“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.
I stepped inside the office. “Lomeli,” I called.
“Yeah?”
“What’s this guy in for?”
“Criminal threats. Destruction of property.” Lomeli adjusted his reading glasses over his nose and looked at the form, running his finger down the page until he reached the appropriate line. “Smashed his ex-wife’s car. Says here it’s a Mustang coupe. Broke the windows, took a bat to the siding, slashed the tires.”
“Jesus.”
“Must’ve been something.” With a glance at the booking counter, Lomeli whistled, whether in admiration or disapproval, I couldn’t tell. Lomeli himself had been divorced three times, a fact I had trouble reconciling with the romance novels stacked on his desk, their spines labeled YUCCA VALLEY LIBRARY. “You know this guy?” he asked.
“We served together in Iraq.”
Lomeli’s eyes widened.
I wasn’t the only vet at that station—Stratton had served in the Gulf War, Villegas had been in Bosnia, and one of our dispatchers had deployed to New Orleans after Katrina—but somehow I never quite fit in with the others. I didn’t go out for drinks with them after work, didn’t forward their chain emails, didn’t find Vasco’s jokes funny. And now one of my buddies was under arrest. I had seen Fierro just the day before, at my sister’s barbecue. He’d seemed fine then, chatted with the other guests, played with the kids, flirted with one of Ashley’s co-workers, a pretty redhead with a freckled face and pouty lips. By the time we left, he was all smiles and jokes. But now, this.
“He’ll be taken to West Valley,” Lomeli said after a minute.
“You can’t keep him here?”
“I don’t have room.”
I stepped back into the hallway and walked up to the booking counter, where Stratton was fingerprinting Fierro. Next to the payphone was a list of bail bondsmen, and underneath it were boxes of blue latex gloves. A notice taped to the far wall said IF YOU THINK YOU MAY BE PREGNANT AND WANT AN ABORTION, TALK TO THE HOLDING NURSE. “Are you on any medications?” Stratton asked, handing Fierro a wet wipe for the ink.
“For what?”
“Diabetes, heart condition, that sort of thing. Something you’re required to take.”
“No, sir.” Fierro’s hair fell in greasy strands over his face. He flicked it away, like a diver who’s finally come up for air, and his eyes caught mine. “Hey,” he said, and broke into a smile.
“What the fuck, man?”
“She’s just making a big deal over nothing.”
“Nothing, huh? That’s what you think this is?”
“Gorecki, you know this guy?” Stratton asked.
“Sometimes I wish I didn’t.”
“It’s my car. My car. There’s no law says I can’t trash it.” He spoke as though the truth of this was incontrovertible and soon enough everyone else around him would come to see it, too. How different he was now from the man—the boy, really—he’d been when we’d met at boot camp. MCRD in San Diego. We’d arrived by bus, still drowsy with sleep, still dreaming of glory, when the voice of the drill instructor delivered us to the new day. From now on, he said, the only words out of your mouths are Yes, sir or No, sir. Do you understand?
We lined up on the deck and were told what to do. Stand with your feet at 45-degree angles. Look straight ahead. Read the Uniform Code of Military Justice. As we marched toward the building a gust of wind blew and my paperwork flew out of my hand. I ran after it. A single page landed on Fierro’s chest and he peeled it off and handed it back to me. For this, the DI screamed at us to get back in line, his voice so high he sounded like a rooster gone mad. What had he done, he bellowed, to get yet another batch of stupid boots like these two knuckleheads right here? What on God’s green earth had he done? How was he supposed to make Marines out of us?
I was so used to silence and neglect that the DI’s voice felt like a stab to the chest. I wanted to run back to the bus, go back to the house on Valley View Drive, with its crushing but dependable indifference. Yet Fierro took the yelling uncomplainingly, his angry eyes trained on something in the distance. In our bunks that first night, bunks we’d been forced to make and remake until everyone could do it in under one minute, I felt compelled to whisper an apology for getting him into trouble with the DI, but Fierro shrugged and said it was nothing his father hadn’t done before. When we found out that we were both from small towns only twenty miles apart in the Mojave, it was enough to make friends out of us, in that unquestioning way when you are eighteen and far from home. Even when things got tough, when the DIs rammed their Smokey Bear covers into our faces or called us bitches and faggots and cocksuckers, Fierro took the abuse without complaint. But all this was before Camp Taqaddum, before Ramadi.