Oscar Casares - Amigoland

Copyright 2009 by Oscar Casares

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Little, Brown and Company

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First eBook Edition: August 2009

Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Los Inditos appears in the book

A Texas-Mexican Cancionero: Folksongs of the Lower Border by Amrico Paredes, University of Texas Press, 1995.

ISBN: 978-0-316-05332-7

ALSO BY OSCAR CASARES

Brownsville

For Becky and Adrian

Ahi vienen los inditos por el carrizal.

Ay mamita! Ay papito! me quieren matar.

The little Indians are coming through the canebrake.

Oh mommy! Oh daddy! They want to kill me.

Los Inditos

Mexican folk song, circa 1848

T he One With The Flat Face was taking her time coming around with the cart. She had stopped to visit with The Friendly Turtle and the two of them were talking and talking, as if it had been years since they had seen each other, as if it wasnt only a few hours ago that she brought out the cart, as if there werent other people already hungry and waiting for their dinner.

He sat at the table closest to the side door, which he planned to use as his escape route once he finished his meal. The clock now read 5:05, five minutes past the time they were supposed to bring out the trays. Five minutes normally wouldnt concern him, but he had only picked at his breakfast and then later not felt like eating the turkey casserole they served at lunch, so instead he spent his lunch hour smoking out on the patio, sitting on the padded seat of his walker.

Youre going to get hungry later, Mr. Rosales, The One With The Flat Face had come outside to tell him.

You think I have never been hungry? he snapped at her.

A man your age should not be smoking cigarettes.

Leave me alone. I smoked my two cigarettes a day for most of my life, long before you or your mother and father were born, maybe even before their mother and father.

Still, its not good for you, sir. If you get sick with the flu, your lungs are not going to be strong.

And what, you afraid I wont make it all the way to ninety-two?

She finally went back inside and left him in peace. That had been more than four hours ago, though, and since his nap Don Fidencio had kept an eye on the clock. The first thing he did was search through each of his five shoe boxes for any cheese crackers or chocolate candy that he might have forgotten. He found everything but the snacks he was looking for his five U.S. governmentissue pens (two more were missing, most likely stolen by a miserable somebody with nothing better to do than torment an old man); his three Zippo lighters (only one of which still had fluid); his federal employee badge, made of brass and still worth the trouble of polishing; his can of Mace spray (just in case); his extra pair of suspenders (also just in case); his roll of lottery tickets, wound tightly with a pair of rubber bands; his slightly warped cassette of Narciso Martinez music; his baseball that had been signed by a famous pitcher for the Astros but whose autograph was now smudged and impossible to make out; his tiny Aztec calendar on a broken key chain; his spare keys to the car and house, neither of which belonged to him anymore, but just the same, he liked to rattle them inside his pocket; a few random pesos and centavos, along with the silver dollar that he used to carry in his wallet; and his rosary that one of The Jesus Christ Loves Everybody Women had given him when they were going room to room, tracking down innocent souls that had somehow survived this long without their help.

The hunger had hit him more so when he walked into the mess hall. He took out one of his ballpoint pens to jot down the hours that had passed since the last bit of food he ate at breakfast. After listing each hour, he numbered them all the way to eleven. Eleven seemed like a lot, but he was sure he had lasted longer in the past. He thought if he could make himself think of a time when he was hungrier, it might make him feel less hungry now. There must have been plenty of times; the problem was making his old head remember. His best guess was it had to be when he was a boy and they would work along one side of the river one year and along the other side the following year, then back again, so much so that he sometimes forgot they were two separate countries. And then again much later they followed the crops up north. Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana. He could remember picking beets. He could remember the onions. He could remember the cucumbers. He could remember the melons. He must have been hungrier then, he and his younger brothers and sisters crowded into the back of the truck, their mother and the baby in the cab with their father, driving all night so they could make it to the next job. He could see himself crouched in a corner, clinging to the wooden slats, the stars up above him like bits of cotton sprinkled across the dark sky.

He was still thinking about this when The One With The Worried Face rolled up in his wheelchair. The wooden table was tall enough for the armrests to fit underneath and let him scoot forward until his chest touched the edge. After locking the brakes, he placed his elbows on the table, then held on to his weary head as if he were trying to decide the fate of the world. A small monitor with a string attached to it hung from the backrest of his wheelchair and then clipped to his collar, ready to send off a piercing alarm if he were to move too far away and slip out of the chair onto the floor. Though the weather outside was predicted to be in the high nineties for the rest of the week, he kept warm with a green ski cap, a checkered flannel shirt, thick sweatpants, athletic socks, and woolly slippers.

The Gringo With The Ugly Finger was the next one to guide his wheelchair into the dining room, using his heels to spur him along until he reached the table.

I could eat two horses, he said, which was what he had said at lunch and before that breakfast and before that dinner, and so on and so on. How bout you boys?

The question got only a half nod from Don Fidencio and even less from The One With The Worried Face, who obviously had too much on his mind to be troubled with something as trivial as feeding himself.

Say, The Gringo With The Ugly Finger began, I ever show you boys what happened to me when I worked for Pan Am?

Only about six hundred times, Don Fidencio wanted to say. But he knew better than to acknowledge the question or to so much as look in the direction of the mans left index finger, which was snipped off at the end like a cigar about to be lit. Don Fidencio pulled his walker a little closer to make sure it wasnt sticking too far out into the aisle. His own hands werent in such good shape either, with a patchwork of scars and splotches scattered from his knuckles to the crook of his elbow, most of them from bumping into this door or that fence or just about anything else that could tear his papery skin. He tried to remember why he had a bandage covering part of his right hand and when nothing came to him he went back to inspecting the rest of the walker. All four tires, front and back, were made of plastic, but he pressed his thumb into them anyway, same as the men used to do when he drove up to a service station. He rattled the wire basket, where he sometimes carried his #4 shoe box, the one with the chocolates. Then he fiddled with the extensions on the handgrips, first making them longer, then shorter, and finally moving them back to their original position, where they should have stayed all along.