Protectors Read online

  Protectors

  Kris Nelscott

  Not to have confidence in one’s body is to lose confidence in one’s self.

  —Simone de Beauvoir

  The Second Sex

  Contents

  1. Val

  2. Eagle

  3. Pammy

  4. Eagle

  5. Pammy

  6. Val

  7. Eagle

  8. Pammy

  9. Eagle

  10. Val

  11. Eagle

  12. Pammy

  13. Eagle

  14. Val

  15. Pammy

  16. Eagle

  17. Val

  18. Pammy

  19. Val

  20. Eagle

  21. Val

  22. Eagle

  23. Val

  24. Val

  25. Pammy

  26. Eagle

  27. Val

  28. Pammy

  29. Eagle

  30. Val

  31. Pammy

  32. Val

  33. Eagle

  34. Pammy

  35. Val

  36. Eagle

  37. Pammy

  38. Eagle

  39. Val

  40. Pammy

  41. Eagle

  42. Pammy

  43. Eagle

  44. Pammy

  45. Val

  46. Eagle

  47. Pammy

  48. Val

  49. Eagle

  50. Pammy

  51. Eagle

  52. Val

  53. Pammy

  54. Eagle

  55. Val

  56. Pammy

  57. Eagle

  58. Val

  59. Eagle

  60. Pammy

  61. Eagle

  62. Val

  63. Eagle

  64. Pammy

  Stone Cribs sample chapter

  Also by Kris Nelscott

  About the Author

  1

  Val

  If you talk to people, they’ll tell you their life has a dividing line. Maybe the first date with their spouse. Maybe failing to get into the top college on their list. Maybe winning the big game in high school.

  Something they can point to. Something important to them. Without it, they say, their life would be completely different. They’d have no kids or they’d live somewhere else or they’d be rich.

  Me, I don’t have a dividing line. I have a fucking crater. My life was shredded, ripped in half, completely destroyed. Shattered into so many tiny pieces that reassembling them is completely impossible.

  I am not the same woman I was in November of 1968. Back then, I’d’ve had a dividing line. Depending on the day you asked me, I might’ve said that line was the divorce from my high school sweetheart. Or the decision to drop out of law school. Or, most likely, the fact that none of the med schools on my list would take me—not because of my grades. No, I graduated number one in my college class.

  The med schools wouldn’t take me because I’m not only female, I’m black too.

  Two strikes, one admissions idiot told me. With your record, we’d take a risk on giving you a slot with one of those strikes. But two? No one’ll take you for an internship. You won’t get a residency. We’ll be wasting that slot on you, honey. So sorry. Maybe the nursing school will look at you.

  If you’d asked me in November of 1968, I would have said that conversation with that administrator was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. It convinced me to marry Truman, consider having some babies. Made me apply to law school. Made me the best damn legal secretary in Chicago.

  Made me give up.

  I was so precious. So delicate. As if these things that happened then were adversity. As if these things were the worst that could ever happen to anyone, let alone someone like me.

  Then, in early December, I humored my two sort-of cousins and best friends, Marvella and Paulette, by accompanying them to the Grand Nefertiti Ball at Sauer’s Brauhaus. Marvella and Paulette, they looked gorgeous dressed in long gowns, wearing gold Egyptian bands on their upper arms. Marvella and Paulette, they’re tall and stately women; I’m small, and that same outfit drowned me.

  I felt ugly and silly and out of place.

  Maybe that’s why I danced with him. Maybe I danced with him because he was persistent. Maybe I’d had just a little too much to drink.

  And no, I’m not going to tell you his name. I try not think his name. That makes him real, a person.

  He wasn’t a person.

  And he wasn’t a dividing line. That gives him too much power.

  Maybe the dividing line came the next day, when I gently told him he didn’t interest me. Or maybe it came at the end of January, when that son of a bitch forced his way into the hallway of my apartment building and raped me.

  The rest of it—the friend from med school who said he could help me get rid of the pregnancy, the horrid, horrid fever, that ride to the hospital in the back of a car—plays in my mind in freeze-frame Chiaroscuro images:

  The sharp pain in my abdomen, and my med school friend saying, It’s nothing, Val. It should feel that way. Marvella, telling me she’ll be right back. A big man carrying me down a flight of stairs. The smell of blood. A white woman in a shimmering blue pantsuit arguing with a white doctor.

  And then waking up, feeling scraped and battered and empty. Finding out that I not only got rid of that pregnancy, but all possible pregnancies.

  Forever and ever, amen.

  Not a dividing line at all. That damn crater opened, right then and there. I don’t remember hopping it. But I ended up on the other side, looking back at who I had been, and barely recognizing her.

  As soon as I could after the surgeries, I sold everything, put the money my ex, Truman, had left me in his will into interest-bearing accounts that I wouldn’t have to think about, and, one bright Sunday morning in early June, got on a bus heading west.

  I didn’t tell anyone. Not my friends. Not my family.

  I just vanished.

  Or rather, my body vanished.

  I had disappeared a long, long time ago.

  2

  Eagle

  The scream made her sit bolt upright in bed. Captain June Eagleton looked around in the darkness, but couldn’t see anyone else moving. Had she dreamed it? Then the scream came again—terrified, long, incoherent. Was there a word? Was it in English or Vietnamese?

  She couldn’t tell; all she could tell was the voice probably belonged to a woman. The scream came a third time, followed by some thuds.

  Eagle launched herself out of the bed, reached for her clothes, which should have been on her footlocker and weren’t, then realized that she wasn’t at the 71st Evac Hospital, wasn’t in Pleiku, wasn’t even in Nam any more, hadn’t been for more than two years.

  She froze, her heart pounding. She’d awakened damn near every night out of a screaming nightmare since the Sikorsky flew over her apartment on May 20 and dropped CS gas all over the Berkeley campus. She had managed to make it outside to help injured students, some of whom had been shot, but all that work she’d done on calming herself, taming her inner demons, coming home—all of it had disappeared as if it had never been.

  The presence of National Guard troops on the streets of Berkeley for an entire month hadn’t helped. She saw the M1 Garands with their bayonets glinting in the sunlight, and her brain would leave the so-called safe streets of American to arrive in Saigon all over again, a baby nurse with big dreams, ready to save the world.

  Eagle stood beside her bed, hands shaking. Coffee wouldn’t be good, but coffee would be better than brandy, better than beer. Maybe someday, she’d be able to get herself a drink of water and call it sufficient. But right now, she needed to self-medicate, and she wa
s trying to avoid the bong that sat on her wobbly coffee table—

  The scream again, this time several short bursts, in English—

  “Help! Help, please! Help, somebody help me! Help!”

  Woman, terrified. And maybe on the street below.

  Eagle shoved her bare feet in her penny loafers and grabbed the Walther P38 she had gotten in Nam. She chambered a round, then kept the pistol at her side, so she wouldn’t shoot any civilians. She scurried across her apartment, opened the door, careful not to close it and lock herself out, and emerged in a dark hallway. The overhead lights had burned out weeks ago, and she had pretended she didn’t care.

  She cared now, as she clattered down the wooden stairs, hoping she didn’t miss any, not with her hand on her pistol. Last thing she needed to do was tumble, ass over teakettle, into the lobby below.

  She was probably waking her neighbors, but if the screaming hadn’t awakened them, nothing would. And the screaming hadn’t brought those cowards out of their snug little beds.

  If the clattering woke them up, too damn bad. They were students. They certainly wouldn’t complain.

  The screaming continued but the words were gone, and there were grunts that didn’t belong to the screamer. Eagle couldn’t parse the sounds, couldn’t quite figure out what was happening, only knew that something was.

  No one was in the hall or the narrow opening that passed for the lobby. No lights here, except one thin ray from under an apartment door. Someone was up, but the screams weren’t coming from inside.

  She passed the row of metal mailboxes, and shoved the front door, trusting her neighbors’ carelessness. They usually left the damn door unlocked. She figured they would do it again.

  And they had.

  The door opened so fast that it banged against the outside wall. Maybe that would give whoever was doing what to whom some kind of pause, and a pause was all Eagle needed.

  Then the scream, a “Help me!” so strong that it made Eagle’s heart pound harder.

  She burst onto the street. Streetlights worked, so the street was in a perpetual twilight. But she was the only person here.

  She took a deep breath, heart pounding. She hadn’t dreamed this. She hadn’t. She kept the pistol at her side, and slowly did a 180. She had to blink to see clearly. The mixed architecture—houses alongside duplexes alongside small apartment buildings like hers—made it hard to take everything in. Lights were mostly off. A few windows were open, but the only cars were parked cars. For a brief moment, a horrifying moment, she thought her night terrors had brought her to the street with a loaded pistol in her hands.

  Then a scream and a thud, and the scream cut off. She ran toward the sound, to her left, closer to the goddamn park, in time to see a man standing outside a gigantic one-ton pickup, holding a woman by her hair. She was struggling, so he slammed her face against the side of the truck.

  “You stop!” Eagle shouted and raised the pistol. She wasn’t sure if she was a good enough shot to hit him and spare the woman—hell, Eagle had never taken a shot outside of a gun range or what passed for a gun range—and the very idea of shooting on these streets, crowded with apartments, scared the piss out of her.

  The man looked over at her. He had one arm wrapped around the woman’s waist, the other still pulling her hair back so that her head was tilted at such an odd angle that her neck shown whitely in the thin light of nearby streetlight.

  He was big or, at least, bigger than the woman. His arm looked beefy, his face ruddy in the gloom.

  “Let her go,” Eagle said, moving just a little closer. She didn’t want to get too close, so that the guy could rip the gun from her.

  He stared at her for a moment, as if measuring her willingness to shoot him. Then, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, he swung the woman he was holding into the bed of the pickup truck.

  She landed with a thud against the metal bed, and she no longer cried out. Which meant she was either unconscious or dazed and unable to help herself any more.

  “Shit,” Eagle said, and ran toward the truck.

  The man yanked open the driver’s door and jumped into the cab, starting the truck and putting it into gear in the same motion.

  She was going to lose him. She was going to lose the woman. If Eagle were someone else, a crack shot or something like that, she’d shoot out his tires, but she wasn’t.

  She jumped into the street, hoping she could get in front of it or grab the gate and pull herself inside. But the truck peeled forward, sending dirt and broken glass and whatever else was leftover from this spring’s goddamn war flying her way.

  She ran after the truck, knowing she wouldn’t catch it. All she had left was her brain. She had to memorize the damn vehicle.

  Big. Ford F-350, according to its back end. Maybe black, maybe navy, no rust, no dents, weirdly big tires. Looked new. Might’ve been a 1969. The gate was closed, and there was nothing in the back that she could see to make it even more distinctive. Not even a gun rack.

  And the woman wasn’t sitting up, wasn’t trying to get out, wasn’t trying to rescue herself.

  Eagle’s breath was coming in huge gasps. She was out of shape, never much of a runner, her side aching. She had to get the license plate. The plate was blue with yellow lettering—California, definitely, and new. One letter—an F—and five numbers.

  She couldn’t get them. Then the truck swerved, the yellow of a streetlight catching the back bumper. The yellow numbers flared, and she whispered them to herself before they disappeared.

  The truck sped up. She ran, hoping the truck would stop at a cross street, something, but all the pot she smoked, all the burgers she ate, all the exercise she hadn’t been doing caught up with her.

  She bent over, wheezing, trying to catch her breath as the truck zoomed around another corner and disappeared into the night.

  “Sonofabitchsonofabitchsonofabitch,” she muttered with each exhalation, trying to regulate it all, hoping her damn heart wouldn’t stop before she could get back to her apartment and call the cops.

  Not that it would do much good. They’d come to her place, smell the lingering pot oil, see how messed up she was, decide she wasn’t a credible witness.

  But she had a duty. And Captain June Eagleton of the 71st Evac Hospital was excellent at duty. And mission. And following orders.

  Only there were no more orders, past what she knew to be right.

  Finally, she got enough air that she could stand upright.

  “Son of a bitch,” she said, her hands shaking, knowing that she had already failed. “Son of a goddamn bitch.”

  3

  Pammy

  The black woman hovered outside A Gym of Her Own like a starving child in front of a candy store window. Pamela Griffin had seen the woman loitering outside the gym all week, but really noticed her today, because everyone else, it seemed, was staring at the television.

  The television showed views from space—in theory, anyway. Right now, CBS was showing mostly drawings and its anchors, talking nervously. Apollo 11 was orbiting the moon, but that wasn’t the big news.

  The big news was that today, human beings were trying to land on the moon.

  Pammy had a TV set up on her counter, facing the mats and the punching bags. All of the six women in the gym crowded around the tiny set, trying to get a glimpse of the lunar lander.

  Pammy had put folding chairs on the floor facing the tall counter, but the women were standing. The tension had grabbed all of them. Pammy didn’t want to stare at the TV, so she moved to the back of the group.

  Pammy couldn’t watch, though. The whole thing made her nervous. So she looked out the gym’s gigantic plate-glass window instead.

  The front part of the gym had once been a store. She had spent months clearing away the shelving, leveling the floor, and securing the ceiling so that the beams running lengthwise could handle the weight of the punching bags.

  If only she had taken out the plate-glass window then. But she
hadn’t considered it. She had not had any idea how many times people would stand outside and stare into the gym. That huge window took away her sense of privacy, and often made the women themselves uncomfortable.

  She could have removed the window. She owned the building, and she had done an extensive remodel. She had converted the two studio apartments in the back into a locker room, offices, and some private areas. She had transformed part of the space into a real kitchen, with new appliances. Initially, she had thought the kitchen would be for her, but everyone used it.

  She had used the last of her money to buy proper gym equipment, modifying as much of it as she could for women’s smaller frames. The gym ended up a place she was proud of before she even opened her doors in May of 1967.

  The dry, flat voice of astronaut Neil Armstrong reciting the distance to the surface made her tense. He had just mentioned some dust and a shadow, and that was when she had to step away from the television, not that it made a difference. She could still hear his eerily calm voice.