And Tom Golden knew something else about her. She was an easy touch, a babe, hot. In the bar at the American Hotel in Sag Harbor and the grill room of the Noyac country club, local men and women-the native aristocracy of people born in East Hampton and Southampton who owned the landscaping companies, the fancy stores, the architectural design firms, the real estate companies-shared stories about Joan Richardson’s multiple affairs. Brad traveled the world. Joan didn’t. She spent long summers on the East End, and word circulated about the men. Tom Golden, who knew one of the men who had been her lover for a week last fall, once imagined he could reach her. Why not?
But Joan Richardson was said to be unpredictable, with diverse tastes in men. Tom soon saw that her range didn’t encompass him. By now he was more interested in keeping her business and the prestige that brought him than he was in screwing her for a week or two and then losing her as a client. He cultivated the image of a stud, and word had spread among the rich ladies that he was endowed.
“Don’t worry about it, Mrs. Richardson,” he said. “They’re well taken care of.”
Juan was one of the four men who rode in her SUV to the roadside woods in Wainscott. He was in the back seat. The fallow corn and potato fields through which they drove were as wide and flat as the nearby ocean. Rain still fell so densely that the sky and the fields appeared to merge into the drenched air. From time to time she glanced into the rearview mirror, pretending to keep in sight the lumbering truck behind her SUV, but really to see Juan-the high cheekbones, the deep eyes, black eyebrows, thick hair. In her glances she saw him only in profile, since he was gazing at the fields.
Tom Golden’s car was already idling several hundred yards from the isolated Post Office building on the Montauk Highway, the road that ran through and linked Southampton, East Hampton, and Montauk and ended at the lighthouse at Montauk Point. The truck pulled in behind the BMW. Joan brought her SUV as close to the truck as she could. Three men clambered out of the crowded cab of the truck. The men in her car, including Juan, said “Thank you” in English as they opened the doors and got out.
She remained in the front seat, listening to the rhythmic rubbing of the windshield wipers while she watched each of the men walk up to the window of Tom’s car. He handed cash through the half-closed window to each of them. She couldn’t see how much, but not one of the men, quickly looking at the bills to count them, was happy with what Golden had given out. She had no idea, she realized, how much he paid them, although she did know that Golden’s bills to her and Brad for a small crew working all day on their estate was almost two thousand dollars. At last, with a transparently ingratiating smile for her, Tom Golden closed the window and sped away in his silver car, its tires flinging wet stones and dirt from the unpaved shoulder of the road.
There were no other cars parked in the woodsy, unsheltered area by the roadside. There was a small shopping mall on the other side of the highway-a Starbucks, the upscale Citarella food store, a fish outlet, and a place selling cheap wicker furniture. The men just stood in the rain. One of them unlocked an old bicycle from a telephone pole and rode west along the highway. The other men, Juan among them, moved far back from the road so that they could find some shelter under the taller, thicker branches of the leafless trees.
Joan Richardson stepped down from her SUV. Again pulling the hood of her yellow coat over her head, she walked toward them.
“It’s still pouring,” she said, raising her voice over the rain and wind. “Who’s coming for all of you?”
Suddenly they weren’t focusing on her. When she turned, she saw an East Hampton police cruiser. As it slowed, the car tossed up sheets of dirty water from its oversize tires. Every one of the men was intent on the cruiser. They obviously felt menaced, they were leery and quiet and intense. Then the cruiser accelerated and sped away, hissing through the rain.
She asked again, “Who’s coming for you?”
Juan said, “People come to pick us up.”
“How does anybody know you’re here?”
One of the men had a cell phone. He lifted it for her to see.
“Friends,” Juan said. “We have friends. We called. They’re coming soon.”
“I can drive you all home,” she said. “The car’s big.”
“Thank you, Mrs., but our friends will be here soon.”
“You can all wait in my car. There’s room.”
“It’s okay, Mrs.”
“All right,” she said. “Take a long bath when you get home. Get warm.”
Imagining Juan naked, powerful, and sinuous as he took a bath, she went back to her SUV and drove off, waving to them while they huddled under the dripping bare trees. It was a cold early spring, and the terrain of woods and underbrush in which they stood looked dismal.
Fifteen minutes after Joan Richardson left, Hector, one of the shuttle crew drivers hired by Tom Golden and other contractors who used day-laborers, pulled up to the edge of the woods. The men climbed into his fifteen-year-old Ford station wagon. In the oversize car, they counted their cash: they had each received thirty dollars in five-dollar bills from Tom Golden. They swore at the cheap motherfucker. Each of them had to give five dollars to Hector for carfare.
Inside the fetid car, one of the men teased Juan. “Mrs. wants to fuck Juan. Juan, when are you going to fuck Mrs.?”
Everyone in the car laughed. Since Juan wanted to get along with these men, he laughed too, but said nothing. He thought about Joan Richardson’s ankles.
4.
It was Brad Richardson who drove to the work gang on the Montauk Highway in Wainscott at six-thirty on Thursday morning. From the open window of his Land Rover, Brad waved Juan over. He remembered the kind man who earlier that week had carried bags of Pepsis to the crew before the rainstorm. A clear dawn, with just a slight chill, was rising through the stark branches of the trees at the roadside. Tom Golden and the other contractors hadn’t yet arrived.
“Juan, good morning,” Brad called out through the open window.
Pointing at his chest, Juan asked, “You want me?” Then he walked to the Land Rover’s open window.
“Juan, my wife and I were talking. We thought about having you come to work for us full-time for a while.”
Juan hesitated. “I don’t understand.”
“Do you work for Tom Golden every day?”
“No.”
“Good. We need a full-time caretaker and handyman. Do you want to work for us?”
“You sure?”
“Of course. Otherwise I wouldn’t ask. Gardening, pruning, some carpentry, raking, whatever you know. Just raking and cleaning up, if that’s what you want to do. If you don’t like it, you can quit, no hard feelings.”
Brad was an efficient man. He told Juan that he and his wife would pay him one thousand dollars each week. After three years in America, Juan knew what that number meant. “You sure?” he mumbled.
Brad ignored him, saying his driver would pick him up at seven each morning wherever he lived. All Juan had to do was tell the driver where that was. The same driver would take him home. Brad and his wife would buy comfortable work clothes for him. The clothes would be cleaned and pressed so that he could start each day fresh. They would first be tailored for him. His name would be stitched over the left pockets and the name of the estate-the Bonac-over the right pockets.