First Rough, single pass, no edits yet done.
Scars
“Well hell, it ain’t like I died!”
David wiped away the tear that slid back and forth in the well of his cheekbone. What an odd day it had become. In the morning, he was driving through the parking lot of the Home Depot, excited to be beginning his new project and looking for the man who had answered his Craig’s List ad. He had passed the kid twice, dismissing him, until during the third pass he stepped in front of the car. The kid spoke, but David couldn’t hear him. He gestured, put his hand to his ear, and the kid came around to the driver’s side of the car. David rolled down the window.
“Yes Sir, are you the fence guy?”
“Yeah, are you Tony?” He emphasized the “you” too much, made it obvious that he was disappointed with what he saw, inadvertently let the kid know that he was expecting someone older, bigger, stronger.
“Yessir,” Tony said and then averted his eyes. “You think I’m not the right guy for this job, don’t you Sir?” he paused for a moment, as if considering whether to walk away, and then blurted out “I work construction all week, every day.” He paused again, deciding whether he should go on. “To be honest Sir, I’m wondering if you’re going to be able to get this done, ‘cause you don’t look like you ever done ANY hard work.” He was right, of course. David was a key account manager for a telecommunications company.
“Whoa whoa! Slow down!” David suddenly felt guilty for judging him. “I never said any of that. I didn’t even think it. I guess I was just expecting an older guy, but it doesn’t matter how old you are if you can help me get this done.” He swallowed too hard and his palms were sweating. “Hop in.” He flicked the button that unlocked the doors. Tony went around to the other side, opened the door, slumped into the seat, and slammed the door shut. He stared straight ahead.
While they drove, David secretly examined his new employee. Tony was wearing two work boots, but they were not a pair. It looked like he was not wearing a sock on his left foot, but definitely had one on his right—a bright pink one that disappeared into the leg of a threadbare pair of jeans. His hands were the rough hands of a worker with ashy callouses in the crook of his thumb and along his index finger, and with splits and scabs in the creases of his knuckles.
A phone buzzed in the kid’s back pocket and he instantly retrieved it, tapped in a security code, chuckled as he read the text he had received, and tapped in his reply. The phone buzzed again, and when David glanced over, he noticed that the text was in Spanish. “You speak Spanish?”
“Yessir. I’m Mexican—well, half Mexican. I know I don’t look it. My dad is white, but my momma’s Mexican.”
“Well, it’s great that you’re bilingual. Gives you a lot of opportunities.”
“Yessir.” He said it more in acknowledgement of David’s words than in agreement.
“Did your mom teach you Spanish from the beginning?”
“Yes Sir. It’s the first language I learned. I didn’t speak nothin’ else until I was eight.”
“Eight?” David laughed a little. “That can’t be right. You would have gone to school when you were five, and you couldn’t go to school without knowing at least some English.” He turned his head to look at the kid, who sighed deeply and then looked at the floorboards.
“The thing is Sir, that Momma didn’t send neither of us to school until I was eight. My sister was nearly ten, and we didn’t neither one of us speak no English, except maybe some words that we learned from television.”
“What!?” David was incredulous. “Why did she wait so long? Why didn’t they teach you English? They had to know that it would put you behind.”
“Yessir, she knew that. But the thing you gotta understand is that my momma is an illegal. She doesn’t speak any English, even to this day. Daddy left when I was just a little baby, so Momma was on her own. She was afraid that if she sent us to school, they would find her and send her to Mexico. Because of the forms, you know?”
“The forms?”
“Yessir, the forms that you have to fill out to put a kid in school. Mexicans don’t like to tell the government who they are and where they are, ‘cause they’re afraid that they’ll get sent back. Me and Millie were born here, so Momma was afraid that they would send her back but keep us here.”
“Oh my God, that’s terrible.”
“Yessir.”
“So why did she eventually send you?”
“Well, and of course I don’t remember this but this is what they tell me—I guess one day, somebody from the welfare office or something came to talk to her, and told her that the state would take us away if she didn’t put us in school. Momma says it was a woman who she worked with who got mad at her and called Human Services on us, but Millie thinks it was Chucho.”
“Huh. So how did you learn English?”
“Oh, it was terrible.” He wagged his head slowly from side to side, still looking at the floorboards, and rubbed his hands together. “They just put us into class. Didn’t speak no English. I didn’t even know when people were saying my name at first—it’s really Antonio—because it sounds so different when you say it in English. I was in the first grade—Millie they put in second ‘cause she could read, but in Spanish.
“To be honest Sir, I don’t really know how I learned English. I just did ‘cause I didn’t have no choice. But it was terrible being the only kid, the only one. The teachers yelled at us all the time. I remember that lady—the one who was my first teacher?—holding a pencil in front of my face and screaming pencil, pencil, pencil over and over. It was terrible.”
©2016 Bruce Wisener All rights reserved.