Chapter 7
AFTER MY PARENTS SEPARATED, DAD WAS SCHEDULED TO PICK UP my brothers and me every Saturday. He didn’t always. I’d sit on top of the wall in front of our house, often with the pair of binoculars he’d given me. On the lookout for his white Karmann Ghia, I knew what it meant when he was late.
He wasn’t coming, but I wouldn’t accept it.
Wandering back inside the house, I’d find Mom and ask where he was.
On one occasion, I remember her in the kitchen with a knife in hand, sawing through a raw chicken, making cacciatore again.
She informed me that Dad couldn’t make it, and I may as well entertain myself with my coloring books and crayons.
He’s just late for some reason, I told her.
Maybe he had to stop to get gas or had car trouble.
I was going to wait for him, I announced, halfway out the screen door, the long spring taut and quivering.
Faint music and laughter sounded from the living room, where Jim and John were watching cartoons.
They’d given up on Dad picking us up that day. But I wouldn’t.
I left the house to the rough sawing sound of Mom cutting through chicken as the morning got hotter.
A breeze rustled the palmettos, cars swishing in the distance.
The wall out front had thick square posts crisscrossed with boards that I’d use to boost myself up.
Once on top I’d sit with legs bent, my chin on my knees.
Waiting.
I’d imagine the big lantern on top of the column was a periscope. I’d press my cheek against the glass, one eye squinted shut.
Waiting.
Turning my head slowly, I’d look up and down the street for Dad’s car. When someone else drove by, I’d sit very still, barely breathing, thinking they couldn’t see me.
Waiting.
On our street was a two-story brick house where a divorced father lived. I was afraid of his son, a monster I’ve never forgotten. I know his real name but will call him Jake.
Not long before, Jim, Jake, and I were playing in a vacant lot where I noticed a stranded baby bird on the ground. I picked it up, cradling it, my heart aching as I wondered how to help.
“I know what to do,” Jake boasted. “Let me see it.”
Taking it from of me, he crushed it with a big rock as I watched shocked. I ran home crying and hid in my room. The few times I’d been on Jake’s property, he’d pushed me into the swimming pool. As I’d dogpaddle to the ladder, he’d try to pull off my clothes and duck my head under the water.
“I’m a shark! I’m a shark!” he’d say, laughing, and he was.
One day he showed up at our house, taking me into the bathroom, shutting the door and turning on the hot water.
He pulled a few steel screws out of a pocket, instructing me to heat them up and insert them into his rectum.
I declined his offer, as did Jim. Looking back, I wonder what went on inside Jake’s home.
Waiting on the wall for Dad, I’d fantasize about the fun in store for us.
Maybe we’d go out in the boat, anchoring in shallow water so we could swim.
He might take us to the beach and feed us hot dogs and soda pop.
Or if it wasn’t too hot, we’d visit the Crandon Park Zoo where I’d gawk at the lions, tigers, and polar bears while feeling sorry for them.
I’d watched for my father all morning, the sun bleaching the street, the rising heat making the air seem wrinkled.
For hours I’d maintain my outpost or climb the banana tree for a better vantage point, scanning with the binoculars.
I was sure that any minute I’d hear the distant rumbling of his Karmann Ghia.
Then it would roll away from the intersection, pulling into the driveway. He’d stop and the emergency brake would ratchet up, reminding me of Jim cocking his toy tommy gun. I’d imagine my brothers and me driven away, maybe to Shorty’s Bar-B-Q or Howard Johnson’s, then on to a surprise adventure.
The street remained empty as hope burned off like dew on the thick, coarse grass.
Mom never told us why he didn’t show up on occasion.
I could only assume he didn’t want to see us.
Eventually, I’d return to the chill of the air-conditioned house, Mom barricaded in her bedroom with the door shut.
My brothers and I knew not to enter as she became more depressed and nonfunctioning.
No father around, and she wasn’t really either.
My brothers and I ran wild. Jim was gigging frogs in the canals and getting into rock wars with the Florida crackers, as people called them.
A few doors down from us, a woman was startled to hear someone banging on the piano in her living room.
Three-year-old John had wandered inside her house, the front door apparently unlocked.
I’d steal fruit from the neighbors’ backyards, loading oranges, grapefruit, limes, mangos into my Radio Flyer red wagon.
Rolling it around to my victims’ front doors, I’d ring the bell, offering the loot for a nickel.
I thought I was sparing them from having to pick anything.
They always paid and told me to keep fruit that Mom wouldn’t want either.
I constantly trespassed, believing that if I ran fast enough no one could see me.
I’d sneak Mom’s books from the house, intrigued by childbirth and other racy subjects.
Hiding in a vacant lot, I’d look at the graphic pictures, intrigued by human anatomy.
I remember a photograph of a fetus that looked like a shrimp.
Microscopic images of sperm reminded me of tadpoles.
Several neighborhood boys built a treehouse about ten feet off the ground, no girls allowed.
It was accessible by a rope, and I decided to climb up when no one was around.
I was no more than five at the time and got up the rope without a problem.
For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to shimmy back down headfirst, and hurtled to the ground, landing on a rock.
One day a boy gave me a cup of the antiseptic merthiolate, telling me it was orange juice and to drink it.
Fortunately, I didn’t. Sometimes I prowled around after dark, watching people through their lighted windows.
I fell off my bike into a pile of broken liquor bottles, cutting my knee wide open.
It needed stitches but Mom was too depressed to take me to the doctor.
My brothers and I were unsupervised. Predators notice things like that, and one did. A substitute security officer had begun patrolling the neighborhood and became aware of the blue-eyed blond little girl roaming the streets at will.
One day I was walking along the roadside near a canal lined with tall grasses and cattails. Jim had ridden off on his bicycle, a bamboo gig across the handlebars, heavy twine looped around his fist.
I was trying to find him when I heard a car slowing behind me. It backed into a driveway and turned around. Then it was pulling up next to me. The driver’s window cranked down.
“Hello, sweetie. Whatcha doing?” The patrolman’s weathered face crinkled into a grin, wisps of hair fringing his uniform cap.
I have a vague memory that he appeared to be in his forties with shoe polish black hair, a craggy face. He was missing teeth like a jack-o’-lantern.
“I’m frog hunting,” I told him.
“Well, I’m little girl hunting, you wanna be my friend?” His grin widened until I could see the tops of the ugly yellow teeth he had left.
Reaching out the window, he grabbed my arm. I saw black hair and thick fingers. I was aware of his firm grip, his hand meaty and damp. I remember liking his affection while feeling that I shouldn’t.
“If you’re really my friend,” he teased, “give me a kiss.”
Standing on my tiptoes, I kissed his cheek, and it was sandpapery like Dad’s. Then the patrolman drove away and began stopping his white cruiser daily whenever he saw me. I enjoyed the attention. My father had moved out weeks earlier. I missed him terribly and Mom was just as absent.
When the patrolman intercepted me for our visits, each one was friendlier and more inappropriate than the last. One day he opened his door, pulling me close.
He started talking dirty. Around this same time, Mom was getting obscene phone calls that added to her sense of poor self-worth and helplessness.
“What if I dropped by your house?” the patrolman said to me.
“I guess that would be okay.”
“What if your mother was home?” He stroked my arm with his thumb.
“She wouldn’t mind,” I lied.
“What if she was naked?” he continued, and I didn’t know what to say to that.
Wrapping an arm around me, he started kissing me on the mouth, digging a hand in a pocket of my red shorts.
“Whatcha got in your pocket?” he asked. “Bet you’ve got treasure in it.”
I shook my head, scared as he wormed his finger deeper into the pocket. Finding a tear and making it bigger. Fingering my panties. Then he withdrew his hand and slid it into the waistband of my shorts. I was embarrassed and too frightened to move. I felt elastic stretch as he touched my hip.
“I’ll find your treasure,” he said. “I’ll find it.”
He was pulling me into his car when Jim rode up on his bicycle, slamming on the brakes.
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING? WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” his shrill voice screamed.
Turning around, he pedaled furiously back to the house to alert Mom.
The patrolman slammed his door, squealing away, leaving black streaks of rubber on the pavement.
Within the hour I was in our living room, sitting in the lap of a Dade County police officer in a light blue uniform with a shiny silver badge.
I told him the details of what had happened. I remember feeling ashamed of myself.
“It’s just a good thing they caught him before he ruined other little girls,” my mother tried to reassure me.
All I heard was the word ruined. She was saying that I was ruined like some of my drawings when I was impatient and annoyed.
I don’t know the name of the private patrolman who molested me.
But I heard he was a convicted pedophile recently released from prison.
Apparently, the neighborhood association didn’t bother looking into his background before hiring him as a substitute.
I’m all but certain that if Jim hadn’t interrupted, the patrolman would have driven off with me.
Chances are, I wouldn’t have lived to tell the tale.
No way he intended to go back to prison, and someone would have found my body floating in a canal.
At the age of five I found myself involved in my first criminal investigation.
Unfortunately, the victim was me, and soon enough I was sitting inside a formal room with dark paneling and a conference table, no windows, a wooden ceiling fan turning.
I don’t remember men present, only women dressed as if for church.
They were quiet and gentle, solemnly passing around my red shorts, asking questions I didn’t like answering.
I was mortified. What had happened was my fault.
I should have resisted somehow. I didn’t run, or fight.
I’ve thought a lot about why a child molester picked me.
I’ve analyzed my response. I remember feeling special that he liked me.
Then I was afraid to anger him. I wanted to please him so he wouldn’t do something terrible to me or my mother.
I don’t know the details of my meeting in the rarefied gloom of that conference room during the early months of 1962 after Dad had moved out.
But I assume it was a hearing, perhaps a grand jury proceeding.
After it was over, I wanted to hide and never come out.
But my bigger worry was Mom. She felt guilty and like a failure.
I sensed it in her silence as we drove away, stopping at a big toy store where I didn’t want to go.
She told me I could have anything I wanted.
Absolutely anything at all. She said I was brave, but I wasn’t and didn’t deserve a reward.
I picked out a Magic Designer set, an early version of a Spirograph.
I never touched it once we got home. I wouldn’t look at it.
Over the decades I attempted unsuccessfully to find out the identity of the patrolman and what became of him.
I couldn’t locate any records about the case.
I’ve imagined confronting him in prison, informing him of the damage he caused, most of all to my mother.
While I was growing up, she wouldn’t buy me red shorts. Even if I wanted them.