The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,144

then he gave it to me anyway when my mom wasn’t looking. It’s got some bad parts. Some parts that are really bad, actually.”

“What? Like murders and stuff?”

“Nah. I can’t describe it. There’s no dragons or warriors or elves like in all the other books I read before. But it’s really, really cool. And bad. There’s kids smoking in it.”

“Smoking?”

“Yeah. Cigarettes. It’s, like, the best book I’ve ever read.”

Max gave a conspiratorial scan, and then took the old paperback from his pocket and handed it to Brandon, who examined its timeworn cover, and a title whose meaning he could not immediately decipher.

“You can keep it,” Max said. “I finished it in the car.”

Brandon opened the first page and began to read. When the narrator promised to describe “what my lousy childhood was like,” Brandon was hooked.

“You know, eventually, they’re going to prosecute that poor woman because of me.” It was one of the few comments Scott had allowed himself to make about the situation, and Peter Goldman decided he would try and ignore it. “It’s either her or me. Or us, I mean. I guess we deserve to be punished more.” They were near the bottom of the bottle and had been talking baseball and football, for the most part. Having bared his guilt for a moment, Scott caught himself, took another gulp of wine, and looked up at his old friend, who seemed more amused than outraged by Scott’s situation. Here’s one person, Scott thought, who won’t sit in judgment. Scott was trying to think of something witty to say to chase away the unwanted pathos of the moment, when the phone on the dining room table before them rang again and Peter Goldman picked it up.

“No, he’s not interested,” Peter Goldman said. “That’s right. Thank you. Bye-bye, now … bye.”

“Thanks for doing that, buddy,” Scott said. “I really owe you.”

“Every good quarterback needs a good offensive line. Especially when the pass rush is as murderous as the one surrounding this household, let me tell you.” They had a camaraderie forged during five years of school meetings, birthdays, and excursions to amusement parks, a brotherhood born of their marriages to women who dragged them all over the city and erased many hours of potential sports viewing, all in the name of family obligation.

There was a knock on the door. Three evenly spaced and polite taps, followed by a pause, and three more evenly spaced but louder taps. Peter Goldman rose to his feet and said, “I’m on it.” A moment later Scott felt a shaft of warm light enter his home through the half-open door and heard the mumble of a voice from outside. After a quick back-and-forth, Peter came walking back to the table.

“It’s a guy from the district attorney’s office.”

“Not again. Fuck.”

“Should I tell him to go?”

“No. I have to talk to him.”

Scott stood up and walked to the front door and swung it open.

“Mr. Torres, we haven’t been able to get through on the phone,” said Ian Goller. He wore a light-swallowing charcoal suit and a thin red tie over a starched white shirt, and to Peter Goldman, who had never met him before, he radiated the unrealness of an actor who’d wandered off the soundstage of a Technicolor spy flick. Goller had been shot back to Pasco Linda Bonita, quickly, by the dizzying spin of the news cycle, and the clamor of a vociferous segment of the voting public inside Orange County, and an influential segment of watchers and commentators beyond the county’s borders. These voices were demanding, via various forms of digital and analog media, that Ian Goller and his colleagues in the district attorney’s office apply the “rule of law” in the case of Araceli Ramirez, alleged childnapper.

Goller had arrived at the district attorney’s office, off the beach and with his hair still wet (figuratively speaking and maybe literally too), with certain idealistic notions firmly rooted in his brain—specifically, the belief that criminal law was a scientific pursuit in which American and European traditions of jurisprudence were applied to the dispassionate weighing of facts and the protection of the public. During his ascent to the upper layers of the agency, and with his eventual admission to the walnut-paneled sanctuary of the district attorney himself, this idealism had aged and matured into a more realistic understanding of the job and its responsibilities. Above all, he had come to learn it simply wasn’t possible for a public servant to ignore public opinion—completely—when defining right and