From The Coffin Maker

 

~coming Summer, 2010~

 

 

We pass that whole winter sleeping on the back stoop of a farmacia. Its iron-grilled gates are padlocked at night, and in return for our space on the porch, it is Michael’s job to drive off thieves by chunking rocks. In addition to carving and selling my saints, it falls to me to restock Michael’s arsenal. Then one afternoon he hurls a rock through a car window, and everything goes south – including us.

A cop pulls up and gets out of his car. He asks my name and how old I am. I kick him in the shin and run like hell. But the cop runs faster, and two minutes later that patrol car lights out of there with me in the back, the front windows down, and dust the color of old blood roiling in. Out on the farm road, telephone poles rush by like they’re late for something. I try to count them so I can find my way back, but the poles run off into mustard fields, and anyway it’s getting dark. There’s nothing to look at but red lights on the dashboard and a metal grill that keeps me from climbing over the seat and gouging this sorry cop’s eyes from his head.

He’s white like me, and still wheezing from the chase. We cross into Mexico, and I sit back against the seat with my arms folded and my chin on my chest. I growl every obscenity I’ve ever heard. He grinds at the gears till the tires whine and throw stones, and when some smack the gas tank, he swears again. My throat is parched.

I guess I sleep because, when I wake, we’re following a track so narrow that sometimes it isn’t there.

He says, “Sumbitch, I passed it.”

We make a U-turn, drive through a town and up to a gate.

“Don’t get ideas about takin’ off, girlie. Ain’t nothin’ here but desert, the Gulf on one side and ocean on the other. Anyway, Radke’s got this town sewn up.”

There’s no point in making a run for it – I don’t know the way back, and by now Michael’s long gone….