“Somebody is paying him to hurt us,” I said.
“Maybe, maybe not. This is going to be a tough one, Weldon. There’s a witness. A woman riding a bicycle said she saw Mrs. Holland try to kick Slakely.”
“That was after he brutalized her.”
“I’ll try to get the charges reduced,” he replied. “That’s about as good as it’s going to get.”
After I hung up, Rosita came out of the shower, a towel wrapped around her.
“How do you feel?” I said, trying to smile.
“I’m fine.”
I sat with her on the side of the bed. Through the window, we could see the tops of trees swaying above our neighbors’ roofs and a plane towing a Burma-Shave ad across the sky. “We may have to pay the fine and be done with it,” I said.
“Do you know where he touched me? Do you want to know what he did to me with his penis?”
“We’ll get him, Rosita. We’ll get the person who hired him, too. We just need to get the court situation out of the way.”
She pulled her hand away from me. “By giving in to it? That’s how we get it out of the way?”
“I’m trying to be realistic. Rhetoric doesn’t help. Those charges could get you up to a year in jail.”
“You don’t realize how your words hurt me.”
The doorbell rang downstairs. Our bell was an old one, installed in the 1920s, the kind you twisted. I don’t know why I thought of that; maybe I associated it with an earlier time, when I delivered newspapers in a small Texas town and I had no consciousness of the evil that men can do to one another.
The bell rang again. I went downstairs and opened the door. No one was there. I saw a kid on a service cycle drive away, his lacquered-bill cap low on his eyes, his cavalry-like breeches puffed around the thighs. A flat cardboard mailer addressed to Rosita lay on the doormat. I carried it upstairs, tapping it against my leg.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“It’s for you. The return address says ‘Blue Bird Record Company.’”
Her face showed no recognition. She removed the towel wrapped around her body and dressed with her back to me.
“You want me to open it?” I asked.
“No, I’ll do it.”
“I confronted Slakely yesterday. If I had my way, I’d shoot him.”
“He’s a functionary.”
I had run out of words. “I’ll fix us something to eat,” I said.
I went downstairs and began making sandwiches and a salad. I kept hoping she would join me of her own accord, slicing tomatoes and bread crust and cucumbers, smiling and talking at the same time, ignoring my cautionary words, as was her way.
Twenty minutes passed. I took an ice tray from the freezer and cracked it apart in the sink. I filled two glasses with sun tea and inserted sprigs of mint in the ice and lemon slices on the edge of the glass. I could hear no sound from upstairs. “Lunch is ready!” I called.
There was no response.
I dried my hands on a dish towel and gazed out the window at the sun spangling inside the trees. I saw my neighbor’s vintage automobile parked on an unpaved driveway, just the other side of our unfenced yard. For a second, the year was 1934 again and I was looking at the stolen vehicle driven by Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. I’m hard put to explain why I would associate that particular moment with the arrival in our lives of the Barrow gang. I think it was because I had never understood them, or perhaps I had never understood what they represented. Some considered them nothing more than pathological killers. Grandfather believed they were lionized by J. Edgar Hoover for political reasons. Others saw them as products of their times. I guess I believed they were all three.
But why would I dwell upon them now? The answer was simple. Something far more wicked than a group of semiliterate, small-town bank robbers was wrapping its tentacles around Rosita and me and also Linda Gail and Hershel Pine. Worse, the people trying to hurt us were using the law to do it.
Rosita was sitting on the bed, wearing only her skirt and bra. The cardboard mailer was on the floor. She had opened it with a pair of scissors that lay beside her. A ten-by-twelve-inch black-and-white glossy photograph rested on her knees. Her eyes were wet when she turned and looked at me. She picked up the photo with her left hand and held it in the air, waiting for me to take it.
“What is it?” I said.