Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls(24)

The officer who arrived began by saying that he’d been in my apartment once before. “It was a narcotics case, years ago,” he told me, looking from the kitchen to the living room, where dozens of index cards dangled from the ceiling. He took my sister’s statement, and as he drove off to canvass the area, our parents pulled up, my mother saying before she’d even set her purse down that this was all Gretchen’s fault. “Walking to the store at eleven o’clock at night, you were as good as asking for it!”

Our father, who has always distorted time to suit his purposes, put the blame on me. “It was one o’clock in the morning, and you let your sister wander the streets by herself?”

“It wasn’t one,” I said. “It’s not even one now.”

“Aw, baloney.”

The policeman returned carrying Gretchen’s grocery bag along with a mayonnaise jar containing a half-dead moth and a ball of cotton soaked in fingernail polish remover. “Is this…yours?” he asked.

My father gave my sister his “now I’ve seen it all” look. “Oh, that’s nice,” he said. “Caught yourself a pretty little butterfly while you were traipsing home alone at two in the morning?”





The following day he took Gretchen to the police station, where she was scheduled to look through mug shots. The fellow who’d attacked her had been black. She’d noticed he was wearing a white T-shirt, but then her glasses got knocked off and it all became a blur.

“All right,” said the policeman. “Let’s talk about pants. Think now—were they long or short?”

When Gretchen said “long,” my father slapped his palm on the tabletop. “There you go,” he said. “Now we’re getting somewhere!”

After that day’s shift at the natural-foods restaurant, I returned to my apartment and found my dad and sister waiting for me. “We can’t count on the police to catch this guy,” my father said. “So what we’re going to do is ride around and see if we can’t find him ourselves.”

“We’re going to drive around and look for a black man?” I asked.

“With long pants and a white T-shirt on,” Gretchen added. “Clothes he couldn’t possibly have changed because they’re permanently attached to his body.”

“Don’t be a smart-ass,” our father said. “This person tried to rape you, don’t forget. You think it’s just a onetime thing, like, ‘Well, that didn’t work, so I guess I’ll turn my life around, maybe sell ice cream instead’?”

He wasn’t the only one who was angry. All morning at work I’d imagined myself going back in time and coming across this person as he attacked my sister. In the fantasy I was just walking along, minding my own business at eleven o’clock on a Wednesday night, when I heard a woman scream and saw some movement in the bushes. At this, I grabbed the guy by the collar, saying something polite but at the same time hostile, like, “Excuse me, friend…” Then I imagined hitting him the way men in movies did, my fist making contact with a smart cracking sound, his jaw splitting open like a ripe melon. Once I got him down on the ground, I’d pound on him until Gretchen jumped in, saying, “David, stop! Stop before you kill him.”

It was an engaging little daydream but would have been a lot more satisfying if the guy had been white, or at least whitish, a Spanish exchange student, or a traveling Hawaiian in town on business. Of all the possibilities, why did he have to be black, especially in North Carolina, where everything was so loaded? I think Gretchen was feeling the same way—not that she needed to let this slide but that she was caught up in some tiresome cliché. Now here was her father organizing a posse.

The situation got weirder still when I noticed the baseball bat lying across the backseat of the car. This wasn’t something that had been brought from home—we’d no sooner own a baseball bat than a trident. Rather, it was brand-new and still had a price tag on it.

“You bought a baseball bat?”

“Calm down,” my father told me. “If we don’t catch the guy, maybe your brother can use it.”

“For what?” I said. “Since when does Paul care about baseball? On top of that, you don’t even know who we’re looking for.”

My father was hoping that Gretchen might identify her attacker through his body language—the way he walked or moved his hands. Likelier still, she could perhaps recognize his voice. This was possible, surely, and I could understand it if the field of potential suspects was narrowed down—a lineup of five behind mirrored glass, say. As it stood, every black male in Raleigh between the ages of eighteen and sixty-five was a possible candidate, especially those with long pants and white T-shirts on.

“This is ridiculous,” Gretchen moaned. Our father drove past the pancake house and turned onto Hillsborough Street, stopping soon after to point to a black man. “Does that one look familiar?” he asked.

The guy was perhaps in his early twenties and was holding a can of Coke to his mouth, a can he lowered when we pulled alongside him and my father stuck his head out the window. “Listen,” he said, “I need you to tell me how to get to the Capitol Building.”

The young man pointed in the direction we had come from and said that it wasn’t very far.