By chance, lost then found

By Timothy Pratt

Thursday, Nov. 27, 2008 | 2 a.m.

From his bicycle he sees it, lying on the grass in front of the sort of suburban house that will never be his address.

It’s a brown leather wallet.

It’s only the third time in six months of sliding fliers under doors for $7 an hour that he’s been in Green Valley, 90 minutes by bicycle from the apartment he shares with four guys.

He rides by the wallet twice before stopping. He gets off the bike, picks it up, slowly folds it open. There’s no money. In the center of three folds, under a clear plastic window, there’s a driver’s license. The man in the picture is white, blue-eyed, probably speaks only English.

That man is me, the one telling you this story.

The other man, the one who found my wallet thinks, “I should call my boss and ask him how to get to the address on the license. It’s probably nearby; I can do the right thing and drop the wallet off. But suppose someone robbed the guy, took money from the wallet and threw it away? What if my boss thinks I was the one? I’ll lose my job, the only thing that pulled me away from all those days standing on street corners near the Home Depot near Charleston and Lamb ...”

He could lose more than his job. Suppose the man on the driver’s license thinks he stole the wallet? He’d never be able to explain to him in English what really happened. He’d be arrested, taken to jail and then deported, like he heard about on Univision news. Then he’d really have to wait a long time before he sees his children again. The oldest is 8.

That child’s father was raised to return what doesn’t belong to him.

At home that evening, he pulls a chair to the table in a nearly empty kitchen, talking to one of the guys who shares the house. He empties everything in the wallet onto the table. There’s a 50 peso bill, folded and tucked into a pocket. It is a link. His friend looks at the photo on the license, says he’s seen the guy on Univision news. The man must speak Spanish!

“Even if money is missing from the wallet, he’s going to appreciate getting his license and everything back. You should call him,” the friend says.

At the end of the next day, Monday, after dodging traffic for 10 hours, he is back home again and decides to call the phone number on a business card in the wallet. The card has the same name as the license, Timothy Pratt.

The answering machine picks up; my message is in English and Spanish. I had just left to pick up my eldest son, Jesse, for soccer practice. (Later, when the bicycle rider meets me, he remarks how great it is that I live in the same house with my two sons and that we get to do things together.)

I pick up his message Tuesday morning. In Spanish, he says, “We have your wallet, we found it Sunday ...” A voice in the background asks: “So he speaks Spanish? He speaks Spanish?”

I return the call and we agree to meet at his house that night. Soon after, my wife returns from work. I tell her about the calls, how the wallet must have fallen from my backpack when the kids and I were riding our bikes home from the park.

I stoop into my car in the driveway of my Green Valley home. I stop for a second to check my internal alarm system, which I trust after growing up in New York City and reporting for years from a war zone, Colombia. What if this is a setup? What if the guy on the phone is waiting with a couple of others and it’s all about trying to get me to an ATM? But that won’t work anyway — I canceled the cards. Maybe they’ll kidnap me. The voice sounded like it belonged to a working-class Mexican, judging by his accent and his way of expressing himself; he could be out of work these days and desperate. Should I bring a friend?

But then I notice that the alarm isn’t going off; the situation doesn’t feel dangerous.

Twenty minutes later we’re standing in his kitchen near a table and three chairs; there’s an empty pan on the stove. The living room has no TV or stereo; a couch is missing cushions and cigarette stubs fill an ashtray on a coffee table.

“Check your wallet; make sure everything’s there,” he says to me. “Are you sure there was no money?”

I feel embarrassed but look just in case. Where’s the black Citi credit card? It’s gone! No, there it is. The press pass I used in Colombia, a talisman of sorts and oddly the only thing I worried about not being able to replace; it’s also there. Everything is there.

I ask about his job. What did you before delivering fliers? Did you work in construction?

“How did you know?”

I tell him I write about the Hispanic community, that I’ve interviewed dozens of construction workers.

He tells me his story. After arriving from Jalisco in 2001, he put up thousands of houses across the Las Vegas Valley for a good five-year run, bringing home $15 to $20 an hour. He and his wife, also from Jalisco, had one, two, three children. They had a home, they were a family.

In late 2006, companies began cutting back, friends began leaving, fights started at home.

“I could tell you so much ...” he says a few times, and then tells me more. He tells me about the drinking, the friends losing their families, the whoring, the bad neighborhoods, the praying to God, the losing his children and wife, the waiting on corners for work and nada, just fights and worrying about police, the whole thing about not asking friends or family for help but then breaking down, with no place to go and not wanting to return to Mexico and give up his children and the idea of another life better than having nothing in Jalisco. His brothers in California let him stay with them for a while. They told him to snap out of it, stop drinking, do some exercise, work will come.

He found the job with the fliers. Things got a little better. He saw his children three months ago.

My cell phone rings. It’s Jesse; it’s 9 p.m. and he wants to know if I’m going to come home to say goodnight. I slide an envelope out of my jacket pocket, a little something to say thanks. The envelope says, Mil Gracias. He’ll open it later to discover $40.

From my wallet I pull out one of my business cards — probably the same one he used to call me.

He reaches in back of his jeans and takes out a frayed nylon wallet. He opens it to stick my card inside; there’s nothing else there.

We’re outside now, saying goodbye.

“It’s so good we met. It’s so good I gave you the wallet. I know God gives back when you do something like this. We have to meet again sometime. There’s so much I could tell you ...”