Cream-colored Camaro
“Police were seeking a cream-colored Camaro in connection to French’s abduction; anyone
with a car resembling that make and model became an instant suspect.” –quote about the Paul
Bernardo and Karla Holmolka murders in Ontario, Canada.
The headline of the Hamilton Spectator announced it first:
horror, horror, a blonde with braces hacked up,
encased in concrete and scattered at the bottom of the city lake.
Then, weeks later, found in the ditch: girl sexed, girl strangled
from St. Catherine’s, and a car connected to both bodies:
Cream-colored Camaro. Decades later, the stories don’t mention
how those cars were suddenly in every driveway,
wicked, pale suspects lined up the street. They don’t tell how
how us girls broke their windshields with rocks from our mothers’ gardens,
ripped pages from our English notebooks to write in block letters
WE KNOW WHO YOU ARE, how even the adults
flagged down police to report every auto in the neighborhood,
anything from tan to barely peach. They don’t talk about how
we were fixed inside our houses after dark, where our brothers
taught us how to punch (thumb outside fist, use a horizontal wrist),
and slipped their switchblade knives into our jacket pockets.
And they don’t remember how we sneaked out
to walk like boys at sunset: hoods up, heavy gait,
stomping down busy Guelph Line, fingering those dull blades,
and boasting exactly where we would stab the obvious man
(thigh, neck, maybe through the eye)
if we are next on his list.
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