Footloose in America: Dixie to New England

by Bud Kenny

  Patricia snuggled her cheek against my shoulder. When I looked into her eyes, they were sparkling like the moonlit snow.

  I love snow!

  A one-mule open sleigh.

  CHAPTER 16

  THE BOYS ARE BACK IN TOWN

  WE DREADED THE RETURN OF the Mexicans.

  When they came back, it would be us two middle-aged gringos with eight young Mexican men–only two of whom spoke English–living in the same house. And the Harding house had only one bathroom and one kitchen. The bathroom lights quit working long ago. So they hung a work light in it–the kind mechanics use under your car. It was attached to a long orange extension cord that ran out the door, down the hall and plugged into Chooey’s room. So you couldn’t shut the door completely–much less lock it–because of the cord. Plus, there was paint and plaster that hung in festoons from the bathroom ceiling. And when you sat on the toilet it rocked.

  The kitchen had no cupboards, shelves or counters. It did have an enamel sink, electric stove, two refrigerators and a Formica-topped kitchen table in the middle of the room. The only light was a hundred-watt bulb dangling over the table, and the only place to set a pan was on the big cast iron radiator next to the stove. Over the years lots of greasy pans had slopped onto it, and obviously the mess wasn’t always wiped off. I didn’t know there were so many shades of burnt.

  Before the Mexicans returned, we fixed ourselves a suite of two rooms upstairs at the back of the house. It had a private stairway that led down to the kitchen, and it was close to the bathroom. (The door now closed and locked. I fixed the lights and the toilet no longer rocked.) Plus our suite had a view of Della’s paddock.

  We knew when the Mexicans came back, we’d have no privacy. We learned that early one morning our second week in the house when we were still sleeping in the game room. The sun was just below the horizon, but there was enough light that Patricia and I could appreciate what we were seeing as we made love.

  “Bud, wait!” Patricia stopped me. “Did you hear that?”

  Mexican voices were in the house yelling for a man who had lived there during apple picking. Suddenly a light in the next room came on as our blanket door flung open. Three men stood there staring as we scrambled for covers.

  I yelled, “What the hell is going on?”

  They just stood there with the blanket pulled back.

  I screamed, “Put the damn blanket down!”

  The one holding it babbled some Spanish. A bald man behind him grabbed the blanket and dropped it as he said, “Excuse us, Senor. We’re looking for Enrique.”

  Patricia and I were alone in the Harding House for two and a half months. And at least once a week a stranger would walk in looking for this Mexican or that–no one ever knocked. After a few weeks of that, I started locking the doors at night. Then they would sit in their cars and honk until someone came out.

  “It’s a Mexican house,” said Chooey. He was on the phone from Mexico. “That’s how it is. They’re always open, and we just walk in.”

  Two weeks later I forgot to lock the door, and in the middle of the night we woke to voices in the dining room.

  I called out, “Who’s there?”

  A man’s voice said something in Spanish. Then a woman asked, “Is Chooey here?”

  “He won’t be back till the end of the week. Check back then.”

  After a quick Spanish conversation, she said, “This is Martin. He lives here.”

  For the past five years Martin had a room downstairs next to the dining room. Florescent stars were on the ceiling and a mirrored ball hung from the middle of it. Velvet paintings of nude women were on the walls with postcards of the Holy Mother and Jesus next to the door. He had black lights, a strobe light and a huge stereo system.

  Martin had a wife and children in Mexico. He also had an American girlfriend, one who–sexually–was very vocal. And that night they made up for the time he’d been home.

  Two days later, Chooey arrived with his brother Jose and longtime friend Pedro. Chooey had been a legal migrant for years. But his brother and Pedro had to sneak into the country. The people who smuggled them in were called “Coyotes.” It cost two thousand dollars apiece. That included the documents necessary to work here.

  “They’ve all got papers.” Chris Watt said, “Green card, social security card, the whole bit. You can’t tell the fakes from the real ones. Hey, it’s a bargain for the Social Security Administration.”

  I asked, “How’s that?”

  “We deduct the taxes from their wages and send it in. But they aren’t citizens. So there’s no beneficiary. That’s a pretty sweet deal for Social Security. I’d like to know how much they bring in off bogus accounts every year. I bet it’s illegal immigrants that keep Social Security afloat.”

  By March 1st, six Mexicans had moved in. Among them was Chooey, his brother Jose and Pedro. We had become fond of Chooey before he left for Mexico, and I guess he must have spoken well of us to Jose and Pedro. Right away they seemed eager to be our friends. Jose spoke a little English, and Pedro was learning. When Pedro spoke, he was so animated that if I just watched him, I usually got the idea. He was a lanky, comical character.

  In Northwest New York, the end of February and early March was pruning time in the orchards. It took lots of hands, chain saws and loppers to prune more than 40,000 apple trees. That’s why the boys were back. They were out in the orchard shortly after sunrise, and usually home just before sunset. In the middle of the day, right at noon, they came in for lunch. It was always a big event, with homemade tortillas, rice, beans and some kind of meat with lots of peppers. All washed down with a few bottles of Bud Lite.

  During the preparation and consumption of the meal, Martin’s sound system would rattle the windows to the tempo of Mexican tubas. It was always a festive affair with lots of chatter, laughter and practical jokes. Often they invited us to join them–sometimes we did.

  It was that way in the evening, too. Food, frolic and fun. But not on March 19th.

  Upstairs we had a TV attached to an antenna that picked up a few Rochester and Buffalo channels. Downstairs, theirs was connected to a satellite dish tuned to Mexican stations. And from March 19th and the next few days, all of us were glued to our televisions watching America invade Iraq. They saw it on Mexican TV and we, on American.

  During those days, the weather was too bad for them to work in the orchard. On those days, meals continued to be made in the kitchen, but without the music or carrying on. And the beer still flowed, but it was all consumed in front of the TV.

  “Why are they doing this?”

  When Chooey was sober, his English was impeccable. But when he was drunk, like the night of March 20th, he could be hard to understand. I asked, “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t get it.” He was sitting on our floor, leaned against the wall with a Bud Lite in his hand. “Why is Bush doing this? Why is he bombing all those people?”

  “Well–”

  He interrupted me. “Those Iraqis didn’t knock down the buildings in New York. So why does he want to bomb ’em?”

  Chooey took a swig from his bottle as I said, “They say it’s because Sadam has weapons of mass destruction.”

  “So what? Bush has got ’em too. Nobody’s bombing him.”

  Except for taking care of the petting-zoo animals, the boys took over our outside chores. That allowed us to concentrate on fixing the house. The hardest room was the kitchen. We replaced the ceiling, floor, and all but one wall. Patricia used ten cans of oven cleaner to un-crud the radiator. When I scrubbed behind it, the plaster fell down to reveal old red brick. It was part of the exterior wall from the original 1832 house.

  I built simple sturdy counters with lots of shelves. We coated the brick behind the radiator with several layers of polyurethane, so it could be washed. On the radiator I built a steel shelf to set pans on. And in the middle of the new ceiling, I replaced the dangling bulb with a suitable kitchen light fixture.

  Wh
at made the kitchen the hardest room to fix wasn’t the amount of work, it was the conditions under which we had to do it. Throughout the renovation, the boys still had to use it. So every day at noon, we’d move the stove and table in from the dining room where they were stored while we worked. After lunch, they’d help me lug them back out. Then at the end of the day, when they came in from the orchard, we’d set it all back in the kitchen for the evening meal. Replacing the kitchen floor was a real challenge.

  By the end of March, the kitchen was done, and everyone was happy with it. It was clean and had lots of counter space, so making meals was much easier. We could tell the boys were proud of it by the way they showed it off to visitors.

  A couple of weeks later, Patricia and I took the farm van and had a night out on the town with a nice dinner and a couple of toddies at a local lounge. Afterwards, when we pulled into the farm, our headlights shined on a severed deer leg in the yard. My wife said, “Chooey told me they might go hunting in the orchard this evening.”

  When I opened the van door, I saw half a dozen deer legs beside the back steps. “Looks like they got more than one.”

  Patricia walked in the house ahead of me. I had just latched the storm door when I heard her gasp. “Damn them!”

  She screamed as she stomped toward me. “I could kill all of ‘em!”

  “What’s wrong?”

  My wife was in front of me shaking as she pointed toward the kitchen. “Go look.”

  When I pushed the door open, I found a horrendous scene of carnage. Blood, guts and piles of meat were everywhere. Our pretty white and brown kitchen was awash with red. The boys had done some serious butchering–and serious drinking. Besides the usual plethora of empty Bud Lites, a couple of tequila bottles were laying on the floor.

  “I’m not cleaning this up!” Patricia stomped past me into the kitchen. “Can you believe this? After all that work, and now look at it! Where is everybody?”

  The TV was on in the living room. I walked in and found two Mexicans I didn’t know passed out on the sofa. Everyone else was in their bedrooms with the doors closed.

  Patricia said, “It’s probably best I don’t see them right now.” As we started up the stairs to our room she growled, “I’d hate to go to prison for strangling a Mexican.”

  Usually the boys were up and out in the orchard before we went downstairs in the morning. We couldn’t work on the house while they were there, so we waited until they were gone. We had a coffee pot in our room, and I had just turned it on when Patricia said, “I really dread going down there.”

  “I heard them moving around early this morning. I think they’re gone. Want me to go down and check?”

  “Would you?” She sat up and swung her legs from under the covers. “I don’t want to run into any of them right now. Make sure they’re all gone before I go down.”

  When I stepped into the kitchen, I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was spotless. Last night I didn’t see how it would ever be clean again. But there it was, in the morning sunlight, just as pretty as the day we completed it.

  “So how was your night out on the town?”

  Chooey walked in from the dining room holding a cup of coffee. I turned toward him and said, “I can’t believe this.”

  “What?”

  “This kitchen. Last night when we came home it was–”

  “A real mess, right? We shot two deer yesterday. By the time we got them butchered, we were too tired to clean it up.”

  “It looks great now.”

  Chooey poured fresh coffee into his cup. “I told the guys last night we had to clean this up before we do anything else. I don’t want Patricia to kill me.”

  The boys always treated Patricia with the utmost respect. Besides turning off the Playboy Channel when she walked in the room, if she and one of them were headed for the bathroom at the same time, they always insisted she go first. If one saw her with a bag of trash, they’d take it from her and carry it out. Even when they were drunk, nobody ever got out of line with Patricia.

  Beyond respect, the boys really liked my wife. Mainly because she took the time to listen to their personal problems–especially those of romance. Even if they spoke very little English, she always made the effort to communicate with them. Many times she came into our room, flopped down in the easy chair and said, “I’m not sure what that was all about, but I know it’s not good.”

  When they got pictures or video from home, right away they’d bring them upstairs to show us. I was welcome to look, but they really wanted my wife to see them. And in May, when four of them decided they wanted to bleach their hair blond, they came to Patricia. “I feel like a fraternity mother.”

  This fraternity was not easy to get into–it could be a life or death proposition. An example of that was when the Border Patrol found fourteen illegal immigrants suffocated in a trailer in Texas. At the time, our boys were expecting two guys to show up, and they had not been heard from in a week and a half. The Coyotes had them, but what they did with them nobody knew. They weren’t just workers, these were family and friends. What if they were in that trailer?

  “No! I know it’s not them,” Chooey said.

  He and Jose were on the floor in our room watching the news with us. One of the guys they were expecting was Jose’s best friend. They grew up together, and he was wiping tears as the network showed immigration officers opening a cargo trailer with dead Mexicans in it.

  Two nights later the call came from the Coyote. “We’ll be there tomorrow. Make sure you’ve got the money!”

  They showed up during lunch in a mini-van with Pennsylvania plates and tinted windows. The yard was alive with excitement, and while I didn’t understand what was said, I’m sure it was along the lines of “Thank God you’re here! We’ve been worried to death.”

  “You have no idea what we’ve gone through!”

  “Come have a beer and tell us about it.”

  “This country could not survive without Mexicans!”

  I heard that from Chooey, Chris Watt and every other farmer we met. Chris said, “I’d hire nothing but Americans if I could. It would be a lot less hassle. But Americans don’t want to work. They’ll pick for a day or two, then we won’t see ‘em until payday.”

  “Nobody thought you’d last a day,” Chooey said. “But when I found you picking in the snow storm, well–”

  I interrupted. “You thought I was one loco gringo! Right?”

  He had that boyish Chooey blush. “I guess so.”

  “Hey, it was fun! Tough work, lousy conditions and the money stinks. What more could I ask for?”

  It was Chris Watt who said, “But you know what? The Mexicans not only make a living doing this work, they all send money back home.”

  You’d think our biggest problem living with the boys would have been the bathroom. Even with the toilet solid on the floor, the walls patched and painted, the fact remained: Eight young Mexican men, two middle-aged gringos and just one bathroom.

  But the bathroom wasn’t the problem. It was the kitchen. Someone was always cooking. Especially after we got it all spiffed up. And with them, it was always Mexican food. Never Italian, or Chinese, or even good ole meat and mashed potatoes. Not that they didn’t like those kinds of food. The boys were crazy about Patricia’s lasagna, but everything they cooked was Mexican.

  When they made tortillas, everybody got in on the act. With two presses, a couple of pans on the stove and a bunch of hands in the mixing bowls, the boys would crank out a mountain of tortillas in an afternoon. Tortilla time called for lots of loud music and plenty of beer.

  It was also party-time when they roasted peppers, which always kept the back door to the kitchen busy. Usually it was open because the fumes so overwhelmed the kitchen that you had to go out for fresh air. And when they burnt one, the smoke would even drive us out of our rooms upstairs.

  “Hey Butt!” Pedro never did get the “D” on the end of my name. “Have a beer?”

  A few ti
mes I wondered if they didn’t burn some of those peppers on purpose, just to get us to come down and party with them–especially one beautiful mid-May evening. The air inside the house was caustic. Outside the back door they’d set a piece of plywood across two saw horses and it was loaded with tortillas, refried beans, fried rice, all kinds of peppers and fish soup. And of course, a few cases of Bud Lite.

  “It’s beautiful, eh?” Pedro said.

  His head was tipped back so he could see the full moon. It was amazing how much English he’d learned in the past two months. Scarcely a day went by that he didn’t ask me or Patricia, “How you say in American?”

  “Yes, Pedro, the moon is beautiful.”

  He laughed, then repeated the word “moon” three times. Each time he stretched the word out longer. We both laughed. Then I said, “You sound like a cow.”

  “Hey Butt. Why you no talk like other Americans?”

  The boys had been roasting peppers since they came in from the orchard, so Pedro was pretty well intoxicated. When the boys drank, seldom were they serious. And even though he was in a festive mode, I sensed something pensive in Pedro’s question.

  I asked, “What do you mean?”

  “You drink with us, but you no yell and want to fight. You laugh and have good time. When I drink with Americans in town, they get mean. They call me ‘Wet back.’ Tell me go home. They always want fight. You no do that. Why?”

  At first, I didn’t know how to answer. Patricia and I had really become attached to the boys, some more than others. Pedro was one of my favorites. He was a gangling, funny, lovable character that didn’t have a malicious bone in his skinny body. The only thing I could think to say to him was, “Because I love ya, man!”

  In the morning, when I went downstairs to feed Della, I found Pedro, Jose and Chooey in the kitchen. The night before, after a couple of beers, I went upstairs to bed. Their pepper party was still going on when I fell asleep. Now, all three sat at the table. Their heads were in their hands, with steaming cups of coffee in front of them.