“It was a brick, Mary Ann,” I called out to her as I came through the front door. “They probably meant to throw it through the window—they just missed. C’mon out. They’re gone.”
Mary Ann unlocked the door and emerged from her hiding place in the bedroom, thankful to see that I’d returned unharmed. “Did you see anybody?” she asked nervously as she looked all around the living room, as though she needed to confirm that we were alone.
“Yeah, I think I did,” I responded. In other times I might have kept the information to myself, not wanting to worry her more than necessary. This time it was clear that she needed to know.
“Yeah, I saw them. There were two of them, and they went peeling out of the parking lot just as I came through the breezeway. Two guys, both of them looked to be in the their late twenties. I’m pretty sure I saw the two of them last Thursday on the Drag.”
“Did you get a tag number? Anything that might help us find out who they are?” she asked.
“It was a blue Dodge, but I couldn’t see the tag. The car was kicking up gravel and dust in the parking lot, and… well, they were gone pretty quickly. I got a look at both of them, though, because the passenger side of the car was facing me as they came across the parking lot and pulled onto the street. I don’t think they saw me. They were looking straight ahead.”
I could see the strain on Mary Ann’s face. She was worried, and she was waiting to hear whether we should should leave the apartment and find another place to spend the night. She was waiting to hear it from me.
“I’m not too worried about them,” I told her. “I think they’re just a pair of thugs that somebody sent to harass us. If they had wanted to take us on or try to get to you, they could have done that just by knocking on the door and trying to force their way in. Instead they threw a brick and ran. They were just trying to harass us.”
“Maybe they were just trying to harass us today, Prentice, but what about tomorrow?” Mary Ann responded. She was worried, and I could understand that. Harassment had become a daily part our lives, and it hadn’t always stopped at threats and attempts to intimidate us. Sometimes the threats had been carried out.
“What about the door?” she asked. “Will it hold?”
“I think the door’s fine,” I answered. It’s got a big chunk out of it on the outside, but I think it’s still strong. I walked over and examined the latch and lock. Mechanically, everything seemed to work and looked fine.
“Don’t worry about it, Mary Ann,” I continued. “Nobody’s getting in here without us knowing they’re coming.”
• • •
I guess things could have gone more wrong than they did over the next few days, but it would be difficult to imagine how. I had chosen the apartment on E. 22nd because there was a grocery store within walking distance, and the apartment was on a UT shuttle bus route. Buses ran past the corner every twenty minutes from 6:00 a.m. to 9 p.m.
I figured we would be able to get to campus and home again easily on the UT shuttle, and Mary Ann could get to work and back to campus on the city bus. I would stay on campus every day until the city bus dropped her off in front of The CO-OP on Guadalupe. Then we would walk across campus and catch the shuttle bus home. It should have worked out. It didn’t.
On Monday morning, Valentine’s Day 1972, the first Monday after our wedding, we were up early. Mary Ann threw down her coffee, bundled up against the cold, and we were at the shuttle bus stop at 6:55 a.m. We were still there at 7:15, 7:30 and 7:45.
Just after 7:45 a.m. a delivery truck, barreled out of the belly of a large commercial laundry situated directly across the street. The driver lunged the truck across the street and pulled to a stop at the corner where we stood, facing south, perpendicular to Manor Road. He threw open the passenger side door of his truck and yelled to us,”You kids waiting on the shuttle?”
At first sight of the truck Mary Ann had thought to run. It had crossed the street so quickly, the brakes had slammed so unexpectedly, and it had stopped so abruptly at the corner that she was startled, rattled, and her instincts told her to flee. I held her hand tightly and stopped her as soon as the door had opened and I could see the driver. I knew he was no threat.
I responded to the driver’s question, telling him that we were, in fact, waiting on the shuttle—the shuttle that was very, very late. I sensed he knew something that we didn’t.
“You’re gonna wait a long time, then,” he warned us. “The shuttle drivers voted to go on strike. It’s in the morning paper,” he said, pointing at a paper box not ten feet from where we were standing. We had passed the box without glancing at the headline.
“Hop in, I’m headed toward the campus,” he said, picking up papers off the seat and tossing them onto the dashboard. “It’s a big truck. Plenty of room for the two of you.”
Stunned by the news, but eager to get out of the cold, we climbed into the cab. The smell of laundered towels and bed sheets, perhaps hundreds of them, still warm from the dryer combined with the smell of diesel and oil to make a memorable mixture. On the way to campus the driver informed us that things weren’t going well in the negotiations between the drivers and the university. He expected that the strike might last the rest of the semester. If he was right, we had a problem.
The laundry truck pulled to a stop at the entrance to Memorial Stadium at precisely 8;00 a.m. “Gotta drop you off here,” the driver said. “They ain’t gonna let me drive this rig any further onto the campus.”
We thanked him for his hospitality, he wished us well, and we descended from the cab onto the frozen ground. We walked quickly up the east mall steps, past the drama school and toward the Student Union, holding hands and talking as we walked, wondering out loud how we would deal with the transportation problem caused by the drivers strike.
As we passed Garrison Hall our conversation was abruptly interrupted by the sight of a girl running toward us and calling out Mary Ann’s name, her full maiden name, to get our attention. She was about our age, glasses, short dark hair tied in the back under a large paisley headband, and wearing an Army surplus coat. Neither of us recognized her. When she reached us she was breathless, gulping at the cold air for breath and trying to talk faster than the words would form in her mouth.
“I told them it isn’t right!” she said. “I told them it isn’t right…”
“Do we know you? What isn’t right…” Mary Ann tried to calm her and make some sense of her words.
The girl was frightened, as though she was being pursued. Her words were broken and, for the most part, incoherent as she tried to tell us something about things she’d overheard somewhere… things someone had said… We could understand very little of what she was trying to tell us.
Suddenly, she reached into the large bucket purse that was slung over her shoulder and pulled out a green sheet of paper, folded in half and creased from previous folds. She shoved the paper toward me and said, “Take this!”
Turning quickly to Mary Ann, the girl said urgently and in a loud whisper as if she feared being overhead, “Meet me tonight at the Holiday House. Nine o’clock.” She hurriedly slung the purse back over her shoulder, turned into the flow of pedestrians walking toward Garrison Hall and disappeared in the morning crowd of students on their way to classes.
To be continued…
