From her kitchen Joan Richardson often watched Juan, his shirt off, navigate the strange device through the pool’s water. He was over six feet tall, so strikingly different, she thought, from the many Mexican, Nicaraguan, and Costa Rican men who had settled in this far eastern end of Long Island. There was a relaxed, muscular tautness to his shoulders. Every lean contour of his body was framed against the grassy dunes and the bright Atlantic beyond him. He could be a model, she thought. It was a guilty pleasure to watch him, like glancing as she sometimes did at Internet porn. At night, even with slender and immaculately clean Brad Richardson asleep next to her, she touched the most sensitive places of her body as she thought of Juan. In the eleven years of her marriage, she had never once conjured up her husband’s image in the long and luxuriant prelude to sleep.
She first saw Juan Suarez on a chilly day in April as she and Brad opened the house for the first time since Thanksgiving. They discovered Juan when they hired blue-eyed, sandy-haired Tom Golden, who ran an expensive nursery and landscaping company, to bring a crew to the estate to trim and shape the high hedgerows, always green, that blocked the view of the sprawling house from the road.
Tom Golden had arrived, as usual, in his new steel-gray BMW just after one of his trucks pulled up to the hedgerows. There were at least six immigrant men, Juan among them, standing in the open trailer attached to the truck. Thirty minutes earlier, Golden had found them on the side of the Montauk Highway in Wainscott where as many as twenty men gathered just before dawn every morning to wait for the owners of nurseries, painting companies, and contractors who stopped quickly, almost furtively, as if buying drugs, pointing at the men they wanted for the day. Strong, swift, Juan vaulted into the back of the trailer as soon as Tom Golden pointed at him. As he always did, Juan held out his hand to help the smaller men clamber up.
It was an overcast day. Golden made the assignments for work at the Richardson estate-the hedgerows needed to be trimmed and boxed and dead leaves raked and pulled by hand from the plants in which they had been tangled since the fall. There was the scent of ocean water and thawing earth in the air. Juan sensed that he and the others would work only half the day, and receive half a day’s wages in cash, because the darker areas of the clouds seemed to carry rain. There was already a mist, chilly and damp. Juan wore only a thin sweatshirt.
Golden, always in a hurry, knew that Juan was meticulous with the gasoline-powered pruning saw. It was as though Juan could create topiary from any bush. Speaking in rudimentary but understandable Spanish, Golden assigned Juan to trim the tall roadside hedgerows. Juan immediately turned to the corner of the truck’s flatbed where the gas-driven trimmer was stored, opened the cap, put his finger into the well, and found that the fuel rose only to the tip of his index finger. He unscrewed the top of the ten gallon gas drum and poured gasoline through a funnel into the trimmer. Then he unfastened a tall, two-legged ladder. Carrying the ladder and the heavy trimmer, he jumped from the back of the truck.
Almost miraculously, the overgrown hedgerows, swept carefully by the powerful saw, were groomed under Juan’s graceful motions as he stood at the top of the ladder. He inhaled the odor of the exhaust fumes together with the earthy smells of the cut leaves, twigs, and branches. Under him, a man he knew only as Paz, slightly over five feet tall, raked the fallen cuttings while Juan moved steadily down the hedgerows, feeling the heaviness in his arms and shoulders but still able to keep sweeping carefully at the tall bushes.
Juan never came near the owners of the houses where he worked. Sometimes there was a glimpse of men, women, and children around a distant terrace and swimming pool, and sometimes he saw people playing tennis on clay courts. And sometimes in the distance he could see thin women sunbathing, naked. They had that aura of moneyed privilege Juan had first seen only when he had migrated from Washington Heights in upper Manhattan to the Hamptons, which he had always heard described by men from Honduras, Nicaragua, and Guatemala as the place where everyone could find work, the promised land.
Juan was surprised when he saw a man walk out of the house carrying bottles of Pepsi in a plastic bag. Juan was the first crew member to notice him, and it took several seconds before he realized the man was bringing the Pepsis to them. Brad put the bags on the ground at the foot of Juan’s ladder.
“Time to take a break,” Brad Richardson said in Spanish. “They’re cold.”
Juan said in English, “Thank you, Mister,” as he reached down from the ladder to take the chilled bottle that Brad handed up to him.
Releasing the bottle, Brad looked directly at Juan’s eyes. “No problem,” Brad said in English.
As Juan slowly drank, he kept the heavy saw balanced on the highest step. He stared out over the dunes to the open ocean water. To his right, the immense shingled roof of the Maidstone Club rose in the distance from the slopes of the seaside golf course. The small triangular flags on the course flapped crazily in the intensifying wind, colorful agate against the rolling slopes of the golf course. The wind became more and more chilly.
3.
The rain started at just after eleven. It came in cloudlike sheets, driven on tall gusts of wind. The ladder shook. By the time Juan climbed down, gripping the precious saw, he was drenched. He jogged to the rear of the truck. On the open trailer the other men already crouched under a dirty tarpaulin. They held their hands aloft to keep it in place. Juan draped the edge of the tarpaulin over his head, clutching the stiff fabric at his neck. But the gusty rain continued to drench him. Stirred by the incoming wind from the sea, the tarpaulin on the unprotected flatbed often lifted off of them. They grabbed it to bring it down to make it a secure tent, not just a loose cover. It was futile. The tarp billowed and snapped, almost out of control. In obscene Spanish, they kept asking when the fuck Tom Golden would arrive in his BMW to tell them they could drive back to the edge of the Montauk Highway where they had gathered four hours earlier and pay them whatever cash he decided to hand out. Juan gazed down the straight country road in the direction from which the BMW would come. The sheets of swirling gray rain would make it impossible to see Tom Golden’s silver car until it was nearby. The other men, trying to control the flailing tarpaulin, repeatedly asked him in Spanish where the motherfucker was. Some of the sounds from the flapping tarpaulin were as sharp as the resonance of small firecrackers.
Suddenly Juan saw something he never expected. From the house, a woman in an orange raincoat came running across the lawn, holding the hood over her head in the same way Juan held the tarpaulin’s edge over his head. The woman was quick. Stopping on the white gravel driveway near the truck, she shouted, barely audible above the torrents of wind and rain, “Why don’t you all come inside the house? You’ll catch pneumonia out here.”
More fluent in English than the other men, Juan translated. They jumped off the trailer, leaving the tarpaulin to blow away heavily, with a slapping noise like a huge wet flag, onto the road. It flew into a barren potato field. The men ran. Juan was first, jogging behind her in disbelief that she was about to take them into her home. Noticing that she had thin, curved, elegant ankles, Juan hadn’t yet seen all of her face. He assumed she was the wife of the kind man who had brought out the Pepsis.