Protectors

by Kris Nelscott

  Today, after that walk (after the renewed panic) it almost felt like too much.

  I made myself step away from the door. I had already filled a lot of the shelves with new books. My old books were in storage in Chicago. I’d spent some of my days here in Berkeley haunting the plethora of used bookstores. Cody’s Books on Telegraph had become a second home.

  I was reading at least a book a day, but that wasn’t keeping up with my buying habits. This afternoon was unusual, in that I hadn’t brought anything home with me to read.

  I almost went into the kitchen and turned on the television, but I didn’t. There wouldn’t be anything on besides the moon landing, and I’d seen enough.

  I had two televisions in the apartment, both of which I had bought. One was small and portable. I had it on one of the kitchen counters so that I could watch while I cooked.

  The other was in my bedroom. I couldn’t sleep most nights, so I often watched until the test pattern forced me to shut the television off. Even then, I couldn’t stand the quiet, although logically, I should have let the room remain quiet so I could listen for whatever was outside to threaten me.

  I kept the radio on, usually tuned to KPAT for the music. The radio in the kitchen was tuned to KPFA, and I found I listened to that more than watched the television. I liked the eclectic listener-sponsored programming and the volunteer DJs. I actually felt tied into the community, listening to KPFA.

  I wasn’t hungry—I had eaten more this afternoon than I had eaten in days—but I felt at loose ends. I was too restless to read. I paced the apartment’s long narrow hallway, my mood alternating between jubilation and panic at the decision I had made.

  For the first time since I’d left Chicago—actually, for the first time since I’d left the hospital—I was choosing to interact with people. It had felt good this afternoon. Odd, but good.

  I still felt fragile, but I was hoping that the exercise, the training, that Pammy Griffin said she could provide would make that fragility go away. Before, I never thought about how strong I was. Now, all I thought about was how weak I was, and I hated it. It needed to change.

  I needed to change—again.

  And this time, I had to initiate that change, and I had to follow through.

  No matter how hard it was going to be, I had to do the work.

  Because I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my life hiding alone in my apartment, wherever that was. If I did, then I was still being terrorized. Even though I’d moved. Even though he was dead. I would still be keeping him in my life.

  He had changed me, but he couldn’t defeat me.

  I wouldn’t let him.

  It was time for him to move out. For good.

  7

  Eagle

  After the cops left, Eagle couldn’t stay in her apartment. She had too much energy. She wanted to hit someone, and she knew the perfect place to do it.

  She stuffed her regular identification and a few dollars into her pocket along with her keys, and headed out of the apartment. As she stepped into the hall, she could hear televisions blaring. It sounded like they were tuned to the same channel, and the voices sounded like newscasters.

  She wondered what was going on. Usually when all the TVs were tuned to the same channel, the Raiders or the Warriors were playing. But that was in the fall and winter, and it was July. Right now, the Giants were playing the Dodgers at Candlestick, but that game wouldn’t have been on television. Local games were blacked out.

  She shook her head slightly, not in the mood to find out what national tragedy had hit on a sunny Sunday afternoon. She was shaken up enough by the damn cops.

  She hurried down the stairs and out the door. She walked to the edge of the street, then stopped, startled.

  It was sunny and 75 degrees, just about the perfect summer day—and no one was on the street. That was weird. Even when the National Guard was everywhere, people were on the street.

  She couldn’t remember the last time that people had stayed home.

  Her stomach twisted. Something really bad was happening, then. She pivoted, and walked to Pammy’s gym.

  Even if Pammy wasn’t there, Eagle had a key. Pammy wanted someone else to be able to get in at a moment’s notice. She sometimes let street people stay in the gym, something Eagle thought was a mistake. Vagrants were desperate, and at some point, one of them would either trash the place or steal all the important stuff from it.

  But Pammy was the ultimate bleeding-heart liberal, and nothing Eagle could do would change that. She walked the half block in the strange quiet, and turned at the alley, to let herself in the gym’s back door.

  She hated going through the front door. She felt like a fraud when she did that. She usually didn’t work out in the gym, and she didn’t spar. She didn’t want to hurt her hands.

  But on a day like today, when the night’s events crowded her, she needed to let out the anger. If she didn’t, she’d smoke too much dope and maybe move to drinking too much. If she did that, she’d end up just like her mother.

  Cleaning the apartment showed Eagle that she was too damn close to the edge as it was. The pot residue on the surfaces had been thick. She’d been smoking every night before bed to calm herself. She had to stop that. Nothing good would come from it.

  At least, the detectives hadn’t said anything. The smell of bleach must have overpowered the oils left by the smoke, but it was damn close.

  Or maybe the cops just expected every apartment in this part of Berkeley to smell like pot and patchouli oil.

  Eagle passed the garbage cans, which reeked of rotted food and dirty cat litter. Two giant piles of dog crap drew flies near the mouth of the alley, and she suspected she walked across some dog urine as well. Students around here who had dogs had stopped running them in the park since the troubles started in early May.

  Since then, Eagle had walked in more dog crap than she wanted to think about.

  She reached the gym’s back door and unlocked it, stepping inside. The back entrance opened into the small kitchen that Pammy kept for her personal use.

  Eagle wiped her feet on the mat and took a deep breath, figuring she’d smell it if she tracked anything inside. The small room smelled of Palmolive and Lemon Pledge, just like it usually did. There was no coffee on the stove, like there often was when Pammy was here.

  Eagle let out a small breath. She was relieved to be alone. She wasn’t sure she was up to a discussion with Pammy. All Eagle wanted to do was slide on some gloves and hit a punching bag for a while. Pammy had shown her how to hit one and protect her hands, and right now, Eagle needed to blow off that steam before she did something crazy.

  She opened the door and let herself into the main part of the gym. Female laughter reached her, along with another sound, lower, just outside her normal hearing range.

  She stopped, startled. All the signs had indicated that no one was here. Her entire body froze.

  It was Sunday, wasn’t it? Pammy rarely ran classes on Sunday. She liked to take Sundays off when she could.

  Eagle debated disappearing through the back door and finding some other way to let out all of her energy. Then she heard her name.

  She looked up. Pammy was gesturing at her.

  “We have pizza, and a TV,” Pammy said, as if those were things Eagle would want.

  Eagle didn’t like the “we” and she didn’t know why they would need a TV. Pammy really wasn’t a sports fan, and there were no fights in the afternoon—at least, not professional level fights that were being broadcast.

  But Eagle’s stomach growled. She could smell the garlic and tomato of the pizza. She wasn’t sure when she had eaten last.

  She stepped in farther, thumbs hooked in her back pockets. A group of women sat at two different card tables, picking at pizza and laughing as if they were having a fantastic time.

  Eagle had trouble processing that. The television on in the middle of the day, and women at A Gym of Her Own, sitting down, not participating in a class. It w
as just too weird to contemplate.

  Pammy walked toward her, smiling. Pammy was a good woman. A little too muscular to be considered feminine, but she didn’t entirely care. She might have cared once, back when Eagle met her, when Pammy actually wore her light brown hair in a flip-do and put on makeup every morning.

  But as the gym became more and more successful, Pammy dropped the rollers-at-night hairstyle and stopped putting on anything except a touch of lipstick. She also stopped wearing dresses. Either she was in loose-fitting pants and a comfortable top, along with a pair of Keds, or she wore blue jeans and a t-shirt, just like the students did.

  Her hair had gotten wash-it-fast short, and she didn’t wear any jewelry at all. Yet she looked a lot more comfortable with herself than she had in years.

  “I didn’t expect to see you today,” Pammy said. Whatever was on the television, it wasn’t a national crisis. Pammy had cried her way through the assassinations of 1968 while Eagle had watched stoically, unsurprised.

  People shot each other. People hated each other. If growing up half-Native hadn’t taught Eagle that, then Nam certainly would have. And had.

  “I thought this place would be empty,” Eagle said, then wished she hadn’t. That sentence was more revealing than she wanted it to be.

  Pammy tilted her head slightly. “You don’t remember, do you? I invited you here today to watch the moon landing.”

  Eagle let out a small breath. She had forgotten all about that particular idiocy. Let’s send a bunch of men to the moon, rather than put money into helping wounded vets reintegrate into society or the thousand other uses those millions could have been put to. Hell, if they’d used the entire NASA budget elsewhere, maybe LBJ would have won his War on Poverty and had had enough courage to run for reelection.

  “Oh, yeah,” Eagle said when she could trust her voice. “I forgot.”

  Pammy frowned. “Everything all right?”

  Eagle suppressed a sigh. When Pammy’s blue eyes focused on someone like that, there was no getting away without an answer.

  “Everything’s fine,” Eagle said, knowing her tone was too dry, but unable to do anything about it. “You got pizza, huh?”

  “It’s cold now, but I could warm it up,” Pammy said.

  Which meant turning on the oven and waiting. Waiting meant conversation, not that Eagle knew how to get out of it.

  “Naw,” Eagle said. “Cold is just fine.”

  She’d said fine twice, which was probably some kind of red flag to Pammy that Eagle wasn’t fine. So Eagle walked away from her, heading to the gaggle of women.

  For some reason, Pammy’s place just off of Telegraph, in the heart of radical Berkeley, attracted housewives. The gaggle had at least five of them that Eagle could see, women who wore the right clothes, had their hair just so, and went home to hubby every night. No conversations about real life or what they had done with their day. Just spending pin money on their little exercise hobby, thinking it made them stronger or safer at night or fulfilling some empty time that Eagle could never imagine.

  She smiled at them, knowing the smile didn’t reach her eyes. Then she looked at the open cardboard pizza boxes. They were stained with grease and had cheese attached to the lid. Someone had consolidated two pizzas into one box.

  She took a paper plate and grabbed two pieces of pepperoni. The pizzas looked a little thin and grease had congealed on the top.

  She’d eaten worse.

  “Did you see it?” one of the women asked her, nodding toward the TV.

  Eagle glanced over. Walter Cronkite was talking to some other man, gesturing with whatever passed for excitement in Cronkite’s world.

  If Eagle said no to the woman’s question, then Eagle would be regaled with stories of the landing. If she said yes, then they’d want to know what she thought of it all.

  She smiled at them again, as she grabbed a few napkins.

  “Great day for America, huh?” she said, like she used to say to visiting brass in Saigon, just before she shipped home. She hoped the women didn’t hear her sarcasm.

  Then she moved away from them, thinking maybe she’d sit in the kitchen.

  Her skin was crawling. She still felt that pent-up rage, and she wasn’t sure what to do with it.

  Pammy hadn’t followed her to the table. Instead, Pammy still stood near the locker room door.

  “What’s up?” Pammy asked, placing one hand on Eagle’s back, directing her to the kitchen.

  Eagle stepped slightly sideways. She didn’t like to be touched, and normally Pammy was good about that. But Pammy seemed to have made a calculation—touch Eagle and get her to do something that she wasn’t going to do otherwise.

  Pammy opened the kitchen door and waited. Eagle couldn’t very well sit in the main room. Near the chairs, she’d have to converse. And if she went to the mats, then someone was bound to follow her. She didn’t want to go into the locker room.

  So now she was going to be interrogated by a well-meaning Pammy.

  Eagle bit back her irritation and went into the kitchen.

  Pammy followed her. “You want some coffee?”

  “I’m fine,” Eagle said, and silently cursed herself. She had to forget that she even knew that word.

  “Well, I want coffee.” Pammy grabbed the percolator, took off the lid, and carried the body to the sink. She turned on the faucet and filled the body to the highest water mark.

  Eagle looked longingly at the door. Maybe she could just walk out. Pammy might ask her about it the next time, but Pammy might forget.

  “You gonna tell me what’s up?” Pammy asked, looking at her sideways.

  Caught. Dammit. Eagle sank into a wooden chair near the small kitchen table. Once Pammy asked that question, there was no getting away.

  “Frustrating day,” Eagle said.

  “I’m gathering that.” Pammy set the body of the percolator on the tiny counter, grabbed the basket, and measured some Folgers into it. “You want to tell me about it?”

  No, Eagle didn’t want to tell her about it. Eagle wanted to punch something.

  She took a bite of pizza. It was lukewarm, not cold, and better than she expected.

  “You don’t have to,” Pammy said, clearly lying. Because Pammy would push her forever to say whatever it was. Or make Eagle feel guilty about it.

  Eagle wasn’t sure how the two of them became friends, because they were so damn different. Except in one thing: they both stood up for the people they cared about.

  And right now, Pammy was showing care for her.

  Eagle sighed. “Cops,” she said.

  Pammy turned, still holding the coffee scoop. “You had a run-in with the cops?”

  “Not a run-in,” Eagle said. “They didn’t believe me.”

  “About what?”

  “I saw a woman get beaten and tossed in the back of a pickup last night,” Eagle said.

  Pammy closed her eyes for a moment, absorbing that news, then nodded, and set the scoop in the sink. She finished putting the percolator back together and set it on the stove, turning on the burner.

  “You called the cops,” Pammy said.

  “Yeah. Happened just after midnight. The cops showed up less than an hour ago.”

  “God,” Pammy breathed.

  Eagle took another bite of pizza, then she got up and grabbed a glass, filling it with water. She kept her back to Pammy as she asked, “You hear anything about a guy in a pickup truck randomly grabbing women?”

  “No,” Pammy said. “The women who come here right now are more afraid of the authorities than anyone else.”

  Eagle nodded. She could have told the government that, even if anyone had listened. The show of force, the untrained young men with guns, the sheer harassment and terror of the past few months, led to more distrust, not less.

  She drank the entire glass of water, then filled it again.

  “The police think that this was something they called a domestic, meaning—”

  “I know
what it means,” Pammy said curtly. Of course she did. Her father had been a police officer back east somewhere. She probably would have followed in his footsteps had she been a boy. “Did it look like a husband and wife fighting?”

  “No.” Eagle turned around. “It looked like this guy was kidnapping her.”

  Big word, kidnapping. She felt her skin grow warm. Pammy didn’t seem to notice, though.

  “She was fighting for her life,” Eagle said, then sank back into her chair. “I should’ve shot the son of a bitch, I swear.”

  Pammy gave her an empathetic look. “Have you ever shot anyone?”

  “Intentionally?” Eagle asked.

  Pammy didn’t smile. Pammy never smiled when Eagle made a dry joke like that. A joke that wasn’t really a joke.

  “No,” Eagle said after a moment. “I have never shot anyone.”

  “You don’t have that kind of training,” Pammy said.

  “I know how to shoot,” Eagle snapped.

  “I meant that you don’t have the training it takes to shoot another human being,” Pammy said. “In fact, your training is the exact opposite. You’re not supposed to harm anyone. You’re supposed to save them.”

  Pammy was doing her magic empathy trick on Eagle, and Eagle didn’t like it.

  “Well, I fucked that up,” Eagle said. “Because that woman is probably dead now.”

  She looked down at the pizza crust on her plate. She didn’t remember eating all of the first piece. Stress eating, yet another sign of her mental health.

  “You did what you could,” Pammy said.

  “No, I didn’t.” Eagle stood. The restless energy was back. “I should’ve driven to the goddamn police station and sat on those assholes until they sent someone out to investigate. Instead, I went back to my little hole and expected the Good Guys to solve it all.”

  Just like she always had. Part of her believed in the Good Guys—enough to join up and become one of them. Then she’d seen what the Good Guys did under duress, and she had felt her illusions crack. Apparently they hadn’t entirely shattered, or she wouldn’t have waited for the damn cops to show up at her door.