by Héctor Tobar
“Yes.” Any layperson could see it, Ruthy Bacalan thought. The shock of seeing principles of the law sullied and mocked—it was the expression on the face of every idealistic attorney after a week or two inhabiting a deputy public defender’s skin. “There is this beautiful idea. A word with Latin roots: ‘justice.’ Of course, it’s the same word in both our languages. Justicia.” These were the opening words to a little speech Ruthy Bacalan sometimes gave to undergraduate classes in the law, but never before to a client. “The justice system is like plumbing. In cases like yours, the basic problem is that there are too many defendants to fit in the system—so we lawyers use tricks to squeeze you through. Against this there is a tradition in the law that says everyone should be treated fairly. My job exists, for example, because a poor man from Florida sat down and wrote a letter to the Supreme Court, with paper and pencil. From his jail cell. Thanks to him the laws were changed so now everyone gets a public defender, gratis. A fighter like that can change the law. United States history is filled with people like that.”
“Mexican history is the same,” Araceli said.
“I imagine it is.”
“But I am not a fighter.”
“Neither am I. Not truly.”
“But I think I want to be respected. Merezco respeto. And I want to respect the rules too. The rules say you should not lie.”
Above all, the thought of pleading guilty to a delito menor and accepting the convenience of a “deal” offended Araceli’s sense of order and decorum. It only added to the sense of unraveling about her: that she was living in a metropolis where all the objects, once arranged in order, had been shuffled out of place. When you live far away, you never associate California with clutter. When Araceli was in a messy home, when the beds were not made and the dishes were left unscrubbed, she invariably felt pangs of disappointment and loss. She had been this way as a girl in Nezahualcóyotl, when her mother slipped into those seasonal depressions that kept her from working for several days at a time, once or twice a year. And she was that way as a woman living in the guesthouse on Paseo Linda Bonita. Now Araceli could see that this place called California was like a home that had fallen into a state of obsolescence and neglect, a conclusion confirmed by the fact that this idealistic woman with the pink-trimmed boots had been forced to make an absurd offer: tell a lie and you can go free. The truth had been building for a long time now—it had been there for her to see intimately in the Paseo Linda Bonita home, in the increasingly frayed interactions between Scott and Maureen, the sense that she was living with two people confused and angry with the familial roles assigned to them. She felt this same unsettled sense when she first entered the center of Los Angeles with Brandon and Keenan, when the mob confronted the councilman in Huntington Park, and when the woman of los tres strikes plotted her escape and then surrendered and wept. She wanted to take all the exhausted American people she’d seen and give them freshly starched clothes to wear, and she wanted to take all the misplaced objects and polish them and put them back where they belonged.
“These laws you have. In some ways they are pretty,” Araceli said. “But in other ways they are ugly.”
The American police would politely release you if they knew the truth of your innocence; they would not accept bribes, apparently, and they placed the property they took from the people they arrested in transparent bags for later return. And yet their courts would blackmail an innocent woman into a devi l’s bargain, just so they could keep the flow of the accused moving swiftly through their concrete buildings.
“Entonces, a pelear” Araceli said.
Ruthy Bacalan beamed. “Yes, we fight.” She explained what would happen next: the court would schedule a “mini-trial” called a preliminary hearing. “I’ll push for that quickly. If we lose that, and we likely will, we go for a full trial.”
The two women shook hands and gave each other a half embrace before leaving the room via separate doors. Araceli took a slip of paper from the guard and followed a yellow line on the concrete floor that led away from the room and twisted and turned down a labyrinth of corridors. On those few occasions when she ventured out of her cell, the expanse and openness of the county jail surprised Araceli: the prisoners shuffled back and forth without escorts, up and down the hallways and escalators, women walking with leisurely strides in groups to the cafeteria, carrying trays of food and boxes and envelopes, guided by a greasy rainbow of painted floor lines. The jail had the structured bustle of a huge office building, a weird corporation where the secretaries wore their hair in dirty strings, or shaved at the sides, and every employee dressed in a blue or a yellow jumpsuit.
She walked back to her cell block, ten minutes through a corridor maze, and remembered what she had told the deputy public defender: “I am not a fighter.” But perhaps she was. She could be a Mexican superhero wrestler, the Masked Inmate, springing into the air in her yellow jail overalls, with ankle-high pink leather boots and a purple cape trailing behind her. She gave another solitary chuckle and thought that it was nice to be able to get out of her cell and talk to Ruthy for an hour, and then to jostle through the rushing crowds of secretaries in the yellow jumpsuits who crowded the passageways.
Halfway back, just past the point where the orange line turned off toward the cafeteria, Araceli felt a jolt to the head and stumbled, tumbling through an instant of blindness. She landed facedown on the floor and regained her sight, touching yellow and blue and green lines on the cement, trying to remember which one she was supposed to follow. “Baby stealer!” someone shouted above her. “Kidnapper!” Someone kicked her in the spine as she tried to rise to her knees, sending her back to the hard coolness of the floor. Someone is trying to kill me. The inmates formed a circle around her, she could see their feet sticking out through the rubber sandals everyone had to wear, toenails freshly painted ruby and tangerine. Where do they get nail polish in here? How did I miss the dispensing of the nail polish? A whistle sounded and all the painted toenails ran away, replaced by the heavy black shoes of a guard. Araceli looked up and saw a tall uniformed and muscular Scandinavian giant with a ponytail. The guard pulled her up, but Araceli’s head wanted to stay on the ground. “Gotta get you outta here, girl,” the guard said. “Get up. Or the crowd will re-form.” Araceli’s legs wanted to give up, but the guard wouldn’t let her fall, and they started to walk back toward the cell, Araceli taking three good steps for every bad one that couldn’t support her weight, being held up by this woman with the torso of a weight lifter. “You gonna make it?” the guard asked.
“Creo que sí,” Araceli said.
They started to move forward again, the guard’s arm around Arace-li’s waist. Suddenly the guard lifted her into the air with a grunt, and all of Araceli’s thoughts were erased by the unexpected sensation of being embraced by the stout construction of the guard’s arms as she carried Araceli over the lines on the floor. Araceli wanted to coo, it felt so good, all the tension in her spine and face and the pain of the blows suddenly slipping away.
Maureen opened the front door at 4:50 in the afternoon, thinking that it was Scott, but found instead an older, heavier, and slightly darker version of her husband. John Torres carried a suitcase and wore the expression of a man forced to rescue a drowning woman too stupid to know she couldn’t swim. “It has come to my attention that you guys are kind of falling apart here,” he announced. “That’s why I’m back. And that’s why I’m gonna move in. I’m going to take that little house in the back your maid had, since I’m assuming she ain’t coming back. I’ll stay four nights a week, which is probably as much as I can take.”
Maureen opened her mouth to speak, but could not find words to resist the affront.
“I can cook. I can clean as well as anyone,” he said, with a kind of wounded determination. “And I sure as hell know how to make a bed, which is more than my son knows. I won’t do the dishes, but I can cook a pretty mean pot of beans and just about anything these kids will eat for breakfast. You can lea
ve your boys with me here and I can babysit, and you can take a break with my granddaughter, which I take it was what led to this mess anyway. And I’d say you probably need a break too, because, to be frank, you’re looking kinda worn down, daughter-in-law.” He took in her frazzled appearance with a quick up-and-down. “I know you’re not supposed to say something like that to a woman, but let’s get down to brass tacks here. You need the help. You’re wearing out like some of the guys I used to pick lettuce with. I’ll work for free. Just let me eat my own arroz con pollo is all I ask.”
El abuelo Torres disappeared into the kitchen and then into the backyard and the guesthouse. Scott found him thirty minutes later, with his head in the refrigerator.
“Dad? What’s going on?”
“I’m looking for a decent cheese to make these kids a quesadilla. That’s something I know they’ll eat for dinner.”
Scott walked away, feeling he had entered a nightmare in which he sleepwalked through scenes from his childhood, the past returning with an eerie and familiar sense of doomed domesticity.
“My father is cooking dinner?” Scott asked Maureen in the living room.
“And living with us.”
“In this house?”
“In the guesthouse, yes.”
“Why?”
“Not my idea.”
“Can we make him leave?”
“I suppose we could,” Maureen said. She took in the smell of melting cheese wafting in from the kitchen. “But can we afford to?”
After serving his grandsons and granddaughter a dinner of quesadillas and sliced apples, with the boys grinning at him and calling out, “Can we have another one, Grandpa?” the elder Torres returned to the silver range. He prepared baked potatoes and chicken thighs spiced with tarragon, the kind of simple but hearty meal you might get at a diner, and slid it across the kitchen table to his son and daughter-in-law.
“Enjoy,” he said flatly.
“Thank you,” Maureen answered weakly.
When they were finished he left the dishes in the sink for Maureen and went out in the backyard and grabbed one of the footballs and yelled out to Brandon, “Go long.” After a few tosses Keenan joined them and they played catch for thirty minutes, until the elder Torres began to cough and he plopped down on the grass and said, “Let’s sit down and take a rest and look at this pretty desert we’ve got growing here.”
Grandfather and grandsons admired the stiff petals of the prickly pear cactus, the spiny yuccas, and held very still when they saw a crow perch itself on top of the ocotillo. It turned its head side to side to examine the humans below with each of its eyes.
“Damn, that’s pretty,” the elder Torres said. “It’s been a long time since I seen the desert like this. Grew up in the desert, you know.”
Brandon sensed his grandfather was drawn to the cactus in some profoundly adult and emotional way, and he half heard and half imagined a cowboy twang in his speech. Perhaps he was a south-of-the-border cowboy like the venal gunslinger with a Mexican accent in that spaghetti western Brandon watched with his father once, until the cowboys started cussing and his father told him he had to leave.
“Is this what Mexico looks like?” Brandon asked.
“Wouldn’t know. I’m from Yuma, in Arizona.” The elder Torres looked at his grandchildren, saw their expression of innocent confusion, and allowed his natural defensiveness to slip away. “My father was from Chihuahua. I was born there, but it’s been a long time. I suppose it probably still looks like this.”
“Are we Mexican?”
“Just a quarter. By me, I guess.”
“Only a quarter?” Keenan said. He thought about the math lessons at the end of second grade, and did not understand how a human being could be divided into fractions. One-quarter, two-thirds, three-eighths. Were his bones and muscles split into Mexican parts and American parts? Could his greenish-brown pupils have a quarter Mexican pie slice, two American pie slices, and an Irish pie slice, and if he looked in the mirror with a magnifying glass, could he see the slices and tell them apart?
“Yeah,” their grandfather said. “Just a quarter.”
“Is less Mexican better than more?”
“Don’t know. Some people think it is. These days, though, I ain’t so sure.”
At 8:45 p.m. the elder Torres retired to the guesthouse, and by 9:15, when Maureen entered the kitchen to make herself some tea, she could hear him snoring, a faint animal rumbling of stubborn helplessness squeezing through the two walls that separated them.
The next morning he awoke at 6:00 a.m., entered the kitchen, and made his son a ham, tomato, and cheese omelet for breakfast. When Scott had finished eating, his father gave him an order.
“Do me a favor and scrub out a couple of toilets before you leave for the day.”
“What?”
“Listen. Your wife is allergic to the toilet bowls, and I’m gonna have a lot on my plate today.”
“But I’m going to work. I’ll be late.”
“I thought you were the boss there.”
Twenty minutes later the elder Torres found his son on his hands and knees in one of the home’s four bathrooms, attacking the porcelain with a scrubber.
“Man, this is gross,” Scott said.
“You’ve got two boys. What did you expect?”
Scott rose to his feet, lowered the toilet cover to sit, and took a break, studying the sink and the tub, both of which were awaiting his attentions.
“Did Araceli really do all of this? By herself?” Scott asked. He looked at his hands, which smelled of bleach. “You made breakfast, and dinner last night. Maureen’s doing the baby’s laundry. I’m cleaning the fucking toilets. I can’t believe that one woman did all of these things.”
“Yeah,” the elder Torres said. “And she did them well.” He examined his son’s work on the toilet, and added, “Don’t forget to scrub down on the sides. You need to get back down on your hands and knees to do it right.”
For the next few days Scott and Maureen remembered Araceli in their muscles, and in their wrinkled and bleached hands, until the tasks became familiar and routine and her prominent place in their memories began to fade, very slightly.
23
“Somebody paid your bail.” The guard named Nansen, who had carried Araceli to safety just yesterday, looked a little disappointed. “Ten grand, paid in full.” Araceli walked through the jail corridors for what she hoped was the last time, trying to imagine who her benefactor might be—a man, a tall man, a gringo? Would his act of kindness present additional complications? After her clothes were returned to her at the Inmate Reception Center, she walked through one last set of doors into a room where the guards didn’t care about her anymore, a waiting area with plastic chairs and the feel of a seedy bus station. Standing in the middle of the room, with the lost look of a passenger who had missed his connection, was a thin, white-haired, and pale man of about fifty with ruddy, cratered skin, in a brown tweed jacket and a white cotton dress shirt that dangled over the top of his jeans.
The attorney opened his arms in greeting. “Araceli! I’ve been here for over an hour. I’m Mitchell Glass. From the South Coast Immigrant Coalition,” he said. “We paid your bail.”
“Why?” Araceli realized, of course, that she should say thank you, but her need to understand what was happening outweighed any pretense. There was a moment of awkward silence while Glass considered the question.
He explained, in slow and condescending English that sped up and was less condescending after Araceli frowned at him, that the coalition had received the funds to free Araceli from a group called the Immigrant Daylight Project, a large circle of benevolent and open-minded people from Manhattan, Austin, Santa Monica, Cambridge, and many other places. “Usually they pay bail for people who are in immigration detention. So they can get out and live among free people while they appeal the verdict. Out of the shadows and into the daylight. Get it? The directors thought that, given the attention to your case,
they would pay your bail too. Plus, it wasn’t a huge amount.”
“¿Y qué tengo que hacer?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Glass said. “These people just want you to be free while you fight your case.”
Araceli did not know it, but not long after her second arrest the Daylight Project had sent off a flurry of emails and posted letters calling on its members to “help throw a wrench in the prison-industrial complex” by “emancipating Araceli N. Ramirez, the latest member of the fastest growing sector of the incarcerated population”—undocumented immigrants. The group’s fund-raising literature was a bit heavy-handed with its use of slavery metaphors, and included broken chains on its logo and references to the Underground Railroad in its brochures. But they dealt almost exclusively with those in federal detention and their decision to pay Araceli’s bail caught Ian Goller and his office completely by surprise. It had been ages since the Orange County District Attorney’s Office had a defendant whose fate worried faraway liberal crusaders. Generally speaking, alien inmates without family members on the outside stayed inside the big house, there was no habeas corpus for them, no writs, no appeals, no purchased freedom.
For the moment, however, Araceli was a happy and unlikely beneficiary of the Bill of Rights, as free of overbearing authorities as the New Englanders who stood up to King George, a startling fact which she confirmed by scanning the street and the parked cars as she walked toward the jail’s parking lot. No one is following me. Qué milagro. The sun is shining on my face. Daylight. She wanted to ask about her public defender, but instead Glass told her something about a “rally.”
“What?”
“We’re going to a little meeting,” he said as they entered his car. “Your case inspired us to organize this.”
