Wendy Hornsby - Bad Intent

“He is a good boy,” she was saying, tears filling her dark eyes before she looked down at the beads in her hand.

Guido had pulled the camera back for a two-shot to include my filmed reaction in the frame. Visually, the scene was good. Behind us the windows of the Lincoln Heights jail, just out of focus, were a fuzzy, pale checkerboard of barricaded windows. It was good neutral, angular contrast to Mrs. Ruiz’s round contours, my blue shirt.

Below camera I held the sheaf of booking slips she had given me to look over, a collection that chronicled her son’s activities from the time he was twelve. She kept the booking slips in a kitchen drawer with her market coupons.

“Mrs. Ruiz,” I said, “when did your son Arnulfo join the Eighteenth Street gang set?”

“He don’t belong to no gang. I made Arnulfo promise me he would stay away from those boys. Gangbangers killed his brother.”

I fast-forwarded through the tape, all the stuff about how Arnulfo the altar boy had just refound Jesus and turned his life around and was planning to go back to school. The kid was holy all right. A holy terror. I heard the same story of impending redemption from every delinquent’s mother I talked to.

Close in on the booking slips, my voice reading through them chronologically:

“Age twelve, arrested for curfew violation, out after ten P.M. unsupervised. Malicious mischief, vandalizing public property. Auto theft-joy riding. Possession of a concealed weapon-a knife. Minor in possession of a firearm. Age thirteen, truancy, assault, armed robbery.”

I turned off the tape.

“What?” Guido sat up. “You don’t like it? I think it plays tight.”

“Yeah. It’s tight. It’s great.” I pulled my knees up under my chin and looked at the blank screen as if it might hold some answers to questions that eluded me. It hurt even to think what I was thinking.

“I know how you feel.” Guido put his hot hand on my knee and looked soulfully into my face. “It is awesome, Maggie. Deep. You’ve made a beautiful, sympathetic portrait of this woman. My God, what she has lived through will make every heart bleed.”

I put my hand over his. “If that’s what you’re getting, then I’ve lied to you.”

“Lied?”

“Lied. I have tried, Guido, really tried, but I can’t find a lot of sympathy for Serafina Ruiz. She has one kid in jail, another one’s dead. Her thirteen-year-old daughter is pregnant for the second time. Her youngest is a paraplegic because he ran into the street and got hit by a car-at eleven o’clock at night. Tell me what a toddler was doing out, unsupervised, so late.”

“Hard times,” Guido said, black eyes narrowed at me, warning me there was a correctitude barrier I was about to cross. “Serafina shoulders a heavy load all by herself. It’s a rough neighborhood. Give her credit; she does her best.”

“Really?” I said, challenging him. “Serafina can’t take care of what she already has, but she’s pregnant again. I think her kids should sue her.”

“Maggie?” He was aghast. “Are you in there? Have aliens taken over your mind? Have they done something evil to my hero?”

“I feel taken over. I have listened to so many horror stories.” I got up to pace around the cluttered trailer, tripping over cords and equipment, miscellaneous battered, black-painted stuff. It was all so familiar, my work milieu. The sort of place that had helped me create the big video lie.

I stopped in front of Guido and narrowed my eyes in imitation of him. “Guido, my friend, I offer you a profundity, a cliche: There is nothing easier than bringing a child into the world, and nothing more difficult than raising it well. Trust me. I have one child, and it’s all I can do to keep her safe, keep her on the straight and narrow, because that straight and narrow line is as treacherous and as slender as the edge of a razor. Every day we get through safely I say a little thank you to the fates. And believe me, if it weren’t for all my efforts, and Mike’s, and ballet giving her structure and direction and keeping her occupied, I know we would be in one hell of a mess.”

“You think Serafina should have had one child, like you? Should have had nice middle-class parents and a white-bread education, like you?”

“I think Serafina should have figured out what turned her kids into thieves and murderers, and fixed it. She sheds good tears, Guido. And she breaks my heart. But it takes a hell of a lot more than tears to take care of her children and herself. We are not powerless.”

“I see,” he said.

“Do you?”

“Yeah. I see that my old friend needs some time off. The last two, three years you’ve been working too hard, Mag. Why don’t you put this one aside for a while? Take a break, give yourself a couple of months to settle in, get your perspective tuned up. You’re beginning to sound like that cop you’re living with.”

“I’m on deadline, Guido. No film, no check. No check, no groceries.”

“So?” He looked at me, exasperation giving his olive cheeks color. “Now what?”

“Define the fine line.” I found my bag on the floor and took out Etta’s tape, traded it for Serafina’s in the player, and sat down on the edge of the sofa beside Guido.

“It is my perception,” I said, “that in postapocalypse Los Angeles, gangs are used as a symbol for everything that has gone to shit. Let’s be careful not to hang the gang rap on their mothers. We’ll tone down Serafina-she is so passive-get more from Etta Harkness and women like her. You’ll see why when you meet Etta.”

“Good Housekeeping mother of the year, huh?”

“No. Just one ballsy lady. You’ll like her.”

The freeway was a shimmering, blazing hot nightmare. The heat seemed to have endowed everyone on the freeway with a hair trigger and, worst of all, my car air conditioner was out. I hadn’t had it serviced for three years.

In Northern California where I live-rather, used to live-fluorocarbon coolants are sufficiently environmentally incorrect to make using air-conditioning on the rare hot day a matter for public scorn. Truth is, I never remembered to get the damn thing fixed.

I drove up the 405 and over the Sepulveda Pass into the Valley in bumper-to-bumper spurts of speed and fast stops. A trip that should have taken no more than fifteen minutes stretched well beyond an hour. I hadn’t yet learned how to gear my life’s schedules around rush hour, the way the natives do; everyone who doesn’t have to be on the road hides out until the worst is over.

By the time I pulled in under the branches of the eucalyptus sheltering Mike’s condo complex, I was desperate for quiet, a cool bath, a place to lay my head.

Mike had bought the condo with wife number two, Charlene, the decorator. She had turned it into something worthy of a magazine layout before the reality of being a cop’s wife got to her. The carpet was dull silver gray and there were only two bedrooms to accommodate four of us.

Though the condo was on the good side, the south side, of Ventura Boulevard, it wasn’t far enough on the good side to be up in the hills where there might be a consistent ocean breeze, some view. There were other reasons I didn’t like living there, beyond location, smog, and dull gray carpet. I’m not a jealous person by nature, but I felt there was entirely too much of Charlene in that condo.

Our newly combined households had three cars but only a two-car garage. I was last one in for the day, so I had to go find a slot in guest parking and hike back through the landscaping. I didn’t mind, because once I had parked I was more or less home. Santa Ana wind whipping through the trees was nice, the pool filter gurgled pleasantly. I could count the steps until I was inside, count off the seconds before I was running a tub and washing the outside world away.