Blood Acre

by Peter Landesman

She says, "What do you want to believe?"

  "How do you know for sure?"

  Fearful, her face awash, she raises a quivering finger. "Look at you."

  He grabs for the picture frame and slides it out from under his mother's hands and sandwiches it protectively between his palms. "Look at me," he says. He turns the picture. His own face superimposed on his father's, feature for feature. He cannot conclude. Maybe. Christ, maybe. He can't be sure.

  He knows now the meaning of his father's last plea. A father warning off his son. To have gone to work for the Steins would have been to be pulled under, dragged into that dark constellation. Whether or not there was a genetic tie wouldn't have mattered. Blood would have passed: Milton's son, Nathan's brother.

  "And Sonia?"

  Her unfocused eyes watch his hands. They slowly close, then open. "Your father's."

  "You don't even know," he says. "What makes you think Isabel didn't take your job completely? Bred for his pleasure. Look where she worked. Look what she was surrounded by day after day. Like you said, more your daughter than my sister-"

  She slaps the table. "He was her father."

  Santos feels the cruel smile on his mouth. His mother clasps both hands over her face. The past is drowned in the bitterest mistakes, and the future, in one clear moment, is upon him. He can see Isabel's funeral, he can see his mother's, Nathan's, Claire's, Milton's, he can see his own. He sees the whole cast, who will be there and how they will be situated, sitting, then standing and, crying, riding to the cemetery. And he knows who will be buried, will lie wooden, varnished, a blanched powdery sack on a bed of bleached satin cushions. The terror so great it feels already like nostalgia, like something lived and over with, memorized in an old and distant sorrow.

  What has begun is already over. And here now is how the dead are beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. The living ferry the consequences but the dead do not remember, and nothingness, Santos sees, is not a curse. Far from it.

  Nathan leans into the cold wind, his arms at his side, his briefcase in one hand. Behind him the Rikers Island waiting room like an airport's, plastic eggcup seats and columns of cigarette sand and dingy light and a large window letting out onto a blank expanse. The shuttle bus's headlights appear across the stretch of empty tarmac, the snow before it coiling and whorling. Beyond shine patches of yellow light. Glinting billows of concertina wire.

  The virtues of prison are not lost on him. He's considered the ease of a morning meal, an afternoon meal, an evening meal, an hour of exercise, a menial job. In the last months he's weighed the pleasures he could take in boundaries against the jail of his current boundlessness and found that, quarantine or full exposure, it could go either way. A thousand hours he's spent already inside this prison, nodding at the declarations of virginal innocence, the lies, the crudely fashioned alibis. He mentally calculates his clients' worth, constructing a plea bargain in his head. Then he sells them. He puts them on the block like highboys at an auction, and the young A.D.A.'s, overloaded, begging for pleas, will give what he wants, as long as it's something. But Nathan gets paid either way. In fact, he gets more for a guilty, more for the appeal, still more for the parole hearings, and then a last retainer for the inevitable parole. And then, of course, they'll be back. Out and back in through the revolving door. And then there are the friends his clients make in the clink. The calls Nathan gets in the middle of the night. They need his fluent Spanish, his sharp wit, his way with the lady judges. Always everyone is worth more in jail than out.

  When was the last time Nathan threw a curveball at a jury with an actual innocent man? His first two years out of law school, before he joined up with his father, Milton called in a favor and got his now-famous friend Sidney Frankel to take his son on. Frankel let Nathan watch him serve up witnesses through cross-examination and pound them over the net until, flinching, they were something less than their former selves. That booming voice, that six-foot-six-inch frame bearing down on you. He knew everything, he knew when you were lying and when you were telling the truth. And even the truth, Frankel had always said: Truth was just a better lie. You pick one and you dress it up with evidence and motivation and hope. You build a world around it, you found a country, identify it by what it's not: it's not a murderer, it's not a rapist, it's not a dealer. It's bad but not that bad. Who among us is as pure as the driven snow? A simple case of wrong place at the wrong time. There but by the grace of God. Otherwise it looks just like you and me. You and me. judge not lest ye be judged. And hopefully after all that a sun will rise and set and the world you have built will spin. This is how we construct our lives. There's no difference. Life is a trial. We spend our days making our case before a jury of our peers, Frankel always said. Are you innocent, Nathan? Even you, the lawyer. Are you pure, are you chaste? The juries of our lives never can know. In the end, only you are certain that you're not. But still, I'll let you convince me that you are.

  Then that was gone, lost. Frankel sent him away. Now Nathan sells off his clients at market value, usually three-to-life. Who's to say no? After all, as Frankel always said, they're all guilty of something, if not this crime then another. Nathan deposits their money then gives them away. The crestfallen parents, babbling on in their Dominican Spanish, weeping in the corridors.

  Headlights stab through the snow, speeding forward, a tail of exhaust, just as he sees again his last act as Frankel's proxy. Frankel had handed him the controls for a sentencing. A mere formality. A three-time loser with legal bills a year overdue. The atmosphere in the courtroom was unexpectant. There was no suspense. Frankel himself couldn't have cared less. Nathan can't remember now what the charge was, attempted murder, aiding and abetting, it didn't matter, there was nothing to discuss. It was going to be life at Greenhaven without parole. They were all waiting for the bailiff to bring him out of the bullpen. Nathan was chatting with the A.D.A., the judge with his clerk, the court officers amongst themselves. The stenographer was filing her nails. The bailiff swung open the door. The stenographer screamed and threw up her hands. The officers dropped to their knees and drew their revolvers. The judge ducked under the bench. Then everyone slowly stood. The officers bolstered their guns. Nathan rose off the floor. A pair of sneakers swung in the doorway, halfway up, a pair of limp, blueing hands. A bench lay on its side. Nathan didn't even know the name. He looked down at his notes: there swung one Raoul Gomez, father, husband, son, someone's brother-there's so much to be-formerly residing at 67-54 Fordham Road, the Bronx, twenty-one years old forever.

  Frankel said word had gotten around Centre Street. Everyone was talking about the young attorney who couldn't get his client to prison alive. Nathan wasn't doing enough, and there was too much reputation to lose. The next day Milton gave Nathan a set of office keys.

  The headlights swing wide then stop. They stab into the dark, run through with large flakes of snow. An old school bus, windows fitted with steel mesh. The doors fold open. The driver, seated in a cage peers down at him. His eyes wet-is it the snow? Nathan steps aboard.

  In the ward the guard leads him into a space partitioned by glass into three cubicles. A back door swings open. Two women file in. Gray flannel uniforms that look homemade. Both are young, Latina. The first, a teenager, is pregnant. She is blank, anonymous; on the streets she would be invisible. The other enters like a force that strikes him. Carefully groomed, heavily made-up, her long jet-black hair pulled off her wide forehead, her eyes chips of coal. A beauty that is at once an advantage and an impairment. Even in her uniform she seems ready for a party as yet unannounced or unplanned.

  She pinches Nathan's arm as she goes by.

  "Buenas noches, Amparo." He smiles.

  She takes in Nathan's face, apparently with pleasure. "You said six o'clock."

  "Buenas noches," Nathan says to the other, trying to summon the salesman's charm he saves for prospective clients.

  The girl ducks; her lips attempt a smile but fail.

  A guard comes up
behind them, shooing them on. The women sit in the far cubicle, Nathan in the middle, the guard nearest the door. Nathan rests a legal pad on his knees. He nods at the guard. She stands and goes out.

  When the door closes, Amparo peers over the edge of the partition into the hallway. The guard there has left her desk. The others in the booth have turned their backs. Amparo prods the pregnant girl to her feet and leads her into the next partition with Nathan. The girl's face is cut, he sees, her bottom lip swollen. Amparo and the girl sit.

  Amparo takes out cigarettes and lights one. The girl reaches for the pack but Amparo pulls it back and holds it over her head as if away from a small child or dog. She blows smoke in the girl's face.

  "Don't you know you can't smoke when you're pregnant?" The girl looks blank-faced and Amparo rolls her eyes at Nathan. "A peasant, my cousin. She's never left America but there she sits unable to speak the language."

  "She's your cousin?" Nathan asks.

  "Sorry to say." As though struck by a sudden thought, a longforgotten memory, Amparo whirls on the girl. "Jibara! Nunca tu iras de este pais, y sin embargo nunca aprenderas su lengua."

  The girl slouches in her chair, her face fixed in an expression of deep dismay.

  Crossing her legs Amparo bounces the top one as though testing the knee. "The peasant needs you. Tell Mr. Stein what happened."

  The girl speaks at the level of whisper. Her fingers flutter. "Hoy me acuchillaron por buena, al paracer no les gusta la gente feliz, hay que estar realmente loco. Fue la chica que supuestamente me iba a cuidar, ella fue la que me jodio. Era la chica que estaba supuesta ayudarme, fue la que me contuvo."

  Amparo leans forward conspiratorially. "She got cut today for being too nice. They don't like happy people here. You have to be mad, she said. She said it was the girl who was supposed to help her, she was the one who held her down. Her boss in the law library." She smokes thoughtfully, then leans and stubs out the cigarette in an aluminum ashtray and gestures vaguely in the air with one hand. "My cousin is a retarded Snow White. She didn't do nothing wrong. And her baby's coming. When, darling? Cuando nacera el bebe?"

  The girl, crying, turns away.

  Amparo shrugs. "I think next week maybe."

  "Of course," Nathan says, and taps the pencil eraser repeatedly on the paper. "Who was your lawyer at the arraignment?"

  The girl begins to speak, but Amparo interrupts her: "Herbert Harvey," she says. "Or Harvey Herbert. Siempre me olvido. Idiot. He wants her to plea to save himself the trouble, but I'm telling you she didn't know nothing about what was in that box. She was sitting in that apartment waiting for her man Arelis, who was delivering. So it's smack. So what? So it's none of her business. She's sitting filing her nails like a good girlfriend, keeping her feet up on the whatchucallit, el marco de la ventana."

  "Windowsill," Nathan suggests.

  "Windowsill. Minding her own business. A beautiful day, you know? She's listening to the radio, doing a little cha-cha out the window, rubbing her belly, talking to her baby, making it feel better about coming out into this piece of shit world. Then there's a knock on the door and it's the mailman with a box. She's expecting a box of baby stuff from the hospital so she signs for it then sits back down to make her nails nice. Then the next thing she knows her door is broken down and six cops are running around the apartment with guns."

  Half rising out of her chair, Amparo aims her fingers with thumbs cocked.

  "They got dogs. The dogs are tearing everything up. They make her lie down on the bed with her hands over her head while they empty her closets. One of them sits on the bed with her and plays with her tits, for as you see, she has very nice tits. Then they make her open the box in front of them. She thought it was baby stuff."

  "From the hospital," Nathan says.

  Amparo turns to the girl. "Que habia en la caja?"

  "Formula, panales y otras cosas."

  "Formula and diapers," Amparo explains. "It’s a free program they got."

  "What was the return address on the box?"

  Amparo waves Nathan away. "So it's Bogota." She shrugs. "The peasant doesn't read."

  "Baby supplies from Bogota," Nathan says aloud, just to hear how it will sound to the judge, maybe jury. He sighs. He puts pencil to paper. "When?"

  "Three months ago."

  Nathan looks up. "Why not bail?"

  "She can't make it," Amparo says.

  Nathan taps the pencil tip against the pad. "How much?"

  "Five hundred," Amparo says.

  "Cinco," the girl spits, thrusting five fingers at the air as if against an invisible wall.

  Nathan looks back and forth between the girl and Amparo. "She couldn't make five hundred dollars? You?"

  Amparo shrugs, as if to say, Why should I help?

  "Is Arelis the father?" Nathan asks. "Arelis es el padre del nino?"

  "Si," the girl says.

  But Amparo shrugs. "You think she knows?"

  Nathan looks at the girl a long time, as if trying to decide, or deciding whether to decide, or if any of this warrants a decision. He writes, because he thinks he should, on a random line in the middle of the legal pad: Arelis.

  Amparo leans back and the girl leans back with her. They conference quietly and Nathan drifts down a strain of music floating by in the wake of a ribbon of thought: Johnny Hartman crooning, "My One and Only Love"-

  "She don't know anything else about anybody else," Amparo says. "But someone has been here."

  The girl hands across a business card. Nathan holds it with both hands and looks at it a long time. It is Claire's. He pockets it and puts down his pencil. "Forget about this," he says. His pad of paper is blank, save Arelis, a name that floats in the middle of the yellow pad without context and without identification. The entire case. He'll sell.

  "So how is my case progressing, Mr. Stein?" Amparo says coolly.

  "I talked with Roberto tonight. He said-"

  She slumps forward on her elbows. "Is it safe?"

  "I talked with him tonight."

  She taps her chin. "Did you."

  "That's what I said. It's safe."

  "Who says? You or Roberto?" Nathan doesn't answer and she pulls hard on another cigarette and cocks a wary eye across the table at Nathan. "Because Manny thinks Roberto's out of town. So I wonder how you could have called him."

  Nathan scratches his arm. The wounds there have begun to itch in the warmth.

  "I suppose you'd tell me if this isn't true," she says.

  "Of course."

  Amparo leans back, fragile and exposed. She seems to hold this news close to her breast. "Because if you are wrong Roberto will kill me as sure as I am sitting here before you. And if I am killed I will leave orders. You will not live five minutes." She smiles broadly.

  "I talked to him," Nathan says.

  "Why don't I believe you?" Her fingers shakily turn the burning stub of her cigarette on herself. She ignites a fresh one, which leads into her mouth like a fuse, and waves it in exasperation. "You still have the money I gave you?"

  "Of course."

  Amparo pushes her hands at the air between them. "That I don't believe, but I have no choice. Tomorrow then. You make the payment tomorrow by noon and then it's all safe and you take me to a beautiful lunch. Then we go lie down in East Hampton."

  Nathan nods. "Of course. But it's cold. It's winter."

  "Winter. Of course. In here one forgets these things." Amparo smiles and leans over the table, playful now. "Now this matter of my payment. My payment to you. For your services. It's good. It's beautiful." She lifts her arms, indicating the space behind him, as though offering a tropical beach, white sand, paradise. "A Land Cruiser," she says. "Forest green. Leather everywhere I am told. It sits in your garage.

  Nathan stiffens. "My-?"

  "East Hampton. They had to move the motorcycle. Manny says it's a very nice motorcycle. He says it rides real nice. He said you have nice toys inside the house, a very nice kitchen. And the bedrooms,
he said, magnifico. That bed of yours he warned me was as big as the lawn, but you need to clean the pool."

  Nathan looks at her. He pictures the house, at the end of a cul-de-sac, hidden behind a stand of thick trees and brush. "How did they know the house?"

  Amparo laughs pleasantly. "How many times do I have to tell you that I know everything? I know you don't believe me, but I do. All of us, we all know where you live."

  Then as if to prove it Nathan's telephone chirps in his jacket pocket and Amparo points and rolls her eyes like a wife who's seen too much, who knows it is too late so who chooses not to see. "Aren't you going to answer your telephone call from your little friend?”

  “Friend?”

  Amparo taps her temple.

  The chirping ceases, the beeper vibrates. The weight of the girl's gaze blankets him, with comfort, or suffocation, with some malignant combination of the two. He unclips his beeper and holding it up to the light fingers the controls and once more brings out of its memory Serena's latest bulletin.

  "I know you went home to see her," Amparo says. Nathan looks up. "See who?"

  "Not the one who calls you."

  "Then who?"

  "The burro perra. Mujerzuela. The cunt." She smiles. "You went to that apartment where you leave her and that poor boy. This child that you have. That you keep in that small, dark place all the time alone. How kind of you, Mr. Stein. To me you should be so kind." Amparo's eyes flare with self-congratulation. "So," she says, "how is she?"

  Nathan smiles woodenly. His hand comes to rest upturned on the table, releasing what is alrea y gone.

  "She is fine."

  Amparo shakes her head, smiling meanly. She puffs her lips with spite: "She is dead." She plucks at the cuff of Nathan's sleeve. It is the arm without the cuts but Nathan gets her point. "And this," she says, "was not even your big mistake."

  The door swings open and the guard points at Amparo. "Phone call.”

  "Maybe it is Roberto," she says, and stands. But before she goes out she whispers something to the girl that Nathan cannot make out, then locks eyes with her and nods, something decided or sealed. By the time Amparo is gone the girl's eyes have located the bulge in Nathan's jacket pocket. Tears dried, instantly expert, she sweeps her head back and forth, toward the closed door, over the empty supervisor's seat, the abandoned control booth in the hallway.