RESCUE MAN, page 25
I continued my casual reading of the Daily Gazette and was shocked at an obituary I found.
We note the passing of Captain George Lawrence Wittingly, US Army. Born February 20, 1972. Wittingly grew up in Schenectady. He entered the army in 1991 at the age of nineteen, and quickly rose through the ranks, becoming a captain while serving his country in Iraq. Home on leave with his parents, he was driving south on Interstate 890 when his vehicle left the roadway and struck an underpass abutment. Captain Wittingly was declared dead at the scene. He was the only occupant of the vehicle. He is survived by his parents, Barton and Olivia Wittingly of Schenectady. Funeral arrangements are pending.
I’ll be damned! He took his own life.
I sat there, weighing whether to show it to Lisa. Would she blame herself for his death? I decided to hold off showing her the obituary until I had a sense of how she’d react to it.
My thoughts turned to finding our next rescue person. With Lisa doing great and Rachel on the brink of relocating to Topeka, we needed to find a third deserving person. With four weeks to go before our wedding, we had time to make a start at rescuing someone.
I shared my thoughts with Lisa when she came home from work.
“You’re right, Joe. The sooner we find the next unfortunate, the sooner we can begin to help,” she was quick to say.
“Can we go for a search on Saturday? I know it’s only two days away,” I said.
“Yes. When I get done at Mom’s at ten, I’ll come home and we can head right out,” she said in a rush.
“That’s solved. Hey, I have a question. How would you feel if you found out that Captain Wittingly died?” I asked her.
Lisa examined my face for a clue as to why I asked such a pointed question. I could see the wheels turning. At length she said, “I’d say, good riddance. He’s raped his last female victim. Why do you ask?”
Her response seemed appropriate, genuine. I led her to my laptop and brought up the obituary. She sat down in the chair and read it. When she finished, she turned to me and said, “It sounds like the asshole committed suicide. I say, good riddance. The world is a better place without him.”
I believed her. She showed no signs of remorse.
Twenty-Six
Saturday came, and Lisa returned home from her mother’s planning session at ten-thirty. We climbed in the car and headed for the parks of Phoenix to search for our next rescue. I shared the experiences I had from my search for Rachel so Lisa would have an inkling of what we were up against. She nodded, understanding and said, “Nothing that’s worth doing is ever easy.”
I was pleased to see that she was fully prepared to share in the search for our next rescue.
We’d earmarked five parks to search. They were scattered through Phoenix and offered a cross section of the city where the unfortunates of the city could find shelter, maybe find a moment of peace. I pulled over and parked outside the first park on our list, and Lisa and I climbed out. We strolled into the park hand in hand, not wanting to pose a threat to anyone watching us. We’d decided to concentrate our search on recumbents. If someone was sitting, either on a bench or on the ground, we figured that they were awake, alert and needed no help.
We found two clusters of benches in the park. The first cluster had two reclined figures. We approached the first of them and Lisa took the lead, asking if everything was right with him. Or her. Filthy, bulky clothing hid the person’s sexual identity.
No response.
Lisa asked again, her voice forceful now.
“Fuck off. This is my bench!” came a mumbled reply.
We didn’t need to be told twice. We moved on.
The second occupied bench was my turn. “Hey, there. Is there anything I can do for you?” I asked the huddled body.
A head raised up, turned my way. “I’ll give you a blow job for a fix,” a male voice said.
Message received, loud and clear.
We moved on to the second cluster of benches where three bodies lay stretched out. Lisa’s turn. She took my approach.
“Hey, there. Is there anything we can do to help you?” Smart. She wasn’t offering something by herself. We were together.
No response.
While Lisa spoke, I glanced around. Under and beside the bench I saw several discarded hypodermic syringes. Druggie. I pointed them out to Lisa. She nodded her head. We moved on to huddled mass number four.
My turn. “Hey, there. Is there anything we can do to help you?”
A dirty male head lifted, turned a bleary eye towards us. “You from mental health?” he asked, fear in his voice.
“No. We’re a couple who’d like to offer you help,” I said.
“I’m not taking any more of those pills! I’m getting along just fine with those voices in my head, thank you very much,” he said.
Mental patient, off his meds. Strike four. On to the next huddled mass. Lisa’s turn.
A smaller huddled mass tightly collected. Lisa asked our well-rehearsed question. At first there was no response. Lisa was about to ask again in a more forceful voice when the mass moved, rolled on its side to face us. The face belonged to a young, terrified girl, if her expression said anything. She looked at Lisa and then at me. “Did they send you to get me?” she asked, panic filling her voice.
“Nobody sent us. We’re two people offering you our help,” said Lisa as her eyes took in the frightened girl.
“There’s nothing you can do. They own me,” she said, conviction in her words.
“Who owns you?” asked Lisa, her voice soft, non-threatening.
“The people who got me across the border,” said the young girl.
“Where are you from?” Lisa asked her.
“El Salvador. My parents lived in the capital, San Salvador,” she said.
“You speak very good English. I thought El Salvador was Spanish-speaking,” said Lisa.
“It is. My parents sent me to a private school where I was taught English,” she said.
“Where are your parents?” Lisa probed.
“Somewhere in the United States,” she said.
“You don’t know where?”
“I had their address and was going to join them after I crossed the border with a coyote, but before that happened, I was robbed.”
“Who robbed you?” asked Lisa.
“A stranger who forced himself on me and took everything I had, including the paper with my parents’ address on it,” she said, her voice matter of fact.
“Oh, my God! Where did that happen?”
“In Mexico somewhere. I was traveling with a group of eight other El Salvadoreans. We were being led by a Mexican coyote,” she said.
“So, your parents left you alone in San Salvador and made the journey to the United States without you?” asked Lisa.
“Yes. They told me the journey was dangerous and they wanted to go ahead of me. When they were safely here, they sent word to me. I had a large sum of American dollars to pay the coyote, and I had the paper with my parents’ new address on it. The stranger raped me and took it all,” said the girl.
“What happened when you reached the border?” asked Lisa.
“When the coyote found out that I had no money, he said that he owned me. He placed me in the hands of some bad people here in Phoenix who make me have sex as payment for what I owe them.”
“What’s your name?”
“Gina.”
“How old are you?”
“Thirteen.”
“Why don’t you leave the bad people? They let you come here to the park without them,” said Lisa.
“They give me drugs when I need them. I resisted at first, but now I need the drugs. I think I would die if I stopped taking them. The drugs help me forget the bad things men make me do. For a while,” she said.
Listening, I couldn’t help thinking how calm and flat she sounded. She was a child, forced into being a sex slave, and she was controlled by men whose only interest was seeing how much they could charge other men for the privilege of having their way with her. Were they keeping a tally of the tricks she performed, and when she’d done enough to pay off the coyote, they’d cut her loose? Do pigs fly? Is the pope Jewish? I figured that they’d keep her captive and performing until she lost her girlish charm, and then toss her out in the gutter, an addict without access to the drugs her body cries out for.
I turned to Lisa, and we made eye contact. She slowly nodded her head at me. We had found our next rescue.
Little did we know what was in store for the two of us.
But that’s another story.
Author's Note
The idea for Rescue Man came from musings about the marriages of American GIs and Japanese women in the years following World War Two. The Japanese from Hokkaido, the largest of their islands, are larger, taller than the Japanese of the southern islands, and it seemed fitting to pass those genes on to Tojo. It helps to bolster his image as a man to be reckoned with, too. I'm already working on the second novel in the series so you can continue to enjoy the adventures of Joe and Lisa.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank my wife Janet for getting me back on track after my derailments, and for offering me her strong words of encouragement.
I also wish to thank Teddi Black for her wonderful cover design and Megan McCullough for her insightful interior formatting work, all of which has elevated my novel to a position well above the competition.
About the Author
After his wild ride through life, going to places and experiencing things that many dream of doing, Charles M. DuPuy now spends much of his time at his keyboard, creating stories he hopes are pleasing to his readers and drawing on a lifetime of memories that add humor, romance, suspense, adventure and realism to his words.
He shares his home in Arizona with his beloved wife, Janet, an aging and devoted Westie named Jack, and two rescue cats, one well-adjusted and the other neurotic.
Charles M DuPuy, RESCUE MAN
