The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas

by Anand Giridharadas

  Rais now saw that the tattooed man was still in the store, just standing there, gazing at his prey. What had somehow failed to occur the first time would surely occur the second. “If I don’t pretend I’m dying, maybe he might shoot me again, to make sure that I’m dead,” Rais reasoned. He had to play dead. He plunged to the floor, into a small pool of his own blood.

  His mind was spinning through a reel of images: his beloved mother and father, his seven brothers and sisters, his lovely Abida. He had promised her he wouldn’t be gone long. Each picture lingered for a few seconds, as though in one of those laptop slideshows. The faces were somber and drooping, looking at him but unable to help, darkly resigned. They seemed to be on the other side of an invisible wall, watching him die. That he recognized this flickering of images from the movies—much as his icicle spine had accurately forecast danger a short while earlier—left Rais especially worried: this was the Hollywood sign for looming death. He was vanishing. He could tell. He saw the pointed tombstones of a Muslim graveyard. He saw his own grave. The horizon drew closer. How many seconds were left? What a life it had been. Where-all it had taken him.

  He was thinking of his God. A part of him wanted to believe that this, like everything else, was just a trial. He wondered which of His verses God most longed to hear right now. He decided to hedge his bets: “I wasn’t sure which one is more effective at this moment. Just keep on reciting one by one all the verses.” He whispered to God, from a floor wet with his own juices, lines from surahs known since childhood:

  He is Lord of the two Easts and Lord of the two Wests:

  Then which of the favors of your Lord will ye deny?

  He has let free the two bodies of flowing water, meeting together:

  Between them is a barrier which they do not transgress:

  Then which of the favors of your Lord will ye deny?

  Out of them come Pearls and Coral:

  Then which of the favors of your Lord will ye deny?

  And His are the Ships sailing smoothly through the seas, lofty as mountains:

  Then which of the favors of your Lord will ye deny?

  All that is on earth will perish:

  But will abide forever the face of thy Lord—full of Majesty, Bounty, and Honor.

  Could this God be bargained with? Was this God like the shops in America or the ones back home? Rais wanted to cut a deal. He was a sinner, he confessed into the sky, but in the name of his Prophet and for the sake of his mother, he begged for mercy. “At least don’t make my mom sad,” he asked God. His draining mind offered a quid pro quo: “If you give me my life back today, I will definitely dedicate my life for others, especially for the poor, the deprived, and the needy—I will, I promise. But give me a chance. There are a lot of people that love me. It will be too hard for them to get this message, to see that I’m gone today. Even for the sake of them—for the sake of my mother—please give me a chance.”

  The door made its closing sound. The tattooed man was gone. Somehow Rais found the vigor to stand, although he was fading: “I was thinking that I don’t know how many seconds I have before I pass away.” He thought about calling 911, but once again his knowledge of Hollywood returned to him. Weren’t there so many films where some guy is dying and calls 911 and, before he can give full details, collapses? “If I call, staying in the store, and if I pass out, then many a times I saw in the movies that they took the phone but then never could call. Someone saying, ‘Hello, hello. This is 911.’ So I was thinking that I should not stay.” He needed someone nearby to help him. He seized a cordless phone and staggered out of the door, on which his hand left a red imprint. A blood trail followed him to the adjoining Strictly Cuts. When he entered, the sight of him caused customers to panic, some of them running for the back door. Rais managed to grab a barber and begged him to call for an ambulance.

  While the barber called, Rais caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror. He saw now that he had been destroyed. His face was perforated in what felt like a hundred places and oozing from every hole. His right eye was shut, caked with blood: “I looked at the mirror and I saw, it’s like all those horror characters in the horror films, with blood pouring, bleeding all over my face. This olive-colored T-shirt was blackish with the blood.” Because vanity is among the more resilient organs, Rais was astonished by his appearance: “I said, ‘Wow—the way I look right now.’ I was a beautiful young guy.” He kept telling himself Death was mistaken. It was too early to bow.

  He feared that sitting down and waiting for the ambulance could be fatal. “Now what?” he thought to himself. “I don’t know how many minutes—how long they will take for an ambulance to come. In the meantime, should I just sit down on the floor? Should I just lie down? If I lie down, sit down, it means that’s it—I’m giving it up, and maybe I will pass away. So instead of sitting tight, I should keep myself positive, energetic, and keep on doing something besides reciting Koran—also do some physical thing that will keep me energized. So I was running in the parking lot, back and forth—as if the ambulance is coming from this way, if the ambulance is coming from that way. Which way is the ambulance coming? I was in a craze—that ambulance, where is ambulance? Because I know I have to get treated. I have the phone in my hand—the cordless phone from the store—thinking that they might even call.”

  When the ambulance arrived minutes later and its back doors opened, Rais was standing just outside them waiting to board. Then he was on a stretcher inside under the medics’ faces, twirling through the city’s pretzel highways. He remembers worrying that the medics weren’t doing enough quickly enough. “Please, start treating me faster,” he begged. He was fighting the urge to sleep. Sleep, he knew, was the shortcut to death. The pictures of his family kept cycling through his brain, but sometimes now he saw just gray. He could feel that his eyes were dimming, swollen shut by the scalding pellets; his mind was dulling. He was losing the power to think. He couldn’t see. He forced himself to stay conscious for as long as he could. He was aware of being in a hospital. Voices above him spoke urgently about him. Then the world faded to black.

  A TELEPHONE RANG IN Dhaka. Rais’s father was bound for the bathroom when he fetched the cordless handset. Your son has been shot, a voice said. The voice sounded far away, but it spoke Bengali. Your boy was shot in the face. He is in hospital. Please continuously pray. Dial tone.

  The father, an aging diabetic whose control of his body was starting to desert him, took a moment to process what he’d just heard. His bladder was telling him that he needed, no matter what, to proceed with his bathroom visit. Then he would come out and inform the family about the call. In the bathroom, he collapsed. It was a stroke, triggered by shock, and it took more than an hour for the family to notice his absence. When they found him, the panic about his condition was interrupted by some dark and cryptic news he wanted to share.

  It sounded—coming as it did from a frail, unwell man—like some kind of mix-up. Then the reality of it sank in. Then tears and screaming. In the ensuing days, Texas sent them no more news, and the family realized that they stupidly had no phone numbers there besides Rais’s, which wasn’t working. They could only assume the worst: the boy had been shot in the head, after all. The news rippled out through the neighborhood. Friends and relatives began to arrive at the house, seeking updates, offering words of consolation to go with the beef curries and rice they brought to spare the family from cooking in sorrow. Slowly the Bhuiyans pivoted from waiting to grieving. Little Ripon was lost, torn from his sweet bride before she could know him. Why did we let him go? they kept asking themselves, until the question spent itself.

  The Chore

  Here sits the Arab Slayer, for what he did we

  Should make him our mayor.

  He has no regret for what he has done,

  Killin Arabs is just half the fun.

  Patriotic yes indeed, a true American, a special breed.

  Did what other’s wanted to do, did the chore for me and you.

/>   They said he was blue, but all he could see was Red, so he shot one of them Arabs in the head.

  So all you American’s let’s stand tall and let’s not forget the man who’s dream was to kill em all.

  —Mark Anthony Stroman

  On the afternoon of October 4, Tom Boston was driving home to pick up a refrigerator to bring back to A Paint and Body Shop. This was the name of the paint and body shop he owned up on Presidential Drive in northern Dallas, surrounded by a great many other businesses likewise dedicated to the repair and primping of vehicles. The shop’s straight-shooting name somehow spoke to Tom’s self-conception. He thought of himself with pride as a sober, boring, married isle of a man in a sea of “loopty-loops”: meth heads and coke fiends; guys who couldn’t keep a job longer than a couple of months; guys who made the mistake of dating strippers instead of just watching them strip; guys who became so familiar with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice that they took to calling it TDC, the way you call a buddy by his initials. Tom liked being better than these men, truth be told, but he also enjoyed using his body shop to reform them.

  “I’m the first guy to take a guy that’s had a past that nobody else will give a break,” he said. It was charity-cum-hobby: “I take personal enjoyment in bringing someone in who’s a real fuckup and trying to turn them around. And I’ve done that with so many people over the years, and there’s been a small handful—a small handful—who have come and been real fuckups, and I can look back and say, ‘Wow. The fucker really turned out to be somebody.’ ”

  The reality, as Tom figured it, was that if you ran a body shop in the Dallas metroplex in this precarious new time—after the globalization came in and sucked jobs down the rat hole to China; after the affirmative action and political correctness took hold and you basically had to be a minority or woman to get ahead; after the wives and mothers went off to school and work and left the boys in the dust; after homes without fathers became the new normal for all Americans, not just one color or community—then the reality was that these were the kind of up-and-down, fate-battered men available to you. “I keep them around me because they make me look good,” Tom joked.

  While driving home that afternoon for his refrigerator, Tom noticed a hurricane of activity around the Shell station at John West and Big Town in the suburb of Mesquite. It was the last pump on his regular route home and where he invariably stocked up on gas and Pall Malls. He knew the couple that ran the place—the Patels, from India, who had run it since the early 1990s—and he even recognized their children. He wondered what the squad cars and yellow tape and camera crews were about.

  He was ruggedly handsome, with a face coated by gold stubble and a hard, athletic body that was slowly melting into middle age. A chunky three-stone ring fortified his left pinky. He had an inbuilt thousand-yard stare. He was a former pro race car driver; a door from one of his old cars hung in the body shop. He had come to Texas from Ohio in the 1980s. He liked to remind people that, unlike the screwballs who worked for him, he had gone to college—studied theology there. He was doing this work out of choice. It was part of his heroic self-conception. He also didn’t hesitate to tell people that his friends often flattered him by saying he should run for some kind of public office.

  Crossing the station again on his return trip, refrigerator in tow, Tom pulled over. It was just before three in the afternoon. He asked a Channel 23 reporter on the scene what was going on. A shooting, the reporter said. The owner’s dead.

  The copper-wrapped bullet entered Vasudev Patel just above his left collarbone. It tore through the left side of his body—through his three uppermost ribs, then through his lung, then through three lower ribs, stopping just under the skin of his lower back. This suggests that he was crouching when it happened, bowing to his taker. It had happened earlier on that morning of October 4, around 7:30. The police found him lying on the floor in his own blood, perfectly still, beside the black pistol that hadn’t saved him and an off-the-hook phone receiver. He was forty-nine, short, and mustachioed, with black-and-white stubble and a single umbrella of a brow. The last words he heard, according to the surveillance tape, were “Open the register now, or I will blow your brains out.”

  Tom was dazed: “I was like, ‘Oh my God, can’t believe that.’ Hopped back in my truck, went on.” A strange thought crept into his head shortly thereafter, though, and he couldn’t shake it. It wasn’t based on anything he knew firsthand, just some things he had heard … but really, what were the odds that one guy he randomly knew from one part of his life would kill another guy he randomly knew from another part of his life, even though he was sure they wouldn’t know each other? “I said, ‘No fucking way. Not even possible. It’d be a billion to one, zillion to one—who the hell? No way,’ ” Boston said. “Didn’t even fathom the connection. About an hour and a half had gone by, and I couldn’t get it out of my head. That’s when I called a buddy of mine who I had raced with.”

  The buddy was a big-shot prosecutor downtown named Paul Macaluso. Tom told him that he was calling about the Shell station murder. He didn’t have a formal tip or anything like that. Just a hunch that he wanted to get out of the way. It was more that he wanted to make sure it wasn’t his friend Mark Stroman than to suggest that it was. He and Mark didn’t keep in touch as much as before, but in recent weeks and months, he had heard second- and third-hand about Mark’s saying some things about Arabs and fooling with guns; Mo Phillips had said something about a string of robberies that Mark was maybe involved with. It hadn’t been all that alarming to Boston, since he had known Stroman to blabber about the darker peoples ever since they met in the mid-1990s. Boston had long ago convinced himself that Stroman was a wannabe and didn’t mean much by it, but now he wanted to make sure. It was the duty of the kind of responsible citizen he fancied himself to be.

  The Shell murder wasn’t in Paul’s jurisdiction, but he offered to make some calls. Eventually he found out that they were processing a surveillance tape from the store.

  Tom told his friend to call back if by chance the tape showed a guy with two hog thighs for arms, decorated all over with tattoos.

  WHEN TOM BOSTON hired Mark Stroman in ’94 and took him under his wing, he offered the job with a condition: “If you’re going to be in a position where you’ve got to meet with people on a daily basis in the front office, you’re going to have to cover those up.” The “those” were Stroman’s rambling tattoos.

  The body shop was in the sparse northern margins of the city, in a building typical of the neighborhood: a low, wide matchbox that clutched the ground and avoided having too many windows. Tom remembered Mark coming in off the street one day and filling out an application. He said he’d been working over at a body shop named The Body Shop. He’d started as a detailer over there and rose to the rank of manager. But he and a bunch of the guys weren’t happy with the place. There was no room for expansion, he said. He wanted to run his own crew, but he’d take anything at this point. He was straightforward with Tom about his prison record, which he perhaps didn’t realize was a bonus for a boss who fancied himself a reformer. Mark was bubbly and energetic, with a drive that Tom had always found missing from the industry. He had smoldering red hair and energetic eyes and ruddy, protruding cheeks and an easy, goofy charisma, and those sprawling tattoos.

  Although they ranked not far apart in the layers of Dallas society, Tom and Mark thought of themselves in starkly different terms. Tom saw himself as better than his surroundings—an educated man who owned a body shop by choice. Mark, by contrast, had few of Tom’s pretensions. Unlike Tom, he took pride in being a run-of-the-mill guy with run-of-the-mill ideas and tastes. There was a widely circulated manifesto of sorts, sometimes called the “Bikers Creed,” that Stroman liked and sent around to friends. He gave it the alternative title “American Me,” and it gave a flavor of his red-blooded self-conception.

  The “proud American” described by the creed was a patriot who liked his cars, motorcycles, and ladies
domestic. He relished a burger and fries like everyone else and drank regular coffee, not the fancy stuff that tasted like pancakes or fruit. He enjoyed the smell of rain, of bacon, and of auto fumes. He made no apologies for his love of naked women, in print or in person, and thought Hugh Hefner more of a revolutionary than Washington, Jefferson, or Lincoln. He liked country music and hated child molesters. He continued to say “Yes, sir” and “No, sir,” no matter how old he got. He confessed to being confused about sex at times but was far from sexually confused. He believed that most of us do the best we can with what we’re given and usually get what we deserve, and that just holding on could be as important as winning. He tended to trust his country more than his government. He thought America—its blood and culture and soul—ought to be preserved as it was, not perennially remade. He believed that if you didn’t like America, you were free to leave it.

  As it happened, this bleeding heart of an ex-con called Stroman had come to Tom Boston at the right time. “Managers in body shops are usually good for about a year, and then they either get comfortable or burn out, or they want to go someplace else,” Tom said. “So I was getting rid of one at the time that was in that situation and was looking for guys—somebody to run underneath me.” What he needed in particular was a good estimator: a guy who could be personable when customers came in, who could type the estimate into the software form they used, who didn’t need it explained that insurance will reimburse one hour of labor for a dent the size of a quarter and four hours for something as big as your palm. When Stroman turned up, Tom sensed that he had found his guy. Mark was hungry and wanted to learn. Tom hired him and quickly discovered him to be “one of the most ambitious individuals that I have ever met,” a climber in a pit of screwy laterals.