Mark the Sparrow

by Clark Howard

“Hello, Nancy,” Cloud said, genuinely happy to see Laurel’s former roommate.

  “How’ve you been, old buddy? You’re looking good.”

  “Been fine,” he said. “Pretty busy and all that. Hey, I hear you’re an old married broad now.”

  “Lord, am I!” She pointed out a rather frail man in a group across the room. “See that skinny feller over there? That’s my guy.” At that moment Laurel looked across the room at them. Nancy waved jovially and Cloud nodded cordially. “Have you and Laur had a chance to be alone?” Nancy asked.

  “Very briefly,” Cloud said.

  Nancy sighed heavily. “Life’s sure funny, Rob.”

  Cloud nodded without answering.

  He sat with strangers during dinner, answering more cliché questions, helping Jerome Traynor out of a couple of corners he got himself backed into, and in general trying to get through the evening as painlessly as possible.

  Before the evening was over, Cloud had an opportunity to spend another few minutes alone with Laurel. They shared a drink at a small table at the edge of the patio.

  “May I ask you something?” Cloud said.

  “Of course.”

  “How did you happen to become interested in the Weldon Whitman Movement? Back then you resented my involvement; now you’re involved yourself. Why?”

  “I’ll be honest with you, Rob: I don’t know why,” she said. “I thought I might be doing it in order to establish some kind of contact with you again. In the hope there might still be some feeling left. Incidentally, I found out tonight that there’s none on my part. Any on yours?”

  “No. But no bad memories, either.”

  She patted his hand fondly. “Good. I’m glad.” She took a sip of the drink they were sharing. “Another reason I came up with was that subconsciously I might be trying to make it up to you for the way I treated you. Of course, I’ve known of your involvement all along: I’ve seen your magazine articles and news stories—”

  “But you don’t think that’s the reason either, do you?” Cloud said. Laurel shook her head.

  “No, not really.” She met his eyes directly. “I think the simple fact of the matter is that I’ve just been hooked. Call it the Whitman mystique, call it social conscience, call it moral rebellion against the taking of a human life by the state—whatever. I think I’ve joined forces with you and the others simply because I don’t want him to be executed.”

  “Whether he’s innocent or not?”

  “Yes. I don’t think guilt or innocence has anything to do with it, really. It’s the taking of a human life by the state that is the crux of it. Do you know, Rob—of course, you probably do!—that experts in the field are against capital punishment because they feel it actually contributes to the crime rate. One man, Donald MacNamara, who is the dean of the Institute of Criminology, contends that as long as the death penalty is a part of our system of justice, a truly rehabilitative approach to penology will never be fully attained.”

  Cloud suppressed a smile. That was exactly the theory he had quoted to her over pizza that evening so long ago when he had just returned from his first trip to San Quentin.

  “Confide in me, Rob,” Laurel said. “Do you think he’s innocent?”

  “I do. Definitely.”

  “Well, for your sake, I’m glad.” She reached for the glass again, took another sip, and sat back contentedly. “Just think, if I had followed my heart instead of those dollar signs, I might be with you now up in Sacramento. We might be working side by side to save Weldon Whitman. I might have done something useful for a change.”

  “What you’re doing here is useful,” Cloud told her. “The movement doesn’t move without money.”

  “Yes, but it’s people who make a cause,” she said zealously. “Particularly people like you, Rob. If I had any reservations at all about supporting the Whitman Foundation, they would be alleviated at once by my knowledge that a person of your character was on the board. You’re an ethical person, Rob, so it stands to reason that what the foundation does will also be ethical.”

  Cloud squirmed slightly and took back the glass she was holding. What would she think of him, he wondered, if she knew how many lies he had told just tonight in the interest of the Whitman mystique? And how would she feel if she knew that his ethics, such as they were, now amounted to no more than a minority vote on the foundation board, and that the direction of the Whitman movement was controlled completely by others? He grunted silently, derisively, at himself, and drained the rest of the gin from the glass.

  He left the party a while later. Laurel and Jerome Traynor saw him to the door. A taxi he had summoned was waiting in the street.

  “It was nice meeting you both,” he said.

  “We’ll send you a check tomorrow for whatever this bunch kicks in,” Jerome Traynor said. “It’ll be better than two thousand, I’m sure.”

  “Wonderful,” said Cloud. He turned to Laurel. “Mrs. Traynor, I’m sure Weldon will drop you a personal note of thanks.”

  “Oh no,” she protested. “His time is much too valuable.”

  “Weldon will want to, I’m sure, when he learns of your interest,” Cloud said. Your interest and the two thousand, that is.

  They said their goodnights and Cloud walked out to get in the waiting taxi.

  Argus turned down the article that Cloud halfheartedly wrote on the Traynor dinner, but through Eugene Terrier it was placed in a West Coast regional magazine. It stimulated mild interest and resulted in a few similar affairs to which Niebold again sent Cloud.

  Another summer had ended and fall arrived. Cloud began to lead a drone existence. Judgment in Anguish was now completely out of his hands, and Niebold gave him no further writing assignments; Terrier now handled all the writing for the foundation: pamphlets, flyers, press releases, even form letters. Cloud, hanging around the foundation printshop trying to be of some help to Genevieve, saw a steady flow of material prepared by Terrier. Gritting his teeth, he helped Genevieve get it printed and distributed.

  After Thanksgiving, a lot of what they were doing went into limbo. Things slowed down until just before Christmas—then stopped altogether. On his own, Cloud did a quick piece about what Christmas would be like on Death Row—but when he finished, he did not even bother to show it to anyone; to be used at Christmas, it should have been done three months earlier.

  Cloud and Genevieve spent a dull, cheerless Christmas in her apartment; there was no visiting at San Quentin that day. Cloud drank too much and fell asleep in a chair. Genevieve, who had not bothered to decorate the apartment, had not even sent Christmas cards, ate alone; then she too drank enough to dull her mind so that she could sleep. It was a pathetic holiday all the way around.

  The new year arrived and the foundation’s activities slowly resumed. Terrier planted a few press releases and did a mailer on fund-raising affairs—and before January was over, the dinners began again. Niebold sent Cloud to all of them; he traveled to San Diego, Santa Ana, Claremont, Orange, Santa Barbara, and Los Angeles. Always Los Angeles, more frequently than anywhere else, as if the place where it all started was determined to stay in the forefront to the end.

  It was in Los Angeles that Cloud’s stint in purgatory finally ended. Arriving back at his hotel near the airport one night, after attending a dinner in Westwood, he found a message to call Borden White, no matter what the hour. It was past midnight, but he dialed the switchboard and had a call put through to White’s home.

  “Borden?” he said when White answered. “What’s so urgent?”

  “We’ve located Glory Ann Luza’s family,” the attorney said.

  Cloud became instantly alert. “Where?”

  “They’re living in Reseda, out in the San Fernando Valley. Morris thought as long as you were down there, you could check out the possibility of a story.”

  Cloud wrote down the address White gave him. “How did you find them?” he asked.

  “We put a private detective firm on the thing quite some time
ago.”

  “No one mentioned it to me,” Cloud said coolly.

  “No matter,” White said. “The important thing is that we’ve found them. The family anyway. We’re not so sure about the girl.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The detective agency hasn’t been able to place the girl in the house. The parents are seen coming and going, as is the girl’s older brother. But so far there’s been no sight of the girl herself. She could be ill or something, of course. Or she might have married and moved away. Anyway, check it out first thing tomorrow.”

  “Yessir, Mr. White. First thing in the morning, Mr. White.”

  “I’d cut out some of the sarcasm too, if I were you, Cloud,” White told him. “Remember, the foundation can replace you.”

  “Fuck you, Borden,” Cloud said flatly and hung up.

  He stretched out on the bed and lighted a cigarette. He smoked for several minutes, trying to relax; but he could not: he was too keyed up. Finally he called room service and ordered a double martini. When it came, he set it on the window sill, put his cigarettes and an ashtray next to it, pulled a chair up to the window, and turned off the lights in the room.

  Smoking, drinking, staring out at the planes landing and taking off in the night, he thought about Glory Ann Luza and wondered what tomorrow would bring.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Cloud made the drive to Reseda in less than an hour. Traffic, even for Sunday morning, was light. He found the street he was looking for, and drove several blocks until he came to the address Borden White had given him. It was a small tract house, modest in the extreme, but tidy and well maintained.

  As Cloud parked at the curb, an older-model sedan pulled up and drove into the narrow driveway. Cloud walked up to the porch and waited there for the old sedan’s three passengers: a middle-aged man and woman, and a young man in his mid twenties. The family was obviously returning from mass. The woman wore a scarf pinned to her severely combed hair, and carried rosary beads. Both men wore neckties over stiffly starched white shirts. The older man had on an out-of-style suit which he had probably owned for two decades; the younger man wore a sport coat. As they approached Cloud at the steps to the porch, their faces reflected their respective feelings: curiosity in the woman, suspicion in the older man, hostility in the younger man.

  Cloud spoke to the older man. “Good morning, sir. Are you Mr. Luza?”

  “I am Emiliano Luza,” the older man answered simply.

  “My name is Robert Cloud, Mr. Luza. I’m a magazine writer. I’m interested in doing a story on your daughter, Glory Ann. I wonder if I might see her—”

  “My daughter is not here, Mr. Cloud,” Emiliano Luza said, stiffening. “She does not live here and I do not expect her ever to live here.” He took his wife’s elbow. “Come, Josefa—”

  They walked past Cloud, up the few steps to the porch, and went into the house. Cloud and the younger man were left facing each other. The younger man was handsome in an angry way.

  “You’re Ramón,” Cloud said.

  “I am Ramón.” His tone was slightly challenging.

  “Is there any way I can find out where your sister is?”

  “Only if my father consents to tell you,” Ramón said. “And apparently he will not do that.”

  “Can you tell me why?” Cloud asked.

  Ramón’s face darkened. “Perhaps he does not care to have his daughter further degraded just to entertain some magazine readers.”

  “Magazine articles aren’t always written for entertainment,” Cloud said. “Sometimes they are written to tell the truth.”

  “Would that be the purpose of your magazine story?” Ramón asked skeptically. “To tell the truth?”

  “That would be my object, yes,” Cloud replied.

  The young Chicano studied Cloud, biting his lower lip thoughtfully as he did. “How much truth do you want to tell in this story of yours?”

  “All of it,” Cloud said. “All there is to tell.”

  “No matter what that truth is? And no matter who it hurts?”

  Something inside Cloud activated a warning signal to remind him whose side he was on. But something else inside him—his conscience, perhaps, or his pride—deactivated the warning and negated it. He did not have to play qualifying games about writing the truth. He was already on truth’s side. “I’ll write it, whatever it is,” he told Ramón flatly. “And regardless of who it hurts.”

  Ramón thought about it a moment longer, then said, “Come into the house.”

  Cloud followed him through the front door. They entered a small, immaculate living room, crowded with furnishings as outdated as Emiliano Luza’s suit, and heavily ornamented with religious decorations: crucifixes, pictures of Jesus and of the Sacred Heart, holy candles, a prominently placed Catholic bible with a binding of simulated white leather.

  In a large overstaffed chair in one corner, Emiliano Luza sat: small, slightly hunched, his face etched with coarseness, his mustache graying and in need of a trim. But still he sat as the head of his household, and his wife, who had just served him his after-mass coffee, sat in a straight-backed chair nearby.

  Ramón Luza did not invite Cloud to sit; instead the two men stood to face the elder Luza.

  “Papa, I think we should listen to this man,” Ramón said.

  “Excuse me,” Emiliano Luza said formally, “but I do not agree with you. The matter is closed.” He handed his cup to his wife. “Josefa, more sugar,” he said with a sour face.

  “Yes,’Miliano,” his wife responded quickly, taking his cup and leaving the room. For nearly thirty years she had prepared his coffee exactly the same way, but always when he was irritated about something, he imagined that his coffee was not the same: it needed more sugar, a little water, it was too hot, it was not hot enough. Whenever it happened, Josefa Luza would take her husband’s cup, leave the room for a moment, then bring the coffee back to him exactly as it was before.

  When she returned his cup, he sipped its contents at once and nodded his approval. “Much better, Josefa, much better.” Josefa Luza smiled slightly and sat down in the straight-backed chair again. Ramón and the magazine writer were also sitting now, so she assumed that the matter was not closed after all.

  “I will tell you, Mr. Cloud,” the elder Luza said, “why I keep my daughter’s whereabouts a secret. She has suffered enough from the ordeal that this animal Whitman caused. Not only did she have to endure the attack, but she then had to describe it in detail for the police—not once, but several times; she had to face her attacker to identify him; she had to describe his violation of her again, in public, at his preliminary hearing, and at his trial. And at his trial, she was forced to talk to him, to answer his questions, as he tried to make a liar out of her about what he had done. No, Mr. Cloud, my child has suffered enough.”

  “I understand how you feel, Mr. Luza—”

  “I do not think so, Mr. Cloud,” the old Chicano said. “To understand how I feel, you must know what it is to live in poverty with a young wife and two little babies in Mazatlán. You must know how it is to dream of coming to the United States, to Los Angeles, to improve the life of your family. You must know how it is to wait years for a permit to enter this country. Know how it is to walk all the way to the border with your wife and little children, carrying on your shoulders all that belongs to you on this earth. Know how it feels to work as an immigrant, to slave day and night for your family until finally, after many years, you begin to see the results of your labor: you begin to see your family in a house instead of a shack, your children in clean, new clothes, your wife wearing a lace mantilla to the church on Sunday. And then, Mr. Cloud—” Emiliano Luza sat forward, a wild look in his eyes “—then you must know how it feels to have your beautiful young daughter, whom you love with your whole heart, taken at gunpoint by a savage like this Whitman, have him strip the clothes from her virgin body, hold her captive for two hours while he violates her in the most foul ways that men kno
w.” Luza shook his head tragically. “And then you must know what happened after that, you must know what it caused. Only if you know that, Mr. Cloud, will you then understand how I feel.”

  “Bur, Papa, listen to me,” Ramón Luza pleaded to his father. “It is because he doesn’t know that he doesn’t understand. That is one of the reasons that this Whitman has not gone to the gas chamber yet: too many people don’t know; too many people are not aware of what his crime did to Glory Ann.” Ramón fell to his knees before his father. “Listen to me, Papa. If we let Mr. Cloud tell Glory Ann’s story the way it really is, then maybe the state will finally kill him next time. Maybe he won’t keep getting off!” The young man turned imploring eyes to his mother. “Mamma, please, tell him it is right.”

  Josefa Luza, her severely combed black hair framing a face that still showed traces of early beauty, lifted her chin with delicate dignity and said, “He is your father. He will decide what is right.”

  At that, the elder Luza turned to his wife and studied her thoughtfully, fondly. “Tell me how you feel, Josefa,” he said quietly. “I want to know.”

  Josefa Luza looked from her husband to her son, her son to her husband. “What I think may seem foolish,” she said. “I only know that the three of us think of what happened to our baby in three different ways.’Miliano, you blame yourself because it was you who brought us here. Better, you say, that we were still in a mud hut in Mazatlán, where Gloriana would not have been violated.” She looked at her son. “And you, Ramon, you consumed with vengeance against this person Whitman. You have become angry at the world because of it.” She lowered her eyes and looked at a tiny handkerchief that she had been twisting in her hands. “As for myself, I believe that my child’s suffering was ordained by God. For one so young and so innocent to suffer as she has must be a design of heaven. I do not pretend to know for what reason this has happened; I only know what is in my heart.” She looked back up at her husband and her son. “It saddens me that our three hearts are so different. Perhaps if this man writes of our Gloriana and we all read his words, it will help us to understand why this terrible thing happened.”