I Am No One You Know Read Free Page B

shoulders, sweating as he lied to Daddy, yet like a tightrope walker venturing across the rope, in terrorof falling, he couldn’t walk back. We don’t know nothing. We didn’t do it! They just want to arrest somebody white.
    I wondered: Did Daddy believe them?
     
    J ADRO F ILER DIED in the hospital on April 11.
    There was a rumor that Jadro had been “involved in drugs.” He’d been beaten by “black drug dealers” from Niagara Falls. There was a rumor he’d been killed by his girlfriend’s older brother. Or: it had been a random attack, white racist skinheads from Niagara Falls.
    These rumors came to nothing. Leo, Mario, Walt, and Don Brinkhaus were summoned back to the police station. And Daddy went with them again.
    The phone rang repeatedly, and Mom refused to answer. Finally I took the receiver off the hook.
    But Leo and Mario weren’t yet arrested. Their names had not been released to the media. Daddy insisted Leo move back into his old room; there’d been “racist” threats against him, and he wasn’t safe in his apartment downtown. Mario was told by the high school principal he should stay home for a while, feelings were running high between whites and blacks at PHS and Mario’s presence was “undesirable.” Mom wanted to keep me home from school too, but I refused. I didn’t care if my teachers and the other kids looked at me strangely. I needed to be at school. I loved school! The thought of being kept home panicked me. I couldn’t bear to be trapped here where my parents and my brothers were waiting for—what? What would save them? For somebody else to be arrested for the crime? (As my mother said, “The people who did this terrible thing. The guilty people.”)
    There was the hope, too, never uttered aloud, that the evidence police were assembling would be only circumstantial, not strong enough to take before a grand jury. This was what the boys’ lawyers insisted.
    Neighbors, friends of Daddy’s from work, relatives, dropped by our house to show their support. Rick, Mariana, Emily, came to supper. It was like old times: nine of us Dellamoras at the table. Mom’s older, favored daughters helping her in the kitchen. There was no subject of conversation except Leo and Mario and the injustice of what the police were doing to them. The name “Jadro Filer” wasnever spoken, there was reference only to “the Negro boy,” “the black boy.” No more did my brothers refer to Jadro as “nigger.” My brothers didn’t speak of Jadro at all. It was the Perrysburg police who were reviled, held in contempt. And some of these men had called themselves friends of my father! There was the “anonymous” driver who’d supplied the police with Leo’s partial license-plate number, to throw them off the track…Our household was under siege, the very walls and roof buffeted by ferocious winds. We Dellamoras huddled inside, clutching one another. Daddy would protect us, we knew.
    With so many people around it wasn’t hard for me to avoid my brothers. Still, they sought me out. “Hey Curly: what’re you hearing at school?” Their eyes snatching at mine. You promised, remember? Not to tell. They had no idea that I knew about the bat. Only that I knew they’d been fighting that night, with some guys from the Falls. And I’d promised not to tell Mom. Meaning I’d promised not to tell anybody. I shrank from Leo’s gaze. He saw something furtive and guilty in my face. You wouldn’t rat on us, right? Your brothers?
    Only years later would I wonder what Leo and Mario might have done to me if they’d guessed all that I knew.
     
    I WAS THE girl who never cried, or rarely. But now I started to cry easily. My outer skin hurt like sunburn, my eyes filled with moisture. At school, at home. Watching TV and seeing Jadro Filer’s mother and older brother interviewed, seeing Mrs. Filer clutch a tissue to her face, dissolve into tears, I began crying, too. He really is gone. Somebody’s dead. It’s real.