A Mile in These Shoes Read online

“Sachez’ writing style is exquisite. Her flawless prose flows—sometimes beautiful, sometimes disturbing —but always memorable.” –Mayra Calvani in The Bloomsbury Review

  “The way Sanchez integrates the natural world with character and personality and actual events is masterful. She moves around in time, picks up threads and makes connections among the characters in a seemingly effortless manner, and the result is stunningly beautiful. For me the

  book was a gift.” –Gloria DeVidas Kirchheimer, author of Goodbye Evil Eye.

  A MILE IN THESE SHOES

  by

  Sandra Shwayder Sanchez

  ******

  PUBLISHED BY:

  A Mile in These Shoes

  copyright 2010 by Sandra Shwayder Sanchez

  Acknowlegements:

  “A Modern Peruvian Tale” was originally published in Zone 3, “Three on A Pier” in The Healing Muse, “Give Me a poster of an Old Rodeo,” “Danny & Joe,” and “Lillian & Alexander” were all originally published in The Long Story, “Incident on the #15 Bus” was originally published in The Monocacy Valley Review, and “The Rose Bush” was first published in the online publication The Dublin Quarterly (an Editor’s Choice “Best of 2007” selection) and reprinted in The New Scene Quarterly in 2009.

  *****

  Table of Contents

  A Modern Peruvian Tale

  Three on a Pier

  Give Me a Poster of an Old Rodeo

  Danny and Joe: A Friendship

  Yellowwolf and Shortstuff

  Incident on the #15 Bus

  Lillian and Alexander

  The Rose Bush

  The Podunk International Bank Heist

  a note about the writer

  ####

  A Modern Peruvian Tale

  I.

  Kevin Costner is a shoeshine boy in the Andean city of Cuzco. His English is excellent and he is popular with the American tourists who come to explore the ruins of the Incas and seek spiritual experiences while hiking the Inca Trail. He tells them his name is Kevin Costner or John Wayne because it amuses them and they remember and ask for him so it is good for business. His real Spanish name, even though shared with hundreds of boys from this city, is his own, private, not to be given out lightly. He is hardworking, a hustler, the first one in the plaza in the morning and the last to leave at night. When some tourist ladies tell him he should go home, that his mother must be worried about him, he laughs because his mother is just around the corner selling handmade dolls and gloves knit from the wool of old alpacas, or asking the tourists to take her photograph for two sols. If he or his mother returns home without enough money, the father will beat the mother and the mother will beat the son and that is the way it goes.

  Kevin Costner hopes to go to North America someday. When he finds a gringo tourist who will talk to him, he asks first if the tourist will adopt him and take him to America, then when he is refused, he asks if the tourist will give him money for his education and when he is refused again, he asks for a new pair of shoes. He finds that a surprising number of tourists, feeling guilty that they cannot adopt him or pay for his education, are willing to go with him to the shoe store and buy him a new pair of shoes. Later, when all the tourists are on trips to the Sacred Valley or gone to Machu Pichu, he goes back to the shoe store and returns several pairs of new, unworn shoes and gets the money which he hides from his father because he is saving to go to the north.

  His plan is to join one of those groups of musicians who walk up through Guatemala and Mexico to the United States, playing their Andean music which has become very popular. He has an uncle who went all the way to Denver. There is a very good group that plays at the fancy hotel at Machu Pichu where people pay $300 U.S. to stay one night and drink in the bar and listen to the musicians. They pay $7 U.S. for one imported beer and toss their Peruvian change into the jar at the foot of the stage for the group of five musicians to share among them.

  Being out on the streets at all hours, Kevin sees many things and has learned to make himself invisible to make sure that he is not molested or robbed. He has learned to be stealthy and quiet. One night after the restaurants and cafes have closed and there is no noise to cover the sound, he thinks he hears a woman yell “Ayudami” and then “Help” once very loud, then softer, then he must strain to hear and hears nothing. He thinks that he should go see what is happening, try to help the woman because that is what men do. He also knows there is nothing he can do, a small boy alone in the dead of night. He removes his shoes so he can walk noiselessly on the cobblestone streets and stays in the shadows until he reaches the relative safety of his home. The whole way home he is thinking he is a coward and wondering what kind of man he will be when he is a man and when he will know. He thinks to himself that the woman was a tourist, she called out in English as well as Spanish. He tries to tell himself that the tourists are bad, that they deserve what they get, walking around at such a late hour in his town. But he cannot help remembering the plea, the need in the woman’s voice. He decides he will tell his father what he heard and let his father decide what to do next. His father is not home and so he goes to sleep and all night long he thinks he hears cries for help and imagines murders and rapes throughout the city. In the morning he remembers that he had a bad dream. He wants to tell his mother but she puts her finger to her lips and lifts her head in the direction of his father passed out on the floor. His father drinks away half the money the mother and son earn on the street. That’s how it goes.

  The father is very dirty, has mud on his pants and Kevin imagines that there is blood mixed with the mud and wants to look more closely but the mother shoos him away toward the door and out. It is time to go to work.

  II.

  When Kevin gets to the main plaza there are more than the usual number of policemen gathered there and tourists are being kept away. There is an ambulance and workers are loading a stretcher with a body covered head to toe with a sheet into the ambulance while the police stand around and talk and some look on the ground for little bits of cloth, for blood and foot prints. There has been a murder and Kevin did not dream it.

  Kevin stays away from the police and goes up the hill toward the ruins of Saqsaywaman. The guides always get a laugh when they explain that the name is pronounced like “sexy woman.” Everyone in Cuzco is a guide, the ones who don’t have horses or vans to transport the tourists hang around at the ruins and offer to walk the people around and explain the history. Some know more than others. It is too early to catch the returning tourists to shine their shoes. Ordinarily the plaza would be the best place to work at this hour but he doesn’t want to catch the eye of the police. He knows the victim was a tourist and they will want to find someone quickly to pin it on.

  After killing an hour or so, Kevin goes over to San Blas where some ancient grandmothers cook bits of meat over a charcoal fire on the corner and he can get some breakfast on credit and then go see Juana at the Posada. Perhaps she will have some work for him to do, some errands to run, messages to carry. Kevin is a hustler and always has an idea about how to make a few sols.

  His father had a similar idea it seems because Kevin runs into him there at the Posada. His father likes a young woman who works for Juana. Kevin knows this but says nothing because the one time he did, his father blacked both his eyes and told him that was what he got for spying. The young woman could be Kevin’s sister. He notices that his father has changed into fresh clean clothes and has apparently just given the young woman a gift, a pair of earrings and Kevin wonders where his father found them. Then his father sees him and tells him to stay away from the plaza because the police will be looking for boys like him to harass and question. Ever
yone is talking about the murder. The woman had been staying at the Posada in San Blas waiting for her husband to join her. He was due in that afternoon on the daily flight from Lima. Everyone is wondering who will break the news to the husband. Juana says she will ask the police to send someone over when she gets the husband’s call from the airport. She does not want to be the person to convey the message. Kevin watches his father closely during the conversation and his father gives him that look that Kevin recognizes as a warning to stop spying.

  Without a word, Kevin runs out the door and down the steep winding street to the church. There is an old man by the door who looks at him with a big grin showing his splotchy gums and single tooth and speaks to him in a voice so old and scratchy that Kevin can’t understand a word he has said.

  “Que paso abuelo?” Kevin asks. The man coughs, spits, and says, “You heard me, little smartass.” Kevin feels himself watched as he enters the church and he goes all the way to the front knowing the old man’s eyesight won’t penetrate the darkness that far into the church. Kevin hides all morning until hunger drives him outside again and the old man is gone or perhaps spying upon him from a shadow of his own.

  III.

  When Kevin Costner the shoeshine boy emerges from the church into the bright afternoon sun he is blinded by the light and almost steps on something that suddenly moves. Kevin sees that it is a snake and the sight of it makes him feel sick so he must sit down on the high stone curb of the street. He tells himself he must be hallucinating. It is still too cold for snakes to be out and about. He closes his eyes to clear his mind but he can hear the snake moving around him even though everyone knows you can’t hear a snake move. Kevin hears the words “you must do something about this” but he doesn’t know what is meant by these words, or who is speaking them. He isn’t even sure the words are intended for him until he hears them repeated in a whisper in his ear and feels a hot breath there but sees no one when he turns. Then there is shouting and screaming as other people have discovered the snake in the church courtyard and chase it with sticks intending to kill it.

  Kevin stands and gets in the way, being himself knocked down as one of the men chasing the snake runs into him. Then the snake is gone and people are screaming at Kevin, angry because the meat of the snake is tasty and gets a good price. Kevin pushes past the people and notices the one-toothed old man among them who smiles that sly smile of his and Kevin waves a hand at him saying, “tu es loco abuelo” and laughs like he means it. Overhead a condor, off its flight pattern, casts a shadow over the town and all its people, swoops down, picks up the snake in its beak and carries it to a jeep rental lot where it drops the snake into a warm, safe spot under the driver’s seat of a jeep and then continues on toward the south where it came from and where it belongs. No one notices the condor but Kevin who stands in wonder to see it, so large and graceful and truly godlike.

  IV.

  That afternoon the town fills up with gringos from Hollywood who have come to town to shoot a scene at Saqsaywaman for a film. Kevin goes to the plaza to get as much work as he can. He wants to catch the people before they have time to exchange their dollars for paltry sols. They laugh when he introduces himself as Kevin Costner but it gets their attention and he has his work cut out for him. They make jokes about putting him in the movies and he forgets about the murder. Then the word gets out and goes round that the director’s wife was killed in the night and the shoot is cancelled. People begin to wander off, not knowing what to do next. No one has seen the director.

  That is when Kevin smells blood and sees it congealed around the rim of the sole of the shoe he is working on. It looks like mud but the day is dry and it has been dry for a long time. No one has mud on their boots, only dust, dry dust. Kevin recognizes the smell of blood. He has smelled it on his cousin’s farm after a chicken is killed or a goat. He recognizes blood and has a lot of thoughts. He is first frightened when he thinks this must be the murderer. Then he is relieved because he had suspected his own father and now no longer has to face that horrific thought, although the mud on his father’s pants and the earrings he gave that girl still trouble Kevin’s mind. He is thinking all this while he continues to rub the top of the shoe, careful not to wipe away the blood around the bottom, knowing it is evidence. Kevin remains cool, not letting his face betray the fact that he recognizes blood when he sees and smells it, or that he is frightened or relieved, just the same concentration on the top leather, not looking up until he has shined both boots to a mirror-like finish.

  When the man pays him, Kevin looks at his face carefully in order to identify him later if he needs to and he is shocked to see that the man is not a gringo but an Indian, tall like one of the ancient Inca people. This frightens Kevin more than anything else for he realizes the man could be a brujo and know his thoughts and kill him quietly from afar if he decides to. He wonders why he didn’t kill the hueda that way and why he killed her in the first place. He wonders what the Indian is doing with the crew from Hollywood, if he is working for them, if he secretly hates them. Kevin can feel some of this. He is trying not to have these thoughts while the Indian is watching him so he looks down at the money in his hand. He sees that the man has given him a U.S. $20 bill and he realizes it is normal and completely unthreatening for him to react to this unexpected generosity.

  “Sir, sir you’ve made a mistake,” Kevin says in English because he has heard this man speak English with his companions. Kevin holds the twenty out to the man who tells him to keep it and Kevin listens carefully to the voice in order to be able to identify that as well. But he does not have the name. He smiles and says with as much childlike glee as he can muster, “Thank you Mr. …Mr.?” and the man says, “Call me Bruce, you know, like Willis,” and smiles at the boy.

  Kevin goes around the plaza to show his friends the twenty dollar bill and the money is a good excuse to point the man out to them. He tells a couple of his friends to help him watch the man. One of the boys goes to Rosie O’Brien’s to watch because they know the gringos will likely go there later and the man is clearly with them. Another positions himself at strategic places, moving here and there, to keep the man in sight. Kevin has not yet figured out how to put the police onto him or if he should take that chance. Finally he decides to find his father. If his father is sober that will be a sign and Kevin will tell him and let his father take responsibility for informing the police. If his father is drunk, Kevin won’t be able to tell him anything. That is just the way it goes.

  He heads back up toward San Blas to find out where his father has gone. That girl will know. He is thinking about things, thinking about how everyone came into town at the same time this afternoon but maybe that one man came in yesterday and hid himself somewhere so he could kill the gringa and then blend in with the others. Why would the man have blood on his boot unless he was the murderer? Where did the man come from? Does he live in Hollywood? or did he join the crew in Lima? Kevin is thinking, thinking, wondering what will happen to him if he solves the crime. He could be killed or he could be rewarded. Then he is thinking that he owes it to the dead woman because he did not try to help her the night before. And while he is thinking, he is noticing everything around him as he has learned from childhood to do. He always knew it was dangerous not to notice everything around you.

  V.

  On the way to San Blas, Kevin sees the loco viejito rummaging in the trash outside the church, looking for anything of value, looking for leftover food. In a window above the street an Indian woman is looking sadly out rubbing a cat against her cheek drawing comfort from its softness. Kevin stares at her sad face framed like a picture in the window with blue shutters. It is the house owned by the woman from Bolivia. The Bolivian woman lives at the top with her two sons and downstairs she has a knitting factory, 4 knitting machines and a dozen Indian women who come in to knit sweaters from alpaca that the woman sells in the United States.

  Everyone gossip
s about this foreign woman who is trying to help the Indian women. She is married to a man from Prague and they go there part of the year and part of the year they go to Nuevo York and she is said to have gone to a great University in Nuevo York. She helps some Indian women get away from their husbands when their husbands beat them. Kevin had wanted his mother to work for her too but his mother refused. She did not want to make his father angry.

  At this moment while Kevin is staring at the Indian woman’s sad face half hidden by the purring cat, a fight erupts in the window. The woman’s husband has found her and is yelling at her and the cat, hardly more than a kitten, but with the soul of the sacred puma flies into his face, with a howl and takes a bite of the man’s cheek and the angered man flings the animal out the window. Everything happens at once. The Bolivian woman comes into the room and hits the man with her son’s baseball bat over his shoulders and chases him down the stairs into the street and the screeching, twisting cat lands on the arm of the rummaging viejito, causing him to drop everything he had picked from the trash. Kevin catches the cat as it bounces off the old man’s arm and strokes it gently. The cat does not struggle but purrs in Kevin’s embrace. Kevin hears the Bolivian woman yelling at the angry man.“If Maria comes to work with so much as a dried tear on her face I will hunt you down and kill you. Do you understand me?”

  The man, now a safe distance from her laughs and says “you? you will kill me?”

  Kevin hears her say “Why do you think I do not go back to La Paz? eh?” …

  But Kevin is not watching this interesting scene for his eye has been caught by the flutter of deep purple paper, many little bits of it blowing along the cobblestones. He sets the cat down gently and picks up the pieces of torn thick purple paper and thin light blue paper. He recognizes the color of LAN Peru airline tickets, recognizes that this might be evidence. He gathers up the pieces of the airline ticket while the cat sits quiet in a doorway and stares at him with the eyes of the puma.

  Why would anyone tear up a ticket into little pieces unless they were done with it and did not want anyone to know where they had been? Kevin is excited. He believes he can solve the murder and collect some kind of reward. At the same time he is afraid the killer has supernatural powers and already knows that Kevin is on to him.

  When he gets to the Posada Juana tells him the police have taken his father. He had given the woman’s earrings to his little friend. He told the police he found them on the street that morning but the police don’t want to believe that because that would mean that they had missed them and if they missed the earrings, what else did they miss? What evidence did they fail to collect? This is an important case for them, a tourist and the wife of a famous film director.

  Juana is smart and will help him so Kevin shows her the pieces of the airline ticket and they tape the pieces together and see that it has yesterday’s date and a name that puzzles them because it is neither English nor Spanish nor Quechua nor anything else that they recognize. It’s a funny name: Begay. Kevin tells Juana that in English that would mean “be happy” and he is all the more puzzled. He decides to tell Juana about the man with the bloody boot and his suspicions that the man is a witch. The cat has followed Kevin to the Posada and watches quietly. Kevin hears a voice and the voice tells him that he can fix two problems with one smart deed. He tells Juana that he wants to talk with his father before they talk to the police and he tells her why and she agrees: she sees how it goes.

  Together they go to the police and Kevin asks to visit his father. He doesn’t say anything yet to the police about the boot and the airline ticket he found. He finds his father very frightened and he tells his father that he himself suspected him, because he has seen and felt his father’s violence and his father begs him not to talk about that to the police even though everyone in town knows this man beats his wife and son. Kevin tells his father he will help set his father free if his father will leave Cuzco, go to Lima perhaps or somewhere far away and never return. Kevin and his mother don’t need this man who drinks up half the money they earn and beats them when they don’t earn enough. The father promises to leave town and Kevin goes out to talk to the police.

  The police do not believe the story about the bloody boot, think that the boy is simply trying to save his father, but Juana shows them the taped together airline ticket. Someone gets the chief. The police chief nods his head, reasons out loud that the man arrived the day before without making himself known to anyone and why would he hide from sight until today when all the rest of the film crew arrived if not because he had planned to commit a crime in the night? A rendezvous in the night he speculates. He agrees to let Kevin’s father go, reasons out loud: all these years the man never attacked anyone outside his family, the mud on his pants explained by the odor of urine, the man stupid enough to pick up the earrings to give a girl without even thinking about the consequences, the police were desperate and that is the only reason they picked up such a stupid and unlikely suspect. The police chief yells at his men, said the killer just tossed this important clue in the trash because he knew the police were incompetent and how could a man solve and deter crimes with such a bunch of jackasses working under him? They get ready to go pick up the man and Kevin goes to find his friends who have been keeping an eye on him. The police chief offers Kevin a job, when he is fully grown of course and has finished his education.

  What Kevin’s friends report to him and he to the chief is that the man has left town. He rented a jeep and drove away, no one knows where. Kevin’s friends have told him there was no way they could stop the man. Kevin thinks the man is gone forever and he is relieved. He does not want that man to know what he has done.

  VI.

  The next day the producers of the film fly into town, more gringos, more shoes to shine, more Americans crowding into Rosie O’Brien’s drinking Cusqueno beer and telling tales of their experiences. The director no longer wants to make this film. He is drunk and says crazy things like the ancient gods took his wife because they did not want him to be filming among the ruins. He says that he dreamed this and believes it is a sign. The producers say “poppycock” or some such thing and talk to him about the budget, inserting here and there that they are “sorry for his loss…but”… always the “but”, the “even so,” the “life goes on” and Kevin, overhearing this, understands completely. He is a practical boy but he feels sorry for the director who clearly loved his wife. He goes up to the party gathered round the bar and says in his excellent English, “Excuse me sir, perhaps I can help you.” The director wonders what Kevin can help him with and Kevin says he can be his assistant while he works the next day shooting the scene at Saqsaywaman, that he speaks English, Spanish and Quechua, and that he is smart and then he says to the man, “I think you need a friend right now.” Of course the man must smile at these words that from a grown man would be unwelcome and obnoxious but are charming coming from a child. So Kevin is hired on and told to meet the crew at the site the next morning two hours before dawn. They want to film the sunrise and need time to set up.

  The producers are very happy with Kevin as he was able to move the director from his grief to the realization that the film must proceed as planned. Kevin walks home followed by his new cat and tells his mother the news: her husband will not be coming home again and he, Kevin Costner, a shoeshine boy with a future, will be earning enough money to take care of both of them.

  Kevin wakes up every day with the sun and has no clock in his house. If it were a clear night he could gauge the time by the position of the moon but it is hazy and to be sure he is not late, he spends the night at the ruins. He will know it is time to report to work when he hears the sounds of the film crew’s jeeps. He carries a heavy warm rug to make a bed. The kitten, who has adopted Kevin, follows him closely. In the night he hears sounds, quiet sneaking sounds and he is too frightened to look out to see who is coming up to the ruins. He hears someone rustle about and settle into a
hidden space. He hears more noises shortly thereafter, some farting and coughing and throat-clearing and nose-blowing and then silence and then he sleeps until he hears the sound of jeeps. Kevin gets up quickly, pees behind a stone, smoothes his clothing and his hair and prepares to report to the director.

  As he approaches the small group of men who have arrived in two jeeps he hears some urgent whisperings and the director gets into a jeep with two other men leaving one lone man behind. It appears they have forgotten something. When Kevin sees the face of the man who remains he wants to run back to his hiding place but now the haze has cleared and the full moon lights up everything. The man has seen and recognized Kevin. The men in the jeep have ridden away too far and too fast for Kevin to catch up with them.

  “You know you owe me a shoeshine kid.”

  Kevin just looks at the man, knowing that sometimes the less said the better.

  “You left some mud on the rim of one of my boots, not a very thorough job. Are you often so careless? Cat got your tongue?”

  The man stares at Kevin as if trying to look into his brain and Kevin says only in a cracked little voice that surprises him with its childishness, “I’m sorry sir.”

  “Why are you afraid of me?”

  “Not afraid sir.”

  “Ah but you are. You work late at night don’t you? Aren’t you afraid to be out in the Plaza late at night? Seems to me that would be scary for a little tyke like you. And here we are in this very scary place before sunrise. Maybe you are afraid of being out here alone with me?”

  That is when Kevin realizes the man is teasing him to try to find out if he knows anything, saw anything. Kevin realizes that if the man doesn’t know already he cannot be all that powerful. He gets his voice back and figures two can play this game. Kevin asks the man why he is working with the gringos on the film and the man’s answer surprises him even as it explains the man’s motivation for the murder.

  “You are a smart little boy you know? I’m going to tell you a story, may come in handy for you someday to know what these people are like, the way that they will use you. Here it is, my story, the reason I am here working on this particular film. I am, as you have guessed, an Indian myself, a Navajo from lands that were first colonized by the Spanish and then taken in war by the Anglos, not that long ago. My people have a story about coming into those lands from a hole in the ground but that is just a story. In reality they were wanderers, coming south from far north, then coming back north from far south, wandering around looking for something, that is how I think of it. My own life was like that, wandering back and forth, looking for something I lost a long time ago. The hole in the ground I emerged from was a ruined family. I was taken from my mother when she was young and poor. My father was a drunk and couldn’t help her and this was a sad thing for me. I went to the white man’s schools and I did well, but how well can you do when you don’t belong? I was a visitor, a guest, not really one of them. No kindness in the world can make up for that. Roots and wings, you need both in this life, kid, roots and wings. I had the wings alright, but nowhere to land, no roots, no place for me.”

  The man looked so sad Kevin wanted to comfort him but he sat very quiet and listened.

  “Well I was good at words. I had to be, I had to entertain myself so I talked to myself all the time and made up stories, fantasies at first then observations of the people around me. I notice you are very observant.”

  Kevin smiled feeling praised, then frowned wondering if the man meant he knew he had witnessed the crime in the night. But the man neither questioned nor threatened him. He merely went on with his story.

  “I wrote stories down and they were published and the white people liked my stories even though in each one I had buried some secret hatred of them. I met a woman. She was married to the film director but she didn’t love him and said she was going to leave him to marry me. I did love her until I realized she was just using me. She wrote stories for the movies and she thought my stories would be great films. This film they are making now, is based on one of my stories and this woman wrote the script for it. You know she died the night before last? You must have heard about it?”

  And here the man looked at the boy a long time, waiting it seemed for Kevin to confess that he had been there, had heard her cry out. Kevin said only that yes he had heard about it. The man continued with his story. He probably knew he had to tell someone.

  “I came as a consultant. She did give me credit for my story, she got me the job. I thought she wanted me to be near her down here, but she was no longer interested in me, got me the job to help me out she said. She said that having this credit would help my career as well, that the Hollywood filmmakers would buy other stories to turn into films. She seemed to think that selling my stories and making money was what I wanted and she even seemed to think that I had made love to her in order to further my career. What do you think of that?”

  “You loved her?”

  “Yes and I thought she loved me.”

  “Maybe she did. Maybe she tried to help you because she loved you.”

  “Well it’s too late now.”

  “Did you kill her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you going to kill me too?”

  “I thought about it, I thought about trying to get away without being caught and getting on with my life but I think now, that is not a life I want. Of course neither is prison. What do you think little fellow? Any ideas about what I should do?”

  “You could disappear into the mountains, change yourself and begin a new life somewhere else and be someone else.”

  “That is what you dream of doing isn’t it?”

  Kevin laughed, not afraid anymore of this man. “Yes that is what I dream of doing, every day.”

  The moon was low in the sky by now being chased over the edge of the horizon by the coming sun. Soon the others would be back.

  “Where should I go?” the man asked Kevin.

  Before Kevin could answer, the condor he had seen the day before flew across the moon and landed on the jeep, looking for something inside it. The great bird, which looked too heavy to fly, found the snake and picked it up and flew away in the direction of the south. At that moment the old man with one tooth left in his mouth, came out of his hiding place in the ruins and beckoned to the murdering Indian man to follow him.

  “I am going now. You can tell the director I killed his wife and he will reward you even if they never catch me but I want you to know that if they do catch me I won’t blame you. I don’t know where I am going but I am going to try to find the life that I lost when I was taken from my mother. I heard that she died a long time ago. Perhaps now I will die too, perhaps not, we shall see but I am not going back to live the white man’s life with a white man’s wife.”

  VII.

  At dawn the Pablos and Joses, Enriques and Guillermos congregate in the main Plaza with their postcards to sell and their shoeshine kits and drink hot “coffee” made from barley and talk among themselves while they wait for the tourists who come out early to meet their tour Vans to Machu Pichu. Mostly they talk about their friends who left. Mostly they talk about the most imaginative among them, the one who gave himself the name of a movie star and how that brought him luck and they resolve to start introducing themselves as John Wayne or Tom Selleck and dream of going to Hollywood. Here is what happened:

  Kevin watched the man, not a brujo at all, just an unhappy man, walk off into his vision. Later the man was caught but he never was tried for the murder of the gringa because he killed himself in a strange way that was reported in newspapers all over the country. He picked up a snake, a very poisonous snake, just picked it up in his hands and wrapped it around his body in a strange circular dance and the snake danced with him until it was coiled around his body from the ankles up and its face was in his face and the snake kissed the man and he ran from the police until he dropped dead and there was nothing they could do to hi
m then.

  When the director found out his wife’s killer was caught and destroyed because of Kevin’s cleverness, he wanted to reward the boy and Kevin asked for a small role in the film so he could brag to his friends and make more money.

  Three on a Pier