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 him for my mother on their first anniversary. The horse is too old now to do more than toss his head impatiently in front of his aluminum feeder.
I hear the two-fingered whistle, coming from one of the Murillo boys. My face feels hot and tight like it’s sun burned, and all I can think to do is pretend they’re not following my every move.
In order to scare off the mice, I kick the door a couple times, then pull off two pre-sliced flakes and balance them, one on each arm. I’m allergic to alfalfa, and if I’m not quick I’ll wheeze like an asthmatic and my arms will rash up and itch. Just as I’m hoisting the flake into Boo Boo’s feeder, something rustles in the alfalfa, something alive. At the first sight of gray fur, I drop the flake between the pipes, piercing the air with my squeal. The mouse scurries off into a puff of dirt.
Behind me, a Murillo boy laughs. I toss the other flake at a hungry Lou, and make a bee line for the house.
“Shut the hell up,” Cheech shouts at his little brother.
I’m on the phone telling Tomoko what happened with the Murillo brothers when our call gets cut short, an emergency breakthrough from the Orange County prison. Whenever it’s a collect call, I know to accept the charges. The client in jail will pay for it later, getting double-billed for calling collect, let alone our home number.
I’ve never spoken to a murderer before, and although my father slept with a hunting rifle by his side when Cooper had escaped, this killer is different. He’s my father’s front page client and I’ll get into trouble if I’m not polite.
“May I speak with your father?” The precise way in which he forms each syllable makes him sound successful, like one of my father’s business clients. Even murderers have phone manners.
“Just a second, please,” I say.
My father is in the living room, the TV on, tuning out the ten o’clock news with the aid of a Walkman. He wears headphones, listening again no doubt to Bared’s confession.
Scattered across the table are black and whites of the crime scene. One shot is of the victim’s head thrown back against the chair, his eyes bulging. On the front of his shirt is a small hole where the bullet had entered, and I am shocked at how little blood there is.
I mouth Bared’s name as I hand over the phone.
My father slides the headphones back a little to make room for the receiver. From his end I’m able to put together half the story. Bared has been roughed up at the jail. A broken nose and finger. It’s race related. While being struck and kicked he heard somebody call him a sand nigger. At twelve I’d heard “nigger” used solely as an insult to a black person. In time I’ll learn the offensive word will do even more damage being used as a root slur against all races.
My father promises that tomorrow he’ll have pictures taken and will use them at the emergency bail hearing.
“The guards beat him up?” I ask after my father is done talking.
He hangs up and shrugs.
“Hard to tell. Usually it’s the arresting cops. He looked fine this morning. Sometimes a client will do it to himself if he thinks an ass kicking will help get him out sooner.”
I hear my sister unlocking the front door. She looks satisfied, refreshed, her lips abloom in bright fuchsia. She takes a long sip of her thirty-two ounce McDonald’s cup, leaving no print.
“Mom finally woke up.”
I wonder if our mother came around on her own or if Rhea helped.
My father removes the headset as if the foam parts impede his hearing.
“How is she?”
“They’re releasing her tomorrow morning.”
My father tosses the rest of the Walkman onto the coffee table.
“Goddamn it.”
“That’s one way of looking at it.” My sister passes us in a burst of Poison, her favorite scent, getting his reaction all wrong.
My father shakes his head at the circumstances he can’t change, at the toxic relationship the two of them share and how what just happened with Bared has ruined his chances of being the good husband. No matter how fast he is at the bail hearing, all my mother will see is that she’s just given birth to his son and he’s late in picking her up from the hospital.
The next morning I’m pouring a bowl of Honeynut Cheerios when my father knocks on Rhea’s door, open handed. In his other hand is a cup of coffee.
“Time to get up,” he calls at the closed door.
Though I should be going to school, my father has decided that I’m to go with him. He doesn’t want to have to worry about picking me up after school. An emergency bail hearing has been granted. I’m not sure how my father is able to pull this off so soon, but he did and we’re already late for it.
By the time I’ve finished the Cheerios and have bussed my bowl in the dishwasher, he’s dressed in a suit and tie.
Dabs of toilet paper stick to the red nicks on his face where he cut himself shaving. He reeks of my mother’s last Christmas present, Drakkar Noir. His open hand on my sister’s door has turned