by Daniel Klein
Although Hector has claimed the best seat in the van, the other passengers are comfortable enough. Whoever’s household belongings are being carted northward is a person who prizes comfort; in addition to the La-Z-Boy, there are two easy chairs and two sofas. With a little rearranging of furniture, every man has a soft perch.
The constant darkness gets to some of them, but not Hector. After days and nights on end under flickering fluorescent tubes, the absence of light feels nurturing. It allows Hector to draw into himself in a way he has been unable to do in over a month. But the air in here does get to him. As the oxygen thins, the odor of sweat and excrement distills to a sickening gas that makes him gag. Jackson, the driver, only opens up the back of the truck for a half hour each day—always in the middle of the night, the vehicle parked on the shoulder of a desolate stretch of highway. This is the same time when Jackson sells them sandwiches and empties their slop pails. The men stand and swing their arms around, but they are not permitted outside. “Too risky,” Jackson says, and Hector supposes he is right, but he also wonders how risky—and expensive—it would have been to take a public bus north. But Jesus, of course, was selling a destination as much as the means of getting there.
They arrive on the outskirts of Danbury, Connecticut, at dawn of their third morning. Jackson simply opens up the back door of the van and drawls, “This is it.” The eight men are so relieved to be able to walk outside into the open air that they are not unsettled by the fact that there is no one here to greet them as Jesus promised there would be. Only after Jackson has returned to his cab and driven off, leaving them shivering in the middle of a barren road, do they realize that they have no idea where they are or where they should go.
While the other men are frightened and dumbfounded by their predicament, Hector is exhilarated. Unlike Florida, which felt like a refugee camp of fellow Latinos, this place already feels utterly foreign, and Hector senses the freedom that comes with being a total stranger. This new world, blank and brisk, seems charged with possibilities. For the first time, Hector feels like he has arrived in America.
Leading the way, Hector finds and follows signs pointing to downtown Danbury. Along the road, they pass a small illuminated building that looks like a railway car, a neon sign in front announcing, ‘Hat City Diner.’ Through its windows, Hector sees men drinking coffee. Most appear to be workmen and many have Hispanic faces. Hector tells his fellow travelers that he is going inside to make inquiries; all of them choose to wait for him outside rather than join him.
Hector goes directly to a stool at the low bar that runs the length of the Hat City Diner, placing himself next to a middle-aged Hispanic man in overalls. As Hector sits down, he is startled by his reflection in the mirror across from him: His drawn face, patchy beard, and red-rimmed, rheumy eyes make him look like a drug addict from Ciudad Bolivar. He sees the waitress eyeing him warily, so he immediately dips into his pocket and pulls out a five-dollar bill, one of the ten such bills that comprise his entire fortune, and places it on the counter. “One coffee and one cake,” he announces in English.
“What kinda cake?” the waitress says, looking past him.
“Sweet,” Hector says. He points to the Danish his stool neighbor is munching. “As so.”
Leaving the money displayed on the counter, Hector finds his way to the men’s toilet where he washes his face, shaves with a disposable American razor he lifted from a Golden Glades supply closet, and splashes and finger-combs his hair. When he returns, the waitress offers him an appreciative smile.
“Night shift?” she says.
Not having any idea what she is asking, Hector smiles and nods, then takes a sip of the coffee she sets in front of him. It tastes even less like café than the hotel’s beverage of the same name. He smiles at the Latino next to him. “I’ve come a long way,” he tells him in Spanish.
“So have we all,” the man murmurs, only glancing at him for a second.
“They say there is work here. Day work in construction.”
His neighbor nods. “Sometimes,” he says.
“Where do I find it?”
The man does not answer.
“Let me buy you a coffee,” Hector says to him.
“Listen, friend, there are too many of us already.” With this, the man stands and heads for the door.
The waitress sets a Danish in front of Hector. “He’s a grump,” she says, gesturing with her chin toward the departing man.
“A grump,” Hector repeats dumbly.
“What did you ask him?”
“Day work. Where find.”
“Like it’s a big secret,” the woman says. “Kennedy Park.” She points out the window in the direction of where the sun is just rising. Hector leaves the five-dollar bill on the counter when he walks out.
There are easily three hundred men assembled in the park. They range from smooth-faced teenagers to grizzled men in their forties—possibly older; all are Latinos. They are gathered in small groups where they talk and joke loudly with one another. Hector stands with his moving van comrades. The cold here is not dulling, like the chill from an air conditioner, but it seeps into his bones and makes him feel weak. Hector takes in long, deep breaths, his mother’s prescription for countering any debilitating force.
“Play for me, boy!” This from a brawny man in the group next to Hector. The man has spied the fingerboard of Hector’s cuatro jutting out from the pack slung over Hector’s shoulder.
It would be impossible for Hector to hear those words from anyone and not immediately be brought back to Rico’s Soacho hut, but to hear them delivered with bravado from a bully-faced man makes Hector’s blood rise, ready for combat. Hector glares challengingly back at the man. The man repeats his demand, then steps away from his group and starts to strut toward Hector when a sudden hush descends on the entire population of Kennedy Park. The bully stops in his tracks. All that can be heard is the cough and rumble of combustion engines. Hector turns his eyes from the man’s face. A caravan of brown and black trucks with canvas-covered flatbeds has begun circling the park. They look like military trucks, and for a second Hector imagines gun-bearing troops springing from their tailgates for a roundup of able-bodied men to join their ranks. His fantasy is close to the mark: the trucks have come to round up able-bodied laborers for back-breaking work. The confrontation between Hector and his taunter has been averted by a higher calling: cash.
Because of his height, Hector is among the first to be selected by the construction bosses. Tall men are rare in this ethnic pool and for certain tasks, like window hanging, they offer distinct advantages over five-foot-two Mexicans balanced unsteadily on stepladders. And so, within three hours of arriving in Danbury, Connecticut, Hector Mondragon becomes the ‘top man’ on a window-hanging crew at the building site of a new Wal-Mart store in Brookfield, Connecticut. Although he is tired and disoriented and has no idea where he will lay down his head at the end of day, Hector learns his trade quickly. At six o’clock, when a truck returns to pick up the workers, Hector is presented with an envelope that contains a small fortune—eighty-five American dollars. That night, he sleeps on the couch in the apartment of a member of the window crew. The next morning, he arranges to make that couch his home in this new place.
In a matter of days, a rhythm is established: Up at five-thirty, genuine café in the kitchen he shares with the six other men in the apartment, to Kennedy Park, to a building site, back, dinner, bed. Even the work itself has a steady, predictable beat of lifting and pushing a prefabricated window into its designated frame, then balancing and bracing it as his teammates screw it in place, then lifting and pushing, balancing and bracing the next one. He sings in his mind.
The money is so good he holds on to a third of it, treats himself to dinners at the Hat City Diner twice a week, buys a radio and CD player, a bicycle, a padded overcoat, coveralls, boots; the rest of his personal allowance he stashes and locks in a tin box that he keeps in the pack he carries with him everywhere he
goes. If the ache in his shoulders and the soreness in his neck pulse steadily with the beat of Hector’s day, he does not think about it, and he certainly does not complain. In this regard, he has not become—nor will he ever become—thoroughly North American.
Hector is content not to think about the future. His family in Bogotá is healthy and well-supported by the money he sends home, his own life is easy and pleasant compared to the one he endured in North Miami, and the apartment he lives in is comfortable. He has companions, if not quite friends—men from Mexico, Bolivia, Chile, and even Colombia—whose lives are almost identical to his, although many have plans to bring their wives or girlfriends and children from home to live with them here. Once, on a mad impulse, Hector wrote a letter to Sylvia asking her to join him, promising her a new life in America, but she never answered. That was just as well, Hector decided in a cooler moment.
It is an early Monday morning in mid-March. Hector and his roommates are sauntering up Kennedy Boulevard on their way to the park. All have a steady gig with Boylston Contractors working on a new mall in Shelton, but they still go through the exercise of shaping up for the caravan of employers as a false gesture of equality with the other men who come out every morning. Before they can see the park, they hear people chanting in English: “Speak English!” and “Job Stealers!” and “Go home, Mexicocks!”
Hector and his fellows stop. They can now hear a counter chorus in Spanish: “Bollo!” and “Asqueroso!” and “Foquin gringo!”
“Protestors,” one of Hector’s colleagues says. “We skip work today, and they’ll be gone tomorrow.” He starts back toward their apartment house, and all but Hector follow him.
Hector is goaded by curiosity to stay and take a closer look. Even if he is content with the predictability of his life in Danbury, the way he has become a survivor is by always confronting the unexpected. This, in a sense, is his vocation. He continues up the hill that leads to Kennedy Park.
Wooden barricades run down the middle of the boulevard that fronts the park, uniformed policemen guarding both sides of it. The police wear helmets with clear plastic face guards, every one of them wielding a black nightstick, but to Hector the entire scene looks almost comically tame. Compared to the political riots he has witnessed in Bogotá where the police brandish—and fire—MP5s, this seems like a schoolyard feud. Indeed, its genuine peril is belied by the television cameramen who have planted themselves within feet of the putative combatants. Hector walks closer.
Just before he reaches the intersection, two white civilians in down hunting jackets advance toward him on his right. The taller of the two waves a hand-lettered picket that reads, ‘INS—Where the FUCK are you?’ The other glares at Hector and barks, “Fuckin’ spic!”
Hector understands the man’s words, but he is neither distressed nor frightened by them; their only meaning to him is that the man is crude and stupid. Hector keeps walking.
“You fuckin’ deaf, Spic-head?” the man yells.
Hector stops, crooks his head toward the man, and says, “No.” Then he nods genteelly and moves on.
“Maricon!” the man shouts at him. It is one of the four Spanish words in this man’s vocabulary, all of them insults, his entire transcultural education.
In Miami, Hector had been patronized and exploited for the place of his birth and the color of his skin, but this is his first face-to-face encounter with brutal disgust based on nothing more than an abstraction of who he is. Hector has more experience than most young men as the object of personal hatred—it was a crucial part of his life in Bogotá—so perhaps that is why he can, in this moment, tolerate impersonal hatred.
“Fuckin’ coward!” one of the men yells.
Reluctantly, Hector turns around to face the gringos. Although this last epithet is no more vicious than any of the others, it happens to increase their accumulated mass to the point that tips him to reaction. It is a matter of personal physics: Hector has simply reached his limit of passivity.
And he feels strong. He is sure he can land a blow on one of them that will be staggering enough to send them both running. But what he does not see is that there is a third man just behind the other two. This man, too, is carrying a picket but it is slung low at his side like a lance, and he suddenly comes barreling toward Hector, aiming its sharpened point at his chest. Hector spins away. The stick punctures the back of Hector’s jacket, his shirt, his skin, and over an inch of tissue to where it creases his small intestine. He passes out onto the pavement. The men run. No one else sees Hector’s fallen body until much later, well after the video cameramen have returned to their studios.
This, then, is how the next stage of Hector’s journey begins.
He is brought in a police car to the emergency room of Danbury Hospital. Despite the fact that blood is still steadily oozing from his wound, he waits in this room for almost two hours before being seen by a doctor. Drifting in and out of consciousness while he waits, he hears the unmistakable cadences of Bogotá Spanish being spoken by two young men behind him. One of them is here because of chest pains, the other is his brother who is visiting him from a town north of Danbury where he works in the kitchen of a restaurant. Both of these men are still in the waiting room when Hector returns from being cauterized, stitched, and given a prescription for antibiotics along with the warning—translated into Spanish by a Puerto Rican nurse—to avoid heavy lifting for at least two months if he wants to keep his intestine from bursting. The name of the visiting brother from Bogotá is Pato and the name of the town he lives and works in is Grandville, Massachusetts.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
From the middle of March to the middle of April is the ‘fifth season’ in Grandville—Mud Season. This is the time when the winter’s snow begins to melt and to seep into the freshly-thawed soil faster than it can evaporate, the ubiquitous mountain springs revive and gurgle forth, and rain showers arrive almost daily. Great Pond Reservoir and Wright River overflow their banks, rivulets arise in gardens and cornfields, street gutters are ankle-deep with runoff, basement sump pumps chug away twenty-four hours a day, and virtually every home is surrounded by a mine field of puddles and muck.
Boots are general all over Grandville. Whitney Pierce, Jr., president of Grandville Savings and Loan, tucks his Brooks Brothers gray flannel trousers into an ancient pair of galoshes that he wears throughout the business day, Terrance Cyzinski, the guidance counselor at Grandville High School, laces up his water-resistant Power Foremans, Wendell deVries slips a pair of moccasin rubbers over his Clark’s walkers (Wendell is the last person in town to wear rubbers), and even his former wife, Beatrice, freshly returned from Florida, dons a pair of Hunter Wellingtons to navigate from the portico of Little Sway Lodge to her Mercedes SUV. This is the sole season when complaining about the weather is not only condoned but encouraged, starting with such fifth season greetings as “Got your reservation on the Ark?” and, among the town’s younger set, “Muck sucks.” Most would argue that it is not the inconvenience of mud season that gets to them, it is its unsightliness. Like their founder, James Wright, today’s Grandvillians are given to strong aesthetic judgments about their town.
The single ray of sunshine on all this slime comes from the lengthened days surrounding the equinox. As Herb Blitzstein’s corroded Toyota slithers through the sludge of Austen Riggs’s driveway at six-twenty on the last Friday in March, the setting sun shines in his eyes. He flips down the visor and a slip of notepaper flutters onto the dashboard. His passenger, Franny deVries, picks it up.
“It says, ‘Check oil,’” she says.
“Shit. I bet that’s been there a month.”
Franny smiles, but she is not distracted from her anxiety.
Other than a half-dozen therapy group walks up and back the length of Stockbridge’s Main Street, this is Franny’s first expedition away from the sanitarium since she entered it over three months ago. In the week since Dr. Werner approved today’s outing, Franny has changed her mind about it almost d
aily; chances are if it had been scheduled for tomorrow, she would be back to her position that she was not ready for it yet.
Franny cannot name what exactly it is out there that frightens her. As she gradually admitted to herself that it was nothing more dramatic than attending an amateur production of a simple-minded play that pushed her past reason into the depths of depression, she had to confront the possibility that absolutely anything could do it again. Of course, Dr. Werner insists that it was not Babs Dowd’s play—or her takeover of the playhouse—that precipitated Franny’s breakdown. No, the true cause of that can only be found in the more distant past—in Franny’s childhood, to be precise. Franny finds Werner’s line of reasoning about as compelling as the feel-good message underlying Herb’s ‘It’s-the-little-things-that-changethe course-of-history’ film series. But then again, there did seem to be some connection between Herb’s movies and her precipitous announcement made during the roll of the end credits of Sliding Doors that she had been thinking about going to a Grandville war vigil again. That is where they are headed now.
“Did I tell you we’ve got some new people?” Herb says.
“Nope.” Franny is staring out the passenger’s window, both hands gripped to her seatbelt. The Christmas trimmings the Red Lion Inn still displays on its porch are mud-splattered and frayed, a timely reminder of the real season.
“There’s Gloria, a friend of Tiffany’s. Her daughter enlisted in the Navy. And a pair of geriatric Lefties from New York—gay, I think, and very funny. They sing.”