When I hired Dan for day work on the construction crew, he couldn’t speak a word of Spanish and few of us spoke English. I was surprised to see an Anglo waiting on the corner with the hombres, but I took him on because I’d seen him earlier with Senora Maggie, my mother’s friend. He wasn’t one of us, so at first the men resented him but he worked hard and didn’t complain.
After he’d been with us a few days, I had to call the police on a family of squatters. We were cleaning out and securing repossessed homes now owed by banks. I warned the family they’d have to leave, but they stayed on. I gave them a final warning, then I called the cops. The crew was eating lunch when the family left. They were a pitiful bunch and as I watched them, I felt ashamed. Carrying bags of food and bedding, they straggled toward the wood line. They had no place to go.
Dan grabbed his lunch bag and ran after the skinny little girl who had fallen behind. At first she refused to take the food, but in the end she grabbed the bag. Dan walked up to the parents and handed the man some money. When he returned, many of the men had left food for him.
“Why do many people here have more than enough and others have nothing?” he later asked me. I had no answer.
After that, Dan was O.K. with the crew. He told us he’d been a teacher and could teach us English in return for help with his Spanish. The men speculated about Dan. He’d admitted he had no I.D. papers, but why? He was different, that was for sure.
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