Nona Monk extricated herself from her Grand Am with great effort. The sun wouldn’t be up for another twenty minutes or so, but she could hear that damn woodpecker doing his mischief on her maple tree high up on the trunk. She liked her little house on Stanley, on a nice section between Packard and San Vicente. She was active in her block club, and it only got noisy on the weekends. And even then not every weekend.
When Josiah was alive, they lived on McKinley off 39th. In those days, South Central was solid working class, her neighbors toiled in the post office, at the railroad, and as skycaps, bus drivers, teachers, and nurses. Her children may not have had everything, but they didn’t want for the basics of clothes, shoes, decent food, or a bike when they outgrew their previous one. Now that they were quite grown, getting gray themselves, it seemed like someone else’s life to think about when Ivan and Odessa were growing up.
These days, Nona Monk was working hard to remain a size ten, when for most of her life fluctuating between size seven and eight had been the norm. Her feet ached and there was that twinge again in her right elbow. Yeah, the next check-up she’d bring it up.
She was also worried about her son. She’d noted the new lines on his forehead, and detected the occasional dread moving behind his eyes last week at dinner. The after-effects of the shoot-out in the Rancho Tajuata were as apparent to her as the tribulations of Vietnam vets she’d cared for decades ago. Ivan’s state reminded her of the constant quiet anguish, intensified by the racism back home, that had eaten at her husband, a Korean War-era sergeant. That gnawing of the way things were, and how hard it was to change the unfairness, tore at him until his will and heart gave out.
At first the jerk of her left shoulder had her thinking she too, like her departed Josiah, was having a heart attack. But she was already dismissing that idea by the time the hand spun her around, and shoved her back against her car. The thing at the other end of the arm was wearing overalls, fur-lined gloves, and a Creature of the Black Lagoon mask. Behind the eye slits, some kind of mesh obscured the masked man’s race.
She’d been mugged before and calculated this wasn’t the same thing. Street thugs had very little imagination nor aptitude for advance planning. She threw her purse at her attacker’s feet. “Take it and go. I’m getting off a double shift and too tired to spit.”
Nona Monk wanted to sound brave and defiant, despite what her son had told her to do in such a situation: to as much as possible go along with the bad guy’s demands. If she didn’t, he’d warned her, defiance would result in angering the crook. And that would be a challenge to his misplaced manhood, thereby compelling him to up the ante into violence.
The Creature kicked the purse back toward her and pointed at her.
Scared and confused, Nona Monk could only gape as the Creature rushed her, forcibly clamping a hand over her mouth. With the other hand, the attacker reached for her hand, the one holding her house keys. “You ain’t going in my house,” Nona Monk said more to herself than in any clear, audible fashion. She started to squirm and got a bop upside her head for her efforts. She sagged against the passenger door, and slid to the grass next to the driveway, near her purse. Dizziness gripped her head, and she felt her stomach lurch.
The Creature bent down, and gurgled, “Look, Nona, let’s get inside and get this over with.”
The gruesome realization of being raped and murdered, particularly in her own house, channeled the fear coursing in her veins. In a strange third-person way, she floated outside her body, watching the gun as it pressed against her temple. The Creature roughly tugged her upright. Reflexively, she swung the can of pepper spray she’d pulled from her purse. She let it go at the eye slits, and prayed as she did so.
“Motherfucking bitch,” the Creature wailed as she emptied as much of the stuff as she could at his face. The Creature put its gloved hands over its immobile face, tearing at the rubber mask. She was on her knees, and tried to stand. Weakness and terror had her disoriented.
“I’ma fix you, you old ho,” the Creature yelled, stomping around, trying to aim the gun at her.
Nona Monk went down on all fours, crawling toward the end of her car. A shot went off, and she didn’t know if it hit her or not. It was so damn loud. All her energy seemed to be leaving her like water out of a pitcher. She blew the whistle on her key ring. She kept blowing it even after she heard a couple of doors open and feet scuffling across manicured lawns wet with dew.