06.Evil.Beside.Her.2008 (4 page)

In James’s estimation his senior year in high school was his best. He wore his school jacket with two big letters, one for basketball, another for the year he spent on the tennis team, and for the first time felt as if he was gaining some respect. “I turned a few people’s heads when they saw that,” he said, proudly. “They didn’t expect me to be so athletic.”

Still, in the 1981
Gusher
, the Pearland High School yearbook, James Bergstrom is a gawky teenager with long, dark hair swept across his forehead, a wary smile, and a tightly manicured mustache. Nowhere is there a sign of the James Bergstrom of the future, not even in the eyes. Brows arched, he stares off the page to the left, without a hint of the anger and rage that would damage so many lives.

Of course, no one in the Martinez family knew of James Bergstrom’s past when he rang their doorbell at seven on the Saturday evening following his phone call. Santos opened her front door and saw only a neatly dressed young man smiling at her. “I’m here to pick up Linda,” he said.

Santos called her middle daughter, and a few minutes later, dressed in jeans and a new shirt she bought for the occasion, Linda walked toward the door to meet her blind date. It was, in fact, her first blind date. She was nervous. “I remember having butterflies in my stomach,” she said. She’d actually had second thoughts about the arrangement just that afternoon, but decided she’d made a commitment.

In the doorway, James stood smiling at her. He, too, was dressed casually in a pair of jeans and a white shirt with one red stripe. Linda thought it would probably be all right when she realized he looked as nervous as she felt.

A few minutes later, they were driving toward the freeway in James’s new midnight blue 1983 Custom Deluxe pickup truck, trying to decide where to go. One of them mentioned Bennigan’s, the other agreed, and they were on their way.

In a booth at the restaurant, Linda had her first real look at James. At five ten, he was eight inches taller than she and gaunt, so much so that his clothes hung on him. But James was not unattractive. His dark hair was meticulously combed over his forehead, and his hazel eyes looked back at her warmly.

They were both too nervous to eat, so when the waitress arrived, they ordered only drinks: Linda a frosty frozen margarita, and James a Crown Royal. While they drank, James did most of the talking, much as he had on the telephone. This time the conversation centered around music, especially rock ’n’ roll concerts he had gone to with Eddie and Sam: the Police, Rush, and a dozen others, all the hottest groups. Linda had only been able to afford to attend one such event, a Van Halen concert the year before.

When they finished their drinks they got back in the truck. As he was throughout the night, James was gentlemanly, opening Linda’s door and waiting patiently until she climbed inside. They then drove to The Galleria, the pricey Houston shopping mall frequented by River Oaks socialites, upwardly mobile young professionals, and vacationing Mexican nationals. On one end it was anchored by Neiman Marcus, and on the other by Lord & Taylor and Marshall Field’s. The cavernous atrium in the center was an acre of ice on which skaters twirled, surrounded by multiple levels of onlookers. Linda and James—continuing their conversation from the restaurant—joined a cluster of sightseers on the second floor and talked while a panorama of the faltering and the fluid skated by.

To Linda’s surprise, James grew suddenly quiet, then asked, “Would it be all right if I held your hand?”

She looked over at him and realized he looked not unlike a small boy requesting an ice cream cone. “Sure,” she answered. “I guess so.”

Smiling, James linked his arm through hers and held her hand tightly.

After the skating rink, James suggested they drive around his hometown and stop at his parents’ house. Linda agreed.

It had been dark for hours and the streets of Pearland were nearly deserted when they arrived. James pointed out the high school, the park where he played basketball with his friends, and the store Sam’s family owned. “He acted as
if he was showing me around San Francisco or New York,” Linda said later. “I couldn’t believe how hard he was working at trying to impress me.” Although the small city with its “Welcome from the Lion’s Club” sign didn’t sway her, James’s eagerness to please her did. He was ungainly and overly solicitous, yet she felt touched by him.

Before long, they were weaving through the streets of Corrigan, the Pearland subdivision where James and his family lived. As they neared the Bergstrom house, James pointed it out. “The front light is on. That means my mom is still up,” he said. “I’ll go inside and see if it’s okay if we come in.”

They pulled up in front of the modest ranch-style house and James hurriedly ran inside. A minute later he came for her and, holding her hand, walked her through the front door. Inside the darkened living room with its wood paneling, Irene Bergstrom sat on the couch watching an old black-and-white movie and smoking a cigarette. She looked up and said, “Hi,” but then stared immediately back at the television, barely shooting Linda a hazy gaze. James had already told her that his mother, just like her own, worked long hours as a seamstress. Linda couldn’t help noting that she appeared to have had a very hard day.

As if he sensed how uncomfortable Linda was in the living room, James suggested they turn on the television in his room. Moments later, James was seated on a chair and Linda on his bed while they watched a movie,
Smoky and the Bandit
, on a small color television. While James laughed at Burt Reynolds leading a convoy of eighteen-wheelers at breakneck speeds, Linda studied his room. It was immaculate, everything precisely arranged. A Rush poster decorated one wall and a crucifix hung on another. On the dresser there was a photograph of a young couple holding a baby.

“Who’s that?” Linda asked, pointing at it.

“My brother, Chris, and his family,” James said proudly. “He’s in the navy, stationed on a nuclear submarine in Washington State.”

Suddenly James jumped up as if he had forgotten something, and a few minutes later he returned with a glass of ice water.

“This is for you,” he said, handing it to Linda.

They sat quietly for a while, until James looked at her and said, “You’re even prettier than Caesar said.” Then he edged forward and kissed her softly. Leaning toward him, Linda fell into the well in the center of James’s old mattress and tumbled over. She giggled nervously as she righted herself on the mattress.

“I better go home,” she said, suddenly very self-conscious.

At her mother’s doorstep, James kissed her again and said, “I’ll call.” Then he turned and left. She watched as he drove away.

Lying on her side in bed that night, Linda thought back over the evening. James Bergstrom had seemed so nervous and he was obviously trying so hard to impress her.
But I don’t really feel attracted to him,
she thought. Though tired and eager for sleep, she kept remembering the way he had kissed her. There was something disquieting about it. The only word that came to mind was
desperate.
Linda was nodding off to sleep when the phone rang.

“I just wanted you to know how much I enjoyed our date,” James Bergstrom said when she answered it. “Why don’t we do it again, real soon.”

When James arrived at Devoe & Raynolds on the following Monday afternoon to start his evening shift, a crush of coworkers spearheaded by Caesar gathered around to inquire about his weekend. Usually James talked about playing basketball or tennis, or going out with friends from high school, most often his old teammates Sam and Eddie. But this week, everyone knew that on Saturday night James had had a date with Gino’s pretty younger sister, Linda.

“Well, how’d it go?” asked Caesar. “You two have a good time?”

“Yeah,” said James, who excitedly recounted his evening with Linda for his friends. Then, to all their surprise, he added, “I’m going to ask Linda to go out steady.”

Allen Gibson, one of the plant’s union stewards, shook his head at James. “You don’t go doing that after a first date, young’un,” he laughed. “You hardly know this girl.”

Though just a few years older than James, Gibson, like much of the crew, had grown used to treating Bergstrom like an adolescent brother, just as the other players had on his high school basketball team. Because they worked together in the filling department, the two men had developed a friendship, and Gibson was pleased when Caesar suggested he introduce James to Gino’s sister, hoping James might learn to be more comfortable around women. Now he was wondering if it had been a mistake.

“Give it a chance, little buddy, and see if you even like her
or she likes you,” cautioned the heavyset and levelheaded Gibson. “James, don’t go overboard on this thing, huh?”

As he always did when Gibson or any of the others offered advice, James nodded agreement. “She’s really beautiful,” he said. “I think she might be the one.”

With that the group disbanded as many chuckled and joined Gibson by shrugging and shaking their heads. Everyone at Devoe was used to James Bergstrom. “James was this quiet, timid little guy,” one co-worker later said. “There weren’t no way anybody ever thought that boy could hurt a fly.”

Years later they would discover how wrong they had all been.

James had hired on at Devoe & Raynolds right out of high school in 1981. He’d worked there for nearly three years that January when he and Linda began dating, and he had a reputation for being generally “a nice guy.” He’d gotten the job on the recommendation of the father of one of his friends from the basketball team, a chemical engineer at the plant. At first James was assigned to the filling department, the part of the plant that packaged the finished paint in cans to be distributed to stores. Later he transferred to shipping.

From the beginning, James’s co-workers knew he was “a little different.” In fact, one story that followed him throughout his years there was that the manager who hired him nearly decided not to because throughout the job interview James never looked the older man directly in the eyes. Bergstrom’s reputation for being a little odd was only reinforced when he took to wearing a wire paint handle looped through the sweat holes of his white hard hat. “He looked like he was wired for sound,” laughed Gibson.

As it had been in the days Linda’s father was employed there, working at Devoe was considered a good job. Unlike so much of Houston where unskilled or minimum-skilled laborers had no union representation and were poorly paid,
Devoe & Raynolds was a union plant; the majority of its seventy employees belonged to local 4-227 of the OCAW, the Oil, Chemical & Atomic Workers. Workers were relatively well paid, and most stayed on for decades, many hoping to retire from Devoe.

The factory itself was a sprawling facility of metal warehouse-type structures painted a coffee-with-cream beige and giant stainless steel tanks of raw materials, most of which were delivered via a railroad spur that ran behind the plant. The main building was three stories high. On the top floor, the mills, a giant mixer transformed the raw materials into a basic paste. On the second, the paint was thinned and tinted in five-hundred-to three-thousand-gallon tanks. On the first, in the filling department, where James started, the paint was canned and then sent off on a maze of conveyor belts to the shipping department in the front of the building.

From the beginning, James liked working in the plant. Though the majority of the hourly workers were black or Hispanic, for the first time in his life, he felt as if he fit in. “They treated me like I was a real person,” said James. “They accepted me right away.”

Still, James was never really “one of the guys.” In the lunchroom during half-hour dinner breaks, he almost always sat alone eating huge lunches with three or four sandwiches he’d brought from home. When he did join the others, it was to play dominoes and to listen to his coworkers gossip about their families, sports, and women. “We’d all be hoo-hawing and joking and all this stuff, and James would absorb it in, but he never had any input,” remembered his friend Gibson.

There were, however, times when James would socialize with his co-workers. He joined the plant slow-pitch softball team—the Devoe Wild Bunch—and occasionally there were those afternoons when he and Linda’s brother Gino would shoot hoops at a park not far from the plant. They
always stopped at a liquor store and bought a twelve-pack of cold Budweiser to take along. Usually James was quiet, just wanting to play. But sometimes, after five or six beers, he would open up about himself and his family, complaining that his sisters were always causing him problems and that his family was constantly at odds.

With another of the men at work, Larry, James had a running discussion on religion. Larry was a fundamentalist Christian, a Pentecostal, and he didn’t believe in many of the basic tenets of the Catholic church, such as the saints and purgatory. James seemed to enjoy acting the part of his religion’s defender, bringing in books—one on the mummification of saints’ bodies—for Larry to read. For his part, Larry urged James to study the Bible, suggesting he memorize Scripture, such as Romans 5:1—“Having been justified by faith, we have peace with God.” James agreed but never actually committed it to memory, instead announcing one day that he had discussed Larry’s views with his father and they agreed it was not wise for him to continue the debate.

“We’ve been Catholics all our lives,” James said, ending the dialogue. “My dad’s done a lot of research and he tells me Catholicism is the one true religion.”

While James was comfortable around the men at work, that was not the case when it came to the few women who worked at the plant, mainly clerks in the front office. Whenever James needed to talk to them, even to do something as simple as put in a vacation request, the others noticed he was as tense as a schoolboy on his first date. “He looked real fidgety,” said Gibson. “Like guys do in their early teens when girls make them nervous. Usually it’s something you grow out of.”

As is often the case in plants where men work with few women, every once in a while a
Playboy
magazine or its equivalent made its way into the shop. On such occasions, it passed from hand to hand through the plant. Often the others stood in a group to present it to James, who self-consciously
fanned through it. He always blushed and looked uneasy. Bergstrom’s co-workers laughed heartily at his embarrassment. “You ought to get yourself something like that,” one would taunt. “Wouldn’t that be nice, James?”

In fact, James’s lack of dates and girls was a common target of the good-natured teasing in the shop. It wasn’t unusual for one man or the other to say, “James, if you don’t get a girlfriend, everyone will think you’re queer.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” James would answer with a sheepish smile.

More often than not, it would end with the other man slapping James on the back and walking to his assigned station laughing at Bergstrom’s expense. As he had throughout high school, James went along, seeming to enjoy the joke as much as anyone. He never gave any indication that the sting of their words hit a particularly sensitive mark.

No one at work knew, but at home James heard similar admonitions, only with little show of humor. “My parents were really bothering me about dating,” said James later. “Because they thought I was gay or something. My mother kept saying, ‘People are going to start thinking you’re funny.’”

It wasn’t that James lacked an interest in women, however. Rather he felt increasingly drawn to them, like on those infrequent nights when someone smuggled a stag film into the plant. They turned off the lights in a secluded office, and many of the skeleton crew that worked the four-to-midnight shift gathered in the dark as an old movie projector lit the room. The others jeered, giving each other the elbow, as images of heavily endowed men and busty women joyfully intertwining flickered against the wall.

On such nights, James slouched in the background, watching, quiet. “He never said anything,” remembers one of the viewers. “It was easy to forget James was even there. The rest of us were all hooting and hollering. Some of the movies were really pretty crude. There was one with Linda Lovelace and one where a woman had sex with a dog.”

Years later, James would emulate a common theme in movies like the ones he watched with his friends: the scenario in which a masked man happens upon a lone beautiful young woman. Though she attempts to fight him off, the intruder overpowers her, binding her by the hands and feet, rendering her helpless and allowing him to do with her as he pleases. But in the fantasy of the movies, it isn’t rape. Instead the actress portraying the victim quickly discards a pretense of alarm and succumbs to her own secret, sensual passions. In the thin dimension of light pulsating through film, the woman willingly and lustfully surrenders all to the actor who portrays her rapist.