The Salt Eaters by Toni Cade Bambara

Author:Toni Cade Bambara [Bambara, Toni Cade]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-77801-7
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-02-16T05:00:00+00:00

Fred Holt took the shortcut through the Infirmary yard. He nodded to the boys and young men roosting on the tabby wall, passing joints back and forth, passing pint bottles back and forth, or just sitting and talking. Some were waiting for the girls, scarce women, who waddled to and from the clinic each day between three and four. The men reminded him of the wives who used to congregate outside of the Palace or the Regal, waiting on their musician husbands, waiting to take them home. Some of the other roosters were waiting no doubt for the swayback girls from Safe Harbour, the shelter the Academy and the church ran for runaways. There was a big stink about that in the papers lately, since most of the kids had run not from their own homes but from those other “homes” and were under court order. Those Academy folks were in for it unless the ministers could work something out with the authorities. Between the trees and the cars and vans of the parking lot behind the Regal, he could make out the Wall of Respect of the Academy.

He almost stepped on it, a small bird calling to the air. A tiny bird that had fallen from its nest evidently, had fallen into a plate some not-so-hungry picnicker had left behind. Fred glanced at the plates, pots and jugs and wondered what kind of weird picnic it could’ve been, so much food left. He tilted his cap back and stared at the bird and wondered what he was supposed to do about it. It had been a day for birds, he chuckled to himself, glad to be out of the driver’s seat and on foot. Leaning against the tree on the other side was a couple murmuring into each other’s face, oblivious of the bird, the plates, and him, and not seeming to know about the caterpillars that were known to drop from this particular tree from late winter and straight through spring. They were leaning against each other, her hands under the front of his shirt, his hand cupping her neck. Fred took off his hat and rubbed his outstretched arm against his sweaty forehead. Tie your apron high, Miz Lucy, he whistled to himself moving on, wondering at what point a hairy green worm might break up the idyll.

Coming out of the rear parking lot, he got sandwiched in by two winos hunkered down in the old stage-entrance doorway of the Regal and a boy with a bike. A mud puddle was in his path, the pigeons circling, fluttering, crowding each other for a drink. He didn’t like what the sight of the nasty pigeons or the puddle was doing to his chili-ruined stomach. The bums weren’t any better, snot-nosed and filthy. He waited on the kid to move. He was taking his time down on one knee tying a sneaker that looked like a planter or a magazine rack or one of them satchels he’d seen in shop windows designed like a basketball sneaker.

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