Judgement Day in Santa Ana

“All of us who work here are very happy to be able to serve the variety of guests who visit us.”

--from the menu of Rancho D’ Mendoza

*

Just inside the door is a jukebox playing ranchera music. Murals on the white-washed plaster walls are of cockfights and vaqueros roping long-horned steers. Except for the passionate voice of Antonio Aguilar singing about the slow, rising passion of love, it is fairly quiet at Rancho D’Mendoza, a rather inconspicuous restaurant in downtown Santa Ana.

It is midday on a Wednesday afternoon, my last day of jury duty for Superior Court. Two young men, charged with the possession of a large package of drugs, are silently waiting for a jury of their peers--myself included--to decide their fate. We’ve been given two hours for lunch. When we come back, we will listen to final arguments and decide what to do with these two who have spent the entire trial listening intently through their headphones to the court interpreter, sometimes biting their lips or rubbing at their hands as if trying to wipe away dirt or grease, but never once speaking.

One of the defendants has a pretty young lawyer, appointed by the court. When she was questioning me as a prospective juror, she told a story about a sealed box with a cat in it. “What if I put a mouse in that box,” she said to me, “and later, when you opened it, the mouse was gone. But there was no sign that the cat had eaten the mouse. Would you convict the cat of murder?”

Before I could answer, the judge intervened. “Is there a point to this story?” he asked. The young lawyer, sounding a little frustrated, said, “I just want the jury to know that you can’t always judge things by appearances.”

What she no doubt meant to say was, look, my client is young and hungry. But that doesn’t mean he ate the mouse. I’ve been thinking about her cat-and-mouse story all week while listening to detectives and witnesses testify.

Did they eat the mouse? I’m not certain. I sit in the back of the restaurant, away from the jukebox, where it is darker and cooler. There is a small bar back here where a waitress in a puffy white blouse and large, gold hoop earrings slices lime wedges while laughing and smiling at a young man wearing a Yankee baseball cap who is sitting at the bar drinking fruit juice and singing along, badly, to the ranchera music.

The waitress laughs, shakes her head, and tells the young man to be quiet. Then she grabs a menu and comes to my table.

I order a licuado of fresh strawberries and banana, and the lunch special, birria de res. The dark-haired waitress keeps looking over her shoulder at the boy at the bar as she takes my order. Whenever he catches her eye, he sings louder, more pathetically, and the waitress laughs and shakes her head.

Out of the back comes a skinny young man--perhaps a dishwasher or kitchen helper--wearing a stained white apron. In that manner peculiar to young people who work at menial jobs and wish to be elsewhere, he goes to the door of the restaurant, leans against the frame, and wistfully watches the people walking up 4th Street.

He shouts something at a woman seated on an upturned plastic bucket beside a shaded cart on the corner. The woman, who sells sodas and bags of fried pork skin and containers of sliced pineapple or watermelon, ignores him. Seeing me watching him, he smiles sheepishly, wipes his hands on his apron front, and walks back to the kitchen.

In a corner in the back is an old man drinking coffee. He uses sign language to order. The waitress signs back, takes his menu without speaking a word. Meanwhile the cook is impatiently flicking at the bell atop his order window. When that fails to immediately roust the waitress, he scolds her mockingly: “Hija, while the food is hot, por favor.”

My steamed beef, covered in red chile sauce, is fiery. I sip on my fruit juice, wrap the tender beef in fresh corn tortillas, think about the two boys in detention waiting for me and the other jurors to finish our lunches and decide their fate. We have not been told a lot about either of the men. That they are from the central highland of Guanajuato; that they came here two or three years ago; that they have no family living here.

That they got caught up in some transaction they shouldn’t have been involved in, there seems little doubt. As for how much they really knew about the packages they were asked to deliver, it’s less clear. Any way you look at it, it is a bad business.

The jukebox is silent and the restaurant seems abnormally quiet so I go over and dump a buck’s worth of quarters into the machine. I pick three cuts from a Gloria Estefan CD, “Abriendo Puertas”--opening the doors. Her voice is strong and clear, and the waitress smiles at me as I walk back to my table. She is singing the words under her breath as she wipes down a table and clears some dirty plates. She sings: “Milagro de amor. . . .” The miracle of love.

An older man, the cook, comes out from the kitchen. He smiles at the waitress, who may be his daughter. He nods at the old man sitting in the booth drinking his coffee.

Then he makes eye contact with me and stares in such a way that I cannot tell what he is thinking. Maybe that I am a welcomed customer and he is glad I have found my way to his little restaurant in downtown Santa Ana on a warm Wednesday afternoon. Or maybe he is wondering what my life is like--where it is I live and whether I am married and have children, how it is I came to eat at his restaurant.

I would like to have that conversation with him. But not today. Today, I must leave my meal unfinished and hurry back to the courtroom. This afternoon I must decide the fate of two young men who have been caught up in a devil’s bargain, and already I am late.

*

Rancho D’Mendoza, 104 E. 4th Street, Santa Ana. Open daily 2 p.m.-2 a.m. (714) 547-0345.

David Lansing’s column is published on Fridays in Orange County Calendar. His e-mail address is occalendar@latimes.com.