The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas

by Anand Giridharadas

  Because of the campaigning he was now doing, he had negotiated with his company to let him work from home three days a week. That was great for his campaign but further deprived him of encounters with women. Another complication was his history with Abida, which he mentioned in all his talks. After his lecture at DePaul, a bunch of young women, taken with his story, had come up to him and asked about Abida and whether they now had children.

  “Since I tell that I had a fiancée, they think that I am still with my fiancée,” he said, unsure of how to correct the record. He wondered if he should start using “ex-fiancée” instead: “I always thought about that—that I had to clarify. Because it also closed a lot of doors.”

  The one thing Rais refused to adopt from America was this insatiable consumption of partners on the supposed path to true love. He knew that women weren’t cars, and that it didn’t work to treat them as if they were: “You switch your partner like a new car came to the market, and you have to test it, drive it.” Wasn’t it this behavior, Rais added, that had so punished the Stromans?

  But why not at least go on a few dates? Nothing too intimate—just dinner and soft drinks?

  “Here’s the problem,” he said, finally just putting it out there. “In this culture, once you go for a date, the way girls—women—behave in this Western culture, then they expect that you will go and sleep with them. Maybe not the first date; maybe second or third or the fourth date. They expect, right?

  “But I can’t do that. I cannot cross my boundary before I find that person that’s my wife. So if I go for a date, and then next date it doesn’t happen, then they will think, ‘What is wrong with this guy?’ And the dates are like that: you have to expose yourself that you’re a guy, you’re manly. You have to expose yourself in that way—sexy way—and then increase the expectation of your female partner that you will take her and there will be something. And I cannot do that.”

  Rais was a man of technology, though. Surely the Internet, with its florescence of dating and matrimonial sites, had overcome this problem. Were there not sites for Muslims who hadn’t slept around and didn’t want to date in the American way? There had to be women out there with the same dilemma.

  “Where do I find them?” Rais said with a nervous, hopeful giggle.

  Hula Hoop

  To get to Stephenville from Dallas, you drive west across the city until, for the briefest time, civilization vanishes. It quickly reappears, though somewhat diminished, in the form of Fort Worth, whose gripe with Dallas is that it is inadequately western. Then you fall out of Fort Worth into country made for horse chases: endless flat land, hilly at times, most of it ranches. You can count the number of animals you see in a few hours’ drive—a lot of land for not so much meat. On the highway, mirage after mirage spreads and dries up in the 100-degree July heat. From time to time, you cross some town redolent of afterness: just a lane or two, maybe a store, maybe a crossroads.

  Erica Stroman emerged from the horseshoe of apartments where she was living. She wore white bug-eyed sunglasses with fake diamonds on the edges and was joined by her cousin Desireé. They were headed to Brownwood, sixty miles to the southwest, to see Tena and Amber. In two days, it would be the one-year anniversary of Mark Stroman’s passing.

  It had been a good year for Erica, considering. “It’s doing better,” she said. “I mean, I’m looking up. Little by little. Just as far as being able to work, pay things. You know, I got a vehicle—a truck. I’m not dependent, really, on anybody else. It’s kind of being on my own a bit, really.”

  Not long after her father’s death, she had taken the graveyard shift at McDonald’s for a month. Then she got 6 a.m. to 2 p.m., which was good because it gave her the rest of the day free. There was a lot to learn very quickly: how overtime works; how the registers were checked and the employees docked for shortfalls; the three-warning system for misbehaving; how to wash your hands at the start of your shift and only then clock in, because they’re not paying you to become clean. Yet what began as a drudgery in Erica’s mind had quickly turned into something else.

  McDonald’s was not known as an engine of mobility, but in a place like Stephenville it could seem like the closest thing. All her life, Erica had dreamed of an altered end state, but she had never been able to figure out the intervening how. Now, at McDonald’s, the future felt real and malleable. She had already been promoted to junior manager, and if she kept rising, she could get a transfer to Fort Worth or maybe even Dallas. The way you got promoted was by studying. Erica wasn’t a big book person, but McDonald’s made it straightforward and step-by-step. You could take online McDonald’s classes and even earn college credits doing it. You could, if you were lucky, get picked to go to Hamburger University, a training center for managers and owners. Erica’s boss had recently gone, and she was now clearing $40,000 a year, just working at McDonald’s.

  When Erica explained to outsiders what she was studying—subjects like food cost, waste, hygiene, and the like—she zipped through it so quickly and energetically that it was hard to follow: “OK, it’s like we sell a McDouble for $1.08. Well, it costs us 60 cents. But if you make a McDouble the wrong way, then you gotta make it again. Then you throw it away—that’s waste. The nuggets are 6 cents. You know, 24 cents for the four-piece nugget that we sell for $1.83. But when it’s busy, we’ll make a lot, and all that’s waste, waste, waste. So that’s 6 times 60. Plus everybody goes by, because on the grill they like to press the timer, so you go by and open it, check it or just pick up one and ‘O.K., that’s old.’ So that whole tray—that’s waste.”

  Life had often left Erica callous and surly, but the customer-service training had helped her keep it together for the sake of business. “Even on a bad day,” Erica said, “nobody’s gonna wanna come in here with me being pissed off.”

  She knew, more clearly than in earlier phases of her life, what the next steps were and what she had to do to take them. She was assigned the cash registers these days, counting down the drawers. If she finished the class she was currently taking, then she’d get a twenty-five or fifty-cent raise. If she continued, she would soon set her own shifts. After the next set of classes, another boost of twenty-five or fifty cents. It wasn’t out of the question to grow into a general-manager role within a few years. Erica’s boss did it within four, and now she owned her own house, had bought a used Camaro for two grand, and paid for school on the side while also managing the restaurant.

  “It’s like a climbing ladder, really,” Erica said. The job had filled her with hope: “I’m not at the bottom anymore.”

  Desireé was Erica’s cousin on her mom’s side; they were rooming together these days. Desireé was eighteen but could easily have passed for ten. She was short and scrawny, to the point of appearing malnourished, and wore little rectangular metallic glasses. The only hint of her age was the sizable diamond she wore on the fourth finger of her left hand. Her fiancé, Chance, had proposed recently, on Valentine’s Day, in the middle of their junior year. They planned to wait a whole year after high school before marrying, to stress-test their love.

  Desireé had a spark and vibrancy and thirst for the world that distinguished her from her family. On paper, her options were just about as lousy, but she had an aspirational quality. She had a lot of questions about the world. She was keen to share the story of her Indian friends in school, who, she helpfully explained, were from Pakistan. She made sure to tell people that Chance came from a family with money. He bought her a $5,000 ring, supposedly, which she claimed to have thrown into a field after a fight. They never found it, she said, and so he bought her another. In a place full of half-men, she’d found herself a diamond mine.

  Amber had, of course, gotten out of the desert of good men by going over to women. When she and Maria got together, four years ago, it had shocked everyone, including her sister. Amber, as far as anyone knew, had never been with a woman before. Some in the family had been resistant at first, but Maria had proven herself, Erica said,
by not cutting and running all the times when that would have been the smartest thing to do.

  As for herself, Erica was dubious about settling down, which often seemed to involve a lot of settling. Girls like Desireé were the lucky exceptions, happy and in love and well tended. The reality was, the women Erica knew worked harder than the men. Far from here, governors and senators and presidents spoke of a crisis of the family, of a breakdown in marriage. But Erica sensed what they didn’t: that for people like her, taking on another person wasn’t always the stabilizer it was cracked up to be. “It’s just, you can do bad on your own, and then when you get with somebody that’s just doing the same as you are, or worse than you are, you can’t—my grandma used to say that you can’t hang around with trash or it gets in your eyes.” The country’s marriage enthusiasts often had the fortune, unavailable to Erica’s class, of being whole to begin with. They multiplied with other whole people to form still greater products. What Erica intuited was that a fractional being like her multiplied by another fractional being equaled—in matrimony as in mathematics—a smaller fraction than either person was before.

  AMBER’S NEW HOME in Brownwood was in a so-called clean house, with subsidized rent, strict rules of sobriety, and required attendance at recovery meetings. The building was various hues of brown and beige, decorated with seashells and cross-sections of trees. Amber had a well-ordered upstairs apartment. The one-bedroom place had a small kitchen, in which dishes recently washed stood neatly in a rack, drying, and a poster over the stove advised “serenity.” The kitchen spilled into the living room, which was dominated by a sofa whose stretchy cover kept coming off. A television with its own built-in DVD player sat unplugged; Amber and Maria carried it into the bedroom when they wanted to watch in there. The air-conditioning was set at 64 degrees and on all day, since electric was included in the rent. The smell of cigarettes, perhaps in violation of the compound norms, hung in the air, mingling with the scent of simmering hamburger meat, which was cooking on a plug-in griddle on the kitchen table.

  Amber Stroman had, for the first time in the longest time she could remember, been sober for four months now. The entire apartment was a temple to the conquest of addiction. A calendar advocating drug-freeness hung on the front door, as though to remind Amber where not to go every time she left. On the fridge, beneath a chart detailing the proper schedule for children’s vaccinations, was Amber’s “Daily Moral Inventory,” a document obtained from her sobriety meetings, which told her which traits to avoid and which to cultivate:

  LIABILITIES

  ASSETS

  Watch for:

  Strive For:

  Self Pity

  Self Forgivness

  Self Justification

  Humilitay

  Self Importance

  Modesty

  Self Condemnation

  Self Valuation

  Dishonesty

  Honesty

  Impatience

  Patience

  Hate

  Love

  Resentment

  Forgiveness

  False Pride

  Simplicity

  Jealousy

  Trust

  Envy

  Generosity

  Laziness

  Activity

  Procrastination

  Promptness

  Insincerity

  Straightforwardness

  Negative Thinking

  Positive Thinking

  Vulgar, Immoral Thinking

  Spiritual, Clean Thinking

  Criticizing

  Look for the good!!

  Tena was sitting on a big, soft chair that was her favorite. She was in her early forties now. She still had that gash the length of a carrot running vertically down the left side of her neck, from the time that either she cut herself as a teenager or Mark Stroman cut her. After all these years, and Mark’s passing, she was still sticking with the story that she had cut herself. She was short and round and sweet to a fault, and given to making impolitic jokes, many of which she had learned from Mark and held on to. She was a person who laughed easily—sometimes she sent out a bit of her laughter after something she said to elicit some more from her interlocutor, which would convince her to unleash a great deal more of hers. She was still wearing the purple Jerry’s shirt from the burger joint where she now worked. Like Amber, she had been clean for a while, almost a year, for the first time in a long time.

  Amber seemed less anxious than a year ago. Her gaze had a new focus. She wore around her neck a red-white-and-blue flag-patterned locket, on a thin black string, containing her father’s ashes. Things were solid between her and Maria, who was also in recovery and who remained pretty much silent.

  The five women had much catching up to do.

  Erica was complaining about money: owing $400 for her truck payment that week, another $120 for insurance, then the elective but essential $30 for Friday after-work drinks at Montana’s.

  Desireé, meanwhile, was somewhat insensitively talking about floating down some river with Chance.

  Tena said she was working forty-nine hours a week or thereabouts serving Jerry’s burgers. Erica was getting thirty-eight to forty, but she was often allowed to get an extra hour in here and there.

  Erica was now criticizing Desireé for her spending habits, saying that she never saved. Desireé countered that she had no bills to pay that month (perhaps the advantage of having a fiancé like Chance) and that she had plenty in the bank. Erica said her bank account contained $93.

  Desireé said something admiring about Amber’s coffeepot, joking that she just might have to take it with her.

  “You cannot take an alcoholic-in-recovery’s coffeepot!” Tena said. Besides, “coffee will put your ADD ass to sleep.”

  In March of that year, eight months after her father left for good, Amber had quit Stephenville for this clean house in Brownwood. Tena was already in the city and sobering up, and Amber somehow realized that it was time: “I just got to, getting high wasn’t even fun anymore. I’d get high, and I’d feel guilty. I was tired of being worthless. I was ready to be Madyson’s mama again.” She still remembered how clear it became to her the last time she used, writing in her diary, taking stock of what she’d become: “I was done.”

  She had remained in Fort Worth for a time after the execution, but it had thrown her even farther off the track. She started using again. Eventually she and Maria returned to Stephenville and lived for six months in the same trailer park where a friend had taken them in on short notice a year before. One day the man they were staying with, a meth head in his own right, told them they had to go. Amber called Tena in desperation.

  “I told her, ‘If you don’t come and get me, then I’m going to a motel room and there’s gonna be plenty of dope,’ and that’s what my way of thinking was,” Amber said. “So she came and got me.” In just three weeks, sequestered from everyone she knew, in a place with rules, she and Maria both found jobs and Amber got into a free outpatient rehab program paid for by the state. The migraines she had suffered for years would soon cost Amber her job at a dry cleaner’s, but Maria had kept working to support them, and Amber felt herself being reborn: “Next month, on the third, it will be five months clean. Clean. Nothing: no drinking, no pills, no dope, nothing. Clean. Only thing I’m doing is smoking cigarettes and drinking a shitload of coffee. But that’s OK.”

  What had most helped Amber through recovery was arriving at a deeper understanding of where her addiction came from. The AA meetings had taught that what she had was an illness, not a habit, and that there was, in her God, a power great enough to pull her out of her morass. The program had, Amber said again and again, helped her to “get out of self,” to overcome the inwardness that for her nourished addiction. To be whole and healthy was not to be without affliction, but to be even more aware of one’s place and duties in a world of others.

  Amber was starting to sense her role in the family change. All her life, she had known th
at she was failing them, especially Erica. She should have been there for her little sister; instead, she had been strung out or semihomeless or in prison. In the last few months, though, she had detected a momentous change in the family dynamics: Erica and the others had started calling Amber for advice.

  “They take what I have to say,” she said. “I guess it’s different today, because I’ve got my shit together. I’m sober. I’m not the fly-by-night family member like I used to be. I’ve got my head on my shoulders. So, yeah, I’m not gonna be their best friend, and I’m not gonna tell them what I think they want to hear. I don’t care if they get mad at me. If I can save them any pain, if I can keep them from going through the shit I had to go through, I would.”

  Still, in Amber’s mind, all these things were fringe benefits. The only prize that mattered was Madyson, and that prize now felt closer than ever. Yes, like her mother, Amber had lost hold of her baby. Unlike her mother, Amber now had the opportunity to win her baby back before she was old enough to know too much.

  Like Erica with McDonald’s, Amber had the steps laid out in her mind. She needed to upgrade the apartment so that by the time she went to court and reclaimed Madyson, the little one could have her own bedroom. Grandma wasn’t going to give Madyson up easily, but if Amber was clean and sober, living in a decent space, with a durable relationship and—not least—a good attorney, she could outwit Grandma. There was a new urgency to her plan: she had heard that Madyson’s father was getting out of prison in a matter of weeks. By law, he wasn’t supposed to be around Madyson, because of his past behavior; in reality, he had nowhere to go but his grandma’s. It pained Amber that she, after everything she’d done to turn around, would be here with her moral inventory and vaccination schedule but without her baby, and he, on what would likely amount to a brief vacation from prison, would “be with Madyson from the time she wakes up till the time she goes to bed.”