He had a labourer's rough hands; he said he was a construction worker but they'd
laid him off; times were hard for guys like him. How you doing? Radix would ask. Carlos
would sigh and say Hanging in there. It sound like a working class struggle and lament.
Radix was sympathetic.
Carlos wore his standard hanging out clothes, spotless white vest, blue jeans tube
socks and sneakers. He seemed in his late twenties, still a young man, with a chest
swagger that suggested he wasn't ready yet to let go of his late teens.
He'd step out his building every day about noon time as if he'd just that minute got up,
made love, then showered; slapped his body liberally with cologne, eaten; and now he
was ready to discover what the rest of the day had to offer.
He was surprised to learn that Radix was a school teacher. A teacher! Right on this
block! He'd seen him sitting on the stoop, but he had no idea…and his wife – not his
wife? his girl friend? – anyway he'd noticed her going off to catch the bus.
He slipped into an aggrieved monologue about the importance of education, the
opportunities it offered which he now regretted he had missed. He'd dropped out. But
he had a two year old son who would not, he swore, suffer the same fate as his father.
Radix was touched by his candour, the armor of his resolve.
Carlos was the happy fellow on the block, stern and good with the kids, an ebullient
problem-solver shouting up intructions at faces looking down from apartment windows;
he slipped cooly between English and Spanish, clever shuffler between both worlds.
One morning he asked Radix if he smoked. Radix didn't. Carlos waved a hand as if it
didn't matter, though he seemed a little disappointed.
"What happened to the guy who used to live here?" he asked, casting a probing eye
inside Radix' open front door.
"What guy?"
"Lived here before you came. He was a Corrections Officer."
"Really?"
"Yeah, man. Was my buddy. He had the night shift at the Corrections facility…? on
Jerome Ave…? Used to come home late, past midnight; we'd sit right here and drink
a beer…right on this stoop… hang out for awhile, you know."
Radix said he hadn't met the man, didn't know the man. He disclosed he wasn't much
of a beer drinker himself and Carlos turned away as if, again, disappointed.
(from Ah, Mikhail, O Fidel! a novel by N.D.Williams, 2001)
FARJOURNEY CARIBBEAN 