Whispers of the Bayou

by Mindy Starns Clark

  Her face turned bright red.

  “Oh. Sure. Sorry.”

  “It’s a security issue,” I explained, feeling bad that I had embarrassed her. “We can’t have strangers wandering around back there. It’s not your fault. They should have taught you that on your very first day.”

  “Got it,” she replied, smiling gratefully.

  I thanked the girl and left, pushing open the door to step out into the warm June sunshine. Joining the flow of people on the sidewalk, I thought how good it felt to stretch my legs after a morning spent working in one position for far too long. I was ready for a break and looking forward to my standing Friday lunch date with AJ.

  The restaurant wasn’t far, and I covered the first three blocks quickly. To avoid the heavy pedestrian traffic of the square, I took my usual shortcut down the alley I had fondly come to think of as “odor row.” Sandwiched between a seafood store and an Italian restaurant on one side and an Indian fast-food place and a dry cleaner on the other, the alley’s cement walls caught and held all the smells of all four places, making it a veritable stink fest, a gauntlet of olfactory overwhelm. Though it wasn’t the most appetizing way to get to lunch, it was worth the trade-off in avoiding the bottleneck at the intersection.

  I was just past the stench of eau-de-fish and about to walk into cloud-of-curry when a flash of movement off to the side caught my eye. Before I could even turn to look, a man was behind me, with one of his strong hands clamped over my mouth and the other pinning my arms to my waist. He pushed me through a narrow doorway into a small, dark cement room where a second person closed the door behind us and then joined in the struggle to force me to the floor. I fought violently against them, but to no avail. Other than landing a few solid kicks to what were probably shins, I was no match for their strength or their carefully laid ambush.

  When they finally had me pinned to the floor, I felt a hand grabbing for my shirt, ripping it upward from my back, and I thought I knew what was about to happen next. Somewhere in the back of my mind I tried to divorce myself from the moment. There was a safe place in my head somewhere, if only I could find it soon enough.

  Beyond the terror of what might happen next was also a desperate need to breathe. The hand was still clamped about my mouth and nose, blocking all air. With desperate force, I was able to shake my head free from the hand, but as soon as I took a breath to scream, something else went into my mouth, a wide strip of fabric which was tied roughly off at the back of my neck, gagging me so that I could breathe but not speak or scream.

  I inhaled frantically through my nose, ignoring the stench as I desperately struggled to catch my breath. As I did, I realized that the room was no longer completely dark. At some point they had turned on a flashlight, and the shadows it created were dancing wildly along the cinderblock wall.

  What happened next left me stunned and confused. After having pulled my shirt all the way up to my shoulders, they suddenly left it alone and grabbed the bottom hem of my pants leg instead, pulling it upward to reveal my ankle and calf. The flashlight beam jerked wildly up and down my lower legs, and then one of the men let out a low, frustrated growl. They did the same with the other leg then, and they ripped off both shoes and socks, an act which was followed by more noises of frustration but no words.

  Their final move was the strangest of all.

  Leaving my bare feet alone, they next grabbed a fistful of my hair. While one of the men pressed my face onto the cold, slimy cement floor to hold it still, the other man kept running his hand back and forth through my hair as he played the flashlight against the back of my head.

  “Wait!” said the one holding me down. “Go back.”

  Reversing the direction of his fingers, the other guy moved back a few inches and then gasped.

  “That’s it!” he cried.

  Except for slight movements of his fingers in my hair, both men were perfectly still for a moment, as if they were studying something back there. Even the flashlight stopped moving around. I waited in silence, terrified of what might come next, the stench of the floor under my nose telling me we were in an empty garbage holding area—and that I was now intimately acquainted with the juices that had recently oozed out of the garbage bags.

  “Got it?” the one holding my head said finally.

  “Yeah.”

  Finally, the guy with his fingers in my hair simply gripped a handful by the roots and leaned down to put his lips next to my ear.

  “Thanks for your cooperation,” he whispered. “Sorry it had to be like this.”

  With a final, sharp tug of my hair for emphasis, he let go. Then the door opened and they both took off, their footsteps sending a telltale echo through the alley as they ran away.

  TWO

  What their errand may be I know not better than others.

  Yet am I not of those who imagine some evil intention.

  I suppose they expected me to lie there in the filth, traumatized and immobile, a weak and shivering victim.

  Don’t think so, fellas.

  With the sound of their footsteps still echoing in the alley outside, I pushed myself up and took off after them barefoot, adrenaline pumping through my body so fiercely that it never crossed my mind to wonder what I’d do if I actually caught up with them.

  From the sound of things, they had run off to the right, so that’s the way I went too, tearing the gag from my mouth as I ran. When I emerged at the end of the alley, I looked up and down the street in both directions, but there were no men running away, no men doing anything that would identify them as my assailants. Either I had misjudged the sound of their footsteps as to the direction they had gone, or they had planned their escape as well as they had planned their ambush.

  The front of the Indian restaurant held a cluster of sturdy plastic tables and chairs, all of which were occupied at the moment. Heart pounding, I cupped my hands around my mouth and yelled.

  “Did anybody see two guys come running out of the alley just now?”

  No one responded, though most of the people stopped eating to stare at me. I looked down to see that I was covered, top to bottom, in the green-and-brown slime of aged restaurant refuse.

  “I was attacked,” I added defensively to a nearby woman who was gaping at me over her plate of tandoori chicken. “In the alley.”

  “I did. I saw something,” a man said finally, waving to me from a nearby chair that would have given him a perfect vantage point. “I think. I wasn’t really paying attention.”

  “What did you see?”

  “I don’t know,” he told me, adjusting the baseball cap on his head. He was about forty years old, dressed young for his age in a sports jersey and faded jeans. “Just a minute ago. I was reading the paper. Two guys came running out right there and jumped into a waiting car.”

  “Two men come running out of an alley,” I demanded, “and it doesn’t cross your mind that something’s fishy?”

  “Nah, they were laughing. Until you showed up, I didn’t think anything of it at all.”

  The impact of the incident finally hit me. I felt my knees growing wobbly, and so I grabbed the nearest chair and sat, gripping the table in front of me for support. Then I began to shake so violently that the table rattled against the pavement. That was when the brown-skinned restaurant manager appeared and listened to my tale of attack and pursuit.

  “You wait here?” he asked the man in the baseball cap. “You wait for cops?”

  “I ain’t leaving. I ain’t even got my food yet.”

  “Good. Good,” the manager said. “You wait.”

  “Okay, but you’ll have to throw in extra chapati if it takes too long.”

  The man sat down and went back to his newspaper as the manager ushered me inside to call the police. Whether from kindness or to get this stinky person out of his restaurant, he then handed me over to an old woman in a sari, who led me to a tiny room in the back crammed with a desk and papers where I could sit. Though she didn’t speak a word of En
glish, she brought me some hot tea and patted my hand, and her quiet presence slowly helped me regain my composure.

  The police personnel who came were polite and professional, though not much help. They didn’t have an explanation for the nature of the attack and no record of anyone else having been accosted in this way. They didn’t seem to think there was much they would be able to do, especially considering that I had not seen the faces of my attackers nor even heard them utter more than a few words. We walked down the alley to the scene of the crime, and there I made some guesses as to the men’s heights and builds. Otherwise, all the police had to go on were the various smears and markings on the grimy floor, not to mention sticky shoeprints that headed in the same direction I’d thought they had gone. The police snapped photos and took the report and gave me a card that explained how to check back with them in a few days.

  “What about the witness?” I asked. “The guy who saw them run out?”

  “The man eating out front here? Yeah, that didn’t pan out.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The manager told us to talk to him, but the guy was gone. The people sitting nearby said he got up and left about a minute after he promised to wait.”

  I gasped, wondering if that meant he’d been in on it too. I explained my theory to the cop, saying that maybe he had lied about what he’d seen to derail my pursuit and then disappeared as soon as he could afterward.

  “More than likely, the guy just didn’t want to get involved. A lot of people in this city are that way.”

  “But—”

  “He could have all sorts of reasons for walking out of here so he wouldn’t have to talk to us. Distrust. Outstanding parking tickets. Immigration issues. Who knows? I wouldn’t put too much stock in his leaving.”

  As far as the cop was concerned, the subject was closed.

  The policeman offered to call an ambulance for me, but I insisted that I was fine, just filthy and a bit rattled. I asked him to call AJ instead, who came running over from the restaurant where she’d been waiting two blocks away. She arrived within minutes, and as she came around the corner she burst into tears at the very sight of me.

  I was feeling calmer by the minute, almost as if that brief period when I prepared myself to be violated had actually worked, that I had been able to protect my mind, if not my body, from assault. Assessing my condition, I knew I was shaken but not really injured, violated but not raped, angry but with no target for that anger. Except for an occasional tremble, the only remaining signs of my trauma were the slime that still coated me from head to toe and a hole in the knee of my very expensive non-wrinkleable pants.

  When the police were finished, AJ insisted that I come home with her to get cleaned up, but I said no thanks, that I really needed to get back to work for our weekly staff meeting. I was late as it was.

  With that, AJ simply put a hand to her cheek and gave a sympathetic groan.

  “Oh, Miranda,” she said, shaking her head. “Honey, snap out of it. You’re not going back to work today. Stop trying to be so strong.”

  What I didn’t tell her was that I wasn’t trying to be strong. Like so many other times in my life, I found strength by virtue of the fact that I had simply managed to go numb.

  Still, an agitated AJ was a force to be reckoned with. To placate her, I called in a message to my boss and apologized, saying that I’d had an emergency at lunch and might not make it back in this afternoon. I went along with AJ to her apartment, though it wasn’t until I saw myself in the mirror that I understood why she had been so insistent. I was a mess, my hair was disheveled, and the stench of that grimy cement floor had been ground into my clothes and body.

  I took a long shower, letting the hot water wash it all away. Afterward, swathed in AJ’s robe, my damp hair towel dried and combed out, I emerged to find my aunt in the kitchen, where she was just putting a hastily assembled lunch onto the table. I stood in the doorway, unseen, and watched her toss a salad, thinking what a comfort she was to me, albeit a beautiful and elegant comfort. Always fond of vivid, voluminous fabrics, AJ was still dressed for today’s outing in a gauzy shawl printed with bright pink cabbage roses on a field of neon green. On anyone else, the outfit would have looked ridiculous, but on her it was simply stunning. She turned and spotted me, and that’s when I realized that tears were streaming down her cheeks.

  “Hey,” I said, moving closer. “Hey. It’s okay.”

  I wrapped her in my arms, inhaling the familiar scent of her perfume, knowing how hard it must be to see someone you love get hurt. I might not be the most intuituve mother in the world, but if someone had dared to attack my daughter, Tess, as I had been attacked today, I knew that I would move heaven and earth to find the culprits and see that justice was done.

  “I haven’t been able to reach Nathan,” she told me when we pulled apart. “But I’ve left messages.”

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” I said as I took a seat at the small table. “I’m fine. Really.”

  She set a bowl of tomato soup in front of me, shaking her head.

  “He’s your husband, Miranda. He should be with you.”

  “Why? There’s nothing he can do at this point. And he has a lot going on at work right now.”

  AJ pulled up a chair and sat across from me, her lovely features shrouded in sadness.

  “Miranda, honey, you’ve got to soften up a little. Husbands need to be needed, especially at a time like this.”

  “He’s not needed,” I replied, and then seeing the shock on her face, I added, “I mean, I love him. I enjoy him. In some ways, I depend on him. But I don’t need him. I can take care of myself just fine, thank you.”

  “Did you take care of yourself in that alley today?”

  I set down my spoon, my appetite suddenly having disappeared.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” AJ said. “I just hate to see you handling this… trauma…the way you handle everything else. Like it’s no big deal. Like you’ll be just fine on your own.”

  “This is who I am,” I said, thinking that AJ was starting to sound an awful lot like Nathan. “You—and Nathan—can take it or leave it.”

  Despite the fact that I was no longer hungry, I focused on the meal in front of me and ate. After a moment AJ began eating too, the only sound the clink of our silverware and glasses. Finally, she landed on more neutral ground by talking about Tess. I answered her question and she replied with another until we were chatting over lunch, ignoring the obvious, pretending that nothing had gone wrong, that two men had not dragged me into the dark just an hour or two before and done whatever it was they had done to me.

  From the subject of Tess and preschool and the overwhelming fixation she’d had with The Lion King ever since AJ took her to see the show on Broadway, we moved on to the topic of AJ’s work as a director at a modeling agency and mine as senior preparator at the museum. I told AJ about the rich man from Long Island and his ugly painting and the strange symbol that seemed so familiar. She found the story amusing until I grabbed a pen and paper from beside the phone and doodled the image for her.

  “It looked like this,” I said, holding it up to show her. “Like a cross inside a bell. It’s driving me crazy that I can’t remember where I’ve seen it.”

  The smile left her face, her rosy cheeks suddenly fading to white.

  “What? What is it?”

  AJ swallowed hard and shook her head, as if to shake away her thoughts.

  “No,” she said, pushing her chair back. “No, no, no.”

  She rose and began pacing in the tiny room, one hand on her stomach, the other held to her forehead.

  “AJ, what’s wrong? Do you know what I’m talking about? This shape, have you seen it?”

  “This man with the painting, could he have been one of the ones who attacked you?”

  “No. They were both tall and muscular. He was short and slim.”

  My response did not change the expression on her face.

  �
�But they were connected,” AJ cried, her eyes wild, her hands now frantically waving in the air in front of her. “However they were connected, this is all my fault!”

  She began pacing again, her hands still moving in front of her, as if she was trying to grab hold of something ephemeral and elusive, some truth. AJ had served as a mother to me since my own mother died when I was just a child. In all these years, I had never seen her like this, never seen her so out of control. I felt unnerved, as if the ground underneath me had shifted.

  “I was hoping it would just go away, all of it,” she continued. “I didn’t know this would happen. I didn’t know!”

  I was thoroughly confused, not to mention frightened for her sake.

  “AJ, calm down,” I commanded. “Talk to me. What’s going on?”

  She stepped toward the table and held onto the edge for support, just as I had done earlier at the Indian restaurant.

  “Miranda, I’ve been keeping something from you that I shouldn’t have. Just promise you won’t hate me or think I’m the most awful person in the world. I didn’t know all of this would happen. I couldn’t know.” Though AJ was in her mid-fifties, for a moment she looked like a little girl—a very guilty little girl.

  “AJ, I love you,” I said. “I could never think badly of you. Just tell me what this is about.”

  She nodded, swallowed hard, and told me to come to the living room. Ignoring the dishes, I followed her through the doorway into the living room of the small but elegant apartment.

  “Wait here,” she directed.

  As I sat down on the sateen mauve couch, AJ disappeared down the hall to her bedroom. My mind was still racing, so I took a deep breath and inhaled this home’s familiar, calming scent, a mix of fresh gardenias and Givenchy perfume. AJ wasn’t gone for long. When she came back, she was carrying a small stack of envelopes. She sat in the seat to my left, her hands once again trembling as she opened the top envelope and pulled out the letter from inside.

  “This came for you, about three weeks ago,” she said.