Verdict in the Desert

by Patricia Santos Marcantonio

  “I can still beat anyone you send against me.” Michael sat back in the booth.

  “Nothing so sad as a washed-up criminal lawyer.”

  “You tried one murder case and the guy confessed right after the voir dire. When I had your job, I took five to trial.” Michael said this, not so much to rib Adam, but to remind himself of what he had accomplished. His friend usually brought out the worst of his fake bravado.

  “I’ve heard those stories before, Mike. Never lost a case. Now you’re Mr. Private Practice and making lots of dough in daddy’s office way up in the bank building, among the vultures. Time to work for the little people.”

  Michael finished the third glass of water. “Hey, before I got that nice office, I worked for peanuts at the courthouse. That was damn well for the people, by the people and of the people.” A smile broke his face. “I told my father I’d build character at the prosecutor’s office. Too bad it didn’t work.”

  “That’s for damn sure.”

  “What can you tell me about this case?”

  “Not much. Some Mexican gal whacked her white husband real good. A few jabs with the knife, then one right in the chest. She even left the handle sticking out. Yech. But listen, Mikey, you won’t even have to soil your manicured hands on this one. It’s open and shut.”

  “Good.”

  “I mean for us.” Adam snickered again. “I got work to do.” He slid out of the booth, picked up his check and gave it to Michael.

  “Still playing ball on Sunday?”

  “If you can get it up by then.” Adam began to leave and then wheeled back toward Michael as he unfolded his wallet. “Oh, and about your new client.”

  “What?”

  Adam took on an embellished Mexican accent. “She don spika dee Inglis too gooda, sinior.” He brushed his hand over the crew cut.

  Michael’s headache reappeared like a shovel against his temples.

  5

  SITTING IN A BLACK LEATHER CHAIR, Toni counted the long hairs Vance Johnson had combed over his glossy head. Her shoes were pushed together, and her hands rested on her lap. Her long hair had been pulled back into a bun. She had made the right choice with the dark suit that was bleak as a dry riverbed. When she left the house earlier that morning her father had told her she looked ten years older.

  “Good,” she had replied. “That’s what I’m going for.”

  The principal of Washington Elementary School was reading Toni’s application. His chest idled like an old motor. Ever since she entered his office, he had avoided her eyes. Even when he shook her hand, his eyes fixed on the playground outside the window or on the top of her head. As he read, his pug nose followed the lines on the paper, and he absently reshuffled the letters of recommendation from her college instructors. He pulled tissue out from his desk drawer and blew as if gray brain matter were a casualty. She jumped at the noise.

  Finally, Vance Johnson spoke up. “Miss García.”

  “Yes.” She gripped her hands more tightly on her lap.

  The pronunciation of her name got caught in his throat like a piece of lettuce. Toni didn’t want to correct him, at least not before she had a job. She didn’t have to wait long.

  “I’m sorry, we don’t have any teaching positions for you, and I’m not sure when we’ll have an opening.”

  With difficulty, she scooted up a little on the chair. “Should a position come up, I’m more than qualified. I graduated with honors and had a teaching job in Phoenix lined up, but I had to come home for family reasons.”

  “That’s nice.” Johnson’s eyes went to the playground again.

  From his indifferent manner, Toni could tell he didn’t care a damn about why she had come back to town.

  “Miss García, I do commend you for completing college. That is quite an accomplishment.”

  For a Mexican, she mentally filled in the rest.

  He finally looked her in the eye. “We could always use help in the school cafeteria. It’s good pay. And I see you worked in the cafeteria at your college.”

  “How about substitute teaching?”

  “We’ll call you.”

  Toni stood up and held out her hand. He barely brushed her fingertips. “I’ll wait for a teaching job, Mr. Johnson.”

  He handed her the papers. “You’re very welcome to try, but we may not have anything for a while.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “That’s nice.”

  Toni shut his door and stood outside, not releasing the handle. Anger and frustration held her in place.

  “Feeling okay, hon?” Johnson’s secretary asked.

  “What?” Toni said sharply.

  “You’re flushed. The heat bothering you?”

  Toni’s mood diminished with the woman’s concern. “I’m fine. Thanks for asking.”

  “Well, be careful outside, hon. This summer sun is enough to fry your noggin’.” The woman flaunted all her teeth when she smiled.

  “I will.”

  About half a block from the school office, Toni took off her suit jacket. Her white blouse, once crisp from ironing, had become soggy tissue. She ambled to the bus stop. Last week, her car’s transmission had gone. Her mechanic cousin Juan promised to fix it for free if she paid for a new part. She refused to let her father buy one. When he got mad, she reminded him of how he taught her to stand on her own. He still sneaked a little money into her purse, but she had to find a job to pay the rest.

  When the bus arrived, Toni took a seat in the middle. An elderly Mexican couple boarded at the next stop and gravitated to the back, while two white teenage girls sat right up front. She had applied to every elementary school in Borden and gotten rejected by all the Vance Johnsons. Toni opened her folder and reread the letters of recommendation from professors, all describing Antonia García as a good student who’d make an excellent teacher. She closed the folder. Some future, working in a school cafeteria, serving hash and macaroni and cheese. She should have accepted the job for the money but didn’t want Vance Johnson to have the satisfaction of seeing her take something less. Although aggravated at the rejection, she was more disappointed in herself. She should have reminded Vance Johnson there was not one Mexican-American teacher at a school filled with Mexican-American students. She should have told him how hard she would work and how she could make a difference in the classroom.

  Should have, would have, could have.

  Toni acknowledged her habit of thinking up speeches after the fact and when it was too late to do any good. The only time she had ever spoken up was to Mrs. Larson, the high school counselor. Toni wanted to apply for a scholarship to Arizona State and asked the counselor for help. Mrs. Larson called college difficult and expensive. Toni would be better off as a secretary or clerk or maybe a hair dresser. All during the conversation, Mrs. Larson spoke in an encouraging tone, which stung like a wet hand across the face.

  At that point, Toni had had enough of the Mrs. Larsons in school and out. She stood up and grabbed her books. “I’m a straight A student and I’m going to be a teacher with or without you.”

  Mrs. Larson’s mouth didn’t close as Toni shut the door. She eventually found a teacher who gave her the help and recommendation she needed and got a scholarship. After all that, she still rode on a city bus, with no teaching job and no car. Less than ten years earlier, Arizona schools had segregated Mexican kids, like the Negroes in the South. What she really had hoped for was change and a little grace.

  Lighting a cigarette, she pulled a piece of paper from her purse that reminded her to be at the county jail at ten the next day. She was scheduled to interpret for a woman accused of murder.

  Toni had had no trouble getting the interpreter job, which wasn’t even full-time or a county job at all, as it turned out. She was regarded as contracted help who would translate for criminal defendants who couldn’t speak English. The county paid five dollars and fifty cents per day, unless the defendants had money. Then, they had to pay. To the county’s chagrin, how
ever, few of them could afford the cost. That’s what a clerk had told her after Toni found the job advertisement in the newspaper.

  Last week, Toni’s only assignment was translating for a frightened young man who had illegally crossed from Mexico. He stole a car in hopes of heading to California to get a good job and send money to his parents in Hermosillo. When Toni entered the holding room in the jail, she stood taller than him in her heels. His delicate features were cast in dark skin, and his hair was black as a crown of evening. She could see him as an Aztec warrior greeting Cortez with awe and violence. She and her family called themselves “Mexicans” more than “Americans,” but they were distant from that country by a generation or two. The young man made her feel as if she had met her own ancestor and witnessed how far apart they had traveled from each other.

  The young Mexican held his eyes to the floor as she told him about the criminal charge. After the needed translations, he asked about her hometown in Mexico. She replied that she was born right there in Borden, Arizona, USA.

  “¿Norteamericana?”

  “Sí.”

  He shook his head soulfully as if he had been deceived by his own people.

  On the hot bus, perspiration slid down Toni’s back. “A shitty day,” she said, but no one heard her above the rumble of the engine.

  Four blocks from her house, Toni stepped off the bus and onto a street full of children. They stomped barefoot through water sprouting from hoses and skipped in muddy puddles. Boys played baseball in the shaded street, calling time out for passing cars. A group of girls sat on porches and primped their blond dolls, made bald from continual combing. Other girls scooped up jacks, their eyes on the darting ball. Nearby, more boys hovered over marbles. They bragged over aggies as if they were jewels. On the sidewalk, larger boys tossed firecrackers left over from the Fourth of July. Their happiness forced Toni to smile, which she welcomed.

  Pulling out her handkerchief, Toni wiped her forehead and neck. A little ways longer to her house, then a bath and nap, a luxury of the mostly unemployed. Her Ford rested in peace in the street, but her father’s truck was gone.

  Cooled by paloverde trees, the neat white house had dark blue trim, which were colors her mother had picked out. The two-bedroom house appeared smaller than when she was a child, as most things did. Out front stood a small statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe surrounded by a carpet of purple pansies. Everyone envied Francisco’s green thumb, with his peonies the size of baseballs and fruit trees drooping with apples and pears. Each year, chilies, tomatillos, tomatoes and corn flourished in a large garden out back, and he would spread the ripened bounty among neighbors and relatives. As a kid, Toni had accompanied him on his rounds, carrying paper bags of vegetables and fruit for a young family living across the alley or the widow down the block, among others. She had waited patiently as her father visited at length with each and every one of them.

  “Toni, Toni.” Her Aunt Lucille ran from her house a few doors up the street.

  “Hi, Auntie. You shouldn’t run in this heat.”

  “I saw you go past my window. I called and called and you didn’t even hear me.” The thin woman wiped her face with a dishcloth.

  Toni bent down and kissed her mother’s older sister on the forehead. Delicate as the doilies she crocheted, her aunt spoke perfect Spanish, not the slang that peppered the language of North Park, the part of Borden prominently made up of Mexicans. Despite the heat, the older woman walked fast. Often, Toni felt dwarfed by her stamina. Her aunt had lost a sister, a husband and a son within twelve years of one another, but the loss only made her more determined to live.

  “Come inside, Auntie.”

  “No, I gotta get back and finish my chicken enchiladas. I wanted to tell you I’ll bring some over. I made too much. You know me. I cooked enough for an army.”

  “Gracias, Auntie.”

  Lucille’s feet already started to move. “See you later.”

  Whistling in admiration at her aunt’s ability to deal with the heat, Toni headed to the backyard.

  Instead of buying a house as they had planned, Carmen and Víctor came up short of money for a down payment and asked to stay in her and Toni’s old bedroom. Toni was prepared to sleep on the couch in the living room after moving back home. But her father presented her with the keys to the garage, which stood at the back of their long yard, near the alley. Francisco and Víctor had cleaned it out, painted it and added a kitchen sink, toilet and bathtub, turning the garage into a smaller version of home.

  Toni had insisted Carmen and Víctor take the little house, but her sister, who could be as stubborn as their father, told Toni she was the oldest and deserved it. Toni believed the little house was a consolation prize because she didn’t have a husband, and Carmen felt a little guilty about that.

  Nevertheless, Toni gladly accepted.

  Her little house. She loved the words. She had her own place for the books, records and other furnishings she had brought from the studio apartment in Phoenix. She could enjoy her jazz records, which her father didn’t like, and read into the middle of the night, as she did as a kid.

  About to open the gate to the backyard, Toni paused at the sight of Mrs. Sonia Hernández hanging wash next door. The woman reached on toes to hang sheets on the clothesline in the middle of her yard. Fortunately, she had her back to Toni, who took off her shoes in hopes of slipping by the woman. It was only a hope.

  Mrs. Hernández had the radar abilities of NORAD, as Toni and Carmen had learned when they tried to sneak home late during a school night. Mrs. Hernández had spied them through her window at the moment they thought they had succeeded. The next day, the neighbor happened to mention to their mother, Maricela, what time the girls snuck in. Their mother pretended to be stern as the neighbor passed on the information, but she didn’t punish her or Carmen too harshly because she didn’t like Mrs. Hernández. In fact, their mother made them laugh by accusing Mrs. Hernández of being a bruja, a witch who made everything go wrong in the neighborhood simply by talking about it. If a chicken died, if a car didn’t start, if their dad farted a lot, they’d blame Mrs. Hernández’s evil eye. The kind of woman who wanted to know everybody’s business, their mother said, and what Mrs. Hernández didn’t know, she made up.

  That morning, the Hernández radar was fully functioning. “Antonia, where you been, girl?”

  “Damn,” Toni muttered.

  The older woman spun around, and her dark eyes narrowed. With no possibility of escape, Toni stepped over to the wire fence separating their yards.

  “So where you been?”

  “Looking for work.” Toni wanted to tell her to mind her own business, but answered politely. Best to avoid a Hernández curse, real or imagined, coming down on her family. “How’s your husband? Dad said he got hurt at the mill.”

  Mr. Hernández was a round, friendly man who smiled a lot, which puzzled Toni because he actually had to live with Mrs. Hernández.

  The older woman leaned on the wire fence, which whined under her weight. “That viejo is back to work already. Nothing serious, a cut on his arm.” She tapped her chest. “But me, ay ay ay, it’s a wonder this ole body is still going. I think I had another heart attack last night.”

  “Oh, no.”

  Mrs. Hernández made a quick sign of the cross. “I wanted to call the priest so he could bless me with the last rites, but my old man told me it was just tamale gas.”

  Toni shook her head sympathetically and tried hard not to laugh. Mrs. Hernández had complained of the same heart attack for the past ten years and regularly recounted miraculous recoveries from her ailment. If a neighbor had a disease, Mrs. Hernández had a better one.

  “How’s your papá?”

  “He works way too hard at the mill and at home, but we can’t slow him down.” Toni edged back from the fence. “Perdón. I should go clean up and start dinner.”

  Mrs. Hernández chattered on. “Your papá is so proud you went to college. And it took four years? Ay,
you could have been married and had babies in that time. You still speak Spanish, don’t you?”

  “All the time,” Toni replied in Spanish.

  “I guess now you’ll be working downtown in some big fancy office and forget about us poor neighbors.”

  Mrs. Hernández mumbled something else, but Toni didn’t understand. The woman had stuffed clothespins in her mouth.

  Toni backed up to her door. “How can I ever forget about you?”

  6

  LEAVING THE COOL AIR OF PETE’S CAFÉ, Michael soon regretted not driving even the short distance back to his office. While his hangover had all but faded, a slippery layer of perspiration stayed behind. As he passed by the courthouse, he decided to sit down on a bench under one of the many mesquite trees surrounding the building. Cigarette butts were scattered underneath because the place was a popular spot for county workers to catch a smoke. Michael wasn’t focused on the cases in his briefcase or those waiting on his desk. Not even the new one assigned by the judge. He thought about another murder case from years earlier. The State versus Marcus Fields.

  At Harvard Law, Michael did well in classes—not at Law Review level, but enough to earn his juris doctorate with honors and still manage to have a good time. Upon his returning to Borden and passing the bar, his father expected him to work in the family firm. One day, however, Michael was flirting with one of the clerks at the courthouse when she told him about an interesting assault trial down the hall. He peeked in. Watching then—County Attorney Leo McCall in court inspired him to apply for a vacant deputy county attorney’s job. Michael admired Leo’s style of affability and sharpness before the bench. Michael also appreciated the passion of criminal law compared with the dry compost of civil, in which the Shaw firm not only specialized but excelled.

  After Michael told his father he had landed the county job, Martin called him a fool. Michael argued the skills he learned there would ultimately result in higher fees when he later joined the firm. Martin agreed, albeit using the Grim Reaper expression he usually reserved for whenever Michael disobeyed his directives.