the bright young daughter of a family friend, into marrying Gil by telling her that a boy who never strays far from home is one who will never stray from his wife.
My mother doesn’t even get to choose Nicholas’s middle name because he’s named after my father. Obviously, I am too, with just an added vowel attached at the end.
“How’s Mom.” Rhea says this more like an accusation than a question, as if our father is to blame for the birth being forced and unnatural.
My father sneaks a look at the other babies, maybe hoping his own will somehow be lying in a plastic bubble on wheels too instead of where he really is, his tiny vitals all wired up in an incubator.
“She’s fine, but she won’t come to for another hour or so.”
Rhea takes a seat. When the news hit, she was pulled out of first period at her new school, a Christian academy in La Verne. She tells our parents she likes it, but she tells them a lot of things she doesn’t mean. She tells them she eats too, and I’ve caught her twice tossing out the noodles, finishing only the broth.
“You two go,” she decides for us. “I’ll wait.”
On the way home, my father pops a cassette in the tape deck. It isn’t Pavorotti or even his favorite country singer, Eddie Rabbit. It’s a foreign sounding voice, broken from nerves, from his Middle Eastern accent. It’s the voice of Bared Garrata, my father’s client, who has just been arrested for murder. Intermittently, his voice is interrupted by the loud creak of an office chair, the interrogating cop leaning back. They never give the comfortable, reclining seat to the suspect.
“Again,” the investigator states louder into the speaker, for the record. “You’re waiving your right to counsel.”
There’s mumbling and then Bared blurts out, “I have no choice. I have to shoot.”
“Bullshit,” my father says. “You hear that, Paula Girl?” He points to the cassette player. “That’s exactly the place where I can get this tossed out. He’s a goddamn foreigner. He’s not even sure what they’re saying.”
I’ve heard this man’s confession before, and I find that part hard to believe. His English sounds crystal clear to me. It’s my father’s first homicide and he’s played the tape countless times since the murder occurred. He’s moving up in the legal world, from the DUIs and drug offenses, where nobody pays much attention, to a murder that has made the local paper in Orange County. Even the birth of his first son can’t stop my father from thinking about the case, debating whether he should try and get the confession thrown out or use it toward an insanity defense. Either way, my father is behind the eight ball. The hearing earlier today was for Bared and because he holds dual citizenship in Armenia, a country that is considered by many to be the northern extension of the Middle East, bail is set at half a million.
Bared works as an assistant manager at a fan manufacturing plant in the city of Orange. He is not a terrorist. Neither is he a religious zealot. He is a family man with two daughters and an American wife. One afternoon Bared is set off when he’s convinced he overhears subordinates and his boss laughing in the break room about his small penis. He must not be able to sexually satisfy his fair-skinned wife, they say. She needs a white man or a Mexican or Black, like them.
The next morning Bared shows up at work, walks right into his boss’s office and fires one shot, square in the chest. The bullet blows clear through, burying in the back of the dead man’s chair. Security doesn’t tackle Bared on his way out of the building because he never runs. There are no other casualties since the act, as he sees it, has little to do with violence. He is defending his manhood, defending his marriage. Talk of pleasuring another man’s wife in his culture calls for immediate and unrelenting measures. After the shooting, Bared leaves the weapon by the body and waits in his office where he phones his wife, explaining that something has come up. Save him a plate. He won’t make it home in time for dinner.
My father wants to argue that the voices Bared heard are really his own, that he’s a paranoid schizophrenic and needs psychological help, not incarceration.
“He isn’t crazy,” I say. “You’d better come up with something else.”
We’re almost home and out on his front porch, I see Moses Murillo, our neighbor, dousing the grass with his own brand of weed killer, a can of gasoline. He’s chosen the worst possible time to pour flammable liquid on his yard, considering it’s early fall and everything is still hot and dry from summer and the Santa Anas have already begun to stir.
But nothing Moses does ever makes any sense. He’s a Vietnam War vet with irrational moods that must make his family want to duck from the swing. Even with the windows closed, we can sometimes hear him yelling at his two boys with the kind of rage that has made my parents anonymously call the cops more than once. In the Murillos’ one acre backyard stands a baseball diamond with real bases and a pitcher’s mound, and by the time the police arrive, Moses will be crouched behind home plate, catching his sons Cheech and Rigo’s slow pitches, patiently instructing them how to improve their throw. Moses used to beat on his dog too, a beautiful German Shepherd named Dexter, until my father convinced him to sell it for big bucks to a client of his who owned a guard dog business.
I point to Moses.
“Now that’s crazy.”
My father chuckles and waves. In response, Moses lifts up the gas can like he’s making a champagne toast.
Bared’s rambling confession is still playing as we pull into our driveway. “They want to take her from me. He say they sleep with my wife. I buy handgun for two hundred dollars. A Filipino man, by bakery. Say it’s okay, I buy for protection. Those people, they insult me, they come for my family.”
The cop grills Bared some more, getting him to admit he purchased the stolen gun the night before the shooting off of some gang bangers while cruising the streets of Artesia. He conceals the gun in his Tupperware lunch box.
“What makes you think he’s sane?” my father asks.
He sounds irritated at hearing the prosecutor’s likely argument out of his twelve-and-a-half-year-old daughter.
I’m surprised he’s even listening, and I open the car door, sorry I brought it up.
“He sounds too nervous,” I say. “You can hear it in his voice. He knows what he did is wrong.”
At dusk, my father orders me out of my room to go and feed the horses. Through the chain link fences, I can see Rigo and Cheech are still out playing ball. Rigo’s at the plate and Cheech is pitching. Overpowering the hard pop of a Louisville Slugger or the even harder punch of a caught ball is the electric sound coming from the oleander bushes. Not to be mistaken for high tension wires, these are horse flies, a genetically pumped up version of the house variety, that buzz and bat against the leaves. It doesn’t matter that they don’t bite. They are dangerous in other ways. They live around horses, hoping to swarm on any scratch, laying eggs inside until the scratch turns into an infected flesh wound. If even one fly gets tangled in my hair, I’m petrified it might feast on my scalp, and I may just have to grab the horse clippers my mother keeps in the hay barn and the Murillo boys can watch me shave my head bald.
With my hands flying overhead, I rush down the steps, then stop before I reach the bottom so they don’t see. The doors to the hay barn are latched yet unlocked. My horse, Boo Boo, an Arabian trail horse, whinnies and paces back and forth in his pipe corral. The other horse, named Lou, is a former prized Saddlebred. My father bought
