06.Evil.Beside.Her.2008 (5 page)

The week after James and Linda’s first date, the phone rang constantly in the Martinez house. James telephoned from home in the mornings and early afternoon. At night, he called from work. Gibson and the others grew accustomed to finding him leaning against the concrete wall outside the break room, the pay phone’s headset pressed to his ear. “Hey, Bergstrom. Aren’t you going to eat?” one or the other would call out.

“I’ll do it later,” James would shout back. “I’m talking to Linda.”

As usual, the others shrugged and laughed.

James spent much of those nights on the telephone boasting to Linda about his exploits. He recounted his tenure on the varsity basketball team, adding his teammates had dubbed him “Magic.” Then he mentioned that he loved playing tennis and watching the professionals battle it out on television during tournaments, especially John McEnroe. James seemed particularly impressed with the way the explosive player threw tantrums, putting line judges on notice and shifting the momentum of the game his way.

“My little sister has a girlfriend who thinks I look a lot like McEnroe,” James said. “What do you think?”

“Maybe, a little,” Linda answered. “Around the eyes.”

“I’ve been thinking about having my hair permed to make it curly like his,” James admitted.

At midnight, after he finished work, James often stopped at Linda’s house. He sounded the truck’s horn and Linda would meet him outside, where they spent half an hour together before he headed home. One night he showed up with his hair permed in tight curls. Linda thought the curls made him look a little odd, but she answered, “It looks good,” when James fished for a compliment.

“My sister says I look just like McEnroe,” James said proudly.

After that night, Daniel and the rest of the Martinez family nicknamed Bergstrom “Light Bulb,” joking that the tight curls made Lily’s new boyfriend look as if he’d stuck his finger in a light socket.

On a Sunday afternoon, two weeks after their first date, James called for Linda at her home for a second time. Again they drove through Houston, talking. James told Linda about his last girlfriend, the ninth grader he dated in his junior year. “You’re a lot prettier than she is,” said James, who went on to contend that while he had given her everything, the girl had been unfaithful, dating others behind his back. Linda could hear the pain in his voice and sympathized. She, after all, understood well what it was like to be betrayed.

As always, his pickup was shining. He had, as he would before each of their dates, washed, waxed, and detailed the inside cab. It was like high school basketball. James left nothing to chance, superstitiously fearing even the smallest defect could jinx the date.

At ten-thirty that night, James drove Linda to his house, suggesting they watch television, but as they approached, he announced he could tell from lights still burning in the back that his father was awake.

“Maybe we can go someplace else to talk,” James said. “Do you want to go to a motel?”

“No,” said Linda. “I think it’s probably time for me to go home.”

James apologized, assuring her he hadn’t meant to imply anything, and that he had no intention of hurting her feel
ings. “I don’t even believe in premarital sex,” he said. “I believe people should save themselves for marriage, like the church teaches.”

“I’m not upset,” she answered. “I just want to go home.”

Throughout the ride to her house, James pleaded for forgiveness, and Linda, in vain, tried to reassure him that he had not offended her. Then she told him something she rarely spoke of, the night she was raped. As he listened, she recounted in sketchy terms how it had happened and what it had been like afterward. When they pulled up in front of her house, James turned to her and they hugged. In her ear he whispered, “I’d never let anyone hurt you like that again.”

From that night on, James added a finishing touch to what was becoming their ritual. He would drive the streets of Linda’s neighborhood each night after work and then call as soon as he arrived home. “The coast is clear,” he said. “I checked the neighborhood and I didn’t see anyone out of place.”

In the span of less than a month, James Bergstrom had appointed himself Linda’s protector. Though she was unsure she liked him as much as he apparently liked her, Linda felt comfortable around James. She thought she could sense a sadness about him.

Weeks and months passed, and the two continued to see each other. One day Linda called James at work and the man who answered the phone chuckled, “You’re that girl James is talking about all the time. You got that guy climbing the walls.” Later Caesar added his opinion. “You know, Linda, he’s crazy about you,” he said. “I bet you’ll end up marrying James Bergstrom.”

Linda just laughed. Marriage really was not in her immediate plans. She was more concerned with just going day to day, working a little and having fun with her friends. But before long, it was obvious Caesar was right about James being smitten. It was as if he couldn’t do enough for her. He insisted she use his truck while he worked, and when they went out he bought her clothes, perfume, and took her to
restaurants and bars. As he had in high school when he always drove and picked up the tab for the beer, James was making up for his own insecurities by showering her with whatever she wanted. When he found out she had once dated an accountant with a sports car, he traded in his truck for a 1984 metallic gold Z28 and then insisted she drive that to visit friends.

Yet there were things that made Linda feel uneasy. When James brought her home to visit his parents, James’s mother often sat silently watching television. His father was noticeably absent. When James C. was home, he stayed alone in the bedroom, rarely coming out, even for meals. One night when the older man did emerge from his bedroom cocoon, he was angry and shouting, obviously drunk. His wife sat silently crying in the living room, and James took Linda home.

Even stranger was James’s mother. Linda didn’t know how to take it one night when she phoned James, and Irene Bergstrom answered. Before calling her son, James’s mother whispered a stern warning. “James had a girlfriend once and she hurt him. If you’re not serious with him, don’t go out with him. Don’t hurt him like she did.” Then his mother added something else, that after the breakup, James was so angry, it tore the family apart. “I don’t ever want to go through that again,” she said.

When Linda asked what she meant, the older woman didn’t answer, instead calling her son to the phone.

Soon Linda began hearing James’s parents yelling in the background during his telephone calls. James told her that they complained he showered her with too many gifts, spending too much money on her. His father, he said, had told him he was living “a champagne life on a beer budget.”

James’s friends had also noticed a change in him. Now when they went out, he didn’t always pick up the check, complaining that he had gone through much of his five-thousand-dollar savings account on the new car and gifts for Linda. Something else bothered Sam and Eddie. James seemed reluctant to introduce them to his new girlfriend. When they
did run into each other, Linda appeared unfriendly and distant. They had no way of knowing James was intentionally keeping them apart. He still blamed his unpopularity in high school for the breakup of his last relationship. This time he wasn’t taking any chances. “I didn’t know how they’d treat me in front of her,” said James. “Mock me or make me look crazy.”

Yet James’s generosity didn’t come without strings. At night he would call, and if Linda wasn’t at home, he would later demand to know where she had been. “Who were you with?” he’d persist.

Linda, who more often than not was just out riding with her girlfriends, felt he had no real hold on her. “It’s none of your business. You don’t need to know. I’m not married to you,” she’d answer. “I can do what I want, remember?”

Then James would tell her that his family, his friends, and his co-workers were saying she was just using him. That he was being taken for a fool. That while he worked, she was driving around in his car with other guys.

“And you believe them?” Linda would ask, angered by the injustice.

James never answered.

Some of James’s co-workers were, in fact, advising him that he was being taken for a fool. Especially on the nights when he would work late, until after 2
A.M.
, and they saw him walking the mile to Linda’s house to pick up his car. Though they offered him rides, James always refused, insisting he preferred walking. One night Allen Gibson coaxed James into his truck and dropped him at Linda’s house. On the way there, he turned to a sullen Bergstrom and said, “Look, James, if she’s not going to pick you up, don’t let her use your car.”

“I’m so damned good to her,” James complained, never mentioning that Linda had offered to drop the car at the plant for him and that he’d insisted that wasn’t necessary. “All she does is take advantage.”

To Linda’s family, James seemed odd at best. Her mother felt it was strange that he never came inside their house and barely talked to her when he picked up Linda, usually waiting in his car until she was ready. When Gino introduced James to Daniel, Linda’s younger brother and former protector, outside the house one day, Daniel came away wondering,
What’s wrong with the guy?

Later Daniel told Linda, “There’s something strange about that guy. What’s his problem?”

Linda assured him, “He doesn’t have one. Gino knows him and says he’s all right.”

“Well, okay. If Gino knows him.” Daniel shrugged. “You’re a big girl now. You can take care of yourself.”

Yet Linda sometimes did worry about James and what she might be getting into by dating him. Especially one night when she had forgotten they had made plans and unintentionally stood him up, instead going out with friends. About ten that night she was at home in bed when she heard the revving of an engine outside her window. She peeked through the curtains and realized that it was James and that he was driving over her mother’s front lawn.
Why?
she wondered.
What is he doing?

A visceral fear ran through her when he drove under a streetlight and she saw his face, so clouded by anger, she barely recognized him.

Minutes later the phone rang and it was James, calm, cool, like any other night. “Linda, did you forget our date?” he asked, politely explaining he was at a pay phone at a convenience store not far from her house.

“Yeah,” she answered. “I did.”

“It’s okay. I was on my way over, but you’re sleepy. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

Confused, Linda hung up the phone and went outside. “I ran my hand over the tire tracks, just to make sure I hadn’t been dreaming,” she said later. “I began to doubt it had actually happened.”

Linda’s younger sister, Alice, mentioned the following
day that James’s mother had called the night before. “She was really upset, Linda,” Alice said. “She asked me to tell you not to hurt her son. If you’re just playing with him, don’t see him anymore.”

Despite her misgivings about that night, Linda and James continued to see each other. Linda blamed herself for forgetting the date, and to her mind most of their arguments were due not to James but the intrusion of his family or friends into their relationship. She knew he was under pressure at home. Though they’d been going out steadily for more than a year and he was now in his early twenties, James often whispered when he called her so his parents wouldn’t know he was on the telephone. On other occasions, she continued to hear James C. and Irene Bergstrom shouting in the background. James admitted they were upset with him, angry about the money he spent on her. “Everybody says you’re taking me for a ride,” he said. “That you really don’t care about me.”

But Linda was beginning to care about James. For the most part, he seemed kind and considerate. He always acted like a gentleman. When it was just the two of them, he could be fun to be with. She often thought of the day they were riding in his car on the expressway. He turned to her, smiled, and said, “You’re going to marry me someday.” And as he had on that first night, James often told her how pretty she was. For Linda, who had never thought of herself as attractive, James’s compliments were endearing.

Unlike other men she’d dated, James Bergstrom never pressed her for sex, always assuring her that they should save themselves for marriage. “That’s the way God wants it,” he said. “It’s in the Bible.”

What might have changed her feelings, had she known about it, was the way James sometimes reacted when she was not around him. Like the night he called during his lunch hour and they argued about where she had been. After she hung up, he beat the pay phone against the concrete wall
and broke the handset. Another night, two of his coworkers at Devoe taunted James, claiming Linda was probably dating someone else and driving her other boyfriend around in his car. Infuriated, James kicked and pounded a pallet of five-gallon paint cans with his fists, shouting, “She’s my girlfriend. She’s my girlfriend.” Over and over.

“Look, hey, James, settle down, man,” Allen Gibson said, pulling him into the warehouse. “Don’t be acting like this. You’re going to get fired.”

“Well, I’m tired of people always saying stuff to me about Linda,” James said.

“It’s not worth losing your job over,” Gibson chastised. “You don’t need to act like this.”

As always, James nodded in agreement and looked embarrassed about his display of anger.

At home, too, James was acting increasingly irrational. “He went out with Linda and it was like she was the only one he’d dated,” Adelaide said later. “They’d have a fight and it would go on for hours. He’d break phones and scream like a demon.”

For Linda, everything changed one night when James came to her house after an argument with his parents. She went outside with him and they got into the car. As they rode around together, James talked about the shouting match and how he had stood up for Linda, telling his parents that she really did care for him, that she wasn’t just using him. Linda listened carefully, feeling guilty, as if many of his problems were her fault. He had been spending a lot of money on her, that was true.