Chollo and I were riding in the backseat of a silver Mercedes sedan through Proctor. Freddie Santiago sat in the front seat and the gray-haired guy with the rimless glasses was driving. There was a black Lincoln behind us, carrying five guys with guns, in case someone tried to spray-paint Freddie's windshield. It was another raw spring day, heavy with the threat of rain, which had not yet been delivered. It was nearly noon, and the unemployed men stood in groups on street corners. Some were on the nod. Some simply stood, their hooded sweatshirts too threadbare, their baseball jackets too thin, shoulders hunched ineffectually as if even the spring warmth were not enough to ease the chill of despair. On one corner there was a fire in a trash barrel, and eight or ten men and boys were around it. There was a quart bottle of something in a big paper sack passing aimlessly among them.
'Probably sherry,' said Freddie Santiago. 'Package store house label. Costs $2.99 a quart, gives you a pretty good bang for the buck.'
'Tastes like kerosene,' Chollo said.
'Si. But taste is not the point,' Santiago said. 'Like most people here they have much time and little money. Sherry helps pass the time.'
'So does work,' Chollo said.
'There is no work,' Santiago said, 'except perhaps your kind, my Mexican friend. This was a fine bustling mill city once, a Yankee city. Did you see the fine clock tower on City Hall? Lots of Canucks and Micks came in to work the mills. Some Arabs, too. Then the Jews came in and organized the mill workers, kicked up the prices, and the Yankees moved everything out… south, where the workers weren't organized and the niggers would work for half what they were paying up here.'
Santiago paused and lit a cigarette with a gold lighter. He checked to make sure no shred of tobacco had fallen on his white raincoat. Spring outside the car was in full flourish early this year, but the impact of it in Proctor was slim. No flowers bloomed, no birds sang, none of nature's first green came golden from the earth.
'So there's nothing to do here, and nobody to do it.'
'A perfect opportunity,' I said.
'Exactly,' Santiago said. 'So the spics move in. And now there's nothing to do and a lot of people to do it.'
Santiago exhaled smoke through his nose and smiled at us. He was sitting half turned in the front seat, his left arm on the back of the seat. He seemed pleased with his small history of Proctor.
'So now there are the leftover Micks, who run the police force, and us, who run the city.'
I looked out the car windows at the lackluster tenements covered with graffiti.
'Not too well,' I said.
'No, not well at all,' Santiago said. 'For we cannot get together. As your Mexican associate can tell you, the concept of Hispanic is a gringo concept. We are not Hispanic, or, as they say on his side of the country, Latino. We are Dominican and Puerto Rican and Mexican. We are like your Indians in the last century. We are tribal, we fight each other, when we should unite against the Anglos.'
'They weren't actually my Indians,' I said.
Santiago turned forward in the seat and rested his head against the back of it and closed his eyes. He took a long drag on his cigarette and slowly let the smoke out. The smoke hung in the car. Some other time, I thought, I'd discuss the dangers of second-hand smoke with him. Right now I was being quiet, waiting for him to get where he was going.
'I have worked very hard,' Santiago said, 'to unite these people in their common interest.'
The car turned right past a burned-out store front. There was no longer any glass in the windows, and the front door hung ajar on one hinge. Leaves and faded parts of newspapers had blown in and piled up against the back walls. Diagonally down one of the dark side streets I saw the church where I had talked with the priest who drank, and I realized that we were now twisting through the narrow streets of San Juan Hill. Behind us, the black Lincoln had come up close.
'But…' I said.
'But I am hindered by…' He paused. His head back, his eyes still closed, he seemed searching for words. Finally he shrugged and continued.
'Your man Luis Deleon, for instance, is such a person as hinders me.'
I looked at Chollo. He nodded. I knew this was going somewhere and now we were nearly there.
'This is a feast, Senor Spenser,' Santiago said, exaggerating the 'Senor,' in mockery of me or himself, I wasn't sure which.
'This is like the carcass of a great whale. There is enough for many sharks to feed. There is no need to fight. But Luis… he is young, he cares nothing for larger questions. He and his people say San Juan Hill is theirs.'
Santiago shook his head sadly.
'As if one could own a slum, or would wish to,' he said.
'Who owns the rest of the barrio?' I said.
Santiago turned back toward us. He smiled brilliantly.
'I do,' he said. 'But it is not such a slum, and I am a beneficent owner.'
'Yeah,' I said. 'It looked great till we got in here.'
'Give me time, Senor. I have not had enough time. I have spent much time putting down unrest and eliminating troublemakers.'
'Except Deleon.'
'Si.'
