Prudence Couldn't Swim (3 page)

“On your belly, hands behind your back,” Carter shouted. “You know the drill.” He was right. I did know the drill. Just like something kicked off in the yard at Leavenworth.

I moved half a step to the left so I wouldn't have to lie on the grass. Cashmere and mud were a bad combination. Carter and the Weasel crept up on me slowly.

“Don't fuckin' move,” the Weasel shouted when they were about ten feet away. “We know all about you.” Two Godzilla types were coming out of the other squad car. They were going to have a party.

“I'm just a respectable citizen trying to live my life in peace and quiet,” I said.

“You're a fuckin' ex-con scumbag,” said Carter, “getting our kids hooked on drugs.”

“I gave all that up. I'm as square as a pile of blocks,” I said. “If your kids are on drugs, it's because you drove ‘em to it.”

Carter kicked me a couple times in the ribs while the Weasel put on the plastic cuffs and pulled them nice and tight. My hands started to tingle. They left me on my belly for two hours while they searched the house. A small crowd of neighbors stood in the street. After a while it started to sprinkle and they all went back in their houses. I'd be the fuel for gossip sessions for the next ten years. A cat caught in a tree was big news in this neck of the woods. The stench of wet cashmere was really pissing me off.

Finally the Weasel came and lifted me up by the by the handcuffs.

“We should take you in on GP,” he said.

Suddenly Carter was right in my face while the Weasel pulled my arms back by the cuffs.

“This woman didn't live here, Winter,” Carter said a little bit of saliva clinging to his lower lip. “What kinda game were you playing with her? Was she turnin' tricks for you? Pushin' a little heroin? Better to spill
your guts now because we'll find out anyway. Once an ex-con scumbag, always an ex-con scumbag.”

“I haven't done anything and I got nothing to say,” I replied looking Carter right in the eyes.

“We'll be on you like ten flies on shit,” said Carter. “And don't leave town.”

“You can't tell me where I can go,” I said, “you need a court order.”

“We've got one,” said Carter patting the 9 mm on his hip, “didn't you get the memo?”

The Weasel giggled as he snipped the cuffs and pushed me toward the front door.

“Have a wonderful day,” said Carter.

They hadn't torn the place up that bad, no holes in the walls or pulled up kitchen tiles. They hadn't even gotten near my stash. They did rip open all my dry cleaning packets and throw my yellow and white Arrow shirts into a pile on the bed. Luisa could iron them back into something wearable. What pissed me off, though, was that they squeezed the toothpaste out of the tube onto my pillow. I'd told them I didn't mess with drugs any more. To tell the truth I was a little insulted they had me as a penny-ante pusher—the kind who stuffed a thimble full of coke in a toothpaste tube. Back in the day, I moved weight or I didn't move at all.

The biggest pain was all the dirty boot prints on the carpet. I had some spray for that as well. Never Stain, they called it. Took a whole can to restore the cream-colored elegance to my thick-pile broadloom.

After about six hours of cleaning and Re-Nu spraying I collapsed in a stupor on the bed. I woke up at two in the morning with my shoes still on and my wrists feeling like they'd been squeezed with piano wire. As I rolled over I thought I heard someone in the living room. I got up to have a look but it was nothing. Probably just the wind or the neighbor's cat, Toodles. She was always up to something.

I had a look in Prudence's room but didn't really want to go in there. Maybe the following morning I'd get up the nerve. As I pulled the door to her room shut, I heard the lock click. I'd have to look for the key. We had an understanding that I didn't go into her space. But given the circumstances, I figured it would be okay if I broke that agreement.

T
he first thing I needed to find out was Prudence's real name. I knew Deirdre Lewis was an alias because I'd gotten her that passport through a connection. The photos on the Internet only said, “Prudence, a lovely Londoner, can cook, clean, and love you to death.” She cost me $5,000 plus a few grand more along the way. That's not how I told the story though. I always said I was doing her a favor, that she was paying me to be her husband so she could get that precious green card.

Whatever the arrangements, when Prudence came along, I was ready for a change. I'd been through three marriages and had nothing to show for any of them except a scar on my neck, lawyers' fees, and restless nights. A black Brit was definitely going to be something new.

She turned out to be even more beautiful in person than in the pictures, the first black woman I ever met who spoke with an accent like the Queen of England's. Not that I'd ever met that many black women. They waited on me at McDonald's, took my money on the Bay Bridge. There was a CO named Washington at Santa Rita County Jail when I passed through there. She used to talk to me about the Raiders. She was Raider Nation all the way.

But to sit down and talk to a black woman in my house, that just had never happened. The closest I ever got was my Luisa. Not very close at all but life is strange. After a while I got used to Prudence being five inches taller than me. Her love for life and sense of humor brought us to the same level.

“I don't know a soul in this flippin' city,” she'd say. “It's quite perturbing.” That's how she talked.

When we went out for drinks, she kept saying “cheers” and touching
my glass before each round. She told me she was “infatuated with America” and was so grateful to be here.

I'd always succumbed to the quest for excitement. I started as a con man. Bad checks, three-card monte on the street, petty flim-flam. No one ever thought a scrawny little harelip could outsmart them. Then I went to the next level: running drugs and people from Mexico to California for more than a decade. I made enough in the first two years to retire. The dope was where the big money was but I liked being a coyote better. I was actually giving people something they wanted, something that would improve their life—a ticket to America. I wasn't like these
polleros
today. I fed my people, gave them blankets to sleep under. We usually traveled in a mobile home, with bicycles tied to the back like the family gone camping. I could pack twenty-five people into that RV. As long as they laid low, they were comfortable.

Today these guys rape and beat up their charges, leave them to bake inside a trailer for fifteen hours. The worst I did was squeeze some four-year-olds in the trunk of a car in the middle of a desert. That wasn't really my fault. These people knew better than to bring little kids. Kids could make noise at the wrong time. Get you into all kinds of unnecessary trouble with the INS.

I was actually lucky when I got caught in 1989. I had less than half a gram of coke on me and my house was clean. The federal prosecutors in Frisco promised to let me go if I just told them where I got the dope. I was buying from some big boys. I took the two years—did a few college courses in the joint, read a lot of books, played a little handball. I stayed out of the prison politics. Then I got out and started living the square life, sort of. Back in those days the Feds didn't search high and low for your ill-gotten gains like they do now. In various accounts from Idaho to Virginia I'd stashed more than half a million. I'd used at least half a dozen aliases, all the names of former Raider players: James Otto, David Casper, even the black stars like Clifford Branch and Eugene Upshaw. With my nest egg I bought a four-bedroom house in Carltonville, a drab suburb in the Oakland hills. I was “out of the mix,” ready to live the quiet life like my doctor and accountant neighbors.

As it turned out, I couldn't quite keep my hand out of the action. I still trafficked in women. I hooked up desperate blondes, brunettes,
and redheads of all ethnicities with the paper they needed to stay in the United States. Through one of Red Eye's amigos, I provided social security cards for Belarusians, drivers' licenses for Filipinas, passports for Guatemalans. With modern computers and color printers, a skilled artist could forge anything. When I felt ambitious I hooked these women up with husbands. That's how I stumbled onto Prudence.

Before she arrived, the cream of my customer crop received more personal service, often passing through my home for several days to celebrate their newly established legal status in this country with an extended session in my bed. Fringe benefits, I called it.

Prudence followed a different path. Before we'd even consummated the marriage, she'd moved into my second bedroom. I bought her a queen-sized Sealy Posturepedic. She said she had “woman problems” and didn't want to give me any diseases. I bought it or maybe I just hoped as we got to know each other things would change.

To compensate for the lack of sexual action, she cooked curries and baked those biscuits the Brits call “scones.” I loved having her around. She sunbathed topless and let me take pictures, not that she really needed a tan. She joked, flirted, and drank up my whiskey. When she changed the lock on the bedroom door, I didn't complain. I don't know how but all this seemed totally normal to me. She ruled the roost. After a while she started disappearing for days at a time and I accepted that I had no right to ask where she'd gone. She always came back with that bubbly smile.

On that rare occasion when she agreed to pretend to the world she was my wife, I waltzed like a king. Men don't age that gracefully. As a five-foot-four harelip, I was no Stacy Keach. Nothing restores masculine self-esteem like the jealous glances of other men lusting after your paramour. I lived for those moments.

The highlight of our public life was Dr. Robson's fiftieth birthday party. Robson lived three doors down and wore his half century well. He was a gym regular and had forsaken the evils of fast food, alcohol, and caffeine. On a typical Saturday morning, I'd see him standing on his front lawn after his run pouring water out of a plastic bottle over his sweat-soaked, graying hair.

The good doctor invited the whole neighborhood to his affair,
including the reclusive Calvin Winter and “guest.” This was to be my debut in mucky-muckville. Up to then the only friend I'd made in the neighborhood was Toodles, that cat from next door. Sometimes I left her an open can of tuna on the back porch.

The setting was a hotel garden in the exclusive village of Montclair, just a few miles down the road from us. Robson went the whole nine yards. He hired a sixties band, put up marquees, and covered dozens of linen tablecloths with vegetable dips, bowls of fresh fruit salad, and meatless pizzas. He added a few bottles of appropriate red wine, since, as he told me, “medical research has proven its efficacy in reducing cardiac disorders.”

Prudence wore a strapless white satin gown with a slit up the leg just high enough to reveal the lace of her purple panties. It all cost me $923. She added purple stiletto heels and matching eye shadow for emphasis. While she pranced off with a string of admirers to do the twist, jerk, and mashed potatoes, frustrated men regaled me with tales of their moribund sex life. In the latter stages of the evening, a seriously lit-up Dr. Robson, toasted my “exquisite taste in female partners.”

“Unlike most of us,” he said gazing at my nether regions, “your sex life does not appear to be material for historians only.”

I did nothing to dispel his assumptions about my relationship with Prudence. I let him go on assuming the tool of my marital trade resembled a gigantic gaffing hook.

I rode the good doctor's waves of praise, culminating my performance with a slow dance to the band's cover of “Michelle.” My hand rested just a millimeter above the buttocks of “my belle” until the final note. While Robson and his friends fantasized, I went home to platonic small talk and futile hopes our relationship would change. I loved Prudence or Deirdre or whoever she was in my own little private way.

Despite my feelings I didn't know much about her at all. One night she arrived home very late after a three-day absence. She drunkenly implied that she wasn't British at all, that she was an “African Princess” named “Tarisai.”

“That means ‘look' in my language,” she said. “I'm Princess Tarisai.”

Then she told me her last name, that long one that began with “m.” I asked her to repeat it three times but I still couldn't pronounce it.

The next morning she denied it all, again telling tales of growing up in the south of London.

“My name is Deirdre Lamming,” she said. “Mum always called me Prudence. She came from Jamaica, said that was the name of an auntie who looked like me.”

Then Prudence told me she had a conviction for possession of marijuana in Britain, that's why she needed a passport in another name.

“The Americans don't let in drug users,” she said.

When I asked her if she was a drug user she laughed and said she got caught holding a bag of weed for a friend. I never knew what to believe. As a con woman, she was flawless, except for that one mistake that landed her in my pool.

T
ry as I might, I couldn't find a key to Prudence's room anywhere. Red Eye came over the next morning with his lock picks. After thirty seconds the doorknob turned.

“Easy as opening a Top Ramen,” he said.

There wasn't much to see inside the room. The bed was made, covered with a bright blue comforter. Three matching blue pillows were lined up precisely against the wall at the head of the bed.

The closet held just two pairs of jeans and a brown skirt. Prudence had a vast wardrobe. I had the receipts to prove it. Did she have another husband somewhere? I ruffled through the nightstand: a bottle of lotion, some cheap perfume, and a scrap of paper with the words, “Mandisa, Tuesday at 2.” The dot over the
i
was a huge circle. Strange. Prudence once mentioned a friend named “Mandy,” said she was a night manager at one of those chain restaurants—Denny's, IHOP. I couldn't remember which one.