Pammy had no idea. She didn’t think so, but she didn’t know.
“All right,” Irene said, her hand still toying with the whistle. “We’re going to sit. I believe we need a discussion more than we need class. Am I wrong, Pammy?”
“I think we need both.” Pammy didn’t want anyone to sit because she would lose momentum, but she had just lost control of the class.
The girls started to sit down. They were talking softly to each other, discussing what Pammy had said. Some just sat down quickly. Others sat cross-legged. Unlike the students in the morning class, these girls were still young enough to make sitting cross-legged look easy.
Pammy needed to get them focused again. She turned to Irene. “Do you have extra paper on that clipboard?”
Irene thumbed through the class roster. “I do.”
“Then would you mind passing the clipboard around?” Pammy didn’t wait for Irene’s answer. “I’d like a list of names of people who have vanished.”
Irene raised her eyebrows. Pammy had a sense that she might protest, but Pammy didn’t give her a chance to.
Instead, Pammy raised her voice. “Please,” she said, “make a list of names of those people who disappeared. And, as the clipboard goes around, if you see a name on the list that you’ve heard of, then put an X beside it.”
“What if you don’t know someone’s full name?” one of the girls asked.
“Put down the name you know and where you know the person from,” Pammy said, improvising.
She walked over to Irene and took the clipboard from her. Then Pammy unhooked the metal clip and removed the class roster, handing it to Irene.
“I’ll start,” Pammy said. “I’m putting down the name that I know, the girl in the flyer. Her name is Darla Newsome.”
She printed Darla Newsome in her best handwriting, clean and legible. Then she handed the clipboard, along with Irene’s pen, to the girl on her left.
The girl held both the pen and the clipboard like they burned her. Pammy decided not to watch the girl study the paper, figuring it would make everyone nervous.
“I want a show of hands,” Pammy said. “How many of you had been warned about a man in that Ford F-350? Or maybe someone called it a one-ton pickup.”
A couple of girls bit their lips. Everyone seemed confused.
“Before today,” Pammy clarified. “How many of you had heard about the man in the truck before today?”
Ten girls raised their hands. The girl holding the clipboard was not one of them.
“Okay,” Pammy said, deliberately making her tone warm. “Those of you who had heard of the man previously, come talk to me over here.”
She walked just a few yards away from the mat. She wanted the illusion of privacy, but she really didn’t want privacy.
The ten girls circled her. None of them looked like hippies, although a few of them were a little unkempt. Their hair was a shade too long or needed a trim. One girl didn’t shave her legs, although she kept swiping awkwardly at them, as if the fact that they were visible bothered her.
Once they’d settled into place, Pammy said, “I want to know everything you know about this truck.”
The girls stared at her.
She had no idea why it was so hard for them to speak out.
“When did you first learn about it?” Pammy clarified.
The girl closest to her, a large-boned girl who, in previous classes, had seemed particularly adept at assaulting an attacker, said, “I dunno. Last fall, maybe?”
“It was last fall,” said the girl next to her, a frail thing with coke-bottle glasses that she couldn’t remove, even for class. At least she had started wearing a strap that held her glasses in place. Still, Pammy had worried about her in every class, afraid someone would accidentally hit her in the face and break those glasses.
The frail girl sounded confident though. Her magnified grayish-blue eyes looked quite sincere as she gazed up at Pammy.
“I’m sure it was fall,” the girl said.
“How do you know?” Pammy asked.
“It was just before Thanksgiving,” the girl with Coke-bottle glasses said. “There were a bunch of us who were going to stay in town and not go home, and as campus emptied out, one of the guys told me to be careful. He’d heard about some big truck stalking girls, and he said he couldn’t protect me anymore.”
“Was that Ronnie?” one of the other girls asked her.
“Yeah,” glasses girl said with a smile, and both girls giggled.
“And Ronnie is…?” Pammy asked.
“Really cute,” said the second girl, and blushed.
Pammy resisted the urge to tell them all to get serious. Instead, she asked Glasses Girl, “How did your friend Ronnie know about the truck?”
She glanced at the others, but they were looking at her, as if they didn’t know.
So she shrugged. “What he told me was that there was this girl from his psych class who had complained about the truck following her everywhere. Then one day, Ronnie was leaving class, and the truck stopped near him. A guy got out, asked about that girl, and Ronnie said he didn’t know her.”
“He lied?” Pammy asked, then wished she hadn’t. The worst thing she could do was sound judgmental.
“Well,” Glasses Girl said, “I wouldn’t tell some stranger about a friend. Isn’t that one of your rules for defense? Make sure a stranger doesn’t know anything about you?”
Pammy smiled. Glasses Girl got her on that one.
“Yes, it is,” Pammy said. “So your friend Ronnie said he didn’t know the girl.”
“And the truck guy, he asked some other kids. I guess someone told him where she lived or worked or something. Anyway, she never showed up to class again. And Ronnie says that was the last time he saw her.”
Pammy frowned. That seemed like a strange story.
“He asked for her by name?” Pammy said.
Glasses Girl shrugged again. “That’s what Ronnie told me.”
Her tone pointed out that she was telling Pammy secondhand information. Pammy understood that, but it was more information than she’d had an hour ago.
“And this incident happened last fall,” Pammy said.
Glasses Girl nodded.
“Have you personally seen the truck?” Pammy asked her.
Glasses Girl shook her head, and then shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know.” She tapped her glasses. “It’s like the boogey man, you know? I’ve been seeing trucks everywhere since he said that.”
“Or police cars,” one of the other girls said.
“Or armored vehicles,” said a third girl.
“Or men with rifles,” said another.
Pammy looked at them, making sure her expression was sympathetic. That terror was why they had taken a self-defense class in the first place. She probably was adding to their unease.
At the moment, though, she didn’t care.
Only Glasses Girl remained focused. “I can’t imagine why he’d be interested in me anyway.”
That comment intrigued Pammy. Her father used to say that it was the comments which seemed obvious on their face that turned out to be the most interesting in an investigation.
On its face, the comment seemed like one about appearance. Boys don’t make passes and all of that other Dorothy Parker stuff. But there was something in Glasses Girl’s tone that made the truck driver’s interest seem a little more unusual.
“Why do you make that assumption?” Pammy asked Glasses Girl.
“I’m not that interesting,” Glasses Girl said as her skin grew pink.
“You think this guy only takes interesting women?” Pammy asked.
“I didn’t mean it like that.” Glasses Girl stared down at her hands. Her nails had been bitten to the quick. “I mean, you know, no one ever notices me.”
And there was an implied please, stop noticing me now, aspect to her tone.
“This other girl,” Pammy said, “she was different from you?”
“Oh, God, yeah,
” Glasses Girl said. “Ronnie thought she was the end. No one compared to her.”
“According to Ronnie,” Pammy said, just for clarification.
“No,” Glasses Girl said. “According to everybody. She was, like, the most important person in her dorm. Everyone knew her and liked her. Of course, some people were getting worried about her.”
A couple of the other girls were making “keep it down” gestures with their hands, but Glasses Girl didn’t seem to notice.
Pammy pretended she didn’t notice either.
“Why were they worried about her?” Pammy asked.
Glasses Girl looked at the others, her skin getting even redder. By now, she had clearly started to realize she was talking too much.
“I don’t know,” she said quietly.
“It’s all right,” Irene said, “just answer. It’s important.”
Glasses Girl stiffened up. Pammy felt her heart sink. They had an important discussion going, and Irene might have just stopped it.
“Well,” Glasses Girl said, sounding miserable, “she was getting into the—you know—heavy stuff. Starting to neglect her studies and things for politics. She said Nixon had to be stopped.”
She was right, Pammy thought, but didn’t say. “And this was last fall, before the election?”
“I don’t know exactly.” Glasses Girl shook her head as she said that. “But she was going to go to some sit-in. She didn’t show. And she stopped going to class. And Ronnie thought it was all really, really weird.”
Pammy frowned, thinking about that. Some of the girls whispered to each other. Irene toyed with her whistle, as if she were thinking of blowing it to shut them up.
Pammy glared at her. The whistle was the last thing she needed.
But one of the other girls was nodding as she watched Glasses Girl. The other girl was tall and thin and always backed away instead of following the instructions Pammy gave to hit the practice dummies.
“I know a guy who disappeared,” the tall girl said. “He walked away from everything, I mean, that’s what some people thought. But I didn’t think he was the kind to walk away. He cared too much. He had just participated in the Third World Liberation Protests. He was organizing some more protests, and then we never saw him again.”
The Third World Liberation Protests were in January. They had gotten violent.
“Yeah,” said a third girl. She was tiny, but she had started to use her size in class to disarm the taller, stronger girls. “I know a guy who disappeared too. He had dropped out of school after the protests, and he was going to lead a group of protestors at some speech Governor Reagan was going to give, justifying the changes he wanted to make to the university system.”
“That was, like, March, right?” a fourth girl asked. “Because that’s when I heard about the truck. I heard he was, like, killing activists, so we should all hide if we saw the truck.”
Pammy’s heart was pounding.
“It wasn’t March,” the tiny girl said. “It was earlier than that.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said a girl beside Pammy. “I heard the same thing, about the truck driver killing activists.”
She turned to Pammy, her brown eyes earnest, “Do you think that’s true? Do you think that the truck guy is killing activists?”
It certainly sounded that way, but rumors made everything seem rational.
“I don’t know,” Pammy said. “All we have is gossip at the moment. When the clipboard comes around, please write down the names of the people you know who disappeared around the same time as that truck, and if those people were involved in some political movement.”
She didn’t like how any of this sounded. But she also knew it was all supposition. Still, everyone seemed to have heard about the guy in the truck.
Could he be a one-man army against political activists? Or was that pot-induced paranoia, seeping everywhere?
She supposed the paranoia didn’t have to be pot-induced. Given the last year—with the assassinations, the protests, the tear gas being dropped in the center of Berkeley—paranoia almost seemed like a rational response.
A girl who hadn’t joined their group stood, and handed the clipboard to Glasses Girl. She stared at it for a moment, then shook her head.
“There’s, like, a dozen names here, and even more check marks.” She sounded shocked. Then she sighed, and wrote something on the paper.
Pammy looked at Irene. Irene’s face was drawn. She looked tense, which Pammy realized she had never seen before.
Pammy was going to give the information to Eagle. What they would do with those names, Pammy had no idea. But it was clear something was going on.
They had stumbled into something. She was sure of that now. But she wasn’t sure what.
Or what a group of women, inside a gym, could do about it.
16
Eagle
She laughed.
Eagle couldn’t remember the last time she had laughed, really laughed with one of those deep, silly guffaws that she felt throughout her entire body.
She was a bit stunned that she could laugh, especially after that gross stress reaction or whatever she wanted to call it. Especially after she had lost her temper so very badly.
The couple at the table next to her gave her a wary glance. She always felt like she didn’t fit in here at the Caffe Med. She didn’t like snotty coffee and the crowd itself was either too hippie or too student-focused. And then there was the matter of the dogs.
The owner here didn’t mind dogs walking through his establishment as if they owned it. Eagle believed dogs should remain outside, peering in like Dickensian waifs looking at a Christmas goose through a shop window.
Val had picked up the second half of her ham sandwich, mustard dripping out the back end onto the white china plate. When she laughed, as she had a moment before, she was utterly beautiful.
Eagle noted the thought, then set it aside. Val had made it clear that she was straight. She probably hadn’t even noticed the attraction Eagle felt. It had surprised Eagle too. She hadn’t felt something this immediate in years.
“You okay?” Val asked, a thread of concern in her voice.
Apparently, Eagle’s smile had faded without her even knowing it. She pasted it back on.
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s just been a rough few days.”
She surprised herself with her answer. She hadn’t planned a confessional like Val had done.
“If you feel like telling me,” Val said, “I’m happy to listen.”
Not willing to listen. Happy to listen. Val clearly needed companionship, and was willing to go through anything to get it.
Eagle forced that thought back. That wasn’t what Val had meant, and Eagle knew it. Val was trying to make her feel comfortable, that was all.
Eagle shook her head, then glanced around. A group of jeans-clad young women were cleaning the table near the stairs, removing the dishes and carting them, one small pile at a time, to the kitchen door. The women clearly didn’t work here; they just wanted a place to sit.
Everyone at the tables leaned over their coffee cups and half-eaten pastries, deep in earnest conversation, speaking in low, urgent tones. Three people stood in a makeshift line near the counter, while the students behind it made coffee and filled it with milk from some hissing steam machine.
If she stood up right now, got on the table, and demanded a show of hands from anyone who had seen the truck or anyone who knew a person who had disappeared under mysterious circumstances, what would she get? Demands that she sit down? Tossed out? An actual show of hands?
Eagle sighed, then looked pointedly at Val’s Chicago Police Department t-shirt—which, surprisingly, no one had given her shit about.
“Your cop husband,” Eagle said, a little too bluntly, probably too insensitively, but then, that was who she was. “Did he…was he white?”
Val glanced at her own shirt, as if trying to remember. She didn’t seem offended by the question at all.
“Did he work in an all-black neighborhood?” Eagle asked.
“Most of the time,” Val said. “Why?”
Eagle shook her head. The couple at the next table was really staring at her now.
“Cops around here,” Eagle said, “they take their own sweet time responding to emergency calls.”
Val frowned. “I saw a police car on my walk to the gym this morning. He was parked near Dwight.”
“Oh, there’s the one squad planted here to harass everyone,” Eagle said. “And at the end of the month, when the squads need their quotas, they come down here to bust some of the known drug-users or issue a few fines.”
Val finished her sandwich, and grabbed a napkin, but she hadn’t lost eye contact with Eagle.
“But mostly, if there’s a real problem, the cops aren’t interested at all.” Eagle sipped the water. It was lukewarm. “I would’ve thought that all-black areas of Chicago were like that. Oakland is.”
“It used to be worse,” Val said. “My grandparents would tell stories that scared me half to death. There’s minimal policing now, mostly to get rid of gangs.”
Her skin turned ashen when she mentioned police and gangs, as if something about that bothered her. Eagle didn’t want to push to find out what it was.
“No gangs here,” Eagle said. “Hippies, though. And ‘domestics.’”
She almost whispered that last, but Val heard it.
“Domestics?” she asked. “What happened? Did someone hurt you?”
Eagle shook her head. She sighed, realizing that she had backed herself into a corner on purpose.
She glared at the couple. They looked down as if they were ashamed of listening in.
“Saturday night,” Eagle said, “cops dismissed something I saw as a domestic.”
She told the story for the third time. Val was the first person who didn’t interrupt. She propped her elbow on the table, rested her chin in her palm, and kept her gaze on Eagle the entire time.
“And then this morning,” Eagle said, her voice rising some, “this hippie-dippy ding-a-ling tells me she doesn’t want to help out, even though she’s heard about this truck and this guy, and even though she knows some people who disappeared around the time the truck was in the area. She was much more interested in protesting the war or something stupid like that.”
Protectors Page 17
