An Orchard in the Street by Reginald Gibbons

Author:Reginald Gibbons
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781942683506
Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.
Published: 2017-07-15T04:00:00+00:00

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The little boy whom I’d last seen about two hours earlier, the one wearing a tattered T-shirt and raggedy jeans, came up the dirt road carrying on his back a huge load of long sharp-edged leaves that had been tied in a bundle with lengths of vine. He was maybe seven or eight. Bent over. Holding the vine-ends with both hands at the back of his neck, his little dirty elbows sticking out in front of him. In a tree overhead a bright red and green bird was whistling its ideas about everything. A kind-faced priest wearing only snake-skins, sneakers, and a skirt of feathers blessed the boy as he went by, and then took another sip of his Pepsi. At the top of the slope, a shiny Hummer with a flatbed trailer hitched to it was waiting, and it seemed like this boy’s bundle was the last that was needed, because one of the three soldiers there—who were wearing work gloves, while the boy had none—took the bundle from him and threw it onto the load, and the three of them got into the Hummer and drove off, spewing mud and gravel behind them. The boy came back down the slope, standing up straight now. I was ashamed and stepped out from where I’d been hiding. The look in his eyes was wary—fully as much of me as of the soldiers. It was early afternoon, and he had to be hungrier than I was. Everything around us was growing fast in the hot wet narco weather, and inevitably he would have to grow, too. The priest never said much. Who knew what he was thinking? I’d learned he wasn’t allowed to show up back at his strange kind of group house till dusk, or they would punish him. Clean water hadn’t been reinvented yet. I was writing everything down on white lotus blossoms and floating them away on the muddy stream nearby, and keeping a mental photocopy for myself. I was making something like a tiny model story of the real story, I was making believe, making do, making up what I could never make up for.

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