Chapter 37

“Hugo, the other night, did you know the man who stopped us wasn’t a policeman?” Linda asks me.

“I think it may be so but I do not know, I have met none of those you call police,” I say. “I know only that something is not right. I know that when man tells you to leave car he— it is not what you tell me will happen. And it is not proper that he tells you this, it is not right.”

“How? How did you know?”

I can find no way to speak this. I cannot say it is this thing or that thing. While I try to think of words I can say she breaks my thought.

“Was it the way he smelled?” she asks. “His attitude? Did you look at his car?”

I shrug; these were a part, though only small, but what are right words? “I know,” is all I can at last say. “It was not right.”

“Just instinct then?”

I ask her what is instinct, and she explains that it is feeling of animals that leads them to act without thinking. I know men may do in this way too, my reasons were not so but I can find no better way to speak it. I tell her yes, instinct.

“Would you have done the same thing if you’d thought it was a real policeman?” she persists.

“It was feeling I had from this man that makes me act so,” I tell her. “I do not know feeling of real police, so I cannot say. But if police are as you tell me, they seek to make others hold to law and do not do for themselves with no caring for law, then no, I would not do so.”

“Well, I’m damn glad you did what you did, even if you don’t know exactly why,” she says. “Here, you’re reading well enough, read this.” And she hands me large paper like the one Danny brings long ago and points to one place and I read. When I come to where the tale stops suddenly I look at her and she turns paper and it continues there.

This is terrible tale! I know now what is rape, it is the forcing of a woman to mate when she does not wish to mate, and paper writes that this man who pretends as policeman does this to many women and even kills one. If I knew this I might have kicked the man much harder, it is still not right to wish death on another but this man should not live, I think. I tell this to Linda.

“I feel a lot the same way. Well, never mind, he’s going away for a very long time. Going to prison, I mean,” she adds as she sees I do not understand.

I nod; this is right. “Will it help if we are there to say what happens?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “No. All he did with us was attempted rape, attempted murder, and that’s small change—I mean of little importance—to what else they have him for. And we can’t even prove that much. I got us out of there because I don’t want your ID tested that hard, anyhow not yet. Understand?”