by Paul Batista
Juan was surprised when he saw a man walk out of the house carrying bottles of Pepsi in a plastic bag. Juan was the first crew member to notice him, and it took several seconds before he realized the man was bringing the Pepsis to them. Brad put the bags on the ground at the foot of Juan’s ladder.
“Time to take a break,” Brad Richardson said in Spanish. “They’re cold.”
Juan said in English, “Thank you, Mister,” as he reached down from the ladder to take the chilled bottle that Brad handed up to him.
Releasing the bottle, Brad looked directly at Juan’s eyes. “No problem,” Brad said in English.
As Juan slowly drank, he kept the heavy saw balanced on the highest step. He stared out over the dunes to the open ocean water. To his right, the immense shingled roof of the Maidstone Club rose in the distance from the slopes of the seaside golf course. The small triangular flags on the course flapped crazily in the intensifying wind, colorful agate against the rolling slopes of the golf course. The wind became more and more chilly.
3.
The rain started at just after eleven. It came in cloudlike sheets, driven on tall gusts of wind. The ladder shook. By the time Juan climbed down, gripping the precious saw, he was drenched. He jogged to the rear of the truck. On the open trailer the other men already crouched under a dirty tarpaulin. They held their hands aloft to keep it in place. Juan draped the edge of the tarpaulin over his head, clutching the stiff fabric at his neck. But the gusty rain continued to drench him. Stirred by the incoming wind from the sea, the tarpaulin on the unprotected flatbed often lifted off of them. They grabbed it to bring it down to make it a secure tent, not just a loose cover. It was futile. The tarp billowed and snapped, almost out of control. In obscene Spanish, they kept asking when the fuck Tom Golden would arrive in his BMW to tell them they could drive back to the edge of the Montauk Highway where they had gathered four hours earlier and pay them whatever cash he decided to hand out. Juan gazed down the straight country road in the direction from which the BMW would come. The sheets of swirling gray rain would make it impossible to see Tom Golden’s silver car until it was nearby. The other men, trying to control the flailing tarpaulin, repeatedly asked him in Spanish where the motherfucker was. Some of the sounds from the flapping tarpaulin were as sharp as the resonance of small firecrackers.
Suddenly Juan saw something he never expected. From the house, a woman in an orange raincoat came running across the lawn, holding the hood over her head in the same way Juan held the tarpaulin’s edge over his head. The woman was quick. Stopping on the white gravel driveway near the truck, she shouted, barely audible above the torrents of wind and rain, “Why don’t you all come inside the house? You’ll catch pneumonia out here.”
More fluent in English than the other men, Juan translated. They jumped off the trailer, leaving the tarpaulin to blow away heavily, with a slapping noise like a huge wet flag, onto the road. It flew into a barren potato field. The men ran. Juan was first, jogging behind her in disbelief that she was about to take them into her home. Noticing that she had thin, curved, elegant ankles, Juan hadn’t yet seen all of her face. He assumed she was the wife of the kind man who had brought out the Pepsis.
Just as they walked through the entrance to the vast kitchen, a small Mexican-Indian woman, whom Juan had sometimes seen when he brought the weekly laundry to the laundromat at the end of Main Street in Sag Harbor, passed out towels to the men. She laid more towels on the floor as she told them to gather around the tall chairs that surrounded the kitchen’s central marble-surfaced island. On that table were silver urns and china cups and plates with cookies and cake. The men took their seats, towels draped over their shoulders and heads like shawls.
When Joan Richardson removed her slicker and handed it to Leanna to be hung in what she called the mud room, Juan and the other men—all of them acting demure and ill at ease and shy—saw that she was beautiful. Blue eyes, blonde hair, full breasts, slim legs in slacks. And she was kind, Juan thought. She instinctively appeared to know that Juan—by far the tallest, the one who most calmly looked at her, the obvious leader of the smaller dark men around him—knew more English and would interpret for her.
She said, “I should have called Golden this morning and asked him not to bring you all here. I heard it would rain. I guess I hoped for the best.”
“It’s okay,” Juan answered. He didn’t know her name. He never knew the names of the people at the houses where he worked. The small, tasteful signs at the entrances to the long driveways in East Hampton, Sagaponack, and Southampton had the numbers and names of the streets and roads, never the names of the owners. “We get wet all the time.”
“Go ahead, have your coffee. Leanna? Can we also give them tea?”
“Nobody drinks tea, Mrs. We drink coffee.”
“My name is Joan.” She began pouring hot coffee into cups and pointed to the milk and sugar in ceramic bowls. “And my husband’s name is Brad.”
“He’s nice. Nobody ever gave us soda before.”
“Really? I’m surprised. No one ever? Brad’s thoughtful.”
Juan wasn’t sure he knew the meaning of “thoughtful.” He was sure that the other men noticed that this blonde woman with the dazzling smile was spending a great deal of time talking to handsome, black-haired Juan Suarez. He knew he would later take merciless ribbing from them.
Joan asked, “Where do you all live?”
Juan hesitated. Like the others at the table—and like every illegal immigrant he knew—Juan was leery about that question. It was men in uniforms or suits who always asked the question, and no one ever answered it accurately. He said, “Hampton Bays.”
Hampton Bays was twenty miles to the west, a far less attractive, working class area of the legendary Hamptons. In fact, Juan lived in a rundown ranch house with at least ten other men, women, and children in the desolate woods along the Sag Harbor-Bridgehampton Turnpike, the ancient road that for more than two hundred years had been the place where generations of local black families lived in frail, ramshackle houses.
Joan Richardson, regretting the question, recognized the evasion. She smiled and changed the subject. “I don’t know your name.”
“Juan.”
“What about the others?”
Juan hesitated. For the most part he knew these men by names that were Spanish words referring to parts of their bodies or their habits: Victor the Pineapple, Julio the Dick. Juan told her that three of the other men were named Juan as well. “Like John,” he said. “John and Juan. They’re the same. Lots of men are Juan.”
She laughed. It was a gutsy, big laugh for such a slim woman. Then she asked, “Do you always work together?”
“No, it depends on who gets picked.”
“Gets picked? That doesn’t sound fair.”
“It’s okay. It’s the way it is.”
More than an hour passed before Tom Golden, running through the sheets of rain without an umbrella, came through the kitchen door. He glanced first at the cowed Mexican men. Clearly he’d expected to find them still in the rain under the tarpaulin on the open trailer. When the storm started he had been three miles away in Amagansett, where another, more skilled crew was working on the renovation of several interior rooms.
Tom Golden had never imagined that Joan Richardson or any of his elite, moneyed customers would let a yard crew into the house because of rain. His orders were that they never wander away from the truck or the specific work areas he assigned them. There was the detritus of mud and leaves, footprints and puddles of water, spread over the marble floor. Wind gusts pelted rain against the seaward-facing windows.
Ignoring the watchful men, Tom said, “God, Mrs. Richardson, I’m sorry for this.” He waved his muscular, hairy arm in the direction of the men. They were now quiet, expectant, watchful, like children about to be disciplined at school.
“Why so?” she asked.
“They’ve made a mess in here. The leaves, the dirt.”
“I as
ked them to come in. Brad thought it was a good idea, too.”
For the first time, Juan glanced down a long hallway, at the end of which was a room with glass walls where Brad Richardson sat at a gleaming computer terminal. He was leaning backward in a wooden swivel chair, speaking into a cell phone. He waved and smiled at his wife and the other people in the kitchen. He continued with his conversation.
“I’ve told them, Mrs. Richardson, that in bad weather they should stay in the truck until I get there.”
She laughed. “Tom, you’re a busy man, obviously. You’ve been gone for more than an hour since it started raining. They’d be drowned by now.”
“It didn’t start raining where I was until fifteen minutes ago.”
She laughed again, that full-throated laugh: “Were you in bed with the sheets over your head?”
“I was at a job in Amagansett, over on the Montauk side. Must have taken the rain longer to get further west. Weather travels west to east out here.”
“Is that so?” Joan Richardson asked. “What a surprise.” She looked directly at him. Dumb bastard, she thought, and then said: “But no harm, no foul. They’ve enjoyed their cookies and coffee. And Juan is a wonderful translator.”
Juan’s full head of black hair was still wet, almost gleaming, curling over the collar of his sweatshirt, as though he’d been swimming. He was taller than Tom Golden by at least a head. His arms, covered with sleek black hair, were even more muscular than Tom’s. Juan had the exhausted, happy look of a Spanish tennis champion who had just won a tournament, and Tom Golden looked like an entitled fraternity boy from Ohio State.
“Juan’s a talented guy,” Tom said. “The pick of the litter.”
Joan Richardson rolled her striking blue eyes upward. “The pick of the litter?” She feigned a shudder of disgust. Then she said, “Brad thinks that maybe we better call it a day. He’s been on calls to Europe all morning, but he said a few minutes ago that the day is a washout for these men. You’d better get them home. If it clears up tomorrow, Brad said, come back, or wait another day or two. It’s your call.”
He saw that he had annoyed Joan Richardson. He didn’t want to lose the Richardsons as customers. They were his most important clients by far. He ranked his customers by their status on Google. Brad Richardson was not only one of the richest men in the world, he was influential in other ways as well. He wrote articles on economics and politics for the Op-Ed page of the New York Times and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. He recently had lead articles in two editions of the New York Review of Books. Tom recognized that all of this was a really big deal: Brad was not only immensely wealthy, he was emerging as an intellectual, a man of ideas and vision. There were news articles that said Brad Richardson was high on the President’s list to be the next Secretary of the Treasury.
But Brad’s wife was even more of a presence on the Internet. She was the golden daughter of George Cabot, who still reigned, at 77, as the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, presiding as a liberal icon over the National Cathedral, and of Catherine Bybee, once an actress who before her marriage in the 1980s was called the Grace Kelly of the Reagan era. And Joan over the last five years had become legendary for running the Richardson Foundation, a charity that funded relief for hundreds of thousands of displaced children who were refugees from wars in Syria, Somalia, and South Sudan. A cover story in Elle ranked her with Melinda Gates as the leading female philanthropist in the world. In the picture of her on the cover of Elle she was depicted as what she was in real life: blonde, striking, elegant, smiling, a woman who loved life.
And Tom Golden knew something else about her. She was an easy touch, a babe, hot. In the bar at the American Hotel in Sag Harbor and the grill room of the Noyac country club, local men and women—the native aristocracy of people born in East Hampton and Southampton who owned the landscaping companies, the fancy stores, the architectural design firms, the real estate companies—shared stories about Joan Richardson’s multiple affairs. Brad traveled the world. Joan didn’t. She spent long summers on the East End, and word circulated about the men. Tom Golden, who knew one of the men who had been her lover for a week last fall, once imagined he could reach her. Why not?
But Joan Richardson was said to be unpredictable, with diverse tastes in men. Tom soon saw that her range didn’t encompass him. By now he was more interested in keeping her business and the prestige that brought him than he was in screwing her for a week or two and then losing her as a client. He cultivated the image of a stud, and word had spread among the rich ladies that he was endowed.
“Don’t worry about it, Mrs. Richardson,” he said. “They’re well taken care of.”
Juan was one of the four men who rode in her SUV to the roadside woods in Wainscott. He was in the back seat. The fallow corn and potato fields through which they drove were as wide and flat as the nearby ocean. Rain still fell so densely that the sky and the fields appeared to merge into the drenched air. From time to time she glanced into the rearview mirror, pretending to keep in sight the lumbering truck behind her SUV, but really to see Juan—the high cheekbones, the deep eyes, black eyebrows, thick hair. In her glances she saw him only in profile, since he was gazing at the fields.
Tom Golden’s car was already idling several hundred yards from the isolated Post Office building on the Montauk Highway, the road that ran through and linked Southampton, East Hampton, and Montauk and ended at the lighthouse at Montauk Point. The truck pulled in behind the BMW. Joan brought her SUV as close to the truck as she could. Three men clambered out of the crowded cab of the truck. The men in her car, including Juan, said “Thank you” in English as they opened the doors and got out.
She remained in the front seat, listening to the rhythmic rubbing of the windshield wipers while she watched each of the men walk up to the window of Tom’s car. He handed cash through the half-closed window to each of them. She couldn’t see how much, but not one of the men, quickly looking at the bills to count them, was happy with what Golden had given out. She had no idea, she realized, how much he paid them, although she did know that Golden’s bills to her and Brad for a small crew working all day on their estate was almost two thousand dollars. At last, with a transparently ingratiating smile for her, Tom Golden closed the window and sped away in his silver car, its tires flinging wet stones and dirt from the unpaved shoulder of the road.
There were no other cars parked in the woodsy, unsheltered area by the roadside. There was a small shopping mall on the other side of the highway—a Starbucks, the upscale Citarella food store, a fish outlet, and a place selling cheap wicker furniture. The men just stood in the rain. One of them unlocked an old bicycle from a telephone pole and rode west along the highway. The other men, Juan among them, moved far back from the road so that they could find some shelter under the taller, thicker branches of the leafless trees.
Joan Richardson stepped down from her SUV. Again pulling the hood of her yellow coat over her head, she walked toward them.
“It’s still pouring,” she said, raising her voice over the rain and wind. “Who’s coming for all of you?”
Suddenly they weren’t focusing on her. When she turned, she saw an East Hampton police cruiser. As it slowed, the car tossed up sheets of dirty water from its oversize tires. Every one of the men was intent on the cruiser. They obviously felt menaced, they were leery and quiet and intense. Then the cruiser accelerated and sped away, hissing through the rain.
She asked again, “Who’s coming for you?”
Juan said, “People come to pick us up.”
“How does anybody know you’re here?”
One of the men had a cell phone. He lifted it for her to see.
“Friends,” Juan said. “We have friends. We called. They’re coming soon.”
“I can drive you all home,” she said. “The car’s big.”
“Thank you, Mrs., but our friends will be here soon.”
“You can all wait in my car. There’s room.
”
“It’s okay, Mrs.”
“All right,” she said. “Take a long bath when you get home. Get warm.”
Imagining Juan naked, powerful, and sinuous as he took a bath, she went back to her SUV and drove off, waving to them while they huddled under the dripping bare trees. It was a cold early spring, and the terrain of woods and underbrush in which they stood looked dismal.
Fifteen minutes after Joan Richardson left, Hector, one of the shuttle crew drivers hired by Tom Golden and other contractors who used day-laborers, pulled up to the edge of the woods. The men climbed into his fifteen-year-old Ford station wagon. In the oversize car, they counted their cash: they had each received thirty dollars in five-dollar bills from Tom Golden. They swore at the cheap motherfucker. Each of them had to give five dollars to Hector for carfare.
Inside the fetid car, one of the men teased Juan. “Mrs. wants to fuck Juan. Juan, when are you going to fuck Mrs.?”
Everyone in the car laughed. Since Juan wanted to get along with these men, he laughed too, but said nothing. He thought about Joan Richardson’s ankles.
4.
It was Brad Richardson who drove to the work gang on the Montauk Highway in Wainscott at six-thirty on Thursday morning. From the open window of his Land Rover, Brad waved Juan over. He remembered the kind man who earlier that week had carried bags of Pepsis to the crew before the rainstorm. A clear dawn, with just a slight chill, was rising through the stark branches of the trees at the roadside. Tom Golden and the other contractors hadn’t yet arrived.
“Juan, good morning,” Brad called out through the open window.
Pointing at his chest, Juan asked, “You want me?” Then he walked to the Land Rover’s open window.
“Juan, my wife and I were talking. We thought about having you come to work for us full-time for a while.”
Juan hesitated. “I don’t understand.”