The Neon Wilderness by Nelson Algren

Author:Nelson Algren [Algren, Nelson]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781583225509
Amazon: 1583225501
Goodreads: 350868
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 1946-11-30T05:00:00+00:00

el presidente de méjico

Portillo, a bridegroom of six weeks who looked like a youthful Wallace Beery, kept us informed of as much of the life of the town as he could see from the run-around; he had lived in the place all his life.

“There go pretty girl,” he would observe, “walkin’ with one ugly man.”

All winter we had been waiting for court to convene. It opened any time in spring and closed as soon as the circuit judge disposed of cases accumulated during the winter; then he moved on to the next wide place in the road, usually reaching El Paso in time for the fall hunting.

Portillo didn’t have to stand trial because there was no charge against him. The sheriff had simply picked him up to ask him the whereabouts of a certain still. Portillo didn’t know. So the sheriff kept him in the run-around in the hope that he might remember. He kept him out of the cell block itself, as much as possible, because of Jesse Gleason.

Jesse was a wiry little man, about thirty, who had once killed a Mex over a game of dominoes, on the American side, and had gotten over the river in time to avoid arrest. He had lived in and around Juarez then, with a Mexican woman, until he had come another cropper and had gotten back across the river only half an hour in front of the Mexican authorities. He had surrendered himself to the local sheriff with the explanation that his conscience had at last brought him back. Everybody had liked good old Jesse for that and the sheriff had shaken his hand and called him “Hair-Trigger.”

Yet the affair in Juarez had been simpler than any difficulty of conscience could be: he had killed the Mexican woman over a game of checkers. Here in Cactus County, however, he had more relatives than the sheriff, and was confident of beating the rap.

“There’s more bad Mexicans in West Texas than good horses,” good old Jesse was fond of saying.

The law apparently bore him out, for shooting a Mex was still safer than stealing a horse. There were second-offender horse thieves doing twenty to life at Huntsville, but nobody got that for shooting two Mexicans. Jesse himself had said that Crying Tom, whip boss of the Huntsville pea farm, was tougher on horse thieves than anyone, having once lost a pair of army mules out of his own corral. The whole thing was a legal hangover from a time when stealing a horse meant leaving its rider helpless in the desert.

Jesse was the bad-man of the tank, and everyone soothed him. “I’d trust my own sister with a man like that,” his cell mate Wolfe would vouch. And Portillo, watching for a sight of his wife from the window, would agree absent-mindedly. “I trost sister too.” Portillo wasn’t looking for trouble. He was fair stuck on his own girl.

Jesse never exercised, but possessed a wiry prairie strength that five months on two thin meals a day hadn’t modified.

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