Chapter 7
The morning sun was already blisteringly hot. Traci wiped a bead of perspiration from her chin and pointed to a spot near the roofline of the old golf cart barn.
“What’s that? Tell me it’s not rot.” She lifted damp hair from her neck and exhaled a quick “hfff” to dispel the cloud of gnats swarming her face.
The Saint’s construction foreman gave a rueful laugh. “C’mon, Traci. You want me to lie? Yeah, we got some rotted boards up there, but I’ll get the framing crew up there this afternoon and we can patch and paint it so it’s good as new.”
Javi Guerrero was three inches shorter than Traci Eddings, and built like a fire hydrant, with a full head of graying hair and massive forearms covered in tattoos. He’d worked at the Saint for as long as Traci had. There had been some rough patches after Hoke’s death, when Javi clearly resented working for a woman, but they’d slowly developed an easy working relationship.
“What about inside?” she asked, walking toward the open barn doors. “How’s that coming along?”
“See for yourself,” he said. “We’ve got new doors on the way, and then we’ll get started framing in the new entrance.”
Even before they walked inside they could hear the whine of saws and the rapid fire of nail guns, and smell the pine scent of fresh-cut sawdust.
Already she could see the skeletal outline of the cart barn’s transformation. A wide hall ran down the center of the barn, and the framing for the dorm rooms was almost completed.
“The electrician ran into town for some more cable, but he swears he’ll have everything roughed in by end of day. If he gets that done, my guys can start hanging drywall tomorrow,” Javi said, walking beside her.
She threaded her way through the corridor and poked her head inside one of the framed-in bedrooms. It didn’t look like much at this stage. Concrete block walls, concrete floors, a dimly lit nine-by- twelve cell. Still, it was an improvement on the dumpy dorm room she’d lived in at the Saint at the age of nineteen.
Back then, the “staff quarters” consisted of a long, narrow wood-frame building in a swampy corner of the property. The rooms were tiny and stifling, barely big enough to hold the army surplus single bed and three-drawer dresser that were the only furnishings. No closet, just hooks on the wall, and no air-conditioning, just a box fan she’d bought for herself to stick in the window.
Traci sighed at the memories of that time, her last summer of innocence, and the foreman gave her a questioning look.
“Just thinking about the old days,” she confessed. “Did you ever live in the dorm back then?”
“No,” he said, his usually amiable expression hardening. “Old man Eddings didn’t want the white kids mixing with the Blacks and the wetbacks.”
“Oh God, that’s right. It never occurred to me at the time to wonder why everyone in the dorm was white. We were so clueless.”
“And the old man was such a racist. Hard to believe Hoke was his son. He was a good man, Traci.”
“Thanks, Javi,” she said lightly. “He wanted to do the right thing. He didn’t always succeed, you know, what with his dad and Ric siding against him, but at least he tried.”
“I paid ninety bucks a month to live in a garage apartment in town,” Javi reminisced. “Shared it with two other Guatemalans. I was the oldest, so I got the only bed and the other two shared the pullout sofa.” He laughed. “That said, it was a hell of a lot better than that crappy dorm of yours. We had a little kitchen with a fridge and a two-burner stove. Even had a window AC unit. Man, come Friday, we’d pool our money, get some beer, order pizza, crank up our boombox, and party down! We thought we were living high on the hog.”
“And I was just excited to have a real job and be able to live on my own. I guess we were all young and dumb and ready to be grown up.”
“Speaking of young and dumb, whatever happened to that friend of yours, you know, the cute little lifeguard, the one the old man fired after that poor little kid drowned?”