drewswerds

The following is a chunk of prose written as an exercise with Tom Jordan. The idea was, he’d write a passage, I’d write a passage, we’d continue until we had sure-fire Hollywood gold. Problem is, I never got past this first submission. Was I intimidated by the lofty company in which I found myself? Perhaps. Regardless, so much for Hollywood gold.

Anyway, here it is. If you happen to be Tom Jordan and you’re reading this: We’ll get it going some day, buddy!

Otherwise, enjoy.

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Three seats behind Phillipe Valdez, a wiry, cigar-colored Mexican stirred and looked around sleepily. The boxy shoulders of his rumpled suit jacket were too large for his thin frame and his sinewy forearms were thrust from rolled up sleeves. He wore no watch. No wedding ring.

His name was Salvador Torrez, but he was simply referred to by those that knew him as Flaco. He was easily the tallest from his home village, near Oaxaca and he came from seven generations of butchers; robust, vital slaughterers of livestock with heavy, pugilist hands. His father was a butcher, his grandfather a butcher, and so it went.

Like his father before him, Flaco was a butcher, but his hands were not the hands of his forbearers. Flaco’s hands were subtle, graceful, cruel.

Flaco considered the man in the neat straw hat three seats ahead. He was very sure that he was the right man. Diego had described him well. He wondered what could be so important that a gabacho of such standing – the man wore shoes made of alligator’s skin and carried his cigarettes in a delicate silver case – what could be so important as to make him pack himself onto a red-eye bus with the migrant workers, wanderers, and parole violators.

He absently fingered the object in his pocket and considered the backpack the man cradled in his lap. It was a rugged canvas bag; more suited to a soldado than a procurer of exotic shoes. The contents of the bag were the reason. The reason the man had set out in the rain and the steam tonight. The reason Flaco was here.

He wondered at the bag. Did it hold money? Drogas, perhaps? He would like to know. He could sell the drogas to his cousin Emilio. He could give the money to Gloria. Then her father would respect him.

But Diego had given a stern warning not to disturb the contents of the bag when he was finished. The contents were not his concern. There would be money for him when he was finished. Plenty of money, Diego promised.

Flaco leaned his head against the steamy window of the bus. It was stuffy, humid inside the vehicle, but Flaco’s forehead was smooth and dry. He would sleep until they reached their destination. The gabacho would be there when he woke up.

He was just beginning to doze when the bus the shuddered violently and lurched to the right. Flaco cursed as his head smacked the window. Somewhere among the slumbering passengers a baby hiccupped and convulsed into a screeching yowl. The vehicle rattled off the side of the narrow highway and thudded to a halt like a spent buffalo. Phillipe, the gabacho, was visibly sweating a few seats ahead, nervous.

“Barracho,” muttered Flaco. He was suspicious of the driver when he boarded the bus, a glazed man with a habit of regularly rubbing his entire face with the palm of his hand. Now he was sure that the driver was half in the bag, and he had no doubt that quiet sips from a hidden flask or bottle had gotten him far enough along into the second half.

The driver staggered from his seat and yanked on the handle, swinging the narrow bus doors inward. Valdez was half out of his seat with the backpack clutched tightly to his chest. The driver squinted out the door. Raindrops beaded on his cheeks and brow.

“Flat tire.” He announced, and palmed his face. “The bus, she don’t take well to the hard driving. I have a spare on de back. Fifteen minutes.” The passengers were coming to life, groggy, disinterested.

The driver reached into a compartment in the dash of the ancient bus, produced a greasy tool box, and lumbered down the stairs sludging through the gravel and mud toward the back of the bus.

Fillipe looked nervously around the bus. “Fifteen minutes,” he reassured himself. He pulled a linen handkerchief from his shirt pocket and mopped the back of his neck.

Flaco eyed him coolly, tapping the object in his pocket. Looking at the window next to him, he could see where the steamy fog had smeared a clear streak on the pane; a streak the shape that his head had made, striking it. Through the smear, Flaco could see lights below in the near distance: The lights of a town.