Deadly Goals

by Wilt Browning

  “When people start telling you all they have and all they are, they’re usually the people who don’t have, aren’t and never have been. And that’s the way I saw Pernell.”

  But Jeannie didn’t see Pernell that way. She clearly thought that he was wonderful, and Denise kept her opinions of him to herself.

  “What do you think of my black guy?” Jeannie asked one night after a workout.

  The question caught Denise by surprise, and she wasn’t certain how to answer. It bothered Denise that Mike had quit coming to workouts with them and had stopped calling Jeannie, and that Jeannie had been so wrapped up in her training sessions with Pernell that that hadn’t bothered her at all. Denise liked Mike and thought that he was good for Jeannie, but she didn’t like Pernell at all and had been concerned that Jeannie might be developing personal feelings for him.

  If she’s looking for my approval to have a relationship with a black guy, I have to be careful, Denise thought, as she considered how she should answer.

  “Jeannie, it really doesn’t matter what I think of him, does it?” she finally said. “What do you think of him? That’s what counts.”

  “I think he’s good for me. He tells me I look good. He says things I need to hear. He pushes me.”

  Denise wanted to tell Jeannie that she was worried that she might be venturing into a dangerous relationship. She wanted to say that every time Pernell said, “Looking good, Baby Girl,” it was like a slap in the face. She wanted to say that he was not the knight in shining armor that Jeannie seemed to think he was; he was a jerk with little or no respect for women. But she kept her opinions to herself.

  Jeannie’s parents knew little about her relationship with her fitness trainer. Though Jeannie had mentioned Pernell’s name a few times, she had volunteered little about him.

  “Jeannie was always worried about what her mother and dad, especially her dad, would say if they found out Pernell was black,” Denise said. But curiosity would lead to that discovery.

  In early May, Jeannie went with Pernell on a weekend visit to his mother’s home in North Carolina, where she met Willie, Pernell’s brother, who admired her shiny Nissan 300 ZX. Willie had become an expert at automobile detailing and offered to add some small, tasteful pinstripes to highlight the sports car form of Jeannie’s vehicle. But it would take him several days to do the job, he said. He would deliver the car to Virginia Beach when he finished.

  Since she had purchased her dream car shortly after her divorce from Tony, Jeannie had been so particular about it that she washed and waxed it every Saturday morning and kept it immaculately clean. No one but Jeannie was allowed to drive it. Now she was leaving the car she loved in the hands of a man she had just met so that he could spend a week painting designs and lines on it. That made no sense to Denise.

  The arrangement also left Jeannie without a car for more than a week. But Pernell offered to pick her up in the morning and drive her home in the afternoons. To keep Pernell’s identity from her parents, Jeannie devised a plan to meet him a block away from the Prickett home and have him drop her off at the same place.

  The plan stirred curiosity in her father, who, close to a week into the arrangement, purposely timed a leisurely walk in the neighborhood to the hour Jeannie was expected home. He watched from a discrete distance when Pernell pulled to the side of the street and let Jeannie out. Though he didn’t get a good look, he realized that Jeannie’s friend was of a different race, and later he asked her about it.

  “Jeannie, this guy Pernell, is he black?” Ben asked, going straight to the heart of the matter.

  “Yes,” she answered.

  “Jeannie, you know I don’t tolerate that,” he said.

  Nothing more was said and Ben and Jeannie never discussed the matter again.

  “You have to remember that I am a Southern boy, raised in the South in the forties and fifties,” Ben said years later, recalling this brief exchange with his daughter. “Times have changed, I guess, but they have never changed that much for me.”

  Ben and Carrie talked at length about the situation, trying to decide if they should do something. Carrie already had asked Jeannie if she were getting serious about Pernell and Jeannie had said they were only friends, but the Pricketts suspected otherwise. Should Ben talk to Pernell? Did they have the right to do or say anything? They had to remind themselves that Jeannie was almost 30, no longer their child, no longer bound to their commands.

  “Remember Tito,” Carrie said during one of their conversations. “We didn’t think Tito was right for Jeannie either, did we? But we decided then that you don’t own your children; they’re yours to keep for only a little while. And you love them for all the decisions they make. I guess I still think that approach is best.”

  Ben nodded. He’d let his daughter know how he felt, and that would have to do. He would not interfere.

  The Pricketts’ suspicions about Jeannie’s relationship with Pernell deepened shortly afterward when Jeannie told them that she was renting an apartment and moving out of their house. Denise had been trying to get Jeannie to move in with her for months. It seemed the sensible thing for both of them. Denise shared her home only with her daughter, Dawn, who loved Jeannie and had called her Aunt Jeannie from the time she could talk. Jeannie loved Dawn as well, and the house was plenty big for all of them. Still Jeannie had declined her offers. Why would she take an apartment of her own now if not to be with Pernell?

  The apartment was at 1216 Level Green Boulevard in Virginia Beach, just four miles from her parents’ house but more than eight miles from Denise’s house in Chesapeake. It was on the second floor, and it had only one bedroom, a living room and a small balcony off the kitchen-dining area.

  Jeannie was excited as she moved into her new place, but Denise knew that she was more excited about Pernell’s impending 25th birthday. Denise went with Jeannie as she searched for a gold chain to give to Pernell. Again and again, Jeannie had sales clerks remove chains from display cases so she could examine them, but each time she looked in dismay at the price tags.

  “I just can’t afford that,” she would confide.

  As June 4, Pernell’s birthday, drew closer, Jeannie arranged for a small dinner celebration at Captain George’s, a seafood buffet restaurant at Lynnhaven Mall in Virginia Beach.

  “You’ll come, won’t you?” Jeannie asked Denise.

  “Sure,” she said without enthusiasm.

  Only a few couples, friends of Pernell’s, would be there, she said, all dutch treat except that she planned to pay for Pernell’s dinner.

  Denise came with a friend from the bowling league and was astonished when Pernell opened a small package from Jeannie and drew out a gleaming gold chain. Jeannie helped him with it, latching it into place around his strong neck.

  “When did she buy that?” Denise said under her breath.

  “What did you say?” her friend asked.

  “Just talking to myself,” she said.

  Because the only large table available was crowded, Denise and her friend volunteered to move to a table for two near the back of the restaurant and told their waitress to keep their bill separate from the rest. Her friend took the bill when it was presented and Denise looked to the table where Jeannie sat surrounded by Pernell’s friends. She witnessed the awkward moment when the bill came and no one reached to pick it up. Finally, Jeannie pulled it toward her and handed the waitress a charge card. No one else had offered to pay part, or to even pay their own share. Jeannie was stuck with the tab, dinner for eight.

  As the small group was making its way out of the restaurant, Denise hurried to catch up with Jeannie, pulling at her elbow. “Why’d you do that?” she whispered. “Why’d you let them do that to you?”

  “It’s all right,” Jeannie told her.

  “It is not all right,” Denise said.

  But Jeannie turned cheerfully to the others. “Anybody for Rogues?” she asked, referring to a favorite nightclub at the beach. “Why don’t we al
l meet there?”

  Denise and her friend, Jeannie and Pernell arrived at the nightspot, got a table for eight and waited. No one else came.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Denise whispered to Jeannie as acquaintances began coming over to speak them. “I don’t like doing this. There are just too many people in here that we know.”

  Denise thought that Jeannie also had grown uncomfortable as people she knew realized that Pernell was her date and obviously began talking about it, but when she suggested that they leave a short time later, Pernell balked.

  “I’m staying,” he announced. “You can go if you want to. I’ll find a way home.”

  Disappointed and hurt that her evening was not turning out as she hoped, Jeannie got up to go, following Denise and her friend out, leaving Pernell behind.

  Early in Jeannie’s relationship with Pernell, Denise and Jeannie had maintained their old routines, still going to clubs on Friday nights, still spending time at the beach on Saturday afternoons, but all that changed without notice.

  “Jeannie and I talked on the phone at noon just about every day,” Denise remembered later. “When she got her lunch break, she’d always call me. If it was early in the week, one of us would ask if we were going out on the weekend and we’d always agree that we would stay home for a change.

  “But as it got later in the week, we knew we’d change our minds. And it was always the same. It would get to be Wednesday or Thursday, and Jeannie would say, ‘We going out this weekend?’ And I’d say, ‘I don’t know. What do you think?’

  “‘Yeah,’ she’d say. And then there would be silence on the phone because neither one of us wanted to ask what the other one was going to wear. Then one of us would do it and we’d spend the rest of the week fussing about that and getting ready to go out.”

  And so it was into the third week in June. But this time when Denise arrived at Jeannie’s apartment to pick her up, Jeannie was not ready to go.

  “Aren’t we going out?” Denise asked.

  “No,” Jeannie said in a strange tone of voice.

  “Why?” Denise pressed.

  “Pernell might call.”

  For a moment, there was silence. Denise wasn’t sure how to handle this situation.

  “Where is Pernell?” she finally asked.

  “He’s gone out with some friends.”

  The conversation was making even less sense to Denise, and she had become annoyed.

  “He’s gone out with some girl, and you’re sitting here at home waiting for him?”

  Jeannie now did not look up to meet Denise’s gaze.

  “What happens if we go out like we’d planned?”

  “I’m afraid he’ll come looking for me,” Jeannie answered.

  “So what?”

  “I’m afraid he’ll be mad.”

  Now, unexpectedly, Jeannie extended her right leg and flexed her small calf muscles. “You think my legs are showing any muscle yet? Pernell would like it if I was finally showing some muscle definition in my legs.”

  Denise had been concerned about the spell Pernell seemed to be casting over Jeannie, and now she was sure that he’d succeeded in taking control of her. There was nothing logical about this conversation, she thought.

  “Jeannie,” she said, “think about what’s happening.”

  But Jeannie only continued to look at the muscles in her legs, as if she hadn’t even heard Denise. Denise left fearful of what was happening to her friend.

  During the week that followed, however, Jeannie called regularly, as usual, acting as if nothing had changed, and once again they went through the old routine of deciding whether to go out on the weekend. In the end, Jeannie told Denise to pick her up at eight Saturday night.

  Denise arrived on time, but when she knocked on the door, no one answered. She could hear someone walking inside, so she knocked again, still getting no response.

  Now she went back downstairs to the back of the building and looked up, trying to see past the trellised balcony to get a glimpse inside. The apartment was dark. Once more, she returned to the door and rapped on it, this time more insistently. This time, she could hear whispered voices inside.

  What on earth was going on?

  Denise returned to her car and stood there, trying to decide what to do. Should she call someone? The police? Ben and Carrie? She looked to see if Jeannie’s 300 ZX was there and spotted it parked just across the lot. Finally, she climbed into her Jeep and drove slowly through the parking lot looking for some clue to as to who might be in Jeannie’s apartment with her, though she suspected Pernell. Who else but Pernell?

  Twice she circled through the complex, then began a slow drive through the nearby neighborhood. Two blocks away, parked along the curb, was a gold Pontiac Fiero that Denise recognized as Pernell’s.

  Though she was worried and dialed Jeannie’s number numerous times that night, Denise got no answer until Sunday.

  “Jeannie, I’ve been worried sick,” she said. “What happened?”

  “I heard you knocking,” Jeannie said matter-of-factly, “but he wouldn’t let me answer the door.”

  Denise didn’t have to ask who he was. And she was annoyed that Jeannie now seemed to think of her out-of-character rude behavior as nothing important, not even requiring an apology.

  Some aspects of Jeannie’s life remained unchanged since Pernell had come into it, however, and Denise saw that as a hopeful sign.

  As she had always done, Jeannie still visited on the phone with her mother two and three times a day. She continued meeting her mother for Saturday lunch after Jeannie’s regular visit to the hairdresser. Her appointments at a nearby tanning salon were faithfully kept.

  Despite this, by mid-summer, Jeannie’s relationship with Pernell worried her mother, who thought that Jeannie’s personality was changing. During one of their Saturday outings, Carrie carefully broached the subject.

  “Baby, is there anything I need to know about you and your friend, Pernell?” she asked.

  “Mama, I know how Daddy feels,” she said. “But how do you feel?”

  “All I can say, Jeannie, is not in my lifetime,” said Carrie, who feared that the relationship might be leading to marriage. “Please, not in my lifetime.”

  Jeannie smiled at the response. “I swear to you, Mama, we’re just good friends,” she said and reached to hug her.

  17.

  The Christmas Visitor

  BY LATE JULY, Pernell had left his job as an instructor at the fitness center and had begun selling cleaning supplies in the Tidewater area. He stopped supervising Jeannie’s training and only occasionally visited the fitness center. Jeannie continued training on her own, and Denise thought it was becoming as much an obsession with her as Pernell seemed to be.

  On August 5, Jeannie’s 30th birthday, her mother made a cake for a small family celebration. Denise called with birthday wishes while the party was going on.

  “What did Pernell give you?” Denise asked.

  “Well, he didn’t have any money,” Jeannie said, almost apologetically. “You know he took that new job and he’s having it a little tight right now.”

  That made Denise angry. She remembered the gold chain Jeannie had bought for Pernell on his birthday only two months earlier, even though Jeannie couldn’t afford that either. Nor could she afford the dinner tab for Pernell and his friends.

  “What about all those NFL checks he’s never cashed?” she wanted to say, but kept it to herself.

  “He got you nothing?!” she said instead. “Didn’t even mention it, didn’t say ‘Happy birthday, Jeannie,’ or anything?!”

  Jeannie started to make another excuse but Denise cut her off.

  “Jeannie, even if he had no money, he could have found a pencil and piece of paper and made you a little card that just said ‘Happy Birthday, Jeannie’. Sometimes those are the best of all anyway. And he didn’t even think to do that?”

  “I guess not,” Jeannie said, as if embarrassed.

&n
bsp; “Jerk,” Denise said, not bothering to hold back her opinion any longer.

  Still, Jeannie remained under Pernell’s spell, often waiting alone in her apartment while he was out on the town, fearful of stirring his anger.

  Denise had never known Pernell to have his own apartment. He kept moving in for extended stays with friends and acquaintances. When Pernell first came to the Tidewater, she knew, Lamar and his new wife had taken him in. He’d had a couple of other temporary addresses since then. Denise saw him not as an All-American football player, but an All-American moocher, and she suspected that Pernell had now moved in with Jeannie, no doubt with Jeannie paying all the bills, though she didn’t inquire. “Any time I’d call or stop by,” she recalled years later, “he seemed to always be there.”

  That troubled Denise deeply, because Jeannie had once told her that Pernell had angrily pushed her against the wall and held her so she couldn’t move. True, that seemed to have been a solitary incident, for Jeannie hadn’t mentioned any others. Still, Denise worried that something like it, or worse, might happen again.

  In September, Pernell quit his job selling cleaning supplies and with little warning moved away. He was going to share an apartment with his half-sister, Blondie Richardson, at 2347 Brady Street in Richmond, two hours away, he told Jeannie. Within days, he called to say he had a job in Richmond at Remco, an appliance rental store in Southside Plaza where he worked as a delivery man and chased down deadbeat debtors. His massive body and intimidating appearance made him perfect for the job.

  Denise thought Pernell’s departure was good news for Jeannie. “Let’s go out this weekend, maybe a little celebration,” she suggested.

  “What are you going to wear?” Jeannie asked, more cheerful, Denise thought, than she had been in months.

  “I don’t know. What’ll you wear?” Denise said, going along with the silly game the two had always played.