I removed the handcuffs from a prisoner and recognized the tattoo of my dead father. He died in Vietnam three months before I was born; I never knew him. And this 67-year-old man, accused of stealing medicine from a pharmacy, had the same military badge on his arm that my mother has had framed in the living room for forty-eight years.
Part 2.
The old man said the name, and I knew it.
Not from the photo. From my mother. From when I was a little girl, and she would sometimes say, almost to herself, “Güero, poor Güero.” She never explained who he was. I thought he was a dead friend, one more of those taken by the war.
And there, right in the courtroom, that old prisoner was telling me that the eighty-nine-dollar medicine he stole was for Güero.
Güero. The one next to my father in the photo.
The judge kept waiting. “Officer Ortega, do you have anything to say?” My mouth was open, and I couldn’t speak.
And then the old man did something I didn’t expect. He squeezed my hand, the one I was still holding on the railing, and said quietly, quickly, like someone covering a pot before it boils over:
“No, daughter. Don’t say anything. Leave it like this. Let them sentence me, and that’s it.” I stared at him, uncomprehending.
A man about to be thrown in jail was begging me NOT to help him.
