“ I’m coming over. Wait there.”
“ No! Please, Jake! I don’t want you to see me like this. My face is puffy, and I’m…I’m so filthy.”
“ What?”
“ Oh, darling, I didn’t want to tell you. He forced me. He tore off my clothes, just ripped them to shreds with his hands. He was crazed, his eyes wild like a rabid animal. He took me, then left me here, filthy and naked and freezing.” She started to say something else but was racked with sobs. I waited, the heat spreading to the back of my neck, sweat pouring off me. “Oh, Jake, I feel so stupid, so ashamed.”
“ Wait there! Don’t move. I’m coming over.”
“ No, don’t!”
“ Jo Jo, I swear I’m going to tear him apart, and when the doctors put him back together, we’re going to prosecute.”
“ Jake, no! You don’t understand. It’s more complicated than you realize.”
“ I know. You said that before. You said you hadn’t told me everything, you were sorry Blinky got me involved in it, and you hoped I would forgive you. When I get there, you can tell me everything.”
“ I’ll tell you now, darling, but you’ve got to calm down. I’ll be all right. You can’t come out here. Simmy’s in the house. If he-”
“ Don’t move,” I told her again. “Wait for me.”
I flew out the door, running for the car. Kip was videotaping a mangy dog urinating against a tree. I don’t know what I looked like, but Kip turned, at first puzzled, then fearful as he watched me. He left the dog there and raced toward the car.
“ Uncle Jake, what’s wrong? Your face is all angered up.”
“ Huh?”
“ That’s what Granny says about you. That you’re sweet as mother’s milk, but watch out if you ever get all angered up. “
From the neighboring cottage, the father of the two boys wandered out, pulling up suspenders over plaid Bermuda shorts.
“ Kip, I’m in a hurry, and I don’t have time to explain. Stay here.’’
I hopped in the car, and as I started the engine, Kip tossed the camera in, then vaulted over the passenger door, just like I taught him. “Nothin’ doin’, pardner. Granny also told me that when you’re like this, you don’t think clearly. You make mistakes, and my job is to help you stay cool.”
“ C’mon, Kip, out! This is serious.”
The car was moving, and Kip was buckling his shoulder harness. “I’m not letting you head into Shinbone all by your lonesome. I’m riding shotgun, Uncle Jake.” was aware of Bermuda Shorts watching us argue. “Kip, this isn’t a movie. Now, for the last time, get out!” I started to unbuckle him.
“ I’ll scream child abuse,” Kip said, “so you might as well gun it before knock-knees there throws himself in front of the car.
“ Kip!”
“ You promised never to leave me alone again. Last time-”
“ I remember last time,” I said, hitting the gas.
We tore up clouds of dust as we headed toward the Red Canyon Ranch and what would be my third and final meeting with the last living witness.
CHAPTER 18
Granny taught me right from wrong.
I didn’t have a father or a mother around, and I didn’t pay a lot of attention to teachers, ministers, or United Nations ambassadors. I hung around Key Largo and Islamorada with the kids from the trailer parks. Their idea of fun was to throw rocks at tourists’ cars coming down U.S. 1, maybe jimmy Coke machines in their spare time. Their dads-the ones who had them-worked on shrimp boats or road crews, if they worked at all.
For a mentor, it was either Granny or the guys who loafed at the 7-Eleven on Little Pine Road, the place I started drinking beer when I was about Kip’s age.
Thank God it was Granny.
She taught me not to cheat, not to steal, and not to hit anyone who hadn’t hit me first. She taught me to avoid cruelty in words and deeds. She taught me that black and brown folks were as good as white folks, and many times, a damn sight better.
And when I was a little older, she taught me never to raise a hand to a woman. “Only the lowest kind of trash hits his woman, and don’t you fergit it. Only a sniveling weakling, a bottom-feeding gutter rat will ever strike a woman, and no Lassiter ever done it or ever will. You understand?”
I told her I did, and if I ever saw a man abusing a woman, I’d step in and put an end to it right then and there.
“ Another thing, too, Jacob. No real man ever forces a woman to do what she don’t want to do. A woman who don’t want to be touched is not to be touched.”
I understood that, too. The thought of a man doing violence to a woman, any woman, is repellent to me. The thought of it happening to Jo Jo Baroso filled me with rage.
Another memory came back to me on the drive past Woody Creek. In my first year as an assistant public defender, I was handling domestic violence cases. One of my first clients was a grinning yahoo who had tossed a frying pan filled with sizzling bacon at the woman who lived with him. The grease left a ridge of scar tissue from one eye diagonally across her nose to her upper lip.
“ Bitch deserved it,” he told me, a cigarette flapping out of the corner of his mouth. “If I told her once, I told her a hundred times to have two six-packs in the fridge, cold and ready. A man comes home from pouring tar on roofs in August, a man is thirsty. She’s there making BLTs and she says, ‘Sorry, honey, there’s only one can left, but you took the car, and I couldn’t carry beer, what with the eggs and bread and what all.’ So I chugged the can, smashed the empty on her forehead. Bitch just smiled at me, so hell, I picked up the frying pan.”
Then he grinned, looking for approval from his state-appointed counsel. Just a couple of guys who understand you have to smack them around once in a while, let them know who’s boss.
I’m not real proud of what I did. He was small and wiry and sun-browned from his outdoor work, with a creased face and dumb, blank eyes. He was expecting to cop a plea, maybe get probation, go out drinking with the boys, brag about teaching the bitch a lesson. He wasn’t expecting his lawyer to be crazed on the subject of men beating women.
“ I’d like you to put out your cigarette,” I told him.
He looked around. “Don’t see no ashtray.”
“ I want you to swallow it,” I said, placidly.
He gave a nervous little smile, wondering if I was joking. I let him wonder a moment, then came around my desk and yanked him out of his chair by the scruff of his neck. The cigarette fell from his mouth, but I caught it, remembering even now the singe of hot ash in the palm of my hand. His eyes were wide and fearful. I let go of his neck, and with one hand, pinched his jawbone hard, forcing his mouth open. Then, I jammed the cigarette in, hit him under the chin to close his mouth, and yanked back on his neck to tilt his head toward the ceiling.
“ Swallow!” I yelled at him. “Swallow, you worthless piece of slime.”
I watched his Adam’s apple work the butt down his throat, then I let go of him.
The punk filed a complaint, and I was suspended for a month without pay, forced to undergo psychiatric testing, then counseling, then a program called Alternatives to Violence, which, ironically, was intended for abusive husbands and boyfriends. When I came back to work, I was reassigned to zoning cases, where I defended a Santeria priest for sacrificing live goats in neighborhoods usually reserved for drug deals.
It was years later in private practice that I crossed paths with another of those cowardly cretins. This one was a yellow-haired, blue-eyed devil in a padded-shoulder, double-breasted suit, a guy Granny would say considered himself the last Coke in the desert. He was a rich man’s son, driving a Porsche, living in a high rise on the Intracoastal, sharing his chrome and glass bachelor pad with a flight attendant who eventually grew tired of his two-timing. When she moved out, the blond boy’s ego was hurt, and he asked her to return his Christmas presents. She thought he was joking-the presents were the crowns on her front teeth-but he took them back anyway. With pliers.