Hunting Season Read Free Page B

before him, he set out to conquer the city. First, he needed a job.
    He found one in two days, after someone told him a local Chinese restaurant was always looking for dishwashers. Loja went to the restaurant and as soon as he walked in, he was immediately ushered to a back room and shown an enormous column of greasy pots, taller than him, at five foot nine, and tottering perilously. Undaunted, he started, but he could never make a dent in the pile. The faster he washed, the faster the restaurant’s owner piled more pots on top.
    Hurry up, you lazy bum. Quickly, quickly. Where do you think you are? Work, work, work! the man urged him on.
    Loja didn’t understand English, much less Mandarin-accented English, but he understood the tone and asked another dishwasher to translate for him. At the end of the day, he took off his apron and walked out, without pay, never to return. Hard work didn’t scare him; the abusive language did. At home no one ever had treated him like this. He felt small and unwanted, but he figured that one Chinese restaurant couldn’t possibly thwart his idea of America or his plans to save enough money to help his family and to eventually go back home.
    He found a job at a Sbarro restaurant across from Madison Square Garden, making salads, and was soon promoted to cook. The job was good and steady, and it helped Loja to pay the $6,000 he had borrowed to make his way to New York. In two years, paying $300 every month, he canceled the debt, with interest. In 1996 he moved to Woodside, Queens, to live with a sister who had justcrossed the border. Life in Queens, surrounded by so many other immigrants, many from his own town, was more tolerable than his lonely life in Manhattan had been.
    After six years at Sbarro, where he was making about $240 a week at a rate of $7.25 an hour, a friend mentioned that jobs on Long Island paid better. A man could make $400 a week working construction or picking up leaves from manicured lawns, the friend said. Loja didn’t think about it twice. He threw a few items of clothing in a bag and took the train, leaving his job and the city behind.
    It was late summer in 2000, and he was headed for Patchogue, where, his friend had assured him, a lot of Gualaceños had found jobs, clean and ample homes, and a measure of peace and contentment. A former shoemaker, the friend said, had paved the way.

CHAPTER 2
    PAINTED BIRDS IN THE AIR
    From his window seat in an Aerolíneas Argentinas flight, Julio Espinoza could see the city, sprawling and twinkling underneath him, just like he had seen it countless times in the movies back home. Only now New York seemed more imposing, larger, and forbidden, even dangerous. He focused not on the lights but on the darkness.
    What don’t I see? he thought, and immediately covered his eyes because he had begun to cry again. The Argentine couple seated next to him ignored him, as they had for the entire five-and-a-half-hour trip. Almost three thousand miles away, at home in Ecuador, his wife, Ana, and three daughters, the oldest just seven, remained. He was traveling with a visa that allowed him to enter the country and return whenever he wanted. Because he was a businessman, the US government did not fear that he would want to stay. Besides, he didn’t look like someone who would need to stay.
    He was tall and good-looking with fair skin and a broad, open face that seemed trusting and therefore trustworthy. Hehad an easy smile and friendly eyes that narrowed to slits when he smiled; his straight dark brown hair was trimmed in the back and worn a little long in the front, lending him a boyish look. He wore his one good suit—dark, with a blue tie and an impeccably white long-sleeved shirt. Surely he was coming for a short visit, perhaps to make a business deal or to find new buyers for his seemingly thriving shoemaking business in Bullcay, a hamlet just outside Gualaceo, a place so small that even some Ecuadorians have trouble locating it on a