason to call Isobel and see if she can get him into a rehabilitation program. You would have been sorry you shot him. You’d have to live with that forever.”
“I would not be sorry. I’d be glad.” We picked up the pace and walked around the beached sailboats by the Washington Avenue entrance to the sound and out onto a spit of land where dozens of sea gulls were resting on the wet sand. The tide was so low the beach went out halfway to Deer Island. A blue crane came in and made a landing. He turned and looked us over.
In the distance a fake pirate ship was being hauled from Mobile Bay to a new mooring at Biloxi, where it is slated to become the fifty-first casino on the coast. We watched its progress. We watched until the drawbridge opened and it passed through. Then we moved around the sea gulls and the heron and kept on walking.
She will call Isobel Madison and Isobel will come over, I decided. Then Judge Arnold and Isobel will pull strings and the wretched man will be sent to a rehabilitation program instead of prison. Then he will get out and come back to Ocean Springs and break into my house and my pair of black German shepherds will tear him limb from limb while I shoot him.
“I told you so,” I practiced underneath my breath, but she heard me.
“What did you say?” she asked.
“I said I’m going up to Woolmarket on Saturday and look at those dogs. I want one whether you do or not.”
“Don’t be foolish
, Louise,” she answered. “Of course we aren’t going up to Woolmarket and get some vicious dogs.”
“I’m getting one,” I answered. “I might get two.”
Be careful what you say in jest or fear or anger. Two days later we were up in Woolmarket looking at the dogs. A young police officer had driven us there in a police car. There was a litter of five puppies the chief of police wanted us to see. They were three months old. The mother was a beauty. We petted the father and watched him go through his paces. He had been a Seeing Eye dog but his owner died and he had been retired to the breeding program. I thought he was the smartest dog I had ever seen and I told Miss Anastasia so. She was already holding a puppy in each arm.
Which is how three-fifths of a litter of black German shepherds bred to be working dogs are now living the life of leisure on the coast. Two are at her house and one is at mine. I named mine Cincinnatus after the Roman hero and she named hers Rafaela and George. She says it’s pretentious to name dogs after historical figures and I say it’s pretentious to name them the first thing that pops into your head.
Miss Anastasia’s presentation to the young women at the middle school went well. It was a cold day and she wore the long dark green velvet cape lined with fur which she has had since 1946. She talked to the girls about being aware and protecting themselves and the sacred beauty of the human body and also its resilience and power to forget and heal.
She fielded questions, including one from an animal-rights activist about the cape. “I would not buy it now,” she answered. “Neither do I see any need to throw it away.”
“Have you forgiven this guy then?” a girl asked. “Or do you secretly want to hit him or do something bad to him?”
“I want you girls to work very hard at math and raise the overall math scores in Mississippi,” she answered. “I think about the man who harmed me and try to figure out what society can do to lower the number of desperate people who live among us. Filling the world with jails is a primitive solution to our problems and doesn’t seem to be solving them.”
“That’s enough questions for now,” I broke in. “You are all going to be late for third-period classes. Miss Anastasia will be eating lunch with us in the cafeteria. You may talk to her there, later, if you wish.”
The lovely girls of the Ocean Springs Middle School broke into applause. Miss Anastasia stood beside me while they filed out of the auditorium and into the hall.
“What if they really raised the math scores?” I asked. “What if they actually did that?”
“It could happen,” she answered. “If the winter is long and it rains a lot and the parents turn off the television sets.”
The wretch in the jail was set free. The police were forced to let him go for lack of evidence. Fingerprints in Miss Anastasia’s bedroom did not match his fingerprints. Footprints did not match his shoes. There was nothing but her identification, and that is not enough for the law. The local newspaper put the story on the front page. SUSPECTED RAPIST FREED, NO EVIDENCE, the headline read. We all expected Miss Anastasia to be embarrassed by this but I think she was relieved. I was the one who got scared and made my daughter sleep at my house for two nights after they let him go. After all, this dog is not grown yet and I don’t really want to use my gun.
In spring five hundred daffodils bloomed on the lawn of Miss Anastasia’s house. Also, math scores on the standardized tests at the middle school went up seven points for the year, but, of course, we cannot prove Miss Anastasia did that.
PART III
Abstract and Brief Chronicles of the Times
Excitement at Drake Field
Yes. My name is Phyllis McElroy and I am the one who captured the Greek fugitive at the Fayetteville airport. I’m not the one he threatened. He was threatening my fellow worker, Dale, but I’m the one who called the police. “Nine-one-one, there is a man at the American Airlines counter at the Fayetteville airport threatening us with a gun.”
“What airport?” she asks.
“Drake Field,” I answer. Can you believe that? The operator asked me what airport. This is a town of sixty thousand people, give or take the students and not counting all the new people moving here to escape real estate taxes.
Dale had come in about five that morning to work the early flights and was in a bad mood anyway. I’d come in at seven. I’ve only been working the counter for four months. Talk about a crummy job. Listen, this Greek fugitive is not the first person to threaten us. Mostly they threaten us with writing the management and so forth when we let them check in and then the planes don’t take off due to weather. It is a crummy way to treat customers, but what can I do? I’m going to be a photographer or a dancer if I ever get out of school and pay off my school loans and get a house and a life. For now, the check-in counter at American Airlines.
So Dale is just standing there, checking people in as fast as he can when anybody with a brain could look out the windows and see that the ceiling is too low for these little planes to take off. Saab Turbo Props, that’s what American Eagle flies out of Fayetteville. Northwest and Delta and TWA have counters too. Listen, this is a very busy airport for a college town of sixty thousand people. The world offices of Wal-Mart are twenty miles away at Bentonville and this is where the salesmen land. There are a thousand of them a week, all dressed in black and slick-looking clothes, with their shoes shined, carrying heavy briefcases and looking worn. The Waltons and their cronies are building a new airport twenty miles from here, thank God. Who needs airplanes full of salesmen flying over their houses at night? We’ll be glad to get rid of them and hopefully I won’t need this crazy job by then.
Back to this fugitive. He was here as an interpreter for a Russian poultry buyer. The poultry buyer was trying to buy chickens from Tyson Foods, our other big industry. The fugitive was mixed up in the Iran-Contra scandal and was convicted ten years ago of trying to smuggle missiles out of the United States. Then they let him out of prison while an appeal was going through and he disappeared. Can you believe it? I called the police and now he’s been sent to Atlanta with federal marshals. This poor buyer guy from Russia didn’t know what to think. The police came running into the waiting room and grabbed up his interpreter and took him along for questioning. I mean, this guy had lived in Communist Russia and he was at least sixty years old. I suppose he thought his number was up. I’m the one who went over and told the police the buyer hadn’t done anything. It was only the Greek guy who threatened us.
There was an archaeologist from the university in the airport who spoke a little Russian. He came over and tried to calm down the Russian and then they called the Tyson corporate headquarters and they sent someone out to rescue him and get him on his flight to Russia. He missed the one he was scheduled on but they got him on one later in the day. I mean, the Russian wasn’t in on it. He was just in town to calm the waters about a Russian poultry deal that had gone sour. The Tyson folks are having a hard time with their foreign sales because in many countries the refrigeration isn’t dependable enough for storing chickens.
One of the policemen is a guy who’s on my boyfriend’s basketball team. Everyone in Fayetteville plays basketball or watches it. It’s how we make it through the winters, and this winter has been especially bad. These are the Ozark mountains and you put snow and hills together and you’ve got some people in a bad mood. Plus, last week it was so cold again, right at the beginning of March, when there should have been some relief.
Plus, I think my boyfriend’s running around on me with my best friend. I’m not sure and I can’t prove it but he takes her out when I have to work at night. There ought to be someone you can trust but there’s probably not, except your family and that’s another can of worms. You can trust them to suck off of you when you are healthy and making money. You can trust them to think you’re always supposed to lend them your car.
If he’s running around with her, what am I supposed to do? Kill them or kill myself or be surprised? Listen, I took this drama course last ye
ar and every play we read was about something that happens every day in Fayetteville. So what else is new? When I had to write a paper for it, that was my theme.
In other words, if this is going steady, I’m a woodpecker. One of the cops that came out to the airport, his name is Hadley Townsend, puts his arm around my waist and asks me if I’m coming to the basketball game that night at the youth center.
“I guess so,” I answer.
“How are you and Dan getting along?” he says. “If you ever break up with him, you know who to call. You sure do look great in that uniform. I like that little skirt.”
“Are you here to collect this fugitive, or not?” I answered, or something like that. Of course, I didn’t know he was a fugitive yet. To tell the truth, he looked like a drug runner to me. All haggard and mean and half crazy. We get all kinds here at the counter.
“I hope you come,” Hadley said and gave me another squeeze.
Well, it was Friday so as soon as I got off work I went home and did my Computer II homework and then got all dolled up and went down to the youth center to watch the guys play ball. There was a new moon in the sky and a pretty little planet right above it. Venus, I bet it was. I had astronomy last semester and I made an A in it. Venus will be lucky for me, I decided. I don’t care if I have two guys showing off for me at a basketball game. Let’s see if Dan, my boyfriend, picks up on me and Hadley making a connection. He deserves it, the bastard, not to mention I will probably have my name and maybe my photograph in the morning paper.
Flights of Angels Page 23