The Other Americans(15)

But my wife nudged the paper toward me.

“I don’t read English,” I said, irritation bubbling up in my voice, although the truth is that I can read some, enough to fill out a job application or make sense of the notices pinned on the corkboard at the grocery store. HOUSE FOR RENT. CAR FOR SALE. JANITOR NEEDED.

“It’s about the accident,” she said, tapping her index finger on an article to draw my attention to it. Marisela took an English class some years ago, before the children were born, and now that they’re in school she goes to the library with them on Saturdays and sits beside them while they read, so she’s getting better and better. She’s the one who talks to the landlord when there’s a leak in the bathroom or if we’re behind on the rent. “It says the police is asking for the public’s help with the case. Look. Right here.”

“I don’t have my reading glasses,” I said.

Marisela pulled them out from her apron pocket and set them in front of me on the table. At the time of these events, she was working for a senior-care center, bathing and grooming people who had forgotten how to do it for themselves. That job changed her. It gave even the smallest of her gestures a disarming patience.

I pushed the reading glasses off to the side. “Later,” I said, and took a bite of my torta. But it didn’t taste right. Even though it had been wrapped in aluminum foil and kept on the stove warmer, the bolillo had soaked up the sauce and the meat was dry. It seemed to me the day’s frustrations would never end. “What is this?” I asked.

“They’re looking for witnesses.”

I had told her a million times that I wasn’t a witness. I didn’t see the accident. All I saw was the man falling to the ground, it wasn’t the same thing. I split the bolillo open and, pushing aside the onions and chiles, poked at the meat with my knife. “Did you use pork?”

“It says the victim lived in Yucca Valley.”

“You know I don’t like it when you use beef in the tortas. It doesn’t taste the same.”

“He was sixty-one years old. And he was a father and a grandfather.”

She said this just to make me look at the newspaper, and finally I put on my reading glasses. In the photograph, an old man with a wide forehead and curly white hair reclined in an armchair, smiling at someone out of the frame. On his lap was a paper plate with a crumpled napkin and a half-eaten piece of chocolate cake. It was the kind of picture you might take at Christmas or a birthday party, when the house is full of family and friends and everyone is dancing and having a good time. The caption said Driss Guerraoui. What a strange name, I remember thinking. “Where is he from?” I asked.

Marisela leaned closer, and read the article again. “It doesn’t say.”

He couldn’t have been American, that much I knew. He had to have been an immigrant like me. And Guerraoui sounded like Guerrero, but it wasn’t a Spanish name. With my knife, I flipped the bread back on the meat. “This isn’t pork,” I said.

“It is. I just trimmed all the fat,” Marisela said.

That was another thing that had changed since she’d started working for the senior-care home. She wanted us to eat “healthy” things. No more chicharrones while we watched television. No ice cream after dinner. Only one spoon of sugar in our morning coffee. But now that she was trimming fat from my carnitas, she might as well have been trimming joy from my life.

“Do you want some more sauce?” she asked, patting my hand. “I can add more sauce.”

She took my plate to the counter and brought it back a few minutes later. I took another bite. The meat was moist now, but still it didn’t taste the same. So much depends on the little things. If I had turned left at the fork in the road that morning, Enrique and I wouldn’t have been late to our first appointment, the lady of the house wouldn’t have been so angry, we would have kept our schedule, the boss wouldn’t have called us lazy. But I drove, and Enrique read the map; that was always our arrangement. When he glanced at the street signs and said, Go left, I went left. Another little thing: if I’d taken the Saturday night shift instead of the Sunday night shift at the motel, I wouldn’t have been traveling down the 62 on the night of the accident. I would never have laid eyes on this man, this Guerraoui. I wouldn’t even know his name.

“They’re looking for anyone who might have seen the runaway car,” Marisela said.

“I told you, I didn’t see it.”

“You said it was white.”

“I said it could be white, but really I’m not sure. And even if I was, I’m not talking to the police. I can’t take that chance.”

If I thought that would stop my wife, I was wrong.

“Amor,” she said, nudging the paper toward me again, “it says you can call anonymously. On this hotline.”

I should never have told her about the accident.





Jeremy




At the end of my shift the next day, I found myself at the Joshua Tree jail for another meth arrest, this time a middle-aged woman whose neighbor called the police when he found her sitting on the roof of his shed. While the paperwork was being processed, I went to get some water from the storage room, where canned beans, powdered milk, and bags of rice and pasta were stacked in columns that reached the ceiling. The overhead lights cast an unsteady glow over the gray concrete floors, and the only sound I could hear were metal doors closing somewhere down the hallway. The jail always unsettled me, no matter how often I came inside. I tossed the paper cup in the trashcan and hurried out to the front office, where I found Stratton booking a new suspect. Fierro.