Warpath

“Twenty-six years old at the time. Punk kid. I had him locked up for statutory rape. He signed away his parental rights for Absinthe the day she was born. He’ll be out in another two years. Little shit is in the same prison as Mickey was all those years ago.”

I study Absinthe for a moment and wonder what I would have been like as a father; then I blow it off because with the shape my wife was in when we dated, when we married, there was never a chance. I heard a woman once say as an experiment we should all list the people we’d be willing to have sex with. Those lists would be miles long. But then, she said, make a list of those you’d be a parent with. Those lists had a single name. Maybe less. Somewhere along the line people somehow forgot that one leads to the other, and look at the difference in the selection process.

“Sometimes gifts come out of bad things,” I say. “I’ve seen it on the streets all the time.”

“I agree,” Carla says. “That’s why I have Absinthe as much as I can. Jamie is so willing to pass off being a mother that she actually took a second job. I didn’t mind; it gets me more time with my grandchild. Plus, Jamie is not interested in being a parent. That’s not fair to Absinthe. I am interested, and truth be told, I’m better at it. More experience if nothing else. So this is our arrangement.”

“Good for you,” I say and I mean it. In my time I’ve seen so many single moms with small children slung on their hips who had no interest in loving the kid. Their interest stopped at the sex, which I’m sure was a one-night stand. And the kids I saw, those are the lucky ones who were passed over by the Abortion Fairy. Cruise through any ghetto stuffed with any example of the human race and know that out of all the kids playing in the streets, they’re the surviving fifty percent or less.

No one can wait to blow their load, nor can they be any less interested in their own children.

“Good for you,” I say again. “Maybe we can switch gears a little bit and talk about Mickey.”

“Well, I’d rather you keep telling me how wonderful my granddaughter is, but okay,” Carla says, rubbing out a cigarette. “So, who got raped?”

“A woman named Shelia.”

“I see. Is she okay?”

Not too many details. If I assume the worst here and Mickey is the rapist, let’s assume he lives here with Carla. I don’t think he does; but assuming the worst he’ll be home after his shift is over at five. Carla here gets all the dirty details out of me, passes them on to Mickey who thought he was in the clear. Now it gets more complicated.

Or, assuming Carla knows nothing about it, she might clam up when she hears the man she loved is now accused of raping a woman who later killed herself over it.

Not too many details.

“I haven’t spoken with her. I think she’s a lot better now.”

“Good,” Carla says, lights a new cigarette. Drags deep, blows out long and cleansing as if the act of doing so releases her pent-up tensions about her long-lost love Mickey Cantu.

“Mickey and I met at a bar. Sweet, sweet guy. Never hit me. Never really even raised his voice. He treated me like I rode in on a pumpkin that had been turned into a carriage or something. We lived together for a year. I knew he was a burglar but he never hurt anybody. I can’t say that enough. He took good care of me. I was Jamie’s age when I moved out. I had terrible parents. By the time I met Mickey I was jaded. The thought of being with a fel

on didn’t make me bat an eye. I’ve got stories about old boyfriends if you want to know about real felons.”

She drags off her cigarette, a long, slender feminine thing. Her nails are meticulous. She’s pretty for her hard life and her fashion looks like she borrowed it from Miami.

“Anyways. Mickey. Like I said we lived together for a year and then I asked him to take me along some night. We were probably drunk and I just got a wild hair. I was a receptionist for the local telephone company at the time and they just had laid off four of us. They called it cut backs. So I had time on my hands. He didn’t want to take me but I have my ways. He had been scouting a display home in a new neighborhood for a week or so. The builders were showing it off day and night so he and I posed as an interested couple although we could never afford it. The builders had stocked it with furniture and some electronics. If nothing else Mickey thought the display items were better than what we were living with so he figured it’d be a good score.

“We gave it a week so they’d forget us and see a bunch of new faces. Then we hit it one night. What we didn’t know was there was an electrical problem earlier in the day and the builders had an electrician inside the house working until it was fixed. I can’t imagine the overtime money they were paying that guy...but he was there.

“He stayed upstairs while we rushed around downstairs grabbing things. He called the cops. We were busted red-handed. Charged with aggravated burglary. I was so pissed I pleaded not guilty just to cost the city money. Mickey tried and tried and tried to talk me into pleading guilty so I could plea down my sentence but I have a stubborn streak. I lost and became inmate number one-one-nine-seven-one-one-three. Mickey pled guilty and worked things a bit, as much as he could. That’s how he got out before me.”

“When did he get out?” I ask.

“Spring of ’92. The bitch of it is with good behavior I got out like four months later. But I never saw him again.” Twinges of regret surface in her eyes. It’s been too long and buried under too many new regrets to be tears. Those, I’m sure she finished crying a long, long time ago.

“Can you be more specific?”

Carla retreats into her memory and begins to recount mundane events stitched together as the timeline of her imprisonment. I see her eyes drift up and off as her lips move with very quiet words. She ticks off on her fingertips.

“Well, I remember President Bush vomiting on that Japanese guy. There was the whole Dahmer trial. There was a big corrections officer house cleaning at Happenstance right around then. Male guards and female inmates. It was problem. Mickey wrote a letter and said probably half those CO’s wound up at his prison. The Bosnian War started right about the time I got a phone call from Mickey saying he was out. I remember that pretty well because I wanted him to watch the TV and tell me where the hell this Serb place was. I can show you Hollywood, Vegas and New York City on a map but Bosnia and Serb-whatever? Forget it.”

The Bosnian War started in the beginning of April, 1992. Shelia Petticoat was raped in the last week of April. Which puts Mickey out of prison.

“Did he say anything about burglarizing a new house?”

Carla looks away. Very pointedly. A tell. She exhales smoke forcefully. Again, that cleansing. She scrubs the ashtray with her cigarette, as if it were a fingerprint she was trying to rub off or a bloodstain she needed to work out of clothing.

Occupied with her cleaning, she says matter-of-factly: “He mentioned he was ‘looking at some employment’ which was Mickey’s way of saying he thought he had eyeballed a new place to hit. That’s all. I swear.”