(Re)Tired Gun
The yard in the middle of the afternoon looked different than at six in the morning. A half-dozen cars were parked on the weedy verge, a panel truck stood in the drive, partly blocking my way, while several men were hauling fabric, shouting to each other in Spanish. I drove the Mustang onto the weeds, next to a late-model Saturn.
The factory’s front doors stood open, but I went down to the loading bay, where a second truck was docked, motor running. I went over next to it and pulled myself up onto the lip of the dock, hoping to avoid both the foreman and Zamar. I sketched a grin and a wave at the men, who had stopped to stare at me. They had driven a forklift up to the back of the truck and were loading boxes, which they hurriedly covered with a tarp when they saw me watching. I pursed my lips, wondering what they were hiding. Maybe they were even smuggling some kind of contraband. Maybe this somehow lay behind the sabotage attempts, but they were staring at me with so much hostility that I went on in to the main part of the factory.
On one side of the floor, a team of women were folding banners into packing crates. As luck had it, Larry Ballatra, the foreman, was right in front of me, barking orders to the crew. I passed him without pausing, going straight to the iron stairs. He glanced at me but didn’t seem to really notice me, and I ran up to the work floor.
Rose was at her station, working this time on an American flag, outsize, like the one hanging over the shop floor. The soft fabric was falling from her machine into a wooden box: the U.S. flag must not touch the ground. I squatted next to her so that she could see my face.
She gasped and turned pale. “You, what are you doing here?”
“I’m worried, Rose. Worried about you, and about Josie. She said you had to take a second job, and you left her in charge of the boys and the baby.”
“Someone has to help out. You think Julia can do it? She won’t.”
“You said you want Josie to go to college. It’s too much responsibility for her, at fifteen, and, besides, it makes it hard for her to study.”
Her lips tightened in anger. “You think you mean well, but you know nothing about life down here. And don’t tell me a story about growing up here, because you still know nothing, anyway.”
“Maybe not, Rose, but I know something about what it takes to leave here to go to college. If you can’t be with Josie, making sure she gets her homework done, what’s she going to do? If she gets frustrated with the responsibility, she could start cruising the streets, she could come home with another baby for you to look after. What job is important enough for that?”
Anger and anguish chased each other across her face. “You think I don’t know that? You think I don’t have a mother’s heart? I have to take this other job. I have to. And if Mr. Zamar, if he sees you here, he will fire me anyway from this job, then I have nothing for my children, so leave before you destroy my whole life.”
“Rose, what changed overnight? Monday, you needed me to find the plant saboteurs; today, you’re scared of me.”
Her face was contracted in torment, but her hands kept steadily feeding fabric through the machine. “Go, now! Or I will yell for help.”
I didn’t have any choice except to leave. Back in my car, I didn’t go anywhere for a while. What had changed in three days? Me offending her wouldn’t have caused this agonized outburst. It had to be something else, some threat Zamar or the foreman had used against her.
What were they making her do? I couldn’t imagine, or I could imagine lurid things, but not likely things—you know, prostitution rings, that kind of misery. But what hold could they have on Rose Dorrado? Her need to keep working, I suppose. Perhaps there was some connection to the boxes going into the panel truck, but the truck had left while I was in the plant, and I had no idea how to track it.
Finally, I put the car into gear and drove slowly down the avenue to Mt. Ararat Church of Holiness, at Ninety-first and Houston—just a block south of the house where I grew up. I came at the church from Ninety-first—I didn’t want to see the wrecked tree in my mother’s front garden again.
In a neighborhood where twenty people with Bibles and an empty storefront constitute a church, I hadn’t known what to expect, but Mt. Ararat was big enough to have an actual building, with a steeple and a few stained-glass windows. The church was locked, but a sign on the door listed the hours for services (Wednesday choir practice, Thursday evening Bible study, Friday AA meetings, and on Sundays, Sunday school and church) along with Pastor Robert Andrés’s phone numbers.
The first number turned out to be his home, where I got an answering machine. The second number, to my surprise, connected me to a construction company. I asked for Andrés, somewhat uncertainly, and was told he was out on a job.