by Laila Lalami
“Just a minute,” I said. I was making change for an elderly couple, both of them after-church regulars. When I was counting money, I couldn’t talk, and Baker’s interruption forced me to put the bills back in the register and start over.
“It’s double-parked. It’s taking up two spaces.” He raised his fingers in a V, as if I didn’t know what “double-parked” meant.
“Just a minute,” I said again. I counted out the change and handed it to the couple, slamming the register drawer closed with my hip. “Thank you.”
The couple stepped away, and Baker took their place. “Whose Land Rover is that?”
I craned my neck to look beyond his shoulder at the parking lot. From where I stood, I could see only an old, dusty Buick and a blue truck covered with colorful stickers. A parking spot in the corner was still open, and anyway the bowling alley never got busy until after lunch. Before I could say anything, though, he snapped, “Well? Don’t just stand there. Find out.”
I didn’t know what had set him off like this. Of course, we’d had disagreements in the past, but they’d been about serious things, like the noise during the remodeling I’d done a while back, or the smell from the sewer line that broke under the bathrooms of his arcade. Now he was upset about a parking space. His face turned pink as he glared at me, waiting for me to fix a problem I’d had no part in creating. “All right,” I said, trying to calm him down. “Let me find out.”
I picked up a pitcher of water and went to the first table—a family of four, still in hiking clothes, still smelling of campfire smoke. I refilled their glasses, asked how their chicken-fried steaks tasted, and whether they happened to drive a Land Rover. Then I moved on to the next table. But Baker wouldn’t wait, he pushed past me into the middle of the diner, all six feet of him occupying the center aisle, and in a radio announcer’s voice, he boomed, “Land Rover Defender. Gunmetal gray. Come move it now or I’ll have it towed.” Silence descended on the restaurant. Everyone looked up, but no one claimed the Land Rover. So Baker stormed out, leaving me to apologize, to bring extra crayons for the children and refill breadbaskets for the adults.
Our relationship had already become touchy, but that morning’s argument turned it raw. Now I had to be watchful about everything: what parking spaces my customers used, how long the delivery truck sat idling when it brought soft drinks, whether the cook smoked cigarettes too close to the dumpster. I had the feeling that I was being watched constantly, that the slightest misstep on my part would cause another eruption. What could I do with a neighbor like that? How could I prevent him from finding fault when fault was all he was looking for?
These questions were so unsettling that I put them aside. Maybe I was letting what happened with the Land Rover blind me. Baker and I had been neighbors for a very long time, after all, and when a freak storm three years earlier had left debris all over the street, we’d worked together to clean it up. This was just a rough patch. Besides, he was getting old, which meant that sooner or later he would have to retire. I needed to keep all this in perspective. Be patient, I told myself. Be patient. Things will get better.
Nora
The charge against Anderson Baker was formally filed on a clear morning in May, with the air still crisp from a recent thunderstorm and the mountains in the distance outlined like a woodcut print. I drove to the arraignment at the Morongo Basin Courthouse in a state of febrile anticipation that was only heightened when, passing through the metal detector, I was pulled aside for a random pat-down. It had started years ago, this experience, and it was unavoidable. It didn’t matter if it was a state-of-the-art machine at San Francisco International Airport or some rinky-dink contraption at a sports arena in Kern County, I was always pulled aside for the random pat-down. The local courthouse was no different. My mother had already gone through the process and was waiting for me on the other side. “Where’s Salma?” I asked her as we embraced.
“In clinic.”
“But this is very important. Couldn’t she have rescheduled?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can you call her? It’s only nine thirty. If she leaves now, she can still make it.”
My mother hesitated. The argument between my sister and me at the children’s school play had mortified her and she seemed reluctant to risk getting into another one here, at the courthouse. She didn’t reply. Instead, she looked at the wall screen that showed the cases on the docket that day. “There,” she said. “Baker. Courtroom M-2.”
When we walked in, the only seats left were in the last row of pews. How strange, I thought, that the courtroom had pews. They gave the gallery a patrician air, but this impression was tempered by the white grid ceiling, which would not have looked out of place in an industrial warehouse. The room was windowless and brightly lit and, although there were attorneys and bailiffs and an audience, it was eerily quiet. The judge was already at the bench, shuffling papers, waiting for one defendant to be taken out and another brought in.
The old man who sat next to me looked up suddenly as a boy in a gray T-shirt was called up on a possession charge. The boy came forward, shoulders hunched, his arms white and skinny, a look of bewilderment on his face. The charges were read, and bail was set at $5,000. Most of the cases that morning were like this. Pot. Crystal meth. Sometimes heroin. Skirmishes in the endless war on drugs. I couldn’t shake the feeling that my father’s murder was buried under a rubble of cases that properly belonged elsewhere.
It was past eleven when Anderson Baker was finally brought into the courtroom. He was so tall—six foot three, six foot four—that I had no trouble seeing him from the last row. In a white linen shirt and beige pants, he looked as though he had spent the night at a wedding in Palm Springs and was just now coming home, no worse for the wear. He turned around and scanned the courtroom, his eyes settling on someone seated in the first row across the aisle. Mrs. Baker. A tall, thin woman, all sharp edges. On her lap was a sleeping girl, perhaps three or four years old, with a full head of blond curls. A granddaughter, presumably. And next to Mrs. Baker was A.J., her son. High school star wrestler, popular kid, vicious bully. He had gotten into some college out in Orange County, I couldn’t remember which, and lived in the area. Now here he was, providing moral support to his father. On the other side of A.J. was a young brunette, probably his wife, and in the row behind her sat two middle-aged men I recognized as maintenance workers at Desert Bowling Arcade.
I began to realize how unprepared I was for this day in court. It hadn’t even occurred to me to tell anyone at my father’s restaurant about the arraignment, or to ask if they might like to come to court with us. Again, I felt a surge of irritation at my sister for not canceling her clinic appointments that morning. It was as if she were trying to send me a message: You deal with this. I’ve done enough. I knew, of course, that she was still angry about the life insurance money, but of all the ways to make a statement about it, she’d chosen the most hurtful to me, and the most damaging to the case. Because why would anyone care about a dead man if the only people present at the hearing were his wife and daughter? And how could anyone believe that someone like Baker was capable of premeditated killing when all his friends and family, the little girl and the pretty brunette included, were there for him?
Baker turned back to face the judge as the charge was read: one count of felony hit-and-run resulting in injury or death. “Do you have a lawyer, Mr. Baker?” the judge asked him.
“Caroline Perry, Your Honor.”
“Mr. Baker, how do you plead?”
“Not guilty.”
I had read somewhere that most defendants entered not guilty pleas at arraignments, so this answer was to be expected, but I worried that the presence in the courtroom of so many people who supported Baker gave additional credibility to his plea. The judge rested his chin on the heel of his hand and waited for the lawyer to speak.
“Your Honor,” Caro
line Perry began, “my client has no criminal record.” The ease with which she spoke to the judge suggested that she knew him or had argued cases before him in the past. In just a few broad strokes, she drew a flattering portrait of the man standing beside her: Anderson Baker was a business owner with strong ties to the community; he was a native of the Mojave whose family all lived within a few miles of one another; he was seventy-eight years old and had owned a home here for forty-five of those years; and he was a veteran of the Vietnam War. “Your Honor, this accident was very unfortunate, but the evidence will show that my client believed he hit a wild animal; he had no knowledge that he hit a human being. This was a tragic mistake, not a crime.”
Was this a harbinger of what would happen when the case went to trial? The jury would be hearing two stories about what happened on the night of April 28, one told by the prosecutor and one told by the defense attorney. It didn’t really matter which one was true, it only mattered which one the jury found more convincing. And I could already see that Baker’s attorney was a good storyteller. She could neither retract Baker’s confession nor deny the overwhelming physical evidence—the extent of my father’s injuries, the paint chips recovered by the forensics team, the three-foot dent on the Crown Vic. So she had chosen to focus on awareness: Baker didn’t know he had killed a man.
But a coyote weighed, what, thirty or forty pounds? How could Anderson Baker have possibly mistaken the impact of a small animal for that of a hundred-and-seventy-pound man? The case seemed so clear-cut to me that I had to swallow the protest that was rising in my throat, and wait for the prosecutor to speak.
The assistant D.A. was a small, chubby man by the name of Thomas J. Frazier (the J. stood for Jefferson). He seemed to be in his early thirties, and either new to his job or completely overworked, because he had to sort through his papers for a few excruciating minutes before he was ready to address the judge. “Your Honor, given the age of the defendant, the state is not opposed to bail.”
“All right. Bail is set at $10,000.”
I turned to my mother in disbelief. “Mom, I think that’s it. It’s over.”
“What do you mean, it’s over?”
“I mean, it’s done. He can post bail and be out before dinner.”
“He’ll be free?”
Free, yes. I buried my face in my hands. Perhaps if I had done a better job of explaining to Coleman and the D.A. the threat that Anderson Baker posed to my father, we might have seen a more serious charge. Or if Salma had come today and brought the twins with her, the outcome of the bond hearing might have been a little different. I was overwhelmed with the feeling that I had failed my father somehow. He hadn’t even been mentioned in the proceedings; the focus had been on Baker’s history and Baker’s service and Baker’s family, and so he’d received the benefit of the doubt. But if the roles had been reversed on the night of April 28, and Mohammed Driss Guerraoui had killed a man he’d been fighting with for many years, would he have been charged only with a count of hit-and-run? Would the D.A. have so readily agreed to bail? Growing up in this town, I had long ago learned that the savagery of a man named Mohammed was rarely questioned, but his humanity always had to be proven.
“We should go,” my mother said.
All around us people were shuffling in and out of seats. I stood up as if in a daze and followed my mother through the swinging doors. In spite of the air conditioning, the place felt hot. The hallway was loud and crowded and as I stepped aside to let someone through to the courtroom I found myself face to face with A.J. He looked the same as he had in high school, tall and blond, except that his face had filled out over the last ten years. In his crisp black suit and red tie, he could have passed for a businessman who had come here for a minor transgression, a traffic-ticket challenge or a hunting-permit violation, but the effect was contradicted by the presence of his mother, who carried the sleeping toddler in her arms, and the young woman who was rummaging through her purse. “A.J., honey,” she said, “I can’t find my keys.”
But A.J. didn’t hear her; he was staring at me. Then he detached himself from the group and crossed the hallway. “Nora,” he called.
Jeremy
“So what did you say?” I asked. I was leaning against the kitchen counter, watching her stir a stew in the pot. Three silver bracelets jingled on her wrist with each turn of the wooden spoon. She was still in the white blouse and gray pants she’d worn that morning to court and her hair was tied in a bun. Such a different look on her. So formal. Severe, even. I’d wanted to take her to dinner that night, but she said she wasn’t in a mood to go out, and suggested that we eat here, in the cabin.
“Nothing,” she said. “I just stood there like an idiot. I was petrified. You remember what A.J. was like.” She told me about the slur he’d written in blue marker on her locker. The principal had made him wash it off and apologize, but didn’t suspend him; the school’s wrestling team was competing that weekend.
The strange thing was that I could barely remember this particular incident; it had happened the year I’d lost my mother, when school was little more than a blur. The memories I had of Nora were from a later time. They were like little treasures I’d saved up in a box: how her skirt hiked up her legs when she sat down at the piano in music class; how she’d throw her head back and laugh when she and Sonya were at the ice-cream parlor together; that time she’d stood under my umbrella, her hair spilling over my arm while we waited for the school bus to take us to Big Bear Lake.
“And he wrote it without the second a,” she said. “He couldn’t even spell raghead.”
It was a word I’d heard nearly every day when I was in Iraq. Hell, I’d used it myself. Around the chow table that kind of talk was common. Hajji. Camel jockey. Dune coon. Ali Baba. One guy in my platoon even called Iraqis monkeys and savages. Back then I had thought of this behavior, if I’d thought of it at all, as part of the war: we had to dehumanize the enemy in order to fight it. But now, hearing her talk about the slur on her locker, I felt shame overtake me, followed by a private rebellion. This wasn’t the same thing, and I sure as hell wasn’t like A.J. “I’m sorry,” I said, touching her elbow, where the scrape from the other night had scabbed.
“I remember we had health class together once,” she said. “The teacher was talking about genital warts and A.J. said, ‘My mom gets them all the time.’ I was kind of stunned, so I turned to look at him. He pointed to the corner of his mouth. ‘She gets them right here,’ he said. I laughed—I couldn’t help it—I laughed. I said, ‘That’s not what genital means.’ After that, he hated me even more. And then a few days after 9/11, he defaced my locker.”
A memory surfaced. “He used to call me Jabba,” I said.
“Jabba?”
“Like Jabba the Hut. Because I was fat.” Even at a distance of many years, the insult still stung. I could still hear A.J.’s voice behind me in algebra class. Hohohoho Jabba Jabba.
“That’s awful,” she said. She turned the heat off and served the meat, potatoes, and carrots on a single plate.
“You’re not eating?”
“I already had something, I’m not hungry.” Carefully, she spooned the tomato sauce on top of the meat and set the plate on the table for me.
“Will you sit with me, then?”
She took the chair across from me and watched me eat. The sauce tasted familiar and yet different at the same time. I detected paprika, which I knew well enough, but also cumin, parsley, coriander. The meat was tender and came easily off the bone. “Amazing,” I said. “You’re a great cook.”
“I like your optimism.”
“Yeah?” I reached for her hand and kissed her palm.
“I didn’t make it,” she said with a smile. “I can’t cook. Not anything like this, anyway. My mom made it. I had lunch with her after the hearing and she sent me home with more food.”
“Well, it’s tasty
either way.”
She took my fork and tried some of the stew for herself. “It is amazing. She should’ve been the one who started a restaurant.” She handed me back the fork and rested her chin on her hand, once again lost in thoughts about the court hearing. “I can’t believe I just stood there, speechless, while A.J. said how sorry he was for my loss and how this was just a tragic accident. That’s what he called it, ‘tragic.’ And when he offered me his hand, I shook it. As if nothing had happened. As if he weren’t on his way to bail out his father.” Her eyes were dark and probing. With her hair wound in a tight bun like that, she could have passed for an officer of the court—a prosecutor or a defense attorney. “Meanwhile, his father is still trying to make it look like it was a random mistake. Like he just happened to run over and kill the man he’d been fighting with.”
“You really think it was murder?”
“I know it was. I know it in my bones. And now he’s out on bail. He could go out and do it all over again.”
The image of Fierro at West Valley came to me suddenly. How eager he had been to leave the jail, how he hadn’t even bothered to shake hands with me before he was out through the double doors. A strange uneasiness settled on me. I wiped my mouth with my napkin.
“You were right about Coleman, though. She’s a good cop.”