The Other Americans Page 6

  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.

  By the time we came back from the war, almost five years later, his restraint had disappeared. He’d become a talker, a prankster, a braggart. I remember going out drinking with him at the Joshua Tree Saloon, a few weeks after we’d returned home, and he wouldn’t stop talking. It was a cold night in January and the air was threatening snow, but when we left the bar, we were still in the T-shirts we had on when we’d come in at two in the afternoon. Even though I didn’t feel cold, I was shaking so much I dropped my car keys. I was on my knees looking for them in the dirt when the headlights of a sheriff’s car blinded me. I failed the sobriety test, but Fierro struck up a conversation with the officer, told him we’d been in Iraq, and asked if he might let me off with a warning and a promise that I would call a cab. I should’ve been grateful when the officer said yes, and yet all I felt was rage—and I didn’t even know why. Something about that cop, with his receding hair, his pitying eyes, his sagging belly, made me want to punch him. I couldn’t have foreseen that someday I’d end up a cop myself, or that Fierro would land in jail.

  Now Stratton led Fierro to the holding cell and locked the doors. The metal bars had recently been painted a cheerful blue and I stood against them, watching him. I didn’t know how to help him, how to tidy up this mess he’d made. “Don’t worry, this’ll blow over soon,” he said with a grin. “And meantime I got to meet Deputy Gorecki, all official and shit.”

  “Yeah, well. Take a good look, asshole. Make sure it’s the last time I see you here.”

  Nora

  Then it was my turn. I stepped into the gray light of the viewing room, but kept my gaze averted until the last moment. Once I looked at the coffin, my father’s death would become real and unalterable; I would have to accept it. The casket was made of varnished wood, but free of any designs or embellishments. Inside it, a white burial shroud cloaked my father’s body. His face was pale, his right cheek bruised, his lips tightly shut. “What did you want to tell me that day?” I whispered. It was rare for him to call in the middle of a workday, but not so rare as to have caused me any alarm. The extent of my loss was barely starting to reveal itself to me in that airless room, with the mortuary men behind me speaking in hushed voices. I stood beside the coffin with my heart aching inside my chest until it was time to leave.

  Outside, the sun was so bright I had to shield my eyes with my hand. Sparrows came in a flutter of wings to settle on a eucalyptus tree at the edge of the parking lot. A man in a brown suit stood next to the hearse, its back doors gaping open like the maw of a hungry beast. My sister and her family were already in their Escalade, but my mother was waiting for me beside my car. When I put my key in the ignition, music from the classical station blared, replacing the silence with a crescendo of violins. I shut it off.

  In the sudden silence, my mother said, “It’s not supposed to be like this.”

  For my mother, things were forever not the way they were supposed to be. She had left her country with her family, but she still longed for everything else she hadn’t been able to bring with her. She missed her old house, her childhood friends, the call for prayers at dawn. No matter how extravagant a meal she cooked, she found it wanting—an ingredient was always missing or the flavor just wasn’t right. My sister’s wedding sent her into paroxysms of nostalgia that transformed our house into a bazaar filled with henna patterns, embroidered belts, brass trays, a litter to carry the bride and groom. My mother had to leave many traditions behind and the more time passed, the more they mattered to her.

  Even in death. The way we were handling the funeral seemed wrong to her. She was aghast at the fact that my father’s body had lain in the morgue for four days before he was released to us. Make haste in taking the dead to the grave, she said, over and over, though there was nothing Salma or I could do about it; we had to wait for the autopsy to be done and for the paperwork to be completed. When we’d arrived at the mortuary that morning, my mother seemed surprised to find only three employees waiting for us.

  “How is it supposed to be?” I asked.<
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  “They should do the prayer here, at the mosque. Bring him inside and pray for him. And then your uncle and Tareq lead, how do you say, the walk to the cemetery?”

  “The funeral procession?”

  “Right. They lead the funeral procession, and we go the next day to visit the grave.” She gave me an accusing look, as if I had plotted this new affront to tradition. “But they don’t do it this way here.”

  All of a sudden I realized I had never known anyone who died, had no experience whatsoever with death. I had nothing to compare it to, unlike her. Before she’d turned twenty, she’d lost both of her parents and an aunt. Their pictures sat on the dresser in her bedroom, along with photos of all the family in Casablanca. “I’m sorry, Mom.”

  My phone buzzed with a text from my friend Elise. Thinking of you today, she said. None of my friends from the Bay Area were coming to the funeral. Elise was teaching and could not get away; Anissa was on a reporting trip to Texas and could not get away; and Margo was at a music festival in Pittsburgh and could not get away. I tried to swallow my disappointment, though it kept rising like bile. I think I was starting to apprehend how clarifying death could be: it made everyone around me disappear. Perhaps they were afraid of intruding on my grief or saying the wrong thing, so instead they sent brief notes of condolence and asked what they could do. A question I couldn’t answer.

  In the rearview mirror, I noticed that the hearse had pulled out of its spot. I hadn’t seen the coffin being loaded, and the lapse gave me a strange feeling of guilt, as if I’d let my father down. “They should’ve given us some kind of signal,” I said as I eased out of my space and followed my sister’s Escalade. It barely cleared the metal gate of the mortuary of the Islamic Center before it sped toward the freeway entrance at Vermont Avenue. It was the first week of May and the jacaranda trees were starting to bloom, their sparse blossoms a bright shade of violet. The sidewalks were packed with vendors and pedestrians. At the on-ramp, a truck had just rear-ended a convertible in the right lane, and traffic was slowly merging left. “Your father hated freeways,” my mother said as she watched the commotion. “When we first moved to California, he wanted me to drive him everywhere. I worried all the time about the accidents.”

  “Is that why he never wanted to move out of the desert?”

  “He didn’t like L.A. It’s full of crazy drivers.”

  “You know what’s ironic, Mom? The 62 is three times as deadly as the average road in California. I didn’t know that until this week. So we could have lived in L.A. or anywhere else and he would have been safer there. And we’d have been away from all those hicks.”

  “But he liked the desert. When he was a boy, he used to go to Marrakesh every spring to visit his grandmother. And he loved hiking in Joshua Tree, you know that.”

  “Joshua Tree isn’t Yucca Valley.”

  “It’s ten miles away.”

  “Might as well be a hundred.”

  We were already at the East L.A. interchange, negotiating the switch to the 60. It was a little after eleven in the morning and the freeway was clear, with cars whizzing by at speeds that made my mother clutch the handle above the passenger door. In the cup holder, my phone buzzed again with a new message. I picked it up.

  “Nora, you’re driving.”

  “It’s okay.” I glanced at the screen—it was another text of condolence. I dropped the phone back in its place. Even now, a month after Max had told me he needed to figure out what he wanted to do, my heart still seized whenever I received a text. I wanted so much to hear his voice, hear him say that he loved me, that everything would be all right. And I think, too, a part of me held out some hope that he would choose me over his wife.

  “You want me to read the text to you?”

  “Sorry? Oh, sure.”

  My mother picked up the phone. “It’s from Andrea. I’m sorry I couldn’t be there today, but…How do I get the rest?”

  “You need to unlock the phone.”

  “Give me the password.”

  “It’s okay, I’ll just read it later. We’re getting close now.”

  I followed my sister’s car into Rose Hills Memorial, then down perfectly manicured lanes toward the Cedar Crest Lawn section. A row of oak trees sprouting new leaves bordered the parking lot. Beyond it, the lawn sloped into a valley, all of it a deep shade of green, in spite of the drought that had plagued the state for months. “This place is so big,” my mother whispered, looking at the burial grounds that seemed to stretch endlessly around us. Then she put her face in her hands and began to weep. I reached across the seat divider and touched her knee. The strange thing was that I’d always cried easily—watching Little House on the Prairie or listening to Umm Kulthum. Now I had a ball in my throat and my chest hurt, but my eyes were dry. What was happening to me? Why couldn’t I grieve like the rest of my family?

  I stayed with my mother until she was ready to step out of the car. Tareq and Salma were already waiting, he in a black suit and she in a blue shirt and an ankle-length skirt. The twins were in the prim clothes they usually wore for school recitals. But from head to toe, my mother was in widow’s white. The color of absence. The color of mourning. We all started down the path toward the gravesite and the sound of our footsteps cut through the vast silence of that part of the cemetery. On the grounds, a gardener stopped pulling weeds to stare at us.

  Salma turned to me. “Did you remember to bring a scarf?”

  “Yes, of course.” I rummaged through my purse, but couldn’t find it. “I think I left it in the car. I’ll go back.”

  She pulled a blue scarf from her own purse.

  “You brought an extra one?” I asked.

  “Just in case.”

  A small group of people was waiting at the gravesite—my aunt and uncle from Culver City, two cousins, some friends of Salma and Tareq’s, and three or four people I didn’t know. A gaping hole in the ground waited, too. Then the coffin arrived, and the imam faced east, cupped his ears with his hands, and called the faithful to prayer. God is great, he chanted. God is great. At these words, my uncle and Tareq gathered with the other men in the front, and I had to stay in the back with my mother, my sister, and all the other women.

  In the name of God, most Compassionate, most Merciful, the imam began. His voice was a beautiful baritone, but as he recited the Fatiha it rose to nearly an F, a greenish blue. The ritual words, once as familiar to me as a lullaby, did not come easily—the last time I had gone to prayers was for Eid services when I was sixteen years old. The outing had ended with another argument between my parents, in the car on the way back.

  The sight of a cleric in robes praying over him would not have moved my father. But he would have liked Rose Hills, I decided. There were willow trees everywhere, the air was brisk and clear, and beneath my feet the ground felt soft. Bluebirds chased one another across the lawn. It was a good place to rest for a while. The voice of the imam brought me back to the present moment: he chanted a prayer for the Prophet, a prayer for the dead, and a prayer for the living.

  Then the coffin was lowered into the grave, and my father was gone.

  Driss

  This is what happened. Eid fell in mid-December that year, and Maryam wanted the whole family to go to the mosque in Riverside for morning services. Take the girls if you want, I said, but why would I go? I’m an atheist. She doesn’t like it when I use that word, especially when her brother visits us from Los Angeles, but it’s the truth. Sometimes, I hear her apologizing to him in the driveway, telling him that I don’t mean it, that I just say these things to get a rise out of him. But of course I mean it. I don’t pretend to be someone I’m not. And yet I agreed to go that day, because Maryam insisted, and Salma was home from college for winter break, and I wanted to keep everyone happy.

  Holiday services started at seven in the morning, but by six thirty you could hardly find parking
. I had to circle the lot several times before I found a spot, and that put me in a bad mood. Maryam led the way on the concrete path, our daughters followed, and I lagged behind, trying to finish my cigarette before we went inside. At the entrance, a handsome boy, perhaps ten or eleven years old, held an orange bucket labeled EID DONATIONS. A tithe isn’t a donation, I wanted to say, one is a tax and the other is a gift, but no one else seemed to mind it. People lined up to put their money in. Maryam had prepared the check at home and sealed it in an envelope, but as she let it drop into the bucket, the boy called out to Nora. “Sister,” he said. “Cover your legs. You’re indecent.”

  Indecent! For a moment, I thought I’d misheard him. Did he even know what the word meant? I was glad when Nora turned on him. “What did you just say?” she asked, her lips breaking into a puzzled smile.

  “Cover your legs, sister.”

  “Who do you think you are, kid?”

  “Your brother in faith,” he said gravely. Then he nodded to thank a lady who’d placed a crisp $50 bill in the orange bucket. People walked past us, dressed in Eid clothes. No two outfits looked the same: men in suits and thobes and dashikis, women in flowing robes and shalwar kameezes and bright-colored tunics. My daughter was in a black skirt that fell below the knees, but it had not been enough for this miniature cleric. It was very crowded, and I could hear impatient car horns in the parking lot. An old man circled around us so he could get inside.

  “We’re going to be late,” Maryam said as she pulled our daughters toward the women’s section.

  I had finished my cigarette by then, but stayed behind, watching the boy. He had curly hair, a small nose, skin the color of sand. Except for his green eyes, he could have passed for my son. His face glowed with a confidence that unsettled me. “What’s your name?” I asked him.

  “Qasim.”

  “And how old are you?”