He holds the cigarette between the 2nd and 3rd knuckle . Close into his hand. He holds it the foreign way. The European way. Not like Americans who hold between their pointer and index finger; waving it around flamboyantly.
He has very short hair. A buzz job. Zero style, just shaved, close cropped. Requires no maintenance. Like a soldier. Quite grey, considering his age.
The cotton shirt runs across his shoulders as though it’s still in the closet, on the hanger. He’s skinny. Not much there, but it is tight around his biceps where he’s rolled it up and cuffed it over, the shirt tucked in. The work pants rolled up and cuffed atop the boots. European again. Foreign. This one has put thought into what his trousers need to do.
Local guys just sniff a T shirt off the floor and if they can stand the stench of it, pull it over their heads. They drag their Levi hems in the dirt and dust as they shuffle in and out of the construction zone. They carry their tools and bags. By default, the jeans become the length they need because the bottoms are just raggedy threads.
He’s older than me by 10 or more years. Came over from Bosnia. He built the house I am now sitting out front of, in the hot desert sun. I am by the pool. The pool is fantastic. The deepest blues and greens, terra cottas, yellows, vivid reds and pure white with a black outline. Handcrafted, tiny mosaic tiles chase one another around the edge. The pattern reminiscent of far-flung exotic lands.
It makes me think of Morrocco; its understated, casual and lux all at the same time. The Bougainvillea, just planted, still tied to its little bamboo stake, wilting in the sun, tries hard to add a splash of pink. I think I can smell a hint of Turkish coffee, although, the only cups around us are dirty styro Bladder Busters, discarded by the roofers, bought at lunch time from the convenience stores.
He drags on his hand-rolled smoke. The rough, dirty hand covers the lower 1/3 of his face when he pulls on it the unfiltered dart. It feels secret, like he’s about to tell you something he wants no one else to hear. The cherry glows red for a second in the dusty yard of the newly completed house. There is no one there to hear it, anyway. Just me and him.
“You know, bombs were falling all around us. The apartment building over…” His sentence dies out. He waves the cigarette vaguely in the direction of the newly completed kitchen with its stainless appliances and granite counter tops.
“You could look and see all the living rooms. The front of the building just removed, in, how do you say, a heap? In a rubble on the ground, below.” He gestures with the cigarette, and looks over the edge, many stories to the ground but we are sitting on the ground, so the edge only exists in his memory.
“Wow” I say, shading my eyes. The question is not for the events he is describing, it is for the syntax. He is not unclear on the concept at all. Just the English words.
“Friends missing, furniture missing, no windows, just broken glass. Like the beach. He says ‘bitch’, but I do not correct it.
“Some small fingers of glass, paving the road. A baby we knew was gone.”
I nod. Nothing to say. He takes another pull on the cigarette.
“My wife, she is screaming all the time. Her mother and father, screaming all the time. My daughter, my son; also screaming.”
I know the wife, the son. She is my friend. The son plays with my daughter at the private school they both attend. The wife works at the school part time to offset tuition. I have seen his oldest daughter; a high school girl. She watches both kids at their house, a rental half a block from here.
My eyes get wide. I tilt my head.
“So, I decide to take them out from there, you know? So we can be happy”.
He lowers his head. Chin on his chest, his shoulders sag a bit.
“Be safe”.
“All the screaming, I cannot take it, anymore, you know”? He sighs, sadly.
I do not know but I nod my head in understanding.
