The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas

by Anand Giridharadas

  She confessed that she was struggling to reach Rais’s level of forgiveness for her father. She told Rais, “I’m not a good person like you, I guess. Because I still do have hate and animosity towards him.” Part of her still thought he had manipulated his little international tribe of holy rollers, made them think he was what he wasn’t: “That’s what pissed me off about him, too, because in so many ways he was so fake—I mean, so fake.”

  She still carried the memory of that story her father once told her about the black lady: “There was this one time he picked up a black. She was walking down the road, and he picked her up. She gave him a blowjob. They were driving the road, and after she was done, he opened the door and kicked the lady out of a moving vehicle.” He had told Amber this story, back when she was just a girl, because he figured it would impress her. At other times her father could be totally the opposite. Like when Amber’s best friend in ninth grade was black, and Amber warned Stroman before introducing them, “If you disrespect her in any way, I will never talk to you again.” He treated her fine. Treated her, Amber said, “like she was white.”

  Stephenville was drawing close. It had been a while since Amber had seen Erica, who was now helping the grandma out with Madyson Michelle. Of course, Erica had her own troubles—she didn’t touch meth, as far as Amber knew, but she loved her drink.

  “Would you call her an alcoholic, babe?” Amber asked Maria in the backseat. Maria said nothing. “I would,” Amber said after a moment. “If she don’t have beer, she don’t have alcohol, she gets the shakes. She smokes weed. I mean, that was a trait we got passed down from him himself.”

  Amber knew that all too well. She said she was clean now, but only barely: “I haven’t used in a long time, but I consider myself an addict because I think about using all the time.”

  She wanted to stop in the local Exxon station. She needed a smoke. Entering Stephenville was making her anxious; she could feel the energy of her daughter somewhere not far from her. She bought some Marlboro 100s and sat on the bench outside smoking one, as Maria looked on. Amber knew this gas station well, because it was a favorite hangout of Stephenville’s late-bird meth heads.

  It was painful to come home. A reminder of her failures as a mother, of the fact that her own flesh was living with the grandmother of a no-good man. Still, Amber had seen the wisdom in the grandma’s ultimatum: go away, get clean, and only then get Madyson back. Having herself been kidnapped as a child and raised by a grandma, Amber knew that this was normal. She looked around Stephenville and saw a town that to the outsider might seem quaintly Western but that she knew had been eaten inside and out by meth. You knew it was bad when the teachers at junior high would deal you dope. “If I stay here,” Amber figured, “I see myself going downhill faster than what I could climb the damn hill.”

  In that sense, Madyson’s great-grandma was a kind of savior, because her grandson was as reckless as Amber. He’d been in prison for almost the entirety of Madyson’s three years alive. He was in there now for deeds that Amber recalled involving the theft of a car and evasion of arrest. It was something else before that, and would be something else after. He wasn’t really part of Madyson’s life. Of course, Grandma mentioned him to Madyson, but the little girl knew that Amber and Maria were her parents. It got to the point, with Madyson only being around them or Grandma or Erica, that Amber saw an “eerie” look on the little girl’s face whenever a man entered the room. It was as though, by the age of three, Madyson had understood the bane of her life: that the men accessible to girls like her would almost uniformly disappoint them.

  Where, and how, would the Stroman cycle break?

  STEPHENVILLE HELD MORE promise back when the dairy business was still around and thriving. Now it was mostly fast-food joints on the roads. It was hard to fathom how a town full of people could survive on so many citizens serving each other fast food and being served fast food in turn. It was what was available, though; moreover, it wasn’t illegal. There were other opportunities—a local research and extension center of Texas A&M and a well-regarded rodeo, among other things—but they were many social light-years above the Stromans. People of the Stromans’ station couldn’t really aspire to those.

  The Stromans were somewhere above the bottom but below the middle of American life. They claimed not to touch welfare, mostly out of pride, except for a brief time after Tena had the children. They were sophisticated enough to realize that they needed improvement. They were, in their own estimation, above white trash, with its food stamps and trailered living, but below monthly cell phone bills and the fixedness that they implied. They were above having no phone at all but below keeping it on at all times. They were above homelessness but below addresses that persisted longer than a year. They were above hunger but below access to food that actually nourished.

  The first restaurant Amber had chosen didn’t work, because it didn’t serve alcohol. Erica needed a place where she could drink. The Bull Nettle sports bar, dingy inside even at noon, was a natural second choice. Everyone sat on high stools at a wobbly table, beneath vinyl posters that underscored the beer offerings on the menu. There was a lot for everyone to catch up on—though Maria mostly just nodded or mumbled as the others spoke. When the food came, she kept ashing her cigarette into the ketchup on her plate. Erica, meanwhile, was nervous and fiddling with her phone, but also eager for a drink and some talk.

  She, too, was processing her father’s legacy, trying to organize the facts about him into some kind of edifying narrative. But she was less fluent than Amber, and more guarded and injured still.

  What kind of a man was he? “He was a dad, I guess,” Erica said. What would he want for them now? “To not end up where he did, and put God in our life.”

  Amber seemed to be growing distracted by something but chimed in here: “I feel that he wanted us to be a better parent than he was to us.”

  For Erica, as big as her father’s death was, it felt at times like just another thing that wasn’t going right. She spoke of many rival goals at present, all jousting for priority, each insisting that another be achieved as a prerequisite. She wanted (a) to take her niece back from that woman, (b) to get her GED so that she could get a halfway decent job, and (c) to start the job at McDonald’s that she’d been offered, which her boyfriend had told her might pay fifty cents an hour extra for the night shift. “It’s just McDonald’s,” she said, “but it’s something, and it’s overnight—it’s going to be graveyard shift—so it’s probably going to be more. I just need something to start, or at least something to get that $75 to pay for GED.” That could bring a high school diploma.

  Poverty, in Erica’s experience of it, was an unwinnable game. It was more than a deficit of funds: it was a set of distinct, interlocking impossibilities. It felt as if some of the impossibles had to flip to possible in order for the other impossibles to follow, but no impossible was willing to flip first. “It’s like one thing after another,” Erica said, “and you can’t worry about taking care of this because you gotta worry about taking care of this first—and where you going to be next week? You can’t jump ahead.”

  What was especially hard was that everyone in the family was simultaneously down. Robert was in a maximum security prison down in Kenedy, Texas. Mom was addicted and shifting from place to place, often out of reach. They couldn’t take turns being each other’s rock, Erica said—“like, OK, you may be down, but I’m up, so let me drag you this way for a little bit and then you can bounce back up.” No chance of that, since at any given moment so many of them were either high or in withdrawal or short of cash or wondering whose mattress they could sleep on—and therefore in no position to offer charity and guidance. It wasn’t success that Erica was seeking from God, just the diversification of failure: “It’s like, where she can’t do it, I can do it. Where she can’t do it, Mom can do it. You know what I mean? Back where we’re the backbone for each other, instead of trying to help one another at the same time.”

  Eri
ca added, “Something’s gotta give. Something’s gotta happen, somehow.”

  She was nibbling on batter-fried jalapenos. She had brought her own little yellow box of lime salt with her and was now sprinkling the salt onto a slice of lime and sucking it off, resuming the cycle over and over with the same worn-down slice. Amber, meanwhile, wasn’t touching her food. Something had gotten into her.

  What emerged was that it had been a big mistake for her to visit Stephenville. She thought she could handle it, but now she saw her error. “I hate being this close and not being able to see her,” she said. She felt an almost gravitational pull to Madyson, but Amber had decided that she didn’t want to raise her baby’s hopes by seeing her, only to dash them by leaving. Madyson had known enough disappointment already. Now Amber was having second thoughts after all.

  It was too late, because if she stayed a few days, she wouldn’t have a ride back. Then a new possibility emerged: if she could secure the money for bus tickets, she could spend the night in town, see Madyson, and then return. Yes, this would be her plan.

  The question arose of where to sleep. Though she had lived in Stephenville all her life, until a short while ago, Amber could not think of anyone to ask to shelter her and Maria for the night. Her sister was living with a current boyfriend, who was in turn crashing at a friend’s. Hopefully, within two weeks, everything would be different with their situation, he assured her, as men around here often did, but for now it wasn’t an option. It was like that with many of the living arrangements of people they knew—many layers of transactions and understandings between the person inhabiting the space and the person who could give permission.

  The table now became a situation room tasked with finding an open bed in Stephenville. They called relatives: no. Called friends: no. The explanations of why not seemed to lurk in that no-man’s-land between an excuse and a reason. As Amber continued to dial around, as Maria broke her silence to try her own contacts, as Erica called hers, a solemn loneliness crept into Amber. She began to see the situation for its larger implications and started to cry. Was this how low things had sunk? She seemed to see that it wasn’t illogical that people didn’t want her around. Was it maybe, just maybe, that she was a bad mother who had lost her baby girl? Or that she was an addict? Was it that she’d been in prison? Or that she’d abandoned the abandoning sex for a woman, seceded into her own little matriarchy? Or maybe it was all the recent television news of her father’s ignoble end.

  Between phone calls, Amber said, sort of to the table but mostly to herself, “I’ve turned out to be just like Dad—to the T.”

  Erica snapped back at her, “Well, you’re not on Death Row.”

  Amber was no longer listening. “I chose dope over her,” she muttered, thinking of Madyson.

  She tuned out again, looking away from the table. Erica wasn’t giving up so easy. She clearly had more numbers she could call, and plainly had done this kind of thing before. It was no biggie. They would find something. Her mind lurched from one man she could ask to another. (She seemed to call no women.) Erica knew how to play up the charm before asking the favor. Amber, far plainer than Erica, swelled up over the years, and now a lesbian, couldn’t push through the doors on which her sister was knocking. It might have made a difference, one suspected, if Erica alone had needed a bed.

  “I’ve lived here my whole fucking life,” Amber said, “and I can’t even find somebody to stay with.”

  They ran through names—Eddie or Craig, J.R. or Chip, maybe Michael—or what about David? Yes, why not try David.

  “Hello,” Erica’s side of the conversation began.

  “Nothing. What you doing?”

  Pause. “Nothing. We’re at Bull Nettle, drinking—eating and talking with my sister.”

  Pause. “Yeah, for a little bit.”

  Pause. “Hey, I have a favor.” Here, a nicely placed giggle. “I have a favor. OK, it’s kind of a way long story and I really can’t explain it all, but my sister’s down right now, and she’s gonna have a bus ticket to go back on Monday, Tuesday, whenever. She’s gonna have the money for that. But I was gonna talk to you or J.R. and see if it would be OK for y’all to help me with the place for a day or two, so they can stay. And they’ll have the money for a bus ticket or whatever to go back.”

  Pause. “Well, it’s her and Maria. And I’ll probably be with them.”

  Pause. “I mean, just for like today and tonight really—and tomorrow. And they’ll probably leave Monday. They’ll have a bus ticket and everything.” She tried to reassure David that this bus ticket would definitely materialize. The man had clearly been duped before. “They wanted to see if they could stay longer to visit Madyson for a little bit,” Erica explained.

  It sounded promising, but David wanted to talk to Amber directly. Who knows what he already knew about her, and what more he needed to understand. Erica passed the phone, and Amber left the table for a quieter spot.

  When she returned, call over, she reported the verdict: “He said no.”

  “HE WASN’T SOME evil, cruel, no-caring guy,” Erica said of her father. “He wasn’t like that. He was a father.” She had heard all the talk about what was wrong with him. She’d heard people say he was bipolar. From the barstool where she sat, though, pretty much everyone was bipolar. By the definition going around, her mom was bipolar and her uncle was bipolar and there’s a fair chance her father was, too. What difference did it make? “I think he was a normal person got hurt,” Erica said.

  Erica’s great regret was a simple one. Because she’d been the youngest of the three, her father had always protected her. He might have fed Amber or Robert a weed brownie, but not Erica. She remembered how they’d walk into the Texas Trap on those rare evenings together. The parking lot had no cars, only motorcycles. She would sit towering above the ground on a stool, and her father would proudly introduce her around. All the guys would come up and fuss over Mark Stroman’s freckled little daughter. From the moment Stroman walked in, he was in five conversations at once, midsentence with this guy when that guy called out to him, an impresario more than a customer. And for Erica he would always and only order a root beer or a Cherry Coke, maybe nachos. No alcohol. Erica regretted, more than she could express, not breaking the alcohol barrier with her father. It was a substance that had become so important to her—and always been important to her father. It invisibly bound their lives, and yet they never shared it.

  “I never drank with him,” Erica said. “I never smoked a cigarette with him. And that’s what makes me mad, too. I wouldn’t mind sharing a Budweiser with my dad or smoking a cigarette with my dad. Just doing anything with my dad to say, ‘Oh, I did it—one time I got really wasted with my dad and he’s carrying me home and I’m puking on the sofa’—you know, something, just to say I did it.”

  “YOU’RE A BIG girl, huh? Nuh-uh, you’re Mama’s baby. Are you a big girl or Mama’s baby? Mama’s baby? Yeah.” Amber sat in a chair in the corner of Madyson’s grandma’s place, blessedly lost in her daughter.

  Amber’s luck had struck at last. They had found a bed at a friend’s place, which made it OK to visit Madyson. So they headed to Grandma’s home in a small development outside of town, packed with identical cramped dwellings.

  Grandma, who was wearing a Lady Liberty shirt and playing Farmville on her desktop, seemed happy to see Amber. She had just returned from visiting her grandson at the penitentiary. Her matchbox of a condo was decorated by a “God Bless” poster and fake flowers. The curtains were drawn in the early afternoon—protection from the vengeful heat that was especially unkind this summer.

  Madyson was running around in a green dress with pink frills. She offered her new audience a basket of hairbands to choose from. After a time, she got bored and turned to her Etch A Sketch. Her intelligence and spark were evident. Amber’s mother often said of Madyson, “Two idiots make a genius.”

  There were already small hints of how this innocence could be lost, how the trajectory of Madys
on’s life could fall back to where she came from. She appeared to have learned, for example, that she was being passed around so much, day after day, to people who weren’t aware of her full history, that she could angrily throw a new toy while at one house, get scolded for it, even spanked like last evening, and then move to the next house, with the next people—sometimes Erica, sometimes others—and try the same antic again. She had learned to exploit the absence of a unified witness to her life.

  When Grandma told the story of yesterday’s spanking, Amber wasn’t really listening, still lost in her little girl’s gaze. So Amber didn’t hear, or maybe didn’t want to hear, the subtle ways in which Grandma was undermining Amber’s position. Grandma told of how, after the spanking, Madyson had been crying on the floor, gasping, “Oh, Mama. Oh, Mama,” to her—to a woman certainly not her mama. Grandma added that she had been unmoved, having seen these tricks before. She left Madyson alone for half an hour, and when eventually the child toddled over to Grandma, she said, “I love you, Mummy.”

  Yet Grandma wasn’t unkind to Amber. She reassured her, once again, in front of everyone, that she promised to give the child back. She just wanted Amber to get on her feet again. What went unsaid was that, in a matter of days, Amber was going to have to start paying more than $200 a month in child support to Grandma for Madyson’s maintenance, in keeping with the custody agreement. This made it essential for Amber to get a job while going through outpatient rehab. If she didn’t pay, she could be arrested and end up back inside.