Border Street: Lives just abandoned on 'forgotten street'

By Tina Griego, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published November 27, 2006 at midnight

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The Legal Permanent Resident disappears as the others on Border Street have done this year. Gradually. One week, a twin mattress appears on the driveway and the next, newspapers start piling up in the driveway. A white plastic chair on the porch topples and remains on its side for days. The trash can sits on the curb and stays there, falling over, garbage spilling into the gutter.

I should pick that up, says the Fed Up neighbor, who dismisses the thought a second later. Why the hell should I, why can't people be responsible for themselves, she says, the tiny bubble of optimism that carried her through summer pierced by the inconsistency of Border Street. The Construction Worker next door turns up his car stereo in the driveway. She opens her front door and slams it shut in protest. He turns it down. A friend tells the Fed Up neighbor that she will not come to her home again. The kids playing in the street, the friend says, they wouldn't move when I drove up. From now on, the friend says, I'll meet you somewhere else.

We're a forgotten street, the Fed Up neighbor says, and she and her daughter talk again about selling the house.

The twin mattress in the Legal Permanent Resident's front yard leans against a fence near the dying rosebushes and the For Sale sign. He'd had trouble making the mortgage payments and hoped to sell it to skirt foreclosure. After a couple days, the mattress proves too tempting for the neighborhood boys who drag it out and jump on it and then it, too, disappears along with the For Sale sign and the lockbox on the front door.

All of these signs - the trash, the chair, the papers - enter the neighborhood subconscious, adding up. He must have moved, a neighbor says, and tries to remember when she saw the Legal Permanent Resident last. I think it was a couple weeks ago, she says.

He lived on the street for almost two years but was a stranger to everyone except the Mexican grandma, who was his mother-in-law. He bought his house in December 2004, a little more than two years after his in-laws bought theirs. They lived on the same side of the block, four houses between them. Their houses were nearly identical, though the Legal Permanent Resident paid $8,000 more, his backyard coming with a large detached garage, the floor of which he expertly resurfaced a deep speckled blue. The living arrangement pleased his wife. They had lived apart most of their marriage, she raising their family in Mexico while he worked in California and Washington and Colorado. She joined him in Denver, crossing the border illegally with their sons. He drove a nice SUV to his construction job. She took the bus to a Mexican restaurant where she worked part time with her mother. He played soccer with his sons on weekends.

He sent them back to Mexico this summer after his younger brother, the Fugitive Boyfriend, ran afoul of the law. The police came to the Legal Permanent Resident's house. He did not want to worry whether immigration would show up next. After they left, there was only work and past-due bills and money owed to his boss, an American who put up part of the $5,000 bond for the Fugitive Boyfriend because the Legal Permanent Resident did not have it. The boss considers him a good, loyal worker. We're like family, he says.

The Legal Permanent Resident was not alone in his too-expensive house. One of his brothers moved in. So did a third man. All three left at the same time in the morning. They all arrived after dark, and then they stopped coming home at all.

On the street, it is as if the Legal Permanent Resident has become a ghost. A side door to the garage remains open, his work tools and boots and belt inside. Evidence of a life that will not be missed on this street because it was never really noted. Like Border Street itself. Like the American woman who skipped out on her rent in the middle of the night. And the Mexican grandma and her two sons and five grandchildren who lived three months without electricity and then walked away from their house, leaving it to the bank, leaving it to whoever broke in through a back door revealing the room where one of Mexican grandma's sons and his wife slept, and the melted red candle on the window sill where their bed used to be. Inside: the couch where the Mexican grandma fed her granddaughters bread, an upturned recliner near the front door, trash everywhere, a dresser, shelves, a car seat, an old television, an older stereo, and in the back bedroom shared by another son, his wife, and their four children - bunk beds against crib against crib against crib - the bed, two mattresses and one crib remain. They abandoned the house two months ago.

Can you imagine, the Teacher's mother says. She cannot picture walking out of a life this way. Sometimes it seems that without her or Longtime Eddie or the Fed Up neighbor, without Woody's son and the Patriarch, Border Street itself would become a mirage, that only they and their history and memories keep it anchored.

It is one of the Mexican grandma's daughters-in-law who confirms the Legal Permanent Resident has moved. He's living with his sister in Denver, she says. She doesn't know what happened. They were not close. He doesn't answer his cell phone.

The daughter-in-law is still living with her husband, four children, brother-in-law, nephew and the Mexican grandma. They found a two-bedroom apartment near a Mexican bakery, and the place is cramped and dark, but outside, the air smells like fresh tortillas. Things haven't turned out the way they'd planned, losing the house, living without electricity. So, a skeptical visitor asks, is life here still good, still better than Mexico, still everything you imagined? She beams and looks up at the sky. Oh, yes, she says.

griegot@RockyMountainNews.com

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