Long Island Noir (25 page)
C.T. says:
Why should we pay his bills? Let him go back to El Bananastan and have THEIR taxes pay for a witch doctor.
WhiteMale14 says:
Kick him in the head a little harder next time and save the taxpayers some money!
The night before, the phone had rung at Nuñez’s house, on a side street between Portion Road and the Expressway. Nine people shared the four-bedroom dwelling, three pairs of men, including Jefferson and his cousin Juan Carlos, in the smaller bedrooms, and a family, Santiago and Carolina and their baby girl, Xochi, in the big one.
Carolina answered. “
¿Hola?
”
“Good evening, this is Michelle from Atlas Health Insurance. Can we speak to Jefferson Nuñez?”
“
Mi ingles
is no good.
Momentito
.”
She went to look for Gabriel, one of the two Salvadorans, who spoke the best English of anyone in the house.
Jefferson Nuñez had insurance with Atlas, thanks to the regular job he’d scored in March with Ozzy’s Demolitions in Holtsville. The side of the company van declared,
EVIL MINDS WHO PLOT DESTRUCTION
. Ramon, the longhaired Mexican
rockero
whose
tatuajes
covered his arms like sleeves, had to explain the joke.
Gabriel got on the phone. The woman repeated her inquiry.
“He’s in the hospital. Can I take a message?”
“We’re just reaching out to you to make arrangements for payment.”
“I don’t understand. He’s in the hospital.”
“Sir, we have to make arrangements for payment for medical services. His claim has been denied. There was alcohol in his blood.”
“Say what?”
“He is ineligible for reimbursement. His policy does not cover alcohol-related injuries, so it is his responsibility to make payment in full. He is legally obligated to do so.”
“
¡Puta!
” Gabriel cursed, slamming down the phone.
* * *
Jason called Danny and Lisa into his office. “I think I got something,” he said. “The IP address for both ItalianStallion and WhiteMale14 is the same as the one for the website of the Farmingville Civic Protection Association.”
“That doesn’t prove anything, but it makes sense,” Lisa observed. “Those were the people trying to get a town ordinance prohibiting landlords from renting to illegal immigrants last year. Tom Montanelli was the head of it. I remember him saying,
If we don’t stand up now, we’re gonna be overrun
.”
“Yeah, they’re scary,” Danny reflected. “When Jay Knight had a congressional town hall meeting there, he got booed off the stage. There were all these people screaming at him,
Keep the government out of our Medicare!
And others chanting,
No amnesty! Build the fence!
The cops had to escort him to his car.”
“Yes, but why two names?” Lisa asked.
Jason Googled Montanelli. “He’s got a teenage son, Michael,” he explained. “Goes to Sachem East High.”
“Fourteen is a white-supremacist code,” said Danny. “It stands for the
fourteen words
, one of their slogans.”
“A lot of them use it in their online handles,” Jason added. “That and 88.”
“Fourteen could be his age when he started posting,” injected Lisa. “Or the year.”
“There hasn’t been a lot of organized white-supremacist activity on Long Island,” mused Danny, “but they’ve been trying to make inroads into the anti-immigrant movement. That stuff really doesn’t play very well here. People moved out of the city to get away from the blacks and the Puerto Ricans, but they’ll insist they’re not prejudiced. They want to keep their towns white, but they’ll say it’s about schools and crime. They lower their voices when they talk about race.”
“Yeah, but the kid could be a wannabe,” Jason put in. “You know teenage boys, they always want to be the most bad-ass. The closest they’ve ever been to South Central is watching the Lakers on TV, but put on a red bandanna and presto change-o, they’re a Blood, you know what I’m saying? And if you read what WhiteMale14 is posting, it sounds like he’s bragging about it.”
Lisa had the last word. “That makes sense, but it’s all speculation. We’re not cable TV. It still doesn’t give us anything we can use. Let’s get back to work. Production’s tomorrow night.”
St. Matthew’s Church in Central Islip, a few miles away, was abuzz with grief and outrage. People from middle Suffolk’s Latino communities agglomerated, commiserating and pondering what to do. In the basement, nine people met around a long fold-up table, draining a metal urn of coffee. There was no formal leader, but they deferred to Nydia Perez and the priest, Father Miguel Martin Reyes.
Father Reyes had just celebrated his sixty-first birthday. He’d been at St. Matthew’s since 1990. A year in El Salvador had marinated him in liberation theology. These children, these thin, young boys in cheap sandals kicking a ragged soccer ball in the dirt street between their houses of cinder blocks and cane stalks, these children and toddlers skittering about like a litter of kittens, they are the future of our world. And without justice, what will happen to their lives? What will happen to their souls? Their parents slaving away, their teenage brothers and sisters succumbing to the temptations of drugs and gangs, trading the flower of their youth for a few gaudy trinkets and a poisonous solidarity.
The hierarchy hadn’t liked him preaching those lines in Brooklyn and the South Bronx. The last straw was when he’d led a sit-in protesting the closing of a firehouse in Bushwick, the city neighborhood scorched almost to the ground by looters in the ’77 blackout and by landlord-hired arsonists in the decade surrounding it. They’d bounced him out to a suburban parish where he occasionally heard dark mutterings.
We moved out of the city to get away from THEM. Now they give us one as a priest?
Demography played a trick on them. The parish now gave more Masses in Spanish than in English.
Still, the gringos here had tested his faith. Ignorance you could cure, but theirs was different. It was a willful, belligerent ignorance that insisted it was right and didn’t want to know anything else. You couldn’t tell them nothing.
He remembered the young woman teacher who, almost in tears, spoke about the parents at her school telling her, “Why does my son have to learn Spanish? This is America, we speak English!”
You needed to have faith. Without faith there was no hope. Without hope you were in the abyss, like the glue-sniffing kids in San Salvador, the boys in Brooklyn, barely teenagers, who if you asked where they were going to be in ten years, they’d tell you “dead” or “in jail.” If they were optimistic, you’d get some variant on “big-time drug dealer.”
Bolivar and Susana, Jefferson’s older brother and sister, arrived at the ICU around noon after taking a red-eye from Guayaquil. His pulse was strong but jittery, the oxygen mix okay yet his breathing irregular, the EEG slowly fading to a flat green line. He was brain-dead. Father Reyes gave him Last Rites.
At 4:07 p.m. on Tuesday, Jefferson Tomás Nuñez Yagual left this world for whatever lies beyond it,
paz en el cielo
or eternal nothingness.
The funeral was at 9:30 Wednesday morning in Central Islip. Danny headed west on 347 and then south on Nicolls Road toward the LIE, steering with his left hand, his right alternating between delivering bites of buttered bagel and sips of deli coffee. The Expressway jammed up just after he got on. Stop-and-go, inching forward, then jumping up a few yards when the car in front moved. Shit, I’m gonna be late. No time to find a good position, unobtrusive but close to the action.
Traffic opened up just before Exit 60, then slowed again when he passed the ramp. The car barely moved when he stepped on the gas. White smoke spewed from the engine. He pulled over. It smelled like burnt rubber. He opened the hood. The radiator was jetting out smoke and steam. There was a big crack in the top.
He called Lisa. “Don’t worry about it,” she told him. “Deal with the car and come back to the office. I’ll reimburse you.” He called a tow truck and took a cab from the garage.
Top-of-the-hour news bleeps teletyped out of the radio.
Five Farmingville youths have been arrested in connection with the fatal beating of a South American immigrant in Lake Ronkonkoma last weekend. Suffolk County police said they made the arrests after one of the suspects posted pictures of the assault on Facebook. The victim, twenty-four-year-old Jefferson Nuñez, died yesterday afternoon.
Danny desperately checked his phone for messages. It was hopeless to try to get online in the cab. His phone beeped with a text from Jason.
Michael M. 1 of 5 charged. Other names TK.
The story’s blowing up and I’m out of the action. He furiously recalculated. It’s a backstory/reaction piece now. The dailies and TV will be all over the arrests, we’ve gotta go for depth, and I have twelve hours to do it. I should’ve been at the funeral.
He got another message a couple of blocks from the office. Jason had grabbed some screenshots off Facebook. The photos were dim and impossibly blurry, but the comments were readable.
Another spic smackdown! M&M do it again! Mark, u should of kicked that hard when we played Newfield :)
They really were that fuckin’ stupid, he mused. Or narcissistic.
In Lisa’s office was an executive-looking woman he couldn’t recognize, but she seemed familiar. Like bad news. And Lisa looked like she’d just run over a cat and was trying to figure out how to tell its owner. Oh yeah, she’s from Human Resources at VNT Media, the parent company, the one you’d see once or twice a year at staff meetings where she explained our benefits or how they were being “adjusted.” The knowledge hit him before its full import could flower.
“We’re sorry, this has nothing to do with the quality of your work, but your position is being eliminated.”
Father Reyes delivered the funeral oration.
“His name was Jefferson. His family, thousands of miles away in a different land, gave him the name of an American hero. They named their youngest son after the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence. The man who wrote that
all men are created equal
. And we believe that Jefferson Nuñez was brutally beaten, cruelly murdered, by a gang of young men—still boys, really—who thought that he was not American enough to have the right to life.
“He was one of the legions of immigrants who have come here, seeking a better life for themselves and their families. Who fled the green fields of Ireland when a deadly plague turned the potatoes black. Who fled the grinding poverty in the mountains of Sicily and the marshlands of Poland so their children would not be trapped in the same fate.
“Who taught his killers to hate people like him—and us? Was it the descendants of those who came before?
“
Dios conoce el camino de los justos.
God knows the way of the just. Let us make that road, and let His love and wisdom guide us as we build it.”
T
he envelope was addressed to
Mr. James F. Keenan III
, a name he never used.
Jimmy tore the envelope open the minute it arrived, barely flinching as the chaotic results of his frenzy sent a wayward piece of glue-stiffened flap slicing into his little finger.
His meaty hands had no trouble grappling with an I-beam swinging on a cable ten stories up, but now they tingled as if they belonged to someone else as he unfolded the letter, leaving a thin smear of blood on the plain white paper.
His long-overdue severance pay.
He stared at the numbers on the check and recoiled as if he’d been whacked in the head with a cue ball.
Something was wrong. Dead wrong. There were only three numerals, and two of them were zeros that meant less than nothing. There was an awful lot of emptiness on the page, where there definitely should have been something. Something
more
.
“Seven dollars?” His temples pulsed, and the room flattened out behind the sheet of onionskin bearing the name
Brady Construction
, the walls and furniture turning paper thin. “Seven fucking dollars?”
He’d been waiting all week for this lifeline, or at least for a sign that he had a
chance
of being pulled from the rising tide of debt before his strength failed and he went down the drain completely.
The envelope fell to the floor.
Even the white noise of daytime TV couldn’t drown out the giant sucking sound in his ears.
You work for a company twelve years
…
Time enough for the navy-blue anchor on his wrist to go fuzzy around the edges and fade to match the dull grayish blue of dead people in movies.
His muscles were still hard, and he could hump a ton of rebar up a ladder as fast as any kid half his age. But the company could get away with paying the kid a whole lot less.
He crumpled the check and threw it at the TV screen. It fell three feet short of the target.
“Honey, what’s wrong?” Rusti called from the kitchen, her voice cutting through the whirlwind like a chain-smoking Siren of the seas.