Bad Intent

by Wendy Hornsby

  I was at least two weeks behind on my filming schedule, and with the workload I faced, I knew I was going to fall back another week or two before I finished. I needed help. My knight, as far as work goes, is Guido Patrini, associate professor of film, UCLA.

  It was just past three o’clock when I finally found Guido on campus—in a computer lab, begging time from a techno-nerd who had a plastic pocket protector pinned to his tee shirt.

  “You’re early,” Guido said to me.

  “I was supposed to be here yesterday,” I said.

  “So.” He pointed an accusing finger at me. “You did remember.”

  I sighed and Guido put his arm around me. It felt so good to have someone hold me up that I let my head rest on his bony shoulder. Guido is about my height, maybe five-seven, a spare frame of a man strung together with sinew. Even his curly black hair seems to have muscle. I think he may be my best friend in the world.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m feeling overwhelmed.”

  “Not working out with Mike?” I heard some eagerness in his tone.

  “We’re fine, Guido. There is just too much going on in my life right now to keep track of everything.”

  “Bet he’s a handful.”

  “So are you. Show me what you have.”

  We shambled arm in arm across the quiet, shady campus back to his trailer behind the fine arts building where special film projects had been relegated after the last earthquake.

  As he opened the trailer door, he said, “It’s a good thing you didn’t come yesterday, because I didn’t have anything for you except a lame excuse. I recut Mrs. Ruiz this morning, dumped all that footage from the visitor room at the jail. I like it now.”

  The trailer was cool inside. The fall quarter had not yet begun so the usual mass of puppy-eager film students Guido normally has en train were blessedly absent. It was nice to have Guido all to myself for a change.

  I took a bottle of mineral water from the film refrigerator and sat down next to him on a saggy reject of a sofa. He punched a TV monitor remote and Serafina Ruiz’s profile filled the screen: broad nose, high cheekbones, straight black hair pulled into a ponytail.

  “He is a good boy,” she was saying, tears filling her dark eyes before she looked down at the beads in her hand.

  Guido had pulled the camera back for a two-shot to include my filmed reaction in the frame. Visually, the scene was good. Behind us the windows of the Lincoln Heights jail, just out of focus, were a fuzzy, pale checkerboard of barricaded windows. It was good neutral, angular contrast to Mrs. Ruiz’s round contours, my blue shirt.

  Below camera I held the sheaf of booking slips she had given me to look over, a collection that chronicled her son’s activities from the time he was twelve. She kept the booking slips in a kitchen drawer with her market coupons.

  “Mrs. Ruiz,” I said, “when did your son Arnulfo join the Eighteenth Street gang set?”

  “He don’t belong to no gang. I made Arnulfo promise me he would stay away from those boys. Gangbangers killed his brother.”

  I fast-forwarded through the tape, all the stuff about how Arnulfo the altar boy had just refound Jesus and turned his life around and was planning to go back to school. The kid was holy all right. A holy terror. I heard the same story of impending redemption from every delinquent’s mother I talked to.

  Close in on the booking slips, my voice reading through them chronologically:

  “Age twelve, arrested for curfew violation, out after ten P.M. unsupervised. Malicious mischief, vandalizing public property. Auto theft—joy riding. Possession of a concealed weapon—a knife. Minor in possession of a firearm. Age thirteen, truancy, assault, armed robbery.”

  I turned off the tape.

  “What?” Guido sat up. “You don’t like it? I think it plays tight.”

  “Yeah. It’s tight. It’s great.” I pulled my knees up under my chin and looked at the blank screen as if it might hold some answers to questions that eluded me. It hurt even to think what I was thinking.

  “I know how you feel.” Guido put his hot hand on my knee and looked soulfully into my face. “It is awesome, Maggie. Deep. You’ve made a beautiful, sympathetic portrait of this woman. My God, what she has lived through will make every heart bleed.”

  I put my hand over his. “If that’s what you’re getting, then I’ve lied to you.”

  “Lied?”

  “Lied. I have tried, Guido, really tried, but I can’t find a lot of sympathy for Serafina Ruiz. She has one kid in jail, another one’s dead. Her thirteen-year-old daughter is pregnant for the second time. Her youngest is a paraplegic because he ran into the street and got hit by a car—at eleven o’clock at night. Tell me what a toddler was doing out, unsupervised, so late.”

  “Hard times,” Guido said, black eyes narrowed at me, warning me there was a correctitude barrier I was about to cross. “Serafina shoulders a heavy load all by herself. It’s a rough neighborhood. Give her credit; she does her best.”

  “Really?” I said, challenging him. “Serafina can’t take care of what she already has, but she’s pregnant again. I think her kids should sue her.”

  “Maggie?” He was aghast. “Are you in there? Have aliens taken over your mind? Have they done something evil to my hero?”

  “I feel taken over. I have listened to so many horror stories.” I got up to pace around the cluttered trailer, tripping over cords and equipment, miscellaneous battered, black-painted stuff. It was all so familiar, my work milieu. The sort of place that had helped me create the big video lie.

  I stopped in front of Guido and narrowed my eyes in imitation of him. “Guido, my friend, I offer you a profundity, a cliche: There is nothing easier than bringing a child into the world, and nothing more difficult than raising it well. Trust me. I have one child, and it’s all I can do to keep her safe, keep her on the straight and narrow, because that straight and narrow line is as treacherous and as slender as the edge of a razor. Every day we get through safely I say a little thank you to the fates. And believe me, if it weren’t for all my efforts, and Mike’s, and ballet giving her structure and direction and keeping her occupied, I know we would be in one hell of a mess.”

  “You think Serafina should have had one child, like you? Should have had nice middle-class parents and a white-bread education, like you?”

  “I think Serafina should have figured out what turned her kids into thieves and murderers, and fixed it. She sheds good tears, Guido. And she breaks my heart. But it takes a hell of a lot more than tears to take care of her children and herself. We are not powerless.”

  “I see,” he said.

  “Do you?”

  “Yeah. I see that my old friend needs some time off. The last two, three years you’ve been working too hard, Mag. Why don’t you put this one aside for a while? Take a break, give yourself a couple of months to settle in, get your perspective tuned up. You’re beginning to sound like that cop you’re living with.”

  “I’m on deadline, Guido. No film, no check. No check, no groceries.”

  “So?” He looked at me, exasperation giving his olive cheeks color. “Now what?”

  “Define the fine line.” I found my bag on the floor and took out Etta’s tape, traded it for Serafina’s in the player, and sat down on the edge of the sofa beside Guido.

  “It is my perception,” I said, “that in postapocalypse Los Angeles, gangs are used as a symbol for everything that has gone to shit. Let’s be careful not to hang the gang rap on their mothers. We’ll tone down Serafina—she is so passive—get more from Etta Harkness and women like her. You’ll see why when you meet Etta.”

  “Good Housekeeping mother of the year, huh?”

  “No. Just one ballsy lady. You’ll like her.”

  Chapter 5

  The freeway was a shimmering, blazing hot nightmare. The heat seemed to have endowed everyone on the freeway with a hair trigger and, worst of all, my car air conditioner was out. I hadn’t had it serviced for three
years.

  In Northern California where I live—rather, used to live—fluorocarbon coolants are sufficiently environmentally incorrect to make using air-conditioning on the rare hot day a matter for public scorn. Truth is, I never remembered to get the damn thing fixed.

  I drove up the 405 and over the Sepulveda Pass into the Valley in bumper-to-bumper spurts of speed and fast stops. A trip that should have taken no more than fifteen minutes stretched well beyond an hour. I hadn’t yet learned how to gear my life’s schedules around rush hour, the way the natives do; everyone who doesn’t have to be on the road hides out until the worst is over.

  By the time I pulled in under the branches of the eucalyptus sheltering Mike’s condo complex, I was desperate for quiet, a cool bath, a place to lay my head.

  Mike had bought the condo with wife number two, Charlene, the decorator. She had turned it into something worthy of a magazine layout before the reality of being a cop’s wife got to her. The carpet was dull silver gray and there were only two bedrooms to accommodate four of us.

  Though the condo was on the good side, the south side, of Ventura Boulevard, it wasn’t far enough on the good side to be up in the hills where there might be a consistent ocean breeze, some view. There were other reasons I didn’t like living there, beyond location, smog, and dull gray carpet. I’m not a jealous person by nature, but I felt there was entirely too much of Charlene in that condo.

  Our newly combined households had three cars but only a two-car garage. I was last one in for the day, so I had to go find a slot in guest parking and hike back through the landscaping. I didn’t mind, because once I had parked I was more or less home. Santa Ana wind whipping through the trees was nice, the pool filter gurgled pleasantly. I could count the steps until I was inside, count off the seconds before I was running a tub and washing the outside world away.

  Already feeling better, I opened the front door. A blast of noise as wild as the heat outside hit me full face. Headbanger music cranked up on the living room CD, an electric drill somewhere, and Bowser, our dog, all competed for air space. For a second I couldn’t decide whether to go in or not. In the end, I steeled myself and walked out of the frying pan and into the fray.

  The music was so loud I could feel the bass through the soles of my Reeboks and the treble in my fillings. Michael, Mike’s college-freshman son, sat sprawled on the living room floor surrounded by his new textbooks and a litter of schedules and course syllabi he was organizing into notebooks. When he looked up at me the smile he gave was absolutely beatific he seemed so happy.

  “How was the first day?” I screamed.

  “Hot,” he yelled back. “Effin’ hot.”

  “Got all your classes?”

  “All but one. Had to petition it.”

  He was on a new threshold and eager to leap through. I loved his enthusiasm as much as I hated his music. I fairly itched to smash the CD with my heavy bag, but I gave Michael the best smile I could muster—he was someone else’s son—covered my ears with both hands, and fled toward the far reaches of the condo.

  I found no relief when I opened the door into the long hall that runs between the bedrooms. The dog was shut away behind a bedroom door, howling to cover the noise of the drill in Mike the Elder’s hand. I nearly tripped over the drill cord.

  Mike and my daughter, Casey, were affixing an eight-footlong hardwood ballet exercise barre to the hall wall. I believe Casey was supposed to be holding up her end of the barre so Mike could see where to drill holes into the wall studs for the heavy support bolts. But Casey was using the barre as she held it, stretching out one spidery-long ballerina leg, then the other. Mike, with a pencil in his mouth, was trying to yell something at her that she couldn’t hear over the combined din of CD, drill, and dog. Maybe that was safer—for him, she was someone else’s child.

  On my way past, I gave her rock-hard rump a sharp tap. “Hi, Ma,” she shouted. “Don’t you love this?”

  “Are you helping?” I asked.

  Casey looked over at Mike, saw the grimace he tried to transmogrify into a smile, and straightened right up. “Sorry,” she said, chagrined, and planted both skinny feet on the floor again so she could hold the barre firmly on its marks.

  Mike had full hands, barre in one, drill in the other. My captive, at last. I had to mess with him because there was nothing he could do about it. I gave his rump some attention, too—more like the squeeze test I give melons at the market than the tap I had given Casey. Mike rolled his eyes to let me know he liked it. I pressed up behind him and kissed the soft, short hairs at the back of his neck until he broke out in goose bumps. He turned off the drill, lost the pencil between his teeth, and gave me his face to kiss. I obliged.

  “Hi, baby. Almost finished here,” he said, turning the drill back on. I gave him another pat and went to tend to Bowser before his anguish did some real damage to the far side of the bedroom door.

  I opened the door slowly to keep Bowser from bounding out and getting involved with the drill or romping through Michael’s books. He let me know he was happy to see me, but Old Bowse weighs over fifty pounds and he made it difficult to get in through the door. When I managed to squeeze into the room, in his glee, he nearly knocked me over.

  I thought his eyes still looked a little glassy from the tranquilizers he had taken for his flight down from San Francisco the day before, but his energy had returned sufficiently for him to have thoroughly trashed the room. Shoes, clothes, pillows, freshly laundered bath towels covered the floor. Maybe he didn’t like the gray carpet, either.

  Seeing me made him stop barking. In appreciation, I got down on the floor and let him nuzzle me, rolled him over and rubbed the long fur on his belly. He smelled like the Giorgio bubble bath I had left beside the tub. I didn’t want to go into the adjoining bathroom to confirm what I suspected.

  Suddenly, the drilling stopped. Mike shouted something and, miraculously, the music disappeared, too. It took a moment for the last reverberations to ripple through the air before blessed silence was restored. But it came.

  Bowser growled once, looked around as if he had lost something, then he sighed big time for both of us. He hardly looked up when Mike and Casey came into the room.

  “All finished?” I asked.

  “All finished,” Mike said.

  “It’s perfect, Mike.” Casey made a slow pirouette. “Thanks.”

  “No problem. Just stop growing, will you? I don’t want to have to raise the sucker.”

  “I wish,” she said. At five-eleven, she was only three inches shorter than Mike. “Can we take it with us when we move?” Mike groaned.

  Bowser got up, routed through the rubble on the floor until he found his leash, which he dragged over to Casey.

  “Want a walk, old man?” she asked him. “Want to go see if that little schnauzer is down by the pool?”

  Walk was the dog’s operative word. Bowser danced around Casey until she managed to hook the leash to his collar. They left the room in a flurry of expectant yelps and slobbery glee and long-leggedjetes.

  Mike closed the door behind them.

  “What a day,” he said, lying down on the floor beside me. “You look pale.”

  “I feel a little pale. It’s the heat.”

  “You’re just worn out,” he said. “Moving is a lot of work.”

  I yawned. “Thanks for introducing me to Etta. I made a little extra pocket change off her interview. I sold a piece of it to Satellite Network News.”

  “You gave Etta a split, of course.”

  “That’s not the way it works, Mike. I own all rights to Etta’s video image.”

  “Doesn’t seem fair.”

  “If I gave her any money she’d have to report it, then the Department of Social Services would screw around with her welfare benefits for months. I’ll find another way to compensate her. Okay?”

  “See that you do.” He had a wry grin. “Etta and I go back a long way. Did you talk to LaShonda and Hanna?”

 
; “I haven’t a clue where to find Hanna, and LaShonda is lost somewhere in the county library system.”

  “But you’re pursuing them?”

  “Uh huh.” I yawned. “Still have your job?”

  “For another two years.”

  “I saw Marovich’s campaign manager this afternoon. He says this case is a ‘good issue’. What is it exactly the D.A. says you did?”

  “Says we coerced some witnesses to identify a murderer, tainted the conviction.”

  “Did you do it? Little rubber hose action on the witnesses?”

  “The witnesses were ten- or eleven-year-old kids. And I told you this morning, it was a good case.”

  “That’s what you said.” I yawned again.

  “Better put you to bed early tonight.”

  “Good. A bath. Food. To bed.” I rolled over on my side and stroked his cheek. “But what if I have other things in mind than sleeping?”

  “You usually do.”

  It was just getting interesting there on the floor when the telephone rang, the beige one, the separate line Mike keeps for calls from Parker Center. Nine times out of ten, when that phone rings Mike has to put on his tie and go off to work. I hate that phone.

  When the ringing started, Mike tried not to react too quickly, and I didn’t let him go. We were at home, finally. Alone, finally. Whatever it was could wait, I was sure.

  By the third ring I had lost him—I could feel him growing more tense—so I rolled away, grabbed the phone, and passed it to him. He had the grace to mutter, “Damn,” before he accepted the call.

  The call was just one more aggravation at the end of an altogether annoying day. I wanted a long walk on the beach until I figured that would mean another hour on the freeway. So, I went in to start the tub.

  Bowser had trashed the bathroom, too. I left the rubble to be cleaned up later, except for wadding up great lengths of toilet paper streamers because they tangled underfoot.

  I turned on the water, scooped up a handful of spilled bubble bath from the floor, and dumped it under the running tap. Just about the time the bubbles crested the top of the tub, Mike came in, looking grim. As he stood there watching me undress, his expression only grew blacker.