The Wrong Man Read Free Page A

like pit bulls, and, as with pit bulls, your best bet is to not move too suddenly, not raise your voice and not make eye contact.
    But, like I said, I’ve only ever been on the outside looking in.
    Blackmer, you see, is a community divided along racial lines, a mixture of two groups that don’t tend to mix—the remnants of the Okies who came to work the fields three generations ago, then moved up or at least moved on, and the Hispanics who have been working the fields ever since.
    Racism, in a town like this, just is. We’re animals, and when we’re penned with animals that have different colorings and markings, the males of the species are going to get nervous. You’re going to hear a chorus of growling, and we’re going to bare our teeth and raise our hackles and occasionally try to rip the throats out of the alien creatures.
    But then, maybe I’m dead wrong. Maybe a racial utopia is possible. After all, the hardest Mexican gangster I ever met had a ghost-white complexion and pale blue eyes.
    I had known Owen Ferguson, or known of him, for most of my life. It made sense he would insinuate himself in this because he knew both me and Rich and had never liked us. I could just see him in a murky, smoke-filled living room in some little back-alley house, vacuuming up a line off the communal mirror, then glancing around at his red-eyed associates and saying in that nasal voice of his, “Yeah, I know that guy, Sam Schuler. He’s a punk, aye. I’ll go hit ’im up an’ he’ll just fork over the money, man. Don’t even sweat it.”
    The joke we used to make was that Owen Ferguson was like Tarzan, raised among the apes and then gone on to lead them. When I entered Conejo Junior High I was surprised to discover this homely white boy was the toughest kid on campus. Most of us Caucasian youths had to tread lightly, to stake out our territory at the corner of the grounds and endure the sneers and scoffs and Spanish insults we couldn’t understand. But not Owen Ferguson. He was one of them. He lived in the middle of gangland, had a Mexican stepfather and a half-Mexican half-brother, and he had run wild in the dirtiest streets and alleyways of Blackmer his entire life, until his English was spoken like a second language and he sneered and scoffed at white people and thought of them as a separate species from himself.
    Even then, at twelve, Owen had been lanky and rangy, half a head taller than most of his friends. And he was already renowned as a fighter—always willing, eager, desperate to square off and start swinging with anyone, any time. He was a tyrant on the school grounds, holding court at a blue fiberglass picnic table, “talking shit” with a Mexican accent among the budding twelve-year-old Hispanic thugs whose big brothers and uncles and fathers were the veteran criminals and warriors of Blackmer. Even then, Owen was already a vato in his soul and a favorite of the vatos in his neighborhood despite his blue eyed, raw-boned, ridge runner ancestry.
    That he would come for me seemed inevitable. As Sully had pointed out, Owen “lived” just across the parking lot. He and his crew had made a sort of clubhouse of the bar off the side of Rancho Bonita, the Mexican restaurant that was just a two minute walk from where I now stood.
    I tried to imagine reasoning with him, explaining what had happened and seeing his eyes soften with comprehension, but I shook my head and cursed. He didn’t have the capacity. The arc of his evolution had been completed in junior high.

    I figured the worst was going to happen and tried to brace myself for it.

3
     

    W hen I saw O wen entering the store about a half-hour before closing, my body stopped being mine. My legs went rubbery, the room seemed to tilt and swing around like a carnival ride, and I couldn’t do a thing except stand there and stare.
    Up to that point I had succeeded in putting it out of my mind. I had to write a report on a hundred-year-old novel called The Octopus