Evan Hunter - The Moment She Was Gone

Annie slaps the newspaper out of her hands.

“Hey!” the waitress says.

“Stop second-guessing me!” Annie yells.

Pearl is out of the booth, already heading for the counter.

“Hell’s wrong with you?” the waitress asks, and is reaching down to pick up her newspaper when Annie shoves out at her, pushing her off the stool. Pearl’s eyes go wide. The waitress is screaming bloody murder now, and a white man who looks like he wouldn’t at all mind a good old-fashioned lynching comes running from the kitchen with a cleaver in his hands.

“Run!” Annie yells, and is out the front door and onto the street before the short order cook, or whatever he is, can come around the counter with his cleaver. Pearl has been black for twenty-two years. She knows better than to run in Georgia, or Harlem, or Watts, or anyplace else where a running black man is reason enough for somebody white to chop off his legs. She lets the waitress and the short order cook do all the running, but by the time they get out on the sidewalk, Annie is gone.

“That’s not the end of the story,” Pearl says.

Aaron listens.

Annie is not at the motel they’ve been living in. The band is supposed to check out at two that afternoon, the van is already packed. They’re supposed to be heading on to the next town, where they will rehearse in the fire house, and then perform there later that night. The two guitarists (Freddie and Lennie, it now turns out their names are) want to get going. They’re still not sure of several passages in Sade’s “Sweetest Taboo,” and they feel they are absolutely in dire need of the rehearsal this afternoon. Besides, someone like Annie — who is constantly bragging about her travels all over the world — can certainly find her way from here to the next town they’re playing, a scant fifteen or so miles south, as the crow flies. Pearl agrees to move on.

Annie does not show up at the fire house until seven o’clock that night, an hour before they’re supposed to start playing. She tells Pearl there’s a nationwide manhunt out for her, police cars all over the roads, state troopers stopping automobiles and searching them and even opening trunks, looking for the blonde who assaulted the waitress up on US 1. She tells Pearl she walked through fields of corn and tobacco, keeping off the roads, tells her she barely escaped being raped by four redneck ruffians who’d come upon her while she was peeing in the bushes, tells her she stopped at a sharecropper’s shack where the door was opened by a bald giant who’d head-butted her and almost knocked her unconscious. She tells Pearl she finally boarded a bus heading south to Macon, and almost missed getting off at the stop here in town. She tells Pearl she’s so happy she got to the gig on time because she knows she has an obligation to the band and the music profession and her own talent.

Harley Welles walks into the fire house during the eleven o’clock break. From the way Pearl describes him, he is a dead ringer for Sven Lindqvist in Stockholm, Sweden, except that he is not a hotel waiter, he is instead wearing the uniform of a Georgia Highway Patrolman. But other than that, he is Sven’s doppelganger for sure. Six feet-some inches tall, with green eyes and blond hair, my sister must have thought she’d died and gone to Valhalla. Tossing all caution to the winds — after all, the entire law enforcement community of the United States is out looking for her — she sidles up to this handsome stranger and asks if he’d like to accompany her outside while she has a smoke.

According to Pearl, my sister and the trooper Harley Welles go out back to have a smoke or whatever else. Pearl and the guys are hanging around the bandstand, fending off the multitude of fans fighting for their autographs, oh sure, when suddenly there comes a shriek from the alley behind the fire house. Someone is yelling “Rape!” My sister Annie is yelling “Rape!” Again. More urgently this time. Lennie and Freddie are black, and therefore not eager to go anywhere near the location where a white girl is getting raped, you know whut I’m sayin, bro? Stephen is white, but neither is he too keen about rushing to the scene of a felony in progress. Pearl is black but female and presumably incapable of complicity in a sexual attack. It is she who rushes out the open side door of the fire house into a May night alive with fireflies, and stops dead in her tracks when she sees Annie standing alone against the wall of the fire house, the trooper Harley Welles nowhere in sight.

Annie’s skirts are up above her thighs.

She is urinating onto the cement driveway.

She is urinating and talking to herself.

Mumbling the words.

Her eyes wild.

There is no one with her.

She is completely alone and talking to herself.

And then she yells “Rape!” again at the top of her lungs, and pulls up her panties, and drops her skirts, and yells, “No!” again, and when she sees Pearl approaching with her hand outstretched and a plaintive look on her face, she shouts “Get away from me!” but she is not talking to Pearl, she is talking to Christ only knows who. And she yells “Rape!” again and rushes off around the back of the fire house and into the arms of two local policemen in uniform and one state trooper named Harley Welles, who apparently ran for backup the minute Annie started behaving peculiarly.

“They wanted to take her straight to jail,” Pearl tells him now, “but I begged them not to. I told them she’d just broken up with her boyfriend and was taking it very hard. They didn’t believe me for a minute. I think they figured she’d dropped acid or something. But they were nice guys, actually, and they let her off with just a warning instead of booking her for disorderly conduct and inciting to riot, which was what one of the cops said they could’ve done.”

“Well, they weren’t that nice,” Aaron says. “They fined her a thousand bucks.”

“Where’d you get that idea?” Pearl asks.

“My mother sent her a thousand dollars.”

“Not to pay any fine. How could there be a fine? They never even arrested her.”

Aaron looks at her.

“She was lucky, actually,” Pearl says.

“Yes.”

“It was scary, I have to tell you.”

“I’m sure it was.”

They sit in silence for several moments. Across the room, there is more laughter.

“But she’s okay now, right?” Pearl says.

“Oh, yes, she’s fine,” Aaron says.

“Well, good,” Pearl says. “Good.”

Annie walks over, smiling.

“You guys getting to know each other?” she asks.

“You learned this sixteen years ago?” I say.

“Uh-huh.”

“You’ve known this for the past sixteen years?”

“Yes, Andy. However long. When she came back from the tour.”

“Does Augusta know?”

“I tell Augusta everything.”

“No wonder she treats Annie the way she does.”

“That’s not why she treats Annie however you may think she treats her. But see? You still don’t believe she stole that money!”

“Who else did you...? Jesus, you didn’t tell Mama, did you?”

“Yes, I did,” Aaron says.

“Then... why didn’t you tell me?”

“I think you know why, Andy Besides, what difference would it have made?”

“We might have prevented what happened in Sicily.”

“Oh, really? How? Would you have called the police? Would you have put your twin sister away? Who are you kidding?”

“You should have told me.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You should have at least given me a chance,” I say, and turn abruptly and start walking away from him.

“Hey!” he calls. “Where’re you going?”

“There’s someone I have to see,” I say, and keep walking.