At this time of night, the roads were unlit and empty. The Antelope Valley seemed to revert back to the town I knew as a kid, and the drive toward the Karinger house seemed less like a distance to traverse than a stretch of time.
We arrived at a streetlight that had been switched to a flashing red, and Watts came to a complete, unnecessary stop. Nobody else was around. The rosary hanging between us reflected the red light, on and off, in perfect time. Watts didn’t move the car. Instead, he started to talk.
“It sucks being here without you guys,” he said.
I wanted to tell him that the word “here” was unnecessary, that I felt the same way in an entirely different place. But the truth was, leaving and being left produced two distinct species of nostalgia, and I could speak to only one. So I said, “Go on. I’m listening.”
He checked the mirrors constantly while he spoke, making sure we were alone on the road. “I lied the other day,” he said. “I know why Roxanne stopped talking to me.”
“I knew it,” I said. “It’s because of me. She hates me and doesn’t want you keeping in touch with me.”
Watts laughed. “Dude, not everything’s about you. Roxanne likes you a lot, actually. She thinks her brother was an asshole to you. She’s always trying to get him to apologize. No, this is about me, for a change.”
“For a change?” I asked, though — considering how badly I wanted to ask for more information about Roxanne helping me and Karinger be friends again — I knew he had a point.
“I don’t know if you can get how hard it is growing up in a place where all your friends look alike except for you. Like, nobody’s blatantly mean or anything, but there were a lot of times with you and Karinger where I felt kind of invisible. I don’t know if you knew that about me, but there it is.”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t know.”
“What I mean is, I’m trying to figure out how to tell you this story. I guess the best way is to just come out with what I did, which is I ratted out one of the workers at my parents’ company. For months I heard this guy — our age, maybe a little older — talking shit about my dad to another worker. He must’ve thought I couldn’t understand Spanish or something. My dad can be a prick, but he’s a good guy. He treats his employees fair, is what I mean. So I was pissed at this worker, who kept saying petty things about my dad — making fun of his weight, for example. Then one day I heard him mention to another worker that he was undocumented, and I sort of filed it away. I told myself, the next time he makes a joke about my dad, I’m going to — and, the next time he did, I went straight into my parents’ office and ratted him out.”
He paused. Then he said, “He’s always called me Danner, you know.”
“What?”
“My dad. He calls me Danner.”
We laughed, sort of.
“When I fucked up in school or something, he’d say, ‘Danner, you got that from your mother’s side of the family.’ He’s always wanted me to be more—”
“White?” I said. “So you told your dad about the undocumented worker because you wanted him to know you weren’t just your mother’s son, but his, too? You wanted to make your dad proud, and you didn’t care if you hurt someone along the way.”
“I don’t think so,” Watts said. He turned to look at me, and the already cramped cab of the truck seemed to shrink. I rolled down my window to breathe.
“Like I said,” he went on, “I think it was more about me, for a change. I think I wanted to feel that kind of power, the power of having somebody’s life in my hands. I also think I wanted the worker to know I wasn’t invisible. That I’d been there when he was talking, that I’d heard what he’d been saying and understood him. That I was like him, in a way, and also not. That I had something he didn’t have, which is that I could be two things at once. I think that’s why I had him deported.”
I wanted to punch him in a friendly way, let him know I was still listening, still someone he could talk to. But I feared Watts would understand my hitting him as an indictment of what he’d done, and I knew he deserved much more than a punch. The haloed headlights of an oncoming car grew ahead of us. I asked Watts how this had anything to do with Roxanne.
“The whole time my dad was on the phone with the immigration officer, he kept saying that his son, Danner, was the hero. I’m not going to lie, Kush. I felt proud. For a few weeks, I felt like a fucking patriot. Only later did I start feeling sick. I fucked up a man’s life — and his family’s, too — because he called my dad fat. Jesus. I was really sick with guilt, man. I started going to church more and more, tried to atone, but I couldn’t tell some stranger what I had done. God, I wish you or Karinger were around, because I was crying like a fucking idiot and ashamed and I needed someone to talk to. In person, I mean. So I went to Roxanne. I picked her up and we drove to the aqueduct, and I told her everything. After a while, she just stared at me, like she’d never seen me before. Then she told me to take her home. We haven’t talked since.”
The oncoming car passed, flooding us momentarily in white light.
“She’s the only reason I still love being here,” Watts said. Then he said it again. “I really love her, Kush. I really do. And I need her. I need to fix this. I don’t know how, but I need to fix this.”
I looked at my friend beside me, the one who stayed, and I knew what I had to do. I wanted to believe good men could do despicable things and remain good men. I wanted to believe this place was better for having him.
“I can fix it,” I said.
“You can?” he said.
“I think so.”
“What can I do to help?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Remember your motto: Just be there. Then we’ll see what happens.”
* * *
One of the poems Robert Hass read the day I stole the wine began, “In one version of the legend the sirens couldn’t sing.” That’s how I felt that night, just being there with Watts at the Karinger house, unable to lure the story closer. We parked across the street, knowing we couldn’t do anything but watch the unlit windows. This wasn’t a movie. We couldn’t get out of the car and call Roxanne’s name. We couldn’t perform a grand apologetic gesture. We couldn’t even apologize, simply. We couldn’t predict the future, which was that Watts would go on to save more lives than he damaged. We couldn’t reverse the deportation of the undocumented worker. We couldn’t do what Karinger would’ve done, concoct an extravagant plot to prevent further deportations by splashing bleach across the lawns of the Antelope Valley, heightening the demand for workers. We couldn’t continue to demonize Seth Watts, and I couldn’t balk when his son, understanding how flatly he’d portrayed him, began reciting a litany of genuinely redeeming qualities. We couldn’t say another word about mothers, though we thought about ours constantly. We couldn’t spend all night parked at the Karinger house, waiting for a girl to emerge and absolve us of our sins, and we couldn’t regret turning the truck around eventually, back through that flashing red, to get some rest before my departure.
All we could do was return to our lives. Only then, from the distant Oakland Tribune offices, could I go through with my plan. I wrote an email to Roxanne Karinger explaining how Watts had taken the blame when in fact the deportation was my fault. I’d been doing research for an article, I lied, calling out small-business owners exploiting illegal labor. I’d been the one who discovered the undocumented status of the worker, and Seth Watts deported him on my notice. Why Watts would cover for me, I wrote, I couldn’t say. Why do friends do anything for each other?
Roxanne never replied to my email, but the plan worked. Watts, grateful, kept me informed. Roxanne thought what I had done was disgusting and inhumane. Journalism, she concluded, was nothing but self-promotion. At last she understood why her brother stopped talking to me, and would never take my side again. Still, she could see why Watts would stay in touch with me after all these years — she admired his loyalty. Anyway, the truth was she hadn’t been that upset about the deportation in the first place. She could see now that she’d used the opportunity to take a “much-needed break” at a “difficult time” in her life. Later, with her brother visiting between deployments, and with the inception of her new, adult life fast approaching, she felt ready to stop keeping her love for Watts a secret, which was the true issue at the heart of their struggle. Watts agreed. And the nameless worker who’d been arrested and deported soon became simply another part of their story, important only in the most fleeting way: that he had been there, and then one day, he wasn’t.