Джон Гришэм - The Rooster Bar

“They’re getting married May 15, Todd. As I recall, you and I signed on as groomsmen.”

“Well, don’t bet on it. He’s already back in town and off his meds. Zola stopped by this afternoon and gave me the heads-up.”

“What meds?”

“It’s a long story.”

“What meds?”

“He’s bipolar, Mark. Diagnosed a few years back.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Why would I kid about this? He’s bipolar and Zola says he’s off his medication.”

“Why wouldn’t he tell us?”

“I can’t answer that.”

Mark took a long drink of beer and shook his head. He asked, “Zola’s back already?”

“Yes, evidently she and Gordy hurried back for a few days of fun and games, though I’m not sure they’re having much fun. She thinks he quit his meds about a month ago when we were studying for finals. One day he’s manic and bouncing off the walls; then he’s in a stupor after sipping tequila and smoking weed. He’s talking crazy, says he wants to quit school and run off to Jamaica, with Zola of course. She thinks he might do something stupid and hurt himself.”

“Gordy is stupid. He’s engaged to his high school sweetheart, a real cutie who happens to have money, and now he’s shacking up with an African girl whose parents and brothers are in this country without the benefit of those immigration papers everyone is talking about. Yes, the boy is stupid.”

“Gordy’s in trouble, Mark. He’s been sliding for several weeks and he needs our help.”

Mark pushed his beer away, but only a few inches, and clasped his hands behind his head. “As if we don’t have enough to worry about. How, exactly, are we supposed to help?”

“You tell me. She’s trying to keep an eye on him and she wants us to come over tonight.”

Mark started laughing and took another sip.

“What’s so funny?” Todd asked.

“Nothing, but can you imagine the scandal in Martinsburg, West Virginia, if word got out that Gordon Tanner, whose father is a church deacon and whose fiancée is the daughter of a prominent doctor, lost his mind and quit law school to run off to Jamaica with an African Muslim?”

“I can almost see the humor.”

“Well, try harder. It’s a scream.” But the laughter had stopped. “Look, Todd, we can’t make him take his meds. If we tried to he’d kick both our asses.”

“He needs our help, Mark. I get off at nine tonight and we’re going over.”

A man in a nice suit sat at the bar and Todd walked over to take his order. Mark sipped his beer and sank into an even deeper funk.

Three years before Zola Maal was born, her parents fled Senegal. They resettled in a Johannesburg slum with their two young sons and found menial jobs scrubbing floors and digging ditches. After two years, they had saved enough for a boat ride. Using the services of a broker/trafficker, they paid for a miserable trip to Miami aboard a Liberian freighter, along with a dozen other Senegalese. When they were safely smuggled ashore, an uncle met them and drove them to his home in Newark, New Jersey, where they lived in a two-room apartment in a building filled with other folks from Senegal, not a single one of whom held a green card.

A year after they arrived in the U.S., Zola was born at Newark’s University Hospital and instantly became an American citizen. While her parents worked two and three jobs, all for cash at less than minimum wage, Zola and her brothers attended school and assimilated into the community. As devout Muslims, they practiced their religion, though at an early age Zola found herself attracted to Western ways. Her father was a strict man who insisted that their native tongues of Wolof and French be replaced with English. The boys absorbed the new language and helped their parents with it at home.

The family moved often around Newark, always to cramped apartments, each one slightly larger than the last, and always with other Senegalese close by. All of them lived in fear of being deported, but there was safety in numbers, or so they believed. Every knock on the door brought a brief shudder of fear. Staying out of trouble was imperative, and Zola and her brothers were taught to avoid anything that might attract the wrong kind of attention. Even though she had the right papers, she knew that her family was in jeopardy. She lived with the horror of her parents and brothers being arrested and sent back to Senegal.

When she was fifteen, she found her first job washing dishes in a diner, for cash of course, and not much of it. Her brothers worked too, and the entire family scrimped and saved as much as possible.

When Zola wasn’t working she was studying. She breezed through high school with good grades and enrolled in a community college as a part-time student. A small scholarship allowed her to become full-time and also landed her a job in the college library. But she still washed dishes, and cleaned houses with her mother, and babysat children for family friends with better jobs. Her oldest brother married an American girl who was not a Muslim, and though that meant an easier route to citizenship, it caused serious friction with her parents. The brother and his new wife moved to California to start another life.

At the age of twenty, Zola left home and enrolled as a junior at Montclair State. She lived in a dorm with two American girls, both of whom were also on tight budgets. She chose accounting as a major because she enjoyed working with numbers and had a knack for finance. She studied hard when time allowed, but the juggling of two and sometimes three jobs often interfered with the books. Her roommates introduced her to the partying scene and she discovered she had a knack for that too. While she clung to the strict Muslim prohibition against alcohol, and she really didn’t like the taste of any of it anyway, she was more receptive to other temptations, primarily fashion and sex. She was almost six feet tall and was often told how great she looked in tight jeans. Her first boyfriend happily taught her all about sex. Her second introduced her to recreational drugs. By the end of her junior year she silently and defiantly considered herself a nonpracticing Muslim, though her parents had no clue.

Her parents would soon have more serious problems. During the fall semester of her senior year, her father was arrested and jailed for two weeks before bail was arranged. At the time, he was working for a painting contractor, another Senegalese with proper documents. Evidently, his boss had underbid a union contractor for a job painting the interior of a large office complex in Newark. The union contractor notified Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and reported that illegals were being used. That was serious enough, but some office supplies were allegedly missing and fingers were being pointed. Zola’s father and four other undocumented workers were charged with grand larceny. He was served with a Notice to Appear in immigration court, along with a criminal indictment.

Zola hired a lawyer who claimed to specialize in such matters and the family forked over a retainer of $9,000, virtually all its savings. The lawyer was extremely busy and seldom returned their phone calls. With her parents and brother hiding in and around Newark, Zola was left to haggle with the lawyer. She grew to despise the man, a fast talker who liked to stretch the truth, and would have fired him had it not been for the retainer. There was no money to hire another. When he failed to appear in court, the judge kicked him off the case. Zola eventually convinced a legal aid lawyer to step in and the indictment was dismissed. The deportation, however, was not going away. The case dragged on and became so distracting that her grades suffered. After several court appearances and hearings, she became convinced that all lawyers were either lazy or stupid and that she could do a better job herself.