Lucky (15 page)

"Hey, girl," he said. "Don't I know you from somewhere?" He smirked at me, remembering.

I did not respond. I looked directly at him. Knew his face had been the face over me in the tunnel. Knew I had kissed those lips, stared into those eyes, smelled the crushed-berry smell on his skin.

I was too afraid to yell out. There was a cop behind me but I could not scream: "That's the man who raped me!" That happens in movies. I put one foot in front of the other. I heard him laughing behind me. But I was still walking.

He had no fear. It had been nearly six months since we'd seen each other last. Six months since I lay under him in a tunnel on top of a bed of broken glass. He was laughing because he had gotten away with it, because he had raped before me, and because he would rape again. My devastation was a pleasure for him. He was walking the streets, scot-free.

I turned the corner at the end of the block. Over my shoulder I saw him walking up to the redheaded policeman. He was shooting the breeze, so sure of his safety that he felt comfortable enough, right after seeing me, to tease a cop.

I never question why I went to tell Wolff I couldn't attend his class. It was my duty. I was his student. I was the only sophomore in the class.

I walked to the Hall of Languages at the top of the hill and checked my watch. I had time before Wolff's class to make two phone calls from the phone booth on the bottom floor. I called Ken Childs, told him what had happened, asked him to meet me at the library nearby in half an hour. I wanted to make a sketch of the rapist and Ken was in art school.

Then, as soon as I hung up the phone, I called my parents collect.

They both got on the phone.

"Mom and Dad," I said, "I'm calling from the Hall of Languages."

My mother was attuned now to any waver in my voice.

"What is it, Alice?" she asked.

"I just saw him, Mom," I said.

"Saw who?" my father asked, as always two beats back.

"The rapist."

I don't remember their reaction. I couldn't. I was calling because I needed them to know, but, once I told them, I did not wait, I rushed at them with facts. "I'm going to tell Professor Wolff I can't come to class. I've called Ken Childs, he's meeting me to walk me home. I want to make a sketch."

"Call us when you get there," my mother said. I remember that. "Have you called the police?" my father asked.

I did not hesitate. "Not yet," I said, which meant to all of us that it was not a yes-or-no question. I would call them. I would pursue this.

I went up the stairs to where my workshop was held, and ran into Wolff as he was about to enter the English office.

The other students were filtering inside. I approached him. "Professor Wolff," I said, "can I talk to you?"

"It's class time, we'll talk after."

"I can't make it to class, that's what it's about."

I knew he would not be happy. I did not know how
not
happy he would be. He proceeded to tell me how lucky I was to be in the class, and that missing this one class was equivalent to missing three classes of a regular undergraduate course. All this I knew. All this had been why I walked blindly up to Humanities Hall instead of returning directly to my dorm.

I begged Wolff to give me just two minutes of his time. To talk to me in his office, not the hall. "Please," I said. Something in the way I said it called to that place inside him beyond the formal rules of the classroom, which I knew he valued. "Please," I said, and he responded—still it was a concession—with, "It will have to be brief."

I followed him down the short hall, turned the corner after him, and stood there while he unlocked the door. Looking back, I can't believe how calm I remained from the moment I saw my rapist on the street to that moment, inside Wolff's office, with the door closed.

Now I was with a man I knew would not hurt me. For the first time, I thought it was safe to exhale. He sat facing me while I hovered over and then sat in the student chair.

I burst.

"I can't come to class. I just saw the man who raped me. I have to call the police."

I remember his face and I remember it vividly. He was a father. I knew this vaguely at the time. He had little boys. He came near me. He wanted to comfort, but then, instinctually, he pulled back. I was a rape victim; how would I interpret his touch? His face fell into the recesses reserved for the pure confusion one expresses when there is nothing on this earth that he or she can do to make something better.

He asked if he could make a call, if I had a way home, what, if anything, he could do. I told him I had called a friend who would meet me at the library and walk me home, where I would phone the police.

Wolff walked me back out into the hall. Before he let me go—my mind already working on putting one foot in front of the other, thinking of the phone call to the police, repeating over and over again in my head
maroon windbreaker, blue jeans rolled at cuffs, Converse
All-Star sneakers
—Wolff stopped me and put both hands on my shoulders.

He looked at me and when it was clear to him that for that second he held my attention, he spoke.

"Alice," he said, "a lot of things are going to happen and this may not make much sense to you right now, but listen. Try, if you can, to remember everything."

I have to restrain myself from capitalizing the last two words. He meant them to be capitalized. He meant them to resound and to meet me sometime in the future on whatever path I chose. He had known me for two weeks. I was nineteen. I sat in his class and drew flowers on my jeans. I had written a story about sewing dummies that came to life and sought revenge on dressmakers.

So it was a shout across a great distance. He knew, as I was later to discover when I walked into Doubleday on Fifth Avenue in New York and bought
This Boy's Life,
Wolff's own story, that memory could save, that it had power, that it was often the only recourse of the powerless, the oppressed, or the brutalized.

The walk to the library, only two hundred yards across the front of the quad and on the other side of the street fronting the Hall of Languages, was a walk I made on automatic. I became a machine. I think it must be the way men patrol during wartime, completely attuned to movement or threat. The quad is not the quad but a battlefield where the enemy is alive and hiding. He waits to attack the moment you let your guard down. The answer—never let it down, not even for a second.

With every nerve ending pushing out against the edges of my skin, I reached Bird Library. Although I was still wary, I allowed myself to exhale here. I walked through the fluorescent light. It being still early in the semester, the library was not busy. The few people I passed, I did not look at. I didn't want to meet anyone's eyes.

I could not wait for Ken; I was too afraid to stop. I kept walking. Bird was constructed so that by walking through the building, I could exit on the other side of the block, no man's land. It was a street populated by old wood frame houses, many of them used by fraternities and sororities, but it was no longer the sanctified quad. The streetlights were fewer here and in the time it had taken me to walk from Marshall Street to tell Wolff I couldn't come to class, it had grown dark. I had only one goal: to get back to my dorm without injury and to write down everything he'd worn, to detail the features of his face.

I got there. I don't remember seeing anyone. If I did, I brushed by them without comment.

Inside my small single, I called the police. I explained my situation. I had been raped in May, I said, I was now back on campus and had seen my assailant. Would they come?

Then I sat down on my bed and made a sketch. I had written out details. I started with his hair, went next to height, build, nose, eyes, mouth. Then there were comments on his face structure: "Short neck. Small but dense head. Boxy jawline. Hair slightly down in front."

And his skin: "Pretty dark but not black black." At the bottom of the sheet, in the left-hand corner, I did a sketch of him and beside this noted his clothing: "Maroon jacket—

windbreaker-style but with down. Jeans—blue. White sneakers."

Then Ken showed up. He was out of breath and nervous. He was a small, fragile man—

the year before, I had romantically compared him to a pint-size David. So far, he had not shown much ability to handle my situation. Over the summer he had written once. He explained, and at the time I accepted it, that he had reinvented what had happened to me so it wouldn't hurt him as much. "I have decided it is like a broken leg and like a broken leg, it will heal."

Ken tried to improve on my sketch, but he was too nervous—his hands shook. He sat on my bed and looked very small to me, frightened. I decided he was a warm body who knew me, who meant well. That had to be enough. He made several attempts to draw the head of the rapist.

There were sounds in the hall. Walkie-talkies tuned to a self-important pitch, the sound of heavy footsteps. Fists thumped against the door and I answered them as girls came out into the hall.

Syracuse University Security. They had been alerted by the police. They were amped.

This was the real shit. Two of them were quite wide and, in my tiny studio, their size was accentuated.

Within seconds, the Syracuse City Police arrived. Three of them. Someone shut the door.

I relayed my story again and there was a slight squabble about jurisdiction. The SU

Security seemed personally disappointed that since the original incident had happened in Thorden Park and the sighting was on Marshall Street, it was clearly a City of Syracuse matter and not a campus one. On a professional level, this reflected well on them, but they were not as much university representatives that night as they were hunters with a fresh scent.

The police looked at my sketches and Ken's. They repeatedly referred to Ken as my boyfriend, though I corrected them each time. They eyed him suspiciously. In his slight physique and nervousness, he stood out as a freak in a room populated by large men armed with guns and billy clubs.

"How long ago did you see the suspect?"

I told them.

They decided there was still some chance, since I hadn't acknowledged him, that the rapist would be loitering in the area of Marshall Street. It was worth a ride in a squad car.

Two of the city police took my sketch, leaving Ken's behind.

"We'll make copies of this and send out an APB. Every man in the city will keep this in his car until we find him," one said.

As we readied to leave, Ken asked, "Do you need me to come?"

The looks from the police must have burned into him. He came.

With six men in uniform escorting us, we left the building. Ken and I got in the back of a squad car with one officer in the front. I don't remember this man's name, but I remember his anger.

"We're gonna get this puke," he said. "Rape is one of the worst crimes. He'll pay."

He started the engine and turned on the red and blue flashing lights of his squad car. We roared down to Marshall Street, only a few blocks away.

"Look carefully," the officer said. He maneuvered his squad car with a manhandling agility I would later recognize in New York cabbies.

Ken was slumping down in the seat beside me. He said the flashing lights hurt his head.

He shielded his eyes. I looked out. While we drove up and around Marshall Street a few times, the officer told me about his seventeen-year-old niece, just an innocent girl. She had been gang-raped. "Ruined," he said. "Ruined." He had his billy club out. He started smacking the empty seat with it. Ken winced each time it hit the vinyl. Having thought this mission was probably futile from the start, I began to be afraid of what this policeman might do.

I saw no rapist. I said this. I suggested leaving, looking at mug shots down at the station.

But this officer wanted release and he was going to get it. He braked hard on the final pass down Marshall Street.

"There,
there,"
he said. "What about those three?"

I looked and knew immediately. Three black students. You could tell by the way they were dressed. They were also tall, too tall to be my rapist.

"No," I said. "Let's just go."

"They're troublemakers," he said. "You stay here."

He got out of the squad car in a hurry and chased after them. He had his billy club in his hand.

Ken began to suffer some version of the panic I was familiar with from my mother. His breathing was labored. He wanted to get out.

"What's he going to do?" he said. He tried the door. It had been locked automatically.

This was where criminals as well as victims rode.

"I don't know. Those guys aren't even close."

The lights were still flashing overhead. People began to come up to the car to stare in. I was mad at this policeman for leaving us there. I was mad at Ken for being a wimp. I knew no good would come of an angry man, speeding on adrenaline, looking for revenge for his raped niece. I was in the center of it all and simultaneously I realized I didn't exist.

I was just a catalyst that made people nervous, guilty, or furious. I was frightened, but more than anything, I was disgusted. I wanted the policeman to come back and I sat in the car with Ken whimpering beside me, put my head between my knees so the people on the outside of the car looking in would be met with "the back of the victim," and I listened for the sounds I knew were taking place in the alley. Someone was being beaten, I knew that as surely as I knew anything. It was not Him.

The officer returned. He swooped into the driver's side and laid his billy club firmly against the palm of his hand.

"That'll teach 'em," he said. He was sweating, exhilarated.

"What did they do?" Ken ventured. He was horrified.

"Open container. Never talk back to an officer."

I did not overlook what happened on Marshall Street that night.
Everything
was wrong. It was wrong that I couldn't walk through a park at night. It was wrong that I was raped. It was wrong that my rapist assumed he was untouchable or that as a Syracuse coed I was most certainly treated better by the police. It was wrong that the niece of that officer was raped. It was wrong of him to call her ruined. It was wrong to put the lights on and strut that car down Marshall. It was wrong to hassle, and perhaps physically hurt, three innocent young black men on the street.