Maybe Even American

Maybe Even American... excerpt 

The Unforgotten

Like everyone else in the kitchen, Armando was from Colombia. One of the hotel owners had a coca farm there. And after the original kitchen staff started to make noise about overtime, back pay and unions, he decided to make an offer to some of the Colombian farm workers. 

He rounded up a dozen men, some as young as 16, all bachelors, and offered them a chance. A chance to leave their village and go to America. 

“You’ll travel the ocean and see a great city,” he said. “You’ll have jobs and a place to stay and the pay will be twice what you make pulling weeds and kneeling in this dirt.”

Each young man looked into his father’s tired eyes, then one by one laid down those weary dreams. For something more. For maybe even becoming American.

One by one they said, “Yes señor. I will leave all I have known of this life I will go and live among strangers and try to be something greater than a gatherer of coca leaves.”

They said goodbye to all they ever knew of love, goodbye to crying mothers and brokenhearted girlfriends and boarded a ship.

It was two weeks by ship but finally they came in through the port on Manhattan’s west side. 

The hotel owner had, of course, greased the immigration officer. Two bottles of Irish whiskey and a throw with one of the girls at his brothel.

'The Irish,' he thought. 'They’ll never be anything but cheap poets and dreamers. All they want is a night’s respite from their loneliness, and it’s always whiskey or women they’re convinced will save themselves from it.'

So the Irishman looked the other way. And a dozen farmers from South America in cheap suits told to keep their heads down and not say a word, were loaded on an old school bus. They were driven that night through the streets of Manhattan toward the future, into the land of hope and strangers.

“Dios mio,” they whispered looking at the steel and the glass, the pavement covering every inch of earth, each soul certain that this could not be the same world they knew. The world of dirt and dark nights.

When the Columbians finally arrived at the hotel, the kitchen help were told,

“You boys work too hard. We’re just trying to cut down on the long hours. These spics are your second shift. Saves the overtime. We want you to be happy.”

So for a month they taught the Colombians how to filet and how to dice. They showed them how to scrub and clean and run a kitchen. And at the end of each day the Colombians would strip off the soiled kitchen whites. 

And soaked in the smell of charred fish gut and sweat and dirty dish water, they would march up a back stairs to a bunk room over the kitchen.

Then one morning, when the owners were finally sure the kitchen was in order, the help were met at the door with their last week’s check and a one way bus ticket to the Bronx.

And so Armando, the oldest, a quiet man, became the head cook. Armando had married young and was happy for a time. But after just a year, his wife had died trying to deliver their firstborn and the boy, just four pounds, died three days later. 

Armando carried both the bruise of the loss and the weight of grief in his eyes. And as often happens, those two burdens commanded respect from all who understood the strength it took to carry them.

Life in America became 7 days on, 12 hour days. Each morning, like hope, they put on clean whites, and each night covered with grease and stains they pulled them off and tried to wash away the doubt that life and tomorrow would be anything but another 12 hours.

But sometimes at night when it stormed Armando would step out on to the roof. He would close his eyes and raise his hands and call out to his wife. He would pray that she and the rain could somehow cleanse him of weariness and of doubt. 

The Colombians were never to eat a bite of the fine meals they labored over each day. Instead they ate paella and drank water. None of them spoke English and though they knew a town was just beyond the hotel grounds, none of them ever walked through it

“Never leave the grounds,” the concierge warned. “You’ll be arrested.”

What’s the difference? Armando thought.

As the months passed the youngest of them, a boy named Esteban, who worked the grill grew quiet.The only time he ever spoke was in his sleep, when he called out for his home and his mother and for the girl that kept whispering to him from his dreams.

He was promised to be married, and in time he began to believe that he would never see the girl again and that he would die alone, a prisoner of a dream in the land of opportunity.

Armando, hearing him cry out in his sleep would get up in the night, shake the boy awake and hush him.

“Silencio hermanito. Estes bien. You are all right. We are all here. Estera bien.  It will all be ok. I promise you."

"Algun dia…someday.”

But looking into the boy’s eyes, Armando could see that someday was too far and he would never be strong enough to reach it. 

He could see that something like hope had broken in the boy and something else like despair had taken hold. And like an animal it dragged him by his loneliness each day and then mauled him each night in his dreams.

One day, after nearly a year in America, the boy who never said a word told Armando that he was tired and he needed to lie down.

Armando listened hard. He heard the lie in the boy. He felt something in the boy’s tone begin to ring in the back of him like an alarm. 

But Armando was trying to finish a stuffed bass for a party of 8. "Very important people, very important,” the maitre d’ hissed.  And all Armando could think was ‘What am I to do?’

He turned to the boy and put a hand on his shoulder, “Are you sure? ” 

Then in shame lowered his eyes and nodded, “Yes,” he said. “whatever time you need.”

The boy’s eyes grew wide with a frenzied quiet. Then he wiped his hands on a towel and turned to his friends. 

For just a moment they all halted and peered at him, then afraid, stared at the floor.

“Dios te bendiga Esteban. God bless you”’ one called out. And another, a boy who had once studied to be a priest, quietly blessed himself again and again.

Estaban lowered his eyes. He hands shook. Then holding them up in wonder smiled, then sobbed and stepped away into the shadows.

After the kitchen closed, they filed up the stairs back to their windowless bunk room.

And there was Esteban, swinging silently by a bedsheet from a rafter. The boy who had left his home hoping for a richer life, had managed the only way he knew to suspend himself above the loneliness he had found.

No one made a sound but each, trying to shield himself from heartache and terror stared at the floor. The boy who had once wanted to wear the collar fell to his knees and blessed himself again and again and the others, unsure and frightened joined in.

Armando, the last to pull off the stained whites, trudged up the back stairs.  

Pushing them aside he saw the boy and the beam and felt a weariness enter his heart. He felt the air grow heavy, touched by the reverence that only death too soon can bring.

“Help me,” he said. “Help me lift him down.”  And together they held the boy and gently lowered him to a clean bed sheet.

One of the grill men ran to the hotel. The concierge listened, cursed in Spanish then annoyed said, “Wait here.”

He talked quietly to the manager, who grimaced. Worried about the headlines and his annual bonus, the manager began to raise his voice. Then thinking better, he pointed a finger at the concierge and tapped his chest for emphasis. 

The concierge, suddenly afraid, turned back to the Colombian, “Follow me.

They hurried to a tool shed. Finding a dirty shovel, the concierge threw it at his feet. He took a deep breath then muttered -

“In America you clean up your own mess.”

Then he inspected his hands. In the moonlight the dirt on them looked almost like blood. 

“Look at this.” he whispered to himself. “How will I ever get myself clean.”  Then he scurried away.

The boy standing alone bent over and picked up the shovel and slowly walked back to the kitchen and the bunk house.

Armando listened, then nodding took the shovel and dug a shallow grave just outside the kitchen door. Together they carried the boy in a bright clean bed sheet down the stairs, laid him in the ground. And buried his loneliness forever.

And the next day at dawn Armando woke and listened to the rain. 

Once more, like a worn out prayer, he whispered his wife's name, then rose, put on clean whites, and went to work.