Red House by Ken Wishnia

Author:Ken Wishnia
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2014-09-15T16:00:00+00:00

The sign says: KEEP OUT OF BIN.

Right. Otherwise I might have been tempted. It looks like such fun, diving into a bin full of used mufflers.

The sky is a hard slab of flagstone, as I wander around the truck stop, taking a break from the state thruway and its long stretch of filthy ugliness. Or is it ugly filthiness? I can never get that straight.

I’m watching the tiny suburban women piloting their amphibious personnel carriers, thinking about how the luxury jeep is actually third world importation. The concept started there. European- and American-style luxury sedans are often impractical when the road to your second home in the country is impassable four months of the year due to heavy rains. Now everybody’s got them.

I climb onto an abandoned picnic table and look out beyond the low-lying warehouses and wet tree skeletons to the cold, gray shore of the Hudson River, swirling past much as it did in the days when it marked the western frontier of colonial expansion. I’m turning around and I nearly fall on the slippery planks as a juice bottle comes sailing past me from a moving car and shatters like a bomb against the cement pillar of a water fountain. Jesus. I’m too worried about breaking my wrist against the splintery edge of the table to ID the vehicle, allowing my shoulder to whack the dark wood instead. By the time I look up the car is long gone.

I absolutely cannot understand the male mindset that craves this sort of anonymous violence. I mean, I understand serial killers better: A serial killer’s a sick SOB who hates the world. These guys are “normal.” It’s normal for boys to hurt things weaker than themselves, to hurt people they don’t even know and to have fun doing it. You tell me which is sicker.

And now my shoulder hurts. I’m wiping off the dark, wet picnic-table residue when I hear the distinct, polyrhythmic piercing tone of a language whose lamentations usually resonate through the mountains of south central Ecuador.

“Ari, caypimi cani.” Well, here I am.

I turn around and look at the polished red pickup truck that just pulled in with more than a dozen rain-soaked men crammed into the cargo bay. The men are wearing American-made work clothes, but I can tell by their faces and their straight, black hair that they’re Cañari Indians, probably all from the same village.

“Cay isma allcucuna.”

Those shitty dogs. Who’s being shitty to them?

Nobody but an Ecuadorian would even know where to find workers like this, much less bring them to the U.S. I go up to them, introduce myself and ask what’s going on. They’re not the least bit surprised to meet someone up here who speaks their language. I doubt they know exactly how far from home they really are. As I suspected, a middle-class Ecuadorian couple brought them here, along with their wives and children, and they all live together in a big barn with no heat, being moved from place to

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