“And what do you want me to do?”
“We want you to deliver the message in the only language this man understands. You can roll down your sleeve now.”
He obeyed. He was feeling a bit lightheaded from the loss of blood, so she helped him over to one of the cots, where the volunteer handed him a cookie and a plastic cup of cranberry juice and Gabriela gave him some kind of pill to bring up his blood pressure and told him to lie still for at least twenty minutes.
“Well? Will you do it?” Gabriela asked, peering down at him through the haze.
“Listen, sweetie, a job like that has got to cost at least—” What did it cost? What should it cost? He’d never put in a bid for a job like this. “Three hundred bucks,” he said, pulling a figure out of the air.
She spun on her heel and walked away, disappearing behind the screen, and he figured that was the end of it. Maybe he should have said two hundred.
Ah, screw it
. Why should he run the risk of felony assault charges for a lousy couple hundred bucks? If anything, he should have asked for more.
He lay back, chewing on the crumbling cookie, and stared at the TV on the wall. It all felt a bit unreal to him. He was still kind of dizzy, and it was hard to concentrate on the image of a newly elected congressman with a bright red tie who was proposing to reduce the federal deficit by cutting Social Security and raising the retirement age to seventy-two. The words and numbers swirled around in Jimmy’s head, but they weren’t adding up to anything until the truth crept up and bit him in the cerebral cortex.
What a bunch of crap
. Retiring at seventy-two might be fine for corporate-funded assholes like the guy on TV, but not regular working people like him.
What a fucked-up country we turned out to be
. What happened to paying people a decent wage and taxing the rich for all the highend crap they’re always showing off? Cars, clothes, jewelry. We could turn this whole shitty situation around in a minute if we just got back to basics.
So his mind wasn’t really on the deal he’d made when Gabriela stepped out from behind the privacy curtain and stuffed a wad of grimy, mismatched bills in his fist.
Good thing it’s getting dark early because there are cameras everywhere that would burn him in a second. Shadows are blending into the night and a stiff breeze off the Sound is blowing through the hospital parking lot and there’s nowhere to huddle to get warm, so he just has to wait it out on the lee side of a dark green minivan like a burl of briarwood clinging to the side of a cliff. The SOB’s shift ends at four-thirty, she said, but it’s way past that now and he hasn’t called home yet to tell Rusti that he’ll be back for dinner, he just has a job to do first.
The glass doors keep sliding open and shut, open and shut, and people who don’t match the description she gave keep coming and going, and the nasal echo of the public address system keeps releasing snippets of doctors’ names into the night:
Paging Dr. Andresen, Dr. Andresen? Paging Dr. Contreras, Dr. Husseini? Paging Dr. Andresen? Dr. Andresen?
Yeah, where the hell is Dr. Andresen?
Not the guy he’s waiting for, but still …
Then a young nurse with the soft, clear voice of a water nymph cuts through the clutter: “Goodnight, Dr. Clinton.”
That’s him
.
“Goodnight, Becky.”
Footsteps scrape the pavement, loose gravel rolling under his shoes as this Clinton guy gets louder and closer until his shadow pierces the space just beyond the edge of the van, and Jimmy looks around for the hundredth time and lunges and suddenly it’s all knuckle and bone and teeth and pain and pleading and a knee to the groin and another look around and ducking the weak swing and kicking out sideways and driving the kneecaps in a direction they were never meant to go till the SOB finally goes down and kicking him in the ribs over and over till the guy’s arms fall flapping to the ground, and then stomping again and again until he hears the satisfying crack of boot on bone. Boot on skull, it turns out, but he can’t skip out yet, not before he delivers the message: “Lay off the girls.”
Red bubbles dribble down the guy’s cheeks as he struggles to draw breath. Then he says, “Which ones, asshole?”
Which calls for one more kick in the jaw.
By the time his pulse returns to normal, he’s wiped most of the blood off his hands, but there are bruises on his fists and places where the skin is broken and the flesh beneath glistens like raw meat. Must have happened when he knocked out some of the guy’s teeth. Those teeth sure hurt like hell. But he thinks of his old boss, Mr. Brady, and wonders how many guys would chip in to pay five hundred bucks a pop for every tooth he knocked out of
that
guy’s mouth, and a slow mean grin blossoms across his face.
And he thinks of all the other assholes who need a beating that nobody else is willing to give them, like the abusive jerks who smack their girlfriends around for smiling at some guy on the supermarket checkout line, and the pimply faced punks who call their own mamas bitches when they get caught stealing from their purses, and all the deadbeat dads who always seem to have money for beer but never seem to have money for child support, and all the false profiteers who get rich preaching about how making piles of money is God’s way of rewarding the faithful, and
definitely
all the bosses who push their workers harder and harder, demanding concessions or else the jobs will go to China, so the workers make the concessions but the jobs
still
end up going to China, and hell, maybe even a newly elected state senator or a congressman who sails into office on a sea of fat-cat money and the first thing he does is make plans to slit the throats of the people he’s supposed to help. I mean, they don’t get serious Secret Service protection or anything like that, do they?
He sees himself printing up business cards saying
Jimmy Keenan, Advocate
, but can’t figure out what else to say or how to say it, and decides that word-of-mouth will have to do for now.
His knuckles bitch and moan as he ignores the approaching sirens and feeds a couple of battered old quarters into the pay phone and dials the number, a warm feeling spreading in his chest as he tells his wife the good news.
“No worries, honey. Looks like I got steady work for the next six months, at least.”
T
hough we lived a little over a mile from the famous ocean shoreline in the small but quaint town of Bridgehampton, the ocean was a place we hardly knew. The glitz and glamour of the Hamptons were far beyond our reach; we lived tucked away on Sag Harbor Turnpike, an area made up of generations of migrant workers, many of who had come up from the South as early as the 1800s. My mother and father migrated north from Georgia in 1958, to get away from poverty and racial injustice.
The season for watermelons was winding down when May and Shangy decided to catch a ride on the back of a watermelon truck passing through Lyons, Georgia. They had heard stories of how black people had good lives up in New York. Shangy had been released from the army and was seeking a better life and May, she was a young teenager fascinated by the tall caramel-colored man. Shangy’s family warned my mother that he was no good and that she shouldn’t leave Georgia with him, but at eighteen years old May felt she had the right to do what she wanted, even if it meant dropping out of school.
Shangy was known for his gambling, drinking, and womanizing, why would she think he would change when he arrived up north? May was a quiet girl who had lost her mother as an infant and was raised by her grandmother. All May knew about her own mother was that she was a very good painter and was only nineteen years old when she died giving birth to her. My mother’s world was so small and limited she actually wrote down her life plans—to have three children and be on welfare, just like the many generations of women in her family before her.
With their worldly possessions stuffed into pillowcases and small suitcases, the eager group of migrant workers jumped on the back of the old GMC truck that had a wooden dump bucket. The truck provided very little protection from the cold and rainy days and nights heading north, but the workers didn’t mind because they were all thinking about a better life than the one they’d lived in Georgia. The trip was long and hard. The group spent time working on farms in South Carolina and Virginia, until finally settling at Rosco’s Camp, a potato farm in Bridgehampton.
May and Shangy had made it to Long Island, to Sag Harbor Turnpike, a part of the Hamptons few really knew or talked about. The work camp was sometimes overcrowded, forcing some of the workers to sleep outside in makeshift tents. They would gather around fire-filled steel drums for warmth, drinking moonshine. My mother tried not to be scared, because her grandmother had told her that there was good in everybody, you just had to find it. Times were particularly hard for Shangy; he could not find enough work. He spent his time gambling and drinking, and to make matters worse, my mother was now pregnant.
Word had gotten around about the living conditions in the migrant camps, so social workers were often dispatched to see if they could be of help. One such social worker saw my mother, almost eight months pregnant, kneeling down by a stream with no shoes on in the cold, trying to catch fish. The campers were tested for TB and sent to treatment centers, and my mother’s test came back negative. The social worker, still overwhelmed with concern, had my mother admitted to a nearby hospital so she would at least have food to eat. When she was released after giving birth to my brother and me, the social worker found her a place to stay.
My mother became good friends with Mrs. Cora Lee, who ran the small nursing home where she was sent. That was the first time she was separated from Shangy, but May would not return to the camp. Mrs. Cora Lee allowed my mother to stay until she got back on her feet. Here May met Mr. Roosevelt Lee, and got pregnant with my brother Mark. But they didn’t stay together. By the age of twenty-one May was alone and had three kids. She eventually found a small four-room place of her own on Sag Harbor Turnpike.
Like many of the other women who lived on Sag Harbor Turnpike, my mother scratched out a living doing house cleaning for the rich white folks on the other side of town. House cleaning was backbreaking work and it didn’t pay much for a single woman trying to raise three kids, so our mother would clean two houses a day, leaving very little time for us, which meant my brothers and I were left alone most of the day, when school was out.
Behind the scenes of the famous and super-rich people who lived and vacationed in the Hamptons were parts of Sag Harbor Turnpike that were full of pain and suffering. Some people had and some didn’t, and the ones who did have were often cruel and heartless. There was a place called Jabo’s, a two-story house on the Turnpike that was run by a husband and wife, but because the husband was sickly, his wife Mrs. Ella was in charge. She was a mean-spirited woman who thought of no one but herself.
Everyone who lived on the Turnpike knew about Mrs. Ella’s place. Jabo’s was considered the local hangout for loose women and alcoholics. Mrs. Ella and her husband Jabo sold everything out of their house—fried chicken dinners, cigarettes, alcohol, and soft drinks—which was convenient for those who didn’t have a car to get around.
The place also catered to those poor souls who had returned from the army with no family, or came up on the season and had nowhere else to go. Some had simply lost their way, fallen on hard times and found themselves trapped by alcohol, living each day for their next drink. Mrs. Ella would accept their Social Security benefit checks in exchange for booze and a cot in the basement of her house. I never understood why those men couldn’t do better for themselves, or why Mrs. Ella herself wouldn’t help them. Jabo’s was a sore covered up by the neighborhood that grew along Sag Harbor Turnpike. Though Jabo’s was not a labor camp it encouraged camp-style living for the numerous men who lived there in the basement. Everyone knew what went on at Jabo’s but everyone acted as though nothing was wrong. Children were not allowed to go down to Jabo’s. Friday and Saturday were the busiest and most dangerous nights because that’s when people had money.
My parents hadn’t been living together for several years. One night, Shangy was drinking and gambling at Jabo’s when another player accused him of cheating. A fight broke out. By the time it was over my father lay on the floor with a knife broken off in his head. Everyone thought for sure he would die, but he didn’t.
After surgery removed the broken knife, my mother stayed by his side, and when Shangy was released from the hospital she brought him home. Shangy had to learn all over again how to talk and walk. Soon he was almost good as new, except now he was prone to seizures. The man in the wheelchair was kind and slow to anger and once let us eat a whole five-pound bag of sugar.
When Shangy could take care of himself, once he was on his feet again, he moved out and took a cot in Mrs. Ella’s basement down the street, so that he could be close to my brothers and me. After that we only saw him on Sundays, a day he reserved just for us.
One Sunday I wore a red-and-navy-striped baby-doll dress with a navy bow pressed between a wide white collar with white ankle socks and black patent-leather Mary Janes made by Buster Brown, waiting for Daddy to take me for our Sunday walk. Though it had been said that my daddy was as mean as cat shit, when I was with him I felt special and like I really belonged. But this Sunday, for some reason my mother refused to let Shangy take us, and I stood behind the broken screen door begging May to let us go, and she said no. I watched my father walk angrily down the dirt path back to Mrs. Ella’s. Later that day the news came that Shangy was dead. He had suffered a seizure and fallen down the stairs leading to the basement. He died instantly. I was only five but I can still smell the overwhelming scent of spring flowers and I can see his casket and the military officer removing and folding up the flag and his frozen face as he gave it to my mother. Shangy was only thirty-two years old.