Gods Go Begging by Alfredo Vea

cops and a paramedic couldn’t pull him out of that Dumpster. They had to send one cop over to a rest home near Park Merced. They dragged my boy’s dear, sweet mother away from her bingo game and drove her to the scene of the crime. It took her twenty minutes to talk him out of that garbage can. ‘Antonio, mijo,el tigre, ya se fue.’”
    The table was quaking with sardonic giggles, tragic guffaws, sympathetic wails.
    “Out of ten fingers, the tiger eats that one. His primary means of self-expression had been chewed off and swallowed. It would be like one of us losing our voice. When I went to see him at the hospital, he only had two things to say: ‘Hey man, you a lawyer, tell me, ain’t tigers illegal? Ain’t they against the law?’ After I recovered from my disbelief, my client begged me to ask the owner of the tiger to look around the house for his high school ring.”
    Another burst of laughter filled the House of Toast, as this particular eating establishment was unofficially named. Like all such places in government buildings, the contract to serve sumptuous and appetizing food had gone to the lowest bidder. The lowest bidder—a petulant, brooding group of smoking Vietnamese cooks—did not look up from their tedious work. They had grown accustomed to the incomprehensible banter of these coffee-swilling lawyers. Though most of the cooks had learned to speak some English, the dialect these lawyers were speaking seemed totally alien.
    Back home, in a South Vietnam that no longer existed, there were lots of police and lots of prosecutors, but no such thing as defense lawyers. One of the cooks wiped the sweat from his brow and sneered at the circle of men in suits and shirtsleeves. Back home any decent person would rather cross the street than walk on the same sidewalk with a lawyer.
    “That was Antonio Ruiz, wasn’t it?” said Matt Gonzalez, the Te jano lawyer. “I represented him over at San Quentin.”
    “Señor Antonio ‘El Tigre’ Ruiz to be exact,” said Jesse Pasadoble, a Chicano lawyer who was a veteran of the Vietnam War and of almost two hundred felony trials. “He renamed himself after that case and became a minor celebrity in the jails. You should have seen him at his sentencing. There he was, on crutches, flipping the judge the bird with that phantom middle finger of his. The judge cited him for attempted contempt of court. Of course we argued both legal and factual impossibility, but the judge thought the intent to flip the bird was sufficient. Why were you representing him in custody?” Jesse asked, turning to Matt.
    “He got caught burglarizing the cells of his fellow inmates! They caught him by using the state of the art in forensic science and crime-scene detection. It seems the cells at San Quentin are pretty dusty and the thief left a series of shoe prints—all of a left shoe.”
    “At least he’s consistent,” said one laughing voice. “How does he describe himself these days, as a cat burglar?”
    “He told me,” said Matt, “that he wasn’t scared of getting caught burglarizing in the pen. After that damn tiger, those guys in the Aryan Brotherhood and the Mexican Mafia looked like a bunch of sissies. El Tigre is back on the streets, you know. Some Mexican lawyer got all of his priors stricken and worked out a great deal.”
    He winked at Jesse, who smiled back.
    “I saw him not too long ago. You won’t believe it! He went and bought himself a used prosthetic limb. Only problem is that it’s another left leg! At first I thought something was wrong with my eyes. I was talking to him for a few minutes, and I kept trying to clear my head, before I realized he was wearing two left shoes! Poor bastard. If you tell him to move to the right, he’s paralyzed!”
    Matt laughed deeply at the memory, then gathered himself for his own contribution to the contest.
    “But my dear, dear friends, I’ve got one even better than my man Antonio Ruiz,” he announced with a look of