Pilgrims

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  here. Hurry up, or everyone will think I’m giving the stuff away

  for free. Everyone will think I can’t even run my own goddamn

  business.”

  Jimmy Moran walked slowly through the complicated and con-

  necting parking lots to find his car. He swung his arms as he

  walked, trying to take the stiffness out of his back. He thought

  that he probably looked like an idiot doing this, but he didn’t

  care. As it turned out, he was walking along the back parking lot

  of the Korean market most of the time anyway, and he didn’t

  care what Koreans thought of how he looked. The Korean

  market was huge now. Jimmy Moran thought that someday the

  Koreans might take over the entire Bronx Terminal Vegetable

  Market, an idea he wasn’t crazy about in any way. The Koreans

  worked ridiculous hours and didn’t even have a union. They

  sold vegetables nobody had ever even heard of.

  He was tired. During his four months off, he’d been keeping

  human hours for the first time in his adult life — asleep during

  the darkness and awake during the day — and he was not yet

  readjusted to being up in the middle of the night. It was nearly

  dawn. It took him almost an hour to get back to where he had

  parked, under a strong streetlight. His car did look beautiful.

  He loved his car. On this cloudy and damp night, under this big

  artificial beam of light, it looked like some kind of a sea animal

  — watery blue and powerful, with shimmering fins. The tail-

  lights looked like reflective decoy eyes.

  He had a second sack of campaign buttons in the trunk of his

  car. His plan was to drive to the north side of the market and

  hand out buttons at some of the bigger commercial houses over

  there before everyone left for the day. He drove toward the

  north, passing the lines and lines of freight trucks all backed up

  against dark loading docks. The cabs of the trucks were dim and

  closed. The drivers, mostly Southerners like himself, slept in-

  side on hidden mattresses while the porters loaded the freight.

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  At the Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market

  Men pushed hand trucks loaded with crates and maneuvered

  along the narrow alleys between the big trucks. Sometimes

  the men would pause and give Jimmy Moran a thumbs-up

  gesture for his beautiful car. Sometimes they would come jog-

  ging across his path, concentrating on their destination, and he

  would nearly hit them.

  Jimmy came upon a security guard he knew, patrolling a

  parking lot on foot. Low, thick diesel fumes reached up past the

  man’s knees, making it look like he was wading in mist. Jimmy

  stopped to talk. The guard was a friendly Polack from Jimmy’s

  own neighborhood named Paul Gadomski. Jimmy rolled down

  his window and Paul leaned against the Chrysler and lit a cig-

  arette.

  “What is this, a ’fifty-eight?” Paul asked.

  “It’s a ’fifty-six, Pauly.”

  “She’s a sweetheart.”

  “Thanks. Have a button,” Jimmy said, and handed a cam-

  paign button out of the window.

  “What’s this? You’re not running against DiCello?”

  “I am,” Jimmy said. Christ, he was tired. “And I’d like to

  think I can count on your vote, Paul.”

  “Hell, I’m not voting in your union, Jim. Get serious. I’m no

  teamster. I’m a cop.”

  “You get serious, Pauly. You’re no cop, buddy.”

  “Same thing.”

  “Security guard?”

  “Well, I’m damn sure no teamster.”

  “I’d sure like it if you’d wear the button anyhow.”

  “Hell, Jim. I can’t wear no teamster’s campaign button on my

  uniform.”

  “Well, think it over, Pauly.”

  “I’ll bring it home for my kid to play with,” Paul said. He put

  the button in his jacket pocket.

  The two men, alone in a back parking lot, talked about

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  business. Paul said that when Jimmy was out for back surgery,

  there was a trucker who got his neck slit one night. Nobody had

  been arrested for it yet. Jimmy said he hadn’t heard about that.

  Paul said the corpse had been found underneath some other

  driver’s truck. That driver, some guy who was hauling bananas all the way up from Florida, claimed he didn’t know anything

  about any murder, so the police let him go. Paul couldn’t be-

  lieve how gullible the cops were. Paul said the cops didn’t seem

  too interested in finding out what really happened that night.

  Jimmy said that it was almost always that way, because the cops

  were usually mobbed-up and corrupt like everyone else. Paul

  said he knew for a fact that the murdered guy had hit the

  Trifecta that very afternoon and had been bragging all night

  about making something like twenty grand. Paul said there

  was crazy bullshit all over the market for about a week, what

  with the cops sealing off areas and asking all the wrong ques-

  tions. Jimmy said it sounded to him like the murder had been a

  fight over a parking spot, and he would be suspicious of the

  banana-truck driver from Florida. Jimmy recalled that the first

  year he’d ever worked at the market, he’d seen a guy beaten to

  death with a tire iron over a parking spot dispute. Jimmy had

  seen lots of parking spot disputes turn violent.

  Paul said that it was just a bunch of fucking animals working

  at this place. Jimmy agreed, and the two men said good night.

  Jimmy Moran drove on. He passed a handsome fleet of re-

  frigerated supermarket trucks, loading in at Bennetti & Perke,

  the major corporate wholesaler that distributed to all the big

  Eastern seaboard supermarket chains. Jimmy didn’t know who

  owned Bennetti & Perke, but it was definitely a very, very rich

  man, who was probably asleep somewhere in a big house right

  on the ocean.

  There was so much fortune being shuffled around every

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  At the Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market

  night here at the Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market, it was

  almost unbelievable. It would be unbelievable and unimagin-

  able to those who had not seen the place at work. The hurricane

  fences and razor-wire coils and security floodlights gave the

  market the look of a prison, but it was certainly no prison, as

  Jimmy and everyone who had ever worked there knew. It was

  no prison. It was, actually, a bank.

  When Jimmy Moran was just a young porter, he and his

  buddies had wasted a lot of time trying to figure out how to

  skim off some of that fortune. They’d wasted a lot of time trying

  to imagine how much money was passed around every night at

  the market. That was a young man’s game, of course. It was the

  old men who understood there was never a way to steal any real

  money unless you were already rich.

  The summer earlier, Jimmy’s oldest son, Danny, had worked

  part-time at Grafton Brothers as a porter. Danny had tried in

  the same lazy way to figure out how much money was contained

  in the market an
d how to get his hands on it. Jimmy was aware

  of this. Danny also wanted to know how to steal it, how to

  hoist it, how to skim it. On their drive home together in the

  early morning, Danny would speculate aimlessly about money.

  Wouldn’t it be fantastic, Danny would say, to skim even one

  lousy cent off every pound of produce sold at the market in one

  night? How much money would that be a week? A month? A

  year? Wouldn’t it even be fair to be able to skim a little off the top? Considering how hard porters worked, and for such a

  shitty pay?

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jimmy would

  tell his son. “Just forget about it.”

  “What about the Korean market?” Danny asked. “All their

  deals are in cash. You could just mug one of those guys and get

  a fortune. All those Korean guys are carrying around at least five

  grand all the time.”

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  “No, Danny. Nobody carries that kind of cash.”

  “Koreans do. Koreans are scared of banks.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “That’s what the truckers say.”

  “Then you can be damn sure you don’t know what you’re

  talking about.”

  Of course it was ridiculous to think about stealing money

  from anybody here, because a lot of people carried guns and

  knives. People were always killing each other over nothing, just to pass the time. It was ridiculous to think about all the money

  other people made here. It would give you chest pains, just

  thinking about it.

  Jimmy had meant to park at Bennetti & Perke. He’d thought

  it was a good place to hand out his second bag of campaign

  buttons, but now he wasn’t so sure. His back was really bother-

  ing him, and he wasn’t sure how he was supposed to carry the

  heavy sack. For that matter, he wasn’t sure how he was supposed

  to go back to work as a porter in just two days, as he was

  scheduled to. How was he supposed to haul crates of fruits and

  vegetables around? How was he supposed to do that? Hon-

  estly, how?

  So Jimmy Moran drove on. It was after 5:30 a.m., and his back

  was seriously hurting. He circled around Bennetti & Perke and

  then headed out of the market altogether. He would just go

  home. He would just forget about campaigning. As he drove, he

  thought for the first time in ages about his old friend Martin

  O’Ryan.

  From March of 1981 to January of 1982, Jimmy had worked as

  a buyer on a trial basis for a discount greengrocery chain called

  Apple Paradise. It was a big opportunity for advancement, and

  his old friend Martin O’Ryan had gotten him the job. It was

  quite a promotion, to be taken off the docks and made a buyer.

  168 ✦

  At the Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market

  Buyers got to work in offices up above the actual market, and

  buyers could really prosper.

  Jimmy’s friend Martin O’Ryan had actually been very good

  at buying. He was a maniac at telephone deals, really fierce at

  negotiating with truckers, farmers, importers, and distributors

  for the best price. Martin made a lot of money for Apple Para-

  dise and for himself that year.

  “Whaddaya got?!” Martin would shout into the phone. “I

  need iceberg! . . . Twenty-five dollars? Fuck you, twenty-five

  dollars! I’ll take it for eighteen! . . . Give me eighteen or I’ll

  come over and burn down your motherfucking house! . . . Give me eighteen or I’ll rip your motherfucking lungs out! . . . Give me eighteen or I’ll blind you and I’ll personally come to your house myself and I will blind your — okay, I’ll take it for

  twenty.”

  Then Martin would hang up the phone and start with some-

  one else.

  Martin O’Ryan and Jimmy Moran were put in the same

  office, at desks across from each other. They were best friends.

  Martin was the first friend Jimmy ever made when he came

  up from Virginia with his mom as a twelve-year-old hillbilly

  kid. Jimmy and Martin had started off as porters together and

  joined the union together and been to each other’s weddings.

  He loved Martin, but he couldn’t concentrate on his own tele-

  phone deals with Martin shouting across the room from him.

  (“Get me that truck of potatoes, you worthless fuck, you worth-

  less, lying cocksucker fuckhole, or I’ll rape you personally my-

  self! ”)

  Martin was the nicest guy in the world, but it was distracting.

  At the end of the year, Martin got a huge bonus and an official

  job for the company, and Jimmy did not. It worked out fine, in

  the end. Jimmy found another job quickly enough, working on

  the loading docks as a porter again.

  Martin was honestly one of the nicest guys in the world, and

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  Martin and Jimmy loved each other, but they hadn’t seen each

  other for quite a while.

  Jimmy needed to gas up the Chrysler and he knew that the

  small gas station in his neighborhood wouldn’t be open yet, so

  he didn’t take his usual exit toward home. Instead, he kept on

  driving around, looking for a twenty-four-hour service station,

  and that is how he eventually ended up on Route 95.

  He was familiar with that highway. Back in the middle of the

  1980s, he’d worked for a while as a delivery driver for a small

  gourmet vegetable wholesale company called Parthenon Pro-

  duce, run by two Greeks. This was the nicest job he’d ever had.

  He used to deliver quality greens — mostly arugula and water-

  cress — from the Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market, up Route

  95, to all the fancy stores along Long Island Sound and up into

  Connecticut as far as Ridgefield. It was a long drive but pleas-

  ant, and he used to get into Ridgefield (a place he and Gina

  used to call “Rich-field”) around eight or nine in the morning,

  when the wealthy men were just heading off to their jobs.

  He had liked that delivery job. He had been happy with that

  job, but the two Greeks had sold their business in 1985. They’d

  offered him a chance to buy that particular delivery route as his

  own, but Jimmy Moran just didn’t have that kind of money at

  the time.

  Jimmy Moran drove past New Rochelle and Mount Vernon

  and into Connecticut. It was very early in the morning, and a

  clear day. As he drove, Jimmy thought that if he could have

  made more money at the Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market, he

  would have moved his wife and all his kids up to Connecticut

  long ago. They still talked about it all the time: the broad lawns,

  the quiet schools, the tall wives. Jimmy Moran’s brother Patrick,

  ironically enough, had married Gina’s sister Louisa, and those

  two had moved to Connecticut right away. But Patrick and

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  At the Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market

  Louisa, of course, didn’t have any kids, and it was easier for

  them to move. They had moved to Danbury, and they had a

  pretty nice little place, with a patio.

 
Gina’s sister Louisa used to be a genuinely sexy girl when she

  was a teenager. She was famous around the neighborhood for

  being no good in a very fun way, and Jimmy Moran’s brother

  Patrick had always been crazy about Louisa Lisante. But Jimmy

  had always preferred Gina. In the summer of 1970, when Jimmy

  had his first job as a porter at the market, he would see Gina and

  Louisa Lisante waiting for the bus together every morning

  when he got home from work. They always wore shorts and

  sandals. They were setting off for their summer jobs as wait-

  resses near the beach. Jimmy used to steal beautiful ripe Hol-

  land tomatoes from the market and leave them on the Lisantes’

  doorstep as paperweights for little love notes to Gina: I love

  Gina . . . Gina is pretty . . . Gina has pretty legs . . . I wish Gina would marry me.

  Jimmy thought about Gina and Patrick and Louisa as he

  drove all the way into Ridgefield, Connecticut. Although he

  had not planned it this way, his timing on this particular morn-

  ing was the same as his timing with the Parthenon Produce

  delivery route, and he arrived in Ridgefield just as the men of

  the town were leaving for work. It was nearly ten years since he

  had been to Ridgefield. In the old days, when he was finished

  with his route, he used to drive around the most affluent neigh-

  borhoods, studying the houses. These homes had all seemed so

  confidently undefended to him, and he had felt traces of a

  young man’s desire to rob them. Of course, it was not the con-

  tents of the houses he had wanted but the houses themselves.

  Particularly the large stone houses.

  The house that Jimmy Moran had always particularly really

  wanted was absolutely huge. It was a half-mile from the center

  of Ridgefield — a great slate-roof manor on top of a steep hill,

  with a circular driveway and white columns. He used to drive up

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  to this exact house some early mornings when the gourmet

  greens were all delivered. His three-ton Parthenon Produce

  delivery truck would rumble obnoxiously up the grade each

  time he downshifted. In all those mornings, he never once saw

  anybody, or any car, anywhere near that house. It always seemed

  like such a crime to have such a huge house sitting there empty.

  It was such a well-kept empty house, and Jimmy used to con-

  sider simply moving in. What if he could do that? What if he