The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas (40 page)

Erica’s great regret was a simple one. Because she’d been the youngest of the three, her father had always protected her. He might have fed Amber or Robert a weed brownie, but not Erica. She remembered how they’d walk into the Texas Trap on those rare evenings together. The parking lot had no cars, only motorcycles. She would sit towering above the ground on a stool, and her father would proudly introduce her around. All the guys would come up and fuss over Mark Stroman’s freckled little daughter. From the moment Stroman walked in, he was in five conversations at once, midsentence with this guy when that guy called out to him, an impresario more than a customer. And for Erica he would always and only order a root beer or a Cherry Coke, maybe nachos. No alcohol. Erica regretted, more than she could express, not breaking the alcohol barrier with her father. It was a substance that had become so important to her—and always been important to her father. It invisibly bound their lives, and yet they never shared it.

“I never drank with him,” Erica said. “I never smoked a cigarette with him. And that’s what makes me mad, too. I wouldn’t mind sharing a Budweiser with my dad or smoking a cigarette with my dad. Just doing anything with my dad to say, ‘Oh, I did it—one time I got really wasted with my dad and he’s carrying me home and I’m puking on the sofa’—you know, something, just to say I did it.”

“Y
OU’RE A BIG
girl, huh? Nuh-uh, you’re Mama’s baby. Are you a big girl or Mama’s baby? Mama’s baby? Yeah.” Amber sat in a chair
in the corner of Madyson’s grandma’s place, blessedly lost in her daughter.

Amber’s luck had struck at last. They had found a bed at a friend’s place, which made it OK to visit Madyson. So they headed to Grandma’s home in a small development outside of town, packed with identical cramped dwellings.

Grandma, who was wearing a Lady Liberty shirt and playing Farmville on her desktop, seemed happy to see Amber. She had just returned from visiting her grandson at the penitentiary. Her matchbox of a condo was decorated by a “God Bless” poster and fake flowers. The curtains were drawn in the early afternoon—protection from the vengeful heat that was especially unkind this summer.

Madyson was running around in a green dress with pink frills. She offered her new audience a basket of hairbands to choose from. After a time, she got bored and turned to her Etch A Sketch. Her intelligence and spark were evident. Amber’s mother often said of Madyson, “Two idiots make a genius.”

There were already small hints of how this innocence could be lost, how the trajectory of Madyson’s life could fall back to where she came from. She appeared to have learned, for example, that she was being passed around so much, day after day, to people who weren’t aware of her full history, that she could angrily throw a new toy while at one house, get scolded for it, even spanked like last evening, and then move to the next house, with the next people—sometimes Erica, sometimes others—and try the same antic again. She had learned to exploit the absence of a unified witness to her life.

When Grandma told the story of yesterday’s spanking, Amber wasn’t really listening, still lost in her little girl’s gaze. So Amber didn’t hear, or maybe didn’t want to hear, the subtle ways in which Grandma was undermining Amber’s position. Grandma told of how, after the spanking, Madyson had been crying on the floor, gasping, “Oh, Mama. Oh, Mama,” to her—to a woman certainly not her mama. Grandma added that she had been unmoved, having seen
these tricks before. She left Madyson alone for half an hour, and when eventually the child toddled over to Grandma, she said, “I love you, Mummy.”

Yet Grandma wasn’t unkind to Amber. She reassured her, once again, in front of everyone, that she promised to give the child back. She just wanted Amber to get on her feet again. What went unsaid was that, in a matter of days, Amber was going to have to start paying more than $200 a month in child support to Grandma for Madyson’s maintenance, in keeping with the custody agreement. This made it essential for Amber to get a job while going through outpatient rehab. If she didn’t pay, she could be arrested and end up back inside.

When Amber and Erica arrived, Grandma had been playing on the computer. She was a big Facebook person, in addition to her love of Farmville. She presently offered some advice on the game to Erica—to stop building so many buildings: “Just spend your time on animals and trees. You get more money off of animals and trees.” Erica moaned that she’d been doing it all wrong. “Get you some stuff planted,” Grandma said. “That’s how you’re making money every day.”

Madyson was staying with her grandma that night, as usual, and Amber, Maria, and Erica at their friend’s. It was probably their last time around a computer that day, and they decided to research bus tickets online.

Madyson, seeing the room’s attention turn away from her, took it as a cue to bring toys from all over the house and dump them on the living room floor. She was bright, full of joy, with so much evident promise. Even so, it was hard to ignore the miserable cyclicality of things. Sandra and Wallace had struggled to care for Mark, leaving grandparents to pick up the pieces. Then Mark and Tena had struggled to care for Amber, leaving grandparents to pick up the pieces. Now Amber and Maria struggled to care for Madyson, leaving grandparents to pick up the pieces. On and on it went, and it was
difficult for anyone with any sense to look at the girl and assume that this time would be different.

Amber, Erica, and Maria said their good-byes, then drove over sparse, hilly country, and at last arrived at a trailer park. They said there was a good party going on there tonight. It was also where they had found a bed.

A
LL THE WAY
down 181 from San Antonio, the road swells and shrinks between four lanes and two, across the flat plains of southern Texas, past one-off barbecue joints, past the parched yellow ranch land for sale or lease, past the signs soliciting prayers for rain. A left on Farm to Market 632, and the John B. Connally Unit rises from the dust, shimmering through the curls of ground heat, a vast and squat hive of dues-paying.

Connally was maximum security, and still haunted by the bizarre and elaborate escape of the so-called Texas Seven in 2000—or, as they were alternatively known, the Connally Seven. To get to Robert Stroman, who had been inside six years, you had to cross a gate with a sign warning “No hostages beyond this point.” What it meant was that the good guys—visitors, ministers, even the guards—went among the bad guys at their own peril. Once you entered that gate, if a prisoner took you hostage, no deal would be made for your freedom, no prisoner release negotiated to win you back. It was said to apply even to the warden.

A prison official with a big smile and chirpy enthusiasm explained that Connally housed “the worst of the worst.” The corridors were weirdly silent, and the centralized air-conditioning sounded shrill amid the absence of other sounds. Occasionally, one heard a concerned groan: the opening and closing of the electric gates that locked the prisoners in. The place was eerie and sad—and also, for those in the industry, ripe with promise. On the wall, a poster
reminded the guards of the possibilities: “The overtime earnings are increasing, last month one employee received $1919.88. Sign up now!!!!!”

Mark Stroman’s son, Robert, was waiting in the visitation room, a tattooed hulk, though much lighter than the four hundred pounds he claimed to have been when he got in. He was dressed in white, with a freshly shaven head. He had less of a facial resemblance to his father than Amber did, but the overall resemblance—the way he talked, those massive arms, the extensive ink work on his body—was just as striking. His most recent tattoo was of a Viking, with his father’s initials on it. He got it done on the inside by a fellow prisoner, which you’re not supposed to do because of the hepatitis risk, but which everyone does anyway. He chose it after he found out his father’s execution date. He hoped it might make him like the Viking, he said: “wise and hardened by going through it.”

Robert was twenty-four and hadn’t seen Amber in six years. He had seen Erica a few times, maybe. The family was too scattered, he explained. He didn’t blame anybody. Maybe everything would be different when he got out in a couple years.

Like his sisters, Robert was undergoing a change he didn’t fully understand in his relationship with his father. Stroman was once for Robert an elusive man to be longed for when he was away and relished when he came around and mimicked as much as could be. Now he was becoming something else: a ghostly reminder of a way of life that Robert knew would tempt him again and again but had to be avoided. It was perhaps useful to have this kind of foil in a dead father.

His father was, like the men at Connally, like Robert himself, a stew of good and bad. What Robert admired in him, and hoped to find in himself one day, was his way of loving by protection. “I want to be loving,” Robert said, “because if you grew up with him and you was his friend, he loves you and he’d go to bat for you any way he could—any way.” Like the time they all went to the state fair together
and Robert vanished among the rides and then saw, perhaps more plainly than ever, the depth of his father’s feeling.

“I knew he loved me because I could see the fear and the panic in his face when he realized I wasn’t around,” Robert said. “And he started hollering my name—‘Robert! Robert!’ And I said, ‘Here I am.’ And I remember him grabbing my arm and shaking me and saying, ‘Don’t you ever, ever …’ And I knew then.”

Robert was aware that his father was a racist, and this he wished to reject, but prison had also made him understand where his father was coming from: “When I grew up, I was never around blacks or stuff like that, so it was like a culture shock, you know what I mean—like, man, took a while to learn how to talk to them and stuff, and understanding why they act the way they do.” Robert claimed that it was the little things that alienated the races from one another: “I say ‘Yes, sir,’ ‘No, sir’ to everybody—my age, older, younger, because that’s the way I was raised up.” In prison the blacks, especially, behaved differently, at least as Robert saw it, often leaping into conversation too directly for his taste.

Robert came to Connally for aggravated robbery at eighteen. “It was a drug deal gone bad,” he said. “That was all. I didn’t know the people. My homeboy ripped them off and—Amber, it was her first car—they chased us, and they ended up running into my sister’s car, and the guy jumped in my window, and he started hitting me. So I stabbed him with a knife.” It was not all that unusual for a methland case. There were defense lawyers in Texas who reported that such cases now accounted for the majority of their work—if you included the various things people did to sell meth, buy it, smoke it, and protect their persons and honor.

“If I could change anything, man, it’d be doing drugs,” Robert said. “It’s definitely the tool of the devil, for real—it twists your mind.” With meth he remembers floating in the clouds, high above the earth but not flying, just floating, all the words coming at once, awake for days, invincible and alive.

Now Robert wanted to remake himself. This year he could feel the end drawing near. He had two years left if his behavior remained solid. He had so many ideas of how he could be. It was going to be different now, he swore. He wanted to figure things out: “Since I’m getting a late start on life, I’m gonna have to work. Maybe go to school, get a trade.” Maybe he would avail himself of the classes inside to learn a skill before he got out, but it was complicated: “There’s certain stipulations.” Those stipulations involved how much time you had done, when you were due out, and the quality of your behavior. This last had gotten Robert removed from a class once before.

Above all, Robert wanted a family—and a family that was “normal,” as his had not been. “To an extent, we won’t ever be perfect because we’ve already made mistakes and stuff in life,” he said. Still, he felt a need, even before he had the rudiments of a good life, to have children of his own: “I want kids, man, and I want my kids to know their aunts, my sisters; their grandma, my mom—all that. And I want them to see me doing good. And I want them to love their aunts, and I want my sisters to love my kids, and I want it to go on for generations and generations.” He stepped back and considered where he was: “I want none of this, man. And I regret these tattoos and stuff I got.”