A Passel of Plumeria (Part 3)

(Continued from Part 2)

With the heat index in the mid-nineties and the sun fiercely radiant, Anna Marie, a self-described "sun freak," was outside on her two o'clock lunch break. Dressed in shorts and, to absorb every ray, flexing and extending her already deeply tanned legs, one and then the other, she was perched on a metal railing at a short distance from a small group of similarly sun-worshipping colleagues in the section reserved for "Associates' Vehicles" adjacent to the shopping center's parking lot. Across from her was the familiar vista, shimmering now in the dense atmosphere, of a giant Macy's, a Chinese restaurant, an ice cream parlor, a RadioShack and the Winn Dixie she worked for. The center's expansive parking area, in the foreground of her view, was bounded by palm trees and only a quarter full. The people passing through it were mostly housewives and young children. Somewhere close magnolias were in blossom, while just overhead two blue and white tree swallows chased each other back and forth, stirring steamy breezes strong enough to feel in her hair.

When a mosquito invaded the space behind her sunglasses and bit her eyelid, Anna Marie had a sandwich in one hand and a bottle of soda in the other. Placing the sandwich on her lap, she removed her glasses to rub at the itch, but she rubbed too vigorously and the sandwich slipped from her lap and dropped to the ground. As she was bending to retrieve it with the hand that held her glasses, she pressed the glasses against the pavement and broke off a stem. Crouching in front of the railing, she set the soda down and took the glasses into both of her hands, wondering if she could fix them. It was at this moment that Walter's pickup, coming from the left, pulled to a stop on the roadway a few yards in front of her.

She didn't see that it was Walter's pickup. From the angle at which she was positioned she was facing directly into the sun, and the pickup was only an amorphous shadow in the wicked glare. She identified it by the clamor of the always unfastened chains and tire irons that rolled around its body whenever he began to move or to brake.

She could hear Walter disembark and hear, as well, that he'd left the motor running. She expected to hear the driver-side door slam shut behind him but, in this regard, there was only silence. Then, as he came around the back of the pickup—himself a gray specter in the impossible light—his movement halted and, she could tell by the clunk and the creak, he opened the passenger-side door. Was he planning to take her somewhere, and in a hurry? Was there an occasion that she'd forgotten? He knew she was working.

He started to approach her and appeared to have something with him, an object that, bouncing along with his gait in a corner of his darkened mass, was of a lighter hue. She thought it must be a gift. Then, as he got closer and the object got brighter, she thought—she was convinced—that it was a passel of plumeria, her favorite flower. He was about to present her with flowers. But as she proceeded to stand, the murkiness dissolved and she saw that he was holding a can, an opened rectangular can colored a brilliant yellow with green and white lettering. She was staring at the can when Walter, now no more than a foot from her and without a word, jerked it at her face. The can contained battery acid and she received the searing liquid with a long siren of a cry that was joined by the sound and the smell of a hamburger sizzling on a charcoal grill.

"It was like he threw fire at me," she would later recount how the splash of acid felt to her.

The sunglasses Anna Marie still had in her hands fell from them and were crushed beneath her weight as she collapsed at Walter's feet. Weeping loudly, she was clutching her fist to her eye. Walter swiftly lifted her and, cradling her with the palm of his hand under the back of her head, carried her to the pickup. Ignoring red lights and stop signs—and dogged by a horn-honking band of appalled witnesses—he drove her at great speed to the nearest hospital's emergency room where he'd been arrested.

TV and newspaper coverage of the assault, which excoriated Walter (and caused his mortified family to refuse any contact with the press for months), was predictably lurid. It faded though in just a couple of days with reports that Walter had pleaded guilty and that he'd be confined in a Miami jail to await sentencing. Anna Marie would remain in the hospital for a week or so. She'd undergone a surgical procedure and more were planned. One of them, perhaps a year away, would likely involve the excision of her left eye. A palliative care specialist forecast a "lifetime of moderate to severe discomfort" in the afflicted space.

Aside from a freelance photographer's attempt to sneak into Anna Marie's room on her second night at the hospital—he was promptly apprehended—Anna Marie was not pursued by the media at the hospital or when she was discharged and there were no indications of what was to follow.

The sentencing proceedings were held in late October, on a fall day that was unusually sweltering even for Miami and in a courtroom in which the cooling system had failed. The windows were thrown open, but there was little movement in air rapidly soured by some fifty perspiring bodies. Moreover, an hour from the appointed time would pass before the judge, a tall, skeletal man in his sixties, made his appearance. Despite his tardiness he was in no hurry to get to the bench. A clearly casual ten-minute conversation with the bailiff took place before, in shirtsleeves, he assumed his position. At this juncture Anna Marie, who was sitting in a front row with an aunt and across an aisle from Walter's parents and brothers, stood up. She'd misplaced, that morning, the white cloth patch she normally used in public now to conceal the damage the acid had done (that it had to have been a frantic morning would presently become obvious), and wearing instead an accessory she might once have donned on a New Year's Eve—enormous, rhinestone-studded cardboard-framed glasses with plastic electric-blue-tinted lenses that did succeed in masking all of her upper face—she said, in a voice astonishingly resonant, that she hoped "His Honor would consider probation for Walter."

"What did you say?" The judge shouted.

"I couldn’t bear to be without him,” Anna Marie said, turning toward Walter who was shackled to a chair at a table near the bench. Walter had been keeping his face down and lifted it then. He'd endured, while in jail, a compulsory haircut and the acne remnants, fully visible, were accompanied by newly inflicted bruises.

The spectators reacted to Anna Marie's words with startled exclamations and much murmuring. The judge was apoplectic. Quivering with rage, he said that he had a daughter of his own and that if something "so depraved" had been done to her he would have "blown the dirt bag's head off with my shotgun.” Anna Marie’s plea was "ludicrous" and would have no mitigating effect on the sentence, he said. In fact, given the “unconscionable cruelty of the act,” Walter was going to get ”every bit of what was coming to him."

According to the judge, what Walter had coming was seven years in a Florida state prison.

As Walter, shuffling in his leg irons but with his head still raised, was led away, the judge summoned a now hysterical Anna Marie and her aunt to the bench. In her discombobulated condition, Anna Marie had knocked her appurtenance askew to reveal a melted-shut left eyelid and the raw, mottled meat, speckled with tiny white pustules and stretching from her hairline to the edge of her nostril, that was the flesh surrounding it. The judge, blanching at the sight of her naked wound, advised Anna Marie to seek counseling. “I don’t need counseling,” she sobbed. “I need Walter.” (Subsequently the judge would tell someone that, “The girl is as sick as the perp. It’s as if she welcomed what he did.”)

Most everything I've related here I would learn on the succeeding mornings when I perused the regional dailies. But what in particular had led me to balk at the blanket derision Walter and Anna Marie elicited, and then to read every word printed about them, was the video I saw when I turned on the news later that evening. Anna Marie, in her comical shades, was emerging from the courthouse and her indignation lit up the screen. Visibly spraying saliva, she sputtered to a cluster of reporters, and before any of them had a chance to speak: "Walter's the whole package. I would have floated right off the world if he hadn't been around. He makes me feel safe."

"I'm still here," she added, and then stalked off to a waiting car.

So seven years afterwards, with the accuracy of my instincts long since confirmed to my satisfaction but anticipating no further word—seven years was, after all, a long time— you can guess what the sudden announcement was.

Below a new picture of a grinning Anna Marie—she seemed to be wincing slightly and the left side of her face, from which a conspicuously prosthetic eye stared, was discolored and mildly tumescent but perfectly smooth—the caption read:

“Victim of 1985 acid attack, Anna Marie Woods, marries her assailant, Walter Parchman, upon his release from prison.”

In my mind I offered my congratulations. They would be, I expected, something like all right.