A Passel Of Plumeria (2)
Walter would find himself chain-smoking and sipping beer in the pickup outside a club or movie theater Anna Marie and her date had gone to. (He kept an empty gasoline can on the floor under the glove compartment to urinate in.) Clocking every couple in the crowds that emerged from the place he was monitoring — feeling his blood jump when he saw a girl wearing her colors — he would, once he’d spotted Anna Marie and the guy she was with for sure, start his motor and set out after them. Most of the time the guy would bring her directly back to her apartment house. In these circumstances, Walter would park as close as he could get to the house — sometimes recklessly close — and stick around to see what she did. Anna Marie, Walter was invariably relieved to note, took no one inside. But when she lingered too long in the car, or if there was a more than perfunctory kiss at the door, it would take all of his will not to shout to her to break it up. There were also nights, less frequent but well-nigh unbearable, when she’d go to the guy’s digs. On those occasions, Walter would wait for as long as it took for her to rematerialize in the doorway — in several instances hours elapsed — and to either be driven home by the guy or to hurry into a cab that had been ordered. Although she’d eventually buy a car of her own, Anna Marie rarely used it for her liaisons. On nights Anna Marie was with someone else and Walter was, for one reason or another, unable to follow her, he would, beginning at eleven o’clock, call her on her personal line to see if she was home yet. If she answered he could go to bed. If she didn’t answer he would call her at 15-minute intervals until she did. He couldn’t sleep unless he knew she was home. When he heard Anna Marie’s voice Walter would hang up without speaking and she never questioned him about the calls. At 2 a.m. on one such night, and well into the arrangement’s third year now, Anna Marie’s phone rang two-dozen times with no response and Walter felt something he hadn’t felt before, a fierce and consuming anger. He wished that Anna Marie had engaged in one of her foolhardy exploits and that an accident had resulted, a disfiguring accident that would make her repugnant to other boys. But merely allowing this thought to enter his mind made him as angry with himself as he was with her. It was so far removed from what love was supposed to be about. And he would never want Anna Marie to be his woman because she had no other options. He wanted to win Anna Marie. In the circumscribed world of his fixation, a world that had narrowed more and more with the inception of the arrangement, nothing less than his very life depended upon her freely and fully giving herself to him. To claim her by default would kill him just as surely as losing her would. He recognized, of course, that the prospects for a positive outcome weren’t good. The arrangement itself was ample evidence of that, and if further signs were needed, whenever he tried to discuss a future together, she quickly changed the subject. The problem, his gut was telling him, was that he wasn’t loving her enough. But what did that mean? How much more could he love her than he already did? He didn’t know. He did know that she wasn’t happy, not even with the arrangement. Not really. He’d begun to think of her — the perception bruised his heart — as some kind of pain junkie, and he viewed the boys she went out with as her dealers. They wanted a sexual score and she was, certainly now and then, trading her body for the hurt they promised. If they delivered, she’d get high for a while and then all raggedy and strung out when she got cut off. “It’s just sports and games anyway,” she’d said to him on one of her low days and after an especially vivid recurrence of that bad dream. “Most of the time it’s no better than a scary movie. No souvenir afterwards to prove the point. You know what I’m saying?” What she was saying had, like the reason for her chronic discontent itself, baffled him. And believing that her equanimity was his to secure, and that its achievement would assure her devotion to him, he’d continually — he was doing it now — ransacked his knowledge of her looking for clues to what he was missing. Thus far, however, his incessant brooding had yielded only frustration. But when he called her again, and she answered this time, which caused a wave of affection for her to flush through him, but also, and confusingly at first because his anger was gone, restored the notion of a maimed Anna Marie to the foreground of his mind, he had what amounted to an epiphany. He understood, and would convey to his confidant with a remark the astuteness of which astonished me, that “It isn’t pain and injury Anna Marie gets off on, it’s the feeling of surviving them.” But that wasn’t the whole of it. The rest, which he was careful not to disclose until a jailhouse exchange with his friend following the incident, was the realization that had arrived with his insight of what loving her enough meant and of what it might demand of him. Shortly thereafter, on an afternoon he was at work and under the assumption that she was too, Walter received a call. “I’m still here,” were the first words Anna Marie uttered. She was in an airfield phone booth twenty miles from Kendall. A boy she’d recently encountered and mentioned only in passing to Walter had taken her sky diving and once they’d landed remembered an “urgent matter he had to attend to.” She was “busted up and stranded.” Walter, doubly disturbed by her uncharacteristic omission of advance notice about the date, found her holding her wrist. “I tripped when I touched down,” she said. “I tried to break the fall. I think I might have fractured something.” He rushed her to an emergency room where the diagnosis was a simple sprain. In good spirits for a week, about as long as it took for her wrist to heal and for her to grasp that the boy had blown her off, she gradually became pensive and withdrawn. Then, in the midst of her despondency, the cycle was in motion again. A guy she’d met at work, another biker, had asked her out and she had accepted. “I don’t know,” Walter said. “I thought we had an understanding,” Anna Marie said. “I don’t know,” Walter said. “Walter,” she said, “what do you want from me?” “I want you to be okay,” he blurted. “To be okay and to love me.” “You are so sweet,” she said, plainly moved by his statement and stepping towards him. He readied himself for a passionate clinch but what he got was a kiss on the cheek. Confronted by a parade of cars, most of which, and oddly, required new batteries, Walter was backed up with work and well on the far side of his regular hours. The minute he finished he climbed into the pickup and set out for Route 1, the highway that would take him the 150 miles to Key West. He’d been experiencing a turbulence in his chest the entire day and warring thoughts were roiling his brain. A long drive would maybe pull him together. Once he was past Key Largo’s garish strip of motels, fish shacks, hamburger stands and gift shops, the road opened to water on both sides and there were stretches in which no land could be seen. To be on this road in the middle of the ocean ordinarily blew his mind. But there was no thrill in it this time. This time what was happening in his mind shut out his surroundings. Holding the wheel steady against occasional squalls, he kept his eyes on the asphalt and the traffic in front of him. He wanted, right now, no wondrous seascapes or stunning sunsets, only the pickup’s motion and the grind of its engine. He could just as well have been driving through a tunnel. He stopped solely for gas and to relieve himself, and never turned the radio on. Arriving at Key West in three hours, he drove half the length of the island where he made a right turn and then another right onto an avenue that led him directly back to Route 1. By the time he returned to Kendall, deep into the night, in a light rain and to streets empty and hushed, his heart was still beating too hard, but his head was clear. With the heat index in the mid-nineties and the sun fiercely radiant, Anna Marie, a self-described “sun freak,” was outside on her two o’clock lunch break. Dressed in shorts and, to absorb every ray, flexing and extending her already deeply tanned legs, one and then the other, she was perched on a metal railing at a short distance from a small group of similarly sun-worshiping colleagues in the section reserved for “Associates’ Vehicles” adjacent to the shopping center’s parking lot. Across from her was the familiar vista, shimmering now in the dense atmosphere, of a giant Macy’s, a Chinese restaurant, an ice cream parlor, a RadioShack and the Winn Dixie she worked for. The center’s expansive parking area, in the foreground of her view, was bounded by palm trees and only a quarter full. The people passing through it were mostly housewives and young children. Somewhere close magnolias were in blossom, while just overhead two blue and white tree swallows chased each other back and forth, stirring steamy breezes strong enough to feel in her hair. When a mosquito invaded the space behind her sunglasses and bit her eyelid, Anna Marie had a sandwich in one hand and a bottle of soda in the other. Placing the sandwich on her lap, she removed her glasses to rub at the itch, but she rubbed too vigorously and the sandwich slipped from her lap and dropped to the ground. As she was bending to retrieve it with the hand that held her glasses, she pressed the glasses against the pavement and broke off a stem. Crouching in front of the railing, she set the soda down and took the glasses into both of her hands, wondering if she could fix them. It was at this moment that Walter’s pickup, coming from the left, pulled to a stop on the roadway a few yards in front of her. She didn’t see that it was Walter’s pickup. From the angle at which she was positioned she was facing directly into the sun, and the pickup was only an amorphous shadow in the wicked glare. She identified it by the clamor of the always unfastened chains and tire irons that rolled around its body whenever he began to move or to brake. She could hear Walter disembark and hear, as well, that he’d left the motor running. She expected to hear the driver-side door slam shut behind him but, in this regard, there was only silence. Then, as he came around the back of the pickup — himself a gray specter in the impossible light — his movement halted and, she could tell by the clunk and the creak, he opened the passenger-side door. Was he planning to take her somewhere, and in a hurry? Was there an occasion that she’d forgotten? He knew she was working. He started to approach her and appeared to have something with him, an object that, bouncing along with his gait in a corner of his darkened mass, was of a lighter hue. She thought it must be a gift. Then, as he got closer and the object got brighter, she thought — she was convinced — that it was a passel of plumeria, her favorite flower. He was about to present her with flowers. But as she proceeded to stand, the murkiness dissolved and she saw that he was holding a can, an opened rectangular can colored a brilliant yellow with green and white lettering. She was staring at the can when Walter, now no more than a foot from her and without a word, jerked it at her face. The can contained battery acid and she received the searing liquid with a long siren of a cry that was joined by the sound and smell of a hamburger sizzling on a charcoal grill. “It was like he threw fire at me,” she would later recount how the splash of acid felt to her. The sunglasses Anna Marie still had in her hands fell from them and were crushed beneath her weight as she collapsed at Walter’s feet. Weeping loudly, she was clutching her fist to her eye. Walter swiftly lifted her and, cradling her with the palm of his hand under the back of her head, carried her to the pickup. Ignoring red lights and stop signs — and dogged by a horn-honking band of appalled witnesses — he drove her at great speed to the nearest hospital’s emergency room where he’d been arrested. TV and newspaper coverage of the assault, which excoriated Walter (and caused his mortified family to refuse any contact with the press for a month), was predictably lurid. It faded though in just a couple of days with reports that Walter had pleaded guilty and that he’d be confined in a Miami jail to await sentencing. Anna Marie would remain in the hospital for a week or so. She’d undergone a surgical procedure and more were planned. One of them, perhaps a year away, would likely involve the excision of her left eye. A pain management specialist forecast a “lifetime of moderate to severe discomfort” in the afflicted space. Aside from a freelance photographer’s attempt to sneak into Anna Marie’s room on her second night at the hospital — he was promptly apprehended — Anna Marie was not pursued by the media at the hospital or when she was discharged and there were no indications of what was to follow. The sentencing proceedings were held in late October, on a fall day that was unusually sweltering even for Miami and in a courtroom in which the cooling system had failed. The windows were thrown open, but there was little movement in air rapidly soured by some fifty perspiring bodies. Moreover, an hour from the appointed time would pass before the judge, a tall, skeletal man in his sixties, made his appearance. Despite his tardiness he was in no hurry to get to the bench. A clearly casual ten-minute conversation with the bailiff took place before, in shirtsleeves, he assumed his position. At this juncture Anna Marie, who was sitting in a front row with an aunt and across an aisle from Walter’s parents and brothers, stood up. She’d misplaced, that morning, the white cloth patch she normally used in public now to conceal the damage the acid had done (that it had to have been a frantic morning would presently become obvious), and wearing instead an accessory she might once have donned on a New Year’s Eve — enormous, rhinestone-studded cardboard-framed glasses with plastic electric-blue-tinted lenses that did succeed in masking all of her upper face — she said, in a voice astonishingly resonant, that she hoped “His Honor would consider probation for Walter.” “What did you say?” The judge was incredulous. “I couldn’t bear to be without him,” Anna Marie said, turning toward Walter who was shackled to a chair at a table near the bench. Walter had been keeping his face down and lifted it then. He’d endured, while in jail, a compulsory haircut and the acne remnants, fully visible, were accompanied by newly inflicted bruises — obviously something else had happened in jail as well. The spectators reacted to Anna Marie’s words with startled exclamations and much murmuring. The judge was apoplectic. Quivering with rage, he said that he had a daughter of his own and that if something “so depraved” had been done to her he would have “blown the dirt bag’s head off with my shotgun.” Anna Marie’s plea was “ludicrous” and would have no mitigating effect on the sentence, he said. In fact, given the “unconscionable cruelty of the act,” Walter was going to get “every bit of what was coming to him.” According to the judge, what Walter had coming was ten years in a Florida state prison. (He would wind up serving seven.) As Walter, shuffling in his leg irons but with his head still raised, was led away, the judge summoned a now hysterical Anna Marie and her aunt to the bench. In her discombobulated condition, Anna Marie had knocked her appurtenance askew to reveal a melted-shut left eyelid and the raw, mottled meat, speckled with tiny white pustules and stretching from her hairline to the edge of her nostril, that was the flesh surrounding it. The judge, blanching at the sight of her naked wound, advised Anna Marie to seek counseling. “I don’t need counseling,” she sobbed. “I need Walter.” (Subsequently the judge would tell a reporter that, “The girl is as sick as the perp.”) Most everything I’ve related here I would learn on the succeeding mornings when I perused the regional dailies. But what in particular had led me to balk at the blanket derision Walter and Anna Marie elicited, and then to read every word printed about them, was the video I saw when I turned on the news later that evening. Anna Marie, in her comical shades, was emerging from the courthouse and her indignation lit up the screen. Visibly spraying saliva, she sputtered to a cluster of reporters, and before any of them had a chance to speak: “Walter’s the whole package. I would have floated right off the world if he hadn’t been around. He makes me feel safe.” “I’m still here,” she added, and then stalked off to a waiting car. So, seven years afterwards, with the accuracy of my instincts long since confirmed to my satisfaction, but anticipating no further word — seven years was, after all, a long time — you can guess what the sudden announcement was. Below a new picture of a grinning Anna Marie — she seemed to be wincing slightly and the left side of her face, from which a conspicuously prosthetic eye stared, was discolored and mildly tumescent but perfectly smooth — the caption read: “Victim of 1985 acid attack, Anna Marie Woods, marries her assailant, Walter Parchman, upon his release from prison.” In my mind I offered my congratulations. They would be, I expected, something like all right.
Go to part: 1 2
Copyright © 2016 Robert Levin |