Protectors

by Kris Nelscott

  “You don’t know,” Pammy said softly. “Maybe they looked.”

  “They didn’t look,” Eagle said. “They aren’t looking now.”

  The percolator started humming as the water boiled.

  “We could do a flyer,” Pammy said. “Maybe find someone to draw the guy.”

  “And say what?” Eagle asked. “Help us find this guy? He might’ve killed someone?”

  Pammy shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  She glanced at the water bubbling in the glass globe on top.

  “I can’t….” Eagle stopped herself. She didn’t want the full sentence to come out of her mouth: the fact that she couldn’t get that woman’s screams out of her head.

  Of course, they blended with lots of other screams, screams she had brought home from Pleiku, screams she had heard in May when she was trying to help kids on the streets outside this building.

  “Do you have the license plate number?” Pammy asked.

  “I gave it to the cops.” Eagle didn’t tell Pammy that she had also kept the number. What good would that do?

  “Maybe we could just put up something in here,” Pammy said. “Watch for this pickup truck.”

  “Why?” Eagle asked. “What would we do, Pammy? Call the cops? They’re not going to want to hear it. Go after the guy ourselves? I couldn’t shoot the bastard. I couldn’t save her. What are your little housewives going to do? Henpeck him to death?”

  “Eagle, that’s not fair.” Pammy moved the percolator, then shut off the burner.

  “Fair.” Eagle spit out the word. She hated the word fair. “This fucking town. There’s nothing fair about it.”

  Or about any other part of the life she had known these last few years. She’d thought of moving after the People’s Park riots, and ruled it out.

  Maybe ruling it out had been hasty.

  There was a timid knock on the outside of the door.

  “Hey,” someone said, not waiting for an answer. “It sounds like they’re getting ready for the moon walk.”

  Pammy glanced at the clock on the stove, and frowned. “That’s early,” she said softly.

  The knock sounded again.

  “Thank you,” she said, louder. “We’ll be right out.”

  Eagle stood. “I’m not watching that. Thanks for the pizza.”

  Pammy sighed. “Wait. Tell me exactly what that truck looked like.”

  “So you’ll make a flyer? It won’t do any good,” Eagle said.

  “If this was a domestic, as the police think,” Pammy said, “then you’re right, Eagle. It won’t do any good. But if this man is picking up women off the street and hurting them somehow—”

  Hurting them, then grabbing them off the street, Eagle corrected, but didn’t say.

  “—then the more information we have about him, the safer everyone is.” Pammy grabbed a cup and saucer for herself, then found another for Eagle, even though Eagle hadn’t asked for any coffee.

  Eagle ran a hand over her face. Pammy was right. If what Eagle saw was what it seemed—a kidnapping—then the man might do it again. And what could it hurt, having the information out there?

  Eagle answered her own mental question. It could hurt a lot if the guy knew they were looking for him.

  “You promise me you’ll keep the information inside this gym, and not staple flyers to telephone poles or something stupid like that,” Eagle said.

  “I promise,” Pammy said.

  Eagle cursed, then shook her head. This was how Pammy roped her in. Always. Pammy sounded so damn reasonable, and then Eagle was doing something she had initially thought a terrible idea.

  Like providing medical help to the hens out in the main room. Like helping Pammy keep this ill-advised place running.

  Like putting up a flyer about some guy who nearly beat a woman to death.

  “I didn’t see the truck as clearly as I wanted to,” Eagle started, as Pammy grabbed a sheet of paper and a pen, and took down every detail Eagle told her.

  Every detail Eagle could remember, details she knew would never be enough.

  8

  Pammy

  Pammy felt oddly out of sorts the following morning. She’d been up half the night thinking about Eagle’s story. Eagle was worried that if they did anything, talked about the guy, put up flyers, asked questions, he would come back and get them.

  Underneath her tough exterior, Eagle was exceptionally paranoid.

  Pammy had arrived at the gym earlier than she had planned. When it became clear that she couldn’t sleep, she had gotten up and gone through her routine, making her arrive an hour early.

  She brought a newspaper with her. The headlines, on all the papers, concerned the moon landing. Everything from The Eagle Has Landed to One Small Step For Mankind to Two Men Explore Dead Moon stared at her from the newspaper boxes.

  All of the moon euphoria wasn’t keeping Eagle’s comments about taking on the guy from playing over and over in Pammy’s head. Eagle’s story bothered Pammy, though, because it didn’t fall into any category. Like the cops, Pammy would have thought it a domestic until Eagle described the level of violence and the way the man had treated the woman.

  Something was really off.

  But then, something had been really off in Berkeley—hell, in the country—for years now.

  The gym still smelled faintly of pizza, although the women had cleaned it up before they left. Pammy had taken the garbage out herself, hoping to get rid of any lingering odors.

  But she couldn’t open windows in the front part of the gym, and she hated leaving the door open. It only invited transients and people who felt like they needed to make some sort of comment on everything she was doing.

  She had the radio on in the gym, but all she was getting was more news. Discussion of the moon landing, the Giants’ win over the Dodgers, and some strange story about the only surviving Kennedy brother leaving the scene of an accident. She didn’t care about any of it, but she was too lazy to change the channel to some music.

  She wiped a few surfaces and put out more sign-up sheets. She thought again about doing some kind of warning flyer about the man that Eagle had seen and taping it to the check-in counter, but didn’t act on it. Obviously, Pammy was feeling a little paranoid too.

  Instead, she set out small tumbling mats for the beginners’ exercise class. She also put out some jump ropes, knowing she would probably get protests.

  As she moved deeper into the gym, she touched the gloves that had attracted Val’s attention the day before. Val was an intriguing woman, but that hadn’t caused Pammy to treat her any differently from anyone else.

  Pammy hadn’t taken Val’s payment for the class. She never did with impulsive first-timers. She wanted them to have twenty-four hours or so to think about their decision since so many of them never returned to the gym.

  Unlike some of her male colleagues, who considered walk-ins found money, Pammy hated taking cash from people who ended up changing their minds. She didn’t think it was an “indecision tax” as Mountain Phillips, the man who owned the gym she used to attend, called it.

  She would rather let the woman keep her money and decide when to spend it. Pammy always thought of the initial payment as a down payment in courage.

  And sometimes, it took a few attempts for people to tap the courage inside of them.

  She suspected it would take Val a few more weeks before she returned.

  Which showed just how wrong Pammy was. Val arrived ahead of everyone else. She wore a loose Chicago Police Department t-shirt, which surprised the heck out of Pammy, and a pair of sweatpants that were tied tightly to her too-thin waist.

  She carried a shoebox under one arm, and Pammy knew without looking that the box held a new pair of sneakers.

  Val’s eyes were bright. She looked both eager and terrified in equal measure. She had been waiting outside the front door when Pammy unlocked it an hour after she arrived. Val slipped inside as if she didn’t want anyone to see her.


  Now she stood in front of the counter, her gaze drifting to the moon landing headline, her new sneakers resting on one of the sign-up sheets. She rocked from foot to foot as if she couldn’t keep still.

  “Do you take checks?” she asked. “Because I have cash if you need it.”

  Pammy smiled reassuringly at her. “I take checks.”

  Val reached into the macramé bag she had slung diagonally across her torso. “Do you want just the class fee, because if there’s a membership fee too, I’d rather pay it all at once.”

  Everyone assumed the gym had a membership fee, but it didn’t. Jill said that Pammy made a mistake by not charging even a token fee. But Pammy didn’t want the hassle of renewals and collecting money for no real reason.

  Instead, she made a rule: If a woman took classes, then she could come to the gym any time it was open. If she didn’t take classes, she wasn’t welcome.

  Not that Pammy enforced the second part. Eagle had never taken a class, but she came to the gym all the time. Of course, she helped with the medical emergencies. In fact, all of the women who came to the gym without going to a class seemed to help Pammy in one way or another. They had all started out taking classes (except Eagle) and they all had stuck around.

  “No gym membership fee,” Pammy said. “If you take a class, you’re welcome to use the gym outside of class.”

  Val looked at her, wide-eyed, then surveyed the entire gym, as if seeing it for the first time.

  Pammy braced herself for the inevitable unsolicited You should charge fees.

  Instead, Val said, “Wow. This is really special, you know?”

  Pammy smiled at her. Finally, someone who understood. “Yes,” Pammy said. “It is.”

  Val opened her mouth as if she were going to say something else, but she stopped. She opened her checkbook, which she kept in a tooled leather holder. Her hands were shaking.

  Pammy wanted to tell her everything was going to be all right. But Pammy had banned that phrase from her patter when the first of her students went home after class, told her husband where she had been, and landed in the hospital with a black eye.

  One class did not a fighter make, although the student had defended herself well enough to get out of the house and over to a neighbor’s. Jill had said that the student probably would have died if she hadn’t gotten away.

  Pammy had thought the student wouldn’t have been hit at all if she hadn’t taken the class.

  Opal had been the one who added that they wouldn’t have known if they hadn’t met the woman, who never did come back.

  So many students never came back.

  Pammy’s stomach twisted as she watched Val write A Gym of Her Own in the check’s “to” line, and then, in one of the most lovely cursives Pammy had seen, added the amount, and signed her name.

  She ripped off the check, and handed it to Pammy. The act of writing the check seemed to stop the shaking.

  Pammy nodded at the shirt. “Chicago PD?”

  Val’s cheeks grew red, and her eyes seemed just a bit brighter. “I shouldn’t have worn that shirt down here. I knew it.”

  She sounded like she had made a major faux pas.

  “No, no,” Pammy said. “You’re fine. No one’s going to mind.”

  “But all the problems with the police here,” Val said. “I’m being insensitive.”

  She had that run-away energy again.

  “No, you’re not being insensitive,” Pammy said. “My father was a police officer. Philly PD.”

  The desperate look on Val’s face faded. “Really?”

  She sounded almost childlike.

  Pammy nodded. “He’s the one who taught me how to defend myself. We spent years in gyms.”

  Val swallowed. “This shirt was my…husband’s.”

  Pammy wondered what the pause meant.

  “He, he always wanted me to learn how to fight. He even took me to a few gyms, and I told him…” Val closed her eyes, then took a deep breath, as if she were steeling herself. Then she opened her eyes again. “I told him that I would never need to learn to fight. I had him.”

  She gave a mirthless chuckle, then shook her head. She said nothing else.

  “I take it,” Pammy said slowly, waiting for Val to give her a clue as to whether or not she should stop speaking, “you don’t have him anymore?”

  Val’s eyes filled with tears. “That’s right.”

  She slapped her hand lightly on the checkbook, then put it back in her purse. She sniffled, grabbed a tissue from the countertop, and lifted one strap of the purse.

  “Any place I can put this?” she asked.

  Pammy nodded toward the locker room. “Back there is relatively safe.”

  Val nodded, grabbed her shoebox, and headed to the locker room.

  Pammy wasn’t sure if she had screwed that conversation up, or if she had done the right thing. Sometimes some of these new students were so fragile that the wrong look could make them leave.

  It didn’t help that most women felt like they shouldn’t be in a gym in the first place, or that exercise was something ladies didn’t do.

  Pammy put the check in the cashbox, and slid it in the drawer behind the counter. She’d take it into the back once class started.

  The main door opened. Pammy glanced over, then felt her eyebrows go up involuntarily. A man had walked in.

  Men almost never came in here. Either they stood outside and laughed as they pointed at the gym’s name, or they walked in and then walked right out again.

  The handful who did come inside and stay were usually businessmen. Pammy’s lawyer came in once to inspect the place; her insurance broker came in several times last year, looking—Eagle thought—for ways to cancel her policy; and the mailman stopped in daily, usually resting his elbow on the counter and making some derogatory comment that he seemed to think was funny.

  This man wasn’t anyone she recognized. He was older, balding, and bulky, although she couldn’t tell if the bulk was fat or muscle. He wore a thick plaid shirt over olive green work pants and boots that had seen better days. He brought with him the scents of garlic and pipe tobacco, which she suspected would get stronger as he got closer.

  He was twisting rolled up papers between his hands, and he looked around as if this place didn’t make any sense to him. Finally, his gaze rested on Pammy.

  “Can I help you?” she asked.

  “I—I’m looking for my daughter,” he said.

  Pammy felt her heart sink. She’d had these kinds of conversations before: worried spouses, worried parents, who didn’t want their wife or kids to interact with the “hippies” down on Telegraph. Pammy had learned to treat these people kindly, but firmly. She would clear up any misconceptions, but she wouldn’t tell anyone to stop coming to the gym.

  “What’s your daughter’s name?” she asked, making certain her expression was pleasant and her tone non-threatening.

  He had a crease between his eyes. They were swollen. He kept looking around, his gaze never really landing on anything for very long.

  “Darla Newsome.” He sounded breathless. He walked over to the counter, still twisting the papers. “She’s Darla Newsome.”

  Pammy had been right; his body odor was stronger up close. Beneath the pipe smoke and garlic, he also smelled of sweat and raw onions.

  “I don’t remember a Darla Newsome,” Pammy said, “but that doesn’t mean she hasn’t come here. So many kids today have taken on nicknames. Is there some other name she might have used?”

  He started to shake his head, then stopped, and shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  He sounded hopeless, as if the idea of his daughter with a nickname he didn’t know were one thing too many.

  He set the papers on the counter, unrolling them and flattening them with his big callused hands.

  “This is her,” he said, pointing at a black-and-white high school graduation photo. The girl had a broad face and the same kind of flip hair-do that Pammy used to have before it becam
e too much work. “She’s missing.”

  The distress in his voice made Pammy’s heart twist. She hadn’t expect this. She thought about Eagle’s story from the day before.

  “When did she disappear?” Pammy was still looking at the photo, running through images in her mind. The girl didn’t look familiar, but so many kids changed their appearance between high school and college, the fact that Pammy didn’t recognize the girl didn’t mean anything.

  “I don’t know,” he said, then he clenched one of his hands into a fist. “She came here, and…”

  His voice trailed off.

  “Here,” Pammy said. “You mean the university?”

  He nodded. “National Merit Scholar, all expenses paid. We couldn’t afford something like this.”

  Pammy looked up at him. His nose was red. He tilted his head, shrugged again.

  “When did you last speak to her?” Pammy asked.

  “Her and me, we aren’t speaking.” He was almost whispering now. “But her ma, she got calls every week, and then tells me about it. Until June.”

  “June?” Pammy asked. “Beginning or end?”

  He swallowed. “End,” he said. “Two weeks before the Fourth. Darla was saying nutty stuff about America, and I didn’t like it. God forgive me.”

  They had split over politics. That was happening so much these days. Pammy tried not to talk about any of it so she could keep her students, but sometimes the day’s events—whatever they were—spilled into a confrontation between her homemakers and her hippies.

  He said, “Her roommate hasn’t seen her for a whole month. That’s how we knew. Her roommate wanted us to pay the rent.”

  “Did you?” Pammy asked before she could stop herself.

  “Of course,” he said. “Her stuff is still there. Her purse is still there, and nobody thought nothing of it. And the police, they won’t listen. Her boyfriend, he’s moved on to some other girl, so they think she ran off with a broken heart, went to Ashbury Haters or whatever—”

  “Haight Ashbury,” Pammy said softly. Two years before, a lot of kids went to the Haight for something the media called The Summer of Love. But those kids had moved on to other places. It wasn’t the “happening” place anymore.