I Am No One You Know (2 page)

It had been approximately 12:15
A.M.
on April 9, 1973, when Jadro Filer left his girlfriend’s house to walk back to his home, a ten-minute walk under ordinary circumstances, across the railroad embankment, along the highway shoulder past darkened gas stations, a Taco Bell, a McDonald’s. It was 12:50
A.M.
when an emergency call was made reporting a badly beaten young man lying in a roadside ditch near a railroad culvert. (No other call was reported that night. But the following morning, when news of the beating began to spread through Perrysburg, an anonymous caller would report to police that he’d seen what appeared to be a new-model Buick in the vicinity of the attack scene, parked off the highway shortly after midnight. The caller, slowing, then accelerating to speed past, had an impression of four or five young white men “involved in some activity like fighting.” The caller would supply police with the first three digits of a car registered to Leo Dellamora.) By 12:50
A.M.,
however, Leo and Mario were back home. They’d dropped Walt and Don Brinkhaus off, and come directly to Crescent Avenue. At this time they hadn’t known, would claim they’d had no idea, that Jadro Filer had been beaten so badly he’d never regain consciousness. They were aroused, excited. Maybe a little panicked. I overheard them speaking together in low, urgent voices. I heard “nigger” several times repeated. I heard their nervous laughter. I hadn’t been asleep when they came home, and I’d noticed the time. And this was strange: no headlights sprang onto the wall of my bedroom, moving swiftly from one corner of the
room to another as usual when someone turned into our driveway at night. Leo must have cut his headlights. Or he’d been driving without them.

My room was downstairs, toward the rear of our house; my single window overlooked the driveway and, beyond that, the river. I’d had to share this room with Emily for years, and now I missed her. Always I’d wanted a room to myself in our crowded household, but now I was lonely a lot, especially at night. When Daddy was out, which was often, or my brothers, I’d wait for them to come home. I missed them! Patiently I’d watch for headlights to flash onto the walls. That night I was waiting for Leo to bring Mario back home, and I was hoping Leo would hang out awhile. In the kitchen, having a beer or two.

Dad, Mom, and Johnny Jr. were sleeping upstairs. I left my room and entered the darkened kitchen, barefoot, to wait for Leo and Mario.

The back kitchen door opened out into the garage. It was rarely locked. I opened it just a little and listened. Often I eavesdropped on my brothers. I was never caught, they took so little notice of me. Tonight I couldn’t hear clearly what my brothers were saying in the garage. I heard only lowered, isolated words, but one of them was “nigger.” I heard the outside faucet being turned on. My brothers were doing something with the hose? Washing the car? I peered through the crack and saw them squatting close together on the floor washing a baseball bat. This was Leo’s bat he carried in his car “for protection.” Leo and Mario had rolled up their sleeves to wash their hands and forearms, cursing as water sprang up out of the hose onto their clothing.

I wanted to laugh, they looked so funny. They were only about ten feet away and unaware of me.

Why didn’t I speak to them then? I would wonder. Any other night, I would have. Why not that night?

Not for a long time would I learn that my brothers were deliberating what to do with the bat during these minutes.
The murder weapon,
it would one day be called. They weren’t thinking very clearly, but they knew they had to get rid of the bat, fast. They thought about throwing it into the river, of course—but what if it floated? Even weighed down, a wooden bat might somehow work loose and float.
And the river would be the first place Perrysburg cops would look. Finally they decided to bury it somewhere on the riverbank, in the underbrush. A few hundred feet away from the house. There was a lot of litter on the riverbank; this seemed like a practical idea. I saw my brothers wrap the bat in a piece of burlap and I saw them leave the garage, but I couldn’t see them for more than a few seconds from my bedroom window. I was mystified. I had no idea what they were doing. I guessed they were drunk. Maybe it was some kind of joke.

A
BOUT FORTY MINUTES
later I heard them enter the house. The kitchen. I heard the refrigerator door being opened and shut, the sound of beer cans being opened. Eagerly I left my room to join them. I was a scrawny weed of a girl who adored her big brothers, basking in the most meager glow of their careless attention. And they loved me, I believed. I’d always believed. Calling me, like Daddy, “Curly”—“Curly Red.” When they were in the mood.

“Hey guys! What’ve you been doing, fighting?”

They stared at me as if for a shivery moment they didn’t know who the hell I was. What to do about me. They were both drinking beer thirstily. They were breathing through their mouths as if they’d been running uphill. I felt their excitement. Their jackets were unzipped, wet in front. Mario’s big-jawed face looked raw; a small cut gleamed beneath his right eye. Leo was rubbing the knuckles of his right hand as if they pained him. But he’d taken time to dampen his longish, lank, sand-colored hair and sweep it back in two wings from his forehead. His skin, like Mario’s, was slightly blemished, but he had a brutal handsome face. He had Daddy’s young face.

Leo said, with his easy smile, “Some sons of bitches over at the Falls. But we’re okay, see? Don’t tell Mom.”

Mario said, “Yeah, Curly. Don’t tell Mom.”

No need to warn me against telling Daddy. None of us would ever have ratted to our father. Even if we hated one another’s guts, we wouldn’t. That was a betrayal so profound and cruel as to be indefinable, for Daddy’s punishment would be swift and pitiless; and for a certain space of time Daddy would withhold his love from the one he’d punished.

I asked who it was they’d been fighting. How badly I wanted to be
like them: a brother to them. Though I knew it was hopeless; they’d shrug as they always did when I asked pushy questions. Leo said quietly, “You got to promise you won’t say anything, Curly. Okay?”

I shrugged and laughed. “Gimme a sip of your beer.”

Leo handed me his can, then Mario. It wasn’t beer but Daddy’s favorite ale. I hated the taste, even the smell, but was determined to keep trying to like it, until one day I would like it just fine. I swallowed, I choked a little. I said, “I promise.”

N
EXT DAY,
news of the beating of Jadro Filer spread through Perrysburg. Even in junior high no one was talking about much else. I heard, and I knew.

A Negro boy, basketball player at the high school. Beaten by several not yet identified white boys. Left unconscious by the side of Route 11. Sometime after midnight. In critical condition in intensive care at Perrysburg General Hospital.

I was frightened for Leo and Mario, I was in dread of their being arrested. I would tell no one what I knew.

But already the Perrysburg police were making inquiries about Leo, Mario, Walt, and Don Brinkhaus. They had the first three digits of Leo’s license plate and a partial description of his car. Leo was picked up at work. Mario had gone to school groggy and nervous, trying to behave as if nothing was wrong, but he was called out of third-period class and taken downtown to the police station. I would learn later that Daddy had accompanied Leo and Mario to the police station; he’d arranged for a lawyer to join them. My mother, at home, was agitated, preoccupied. I knew it was expected of me to ask, “Where’s Mario, Mom? Where’s Daddy? Is something wrong?” But my mother turned away.

In silence Mom and I watched the local TV news at 6:00
P.M.
The lead story was the “severe beating” of Jadro Filer, a “popular basketball star” at PHS. I saw my mother’s lips move wordlessly as sometimes in church, at mass, she knelt, shut her eyes, moved her lips as she said the rosary like an exhausted woman in a trance. Such public behavior embarrassed me now that I was a teenager. Everything about my mother embarrassed me. I hated her for her spreading hips and flaccid upper
arms, the creases in her face, her scared shiny eyes. That night, seeing her praying as she stared at the TV screen, I was filled with raging contempt.

How much did my mother know? How much did she refuse to know?

That night I was wakened from exhausting dreams by voices. At first I thought it was the wind, then I understood it was Daddy talking with my brothers in the kitchen. His voice was low and urgent, and their voices were murmurs. Occasionally Daddy’s voice would be raised, but I couldn’t hear any words distinctly, and I didn’t want to hear. I was sick with the knowledge of what Leo and Mario had done. I had no desire to eavesdrop. Never would I eavesdrop on anyone again. I lay in my room in my bed hunched beneath the covers. I knew that, if anyone questioned me as they’d been questioning my brothers, I couldn’t lie. I could lie to my brothers and sisters but to no adult. I would have to tell the truth. In confession, I listed the sins I’d committed, which included sins of omission. Usually these were small, venial sins. But this was different. If the priest asked me…If one of my teachers asked me…All day I’d been thinking of Jadro Filer. His face on the front page of the newspaper. On TV.
I can’t be like my brothers. I hate them.

Daddy, Leo, and Mario were in the kitchen much of the night. I lay with my hands pressed over my ears. I seemed to know that, upstairs in her bed, Mom was lying awake, too, not-hearing. I seemed to know that Daddy was asking my brothers what they knew about the beating, and my brothers were insisting in hurt, aggrieved voices that they knew nothing. The police had questioned them for hours, and hotly and angrily, like the other two boys, they’d denied everything. My father must have been exhausted by the ordeal of the police station, and humiliated, because he was friends with a number of Perrysburg police officers. Each time he asked Leo and Mario, their replies were more vehement. Of the four boys under suspicion, Leo would probably have been the most convincing. Mario, the youngest, would have been least convincing. Mario with the scabby scratch beneath his right eye. Mario, shifting his shoulders, sweating as he lied to Daddy, yet like a tightrope walker venturing across the rope, in terror
of 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” was
never 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.
The taste of it was like copper pennies in my mouth.