The Glass Factory (4 page)

The ride is getting long, and the meter keeps climbing. If this is how much it costs to get around out here I might as well sink my savings in a used car; five more rides like this and it’d pay for itself.

The cat is raising a fuss. She has been trapped in the carrier for nearly four hours. Antonia tells her to “Shut up.” Can’t imagine where she got that expression from.

“I have three cats,” says Antonia.

“Three
cats?” I ask.

“Puchungo, and Puchungo’s friend—” A stray who used to howl at our window when Puchungo was in heat “—and Rosa.”

She still remembers Rosa, who died when Tonia was a little over a year old.

“Rosa ran away,” she says. “She doesn’t like me anymore.”

That’s it. I used to tell her Rosa “went away,” but I can’t continue the nice euphemisms if it makes her think the cat ran away because it doesn’t like her anymore. “Tonia,” I tell her, “Rosa will
always
like you. She didn’t run away. She died. She’s with Snowball One—she’s in cat heaven.”

“She’s in cat heaven?”

“Yes—”

Sorry, but I’m not about to enter into the whole do-animals-have-souls issue. It is of no comfort to a child to tell her that her cat is being eaten by worms two feet underground. And where is the soul of Antonia’s sister? Poor little thing never stood a chance. Am I supposed to meet her in heaven—a three-month miscarried fetus whom I never knew? I rub my tired eyes, and hug Antonia to me. Do you believe that I still get them? The nightmarish infant mortality fears? Not as often as when she was a newborn but I still get them. Once you’ve lost something that innocent …

There better be a heaven. Or else … My thoughts conjure up the grim vision of the last surviving humans standing in the blood-red sun, lording it over a dead planet.

And speaking of dead planets, we’re entering Fairhaven town limits: an industrial wasteland bleaker than any Gothic windswept heath. Transplanted shrubs are not quite enough to hide the razor-wire-capped steel-mesh fence that rigidly defines the perimeter of an adhesive factory. Four distant smokestacks belch a sulfurous smog so thick even the windborne traces sting my eyes and sear my lungs. And a linen handkerchief isn’t much good against the Devil’s own smelting works. My great-grandparents would have fled in terror from the smell alone. But the dingy line of prefab row houses across the street indicates that today’s inhabitants don’t have the sense my ancestors had. Or maybe the option to flee.

How about that word, “smokestack”? Quite a quaint throwback to an earlier era,
¿no es asi?
I’m amazed they’re still called that. If they had just been invented, they’d probably be called “residual distribution enhancers” or something. You can charge higher rent across the street from one of those.

The stench shifts from a sulfurous, sweet, acidy sting to a thin, warmish wind with the same sweet aftertaste. Bleaah. Imagine my pleasure when the taxi driver pulls up across the road from a fenced-in wasteland of bulldozers and backhoes, dirt piles and stacks of fifty-five-gallon drums and sheets of broken glass and announces, “Forty-four Pleasant Valley Road. That’ll be thirty-four dollars.”

“Thirty-four dollars? Where are we—Kazakhstan?” I ask. He fails to appreciate that. If this is what the L.I. prices are like, I might as well head for home. As if I had one. Fortunately, I always keep some of that green-gray paper on hand just to pacify the natives in case they get unruly. Blighters worship the stuff, you know.

Nobody’s there to meet me. The front door’s locked. I recheck the address and look around for landmarks, but the taxi driver has already turned around and sped off. Should have told him to wait. Having no other choice, I shoulder our bags and shlep around back, where a couple of chickens are tied up. They don’t look happy to see me, either.

The screen door’s locked, too. Inside a woman is chopping vegetables with a ten-inch carving knife. I knock. She starts and turns like she’s been jumped from behind before (that
is
why I knocked) and stops the door with her foot. She doesn’t put the knife down.

“What do you want?” she says. Oh yeah, we’re off to a great start.

“Colomba?” Nothing. “I’m Filomena. This is Antonia.”

“Raúl no tell you don’t bring stuff? We got no room here.”

“It’s job interview clothes,” I tell her in Spanish, hoping my intention to get employed right away will soften her up to me a bit. Not a chance.

She unhooks the screen and turns back to her cooking. I guess this means we can come in, so I prop the door open and haul two bulging suitcases and the cat carrier into the narrow hallway just past the kitchen. I hear the TV and go look: Two young men fully capable of helping me with my bags are slouching on a twenty-year-old couch, watching MTV through their feet on a Formica particle-board table. On screen a nerdy voyeur gazes through Venetian blinds at a soft-porn star doing sexual aerobics on an empty bed while mainstream rock thrashes on the soundtrack and rapid editing gives the illusion of action.

These must be the two boys, Elvis—yes, I said Elvis—and Velasco, who is called “Billy.” Elvis is twenty, tall and very thin, with a thin, thin ponytail in the back, crew cut in the middle, and a half-bottle of moussed post-punk pompadour in front. Billy is seventeen, I think, shorter and considerably heavier, shirttails out, hair uncombed, slouching deeper into the couch. And possibly a blanker look on his face, but that’s really tough to call.

Elvis looks up, his attention momentarily caught between a sex kitten on video and a tired-out mother falling feet first into fossilhood live in his living room. He decides to privilege proximity over fantasy and gets up to have a closer look. I can tell he’s thinking, “Hey, not bad for a mom.” Kids his age still think they can look you up and down and you won’t notice it.

“Where can I put these?” I ask, pointing to our bags.

“Not in my room,” says Billy without looking at us.

“Rosita’s room,
chica,”
says Elvis, as if that means anything to me.

While we’re taking the bags upstairs I complain about the high-priced cab ride and Elvis says, “That trip costs twelve-fifty,
chica.
You were ripped.”

Yes, I was! Of course I should’ve caught that. What is happening to me? Oh yeah: I’m worried about dying before July Fourth weekend. It’s just that it’s making me lose all my street smarts. And I’m going to be needing them.

Antonia’s bored by MTV, so she’s playing with the broken Nintendo in front of an altar to Our Lady of Shock Absorbers opposite the TV. Any kid under four years old is guaranteed to find the most dangerous thing in the room in thirty seconds or less, and sure enough, there’s a battery of plugs overloading a socket under all the altar drapery, and Antonia’s all ready to poke at it. I pull her away.

“We could use something to drink,” I say.

“Help yourself,” says Elvis, pointing to the kitchen.

I rinse a glass from the sink, turn on the tap, fill it and take a big glug.
Wrong:
I’m not making the best impression right now, but my first concern is spitting everything out in the sink. The water tastes like
shit.
Or more precisely, like photo lab chemicals. The only cold thing they’ve got for me is no-alcohol beer. I gargle with it. That goes over big, too. At least it clears the taste of Dektol out of my mouth.

I ask where the nearest grocery store is so I can buy some juice for Antonia. You understand I keep trying to show I’m not here to freeload. Might as well be talking to a wall.

“It’s two miles west on Route 25, in Carthage,” shouts Elvis from the TV room.

“Two miles?” I say to Colomba. Silence. Sure, this is fun.

I’ve got nothing better to do than wait for the grains of my life to run out, so I decide to kill another portion of whatever short life I’ve got left standing around this sweet-smelling kitchen waiting for my proxy sister-in-law to speak directly to me. She gets three onions, ten carrots, a
refrito
of green pepper and tomato and every spice on the shelf into her stew, stirs it, tastes it, stirs it, tastes it, stirs it, tastes it, before she addresses me:

“Don’t you have something for me?” Oh.

“Yeah, sure,” I tell her, reaching for the money. “This is for one month’s rent—” $350: almost what we were paying in New York for a whole apartment “—this is for the phone because I’ll be making a lot of calls trying to find work and all, this is for the electricity, water, oxygen and whatever the hell else we might cost you. There,” I say, piling the cash on the wet counter in front of her. “That’s about every dollar I’ve got. Another couple of hundred and I’d have bought two tickets to Ecuador instead.” I don’t want her to think I
need
this.

Colomba counts it twice as if I’ve got a history of stiffing her or something then stuffs the soggy wad into her apron.

Right now I need food, drink, the want ads and the phone number of the nearest hospital. In that order. Maybe it’s respect for the kid, but Colomba silently puts out two plates of rice and ladles some watery stew onto both of them. She doesn’t call the boys so I guess it’s for us. We eat in silence. The only newspaper in the house is last Saturday’s, opened to the Lotto results, but that’s the day they run a special classified section, so I’m in luck. Lucky me. Elvis finds a coverless phone book for me and tells me to try the teaching hospital attached to the University at Running River ten or fifteen miles north of here. Everything’s slow as can be, but it’s cheap, he says. Wonder what he’s been there for.

I call up and ask for an appointment with a lung specialist. They tell me I have to make an appointment with a student intern first. So be it. They ask me how’s next Thursday at 9:00
A.M.
with Dr. Chu? I tell them I can’t wait that long. They put me on hold for a few minutes then come back and tell me that’s all there is. Now I’ve always tried to be an honest, work-within-the-system kind of person, but right now my fuse is getting a little short. I thank them and hang up. Then I call back, tell them I’m Dr. Buscarsela of Bronx Veterans Hospital’s radiology unit, and ask them what time tomorrow I can consult with Dr. Chu. They put me down for 3:00
P.M.
Sorry, God. But it’s for a good cause. I swear.

There is a tremendous crash from across the street as a dump truck starts unloading broken sheets of heavy plate glass onto the ground inside the fence. They must have been on their lunch break. Terrific. Scared the crap out of me.

I take Antonia out back to play so I can sit in the sun, breathe in the air with the peculiar sweet aftertaste, listen to the sound of bulldozers piling up heaps of scrap metal and glass, and read the classifieds. There’s not a lot of stuff. There’s an opening for a telemetrical engineer with five years’ experience in computer-aided design for F-15 jets, and the county wants a recycling supervisor with ten years’ experience and an MA in Waste Management, but otherwise it’s a couple of columns of Waitress ($2.25/hr plus tips), Asst. Beautician (ditto), Asst. Landscaper (must have own tools and truck), Asst. Plumber (ditto), etc., etc., straight down to the bottom of the barrel. “Positions Sought,” however, is a fat twenty-five pages, ten columns each in six point type of professionals and middle-management with an average of twelve years’ experience willing to take fifty-percent pay cuts, desperate to do anything to stay in the area. I understand there’s some Trans-Himalayan mule packer jobs opening up along the Nepalese border, but the commute’s a killer.

There are a few prospects: a part-time job teaching basic English to immigrants, and a couple of pink collar jobs that all say they want “bright, intelligent, innovative, fast learners.” I consider myself all those things. Like the time I busted out of an Ecuadorian jail by throwing fresh-squeezed lime juice into a cop’s eyes, pushing him through a window and shooting out the courtyard lights with his gun while four of my comrades scrambled down the back stairs under a barrage of machine-gun fire. That was pretty innovative. I pick up the phone and lie my way into three interviews. Fuck honesty.

Look what it’s gotten me.

Colomba and Billy still haven’t spoken directly to me in two days, so I decide to take Antonia with me on the interviews rather than leave her here with them. Rosita comes bounding down the stairs with all the bubbliness of a nineteen-year-old high school grad who can type sixty-five words per minute and buy a sports car with it. If her dress were two inches longer it’d be a mini-skirt. She squeals with delight at the sight of Antonia, and cootchy-coos her while Tonia admires her six-inch high petrified hairdo.