Deliver Me From Evil by Mary Monroe Page A

naked. Maury Povich was on the TV screen, with some trashy-looking, big-footed woman screaming at the married man she’d been having an affair with.
    But no matter how tired I was or how hard I tried to doze off, all I could do was lie there and think. There were a lot of things on my mind that I needed to sort through. My future was the most important. But I couldn’t ignore my past and the things that had happened to me then that had driven me to my present point of desperation.
    I had spent most of my childhood looking for love, but in all the wrong places. And I had tried just about every trick in the book to get it. I didn’t have any family other than Daddy and Mama. At least none to speak of. But from the vague stories that both my parents had told me, usually in whispered voices, I had a few family members left somewhere in some little rural village in Guatemala occupied mostly by blacks and Indians.
    After enduring forty-eight hours of the worst labor any woman had ever experienced, according to Mama, she had given birth to me. “And you was such a homely little beast. You had eyes like a dead fish, hair like barbed wire, and a snout like a pig,” she often told me, adding, with a mysterious smirk, “Praise the Lord, your face eventually settled in the right direction.” That was as close as my mother ever came to telling me I was good-looking. And coming from her that was quite a compliment.
    My untimely, unplanned, and unwanted birth had occurred at home, in the two-bedroom apartment that my parents had lived in at the time, on a dead-end street in North Berkeley, California. We moved from that place when I was eight, but I will remember it until the day I die. Eight other people, from the same oppressed Central American country as my parents, had lived with us. They slept on the living-room floor, on cardboard pallets lined up like corpses. And that was literally the case with one man. One night, as I stumbled through the living room to get to the bathroom, I stepped on the man’s head. He was an ugly old creature that we called Abuelo Pato, Spanish for Grandpa Duck. He looked more like a frog than a duck to me, and the one time that I mentioned that to my mother, she slapped me halfway across the living room. When he didn’t move or say anything, I knew something was wrong. But I didn’t say or do anything. After I did my business in the bathroom, I stumbled back to bed.
    The next morning, when I found out that the man I’d stepped on was dead, I thought I’d killed him. I was the only child in the house, so I didn’t have a high position. I stayed in a child’s place. I spoke when I was spoken to, and nobody bothered to ask me anything about the dead man. I walked around in a daze for the next few days, convinced that I’d caused a man’s death. Each time somebody knocked on our front door, I almost jumped out of my skin, terrified that it might be the cops coming to haul me off to jail. I was just about ready to pass out at the funeral when the preacher saved me by muttering something about the old man dying from a heart attack in his sleep. My life returned to normal, which was not saying much.
    There was not much in my life for me to be happy about. I had no friends or real toys to play with. The television that we had only got two stations: One was a home shopping channel, which was useless because nobody in our house was interested in costume jewelry or Ginsu knives. The other channel was in Korean.
    It was no wonder I was always doing or saying something to upset Mama. Like the time I walked into the bedroom I shared with her and Daddy and saw another man with her on the bed. They didn’t see me, but as soon as Daddy got back home from his janitor’s job at a nearby office building, I met him at the front door, yelling at the top of my lungs, “Daddy, Mama was sitting on a man’s face!” Daddy didn’t respond, so I