Ramón and the Swimming Pool

Two months after we purchased a white fifteen passenger van, Ramón bought one too. I can't say that I ever really liked Ramón. He struck me as an aloof, unpleasant sort of person and as a child, I found great amusement from observing the way his skinny legs stuck out from underneath his large belly in a manner that very much reminded me of an olive on a toothpick. Stray patches of salt-and-pepper hair formed a semi-circle around a shiny bald spot in the center of Ramón's head. He worked at the local laundromat and scarcely said one word to anyone unless it was to ask them to borrow something. No on on Bishop Street knew very much about Ramón and he preferred it that way.

Ramón had two daughters. Yaseña and Dezerae would wait for the bus every morning even though Gary Elementary School stood no more than two blocks from where they lived. They were both around my age and had tight, rosy skin. They wore their hair in a long, straight plait that reached down their backs and past their dimpled knees.

"Me fadder won' lemme cut my hkair," Yaseña would habitually boast through the grating of the rickety fence that separated our backyards.

"He da only one who can cut my hkair when it get too long." Finding much more amusement in terrorizing our senile shitzu than in listening to Yaseña, I ignored her. "He keep it in a box for when I get married" she grinned.

"How...interesting" I replied, half glancing in her direction. I never became friends with Yaseña and Dezarae for they all-too often viewed themselves far above any company they kept. They preferred to sit on the front steps of their house loudly sucking paletas all day, causing the juice to run down the sticks and onto their clothes and hands.

Ramón's wife rarely left their house, but from time to time I would see her in their backyard hanging clothes on the line. Everyone on the street simply referred to her as "Ramón's wife" and she looked like a larger version of her two persnickety daughters. Her calves resembled newly baked loaves of bread and were so large, they kissed even when she stood with her feet shoulder-width apart. When she wasn't screaming at her children in Spanish, she usually grunted to everyone else.

One afternoon, Ramón began to build a new fence. He worked on it day and night for about a week. Standing seven feet high, Ramón decided to paint the fence neon-orange. Ramón began to make all sorts of changes to his house. He landscaped the front lawn and repaved his driveway. The next thing we knew, Ramón would come home from the laundromat with his fifteen passenger van filled with wood which quickly disappeared into his backyard. Ramón could be heard hammering, sawing, and shuffling around his backyard during all hours of the day or night.

"Them Mex-ee-cans sure know how to use a g--d d---n hammer" Mr. Minter would say to anyone who cared to listen. As a kid, Mr. Minter scared me for he looked exactly like Popeye from the cartoons. He was a staunch racist and could cuss more than anyone I knew. To this day, I am convinced that the only words in his vocabulary were racial slurs and expletives. Scott, Mr. Minter's best friend and neighbor of forty years, lived across the street. He was tall and thin and looked very much like the Spirit of Famine. I don't think his wife ever cooked for him. Mr. Minter liked to sit on his porch and smoke. Oftentimes I'd hear him ranting and raving to Scott about how "All of g--d d---n Mex-ee-co is movin' into West Ch-ee-ca-go!" Usually Scott stood there and listened, offering his two cents now and again.

None of the neighbors on the block could figure out what Ramón built so secretively in his backyard. "Lawd!" Mrs. Edith would say to Sarah, Andrew, and me whenever we went over to her house to mow her lawn. "I hope he know what he doin!"

A couple of weeks later, Ramón threw a party. One could hear bachata and merengue blasting from all the way down the block, almost as if Ramón wanted to let all of Bishop Steet know that they were not invited. My curiosity having gotten the better of me, I climbed one of the apple trees behind my house so that I could look over Ramón's fence, which more closely resembled a construction sign, and into his yard. To my great surprise, I observed that a massive swimming pool stood where Ramón's backyard had once been. A group of people stood huddled together on a tiny deck that spanned the four feet from the back door of Ramón's house to the edge of the swimming pool.

Not long afterwards, Ramón hung a large, obnoxious sign above his driveway that said, "La Casa de la Famila Hernandez." A couple of days later, a big, yellow "for lease" sign appeared in
Ramón's front yard. Ramón and his family had disappeared overnight. None of the neighbors knew exactly what became of them or why they left in the first place. It was rumored that Ramón's wife had been deported.

"They don' finally gone back to Mex-ee-co" Mr. Minter would tell people who asked. After a while, people stopped asking.