Land Where My Fathers Died by Joe Edd Morris

Author:Joe Edd Morris [Morris, Joe Edd]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-08-23T16:00:00+00:00

IV

The sun had not yet set and the western sky was blood red, the rooftops beneath it silhouetted in myriad stairstep shapes. The street ran both ways and he had no idea where he was in the city but knew Monterrey was to the west and in that direction he began running.

There was little traffic in the street. A few people strolling the sidewalk. Couples holding hands and mothers with children underfoot. Dogs jumped from hidden alley-ways and off porches and barked at him, snapped at his heels, but he paid them little mind and kept running. He ran several blocks and stopped to get his breath and check his bearings and ran again. He looked for street signs but he was in an old forgotten part of town and there were none. He slowed his pace and began walking briskly and came to a bar where a few men sat outside on the step smoking. He greeted them in Spanish and they holaed back. He asked the direction to Monterrey and one pointed up the street in the direction he had been running and spoke too rapidly for him to follow every word but he caught the words ruta and Rio Bravo and Reynosa and the general picture that the prison where he had been for over two months was on the western edge of the town and he was not far from a major highway.

Night fell fast, filling up the streets and alleyways first. A quarter moon was cocked back on its rim and an evening star beamed not far from its horns and together they looked like the ensignia of some dark flag unfurled across the firmament. He ran along unlit streets where the buildings grew smaller and smaller and the shops became fewer and fewer until they were no more and what dwellings he passed were matchbox shacks alit with single bulbs through the wide cracks of which he saw people gathered and heard the sounds of eating and drinking, of laughter and music and singing, of family.

He ran on.

Shops began to appear once more and with them cafes and bars where the lonely and romantic were beginning their rendezvous and he knew he had passed through the worst of the barrio though those who lived there might say it was the best, for they knew no difference, had known no other. Up ahead a line of streetlights burned above low tiled roofs and he heard the sounds of heavy traffic, people leaving the city he hoped.

The street junctured the highway diagonally and continued on the other side, an intersection quartered with fruit and vegetable stands and make-shift stalls in front of which were rows of ceramics and brass pots and radios, hubcaps and used tires and other assorted wares, some of them displayed on blankets atop the hoods of cars that looked to be as traded and shopworn as the goods themselves.

He stopped at a stall where a man was selling coconuts. They were spread

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