Cinnamon Skin by John D. MacDonald

Author:John D. MacDonald [MacDonald, John D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-82681-7
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2013-01-08T16:00:00+00:00

Sixteen

From Eagle Pass in Maverick County, across the river from Piedras Negras, the Rio Grande drops seven hundred and twenty-six feet in a few hundred miles until it flows into the Gulf below Brownsville at Brazos Island.

There is a deceptive illusion of lushness near the riverbanks, but for the most part it is a burned land of scraggly brush, dry hills, weed, lizard, cedar, and salty creek beds that slant down from the Anacacho Mountains to the north. To the northeast is Uvalde, where John Nance Garner lived and died in a broad and pretty valley, noted in his declining years only for his brief statement about the value of the office of the Vice-President of the United States. “It’s about as much use as a pitcher of warm spit,” he said.

Here all along the valley from Cameron and Willacy counties on the Gulf through Hidalgo, Start, Zapata, Webb, Dimmit, Zavala, and Maverick, the American citizens of Mexican ancestry have, through the exercise of their right to vote, taken control of county functions: school boards, zoning, police and fire protection, road departments, library services, county welfare, and all the other boards and commissions which spring full grown from the over-fertilized minds of the political animals. This has been a slow and inevitable process for fifty years, and it is understandable that during this time most of the Anglos have been squeezed out of participation in county government. Some of those squeezed out were doubtless of exceptional competency. But so are some of the new ones. And the world keeps turning, and just as much money finds its way into the wrong pockets as under the old regime.

Sergeant Paul Sigiera saw us on Thursday morning at nine thirty after a twenty-minute wait in his outer office. There was room in his office for a gray steel desk, three straight-backed oak chairs without arms, and two green filing cabinets. He was in his thirties, in short-sleeved, sweat-darkened khakis. He had black bangs down almost to his eyebrows, anthracite eyes, and a desperado mustache. The small window was open and a big fan atop the file cabinets turned back and forth, back and forth, ruffling the corners of the papers on his desk and giving a recurrent illusion of comfort.

“Friends,” he said in a Texican twang, “the goddarn compressor quit again, and it is hot as a fresh biscuit in heah. They don’t fix it quick, I’m gonna assing me out to patrol and ride around with the cold air turned on high. Now what was it you wanted?”

“We’re from Florida,” I said. “My name is McGee and this is my friend Professor Meyer, a world-famous economist. Perhaps, Sergeant, you remember reading in the paper about Professor Meyer’s boat being blown up in the Atlantic Ocean just off Fort Lauderdale on the fifth of this month.”

“I maybe do remember something.”

“Three people died and no bodies were recovered. We have been trying to trace the person responsible, and there is a faint chance that he may have lived here as a young man before he went off to the University of Texas.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.