The Rodriguez Brothers

March 2002

Brad, my fiancé, expressed strong reservations about my wish to meet Erik Rodriguez. He made that abundantly clear after finding out I was communicating with one of the country’s most popular murderers.

“You do know, we are getting married, right?” His tone was accusatory, as it often was.

“You left out the word, someday,” I said, having heard his empty promise for years.

“So, your new target is a convicted murderer, in prison?” He raised an eyebrow.

“He’s better than–”

I was interrupted by the roar of an airplane overhead. We live a quarter mile from the runway of Fresno-Yosemite, and I’ve been listening to flights taking off my entire adult life. Worse still, the noise of the planes had been joined by the rumble of trucks driving past our 2-bedroom bungalow on their way to the airport’s new runway construction site.

Throwing my hands at the heavens, I mimed to Brad that our conversation was over, and retreated to my bedroom and locked the door.

Over the last 4 years, I discovered going out with a sober man wasn't the blessing that many people told me it would be. Starting with, his constant overthinking about everything. I began packing, carefully folding each item of clothing. When that was done, I adjusted my makeup for going out. In the mirror, I saw an aging, slightly plump, woman looking back at me. A face that apparently screams “good with children”, something I heard far too often at the daycare center I worked at.

On my way out, Brad stood blocking the front door. I had expected him to put up some sort of resistance.

“Don’t leave. I care about you.” He looked at my bag. It wasn’t the first time I’d left. “Where are you going? To your sister’s?”

“I just need to get away from the noise, the construction. Give me a few days?”

His face softened a bit. I pressed a kiss to his cheek, and brushed past him to my aging Honda Civic parked out on the street.

I turned the key, and drove off without looking back. A moment later, all thoughts of Brad evaporated like an intelligent conversation in a childcare center. As I watched the farmland of the valley go by, I thought about the abuse Erik suffered, how it was much like mine. It was unfair he sat in prison, misunderstood.

My plan to contact him had worked perfectly. I sent him a carefully curated headshot, airbrushed to make me look a few years younger. And a message telling him what I had been through, all mailed with no return address. He would have to work to find me. Men like to chase. A week later, a message appeared in my Yahoo account.

“If this is the Amanda who sent me a photo, please reply. Erik.”

Bait taken, we began a long exchange of letters and well-scheduled voice calls, all leading up to me finally finding the confidence to leave Brad.

The morning after leaving, I stood before the imposing facade of the California State Prison in Lancaster. I remember it as if it was yesterday. I lined up with the odd looking people (I would soon get used to them) waiting to enter Visitor Processing, and showed my photo ID, and signed a stack of visitor consent forms.

Erik was aware of my arrival, and sat waiting for me behind a plexiglass barrier, just as I imagined.

“I’m happy you replied to me, Erik,” I said, giving him my most affectionate smile.

“Hi Amanda, I’ve been waiting to meet you in person.” His voice was warm and surprisingly gentle, even through the scratchy phone line in the visitation room. His eyes took in all of me. “I saw your letter postmarked Fresno. It brought back memories.”

“Really?” In the letters we exchanged, he hadn’t mentioned spending time in my hometown. “You’ve been to Fresno. What’s new in Fresno? They’re building a new runway. The noise is horrendous. But the town is growing. It's great for the city,”

I realized I sounded a bit manic, and slowed down, also remembering how men don’t like to hear women complain.

“I hope to see it again soon.” He winked, showing his sense of humor. “You’re a childcare worker too?”

“Yes I am. I love children, and animals,” I said, “but I hate adults. Really hate them.”

I stopped myself from going on a tirade.

But Erik’s eyes glimmered. “So do I. Hate adults. Just to be clear, my brother was an adult, not a child, when…”

“I believe you.” l instantly felt stupid saying that, as there was never any doubt that his brother was 19, and Erik was 17, when that unfortunate murder occurred.

He didn’t bring up many other topics to talk about on that first visit, so I told him stories about the children I took care of at my daycare job, focusing on the joyful ones. He smiled, and looked happy to hear about life outside.

As I spoke, I noticed he often lurched from side to side in his chair like a lemur at the zoo clinging to a branch. A bad nervous habit. Poor thing, he needed someone to take care of him.

He held an open palm to the glass. “Do you want to touch it?”

I held my palm up to the glass. I mouthed the words, “I love you.”

I caught a glimpse of his despair as I prepared to leave.

April 2002

Our conversations continued day after day behind the cold glass of the visitation booth. The distance was infuriating.

I told him more about Fresno, and the tabloid news about the remains of eight dead bodies being found at the construction site of Fresno’s airport expansion. Criminals in prison must be interested in news like that. Fresno was going downhill, he was probably safer in here, I told him. He winked, appreciating my sense of humor.

In town, in Lancaster, I secured a childcare job. The city was full of working parents, all the daycare places were hiring. For a town that had plenty of good paying jobs, the mood remained grim. Many residents worked at the prison. The California State Prison sat on the dusty plain of Lancaster, the way a bad Thanksgiving meal sits on your stomach as you try to smile at your relatives afterward.

I saw Erik every day I could.

One day, leaving the prison, a guard asked, “I don’t understand you women. All the available men out there, and you want to be spending your time in here with these guys?”

“Is that an offer?” I laughed in his face.“We’re in love,” I said, fully aware that the guard could never comprehend the depth of the bond we had.

The guard shrugged, his blank face matching the emptiness of the prison.

So, why do women fall in love with a man in prison? A ‘convicted murderer’, as my mother says. I honestly don’t have an answer.

The media eventually caught wind of my visits. Gossip page headlines weighed in on “Erik Rodriguez’s new love interest”. A paparazzi even got a few grainy photos of my face at the prison entrance. “One of those women” was the subtext of their articles.

They were wrong.

In fact, I was not a clueless love struck female.

Thirty-four million dollars of Erik’s family fortune was parked overseas. I hired investigators to track it down to a trust fund in Hong Kong. Erik’s dad had dodged income taxes. All I needed was Erik’s fingerprint on a withdrawal slip.

August 2002

“So many people in here have been falsely convicted,” Erik said one day, during one of our visits.

“They’re drunks, or druggies. Not like you, Erik,” I said. ”When my father drank, his rage spilled out in an uncontrollable torrent. The next day, he wouldn’t remember what he did.”

I yearned for Erik to ask about my father, but he didn’t.

“Sorry to hear that,” he said simply,

“There's something I wanted to ask you,” I said. “Why did you kill your brother?”

“He didn’t protect me from him.”

“But, why did you kill him so violently?”

Erik’s face flushed red, anger simmering just below the surface. “I don’t know. Maybe I have a taste for blood.”

“Intriguing…” I said. We were finally getting somewhere, getting him to trust me.

In between our visitation sessions, and my dead end childcare job, I filled out the paperwork to become his Registered Domestic Partner.

“You’re as industrious as an ox,“ Erik said when I told him how I figured it out. We both knew what having a Domestic Partner meant in the state of California..

“We have a future together,” I said. “Think of the future.”

September 2002

A month later, the day of our first conjugal visit arrived. I felt a mix of anticipation and fear.

The guard led me to an isolated trailer home in a fenced off section of the prison yard. Inside was an old couch, and a small table cluttered with remnants of previous visits. The air was thick with the scent of disinfectant. None of this mattered when I saw Erik sitting at the end of the room.

“The shagging wagon, that’s what they call it.”

I sat next to him. He fidgeted nervously. Before we touched, I decided to get something out of the way.

I took out the withdrawal slip, “I'm in trouble Erik, in debt. I spent three thousand dollars coming out here,”

He looked at the paper, his brow furrowed. “Where did you get this?”

He stared at the withdrawal form out filled to $3,000. I planned to add more zeros later.

“From your family lawyer,” I lied, but met his gaze with certainty. “Your lawyer said it would be fair to me for the effort I put into our relationship.”

A look of sympathy twinkled in his eyes. Erik took the pen and signed his name, and put his fingerprint in the box outlined on the bottom.

I explained how much I appreciated it.

Then we moved closer. He embraced me. When we kissed, kissing him was like inhaling opium. Before, I had thought of him as my plan, but now, he was something more.

His hands moved toward my crotch.

That’s when I remembered something inconvenient.

“Sorry, Erik,” I said. “But I’m having my period.”

“What?” His voice was suddenly sharp. “This is our first chance to be together, and you’re having your period? Stop lying to me.” His nails, long and sharp, pressed into the skin of my neck. “I told you I have a taste for blood.” There was a manic look in his eyes.

I realized I made a mistake coming here, perhaps the biggest mistake of my life.

I dug my nails into his groin. “Me too, cowboy. Now, sit down.”

Wincing in pain, Erik let go of my neck. After his little boy’s hormonal rush calmed down, I told him about the eight men I killed, after luring to an abandoned lot in Fresno, when I was a call-girl in the 1990s. The bodies that were being dug up now in Fresno’s airport expansion.

“I'm the same as you, Erik. I will get you out of here, and we will do big things together.”

Erik’s eyes sparkled with hope and excitement, like a child discovering a bag of candy in his mother’s cupboard, a teen getting his first car keys, a young man receiving his first paycheck, an old man getting a new lease on life. The future was ours, together.

***

In 2003, aided by testimony from prison psychologist Holly Glaser that he was no longer a threat to the community, Erik Rodriguez was released from prison after serving 7 years for the murder of his older brother. In the following decade, a string of unsolved murders across Southern California left investigators puzzled.

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Author's Note -- after watching the Mendenzez Brothers doc on Netflix, the story was on my mind, and I went on a wild riff on the characters. Horror and crime is not really my genere, and perhaps this was too much plot for a 2,000 word competition, and I placed in the middle with 5 points.