The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [5]
Malinda did not give in easily. She learned of the affair and insisted that Senior break it off. He did, but a few days later Anice came by the house looking for him. She even had the temerity to let herself in the back door, but instead of finding Williams she found Malinda, seething and incredulous. Little Art was there, too, and watched wide-eyed as his mother proceeded to administer a beating as brutal as any he’d later see on the streets of Chicago. By the time it was over, she had broken Anice’s nose.
Anice later called the police, claiming that Malinda had tried to kill her. Confronted by Anice’s thoroughly battered face, they had little choice but to arrest Malinda. Senior bailed his wife out and convinced Anice not to press charges, but Malinda sensed that getting her husband away from the other woman would require more drastic measures. She told Senior that they either had to leave the state and head back to Texas, or she’d leave him.
Senior consented to the move, and within two weeks the family was packed up and headed south. They made a go of it in Houston at first, where Senior worked odd jobs, and when that failed to pan out they retreated to a mobile-home park in Pleasant Grove, a suburb of Dallas. Like many such marginal communities, it hosted a mix of blue-collar strivers, wanderers, the elderly, and religious zealots. The Williamses’ next door neighbors were an older couple that consisted of a World War II veteran and a Santería priestess from the Philippines. The priestess, whose name was Connie, had long black hair that nearly reached the ground, and a beautiful smile. She baby-sat the kids, sang to them, and spoiled them rotten with cookies and milk. She told Art stories about the moody pantheon of Santería demigods, conversed with invisible entities, and told him that a powerful spirit dwelled inside of him.
Little Art loved her.
While Art was learning about the dark arts with his mystical nanny, his dad was spending days on the other side of the park with an evangelical minister. With no work, an unhappy wife, and a guilty conscience, Senior was reaching for Jesus. Things came to head one day when he dropped by his neighbor’s place to pick up Art and found him kneeling in front of a Santería altar with candles ablaze. Harsh words, accusations of devil worship, and hexes ensued. The minister convinced Art senior to move his family to the other side of the park and organized a trailer-park exorcism, during which they held Art down on the floor of their makeshift church and commanded the devil to abandon the boy.
Needless to say, Art was terrified and hopelessly confused—a state that would only become more enhanced by what followed: Exhausted from all the moving, her husband’s bad decisions, and finally the commotion surrounding Junior, Malinda had a nervous breakdown. It manifested itself as a near-catatonic depression and rages at Senior over the fact that they’d descended from a relatively good life to the status of trailer trash.
The obvious solution, he told her, was to return to Illinois and quickly reestablish themselves. And so a little more than a year after they left, they moved back to the Land of Lincoln. They stayed with Senior’s half-brother Richard, who lived in Schaumburg—only eight miles from Bensenville and Anice Eaker. Senior’s proximity to his old mistress was probably enough to doom his marriage, but the catalyst for his final break with Malinda proved far more destructive and tragic.
Senior and Anice’s new plan was to enroll in bartending school, taking turns watching the kids while the other attended classes. One evening while Senior was watching the kids, Wensdae woke up and wandered into the kitchen, where she found her father at practice mixing drinks while the other kids slept. She was only five, but her memory of