Hank and Juan's Story

Hank called up Juan on Monday morning, “Hey buddy you ready? Ya know I gotta change that transmission out of the caddy and man that guy is waiting for it, called me on Saturday night. At home!”

“Si, I am ready Hank, come an’ pick me up.”, replied Juan. Hank had moved to Denver nine years ago, he loved the outdoors and while it was not his native South Carolina, it also had things that South Carolina, at the time, did not have, namely gainful employment. When he moved up he took a job at “Carl’s Imports”, a garage that specialized in foreign cars, repairing them with cheaper, American made, parts to save the original owners a lot of money. Add the non-certified mechanics for their make and model of car and the place was a gold mine. The location worried Hank a bit when he applied for a job, south east Denver was filled with lower income housing and most of it was pretty old too. However under the veneer of age was a sort of quiet dignity, the houses were old, but had new paint, well cut yards and very little actual crime. After nine months on the job Hank bought an old 2 bedroom house about 7 blocks from where he worked. Like all people moving into such a position, Hank figured he would be walking to work every day and saving a bundle on gas, the reality was it took 10 minutes to walk and 2 minutes to drive. So he drove pretty much every day, figuring he was paying the gas for an extra 16 minutes of free time every day.

At first his job was just a job, he got along with the people he worked with, even if most of them spoke Spanish and he could only remember three words of it from his high school years. Over the months though, that changed, after three years Hank was even invited over to several of his co-worker’s houses for dinner and he could get along pretty well in his second language, well enough to work, well enough to joke around and well enough to understand when most of the ‘old school’ Hispanics started asking around why he did not have an ‘esposa’. Hank was not the marrying type, he did not talk about it much with his friends, though they could never quite stop asking him when he was going to ‘settle down’ with a good woman. He figured it was just a cultural thing, plus women could not stand to see a good ‘catch’ like him getting away. Now nine years later and with thirty seven years on this earth Hank could just not see himself changing to the point of marrying anyone. He drank beer on their back patios or in his friend’s garages (never on the front porch stoop like a bunch of ‘boyz in the hood’, the women of the house would never allow that.) and enjoyed having them around. In particular he was good friends with Juan, a slightly younger man of 34 years who lived a couple of blocks down the street from him. They rode in together, they worked like a well oiled machine on any projects they had, they just ‘clicked’.

Juan’s wife was a huge driving force behind the neighborhood conspiracy to find Hank a wife, so far though Hank had parried every attempt of hers to pair him up. And this was seriously hard fighting, the woman was an expert. Parties, where there were a few single women, dinners with an added female companion, movies where one of her single friends tagged along. Hank didn’t mind and eventually Juan asked him if he were homosexual. This was not something Juan did after 2 years of friendship, but closer to 5 years into their relationship and it just came up one day when they were work on one of Juan’s cousin’s Camero. A nice car and Hank could not figure out what the hell Juan was talking about butterflies for. He had a surreal moment where he was thinking to himself, “This can’t be right, ‘Am I a butterfly?’, what the hell Juan?” Juan had looked at him really embarrassed and as he explained Hank become more and more embarrassed. Until they reached an impasse that could only have one conclusion, Hank had burst out laughing.

Hank had always been tight lipped about his past and this was the result, his friends and neighbors thought he was homosexual! He told Juan he just didn’t want to date anyone, he explained about his very horrible, very young first marriage and the two kids he had with his ex-wife back east. Only that the two kids he had conceived while married turned out to be those of two different men, if the dna testing were to be believed. And by that time Hank had been ready to believe anything. All his savings were cleaned out, payments due for loans he had never signed on were coming every day in the mail and his mother, his own mother had to tell him she came over to talk to his wife and found her in bed with another man.

Hank’s parents were not rich, but they had fronted him money for the divorce and the subsequent paternity tests. Soon after the paternity tests came back Hank had hard decisions to make. His wife sued him for alimony and told him privately if he paid it he could still see ‘his’ children every two weeks. Hank had declined to pay alimony, his ex filed suit to keep him from seeing the kids he thought were his, a two year old and a four year old. Life had gone on. Only not quite. His ex was fucked up, no one doubted that by now and Hank had been given a choice of pressing charges against her for wrongfully signing on over seventy thousand dollars of loans with his name or of putting her away for forgery and a host of other charges. Still thinking of ‘his’ kids, he declined to press charges and was subsequently hit up for full payment of the loans. Hank hired yet another lawyer, this one an ace at resolving credit disputes, the lawyer explained the situation to the creditors and while they commiserated with him about the mess he was in, they said he had not pressed charges and they were still owed the money and needed payment.

Eventually Hank declared bankruptcy, he had tried for months to keep up with the payment schedule demanded by the creditors, but his salary was just not enough and then there was no salary. His ex would not leave him alone, she came by where he worked and demanded money, if he did not pay she caused a scene in front of the customers. Hank thought his boss was pretty good for putting up with it as long as he did. Even after Hank had a restraining order his wife still showed up. Even after she was arrested and spent 3 days cooling her heels in jail, she continued to come back. Then cars started being vandalized at night, then a rock was thrown through the front window. Finally his boss called him in and they had ‘the talk’. Hank couldn’t be fired for what was going on, but South Carolina was a ‘no cause’ employment state and his boss explained that he had to let him go due to all the problems caused by his ex wife. The man was decent enough though; he paid Hank 3 months salary and gave him a great letter of recommendation.

Apparently though the news was out, there were no jobs in the area, in two weeks of applying for jobs he should have gotten, no one even so much as called him back. He stopped paying the loans and instead paid a bankruptcy attorney. The process took a surprisingly long time, during which Hank moved back in with his parents. He stretched the money he had and looked into attending college. Four days after his bankruptcy was finalized his parents were driving home on a rainy night and never made it. A state patrol officer explained that they had been in an accident, slid off the road and rolled, they had died quickly.

The weeks that followed were a blur, funerals to arrange, the estate to settle, bills to pay off. They were some of the worst of Hank’s relatively short life. At the funeral his ex-wife had shown up. She caught his attention and beckoned him over. She told him that if he did not give her the money ‘she knew’ his parents had left him she was going to start in on him again, he had two choices, pay her or live in hell. Hank knew then. He knew she had done it, killed his parents, the fucking bitch. Hank’s first instinct he was sure in retrospect, was exactly what his ex wanted, for him to pound her into the ground for murdering his parents. He somehow thought past that and merely nodded and said he would have a check for her when the estate was settled, but that he had nothing now, as his parents bank accounts had been depleted by his divorce and paying for their funerals and that it would take a few months to settle everything. She told him he had a week to make the first of many payments. He asked how much she wanted. She said he could keep anything over seventy thousand dollars. He merely nodded to her.

If he had beat up his wife at his parent’s funeral for what he knew she had done, she probably would have sued him for every penny he owned. Instead he buried his parents, and spoke to several guests who recognized his ex-wife. He told them that she had told him she had killed his parents and if he didn’t pay her seventy thousand dollars she was going to kill him too. A little white lie. He cried too. The rest was as easy as it was painful. First his ex had violated the restraining order, a fact seen by any number of attendees at the funeral, second the district attorney already had a history of his ex harassing him and knew the story of what she had put him through. His investigation into the possible murder of Hank’s parents was far more thorough than it might normally have been. Witnesses were found, alibis turned up to be false, his wife was in a lot of trouble, the day she was charged with the homicide of his parents the police went to her home to arrest her, she had slit her wrists, after drowning her two children, she had left a long, rambling note accusing Hank of abuse, and making everything up. Worse yet the bitch did not have the courteousy to die.

They rushed her, barely alive, to the hospital and she recovered. She was remanded to custody for her trial and had the great big, brass balls to send Hank a letter saying she still loved him and asking him to hire her an attorney to defense her. Hank had never answered her and her subsequent letters were less kind, in fact they were used by the d.a. at her sentencing hearing, the last Hank had heard anyway. By then he had left South Carolina to start a new life.

By this time Hank and Juan had given up all pretense at working on the Camero and Juan’s wife, Nanci, had started bring them beers, beer after beer, after beer. Hank had ended his story well and truly drunk, he recalled, coming back to the here and now, he looked out over the mostly deserted and still eerily light streets and says, “Ain’t that about right Juan?”

“Si. Yea Hank.”

“Of course after that, EVERYONE knew about it. It was great that not everyone was thinking I was gay anymore, but it took a few months before the pity came out of their eyes and that was pretty hard to take. Juan though he was always there for me, so was Nanci. Nanci….”, Hank stared off into the night some more.

Kevin heard the story and knew there was more to come, he doubted Hank or Juan would be up here on this roof, leaving Juan’s wife behind.

Hank started a bit, as if he had half fallen asleep and then said, “Hey Kevin, you can take some of the extra water and wash up a bit around back of this furnace, I got all these cloths for you, I hope something fits anyway. We should probably be hitting the hay, you want first watch Juan?”

“Si.”

“Okay, wake me when you start dozing off. Kevin you get a night’s sleep, you need it more than Juan and I right now.”

Kevin nodded his thanks and moved over to the clothing Hank had picked up.

Hank drifted off to sleep thinking of the way things had been, might have been and were now, the last thing he heard that night was Kevin quietly cleaning up behind the furnace.

previous... ..home..    next...

This section was last updated on 30 Jul 2008

The content on this website is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.