“Green light.”
The story came out in pieces and it took two or three tellings for all of its details to settle into place. Afterward, I pulled into the driveway of my parents’ house. My childhood home, with its little porch and its overgrown sage bush and the screen that never quite fit into the doorjamb. For the first time since I’d heard that my father was dead, my mind began to function again. The aimless fury that had trailed me since I’d left town at eighteen had found a purpose: I would make sure that Anderson Baker was brought to justice. I just wasn’t sure how yet.
Driss
I remember that the park rangers had to put up a sign on the highway warning visitors that campsites at Joshua Tree were booked. The town was packed with hikers, bike riders, families from Los Angeles and San Diego who wanted out of the big city for Presidents’ Day weekend. Business had been a little slow that winter, so I was thrilled to see several parties waiting at the Pantry, spilling out from the entrance onto the sidewalk. A young woman in a bohemian shirt came in to ask if she could order a mimosa while she waited. Not for the first time, I wondered whether I should apply for an alcohol license, try to appeal to the kind of people who had been coming to the Mojave lately. I was working the cash register when Anderson Baker burst in. “Who here has a Land Rover Defender?” he asked. “It’s in one of my spots.”
“Just a minute,” I said. I was making change for an elderly couple, both of them after-church regulars. When I was counting money, I couldn’t talk, and Baker’s interruption forced me to put the bills back in the register and start over.
“It’s double-parked. It’s taking up two spaces.” He raised his fingers in a V, as if I didn’t know what “double-parked” meant.
“Just a minute,” I said again. I counted out the change and handed it to the couple, slamming the register drawer closed with my hip. “Thank you.”
The couple stepped away, and Baker took their place. “Whose Land Rover is that?”
I craned my neck to look beyond his shoulder at the parking lot. From where I stood, I could see only an old, dusty Buick and a blue truck covered with colorful stickers. A parking spot in the corner was still open, and anyway the bowling alley never got busy until after lunch. Before I could say anything, though, he snapped, “Well? Don’t just stand there. Find out.”
I didn’t know what had set him off like this. Of course, we’d had disagreements in the past, but they’d been about serious things, like the noise during the remodeling I’d done a while back, or the smell from the sewer line that broke under the bathrooms of his arcade. Now he was upset about a parking space. His face turned pink as he glared at me, waiting for me to fix a problem I’d had no part in creating. “All right,” I said, trying to calm him down. “Let me find out.”
I picked up a pitcher of water and went to the first table—a family of four, still in hiking clothes, still smelling of campfire smoke. I refilled their glasses, asked how their chicken-fried steaks tasted, and whether they happened to drive a Land Rover. Then I moved on to the next table. But Baker wouldn’t wait, he pushed past me into the middle of the diner, all six feet of him occupying the center aisle, and in a radio announcer’s voice, he boomed, “Land Rover Defender. Gunmetal gray. Come move it now or I’ll have it towed.” Silence descended on the restaurant. Everyone looked up, but no one claimed the Land Rover. So Baker stormed out, leaving me to apologize, to bring extra crayons for the children and refill breadbaskets for the adults.
Our relationship had already become touchy, but that morning’s argument turned it raw. Now I had to be watchful about everything: what parking spaces my customers used, how long the delivery truck sat idling when it brought soft drinks, whether the cook smoked cigarettes too close to the dumpster. I had the feeling that I was being watched constantly, that the slightest misstep on my part would cause another eruption. What could I do with a neighbor like that? How could I prevent him from finding fault when fault was all he was looking for?
These questions were so unsettling that I put them aside. Maybe I was letting what happened with the Land Rover blind me. Baker and I had been neighbors for a very long time, after all, and when a freak storm three years earlier had left debris all over the street, we’d worked together to clean it up. This was just a rough patch. Besides, he was getting old, which meant that sooner or later he would have to retire. I needed to keep all this in perspective. Be patient, I told myself. Be patient. Things will get better.
Nora
The charge against Anderson Baker was formally filed on a clear morning in May, with the air still crisp from a recent thunderstorm and the mountains in the distance outlined like a woodcut print. I drove to the arraignment at the Morongo Basin Courthouse in a state of febrile anticipation that was only heightened when, passing through the metal detector, I was pulled aside for a random pat-down. It had started years ago, this experience, and it was unavoidable. It didn’t matter if it was a state-of-the-art machine at San Francisco International Airport or some rinky-dink contraption at a sports arena in Kern County, I was always pulled aside for the random pat-down. The local courthouse was no different. My mother had already gone through the process and was waiting for me on the other side. “Where’s Salma?” I asked her as we embraced.
“In clinic.”
“But this is very important. Couldn’t she have rescheduled?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can you call her? It’s only nine thirty. If she leaves now, she can still make it.”
My mother hesitated. The argument between my sister and me at the children’s school play had mortified her and she seemed reluctant to risk getting into another one here, at the courthouse. She didn’t reply. Instead, she looked at the wall screen that showed the cases on the docket that day. “There,” she said. “Baker. Courtroom M-2.”
When we walked in, the only seats left were in the last row of pews. How strange, I thought, that the courtroom had pews. They gave the gallery a patrician air, but this impression was tempered by the white grid ceiling, which would not have looked out of place in an industrial warehouse. The room was windowless and brightly lit and, although there were attorneys and bailiffs and an audience, it was eerily quiet. The judge was already at the bench, shuffling papers, waiting for one defendant to be taken out and another brought in.