Wayside - 1920s Japan Dramedy

One month - it had been exactly one month since Alfred had made his move. The tradeoff for wheat fields and tumbleweeds had been for skyscrapers and automobiles. As difficult as it was for him to admit, determining whether the slow journey from Sioux Falls to Chicago was a success was steadily veering towards a grounded “no.”

“I didn’t even have to get her dinner, after one beer she was practically beggin’ for it. Talk about a good deal!”

"Two for one and done, hah!"

Talk of women was rampant on the construction sites Alfred had now called home. With every slam of a hammer or every step around a wayward beam, conversations that would make the devil himself turn even redder beyond his crimson skin were a commonplace occurrence - one which Alfred had not yet become used to.

He didn't want to get used to it. Why the stuffy old coots had branded him a "ruffian" on the sleepy streets of Sioux Falls paled in comparison to what these men were bragging about - conquests that would be shameful rather than praiseworthy back home.

Alfred wiped a bead of sweat from his brow.

But here's not home.

"We gotta get you out with us one of these days, Al!" Mariano, one of the site’s resident loudmouths, slapped a grimy hand against Alfred's shoulder. "Show ya my side of the windy city."

"I think you’d have to wheel me to the hospital after a night with you." Alfred chuckled with a forced smile.

That or I’d be face up six feet under...

“Aw, don’t tell me you’re a floozy! A guy as tall as you, a light weight! I can’t imagine that.” Mariano scoffed. “Or maybe you got a secret girl of your own? She get pissed if you ditch her for a night, huh?”

“Leave the guy alone, Mariano.” Max groaned with a wooden board digging into his shoulder. “He’ll come if he wants to. He might have better things to do than drink his night away.” A fellow “country bumpkin,” Max was another regular wherever Alfred was assigned. Although his roots were across the pond somewhere on a farm near Warsaw, Maxwell had quickly grown accustomed to life in Chicago, a strength Alfred admired and wished for himself as well.

“By the way, hey, Al.” Max smirked, sliding half the beam onto Alfred’s shoulder. “I got a new word for you.”

“Oh, shit, what the hell are you gonna throw at me now?” Alfred rolled his eyes as the midday sun assaulted their faces.

Everyday when they worked together, Max always had some sort of English question for Alfred. It had taken Alfred longer than he would have liked to admit to figure out why Maxwell only posed these questions to him and nobody else on the site.

“Because I know you won’t laugh at me.” Max had told Alfred on a particularly late night at work. On a break, Alfred found him grappling with English phrases hastily written on napkins from their lunch. “I can trust you with my questions.”

And the rest was history.

“My word today is ‘dox-sand.’”

“Huh?” Alfred shook his head, straining his back as he and Max tossed the beam over to the discard pile. “Is that a kind of sand you find by the lake?”

“No! No! I said it wrong.” Max laughed, dodging an airbound hammer haphazardly tossed from one worker to another. “It’s a type of dog.”

“Ah.” Alfred snapped his fingers. “You mean the hot dog! Well, to me, it’s a hot dog, but yeah, they’re called dachshunds. ‘Sund,’ not ‘sand.’”

“In Poland, we call them ‘jamnik.’” Max grinned.

“You named a dog after a vegetable? Yams?” Alfred smirked.

“Huh? What the hell are you talking about?”

“A yam is a vegetable!”

“No, ‘jamnik’! Jamnik means dox-sand!”

“Christ, it’s Dachsund, not dox-sand.”

Any conversation between Alfred and Max involving a ramshackle English lesson always ended in the same fashion as the last - at a point where their fellow yardmen had no other choice but to wonder whether the two had been pounding the hard stuff before their shift.

“You know, you could be a teacher, Al.” Max laughed. “It’d be better pay than whatever this shit we’re doing gives.”

Alfred rolled his eyes, him and Max kneeling down to get a start on stacking bricks. “I’m not one to brush off a compliment, but you’d be one crazy son of a bitch to trust me with your English!”

“You’d be a crazy son of a bitch to trust him with anything!” Mariano’s voice boomed across the site. “The hell is this paint job, huh?” He kicked one of the walls to the new bank building.

“It’s pushing 90 degrees out, they have us up since 4 AM, and you still wanna lick their boots, huh?” Alfred shot back with a smirk, earning a handful of agreeable nods and grunts from other men.

The camaraderie earned by Alfred’s snide remarks and frequent disrespect never sat well with Mariano.

“Some of us have nothing else besides this job, farm boy.” Mariano kept his voice cool and steady, a middle finger raised high in the air as he turned his back. “Not all of us are lucky enough to get a pile of green after their pops croaks.”

“Ignore him, Al.” Max placed a hand on his friend’s shoulder, who, to his surprise, was on the brink of a laughing fit. “Uh…you okay?”

“Haha, yeah! Yeah. Eh, he didn’t really say anything that wasn’t true!” Alfred ran a hand through his sweaty head of hair, eyes darkening as they never left their focus on Mariano. “He’s right. I am lucky. I should be grateful I made it out here this far.”

Hopefully, his niece would be next.

“After all, there’s a lot of people who never even make it past the state line.”