He Who Is Unjust... Let Him Be Righteous Still
He Who Is Unjust… Let Him Be Righteous Still
by: Andrew Mortazavi
Pepe’s sunken, brown eyes held a look of desperation far beyond their years. I avoided them the best I could, but quarters were close. Once we’d gotten up past Laredo, I let him and his brother sit up front in the cab with me because they were the youngest of the dozen or so out back in the trailer. Pepe wedged himself into the middle of the cab. His dark twig-like legs straddled the coffee stained plastic of the gearshift harness, one scabbed and scuffed-up knee at each end. His brother, who had a few years on Pepe and thus spoke slightly better English, sat at the other end. He was about fourteen then and in Mexico-years that put him right about my age, pushing thirty. Earlier, he’d told me all about how both their parents got stabbed not but a quarter mile from their home in the slums of Mexico City. Jose delivered their story calm and cool like it was the most natural thing in the world, all one could expect. A young couple knifed to death over a sack of groceries, the same kind of meanness that led me to my line of work. I ran the highways, smuggling immigrants over the border, a coyote, a rescuer for hire. The police and all them doctors get compensated for their troubles, why not me? They’ll pay you for a bagful of your blood in this country.
Still, I couldn’t pretend like I knew what either of them boys thought of me hauling them across the border like cattle, tucked away in a cramped room behind the false wall at the back of my eighteen wheeler’s trailer. That I would get paid for this made me a professional and this had to register on Jose, the older of the two. But I bet both of them appreciated the complexity to some degree. Youth don’t equal ignorance, not always.
A professional. All that means is you get paid for whatever it is you do. One can become a professional floor-sweep. A professional human signpost. A professional anything. It’s all about the money.
All unexpected expenses factored in, I knew I wouldn’t pull a profit that run, doing it practically pro bono. At a truck stop back in Laredo, this state trooper had seen me lugging a water-bucket into the back of the rig while the tank fueled up. This was my fault for stopping; I should’ve planned a full tank of diesel till we got closer to San Antone. The bucket swung as I carried it, banging against my legs and sending water over the edge and into my worn cowhide boots. Most runners wouldn’t have bothered with this sort of thing-a misguided attention to the wellbeing of the cargo-but I didn’t want to wind up digging a child-size grave in the woods. You hear stories.
The trooper came straight up on me, not from behind, fingers tapping his leather holster. Smiling wickedly from beneath his drawstring hat, red eyes squinting against the glare from the white concrete of the gas station, he looked just like the devil. Now there are only two kinds of people in the world, that’s what Ma used to swear by before she went on to the Lord. Just like that, in her Texas drawl-rural Texas, not that bastardized speech of the college towns-she’d say, “Now, Wayne, there ain’t but two kinds of people in this world. Good ones and bad ones.” Then she’d ask me if I could name the difference between the two, like it was self-evident. I lied, said I knew. But I’ve been mulling that question over ever since, the likeness between saints and sinners. Before I hit the highway, I stuffed three crisp hundred dollar bills into that fat fucker’s hand. He nodded and made a suction sound, tongue against cheek, to let me know he already had my ass cuffed in his backseat and hadn’t one worthwhile reason to set about actually doing it. But I drove off with two dozen heads in the back and not so much as a citation. So I ought not complain.
Once you’ve crossed the border it’s a seven hour straight shot to Dallas. I hated to let all them out back burn up in the trailer for so long-they’d been back there since the night before-but I had to make the run in a single day. My brother’s funeral was scheduled the next morning and I had offered to deliver his eulogy. I’d opted to do this as restitution to my dad for missing Ma’s funeral. I’d not seen him since he moved up north after she’d had her second and final stroke. Eulogizing Stan would change nothing between Dad and me, but at least I’d offered.
With a radar detector strapped underneath my seat, we barreled up I-35 at 85 mph, gunning it north out of Laredo into a wasteland so far gone it don’t even know how to be a desert. There’s no other place in this world so humid that seldom sees a drop of rain.
Pepe gawked at all the different cars as we passed them. They got cars in Mexico City like they got here, fact is they got just as much money there too, but it ain’t like here where you’re guaranteed a used Ford and an air-conditioned apartment so long as you can get your ass up out of bed in the mornings. There, you’ve got to be born into all you got.
A white Mustang, an early 90s model, shot out around us trying to get past. I locked the airbrakes up to keep from clipping bumpers. You could feel the torque working on the cab, and for a second or two the truck felt like it might jackknife. It straightened back out, but not before Pepe gave a neutral shout, like maybe he didn’t even mean it. Jose just shook his head as he watched the Mustang speed away, never letting go of that same thoughtful look he’d worn all day. He had bruises crisscrossing both arms from where he’d been knocked around the back of the trailer the night before. I thought he’d broken something for sure, but he’d said no. Not that I could’ve helped him if he had. I’d never broke nothing in my life.
I nudged the sliding A/C knob all the way left, knowing it would do no good. The heat was inescapable. It danced off the asphalt like the flames of hell. Sunlight filtered through the dust on the windshield into the cab and transformed into more heat inside. The unrelenting Texas sun bore down on the back of the rig, on the unfortunates inside. But there was nothing to be done about it. I had to make Fort Worth by morning. I’d missed Ma’s funeral out on these roads. I’d make Stan’s.
I did not pull over.
We picked up the pregnant girl in Devine, one of the last nice towns just south of San Antone. I don’t usually pick up hitchhikers, especially not in the middle of a job, but she had to be past seven months and hell if it wasn’t going to take her another two to walk all the way to Dallas carrying that much weight around her middle. She had on a plain, white tee-shirt plastered to her torso with sweat so that you could make out every detail of her pregnant form; where her bellybutton had flipped outward, how her tits had swollen into mushroom caps. She carried nothing with her. No backpack, not even a purse. Nothing aside from the unborn child. When she opened the passenger side door, I told Jose one of them ought to go on out back. But he said no and picked up Pepe, sat him in his lap, and scooted over next to me. I waved the girl on in. Her sweat smelled pungent but bittersweet like ginger, and though I thought about rolling down a window for the boys’ sake, I didn’t. When I asked about her name, she said, “Skye.” Just about the most obvious alias I’d ever heard, but whatever. Ask no questions.
Right about then, I’d made up my mind that there was no way in hell I was going to make it to Dallas like this without getting pulled over. I could hear Ma calling from the grave, still scolding softly, still wearing one of the same homemade red-patterned dresses she’d worn everyday of her life. “Wayne, just what in the name of the Lord was you thinking?” But I’d driven off on a girl with child once before and I didn’t have the heart to do it twice.
Skye flicked the pewter cross hanging from my rearview with her finger. “You don’t look like a man of God.”
“No,” I said, “I wouldn’t say so.”
She made a noise in her throat. “I don’t buy into all that superstitious shit.”
There’s a fine way to put it. Despite my own upbringing, it’s a point I can’t argue well against.
I asked her how old she was. She said sixteen before she could even think to lie.
“So, why are you headed up to Dallas all on your own?”
She patted her stomach gently. “Let’s just say this ain’t no immaculate conception.” She flicked the cross again, this time a little harder.
Stan, the fallen brother, went to the Middle East to haul military supplies across the desert because he heard truckers there made triple what they got here. He said he was just gonna do it till the war ran its course and then he’d come back home with enough put away to retire years ahead of time. He was a hard worker once you got him going, but lazy as shit down at heart, like me. He couldn’t wait to be done with the long hauls-or worse, the nine-to-fives-anymore than I could. He was always going on about how he was going to retire before fifty. I suppose he got his way. He was thirty-two when they flew him back to the States last weekend for us to put him in the ground. We were close, but I haven’t cried over him yet. He’d made his choice.
You know what thirty-two is in war-years? Young, old, it’s all about the same. We’re all just pushing to get along.
We rolled into Dallas late in the evening, the skyline alight with pale greens and sadder blues. It was about midnight, but the night air was thick and sticky and did nothing to cool you off. I dropped load at a shutdown factory in a warehouse district just outside of downtown, so close to the bars and nightclubs of Deep Ellum you could hear the sounds of nightlife drifting in through shattered windows. The twang of honkytonks competing with the thumping roll of car-audio bass. Every now and then a bang went off in the distance and echoed through the warehouse rafters. Suburban teenagers lighting Blackcats or the release of a 12 gauge sawed-off, it was hard to say. This was my Dallas, where I’d grown up. They gunned down J.F.K. not but a mile from here.
There wasn’t anyone at the factory to meet me for the drop off. I just had to unload the cargo and then we were all free to go our separate ways. My stateside contact had already collected the smuggling fee on all of them far in advance, and I’d get my cut from her the next day. When it came to delivering the goods, we were on an honors system; either she trusted me to get the job done or she just didn’t care.
I undid the trailer’s padlocked swing doors. Skye and Jose helped me take down the false wall in the back. Dark faces emerged with caution, confusion. They dispersed into the night without a word. No one ever thanked me, not once. Before heading out, I lit up a cigarette, and the flame from the lighter illuminated a huddled shape in the back corner of the trailer. Skye pointed, her mouth a dark tunnel.
I stepped toward the figure, one cautious step only. “You okay there?” No response. My eyes slowly adjusted to the dark. A middle-aged Mexican, in his fifties tops, or maybe just balding prematurely. One of those monk hairlines you usually only associate with whites.
Skye knelt down next to him and took his pulse. “He’s alive,” she said. “But I can just barely find his heartbeat.” I took another step closer. I could tell he was conscious by the way his eyes rolled around in their sockets; not in a wild seizure-like way, more like he was trying to take in all of his surroundings quickly, getting one last good look in while he still could.
Skye looked up at me. “You gonna just stare at him like that or you wanna help me get him out of here?” She was right. The air in the back of the rig was still hovering around a hundred degrees, maybe more, and wallowing in it wasn’t doing him any favors. We carried him out and laid him on the concrete warehouse floor. I did most of the heavy lifting while Skye cradled his head so it wouldn’t hang back and strike concrete when we set him down. She stayed with him while I dialed a cab on my cell. I didn’t keep a car back then because it was too hard to keep track of between runs. Also, I got my fill of driving on the job. I’d been living out of pay-by-the-week hotels for several years by then.
When I told them a cab was on the way to take him to a motel, Jose pushed an eyebrow halfway up his forehead. “He need doctor.”
“You kidding?” I asked, but I knew he wasn’t.
“He’s right,” Skye said. “He’s fading fast.”
“How can you be sure?”
She backed her head up an inch or so as if she were trying to distance herself from me. “How can you pretend like you’re not?”
Reframe the situation. “I’m no doctor, but I’ve seen sicker than him that turned out just fine.” She didn’t look convinced. An appeal to pity. “If I take him to a hospital, they’ll want to lock my ass up. They’ll put it all on me like I put a knife to his gut.” Take it up a notch. I pointed at Jose and then Pepe who was knocking around an aluminum can with a wooden stake, swinging it like a golf club or a machete. “And they’ll send them two back home for sure.”
Skye stood up straight in a futile attempt to get a height advantage on me. “Then I’ll take him myself. Dial yourself another cab if you want, but the first is heading to the ER.”
Passive options were thin. I didn’t want to let on that I couldn’t let her take him, all circumstances considered. Not to sound heartless, but she’d seen the warehouse and the plates on my truck. She’d be able to pick me out of a lineup for sure. Not that I thought she’d want to, but once they started drilling her, tossing around accusations beginning with accomplice to, then she’d have little to keep her from talking.
“Look,” I said, “let’s just take him to a motel and set him up in bed. We can get most everything we need to see him through at the drugstore. Some aspirin and whatnot.” I noticed the man on the floor watching me. I pretended like I hadn’t noticed him and looked away. “It ain’t like he’s got the cancer. Just a little overheated, that’s all. He’ll be fine.”
No one objected to my blatant misrepresentation of the facts. We all knew he was in some shit, but there wasn’t anything else to be done about it. So we shared a solemn, almost macabre silence and waited on the cab. I wondered for a minute why all three of them had hung around to tend to a dying immigrant, a nobody. Then, it dawned on me it had nothing to do with him. They had nowhere else to go.
My thoughts turned to Stan’s funeral, now less than twelve hours away. I passed the time trying to come up with the eulogy I’d still not written. How do you sum up all of a man in a single paragraph? People have written whole novels on less.
We stopped at a cheap motel with the front desk in a drive-thru booth separate from the guestrooms. We parked away from the booth and I gave Skye the money to pay for our room. I asked the driver, a young black man with a perfectly shaved head and coffee bean eyes, to hold the cab till she got back with the room keys. Every now and then, he’d glance into the rearview at Pepe and Jose and then over to Skye talking to the clerk through a plate of reinforced glass, half-shouting through the static of a CB microphone. No doubt, the cabdriver was trying to peg down the dynamics of our unlikely entourage. He took one last scrutinizing look at me and then kept his eyes on the steering wheel. He drove us around back and I tipped him extra to keep his mouth shut. He lifted his chin to signal he understood, a promise of compliance, before driving away without a word. No thank you, no objection.
Our room was cramped, dingy, dirty, and infested. Everything you’d expect for $29.95. Jose helped me carry the man to one of the twin beds. We supported him on both sides by his underarms. Out of the heat, he’d grown slightly more lucid but still had an unhealthy pallor to him. Hell, that’s an understatement to end all. He looked like death. He’d started making these gurgling noises like he was trying to move liquid out of his lungs. Skye was quiet. She didn’t think he would make it through the night, I could tell.
Skye and Pepe watched over the sick man while Jose went with me to the drugstore to buy some aspirin to bring down his fever. Jose didn’t say much as we made the block to the pharmacy. I bought him a small bag of hot-peppered beef jerky. He thanked me for it. Without opening the bag, he tucked it into one of his pockets.
When we got back to the motel room, the man was no longer in bed. The sound of running water whistled through the cracked bathroom door. I peeked inside. Skye had the Mexican in the tub packed full with ice water. She was just about to dump another bucket of vending machine ice over him when I caught her hand from behind. Water retention had left the skin over her wrist supple to the touch, a convincing illusion of the softness of the gloriously young. A couple more cubes spilled into the tub as I wrestled the bucket away from her.
“What the hell are ya’ll doing?”
“Trying to break his fever,” she said. “His forehead burns your hand to the touch.”
I glanced down at the man in the tub. He looked like he’d aged a decade in the time it’d taken me to run down to the drugstore and back. “You keep pouring ice over him like that and you’ll leave him a dead man for sure.”
“I was just trying to help,” she said. “I was afraid he wouldn’t make it till you got back.” Her eyes started to tear, making her age show, even through her pregnancy. Just a baby, some knocked up high school dropout, a runaway. And now I’d put all of this in her lap, right on top of everything else.
I brushed her aside, though careful to avoid her stomach, and pulled the stopper out of the bathtub drain. With my bare hands, I scooped up the ice and shoveled it into the toilet. My hands grew more and more numb until my fingers might as well have not been there. When the toilet bowl filled up, I started depositing ice onto the floor. All the while, the man sat motionless in the tub, no movement save for a steady, worrisome tremble. Most of the ice out, I turned the shower on and rotated the temperature knob left three-quarters of the way into the red. Steam rose off of his body as he warmed. Part of me wished he’d died in the back of the semi. The damage already done, I could’ve made one quick phone call and left him for someone else to handle.
After about ten minutes of letting his body absorb the heat from the tap water, I pulled him out of the tub and propped him up on the toilet with the lid down. The motel towels were stiff and barely absorbent, and I had to work fast to wipe the excess water off of him before it cooled. Once he was dry, I wrapped him up in the few dry towels left and carried him like a newly wed bride back to the main room. I tucked him under the covers and stood over him hoping for some kind of miracle.
An electric pulse shot up my spine when I heard a sound at the door and the knob turned. Moonlight outlined Pepe in the doorway, a bagful of ice hanging at his side.
It was well into the morning, and none of us had slept. We’d wrapped up the corpse in linens and left it on the bed. A single white towel with the motel’s logo stitched across it covered its face, draped like a shawl. I don’t know if it was the ice that did him in or the sudden shock of the temperature change. Or maybe it was just the inevitable corollary of shutting up an old man in a hot metal casket for twenty-four hours. Whatever the case, it was now moot. He’d gone on.
I could hear Skye crying through the thin ply of the bathroom door. She’d been in there for the last hour. Pepe sat on the edge of the bed watching late night cable programming with reception so bad it came out black and white. I wondered how much of the show he could understand, how much of it transcended the language barrier. The dead man’s feet were inches from the child’s backside. Pepe chewed at beef jerky, made a face. Jose was in the other bed staring up at abstract shapes on the ceiling. I sat in a yellow and green pinstripe chair by the window, watching the dawn ascend over the parking lot while making up back stories for passersby. I made up one for the dead man on the other side of the room, made him a war hero and gave him a family to come home to. I made up one for Stan also, one with a better ending. I still hadn’t come up with his eulogy.
The bathroom door swung open. Skye came out frantic, eyes red and puffy. “Can you believe I’m having a fucking baby? Me? It don’t stand a goddamned chance in hell.” She stood there a second till another round of tears forced her back into the bathroom. Under her breath, she muttered, “Jesus fucking Christ.”
There’s this verse in the bible that reads, “He who is unjust, let him be unjust still; he who is filthy, let him be filthy still; he who is righteous, let him be righteous still…” I don’t know exactly what it refers to, but Ma used to quote it at Stan and me whenever we got ourselves into trouble. That’s what I read at Stan’s funeral as his eulogy. Nothing more, nothing less. At the front of the room, I delivered the four lines to a near empty room, tripping once on the word righteous. I cleared my throat and returned to my seat. I tried to catch Dad’s eyes, but he had his head down.
Before the service began, I’d introduced Skye to him as my fiancée. Pepe and Jose, I’d told him, were “children from her first marriage.” I don’t think he bought it and I’d be worried if he had. He’d probably have been embarrassed by the whole situation but the only other person to attend, aside from the four of us, was the preacher. No military funeral for the supply man; no glory for the water boy. No friends, either. Stan was like me, and we’d never kept friends, not for any appreciable period of time. Not any real friends, just drinking buddies, dope connections, that sort of thing. Not bothering to disguise his thoughts, Dad’s eyes kept wandering down to the bulge of Skye’s waist and then over at me as if to ask whether or not this one was mine. An unspoken, “What in the hell were ya thinking, Wayne?” Skye blushed and turned away, tried to look down at her feet, but her belly blocked her line of sight.
A two-car funeral procession headed to Southside Fort Worth. We all rode together in a small, beat-up limo from the 80s that Dad said he’d rented for the day for twenty-five bucks. It still had a “Vote Reagan” bumper sticker on the back window, fading and peeling under the command of time. Dad drove like when we were kids, only now I rode shotgun, not Ma. I kept my eyes on the hearse in front of me, noting its Texas plates. If you jumped out of the car here and walked a mile due north, you’d find the house I was born in; and if you doubled back the other way, the one we were raised in. I doubted Stan would ever have imagined he’d start and end the cycle in quarters so close. Stan had always been the adventurous one. He’d left home as soon as he was old enough to get a job, didn’t matter how shitty it was. He used to pump out septic tanks before he got into trucking.
A closed casket service. When the bomb went off under Stan’s truck, a fuel tank caught fire and exploded. He’d burned to nothing in the cab. I didn’t even get a last look at him, though I was glad to go without. Anyone, anything could’ve been in that casket and we wouldn’t have known better. Did it matter?
Within minutes, they’d bury him. I closed my eyes and tried as hard as I could to pray for him, something I’d never done before in my life. Growing up, I’d always just closed my eyes in church and planned the rest of my afternoon, thought about girls or football scores or where I was going to score booze. But this time I tried as hard as I could to muster up some sincerity. I felt like I just couldn’t fake it. Not this time.
Once the preacher and the groundskeeper left, we stood around Stan’s grave for a while because it felt like the thing to do. Eventually, the awkwardness and heat got to us and we grew restless. Skye took the boys to a nearby field to pick flowers from a patch of Texas thistle. Jose followed Pepe, but he only watched them gather the purple, alien-like blooms.
“You want to grab some lunch?” I asked Dad.
“Can’t,” he said, feet shuffling. “Gotta get the limo back soon or I’ll have to pay for two days. Then I got a flight to catch.”
I offered to drop him at the airport and run it back myself. He said no, he’d already made plans. For sting, he added, “I didn’t think you were gonna make this one, either.” Here he was throwing shit in my face again, and today wasn’t even about him. Or us. He didn’t know shit about how things were with me, never had. I’d been in Mexico with a truck full of border-hoppers when Ma had her stroke. Was I supposed to bring them along? The things you can’t share with those you hold closest.
“You know I’d have come if I could.”
“Then why didn’t you?”
I didn’t answer. It would’ve done no good. Skye and Pepe came back and set a handful of loose thistle and sunflowers and a single bluebonnet over the fresh grave. I leaned into sniff them, but the stifling scent of upturned dirt overpowered the blooms completely.
We had to be back at the motel soon. I’d requested an extension on the checkout time so we could come back later and bury the corpse. Before we left, Skye had sprayed the room down with an entire bottle of air freshener she found under the sink and I had hung up a do not disturb sign on the door. I’d barred the door from the inside with a chair and climbed out through the window, just in case.
“Well, I got to get going then,” I told Dad. We hugged like strangers and then he was gone. I wondered if I’d ever see him again. Dad was an only child and my grandparents were long dead. We were the sole survivors of our family, the final two. When he died, would I be there to put him in the ground? Would he do the same for me?
We had roundtrip bus tickets to take us back to Dallas. On the way to the bus stop, I thought about all the things I wished I could’ve said to Stan and my Dad and everyone else. That I was sorry for never being around and missing Ma’s funeral. Sorry that I hadn’t talked my brother out of leaving home or going overseas, that I’d even encouraged him because I was too weak to do things like that myself. I thought about Shelly, the girl I’d knocked up in high school and run out on. How I’d wanted to stay with her, but I knew we’d all be better off if she just got an abortion. She went on to college and I heard she was working as an RN now and earning a solid living. Who’s the worse off? Never mind the collateral damage, babies die all the time. Sympathy runs scarce these days and we ought to reserve it for the living.
I looked over my shoulder and saw Skye struggling to keep up with us. Her face had gone red from exertion. I slowed down to wait for her and let the boys lead even though they didn’t know their way around the city.
Skye apologized for being the weak link once she caught up with me. “Lately, my feet have been real sore. Worse than my tits even,” Skye said, rubbing at her chest. “I ain’t ever been fat like this before.”
“It ain’t fat.”
“Well, I wish it weren’t there just the same.”
I laughed in spite of myself, but it was a tapered, sobering laugh. “Why don’t you just get an abortion?”
She huffed air out of her nose. “Sixteen, remember? I need parental consent.”
“Your folks won’t let you?”
“Hell no. Guess they wanna sacrifice one soul to save another.”
For lack of words, I simply said, “Sorry, that’s tough.”
There comes a point when a man’s insincerity becomes such an ingrained part of himself that he can no longer tell the difference between an apology and a justification. No one ever means for things to get like this. I hadn’t meant for the Mexican to die. I’d been trying to help him.
“You ever think about trying a ‘do-it-yourself’ abortion?” I asked. I thought of some of the things Shelley had told me about, medieval in nature, things she’d considered before finally convincing her parents to let her get it done legitimately.
Skye said that she’d tried shooting up an unsafe amount of heroin to coax her body into letting go of the fetus, but it wouldn’t give. She even had her boyfriend punch her in the stomach a few times one night. Her parents pressed charges against him when they saw the bruises and caught on. That’s why he hit the road for Dallas.
I knew I shouldn’t ask, but for some reason I wanted to know. I felt like I had some stake in it now. “Did you come down here to try again, or to have it?”
“After today? Shit, I don’t even know what I should do anymore.”
When we got to the bus stop, Skye let her body collapse onto the bench next to a Rastafarian reading a newspaper, the business section of all things. She stretched her legs and massaged a cramp out of her left thigh. The Rasta looked up from his reading and smiled at her. He had thick dreadlocks that snaked their way out of his crown and hung halfway down his back like a lion’s mane. He asked her how far along she was.
“Oh, it’ll be any day now, I suppose.”
The Rasta looked up and beamed a smile my way. “Well, itza beautiful day for bringing a baby into the world. As good as any.” His accent was so perfect it came off as feigned, but the sincerity with which he smiled made up for it, made you want to believe in him.
Skye looked up at the sun just as it moved into a break in the clouds, casting a crimson trim around the breech, bright and oval shaped like an eye. Skye clenched her own eyes shut and made a face like she just couldn’t block out all of that merciless beauty.
“Today’s a funeral day,” she said.
“Well, child, to be fair,” the Rasta said, “most days are.”
The boys went and sat on an open bench. Pepe leaned his head on his brother’s shoulder, and Jose put his arm around him. The Rasta caught his bus. After boarding, he wished us well from a pull-down window. I waved and took his spot on the bench next to Skye. We made conversation to pass the time. She told me about her parents and her boyfriend, how they only meant well. And I joined in with excuses for myself and my dad. And when our bus pulled up next to the curb, we got on.
by: Andrew Mortazavi
originally appeared in The Roanoke Review, Vol. XXXI, Spring 2006
by: Andrew Mortazavi
Pepe’s sunken, brown eyes held a look of desperation far beyond their years. I avoided them the best I could, but quarters were close. Once we’d gotten up past Laredo, I let him and his brother sit up front in the cab with me because they were the youngest of the dozen or so out back in the trailer. Pepe wedged himself into the middle of the cab. His dark twig-like legs straddled the coffee stained plastic of the gearshift harness, one scabbed and scuffed-up knee at each end. His brother, who had a few years on Pepe and thus spoke slightly better English, sat at the other end. He was about fourteen then and in Mexico-years that put him right about my age, pushing thirty. Earlier, he’d told me all about how both their parents got stabbed not but a quarter mile from their home in the slums of Mexico City. Jose delivered their story calm and cool like it was the most natural thing in the world, all one could expect. A young couple knifed to death over a sack of groceries, the same kind of meanness that led me to my line of work. I ran the highways, smuggling immigrants over the border, a coyote, a rescuer for hire. The police and all them doctors get compensated for their troubles, why not me? They’ll pay you for a bagful of your blood in this country.
Still, I couldn’t pretend like I knew what either of them boys thought of me hauling them across the border like cattle, tucked away in a cramped room behind the false wall at the back of my eighteen wheeler’s trailer. That I would get paid for this made me a professional and this had to register on Jose, the older of the two. But I bet both of them appreciated the complexity to some degree. Youth don’t equal ignorance, not always.
A professional. All that means is you get paid for whatever it is you do. One can become a professional floor-sweep. A professional human signpost. A professional anything. It’s all about the money.
All unexpected expenses factored in, I knew I wouldn’t pull a profit that run, doing it practically pro bono. At a truck stop back in Laredo, this state trooper had seen me lugging a water-bucket into the back of the rig while the tank fueled up. This was my fault for stopping; I should’ve planned a full tank of diesel till we got closer to San Antone. The bucket swung as I carried it, banging against my legs and sending water over the edge and into my worn cowhide boots. Most runners wouldn’t have bothered with this sort of thing-a misguided attention to the wellbeing of the cargo-but I didn’t want to wind up digging a child-size grave in the woods. You hear stories.
The trooper came straight up on me, not from behind, fingers tapping his leather holster. Smiling wickedly from beneath his drawstring hat, red eyes squinting against the glare from the white concrete of the gas station, he looked just like the devil. Now there are only two kinds of people in the world, that’s what Ma used to swear by before she went on to the Lord. Just like that, in her Texas drawl-rural Texas, not that bastardized speech of the college towns-she’d say, “Now, Wayne, there ain’t but two kinds of people in this world. Good ones and bad ones.” Then she’d ask me if I could name the difference between the two, like it was self-evident. I lied, said I knew. But I’ve been mulling that question over ever since, the likeness between saints and sinners. Before I hit the highway, I stuffed three crisp hundred dollar bills into that fat fucker’s hand. He nodded and made a suction sound, tongue against cheek, to let me know he already had my ass cuffed in his backseat and hadn’t one worthwhile reason to set about actually doing it. But I drove off with two dozen heads in the back and not so much as a citation. So I ought not complain.
Once you’ve crossed the border it’s a seven hour straight shot to Dallas. I hated to let all them out back burn up in the trailer for so long-they’d been back there since the night before-but I had to make the run in a single day. My brother’s funeral was scheduled the next morning and I had offered to deliver his eulogy. I’d opted to do this as restitution to my dad for missing Ma’s funeral. I’d not seen him since he moved up north after she’d had her second and final stroke. Eulogizing Stan would change nothing between Dad and me, but at least I’d offered.
With a radar detector strapped underneath my seat, we barreled up I-35 at 85 mph, gunning it north out of Laredo into a wasteland so far gone it don’t even know how to be a desert. There’s no other place in this world so humid that seldom sees a drop of rain.
Pepe gawked at all the different cars as we passed them. They got cars in Mexico City like they got here, fact is they got just as much money there too, but it ain’t like here where you’re guaranteed a used Ford and an air-conditioned apartment so long as you can get your ass up out of bed in the mornings. There, you’ve got to be born into all you got.
A white Mustang, an early 90s model, shot out around us trying to get past. I locked the airbrakes up to keep from clipping bumpers. You could feel the torque working on the cab, and for a second or two the truck felt like it might jackknife. It straightened back out, but not before Pepe gave a neutral shout, like maybe he didn’t even mean it. Jose just shook his head as he watched the Mustang speed away, never letting go of that same thoughtful look he’d worn all day. He had bruises crisscrossing both arms from where he’d been knocked around the back of the trailer the night before. I thought he’d broken something for sure, but he’d said no. Not that I could’ve helped him if he had. I’d never broke nothing in my life.
I nudged the sliding A/C knob all the way left, knowing it would do no good. The heat was inescapable. It danced off the asphalt like the flames of hell. Sunlight filtered through the dust on the windshield into the cab and transformed into more heat inside. The unrelenting Texas sun bore down on the back of the rig, on the unfortunates inside. But there was nothing to be done about it. I had to make Fort Worth by morning. I’d missed Ma’s funeral out on these roads. I’d make Stan’s.
I did not pull over.
We picked up the pregnant girl in Devine, one of the last nice towns just south of San Antone. I don’t usually pick up hitchhikers, especially not in the middle of a job, but she had to be past seven months and hell if it wasn’t going to take her another two to walk all the way to Dallas carrying that much weight around her middle. She had on a plain, white tee-shirt plastered to her torso with sweat so that you could make out every detail of her pregnant form; where her bellybutton had flipped outward, how her tits had swollen into mushroom caps. She carried nothing with her. No backpack, not even a purse. Nothing aside from the unborn child. When she opened the passenger side door, I told Jose one of them ought to go on out back. But he said no and picked up Pepe, sat him in his lap, and scooted over next to me. I waved the girl on in. Her sweat smelled pungent but bittersweet like ginger, and though I thought about rolling down a window for the boys’ sake, I didn’t. When I asked about her name, she said, “Skye.” Just about the most obvious alias I’d ever heard, but whatever. Ask no questions.
Right about then, I’d made up my mind that there was no way in hell I was going to make it to Dallas like this without getting pulled over. I could hear Ma calling from the grave, still scolding softly, still wearing one of the same homemade red-patterned dresses she’d worn everyday of her life. “Wayne, just what in the name of the Lord was you thinking?” But I’d driven off on a girl with child once before and I didn’t have the heart to do it twice.
Skye flicked the pewter cross hanging from my rearview with her finger. “You don’t look like a man of God.”
“No,” I said, “I wouldn’t say so.”
She made a noise in her throat. “I don’t buy into all that superstitious shit.”
There’s a fine way to put it. Despite my own upbringing, it’s a point I can’t argue well against.
I asked her how old she was. She said sixteen before she could even think to lie.
“So, why are you headed up to Dallas all on your own?”
She patted her stomach gently. “Let’s just say this ain’t no immaculate conception.” She flicked the cross again, this time a little harder.
Stan, the fallen brother, went to the Middle East to haul military supplies across the desert because he heard truckers there made triple what they got here. He said he was just gonna do it till the war ran its course and then he’d come back home with enough put away to retire years ahead of time. He was a hard worker once you got him going, but lazy as shit down at heart, like me. He couldn’t wait to be done with the long hauls-or worse, the nine-to-fives-anymore than I could. He was always going on about how he was going to retire before fifty. I suppose he got his way. He was thirty-two when they flew him back to the States last weekend for us to put him in the ground. We were close, but I haven’t cried over him yet. He’d made his choice.
You know what thirty-two is in war-years? Young, old, it’s all about the same. We’re all just pushing to get along.
We rolled into Dallas late in the evening, the skyline alight with pale greens and sadder blues. It was about midnight, but the night air was thick and sticky and did nothing to cool you off. I dropped load at a shutdown factory in a warehouse district just outside of downtown, so close to the bars and nightclubs of Deep Ellum you could hear the sounds of nightlife drifting in through shattered windows. The twang of honkytonks competing with the thumping roll of car-audio bass. Every now and then a bang went off in the distance and echoed through the warehouse rafters. Suburban teenagers lighting Blackcats or the release of a 12 gauge sawed-off, it was hard to say. This was my Dallas, where I’d grown up. They gunned down J.F.K. not but a mile from here.
There wasn’t anyone at the factory to meet me for the drop off. I just had to unload the cargo and then we were all free to go our separate ways. My stateside contact had already collected the smuggling fee on all of them far in advance, and I’d get my cut from her the next day. When it came to delivering the goods, we were on an honors system; either she trusted me to get the job done or she just didn’t care.
I undid the trailer’s padlocked swing doors. Skye and Jose helped me take down the false wall in the back. Dark faces emerged with caution, confusion. They dispersed into the night without a word. No one ever thanked me, not once. Before heading out, I lit up a cigarette, and the flame from the lighter illuminated a huddled shape in the back corner of the trailer. Skye pointed, her mouth a dark tunnel.
I stepped toward the figure, one cautious step only. “You okay there?” No response. My eyes slowly adjusted to the dark. A middle-aged Mexican, in his fifties tops, or maybe just balding prematurely. One of those monk hairlines you usually only associate with whites.
Skye knelt down next to him and took his pulse. “He’s alive,” she said. “But I can just barely find his heartbeat.” I took another step closer. I could tell he was conscious by the way his eyes rolled around in their sockets; not in a wild seizure-like way, more like he was trying to take in all of his surroundings quickly, getting one last good look in while he still could.
Skye looked up at me. “You gonna just stare at him like that or you wanna help me get him out of here?” She was right. The air in the back of the rig was still hovering around a hundred degrees, maybe more, and wallowing in it wasn’t doing him any favors. We carried him out and laid him on the concrete warehouse floor. I did most of the heavy lifting while Skye cradled his head so it wouldn’t hang back and strike concrete when we set him down. She stayed with him while I dialed a cab on my cell. I didn’t keep a car back then because it was too hard to keep track of between runs. Also, I got my fill of driving on the job. I’d been living out of pay-by-the-week hotels for several years by then.
When I told them a cab was on the way to take him to a motel, Jose pushed an eyebrow halfway up his forehead. “He need doctor.”
“You kidding?” I asked, but I knew he wasn’t.
“He’s right,” Skye said. “He’s fading fast.”
“How can you be sure?”
She backed her head up an inch or so as if she were trying to distance herself from me. “How can you pretend like you’re not?”
Reframe the situation. “I’m no doctor, but I’ve seen sicker than him that turned out just fine.” She didn’t look convinced. An appeal to pity. “If I take him to a hospital, they’ll want to lock my ass up. They’ll put it all on me like I put a knife to his gut.” Take it up a notch. I pointed at Jose and then Pepe who was knocking around an aluminum can with a wooden stake, swinging it like a golf club or a machete. “And they’ll send them two back home for sure.”
Skye stood up straight in a futile attempt to get a height advantage on me. “Then I’ll take him myself. Dial yourself another cab if you want, but the first is heading to the ER.”
Passive options were thin. I didn’t want to let on that I couldn’t let her take him, all circumstances considered. Not to sound heartless, but she’d seen the warehouse and the plates on my truck. She’d be able to pick me out of a lineup for sure. Not that I thought she’d want to, but once they started drilling her, tossing around accusations beginning with accomplice to, then she’d have little to keep her from talking.
“Look,” I said, “let’s just take him to a motel and set him up in bed. We can get most everything we need to see him through at the drugstore. Some aspirin and whatnot.” I noticed the man on the floor watching me. I pretended like I hadn’t noticed him and looked away. “It ain’t like he’s got the cancer. Just a little overheated, that’s all. He’ll be fine.”
No one objected to my blatant misrepresentation of the facts. We all knew he was in some shit, but there wasn’t anything else to be done about it. So we shared a solemn, almost macabre silence and waited on the cab. I wondered for a minute why all three of them had hung around to tend to a dying immigrant, a nobody. Then, it dawned on me it had nothing to do with him. They had nowhere else to go.
My thoughts turned to Stan’s funeral, now less than twelve hours away. I passed the time trying to come up with the eulogy I’d still not written. How do you sum up all of a man in a single paragraph? People have written whole novels on less.
We stopped at a cheap motel with the front desk in a drive-thru booth separate from the guestrooms. We parked away from the booth and I gave Skye the money to pay for our room. I asked the driver, a young black man with a perfectly shaved head and coffee bean eyes, to hold the cab till she got back with the room keys. Every now and then, he’d glance into the rearview at Pepe and Jose and then over to Skye talking to the clerk through a plate of reinforced glass, half-shouting through the static of a CB microphone. No doubt, the cabdriver was trying to peg down the dynamics of our unlikely entourage. He took one last scrutinizing look at me and then kept his eyes on the steering wheel. He drove us around back and I tipped him extra to keep his mouth shut. He lifted his chin to signal he understood, a promise of compliance, before driving away without a word. No thank you, no objection.
Our room was cramped, dingy, dirty, and infested. Everything you’d expect for $29.95. Jose helped me carry the man to one of the twin beds. We supported him on both sides by his underarms. Out of the heat, he’d grown slightly more lucid but still had an unhealthy pallor to him. Hell, that’s an understatement to end all. He looked like death. He’d started making these gurgling noises like he was trying to move liquid out of his lungs. Skye was quiet. She didn’t think he would make it through the night, I could tell.
Skye and Pepe watched over the sick man while Jose went with me to the drugstore to buy some aspirin to bring down his fever. Jose didn’t say much as we made the block to the pharmacy. I bought him a small bag of hot-peppered beef jerky. He thanked me for it. Without opening the bag, he tucked it into one of his pockets.
When we got back to the motel room, the man was no longer in bed. The sound of running water whistled through the cracked bathroom door. I peeked inside. Skye had the Mexican in the tub packed full with ice water. She was just about to dump another bucket of vending machine ice over him when I caught her hand from behind. Water retention had left the skin over her wrist supple to the touch, a convincing illusion of the softness of the gloriously young. A couple more cubes spilled into the tub as I wrestled the bucket away from her.
“What the hell are ya’ll doing?”
“Trying to break his fever,” she said. “His forehead burns your hand to the touch.”
I glanced down at the man in the tub. He looked like he’d aged a decade in the time it’d taken me to run down to the drugstore and back. “You keep pouring ice over him like that and you’ll leave him a dead man for sure.”
“I was just trying to help,” she said. “I was afraid he wouldn’t make it till you got back.” Her eyes started to tear, making her age show, even through her pregnancy. Just a baby, some knocked up high school dropout, a runaway. And now I’d put all of this in her lap, right on top of everything else.
I brushed her aside, though careful to avoid her stomach, and pulled the stopper out of the bathtub drain. With my bare hands, I scooped up the ice and shoveled it into the toilet. My hands grew more and more numb until my fingers might as well have not been there. When the toilet bowl filled up, I started depositing ice onto the floor. All the while, the man sat motionless in the tub, no movement save for a steady, worrisome tremble. Most of the ice out, I turned the shower on and rotated the temperature knob left three-quarters of the way into the red. Steam rose off of his body as he warmed. Part of me wished he’d died in the back of the semi. The damage already done, I could’ve made one quick phone call and left him for someone else to handle.
After about ten minutes of letting his body absorb the heat from the tap water, I pulled him out of the tub and propped him up on the toilet with the lid down. The motel towels were stiff and barely absorbent, and I had to work fast to wipe the excess water off of him before it cooled. Once he was dry, I wrapped him up in the few dry towels left and carried him like a newly wed bride back to the main room. I tucked him under the covers and stood over him hoping for some kind of miracle.
An electric pulse shot up my spine when I heard a sound at the door and the knob turned. Moonlight outlined Pepe in the doorway, a bagful of ice hanging at his side.
It was well into the morning, and none of us had slept. We’d wrapped up the corpse in linens and left it on the bed. A single white towel with the motel’s logo stitched across it covered its face, draped like a shawl. I don’t know if it was the ice that did him in or the sudden shock of the temperature change. Or maybe it was just the inevitable corollary of shutting up an old man in a hot metal casket for twenty-four hours. Whatever the case, it was now moot. He’d gone on.
I could hear Skye crying through the thin ply of the bathroom door. She’d been in there for the last hour. Pepe sat on the edge of the bed watching late night cable programming with reception so bad it came out black and white. I wondered how much of the show he could understand, how much of it transcended the language barrier. The dead man’s feet were inches from the child’s backside. Pepe chewed at beef jerky, made a face. Jose was in the other bed staring up at abstract shapes on the ceiling. I sat in a yellow and green pinstripe chair by the window, watching the dawn ascend over the parking lot while making up back stories for passersby. I made up one for the dead man on the other side of the room, made him a war hero and gave him a family to come home to. I made up one for Stan also, one with a better ending. I still hadn’t come up with his eulogy.
The bathroom door swung open. Skye came out frantic, eyes red and puffy. “Can you believe I’m having a fucking baby? Me? It don’t stand a goddamned chance in hell.” She stood there a second till another round of tears forced her back into the bathroom. Under her breath, she muttered, “Jesus fucking Christ.”
There’s this verse in the bible that reads, “He who is unjust, let him be unjust still; he who is filthy, let him be filthy still; he who is righteous, let him be righteous still…” I don’t know exactly what it refers to, but Ma used to quote it at Stan and me whenever we got ourselves into trouble. That’s what I read at Stan’s funeral as his eulogy. Nothing more, nothing less. At the front of the room, I delivered the four lines to a near empty room, tripping once on the word righteous. I cleared my throat and returned to my seat. I tried to catch Dad’s eyes, but he had his head down.
Before the service began, I’d introduced Skye to him as my fiancée. Pepe and Jose, I’d told him, were “children from her first marriage.” I don’t think he bought it and I’d be worried if he had. He’d probably have been embarrassed by the whole situation but the only other person to attend, aside from the four of us, was the preacher. No military funeral for the supply man; no glory for the water boy. No friends, either. Stan was like me, and we’d never kept friends, not for any appreciable period of time. Not any real friends, just drinking buddies, dope connections, that sort of thing. Not bothering to disguise his thoughts, Dad’s eyes kept wandering down to the bulge of Skye’s waist and then over at me as if to ask whether or not this one was mine. An unspoken, “What in the hell were ya thinking, Wayne?” Skye blushed and turned away, tried to look down at her feet, but her belly blocked her line of sight.
A two-car funeral procession headed to Southside Fort Worth. We all rode together in a small, beat-up limo from the 80s that Dad said he’d rented for the day for twenty-five bucks. It still had a “Vote Reagan” bumper sticker on the back window, fading and peeling under the command of time. Dad drove like when we were kids, only now I rode shotgun, not Ma. I kept my eyes on the hearse in front of me, noting its Texas plates. If you jumped out of the car here and walked a mile due north, you’d find the house I was born in; and if you doubled back the other way, the one we were raised in. I doubted Stan would ever have imagined he’d start and end the cycle in quarters so close. Stan had always been the adventurous one. He’d left home as soon as he was old enough to get a job, didn’t matter how shitty it was. He used to pump out septic tanks before he got into trucking.
A closed casket service. When the bomb went off under Stan’s truck, a fuel tank caught fire and exploded. He’d burned to nothing in the cab. I didn’t even get a last look at him, though I was glad to go without. Anyone, anything could’ve been in that casket and we wouldn’t have known better. Did it matter?
Within minutes, they’d bury him. I closed my eyes and tried as hard as I could to pray for him, something I’d never done before in my life. Growing up, I’d always just closed my eyes in church and planned the rest of my afternoon, thought about girls or football scores or where I was going to score booze. But this time I tried as hard as I could to muster up some sincerity. I felt like I just couldn’t fake it. Not this time.
Once the preacher and the groundskeeper left, we stood around Stan’s grave for a while because it felt like the thing to do. Eventually, the awkwardness and heat got to us and we grew restless. Skye took the boys to a nearby field to pick flowers from a patch of Texas thistle. Jose followed Pepe, but he only watched them gather the purple, alien-like blooms.
“You want to grab some lunch?” I asked Dad.
“Can’t,” he said, feet shuffling. “Gotta get the limo back soon or I’ll have to pay for two days. Then I got a flight to catch.”
I offered to drop him at the airport and run it back myself. He said no, he’d already made plans. For sting, he added, “I didn’t think you were gonna make this one, either.” Here he was throwing shit in my face again, and today wasn’t even about him. Or us. He didn’t know shit about how things were with me, never had. I’d been in Mexico with a truck full of border-hoppers when Ma had her stroke. Was I supposed to bring them along? The things you can’t share with those you hold closest.
“You know I’d have come if I could.”
“Then why didn’t you?”
I didn’t answer. It would’ve done no good. Skye and Pepe came back and set a handful of loose thistle and sunflowers and a single bluebonnet over the fresh grave. I leaned into sniff them, but the stifling scent of upturned dirt overpowered the blooms completely.
We had to be back at the motel soon. I’d requested an extension on the checkout time so we could come back later and bury the corpse. Before we left, Skye had sprayed the room down with an entire bottle of air freshener she found under the sink and I had hung up a do not disturb sign on the door. I’d barred the door from the inside with a chair and climbed out through the window, just in case.
“Well, I got to get going then,” I told Dad. We hugged like strangers and then he was gone. I wondered if I’d ever see him again. Dad was an only child and my grandparents were long dead. We were the sole survivors of our family, the final two. When he died, would I be there to put him in the ground? Would he do the same for me?
We had roundtrip bus tickets to take us back to Dallas. On the way to the bus stop, I thought about all the things I wished I could’ve said to Stan and my Dad and everyone else. That I was sorry for never being around and missing Ma’s funeral. Sorry that I hadn’t talked my brother out of leaving home or going overseas, that I’d even encouraged him because I was too weak to do things like that myself. I thought about Shelly, the girl I’d knocked up in high school and run out on. How I’d wanted to stay with her, but I knew we’d all be better off if she just got an abortion. She went on to college and I heard she was working as an RN now and earning a solid living. Who’s the worse off? Never mind the collateral damage, babies die all the time. Sympathy runs scarce these days and we ought to reserve it for the living.
I looked over my shoulder and saw Skye struggling to keep up with us. Her face had gone red from exertion. I slowed down to wait for her and let the boys lead even though they didn’t know their way around the city.
Skye apologized for being the weak link once she caught up with me. “Lately, my feet have been real sore. Worse than my tits even,” Skye said, rubbing at her chest. “I ain’t ever been fat like this before.”
“It ain’t fat.”
“Well, I wish it weren’t there just the same.”
I laughed in spite of myself, but it was a tapered, sobering laugh. “Why don’t you just get an abortion?”
She huffed air out of her nose. “Sixteen, remember? I need parental consent.”
“Your folks won’t let you?”
“Hell no. Guess they wanna sacrifice one soul to save another.”
For lack of words, I simply said, “Sorry, that’s tough.”
There comes a point when a man’s insincerity becomes such an ingrained part of himself that he can no longer tell the difference between an apology and a justification. No one ever means for things to get like this. I hadn’t meant for the Mexican to die. I’d been trying to help him.
“You ever think about trying a ‘do-it-yourself’ abortion?” I asked. I thought of some of the things Shelley had told me about, medieval in nature, things she’d considered before finally convincing her parents to let her get it done legitimately.
Skye said that she’d tried shooting up an unsafe amount of heroin to coax her body into letting go of the fetus, but it wouldn’t give. She even had her boyfriend punch her in the stomach a few times one night. Her parents pressed charges against him when they saw the bruises and caught on. That’s why he hit the road for Dallas.
I knew I shouldn’t ask, but for some reason I wanted to know. I felt like I had some stake in it now. “Did you come down here to try again, or to have it?”
“After today? Shit, I don’t even know what I should do anymore.”
When we got to the bus stop, Skye let her body collapse onto the bench next to a Rastafarian reading a newspaper, the business section of all things. She stretched her legs and massaged a cramp out of her left thigh. The Rasta looked up from his reading and smiled at her. He had thick dreadlocks that snaked their way out of his crown and hung halfway down his back like a lion’s mane. He asked her how far along she was.
“Oh, it’ll be any day now, I suppose.”
The Rasta looked up and beamed a smile my way. “Well, itza beautiful day for bringing a baby into the world. As good as any.” His accent was so perfect it came off as feigned, but the sincerity with which he smiled made up for it, made you want to believe in him.
Skye looked up at the sun just as it moved into a break in the clouds, casting a crimson trim around the breech, bright and oval shaped like an eye. Skye clenched her own eyes shut and made a face like she just couldn’t block out all of that merciless beauty.
“Today’s a funeral day,” she said.
“Well, child, to be fair,” the Rasta said, “most days are.”
The boys went and sat on an open bench. Pepe leaned his head on his brother’s shoulder, and Jose put his arm around him. The Rasta caught his bus. After boarding, he wished us well from a pull-down window. I waved and took his spot on the bench next to Skye. We made conversation to pass the time. She told me about her parents and her boyfriend, how they only meant well. And I joined in with excuses for myself and my dad. And when our bus pulled up next to the curb, we got on.
by: Andrew Mortazavi
originally appeared in The Roanoke Review, Vol. XXXI, Spring 2006