The Barbarian Nurseries (39 page)

Janet Bryson’s journey took her next to a Garden Grove apartment block the color of overripe avocado flesh, where a too-thin woman of about forty with bony, sunburned shoulders handed her a letter through a security gate and said, “Don’t go yet, hon. Want some iced tea?” Janet climbed up briefly to the woman’s apartment and living room and sipped and listened to the woman describe “the unraveling of my life.” Her husband had succumbed to liver problems three years earlier, “and my mom died a year ago this week in Kenosha.” She too complained
about the Fourth of July noise and smoke, but also about the disability bureaucrats and her glaucoma, and the neighbors who stole her newspaper, and how she heard her dead husband speaking in the hallways on certain warm summer nights, until Janet finally said, “I’m so, so sorry. But I really have to go.” It pained Janet Bryson that she could not listen more. She picked up the last letter at 3:45 p.m. on Citrus Avenue in Yorba Linda, four blocks from the Richard Nixon Library and Museum, and made her away southward on the State Highway 57 freeway to Santa Ana. By 4:55 p.m., she had managed to deliver one copy of each letter by hand to the five offices of the members of the Orange County Board of Supervisors.

At 5:30 p.m. she was back on Interstate 5, heading north toward South Whittier in heavy traffic, but feeling light and free of the congestion of red lights braking and cars inching forward. She touched the passenger seat, where the letters had lain, and gave a sigh of satisfaction, thinking how she would type
Mission Accomplished
in the subject line of the email she would send to the One California office when she got home. And then she remembered the woman with the dog, and the woman who heard ghosts, and thought she had helped them that day simply by listening.
Owe no man anything, but to love one another, for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law.
She felt attached to something larger than herself. Not just the story of the wronged American family, but also to other homes and automobiles where women looked out their windows and into the city and tried to make sense of what they saw. She turned on the radio and found it tuned, by her son, to some Spanish hip-hop monstrosity: so she changed the station, finding some rock-and-roll songs from her father’s era. Those joyous anthems with their ascendant guitars and big soul choruses matched the way she felt. Her reverie lasted through forty more minutes of bumper-to-bumper, until she reached her exit at Carmenita Road and she turned northward home.

J
ohn Torres was well inside the house on Paseo Linda Bonita before Maureen became aware of his presence. He had talked his way past the useless guards at the front gate easily enough: they were quickly persuaded that a seventy-year-old man was harmless, and Maureen was sweeping in the kitchen when he opened and stepped through the
unlocked front door. He quickly found his grandsons in their bedroom—“You guys are reading? In the middle of a summer day?”—and was hugging them and bribing them with twenty-dollar bills by the time Maureen could rush into their room. She glared at the old man with a
how dare you!
affixed to her lips that died, undelivered, when she saw Brandon and Keenan waving greenbacks ecstatically before her.

“Look! Grandpa gave us money!”

“Hello, daughter,” John Torres said with a stiff cheerfulness, and Maureen wondered if he knew how much she hated hearing him call her that. He was dressed like an angry workingman forced to play a round of golf against his will, copper jowls resting over the collar of his polo shirt, khaki pants affixed to his bony frame by a belt that was about six inches too long. Now he grabbed at its flapping leather tongue as he waited for her to reply, because he sensed that she was studying it and judging him and his simplicity. She was, in fact, looking at his fingers and hands, and thought that the contrast of the wounded digits at the end of arms stuffed into a teal shirt summed up all his contradictions, and for that reason she resisted the temptation to say,
Hello, Juan,
which was his birth name, after all. Scott had discovered this a few years back, when helping the old man with some Social Security paperwork, and Maureen had rather spitefully called him that on that last time he had come to this home, two years ago. It was during Keenan’s sixth birthday, in a moment of high dudgeon following his outrageous, bigoted, and incorrect observation that Keenan was “the white boy” and Brandon was “the Mexican.” It was the sort of thing he said when he had too much alcohol, which was nearly every time he arrived for a family gathering, and she had resolved at that moment to banish him from Paseo Linda Bonita for at least a dozen birthdays.

“Hello, Grandfather Torres. To what do we owe the pleasure?”

He seemed a bit taken aback by the polite greeting, having failed to notice the sarcasm in it. “Well, I have a television,” he began. “And I’ve been watching my grandsons on it for a couple of days now, and the one time I called here I got some stranger who hung up on me when he heard me say, ‘What’s going on over there?’ So I figured I’d have to come over here and see for myself.”

“As you can see, everything is under control.”

“Is it?” He looked around the room, at his grandsons, who were now
busy putting away the two twenties he had given each of them in little plastic safes with numbered combinations. “The newspaper said they were going to investigate you.”

“No, Scott just …” Maureen stopped and gestured with her palms in the direction of the boys. “Should we be having this discussion here?” But John Torres was looking straight into her eyes, demanding an answer to soothe a kind of skeptical parental concern she recognized. “Scott just called,” she lied. “He went to talk to those people at the county. And they dropped it.”

“Because they arrested that Mexican girl you had here. Right?”

“What, they arrested Araceli?” Brandon shouted. “They’re going to put her in jail?”

“No, no, they’re just asking her questions,” Maureen said, and would think later that it had been a long time since she had deceived her children.

“Someone needs to cut the grass,” the elder Torres said abruptly.

“Scott will do it.”

“No. I will.” The old man touched each of his grandsons on the head, and left the room with the air of a man eager to get started on a new job. Ten minutes later she heard a grinding roar from the front yard, and she looked out to see a septuagenarian in a polo shirt digging his leather Top-Sider shoes into the overgrown, spongy grass. The old man pushed the machine over the sloped lawn with surprising efficiency, though after less than thirty seconds he was already covered with beads of sweat, and she wondered if he might have a stroke.
He tackles this physical task with the same gusto Scott attacks a programming problem.
After an hour of grinding, whizzing, and sweeping with various implements, motorized and muscle-driven, he was done. When Samantha woke up from her nap Maureen wandered out with her daughter to inspect his work. He had cut the lawn with a perfection that made the living thing look plastic, or painted, an evenness that was unnatural but also pleasing to the eye.

“Your grandfather knows how to cut a lawn,” Maureen said.

F
irst came the excitement of rushing through the jail, after being told she would face the judge, and then finding there was an anteroom before you got to the court. The guards guided Araceli into a cube-shaped room and directed her to wait alongside two other women on a bench bolted to the floor, one a Latina with eyebrows that looked like they were drawn with a 0.5-millimeter drafting pencil; the other an African-American woman with a head covered with parallel rows of hair and skin, as if plowed by a miniature farmer. The old cement walls of the cube-cell were freshly painted, and in their bone-colored blankness Araceli sensed hundreds of existential agonies, endured by people in much worse situations than hers. Araceli knew that her fate ended in Mexico, that at the end of her current visit to purgatory she would step into the disorderly but familiar sunshine of a Mexican border town, and that afterward she would walk to a bus station or a telephone booth and decide what to do next. It might happen in a year, or two, or maybe even in a few days, but eventually that would be her fate, and it calmed her to know this with certainty. The Latina woman to Araceli’s right apparently did not have such knowledge to settle her nerves, because she was repeatedly folding and unfolding a piece of paper. Finally she looked up
at Araceli and showed her a row of crooked teeth, as if to say hello. She was gaunt and sallow-faced, with the nervous energy of a twenty-year-old, though she seemed a decade older than that, at least. She also seemed battered and confused, but not especially worried about being that way.

“I’m going to make a run for it,” the woman whispered into Araceli’s ear. Seeing Araceli’s confusion, she switched to thickly accented Spanish: “Voy
a correr. Para ser libre.”

“¿Qué?”

“When we get into the court, there’s just a little fence.
Chiquito.”
The woman glanced at the other inmate on the bench, who seemed to be nodding off, and then raised her voice well above a whisper. “It’s a tiny fence about as high as your waist. I’m going to jump over. And I’m gonna book it for the back, and into the hallway, and down the stairs if I’m lucky. If I’m lucky I’ll get to the front steps and out the door. Now I can do it, because I’m still in my own clothes. Later, they’ll have me in jail blues, and I won’t make it. I have to do it now, because if I don’t, I’ll be locked away forever.”

Araceli gave the woman a glance that said, Please stop bothering me with your lunacies.

“I ain’t lying. Because this is my
tercer
strike.
Uno, dos, tres
strikes.
¿Entiendes?
I got my first two strikes with my crazy
novios.
Armed robbery and ADW. Assault with a deadly weapon. Now they got me because I was making eyes at an undercover cop over on Pico. They got me good. And for looking at that cop, and asking him for fifty bucks, I’m looking at twenty-five to life, believe it or not. I said, ‘Okay, honey, if you ain’t got fifty, forty’ll do,’ and that’s when he showed me his badge, the tiny, ugly little fuck. So I told him, ‘Don’t do me that way, Officer. I’m begging you. I got two strikes. I’ll do you for free, just let me go.’ But he was a real tight-ass, and that’s why I’m here, and that’s why I gotta run.” She gave Araceli a wild-eyed look of desperation and mischief. “You’re not understanding me, are you?”

“You’re going to run?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t tell me,” Araceli said. “I don’t want trouble for me.”

The door opened and the paper-folder left, giving Araceli one last ugly smile. Araceli listened to the closed door for a minute or so, in anticipation of the noises of anarchy the inmate’s attempted escape would
set off, but heard only mumbling vibrations of calmly spoken words. Five minutes later, the paper-folder returned with her head bowed, and a palm filled with paper shreds. She averted her eyes from Araceli, sniffled, and began weeping loudly. Before Araceli could ask what had happened, the bailiff called out, “Ramirez and Jones,” and Araceli stood up with the other inmate and followed her braided head into the courtroom.

Unlike Araceli, Jones wore a thin chain around her arms and legs, and a blue jumpsuit. The bailiff directed Jones to a chair in front of the judge, and Araceli to a steel folding chair next to the door they had just passed through. “You’re next,” the bailiff said to her. Forms were shuffled before Jones, an attorney sat next to her and whispered in her ear, and she was asked over and over again if she understood a statement about rights and procedures. Jones nodded several times, and looked impassively at forms that were placed before her, and at the finger of a man who was either a clerk or an attorney and who indicated places she should look. Then he gave her a pen, and whispered into her ear, and she began to sign her name. Araceli had never been in an American court before and wondered if most legal business was conducted this way, with gestures, mumbles, and whispers. Nearly everyone drifted through the proceedings with heavy, tired eyes, even the bailiff, who spent most of his time at his desk. What could be producing this drowsiness? Was it the early hour, the long banks of fluorescent lights, was it something in the air-conditioning? Was it all the paperwork, the forms in triplicate, the stacking of so many manila files? Araceli sensed that the bad-teeth,
tres
-strikes girl had entered this room determined to run, but had been anesthetized by the lights and the drone of bored voices. Now the judge began to speak. He looked like a schoolteacher, and sounded as if he was reading to the defendant from a prepared text, but he wasn’t looking at any papers before him and for a second it seemed as if he was reading words that were suspended in the air.
What a strange trick!
When the inmate stood up to leave, Araceli saw that her wrists and ankles were still shackled and linked together, even though she looked too lethargic to be a threat.

Finally, the judge said, “We’re ready for Ramirez, Araceli.”

She walked to the bench, and a skinny, older man with thick glasses stood next to her. “We’re ready, Your Honor,” the older man said,
and Araceli was puzzled by his use of the first-person plural, which seemed to join him to her for some purpose. “I’m your public defender,” the man whispered into her ear suddenly. “But just for today. For your arraignment. Later, you get someone else.”

She nodded and looked back over her shoulder at the courtroom: there was, indeed, just a very short barrier separating the place where Araceli sat from the public gallery and the doors at the back of the courtroom. The only guard present, the bailiff, stood near the judge, and in the gallery there was a single witness, a man in business attire with a Mexican flag pin on his lapel. He gave her a twinkling-finger wave, and Araceli wondered if he was there to take her back to Mexico.

“Are they going to deport me?” she asked the public defender in a whisper. Resigned as she was to returning to Mexico, she did not like the idea of having other people decide for her what she should do. A woman should be able to pick the road on which she traveled, and it riled her to think the men gathered in this room—because there were no other women present now, besides her—would decide for her. She looked up at the judge, a kind of anti-angel in his black robes and white hair, holding the keys to the gates of freedom.

“I asked you a question,” she repeated to the public defender in full voice, loud enough to cause the other attorney, standing above a table next to hers, to look across. “Are they going to deport me?”

“No, not for the moment,” the public defender whispered back from the corner of his mouth, and before Araceli could ask him to elaborate, he, the judge, and other people in the court began to speak in another language she only vaguely recognized as English, a torrent of numbers and terms that she did not understand, with roots that seemed to be in Latin, except for some of the very last words the judge spoke before she was directed back into the cube and the jail beyond.

“Ten thousand dollars.”

A
ssistant District Attorney Ian Goller monitored the routine arraignment of Araceli N. Ramirez from his fourteenth-floor office, in a room adjacent to the office rarely occupied these days by the district attorney, because the boss was on the road, testing the political waters in preparation for a long-shot run for the Republican nomination to the
U.S. Senate. Ian Goller was, at that moment, a worried man, though not for the reasons that should have preoccupied him. The matrices and spreadsheets that mapped and tallied the flow of cases through the courtrooms in the lower floors of his building, and in five satellite courthouses across the county, were arranged on his antiquated, smudged computer screen, and they pointed to a rising flood of drug trials that would eventually lead to a breakdown in the ability of the district attorney’s office to meet its legal mandates. But the slow drip toward judicial chaos did not concern him this morning, as much as the simple contents of a clear plastic bag, and a single piece of paper in a manila folder. Through the skin of plastic he could see the train and bus tickets retrieved from Araceli’s backpack, while the manila folder contained a copy of a hotel sign-i n sheet retrieved by a sheriff’s detective who had just returned from a trip to the desert. The tickets confirmed, with those stamped digital codes that juries loved, the truth of the time frame of the defendant’s version of events, and the document from the hotel-spa, along with a statement from one of the clerks, offered a disturbing contradiction to the statement of his primary witness.

One day and it’s already falling apart.
He hadn’t handled a case himself in a while, and it had been a long time since he’d been confronted with the elemental messiness of a criminal prosecution seen in its prosaic details, with prospective arguments and “facts” tainted by the poor memory and moral fallibility of human beings.
This is why I’ll never go back to litigating. Because people are idiots and they lie even when, no, especially when you put your faith in them.

If his boss were there, Ian Goller would walk into his office, past the door with the seal of the district attorney and its scales of justice. The Sage of Santa Ana, with his undeniable trial and political skills would then tell him how to handle this conundrum casually and effortlessly, but there were only pictures of his boss’s children in that office, and diplomas, and various photo-trophies of the district attorney’s encounters with national politicians and conservative celebrities, including a snapshot with a distracted and now-deceased President of the United States. Ian Goller could look at those pictures and the district attorney’s confident grin, and intuit what he should do next, and he could even hear the district attorney saying it:
Just kick the can down the road and see what happens. Fifty-fifty, it’ll go our way.

The trial attorney he eventually assigned to the case would likely protest his inability to lift
The People v. Araceli N. Ramirez
over the low bar of proof required for a successful preliminary hearing. But a natural outcome already suggested itself, an obvious deal resting like a jewel box inside the charges the district attorney’s office had just filed. Simply negotiate the charges down from felony to misdemeanor in exchange for a guilty plea, give the defendant credit for time served and hand her ass forthwith to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement representatives at the county jail. She would then be swiftly deported, as were the legions of other foreign nationals without papers who landed there. News of the defendant’s erasure from the American justice system and media orbit would satisfy the constituents clamoring for punishment, and the defendant, in turn, would receive her freedom—in Mexico. Basic fairness to the people of California dictated such a result. After all, the defendant was one of two million residents of the state living every day in violation of Section 8, Title 1325 of the U.S. Code. It fell to county prosecutors to enforce this statute, indirectly, by waiting for each of those two million people to run afoul of some state law, be it a homicide or a DUI. Goller still saw in Araceli N. Ramirez’s actions a basic ignorance of American ways, and the recklessness and bad choices that characterized the existence of so many other, unambiguously guilty defendants. He believed the public defender would find the plea offer appealing, as long as the public defender did not see these train and bus receipts, and the hotel clerk’s statement, and realize just how weak the prosecution’s case really was. Thankfully, the rules and practices of discovery were such that the DA could plausibly delay releasing this information to the defense until after an expedited preliminary hearing. Given the nonviolent nature of the charges, the administrator at the public defender’s office would likely assign the case to a Deputy Public Defender II who would see the plea down to a misdemeanor as an easy and fair resolution, a quick deal that would allow him or her to bank a little extra time to work on the thirty or forty other cases on his or her plate. Deportation was, at any rate, a federal matter beyond the purview of mere county officials: every attorney in the two concrete buildings on the opposite sides of Civic Center Drive accepted such outcomes as a matter of course. There was a door at the end of the maze of jail cells and courtrooms into which a fifth of all the defendants in the county
disappeared; the door opened to a vortex of weeping Spanish souls that drained into Tijuana and Mexicali and other forsaken places. Goller told his lawyers that each case that ended in deportation was, in its way, a victory for the rule of law. Even the most liberal member of the public defender’s office long ago accepted this state of affairs without effective complaint, and it fell to the PDs in courtrooms to explain to defendants again and again that they were about to be deported. Very often this information was relayed at ostensibly happy hearings during which sentences were reduced and probation granted, the news given by twenty-five-year-old PDs in quick murmurs relayed by whispering interpreters, which caused the oft-repeated paradox of defendants weeping inconsolably even as the judge was telling them to behave themselves after being “released.” They cried because they knew their American lives were coming to an end, and in the galleries their sons and daughters and wives wept too, once the truth set in. It was a cruel thing to watch, but it was as it should be, Goller thought. Soon, inevitably, his defendant and her problems would pass through the door that led to Mexico.